The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (23 page)

‘They have no horse at all,' De Warenne had been told, and the lords who revealed it, shooting uneasy looks at Cressingham and Thweng and Fitzwarin as they did so, would be the ones to know. James the Steward and the Earl of Lennox, fresh from negotiating their way back into Edward's good graces, now offered to try the same with Sir Andrew Moray and Wallace.

‘I doubt it will do much good,' De Warenne declared, ‘since Moray might grovel his way back to his lands and titles, but Wallace will not be granted anything, my good lords. Not even a quick death.'

‘For all that,' Lennox said morosely, ‘it would be worth the try and you lose nothing by it – you are waiting for Clifford.'

‘Ha,' snorted Cressingham and De Warenne shot him an ugly glare. Thweng said nothing, but he could see the two Scots lords look round them all, then to each other. No-one offered an explanation, but Thweng knew, as they left, that they would find out soon enough – Robert De Clifford, Lord Warden of the English March and the man who had been assiduously gathering troops for the Earl of Surrey's host, had been sent packing by Cressingham. He had been turned back as ‘not needed', Cressingham ranting about the cost of defraying Clifford's expenses when the army was already large enough to deal with a rabble under a mere brigand.

That had been before they set out, of course and between Roxburgh and Stirling, the great army had melted like rendering grease and the countryside for miles around, in a broad band along the road, was filled with plundering deserters and stragglers.

Now they needed Clifford and that outraged lord would not come even to piss on a burning Cressingham.

Thweng left De Warenne and Cressingham arguing about dispositions and went out into the wind-soughed night, high on the battlements of the castle where sentries marked steady progress between flickering torches. He wondered if he would have to fight anyone he knew tomorrow.

Out on the road to Cambuskenneth's Abbey, far enough from Craig for the fires there to be pale flowers in the dark, Bangtail Hob wrapped himself tighter in his cloak and brooded, half-dreaming of Jeannie the miller's daughter, who could get you cross-eyed with just hands and lips. It was a fair trod to get to her at Whitekirk, but worth the shoeleather … he heard the hooves on the road and raised his head above the tussocks he hid behind.

The wind sighed, damp off the carse, and the loop of wide river was a black shining ribbon in the last light. The rider, hunched on the back of a plodding mount, was a silhouette heading down to the great
campanile
tower which marked where the abbey stood.

Since the only road led down from under the Abbey Craig, it meant the visitor had come either from the Scots camp, or across the brig, up the causeway and along under the Abbey Craig. There had been a few desperate refugees earlier, all handcarts and hurry, but none for some time.

Bangtail watched the rider vanish towards it, then settled back into his half-dream. Stop folk getting out of the Abbey, he had been told – so anyone coming in was not a problem. He glanced up to the distant balefire lights of Stirling's hourds, then across the stretch of dark to the flowered blossom of fires on the hill and wondered what it might be like to be there, waiting on the morrow.

He was certain Sir Hal knew what he was about, trying to avoid the great scourge of soldiery coming up on Stirling, full of vengeance against all matters Scots. Heading for the rebel camp was dancing along a thin edge, all the same – on the one hand, Hal would be seen as a Bruce man and so on the English side. On the other, he had the Countess of Buchan with him and she was the wife of the Earl who, if not actively supporting Wallace and Moray, had contrived to turn a blind eye to their doings, permitting them to unite here.

There were other reasons, Bangtal Hob was sure – or else why would he be sitting here, making sure no wee stone carver crept out of Cambuskenneth in the dark? Yet he did not fully understand them – nor needed to. He had been told what to do and he settled to it, huddling into his cloak against the chill.

Up on the crag, Dog Boy sat in the lee of the striped tent, watching the nearby fires and, beyond that, the little red eyes, like weasels in a wood, that marked where the English walked the walls of Stirling Castle.

He sat listening to the nearby men chaffering each other, arguing about this and that, fixing leather straps, honing the points of the great long spears. He had been watching the spearmen, fascinated, for days; they were being drilled in how to work together, hundreds and more in a block. Level pikes. Ground pikes. Support pikes. Butt pikes. Charge pikes. The Dog Boy had watched them stagger round, clashing into each other, cursing and spitting and tangling up.

Some, he saw, were more advanced than others – the men of Moray's army – and these were a joy, moving and turning like a clever toy. Wallace's kerns did not like the work, but were whipped to it by the lash of his great booming voice and the expert eye of Moray's commanders.

Hal sat nearby and watched the Dog Boy watching the flames of cookfires flatten and flicker in the wind up on Abbey Craig. He was waiting to speak to Wallace and curiosity -Christ, now
there
was a curse on him – had driven him within earshot of the tent, where he could hear the arrived lords try to persuade Wallace and Moray to give in.

‘So you stand with the English,' Wallace said and Hal heard Lennox and John the Steward splutter their denials through the canvas.

‘So you stand with us.'

This time there as silence and then Moray's bland, calming voice broke a silence so uncomfortable Hal could feel it from where he sat.

‘You have our thanks, my lords,' he said in French. ‘Take to Surrey our fervent wish that he withdraws from here and the realm.'

‘Surrey is not the power here,' John the Steward answered, ‘Cressingham will lead the army in the morning.'

Wallace's laugh was a bitter bark.

‘He is no leader of men. He is a scrievin' wee scribbler, who would skin a louse for the profit of the hide,' he growled. ‘Tell him that, if ye like – but mark me,
nobiles,
there will be no repeat of Irvine here.'

‘Those negotiations held the English there. Bought you the time for all this,' Lennox answered sullenly in French, and Hal heard Wallace clear his throat, could almost see the scowl as he made it plain he wanted no more French here, which he could understand much less than English. Quietly, Moray translated.

‘You bought your lands back,' Wallace answered bluntly. ‘With a liar's kiss and betrayals. Soon, my lords, you will have to choose – tak' tent with this; those come last to the feast get the trencher only.'

‘We will not fight with ye, Wallace,' the Steward said defiantly, preferring to irgnore the insults. ‘It is the belief of the community of the realm that a peaceful settlement is by far the best, no matter the considerations.'

‘That will never be from my hand,' Wallace answered, bland as mushed meal and speaking in carefully modulated English. ‘I wish you well of your own capitulation. May your chains sit lightly on you, my lords, as you kneel to lick the hand. And may posterity forget you once claimed our kinship.'

There was silence, thick as gruel, then a voice thicker still with anger; the Steward, Hal recognised, barely leashed.

‘You have nothin' to lose, Wallace, so casting the dice is hardly risk from your cup.'

‘And from mine?' Moray asked lightly. There was silence.

‘We will not stand against ye,' Lennox persisted.

‘So declared another of your brood, Sir Richard Lundie, afore he leaped the fence to the English,' Wallace answered, his voice bitter. ‘He now thinks Edward is the braw lad to put this realm in order and has joined them to fight us. That is what came of your antics at Irvine. If you fine folk persist in grovelling, there will be a wheen more like him.'

‘By God, I'll not be lectured by the likes of you,' the Steward thundered. ‘You're a come-lately man, a landless jurrocks with a strong arm and no idea of what to do with it until your betters tell ye …'

‘Enough.'

Moray's voice was a harsh blade and the silence fell so suddenly that Hal could hear the ragged bull-breathing through the canvas.

‘Go back and tell the Earl of Surrey, Cressingham and all the rest that we await their pleasure, my lords,' Moray added, gentle and grim. ‘If he wishes us gone from here, let him extend himself and make it so.'

Movement and rustle told Hal that Lennox and the Steward had gone. There was silence, then Wallace rumbled the rheum out of his throat.

‘Ye see how it is?' he declared bitterly. ‘Apart from yourself, the community of the realm spits on me. We can never mak' Wishart's plans work if there is only us pushin the plough of it.'

‘Never fash,' Moray said. ‘For all they think it, it is not the community of the realm who fight here the morn. It is the commonality of the realm and you are their man. Besides – the
nobiles
of this kingdom follow us because neither the Bruce nor the Comyn can walk in the same plough trace. In the end all we have is a king, for Longshanks has broken Scotland's Seal, stolen the Rood and purloined the very Stone of kings. There is no-one else to dig the furrow, so we must.'

The Dog Boy had only half-heard this, understanding little, watching the feet come and go. He was an expert on feet, since it was usually what he saw first from the rabbit crouch he always adopted, halfway between flight and covert.

He saw the horn-nailed bare feet of men from north of The Mounth, who scorned shoes for the most part save for clogs or pattens in the deep winter. These were the wild-haired men with wicked knifes and round shields and long-handled axes, who spoke either a language the Dog Boy did not understand at all, or one which he recognised only vaguely. They sibilated in soft, sing-song tones and made wild music to dance to.

There were turnshoes and half-boots, ragged and flapping some of them, belonging to men from Kyle and Fife and the March. These were the burghers and free men, ones who could afford iron hats and fat-padded jacks with studs, the ones who carried the long spear, the pike, in the marching formations which so fascinated the Dog Boy.
Schiltron.
It was a new word, to everyone else as much as the Dog Boy; he rolled it round his mouth like a pebble against thirst.

The men from Ayrshire and those from Fife contrived to sneer at each other for their strange way of speaking – and both walked soft around the men from the north. Yet they were here, all facing the same direction, and the Dog Boy was aware, as if he had lain back in grass and started to look clearly at clouds, of the vastness of that revelation.

They were here because, for all they might dislike each other and the men from north of The Mounth look on the likes of Bruce and Moray and Comyn as incomers, the one thing they hated more was the idea of being ruled by invaders from the English south.

The Dog Boy had also seen the fine leather boots, or the maille
chausse
with leather sole that marked a knight or man-at-arms, but there were precious few of those iron leggings. He had thought of Jamie Douglas then and had asked round the campfires until he had found men from Lanark, one of whom knew the tale of it.

‘Away to France,' he told the Dog Boy in the guttering red light. ‘Away to safety with Bishop Lamberton, since his da is taken off in chains.'

The man who told the Dog Boy looked at the boy's pinched, sunken-eyed face as he added that Jamie's da was unlikely to be seen again, carried off to the Tower from his cell in Berwick, where he raved, ranted and finally annoyed his gaolers once too often. Beatings, he had heard, and worse. The Hardy would not be back in a hurry, his woman and Jamie's siblings were living with her relations, the Ferrers, somewhere in England – and Douglas was now an English castle.

The Dog Boy had wandered in a daze back to the lee of the striped tent where Hal found him. Douglas held by the Invaders. Jamie in France. The Dog Boy only had a vague idea that France was somewhere south of England, which was south of Berwick; it seemed a long way off, even if the high and mighty spoke the language of the place to one another and there was actually a man from France here, on Abbey Craig.

In the middle of the flickering fires, like roses in the dark, the men huddled close and the Dog Boy felt utterly alone, felt the great, black brooding of the surrounding trees, sighing and creaking in the dark.

Jamie, Douglas Castle – everything he had known was gone, even the Lothian lord's fine dogs. Now most the few men he knew – Tod's Wattie and Bangtail and the others – were far across the night and the swooping loops of the river, down where the faint pricking lights marked Cambuskenneth Abbey. He was glad that Sim and the Lord Hal were close.

‘Get yourself to Sim,' Hal said to the huddled Dog Boy, the tail-down hunch of him wrenching his heart. ‘He is by a fire with something in a pot.'

The Dog Boy went into the night. Hal heard the tent rustle again as Moray left it and then Wallace's bass rumble slipped through the canvas.

‘Ye can stop skulking at the eaves, Hal Sientcler, and come and tell me about a stonecarver.'

Wearily, Hal levered himself up and went in to where the air reeked of stale sweat and wet wool. Wallace lay slumped in a curule chair, the hand-and-a-half no more than a forearm length from his right hand. He listened as Hal told him about the Savoyard stonecarver.

‘Forty days, is it? We never have forty days, Hal. We have the night and the morn and, God willing, if battle be joined as we wish it, the morn's morn.'

Hal shifted slightly and inwardly cursed the great giant lolled opposite. He wore better clothes these days – even hose and shoes, as befitting one of the saviours of the realm – but it was still the same brigand Wallace.

‘I can hardly assault Cambuskenneth,' Hal declared. ‘The man has sanctuary for forty days. He has thirty-seven of them left. He cannot get out without being seen, for I have posted men to watch every way away from the place.'