The Lion Rampant (22 page)

‘Pembroke,’ the King said suddenly. ‘Where is the Earl of Pembroke?’

‘Sir Aymer is in Berwick,’ Thweng replied flatly, and then remembered himself. ‘Your Grace sent de Valence to oversee matters in Berwick.’

The King had forgotten and did not like the fact of it, so Thweng moved back into the shadows and out of his eyeline.

He is losing control, he thought. He has even brought that stupid lion in a cage, the one he touted round in ’04, when he and the rest of this menagerie were young. He brought it in the last attempt to bring Bruce to battle, four years ago, he recalled, though the lion was toothless and mangy then. Now it was blind and bad-tempered and dying. A fitting banner for this campaign, in fact.

But the beast harks back to the gilded youth the King and all his company had, Thweng thought moodily, and are reluctant to let go. Christ’s Wounds, the King even calls it Perrot, the ‘loving name’ he gave to Gaveston. Stupid name for a favourite, be it dog, horse, bird or lion – and too Malmsey-sweet for a man.

Was he a sodomite? Thweng looked at the King and wondered. Tall and imposing – the picture of a warrior, but that meant little. Priests, Thweng knew, indulged in it and, by God, the Templars were given it as the second-worst accusation that could be levelled at them after spitting on the God they were supposed to protect and uphold. But magnates of the realm? A king?

Thweng remembered himself as a youth, draped round the neck of a loving brother in arms with nothing more in it than the bonds of battle-forged friendship. He shook the thoughts of royal sin away from him.

The King was no boy-lover, but neither was he a good king, or half the warrior he looked, Thweng thought, and then surreptitiously crossed himself for the sin in thinking it.

Mark you, he added to himself, if this army gets anywhere it will be because someone marches off and all the others will follow after, like sheep – but whether it reaches Scotland, Wales or bloody Cathay will be by accident and all are equally likely.

He straightened, as quietly as he could, to ease the stiffness in his back; he was too old for these late-night maunderings and, if proof were needed that matters were spiralling out of control, it was this need for frantic conferences well into the dark.

It was hot in the room, stank of sweated wool and desperation and Sir Marmaduke longed to be outside, questing for a bit of wind in the summer night.

Craignish, Argyll

At the same moment

He breached from the dark, like the ship out of the maelstrom, crashing back to a nightmare of creak and slow rending, a mad, pale light and the flicker of shadows.

‘Ah, blissin’ o’ heaven, yer honour – ye’re alive.’

Hal was not so sure of it; he struggled to rise and against the thundering pain of his head. A hand fumbled at the trap he seemed caught in, a voice cursed from the dark and Hal was suddenly free to sit up, listening to groans and pig-squeals; a face thrust itself into the light of the torch, grinning with mad relief, dripping sweat and sea-water.

‘Niall Silkie …’ Hal said and the torch bobbed.

‘Good, good – ye have yer wits. Now … careful. We are lying on our side here and everythin’ is arse to elbow.’

Hal saw he had been trapped by the strap of his baldric, which seemed fastened to the floor by an iron hook – until he realized that it had once been hung up alongside a truckle bed, but now the world was canted and crazy.

The ship …

The ship was beached and broken, the timbers snapped and splintered as gnawed bones. Like a rotted whale, it was a cave of dangerous dangle and sudden pits that he and Niall had to struggle through, while all the time the gentle sough and hiss of the merciful, calmly breathing tide set the last of the timbers to creak and moan.

‘Nothin’ so mournful as a stricken boatie,’ Niall said, when they paused the once, to get bearings. His face was sheened and gleaming.

‘Others,’ Hal managed from the great half-numbed strangeness that was one side of his face; there was a ragged, rasping catch inside his cheek that spoke of one or more teeth knocked out or splintered.

‘Kirkpatrick is on the beach. Pegy is gone and gone – Donald, too, unless God is merciful to his brother’s wails. Almost all the crew …’

Niall stopped, trembling.

‘It is after being the Feast of St Erasmus,’ he said wonderingly. ‘May the wee holy man keep them safe as he should.’

He shook it from him like a wet black dog and fumbled on through the dark, Hal at his heels and still clutching his sword and scabbard, all that he could find of his in this dragon’s cave of dark terror. St Erasmus, Hal thought, patron of sailors and known to them as St Elmo. Asleep, with all God’s other holiest, he added bitterly to himself.

Niall warned him; he dropped with a splash and Hal followed, the jar sending a great wash of pain up through his head, so that it seemed like a bursting blood orange. Then they sloshed on, out through the ribs of the stricken beast, where great blocks like stone lay scattered in the luminous tide. The cargo, thought Hal desperately. The cargo …

‘See if we can find any other poor souls,’ Niall hissed and Hal started guiltily from his thoughts of the wrapped weapons. Slowly, carefully, the torch flattening and flaring in the still-stiff breeze, they moved along, searching the dark and wet.

It was a desolate harvesting in the dim, by touch alone, of objects that might be waterlogged flesh and wool, or sheets of bladderwrack silting the waves like streaming hair. They might be heads fronded with cropped beards, or weeded rocks, all of them veined by the sea, surging and dragging, hissing over pebbles.

The only two men Hal discovered were dead and he gave up on dragging them out of the loll of surf. Somewhere further up he heard shouting, saw torches dance in the darkness and Niall Silkie plunged his own brand into the surf with a hiss, falling into a half-crouch of terror.

‘Wreckers,’ he said. ‘Come to loot the ship and slit the throats o’ any survivors.’

But Hal knew at once that the shouter was Kirkpatrick and rose, sloshing up through the surf to the stumbling pebbles, dragging his sword out. Niall, who did not want to be left alone in the dark, cursed.

Moving towards the sound, Hal felt the tug and treachery of tussocks, saw the torches coalesce and the shadows etched against them. He stumbled out of the dark and saw a man whirl towards him, the gleam of naked steel in his hands.

‘Friend,’ he yelped. Somhairl, both fists full of knife, gave a delighted grin and called out his name, so that all the shadows turned; there were not many of them, Hal noted.

One of them was Kirkpatrick, who turned once to acknowledge him, then faced front again and yelled out a long stream of Gaelic, patiently learned at the elbow of Bruce.

‘Bastard Campbells,’ he growled aside to Hal, the sodden dags of his wet hair knifed to his face. ‘Caterans and worse, who would try and steal the smell off your shit because it belongs to someone else.’

Hal saw the figures, uncertain under their torches, all wild hair and bare legs and wet, sharp steel.

‘I hope you are being polite,’ he said and knew the mush of his voice was a shock to them both when Kirkpatrick turned to him and raised his own sizzling torch for a better look; Hal did not want to hear his views on the batter of his face, but had them anyway.

‘Christ, ye look as if ye had the worst o’ an argument with a skillet,’ he declared. ‘Ye are more bruise and swell than face.’

‘A rope’s end will do that,’ Somhairl added sombrely, ‘whipped by a gale like we had.’

So that was what had hit him. Not the whole world
then …

Kirkpatrick’s warning shout buzzed pain through him and, finally, a voice called out in thick English from a throat not used to it.

‘Who is that there then?’

Hal, his head roaring with the pain of doing it, shouted back.

‘Sir Henry of Herdmanston, a friend to Neil Campbell and in need of hospitality.’

There was a pause, then a calmer, deeper voice, growing stronger as it moved closer, fought the wind to be heard.

‘Indeed? You claim the friendship of Niall mac Cailein, which is no little thing and a double-edged blade if you are proved false to it.’

The speaker was better dressed, surrounded by a clutch of bare-legged snarlers, crouching like dogs round him. He squinted, and then grinned.

‘I recall you now: Hal of Herdmanston. I was with you when Neil, son of Great Colin, brought you to the meeting in the heather we had when King Robert fled to the Isles.’

Hal remembered it, though not this man. It had been a low point.

The shadow-man paused and then bowed his neck slightly towards Kirkpatrick.

‘And yourself, who brought the news of our king’s escape and survival. The King’s wee man, though I have forgot your name entire.’

‘Kirkpatrick.’

‘That was it, right enough.’

He made a brief move and the caterans shifted back, lowering their weapons. The man stepped forward and bowed a little more.

‘Dougald Campbell of Craignish,’ he said. ‘You have the hospitality of my house.’

‘That’s a bloody relief,’ Kirkpatrick said as the man turned away to shout a liquid stream of Gaelic to his unseen men.

To Somhairl he said: ‘Gather up those we have found. When it is light, we will return and search for more.’

‘The cargo …’ Hal said and Kirkpatrick patted his arm.

‘Away you and get your face seen to. The cargo will be brought, safe and untouched. You heard the man; we have the hospitality of the Campbell of Craignish.’

‘Aye,’ Hal said. The pain seemed to ebb and flow with the tide now; a sudden thought lanced through it, sharp with the fire of guilt, and jerked his head up into Kirkpatrick’s concerned face.

‘Sim … where is Sim?’

Kirkpatrick’s bloodless lips never moved, his greased face never quavered. Yet Hal felt the leaden blow of it, hard as the rope’s end which had smacked his face, and he reeled, felt the great burning light explode in his head and bent over to vomit.

Then the light went out.

ISABEL

He came to gawp, the de Valence who is called Earl of Pembroke, hearing that I was a witch or worse. Even earls are not immune to scratching the scabs of their itching minds, to look on the strange wonders of the caged. Malise, fawning and bobbing his head like a mad chook, brought him to the Hog’s Tower, but even this rebounded on him, for Aymer de Valence’s distaste for what had been done to me was clear. Dark and scowling he was, so that I was reminded of the name everyone called him behind his back, the one Gaveston gave him: Jacob the Jew. I will resolve this, he said to Malise, after midsummer, when the current tribulations are settled. Malise did not like that and I should have been pleased for an earl’s help, like a thirsty wee lapdog for water. Of course I was not. Immediately after the tribulations of those days, I answered like a prophecy and before Malise could speak, the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light and the stars shall fall from Heaven and the power of the Heavens shall be shaken. Gospel of Matthew, I added as the Earl crossed himself. Chapter twenty-four, verse twenty-nine, I called after him as he fled; I saw the punishments flaming in Malise’s eyes.

It is almost midsummer.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Black Bitch Tavern, Edinburgh

Feast of St Columba, June 1314

The Dog Boy pushed through the throng and wished he was not here at all, nor headed where he was going; the one was altogether too crowded, the other such a trial that the setting for it was aptly named.

Edinburgh stank of old burning and feverish, frantic desperation. The castle bulked up like a hunchback’s shoulder, blackened and reeking from where it had been slighted; carts still ground their iron-shod wheels down the King’s Way, full of stones filched from the torn-down gate towers and bound for other houses or drystane walls.

Without a garrison, the town itself filled up with wickedness, with men from both sides of the divide and every nook in between, with those fleeing from the south and those filtering in from the north seeking loved ones or an opportunity. It packed itself with whores and hucksters, cutpurses, coney-catchers, cunning-men and counterfeiters, while the beadles and bailiffs struggled to keep order with few men and less enthusiasm.

What Dog Boy and the others had brought, of course, did not help, even though it was a handful of parchment, no more. Delivered to the monks of St Giles with instructions from their king, it was a spark to tinder, as far as Dog Boy was concerned.

Twelve parchments he had delivered, each hastily copied and sent here. Six were being further copied here, shaven-headed scribblers fluttering their ink-stained mittened fingers, while six were taken out by large-voiced prelates and thundered from altar and wynd corner.

The shriving pews would fill, soon. Those seeking absolution would creep from the shadows, heaped high with pride, avarice, lust and murder, to dump it at the rood screen in the hope of God’s forgiveness. The sensible sinners would flee.

Dog Boy could not read, but he knew the content of those parchments, the copies flying out to Stirling, Perth and every other ‘guid toon’ in the Kingdom. He had not known the jewel he had plucked from Berwick, bouncing around in the saddlebags of the courier’s stolen horse.

A letter, from the Plantagenet to de Valence:

… to spare Leith for the port, but burn Edinburgh town and so to raze and deface it as a perpetual memory of the Law of Deuteronomy lighted upon it, for their falsity and disloyalty. Also sack as many villages around and burn and subvert them, putting every man, woman and child to fire and sword, without exception, for they are creatures who have defied God and king both.

There was more, all in the same harshness, a great long slather of venom which had been read to Dog Boy when he had been taken in to see the King – as if that had not been shock and horror enough.

Bruce was laid up, propped on pillows in St Ninian’s with a face grey and blotched, peeling and unhealthy with sheen. He smiled as Dog Boy was brought to him, the ruin of his cheek gaping like a second mouth and his hand barely able to wave the fingers.