by Robert Low
Kirkpatrick waved one hand, which had the added effect of scattering the midges.
‘Sma’ folk,’ he growled and jerked his shadowed head at where Sim and Dog Boy sat, shadows against the last of the bloodstained sky. ‘D’ye think they care who rules them? As long as they have their livelihood, the De’il could wear the crown. It is the nobiles of this kingdom Bruce will have to worry ower.’
Hal thought about it. He had seen the sma’ folk, barefoot, shit-legged, trembling, yet determinedly hanging on to their long spears and immovable from the shoulders of the men next to them. Not noble, some not even landed, unable in many cases to understand the very speech of the man next to them and with the men from north and south of The Mounth suspicious of one another, they came together for one reason. They had cared enough to be angered.
Though it had been slow and long in the growing, a realization was sprouting in Hal that there was a kingdom here that the commonality marked enough to defend – more to the point, it was one where the bare-footed shitlegs considered they had as much say in who ruled them as any earl. He said as much to Kirkpatrick.
‘Mayhap,’ Kirkpatrick growled at this, trying to shrug the matter off and failing, for he was no longer as sure as he once had been.
Chickens is vegetables, he thought.
CHAPTER THREE
Balmullo, Fife
The same night
They brought him in the dark on a litter, a milling crowd of riders and footmen strangely silent save for a grunt here, a hissed warning there. They hefted the litter up the steep stairs and across the span of wooden walkway to the door of the stout stone house.
There were lights from torches that let the curious, peeping from the wattle buildings clustered around Balmullo, see who it was who had arrived, but not who they carried in. The Earl of Buchan, visiting his wife, they saw; one or two of the women, swaddled in shawls, added ‘puir sowl’ to that, for it was hard enough for the Countess of Buchan to have to endure the presence of the Earl’s creature as her gaoler without The Man Himself descending on her for his rights.
The creature met the litter at the door, spider-black and hair-thin with a face somehow twisted out of true. The nose, speckled with the fade of old pox-marks, was bent and twisted and there was a permanent stain, like a birthmark or blood bruise, on one cheek where he had once been hit with an iron skillet. There was a chin on the man, but not much of one and it made the teeth stick out like a rat from between damp lips limned by a wisped fringe of beard and moustache, greying now.
He was preparing, Isabel saw, to be scraping and deferential to his master, the Earl of Buchan, in the hope of preferment away from his duties at Balmullo. No more than a mastiff, she thought, set to watch as much as guard and knowing he is hated.
Yet the mastiff that was Malise Belljambe had to stand aside when the grunting men sweated through the yett and into the main hall with their burden, who said nothing beyond a muffled curse when they set him down too hard.
Malise did not want to tangle with the carriers, who stank of sweat, woodsmoke and old blood; the leader lay in the litter like the Devil at rest, but a lesser imp, in his black carapace of boiled leather, spat curses at the careless handlers in a tongue Malise knew to be the Gaelic used by those strange caterans north of The Mounth.
Buchan followed, peeling off his gloves and shifting to remove his cloak from over his head without unpinning it, seeing Malise scuttle to help him. He nodded only a brief recognition – Malise was a mammet, no more, useful for the scut work that was necessary in these savage times. Then the light from the sconce flared in the night breeze and lit up his wife.
He took a breath, for he had not seen her in some months and had managed to forget how she could look, fresh from bed. Her hair was still richly coppered and, even when he knew there was artifice involved in that, the knowledge did not spoil matters. She was beautiful still, the body hinting at slender promise even wrapped in nightclothes and a fur-trimmed gown. Her eyes, lapis in the torchlight, were hard and cold as those gems and he felt the old slither of resentment and anger, quickly beaten down, for he had not come to quarrel.
She saw the cat and dog of that chase itself across a face heavier than before. He seemed weightier altogether, she thought, surprised at how six months could make such a difference. Then she saw that it was not fat – though there were colonies of that round his middle and chin – but a droop to the once-powerful shoulders, as if he carried too much across them.
His hair was pewter, his eyes glass and iron; for a moment Isabel wondered if he would wave imperiously to the bedchamber and follow her in, as he usually did – though less this last year than ever, she noted.
Buchan thought of it, then dismissed it. He had almost done with grunting and sweating on her for no result – even the pleasure of it was licked away by her dignified detachment as she left him at the end of it, he spent and ashamed at his grossness.
No offspring came from it and, for a long time, he had wondered whether this was natural or contrived by her – but he had had other women since and in numbers, too, as if to make up for the lack she offered, and none had conceived. Buchan was beginning, with a nag of fear he could not dismiss, to realize that the problem lay with himself.
‘Wife,’ he grunted at her in the end and she acknowledged matters with a cool, curt bow and then brought forward a servant and a tray with wine and food on it.
‘Malise,’ she declared, ‘see to the care of the others and the stabling of their horses. Find room for them all where you can – but be polite in the asking.’
Malise hovered malevolently for a moment, caught Buchan’s eye and bowed obsequiously.
‘My lord’s visit?’ Isabel asked and Buchan, goblet in hand, nodded to the litter, perched near the fire and surrounded by the grim-faced men.
‘Wallace,’ he growled. ‘He is sick from a wound, so I brought him here. You have some skill with the medical and can be trusted not to blabber.’
She tried hard not to blink, to stay as stone, but it was difficult. Wallace was outlawed and harbouring him was as good as a death sentence to Buchan, only just returned to the favour of King Edward. Her skill with ‘the medical’ was one more perversion of her sex and station and she had thought that, if her husband had considered it all, it was to add it to the black sin of her.
Isabel looked her husband full in his fleshy, pouch-eyed face and had back a cool, wordless stare; she realized, suddenly, what the stooping weight he bore was and that there was steel in the man – more so than even she had thought, with his dogged persistence in carrying on resistance to the English, whether openly or covert.
‘I will take to your chambers,’ he gruffed, ‘so that folk will spread the word that this was merely the Earl coming to take his rights of his wife. Happily for you, I need sleep more than your loins for the moment, so you need not fash over it.’
He did not wait, but barrelled off into the hall’s dim, smoke from the torches fluttering like dark insinuation in his wake.
The men round the litter parted deferentially when she came up and the figure on it, half propped up on his elbow, gave her a grin from a familiar face, sheened and grey.
‘Coontess. Good to greet ye, certes – though I am sorry to be trailin’ trouble to yer hall.’
She had last seen him before the battle at Stirling and was shocked. The hunted years had leached the autumn bracken from his hair and streaked a grey turning to silver. The great size of him was the same, but there had never been much fat to start with, so that hunger had started in to wasting muscle that hard running was turning twisted and clenched like hawsers. The smell of him was rank, like the crew who surrounded him, overlayed with another, pungent stink that Isabel knew well.
She inspected the leg, seeing the green-black lump on it just below the knee, the fret of little red lines.
‘Took a dunt some time back,’ Wallace said cheerfully. ‘At Happrew. Cracked the bone in my shin, but it seemed to knit well enough. T
hen came this.’
‘There is rot in it,’ Isabel said flatly and Wallace chuckled harshly.
‘I ken that, lady,’ he replied. ‘Pain, too – if ye as much as blaw on it, it hurts as bad as if ye had struck me.’
‘We will needs do more than blow on it,’ Isabel answered and Wallace’s throat apple bobbed twice, then he nodded. The smile was gone.
‘Ah spier ye, lady – fit’s gan wrang?’
The voice was thick, the accent strange from the black-carapaced Fergus the Beetle. Isabel explained as best as she thought the man would understand and he nodded, blued bottom teeth sucking his top lip, brows lowered in a frown and eyes peering from the tangle of hair and beard, his face dark from sun and dirt, sheened with grease as protection against wind and rain.
‘Ah howkit oot a daud o’ muck frae it,’ he told her. ‘Black as the De’il’s erse, beggin’ the blissin’ o’ ye, lady. Wull he gan live yet?’
‘Away with ye, Fergus,’ Wallace said gently, hearing this. ‘Leave the good wummin to her skill.’
She had water heated and brought, with cloths and a keen, sharp skewer; Wallace followed it with his eyes, then met hers. Isabel felt clammy at what she had to do to a wound that hurt with a breeze on it, but he swallowed once, then nodded.
‘Hold him,’ she ordered and his men went to shoulders and feet. She hovered the skewer over it and saw him brace – then she struck.
He howled, thrashed, vomited and fainted. The skewer went flying from her hand and skittered across the rushed flags; even as it did she knew she had failed.
It took ten minutes for him to recover. Slick with new sweat, he managed a wan grin from the whey of his face.
‘I have the idea o’ it, now, lady,’ he said and held out his hand for the skewer. ‘Ye have the strength o’ purpose but no arm for the deed.’
She handed it to him and he wrapped all but the last fingerjoint length of it in a cloth while she watched, fascinated and appalled. Could she do this if it were her suffering?
He placed the tip of the skewer gently, just where she indicated and the blue-black mass seemed to Isabel to be pulsing now. Then he nodded to Fergus and the others, who came up and placed their hands on him in readiness.
‘Bigod,’ he said, lifted one great fist and hammered it down on the handle of the skewer.
When he came to his senses for the second time she had placed both fists on either side of the punctured wound and squeezed a festering, stinking mass of green-black pus until the blood flowed cleanly. Then she washed it in clean water and bound it in a warm bran poultice and made him a drink of henbane, knotgrass and yarrow.
He drank it obediently, made a face.
‘What did ye lace into this?’
She told him.
‘I stirred in some honey,’ she added, ‘which is what you do wi’ wee boys.’
He grinned, though his face was still pale.
‘I thought ye had poured in a pint o’ my pish, rather than taste it yersel’ to find what is sufferin’ me.’
She tidied up stinking cloths and bowls, moving soft so that the men, Fergus among them, would not be woken, though she doubted a shrieking Devil could have stirred them.
‘I have no need to lick your piss, or cast your astrology,’ she told Wallace, smiling the while, ‘for it would still come out the same – yon wound had black bile in it. If ye keep the cloths clean and take rest, ye will be none the worse in a few days.’
He experimented and grinned admiringly at her.
‘Och, the pain is vanished entire already. I will sleep the night a bit an’ be gone away by mornin’.’
‘You need more rest than that,’ she argued. ‘Some decent meals would not go amiss either.’
He frowned and shook his infested tangle of hair.
‘I have not far to go. Tam Halliday at Moffat is a safe place. We go there when all else has failed us.’
She looked sharply at him.
‘You should not be tellin’ me that, where other ears can hear. That said in a kitchen is told in a hall, sir.’
He shrugged and gave her back a lopsided smile.
‘Yer husband kens fine I am headed for there. He is safe now – I am here, am I not, at his instruction?’
‘Is he so safe, then?’
The words were out before she could stop them and he cocked his head on one side.
‘Give yer tongue more Fair days than yer head, lady,’ he replied, his smile robbing it of sting. ‘He has good points, has yer husband.’
She flushed at his chiding and he sighed a little and waved one hand.
‘Besides,’ he added, ‘the man is a lion in his own cause.’
‘His cause is himself,’ Isabel persisted warningly and Wallace nodded.
‘Exactly so – and so it is that he has need o’ me. His cause is the spoiling of Bruce, ever the Comyn way, which is why he needs me, to keep Bruce dangling on declaring a kingship that belongs to John Balliol.’
He paused and the smile grew broader.
‘Mind, I would not be as sure o’ the new wee Lord o’ Badenoch, Comyn though he is.’
She nodded, knowing Red John Comyn, Lord of Badenoch since his father’s death, had his own claims to the throne. A cousin to her husband and more important because of his lineage, that wee red-headed lord could be tempted – save that he was still currently imprisoned for his part in the rebellion. She had no doubt that he would wheedle his way out, as everyone else had.
She thought of Hal and wondered where he was.
‘I will let you sleep, Sir William,’ she answered, turning away with the light.
‘Have ye seen ony o’ yer man?’ he asked, soft, gentle – and vicious as a slap. It made her turn and put one hand to her throat at the sudden rush of memories. All she could do was shake her head and he gave a long, slow series of nods in answer.
‘A good man is Hal o’ Herdmanston,’ he went on, speaking low, his face almost vanished in the dim beyond her light.
‘Not a name welcomed by some in this house,’ she managed.
‘Blue’s beauty, red’s all taken, green is grief and yellow forsaken,’ he replied, half to himself and she heard his chuckle. ‘I still have memory o’ the words o’ love, ye see, for all that it seems to have passed me by.’
‘Leave,’ she said suddenly, flooded with sadness for the man. ‘Leave this land. Find a life elsewhere. Peace …’
The chuckle was dry, rasping as talons on a wall.
‘Too late.’
His eyes glazed and she knew he was looking to a future that might have been.
‘Is John Balliol worth this?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Is any king?’
Wallace snapped from his reverie.
‘There speaks the Eden serpent’s yin true friend,’ he replied, though his grin took any venom from it. He leaned forward a little, his face set, his eyes hot.
‘John Balliol is our liege-lord,’ he said. ‘To fight for anything else in this riven kingdom is simply to forge your own chains on behalf of some usurping tyrant.’
He leaned back on the pillow and managed a tired smile.
‘And if that is too fine coming from the brigand likes of me, then settle for this – too many men would bid me to a roast an’ stick me with the spit these days. I have picked my road and will walk to the end o’ it.’
She felt a wave of sorrow and, suddenly, his face formed in the sconce light as he rose up and thrust his stare at her, serious as a stabbing. For a moment she thought he had felt her pity and was ashamed of it – then realized that all the pity came from him.
‘Your road, lady, is forked an’ ye have stood at the cross for too long. Birk will burn be it burn drawn; sauch will sab if it were simmer sawn. Mark me.’
In the morning, he bid her farewell with thanks and a gift which she hid from Buchan. Then he and all his men were gone, leaving only the sour smell and the litter behind. Buchan, risen and breakfasted early, was able to take leave of his wife at the house door in d
aylight, as if only he and his entourage had arrived.
‘Wife,’ he said, grunting up on to the palfrey. He felt a sudden rush of utter sadness, for her as much as himself and for what might have been if matters had twisted differently. She was beautiful still, while the events of the night before and the reason for his coming at all showed the strength and skills of her. A fine countess she would have made.
Then the memories of all her stravaigin’, her slights and breathtaking dishonours wrenched pity from him and he nodded over her head, to the spider-leg thin Malise at her back.
‘Watch,’ he said and turned the horse’s head.
She stood as if dutifully mourning his going, but her mind turned Wallace’s words over and over. Wood will burn even if drawn through water and the willow will droop if sown out of season.
Five years she had resisted her natural inclinations, shackled by the knowledge that, if she stuck to the bargain, Hal would remain safe from Buchan’s wrath.
Did he still hold feelings for her, after all these years?
Could she fortress herself against the promise of them for longer?
Riccarton Chapel
Midnight
The tchik, tchik seemed like a forge hammer on an anvil in the chill dark of the place, bouncing off the hidden stones; the sparks seemed big as cartwheels. It did not seem possible for any one of them not to start a major conflagration, never mind smoulder some firestarter charcoal into embered life.
‘There are dead folk here,’ Sim Craw intoned. Lamprecht snorted; he heard the fear in the man’s voice and it pleased him to see this great beast rendered trembling by the dark and the dead. Neither of them held any fears for Lamprecht.
‘That is the usual purpose o’ a crypt,’ Kirkpatrick said dryly and his face was suddenly looming out of the dark, reddened as an imp’s in the fires of Hell, cheeks puffed as he blew the spark into a tiny blossom of flame, fed the nub end of a candle to it and then the candle to the lantern.
Light bloomed, making them blink and look away even as they crept closer to it. For all his insouciant airs, Hal thought, Kirkpatrick is as ruffled as the rest of us; he had heard the lantern’s loose horn panels rattle in the tremble of the man’s hand. Then he looked at the red-dyed devil face of Lamprecht and corrected himself. All ruffled save this, he thought.
