The Kingdom Series – The Lion at Bay

by Robert Low

  Kirkpatrick did not even blink, merely held out his arms, hands dangling loose at the wrist, in an invitation to be searched. Isabel knew there was no hidden steel on him and, with a leap of fear, realized she could not be so sure of Hal, even though everyone had already been examined, save her.

  Wallace caught her eye as he turned his head. There was a pause, then he focused on Hal.

  ‘And you, lord of Herdmanston,’ he said heavily. ‘Is your task done?’

  Hal felt the moment, the iron rods of Bangtail and Falkirk’s wood and Stirling’s brig all twisting and forging to a point, sharp as the weapon hanging on the wall. He felt the hilt of it in his hand already, burning his swordfist as if suddenly fired red hot by the rage in him. He wondered if he could get to Wallace’s own sword in time, before the battle-honed Wallace reacted. He was weakened and weary, but he was still Wallace, a giant with fast hands and strong wrists; Hal remembered him at Scone, whirling the hand-and-a-half in one fist.

  The moment passed; the tension deflated and Kirkpatrick found he needed to breathe.

  ‘In the name of Bangtail Hob, my task is not done and I will needs live with that,’ Hal hoarsed out, meeting Wallace’s gaze. ‘But yours is. Get ye gone, Sir Will. Your price for freedom has cost too many good folk their lives and the promise you made for it stays unfulfilled.’

  He turned and left like a cold wind. Isabel saw that the slash of those words had wounded Wallace deeper than any dagger could, saw the stagger in the man, like a ship caught sideways in a gale. Then he recovered and drew up a little in his seat, managed a shaky smile.

  ‘Ye’ll need a strong hand with yon yin,’ he said to Isabel and she nodded, his face blurring through the springing tears, so that she turned away.

  Kirkpatrick was left alone with him and the thought was bitter irony. Once this would have been an opportunity needing only a moment and a blade …

  Instead, he nodded to the fallen giant and left. The true weapon was snugged up under the real coin in the bag, as vicious as any knife, a winking red eye of betrayal. Wallace would nurse his pride against need and would never consult the innards of that bag until forced to it. In truth, Kirkpatrick thought, he would not consult it at all; the men who would come in the night, sooner rather than later, would do that.

  Outside in the drenched night, Kirkpatrick sucked in a breath and twisted a small, half-ashamed smile on his face. He now knew the true name of at least one of those jewelled Apostles – a ruby called Judas.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Herdmanston Tower

  Invention of St Stephen, August, 1305

  Lammas came and went, with trestles on the green groaning with meat, bread and cheese. The harvest had involved everyone, lines of men with scythes, gaggles of women and bairns gathering and tying and stooking.

  Hal, stripped to the waist, joined in and, for some hours, reduced his world and the problems in it to a green wall and an avenue of amber stubble. Sim Craw on his right, Ill-Made on his left. Blisters swelled and broke on his hands, life became pain, in the back, across the shoulders.

  At the end of it, Hal was sorry to have to leave, drenching himself with water from a bucket handed by a giggling Bet’s Meg, while the men competed for the kirn, the last cut of corn, and drank deep of Maggie’s new brew, frothed and thick as soup.

  Increasingly mazed, they threw their scythes at the last stand until Dog Boy cut it through; grinning, he presented the sheaf to Bet’s Meg, who would make it into the kirn-baby, a sure sign that she was next for wedding.

  Next for bairning, Hal thought, for sure – Dog Boy was ploughing that willing furrow already, he was sure, just as Sim Craw and Alehouse Maggie could be heard all over the tower.

  The whole world was rutting, he thought, including himself. He lay with her russet spill of hair across his chest, aching and exhausted in the best way, from work and love. The wool was good, the harvest was good, the only deaths were those expected and the rents for Roslin ready for the start of next year, in March.

  Yet the nag was there, of when the blow would fall and how hard and who Buchan would get to do it. There was no question of the Earl openly demanding his wife back; she had been put aside in a nunnery, after all, like a discarded pair of shoes. Still, they were Comyn shoes and stepping into them gained parts of Fife, so they would not be left in a corner of a tower in Lothian for long.

  A hoolet screeched, threading the night with terror. A wind blew, cool and holding the promise of rain, rattling the shutters of that folly of a window, built by his father for his mother and a breach in the defence of a tower. Hal thanked his da for it, all the same, as his mother had when she sat in the nook of it, sewing and looking out. Now Isabel did the same.

  If there was no war, he thought, sliding towards sleep, I would not worry so much about that silly window. But Bruce is moving and war is on the wind …

  He wondered, sinking into the sweet softness of sleep, where Kirkpatrick was.

  Next day, he tried to slough off the unease with a deer hunt, though the chances of success were slight and the manner of it was not to his liking – a ‘bow and stable’, which was usually the province of the old and infirm. I am both, he had to admit to Sim Craw, who merely grunted as he climbed aboard his garron and heaved up his monster crossbow across one shoulder. Only Dog Boy, young and fit, revelled in the moment of it, in sole charge of the deerhounds he had been training.

  They rode out to Roslin’s deer park through a glory of stubbled gold where rooks and crows rose up, protesting loudly. They nodded to wardens and shepherds while clouds swelled over the land from the Firth.

  ‘Weather is comin’,’ Sim noted, when they were in the deer park’s coppiced edges, negotiating the formidable earth barriers and leaps that allowed the roe and hart in but not out.

  ‘Is it now?’ Hal noted mildly and with some humour, for Sim Craw fancied himself a foreteller of rain and storm though the truth was he would know it poured at the same time as everyone else.

  They paused at the entrance to a long, coppiced stretch, while the two deerhounds panted with lolling tongues, tasting the stink of the wolf head nailed high on an oak. It was a warning to poachers on two or four legs, Hal knew and would have paid it no regard – save that the sight reminded him of Wallace.

  ‘It is how every wolf’s head ends up,’ Sim declared when Hal spoke his thoughts. ‘Unless it is wise enow to run out o’ the country entire.’

  It was then that the roe leaped from one side of the wood, paused to stare at them, no more than a lance-length away, so that Hal swore he saw himself reflected in the beautiful deep pool of perfectly-fringed glaucous eye.

  Then, with a powerful heave, it leaped up into the far side of trees. After the first stunned moment – the dogs shot forward, baying exultantly, ripping their leashes from Dog Boy’s hands.

  ‘Ah, ye hoor slips …’

  Dog Boy danced with the pain of the weals on his palms, cursing his charges who disappeared into the trees, trailing leashes and howls. Sim Craw, reeling with laughter, almost fell from the garron, which set Hal laughing and even the Dog Boy joined in, alternately blowing on his palms and on the hunting horn, the sound he had been training the dogs to return to.

  What had sent the deer out into the path? The question was rolling like spit on Hal’s tongue when he felt the garron judder as if kicked, felt it rise up under him with a shriek – then there was only a birling of sky and trees and a great blast of pain as he landed, driving the breath from him and the pain of his half-healed ribs through him like a lance.

  Sim Craw knew in an eyeblink what had happened, so that the two men who spilled from the trees, one casting aside the crossbow and dragging out a long knife, came as no surprise to him.

  He kicked his own horse hard, feeling its shock and the surge of it, then rode at the men. They balked; one had a spear and waved it, but Sim Craw hurled the heavy, unloaded crossbow at him, spilling him backwards even as Sim launched himself from his horse at the second
man, dragging out his own long knife and roaring like a mad bull.

  Hal, struggling and wheezing upright, slapped a dazed Dog Boy hard on the shoulder as two more men closed in, all wild hair and red mouths and frantic, desperate eyes and sharp steel in their hands

  The one who came at Dog Boy thought he had rolled winning dice, for he saw a strapping youth, but one with no weapon on him; his snarl was a feral grin, which he lost when Dog Boy rammed his hunting horn in it.

  Yelping, the man went over on his arse; Dog Boy stepped forward, booted the man perfectly in the cods, then sprang on him to tear the long knife free. They rolled in a maelstrom of wet leaves and mulch.

  The man who came for Hal was the biggest bastard of them all, and armed with a spear. He knows how to use it, Hal thought to himself, seeing the hold the man had on it; Hal struggled to get back the breath driven out of him, but the man bored in, flicking the spear like a snake’s tongue, using the slicing edge of the head as much as the point.

  Something slammed Hal sideways; the rump of his own plunging garron, mad with fear and pain; there’s traitorous for you, Hal thought and watched the butt end of the reversed spear come at him, clipping his thigh and throwing him the other way.

  Babbling and dribbling, face twisted from the pain, Hal reeled away, fumbled his sword out at long last and had it clear of the sheath in time to fall over backwards like a great felled tree. The big spearman gave a howl of triumph, spun the spear back to the blade end with a masterly flick of the wrist, then took it in two hands and raised it high for the killing stroke.

  Stupid, Hal thought with that part of his mind not shrieking with the exultant realization of the man’s mistake. He drove the sword into the man’s keg belly, rammed it hard, for the point was a little blunt, rammed it hard until he felt the jar of it hit backbone.

  The big man’s howl turned to a querulous whimper, he dropped the spear and went into a panicked jerking, as if getting rid of the bar of iron driven into him would put things back the way they were.

  His writhing tore the sword from Hal’s grasp and he could only lie there and watch as the man realized nothing was going to be put back and that the sword wasn’t coming out. The sheer unfairness of it all roared enough anger into him to keep him stumbling forward, even as his legs were failing. Hal felt himself plucked up in an iron grip, a fist hauling him up into the dying rage of the man’s bearded face, a second raising up like a forge hammer to come down on Hal’s face.

  The little knife went in the man’s ear. In and out, faster than an adder’s lick and Hal was suddenly drowning, flooded with blood and the man’s own last flecked froth, so that he panicked and thrashed against the falling weight until, mercifully, it was gone and he rolled over, retching.

  ‘Aye til the fore,’ said a voice and Hal cleaned enough of his eyes to see, red-misted, the grin of Dog Boy, bloody dagger in one hand. He is getting awfy handy at stickin’ folk in the lug, Hal thought and flopped back on the grass until Sim Craw loomed over him, dangling two bags.

  At first Hal thought wildly that Sim had cut the bollocks from his victims, then realized that the bags were purses.

  ‘Taken from each of they moudiewarts,’ Sim growled, shaking the sweat runs from his face. ‘The same amount of coin in either, give or take a farthing.’

  ‘Aye,’ Dog Boy echoed, almost cheerfully, looking up from searching the others, ‘it is the same here.’

  Hal and Sim looked at each other, then Hal took the proffered arm and was hauled back to his feet.

  ‘Buchan,’ said Sim and Hal nodded, wiping the streaks of the big man’s blood from his face. Sent by Buchan, for sure, even if they were fealtied to Earl Patrick of Dunbar, or Badenoch, or some other lord who owed the Comyn favours. Of course, none of the four dead men were identifiable and none were simple brigands – with so much coin a brigand would be drinking and hooring, not taking on three armed men in a wet wood.

  The deerhounds came loping back, slinking ashamedly under Dog Boy’s gaze.

  ‘Well ye might,’ Dog Boy admonished, while the hounds sank to their bellies and crawled to him. ‘Where were ye when ye were needed? Ye didna even get the stag.’

  Sim, chuckling and tucking away purses and anything else of value from the dead, could not be persuaded that it had not been a good day, even if the string of his hurled latchbow was half-severed and so wholly ruined.

  Hal helped drag the bodies off the path and into the trees, for they would not be reported save to Bruce and their vanishing would keep others from the same hunt for a while – why pay more men when you have four already on the spoor?

  He will come at you sideways, like a cock on a dungheap. Hal heard the warning words of his father about Buchan, trailing down the long years like chill from an open grave.

  The fortress at Kirkintilloch

  The same evening, 1305

  The hand was grimy even in the dark, the face half-shadowed, half-gore in the sconce light, so that the twist of nobbed nose gave Lang Jack the look of a weathered gargle, spewing high under the eaves of some church.

  It was an apt look for him, who had vomited all the venomous bile he had stored up about Wallace and his failures and perceived betrayal - bokked it up for a purse of gold until all he had left to spit out was a time and a place. Kirkpatrick dropped the purse in the hand, which closed like a trap, weighed it, then made it vanish. Lang Jack nodded and wraithed into the dark, while the rain gurgled through the gutters and merlons of the fortalice, turning the old wood black.

  Kirkpatrick turned his face briefly to the lisping cool lick of the rain, then shook himself like a dog and walked back under the gateway and into the maw of the place.

  In a room smoky and sick with tallow light, he came on Sir John Menteith slopping wine into a pewter mug.

  ‘I wish ye had not brought this to me,’ the knight declared and Kirkpatrick sighed, since it was not the first time Sir John had said it. That had been when Kirkpatrick had brought the where and when and how of it all, laying it in front of the man appointed Governor of Dumbarton Castle by Longshanks and so responsible for the area. Responsible for the arrest of a betrayed Wallace, lying in a house not more than a handful of miles away.

  Four hours later, the soldiers – all English of the garrison, for Menteith could not trust the Scots in it to carry it out –bundled a giant in chains back through the door, with only minor bruises and one slashed arm to show for it.

  ‘You are the man of the hour and place,’ Kirkpatrick said to him – again.

  ‘They will revile me for it,’ Menteith answered bitterly and Kirkpatrick frowned. Sir John Menteith – and his brother, Alexander – were already reviled, for throwing off the Stewart name and adopting that of Menteith. False Menteith was the least of the epithets hissed at the back of Sir John and the arrest of Sir William Wallace was neither here nor there in it.

  ‘You will be raised by it,’ he replied. ‘King Edward will see to that, advised by his good men in the Kingdom – the Earl of Annandale being one of the more powerful.’

  Menteith had long since worked out that, no matter who ruled in Scotland, his rise was assured, because of a handful of soldiers and a secret night descent on a lonely house.

  Yet Kirkpatrick sensed the wavering in Menteith, saw him swill the wine as if something foul would not be washed away from his mouth. The knight did not care for it – but Kirkpatrick had planned for this, too, so that the news of the betraying Apostle, the Pope’s letter, the bag of coin – though not where it had come from – was already known to Longshanks.

  Wallace, snatched timely from an escape, to be paid for by the proceeds of robbery from the King’s Treasury? With a safe conduct from the Pope so vague it could easily be ignored? It was a tale that could not fail – all Menteith had to do was deliver the man safely to those who would take him south to London and he could not avoid doing that without ending in irons himself.

  Menteith knew it, too, for all his desperate wine-swilling.

  �
��Will you see him?’ he demanded and Kirkpatrick tried not to react violently at the suggestion.

  ‘Best he does not know of my part in it,’ he said, as if the entire affair did not hang on Wallace knowing nothing of Kirkpatrick’s involvement, which would lead him to the Bruce part in it.

  ‘Best to let him believe Lang Jack did him in. That way, word will get out to those Wallace men left and there will be further division among them – and no further rebellion in this part of the realm.’

  Menteith nodded sullenly and Kirkpatrick eased a little. If Wallace discovered that Kirkpatrick had betrayed him nothing would convince him that Bruce had not ordered it and there was no telling what secrets he might spill.

  This way, the Wallace was sent off, growling and tight-lipped, for a date with the executioner, while Lang Jack would last as long as it took for Kirkpatrick to track him to a dark alley, reeling drunk with his new riches. No-one would mourn the traitor who had led Wallace to the English, or help find the vengeful killer.

  And Bruce had his road to the throne unblocked.

  A big risk, of course – but Bruce had sat, quiet and still when Kirkpatrick had voiced this, the pair of them alone.

  ‘He will not betray anyone he believes holds the freedom of the Kingdom in regard,’ he had replied and so clearly, breathtakingly, considered that to be himself that Kirkpatrick had no answer to it. He had left Bruce kneeling, head bowed in prayer, or penitence, for what he was about to do.

  Or mayhap he tries to appease the Curse of Malachy, Kirkpatrick thought to himself with a bitter twist of humour, for forcing him to weigh his soul with so great a sin. I doubt he will, but it would be good of him to offer a prayer for the sins he has heaped on my soul.

  He stepped out into the rainwashed night, wanting to put distance between himself and the shackled giant he could feel through the stones of the keep.