The Kingdom Series – The Lion at Bay

by Robert Low

  A shape shifted, dragging him back to the present, where the Dog Boy sat with a bow in one hand, peering out between the shutters to make sure no-one was thinking of scaling up to this great weakness in the wall. He turned and grinned, his face dark with new beard, his forearms muscled from working with the big deerhounds.

  ‘Aye til the fore, my lord,’ he said and Sim grunted acknowledgement of still being alive over his shoulder as he clattered down the stairs to the hall.

  Hal paused a moment and forced a grin in return; the Dog Boy, as dark and saturnine as the day he had come from Douglas when he was twelve, still reminded Hal of the son who lay dead under the stone cross nearby, together with his wife and his father.

  A stone cross, he recalled bitterly, about forty paces from the bloody springald, the graves trampled and spoiled by the boots of the ingeniator and his minions, who stored their gear in the stone chapel.

  Down in the dim of the Big Hall Alehouse Maggie and a handful of mothers – a Jane here and a Bess and a Muriel there, all from nearby cottar huts – cluttered round the meagre fire in the large hearth, singing quiet songs to calm the fretting weans. Isabel was at a nearby truckle bed, checking on the occupant and turned as Hal clacked across the sparsely-rushed flagstones.

  ‘No worse,’ she declared and then bent and sniffed. ‘Still smells like a privy hole, mark you.’

  The figure on the bed chuckled weakly and Hal stepped to where he could see him, dark hair wild and ruffled, lopsided face pale as poor hope and a stain still leaking into the clean wrappings Isabel had only just bound him with.

  ‘After three days,’ said Ill-Made weakly, ‘twa things stink – fish and an unwanted guest.’

  Hal said nothing. Ill-Made had been hit three days ago by a crossbow bolt, a half-spent ricochet, the shaft shattered and the head ragged, which was why he had not died at once. Digging it out of his armpit had cost him more blood than he could afford, all the same and Hal knew, with sick certainty, that he would go to join the four others who had died in the seven days of siege.

  There were at least a dozen less of the besieging hundreds who surrounded the tower, most of them casualties of the first day, storming up the stair to where the six foot gap had to be spanned to a lip at the foot of the oak door.

  Splintering that door with axe and fire had cost them most of the dozen and others were picked off by Sim and Dog Boy from the roof, until the springald had appeared and the besiegers had drawn back.

  It had taken most of a day to assemble the confection of sticks and metal – but after that it had started plunking great, long, fat-headed bolts at the ruined doorway entrance, hoping to smash the grilled yett beyond. Scabbed stonework showed they had not hit it yet, but the tireless whirr and bang of it, the creakingly painful reloading, grated on everyone.

  Isobel came up to him, hair tendrilling out from under her headcover, her fingers bloody from ministering to Ill-Made; the springald bolt cracked again, though it was only the noise that jangled everyone for the walls of Herdmanston, at this level, were thick enough for rooms to have been scabbed out of the inside and still leave a forearm’s length of solidity.

  ‘What will they do now?’ she asked in French, so that his answer would not be understood by Maggie and the others and he could speak freely.

  Hal thought of it. The tower was the height of ten tall men and stood on a mound that not only gave it more height but pushed out the approach of any siege tower to where a ramp could not cross from it to the top of Herdmanston, even if one could be built that tall.

  There was nowhere for a ladder less than such a height to reach, and no hook-ended ropes could be flung up that far. The garth was plundered and every hut burned – though that usually only meant the thatched roof, for the wattle and daub simply hardened and the few entire stone buildings were left blackened and roofless.

  The Herdmanston cellar had beef and barley and oats enough and, providing it kept raining, the stone butts in the undercroft would keep enough water in them. Still, there was only a handful of fighting men in Herdmanston and too many women and weans for a lengthy siege, so sensible enemies, Hal thought, would sit and wait.

  Buchan, he knew, was not sensible. None of them out there were, too twisted with their own desires to consider sitting and waiting. So they would assault and the only way was under the arch where the oak door had been and then the iron yett. That was where they would come and only after they had destroyed the yett.

  ‘At which point they will offer terms,’ Hal told her with a wry smile, ‘it being a breach and honour requiring it. Young Patrick will so insist, being a right wee Arthur for the chivalry.’

  She nodded, then stared at him with eyes velvet and liquid as blue pools.

  ‘I should go,’ she began weakly and he placed a finger on her lips.

  ‘You will not, lamb,’ he said. ‘The terms are only for the nicety in it and to put a polite face on it for Dunbar. There is no good outcome from our failure to hold here – whatever peace is offered will not be offered to me, nor you.’

  She looked round at the bairns, now being shushed by Annie and herded cautiously to the steps winding to the undercroft, where it was safer but dark and dank even with torches, which they could ill afford.

  ‘The bairns,’ she said with a pleading crack in her voice that Hal had to steel himself against.

  ‘The children and women might be offered leave,’ he answered, ‘but they would have to scamper far and wide, with nothing to their backs or bellies or over their heads, to be safe from soldiery like this.’

  He scrubbed his head and she saw the weary lines of him.

  ‘Besides,’ he went on, waving a hand at the covered Stone, innocuous as a nun’s shift, ‘there is that. Not only will Buchan have it, to display against Bruce’s kingship, he will have you to show likewise. Is that what you want?’

  ‘I would die first.’

  He felt the tremble in her as he took her, let her lay her head on his breast; he smelled of sweat and leather and woodsmoke, but there was strength in him that she sucked at greedily. Like a lamb at the teat, she thought with a soft smile. It faded when she thought of what would happen.

  They would die here.

  The sudden explosion of noise, as if someone had flung an entire tin cauldron down a flight steps, flung them apart. Bairns shrieked and there were frantic shouts – cursing, Sim and Hal sprang for the stairwell that led below, to the Yett Hall.

  Men milled, armed and ready but Hal saw that no enemy had burst in on them. But the yett was open and flapping like an iron bird wing, part of it bent and twisted; in one corner was a bloody smear on the wall and, at the foot of it, a rag-bundle that slowly leaked darkly into a puddle.

  ‘Wull the Yett,’ Sim informed no-one in particular, scowling darkly as if Wull had committed some crime.

  Hal felt the cold stone of it sink in him. Auld Wull the Yett had been gatekeeper since his father’s time, a recalcitrant, shuffling old misery, never done complaining. Until now, Hal corrected.

  It was not hard to work out that the springald had scored a hit, spearing a fat iron-headed shaft in through the ruined doorway and striking the yett somewhere above the lock, where the iron grill had bent but not broken.

  The springald shaft had shattered, though, sharding into a lethal spray of wood and metal in whose path had been Wull the Yett, lopsided pot helm on his head, raddled hand clutching a filthy, notched sword whose hilt rattled when he shook it defiantly. The blast of metal and wood had torn him to bloody pats and burst the lock on the yett.

  ‘Fetch hammers,’ Hal ordered, seeing the ruin of it. ‘And Leckie the Faber,’ he added as men sprang to obey.

  For a moment Sim and he stood, pillars of silent grim in the whirl of activity round them. The lock was a ruin and could not be fastened, though the iron yett could still be barricaded shut …

  Then they looked at each other.

  ‘They will have heard it,’ Sim forced out and Hal nodded. He heard the wea
ns being soothed from snot and tears, became aware of the lack of rushes for the floor, torches for the walls, food, arrows …

  They would ask for terms now and Hal did not know whether to refuse them, bad or good.

  ‘You are certain, Master Ingeniator?’

  Gaultier nodded, while his two assistants, sacking draped over their filthy heads against the rain, bobbed like toys in agreement.

  ‘Through the arch,’ the Fleming said with smug satisfaction. ‘There was a great bang as it hit the gate – we all heard it.’

  And the two toys nodded at him, at each other and then at the dark brooding Malenfaunt. Patrick of Dunbar, round, wisp-moustached face framed by the ringmetal coif, beamed at the Earl of Buchan.

  ‘Well – a palpable hit, by God. Damaged at least. Something we can claim as a practical breach, eh?’

  Buchan, his thinned hair plastered to his bared head, nodded scowling, pouch-eyed agreement; there had been too long spent on this enterprise in his opinion and the reason for it sat cloistered in that hall, no doubt trembling at what might be done to her now. Well might she shake, he thought savagely.

  ‘A white peace,’ Patrick added pointedly. ‘As we agreed – I look to you, my lord, to hold to this, as agreed.’

  Malenfaunt laughed sourly, but said nothing. He seldom spoke these days, the fork of his tongue rendering it almost unintelligible and that, coupled with the deep, banked smoulder in him kept everyone at a distance.

  Malise, dripping patiently by the side of his earl, watched Malenfaunt and remembered how he had come off worst in a tourney duel with Bruce and that there had been some scandal over a nunnery in Berwick, which had had to have the occupants scoured out of it and questioned.

  Depositions of Devil worship and worse were, even now, being taken and Malenfaunt’s name had come up more than once. Now he was here, banished from the mesnie of de Valence, shunned by every nobile who at least professed a measure of honour and trying to ingratiate himself into the grace of the Earl of Buchan, whose wayward wife he had once held to ransom.

  War, Malise realized, would be a joy to this one for it would put an end to all the legalities threatening to swamp him and might even raise his stature; all knights would be needed soon, when Longshanks rose up off his skinny arse and started to roar like the mangy pard he was.

  This time, he knew, there was no question of which side the Buchan and Balliol and Comyn chose – the one which had a Bruce on the opposite.

  ‘I have my reasons for being here,’ Buchan said sourly, peeling off a sodden gauntlet to wipe his streaming face. ‘Make what white peace ye care – but neither the Countess nor Hal of Herdmanston is included in it. That pair are mine, by God.’

  They assembled in the lisping mirr by the stone cross, holding up a shield covered in white linen, turning dark with rain. Two figures came to the arched, flame-blackened doorway, the bigger, badger-bearded one holding a monstrous crossbow. Those who knew Sim and the lord Hal – Dunbar men and those locals who hired out for pay – gave a few friendly shouts, swiftly muffled. Save for one.

  ‘Holla, Sim Craw – aye til the fore I see.’

  The irrepressible Davy Scott from Buccleuch made all the other Scotts laugh, then curl their lip at the glares from the Comyn retinue.

  ‘Davy Scott – I have heard nothing of ye since … bigod, it would be Roslin Glen. How long since was that?’

  ‘Three years,’ Scott called back, heedless of the glowers.

  ‘A rattlin’ time,’ Sim shouted. ‘A rare victory, so I hear.’

  ‘Aye, man,’ Davy enthused, his beady black eyes bright. ‘There were Kerrs every which where, skitin’ like hares. Ah saw Kerrs frae Cessford an’ Graden an’ others frae ower Teviotdale. A right rout it was.’

  ‘And the English,’ Sim pointed out wryly. Davy Scott had the grace to look embarrassed for a moment, realizing not only his preoccupation with an old feud but that he was now, to all intents, with the English he had once scattered so delightedly up and down Roslin Glen.

  ‘Oh aye – them as well.’

  Then Sim swept his eyes round until he found the face he sought; still fox-sharp, the eyes as cold and dark as of old, though permanently narrowed now, as if the man squinted. Losing his sight, Sim thought. Then added viciously to himself: God blind you, Malise Bellejambe.

  Malise felt the eyes on him and flicked briefly to them, then away. He did not like the big, keg-shaped grim of Sim Craw, who made him aware of a man he’d red murdered years before, the one called Tod’s Wattie. A friend of this one, Malise remembered, seeing the banked revenge in Sim Craw’s stare and not caring much for it.

  Ignoring all of this, Buchan and Hal locked gazes. Hal saw the gaunt of the man and wondered at it. He has ten years on me, he thought to himself, but that did not explain the yellow tinge, the unhealthy fever of the stretched cheeks, the bones of his face like oak galls. He felt the heat of the man’s anger.

  Buchan, in turn, saw the still figure, grizzled these days and limned with hard life, but he barely took in the look of the man; his belly turned, for here was his revenge, looking him in the face. It came to him, in a sudden, sick dizziness, that there was no triumph in it, only a reflection of his own mean rage.

  Dunbar thought it best to grip the hilt of matters a little tighter.

  ‘Your folk may depart with honour and their lives,’ he said curtly to Hal. ‘You must hand over the Countess and yourself to the mercy of myself and the Earl of Buchan. Your fortress will be slighted.’

  There was a pause, an indrawing of breath and no more, while everyone waited to see if Herdmanston would capitulate.

  Patrick hoped he would not; though the prospect of storming the place was bloody, he wanted it with all the eager, frantic fervour of his twenty-two years; he had never been at such a matter before and Malenfaunt saw that and sneered at it. The wee earl’s son would find the truth out at cost – if he lived at all, Malenfaunt thought to himself.

  He had avoided such engagements, for the prospect of dying at the hands of a grimy-handed cottar for some pointless heap of stones was not chivalrous enough – yet the high-chivalry tourney with Bruce, who could have killed him, brought back the sweating, shrieking moment when he had thought death would happen.

  He knew he had babbled and pleaded for his life then and the yellow memory of it soured his life like vomit, while the sinuous wriggle and flap of his own forked tongue, the result of what Bruce had done instead, repulsed him.

  The only two who mattered in this were horns-locked at the eyes, cold and unblinking as basilisks until, finally, Hal spoke into Buchan’s unflinching glare, though it was Patrick of Dunbar he addressed.

  ‘I am fine where I am,’ he said softly. ‘Besides – I have only just fixed matters from the last time I was raided. I would liefer have the place unsullied.’

  ‘I am your liege lord,’ Patrick declared loftily, then realized he actually was not and hastily corrected himself.

  ‘My father is. You owe him fealty and explanation for your constant turncoating. I have offered you more honour and mercy than you deserve …’

  ‘Save your words, he does not care – he is Bruce’s man now.’

  Buchan’s voice was a whip that lashed Dunbar to silence.

  ‘If you do not give in now,’ he went on, never removing his eyes, ‘it will be the end of you. I will nail your entrails to a post and walk you round them until your life unfolds. I will allow that wanton bitch to watch, then throw her to my men and, when they are done, to the dogs.’

  Patrick shifted and bleated protest at this, but Hal finally snapped his gaze from Buchan and rested it on the Dunbar lordling.

  ‘Dinnae fash, Patrick,’ he said companionably. ‘Ye have taken up with bad company, for if Christ Himself walked among ye, the Earl of Buchan would deceive Him.’

  Malenfaunt stirred then and made a long series of gabbling sounds, increasing in fury because he realized no-one could understand him. He was wrong and the astonishment in it st
unned him to silence.

  ‘My lord Malenfaunt declares,’ Malise Bellejambe said at the end of it all, seeing the blank faces, ‘that he has a writ from King Edward giving Herdmanston to himself. He has come to take over his fortress and desires you quit-claim from the place immediately.’

  The silence and stares made him frown and he turned into the equally incredulous face of Malenfaunt.

  ‘What?’ Malise demanded. ‘That is what you said, is it not?’

  Malenfaunt nodded, his eyes wide as a dog who has found someone without a whip.

  ‘I hold Herdmanston,’ Hal answered with a growl, ‘and will do so. If ye wish me or mine, nobiles, then you must exert yerself and do yer utmost.’

  ‘Come away in,’ said a new voice, lilting and smooth and so instantly recognizable that Buchan visibly jerked.

  She came to the back of Hal, russet head proud and eyes blazing on her husband’s face.

  ‘There is little point in speaking with a man who would throw his wife to all his dogs,’ she added in French and laid a hand gently on Hal’s shoulder. Up on the roof, the Dog Boy saw the shift in the saddle and even from there, the rush of blood to Buchan’s jowled face turned it almost black.

  Buchan saw Hal’s sudden smile at her touch as a glittering curve of leering triumph against him and all his walls broke. With a sharp cry, almost the scream of a girl, he raked the sides of the great warhorse; taken by surprise, it reared and pawed, then surged forward. Buchan’s blade was raised high and capable of striking Hal’s ankles, bringing him tumbling off the steps.

  A dark shape slammed his horse on one shoulder, sending it skittering sideways. Davy Scott saw Patrick of Dunbar’s furious face as he balked Buchan’s horse with his own and he brought up the spanned latchbow he’d held, quiet and hidden, down one side of his horse, away from the sharp eyes of Sim Craw; if he shot Hal of Herdmanston now, Buchan would reward him richly …