The Kingdom Series – The Lion at Bay

by Robert Low

  ‘Stay yer hand,’ Patrick of Dunbar bellowed furiously at Buchan. ‘This is a truce, by God.’

  For a moment, it seemed the unthinkable would happen and that Buchan would strike the son of the Earl of March – then the arrow hissed, snaking over the heads of everyone, so that only a few saw it and fewer still cried out and reached for weapons. By the time hand was on hilt, though, the best shot the Dog Boy ever did struck Davy Scott on his top lip and drove straight through his head, slicing his brainstem in two.

  As if someone had cut all the strings of him, he simply flopped, slid sideways and toppled off the horse, the latchbow falling free; it hit the ground and went off, so that the bolt wasped over ducking heads.

  There was yelling and confusion; Hal slid Isabel backwards into the keep, covered by Sim’s crossbow, while Patrick of Dunbar bellowed at Buchan and everyone around him to stay their hand.

  With a final savage wrench that took Bradacus’ head back with a protesting whine, the Earl of Buchan reined round and trotted off, the old warhorse stepping delicately over Davy Scott’s body, which Buchan never once looked at.

  They came on in a rush an hour later. The rain had stopped and enough sun came out to steam the ground and bring out a rash of insects, which caused the horses to fret and quiver at their tethers; they were useless in this event and could only stand fast and be bitten.

  The grim-faced men assembled, knowing this would be a hard affair, even though they hugely outnumbered the defenders; there was only one way in and that was up the stair, two wide.

  The first four would have shields up, to front and above. The next two would lug the awkward man-length of wooden planking to span the gap between the top of the stair and the lip of the doorway. The others would come up with spears and axes, the first for forcing the defenders back from the yett, no doubt reinforced and barriered as best as could be managed, the second for the close in-fighting, where even a sword was too long.

  Young Patrick, fired and eager, moved down the ranks, trying to behave as a knight should, his earnest face red where it could be seen in the framing of maille rings and bascinet. He clapped shoulders of men he would never dine with at home and prepared himself to lead the ones carrying the spanning plank.

  Buchan stood and glowered, armed and armoured, a glory of gold wheatsheaves on blue, but patently not involved; it was not the place of earls to risk themselves in such a combat and if the silly sons of earls wished to be foolish that was their own affair.

  He had said as much to Malise, while instructing him to join the affray. Malise, accoutred in uncomfortable maille, stumped bitterly towards the pack clutching an unfamiliar axe and shield, the whole panoply of it a crushing weight that made him wonder if he could even get up the steps.

  Malenfaunt stopped him with a hand on one arm, muttering in his gabbled way. Malise could not work out why no-one else could understand the man; what he said was clear as day to him.

  ‘Stay out of it until they are inside,’ the knight warned, then grinned, thin-lipped and mirthless. ‘See the smoke there?’

  Malise saw it, a curling wisp from a hole to one side, above the doorway; he nodded, confused.

  ‘They have a fire going. It is in a wee kitchen, but I do not think they are making a basket of chicken.’

  They stood and watched as the attack went in, the shielding men huddled and crabbing as fast as they could go, the ones lugging the plank roaring in desperate fear and fury to keep themselves moving forward.

  An arrow spanged off a shield, a bolt took one of the shieldmen in the thigh and he fell with a shriek of despair and a clattering thump. The spanning plank went down and Patrick of Dunbar led the rush, bellowing, into the maw of the doorway.

  The yett had been barricaded and buttressed with the tower’s original spanning plank, while Leckie the Faber, expert blacksmith that he was, had hammered a bar of iron into a circle, fastening the grilled door shut after a fashion. Behind it, as Patrick’s eyes blinked from the sunlight to the dim, were shadowy figures, flicking out spear tips between the metal squares of the yett grill.

  Men crushed forward, Patrick yelling for his own to hammer the bar off the gate. Spears clattered on shields – then, suddenly, inexplicably, the men behind the grill scampered away from it. There was a moment of confusion as the attackers, with nothing to stab at, milled round the yett door, getting in the way of the men bringing in hammers – then there was a hissing sound, like falling rain, and the screaming began as boiling water poured from the murder-holes above them.

  Malenfaunt nodded with smug righteousness as men howled out of the door. Three of them missed their footing on the plank or were shoved aside by the pack of panicked to fall in a whirl of arms and legs and screams. The rest half-ran, half-stumbled back down the stairs; one was smacked on to his face by a bolt in his shoulderblades and Malise knew that came from Sim Craw, high on the roof and hidden by the merlons. He shivered at the idea of almost having been in all of that and glanced sideways at the smiling Malenfaunt, who had saved him.

  Young Patrick came out, bawling and screaming, hauling off his coif in a frenzy, throwing bascinet to one side; squires and servants ran to assist and shield him while he stripped himself to his broiled, blistering face and head, finally falling, moaning.

  ‘Blood of Christ,’ Malise muttered. He crossed himself.

  ‘Amen,’ mouthed Malenfaunt wryly.

  They carried Patrick of Dunbar off to be balmed with goose-grease and reflect on the reality of knightly conflict and the loss of his good looks, while Malenfaunt grinned and nudged Malise to look at the blazing fury that was Buchan’s own face. Even though he did not like the idea of Malenfaunt mocking his lord, Malise had to admit that the Earl of Buchan did look like an ox’s backside with a bee up it.

  Hal had taken little or no part in any of this, for Ill-Made was dying and Mintie Laidlaw had worked herself into such a state over events that her birthing was early, a combination which made for a deal more pain and suffering than anything going on in Herdmanston’s scabbed doorway.

  ‘Fetch me warmed watter,’ Alehouse Maggie demanded of Mouse. ‘Not the boiling ye are dumping on our enemies, mind – softer than that. Likewise a sharp knife, to pare my nails.’

  ‘A good midwife,’ Isabel said with a smile, ‘needs short clean nails and should be a stranger to drink.’

  ‘Ah, weel, my lady,’ Maggie answered with a wink, ‘half right is all good – Mouse, fetch also a cup o’ fat. I would usually use almond oil to grease the privities o’ the likes of Araminta Laidlaw, but needs must.’

  Those who knew Mintie and her cry of ‘I am nobiles born, albeit a poor yin’ laughed, but it was tempered by the crash and clatter and screaming not far from them.

  ‘Make certain ye fetch a cup with no burned bits in it,’ Maggie yelled at the flustered scampering back of Mouse. ‘We are easing a wean into the world, no’ frying bacon.’

  Isabel knelt by Hal, who was wiping the sweat grease from Ill-Made’s uneven face. You could fry bacon on his forehead, he thought.

  ‘Get you gone,’ Isabel said gently. ‘You are needed elsewhere and this is no place for a man. This poor man will go, as we all go, alone to meet his God.’

  ‘Christ be praised,’ Hal said, eyeing the sight of Alehouse Maggie, trimming her nails and laying out a collection of vicious iron more seeming for a forge than a birthing.

  ‘For ever and ever – now go,’ Isabel responded.

  By the time Hal reached the yett the fighting was done and the last moaning man was stumbling out. Two more lay dead, burned and stabbed and Hal’s wolf-grinning men panted and wiped wet mouths with the backs of their hands.

  The hours crawled past in a drip of endless mirr. They used pike spears, twenty long feet of shaft and wicked point, to lever the dead out of the doorway without opening the yett.

  Ill-Made died, sudden as a blown-out candle, so they put him and the blood-fretted remains of Wull the Yett down in the darkest, coldest part of the und
ercroft, which act was a banner-wave of hope – in order to decently bury them, everyone else had to survive.

  Mintie’s bairn was born safely – a girl she was calling Margaretha, promptly christened Grets by everyone else and cooed over.

  The attackers came again four hours later, just as the dark closed in and made them harder to see. This time, they had netted bags of burning straw which they hurled in the doorway, causing a storm of flaming embers and reeking smoke, under cover of which the men piled in, armed with forge hammers and a ram to smash the yett door open.

  Hal watched them come through the swirling smoke, grey shapes half-crouched and huddled with shields up – black pard on white, a red tree, a series of red and yellow stripes, none of which made any sense to him other than that they provided cover for the men behind, the ones carrying the four-foot wooden ram, an iron cap crudely hammered on the end.

  Beside him, Chirnside Rowan and Hob o’ the Merse loaded and shot the only two other latchbows they had besides the one Sim was using on the roof. The bolts flashed like kingfisher wings in the mirk, spanging and ricocheting wildly; a man cursed and reeled into another, clutching his ankle and hopping until someone barged him over. They trampled on him to get to the yett, crowding the narrow way while the flaming straw choked everyone.

  Metal glinted and banged, men roared battle cries or just incoherent bellowings and Hal seemed to be underwater, where the noise seemed muffled and dull. He sweated inside the maille and padding, felt the powerful urge to run, to piss, to throw up, or all of them at once.

  Then the yett broke open and sprang back under the piling weight of bodies, who surged through with fresh, exultant cries.

  Hal and the others met them in a way their grandfathers would have nodded approval at – shoulder to shoulder in a shield wall. The shields were the wrong shape, but the wall of them was just as daunting as any who had sent the Norse scampering away at Largs nearly fifty years before.

  A spear wobbled at him and Hal twisted to avoid it, landed a good hard chop with his axe on the shield of the man trying to wield it, while Sore Davey slashed a rent in the man’s gambeson, so that he tried to back away, grunting. The press was too great and the man was crushed forward, arms trapped so that he could see the needle point of Hal’s waraxe coming at his face but could no more avoid it than a cart rolling downhill can avoid the house. He squealed when it went in, shrieked when it came out and then vanished, sucked under the trampling feet.

  There was a moment of swaying to and fro, where no-one seemed to do much more than curse and struggle, spluttering and choking in the reek – then, like a stone on a mirror, the attackers broke from the rear and stumbled away.

  Feeling the pressure lift, those in front reeled away, blind and breathless with the smoke. For a moment, Hal saw the twisted smile and rat-desperate face of Malenfaunt, forced at last to take part and huddled behind his gashed, striped shield.

  There was a moment when Malenfaunt was about to hurl himself at Hal, to end the business in the best heroic fashion – until he saw the axe. A blade with a pick on the other side curved like a bird beak and a point out of the top of the shaft, another at the foot. He blanched, remembering an axe just like it and how he failed to ruin Bruce with it during the tourney; he raised his shield against it and backed hastily away.

  Coughing, spluttering, red-eyed and half blind, Hal and the others shouldered the yett door shut and held it while Leckie hammered round a new fastening – a sword this time, which was not only an expensive waste, but probably useless since the iron jamb was coming loose from the stone.

  Leckie said all this like a chant to the accompaniment of hammer blows and no-one much cared who actually listened to it. By the time he was done, the air had cleared and women had brought water, to drink and wash faces in; it was as good as goose-grease balm, as Clem Graham announced.

  The dark slithered over them like a merciful cloak. A man hailed them asking for truce to pick up those wounded and dead groaning at the foot of the steps and that was allowed, watched by a scowling Mouse holding a torch, backed up by Chirnside Rowan’s crossbow.

  In the Lord’s Room with its folly window, the Dog Boy faced Sim Craw and Hal, while Isabel chewed a lip and looked on.

  ‘It is the only way,’ Dog Boy said again and Sim scrubbed his nit-cropped head, knowing the truth when he heard it and reluctant to admit it. He looked at the coiled mass on the floor, a mesnie of knotted bast, twisted linen and leather from belts and reins, one end looped and braided round the postered boxbed.

  ‘It will come to pieces like a hoor’s drawers,’ he growled, then bobbed apology to Isabel, who waved it away.

  ‘That’s why I must go,’ Dog Boy answered patiently, flashing a white grin in the dark, ‘since I am the lightest. Out and away, like a lintie off a branch. Easy.’

  Hal knew someone had to get out, to find out if aid was coming, to remind Bruce what was at stake if he did not relieve Herdmanston. He nodded.

  ‘Go with God,’ he growled brusquely and, grinning ferally, Dog Boy hefted the coil and, helped by Sim, levered it to the window and over. Then he was out of it with a quick, neat movement, paused with his head and shoulders showing, grinned a last flash of teeth and was gone.

  The bed groaned a little, shifted with a squeal. Sim, Hal and Isabel moved swiftly to it, adding their combined weight; it stopped; the makeshift rope trembled with Dog Boy’s unseen movement and the knots on it creaked.

  ‘If any daur tell how Isabel MacDuff lay in bed with Hal and Sim from Herdmanston, both at the one time,’ Isabel said grimly, ‘I will make his cods into a purse.’

  ‘Dinna tell Maggie,’ answered Sim vehemently and with more than mock fear.

  Dog Boy slithered down the rope, his shoes skittering on the wet, mossed stones, each skid and scuff sounding like the ringing of a bell to him. He went down past the dark loom of the door, catching his breath at the stink of char and blood, down into the black well between wall and stair, reached the end of the makeshift, softly creaking rope and took a breath.

  Then he dropped, almost shrieking aloud at the plunge into the unknown dark – he fell a foot, hit the slope of the slicked mound and skidded on his arse through the wet and the blood and fluids until he fell and rolled into where the dead had lain.

  He lay in the cold seep of it, waiting and trying to hear over the thunder of his own heart and harsh breathing; no-one came. He heard distant laughter, a burst on the breeze, saw the red-flower flutter of flames and shrank away from it, crabbing towards the wall of the garth until the stones nudged his back.

  It was taller than himself by an inch or two, a wall to keep out maurauding beasts on four or two legs from lifting valuable livestock and no more. Inside it, the keep’s buildings had been ransacked and part burned – until someone had wisely asked where the besiegers would stay; now the bakehouse and brewhouse glowed faintly from the fires lit within, the half-charred thatch of their roofs still a wet stink as Dog Boy climbed over the wall.

  It was the quick way, cutting off a long, arse-puckering crawl round the wall and through the enemy camp – but it held dangers of its own.

  The first was the dark, which struck Dog Boy almost blind and left him with only the glow of the fires to let him know what direction he moved.

  Now he blessed the persistence of Hal in giving him the old sword and scabbard; Dog Boy had preferred his knife – but that would be no help in a stand-up fight, God save you, Hal had said. The awkward sword had been slung on his back for the climb down and was rendered useless, for he would have needed the arms of a babery beast to draw it from there.

  Now, though, he took it off his back, drew it, took the scabbard and placed it on the very tip, holding the belt fastenings in his teeth. Now he had a wobbling curve near the length of a man in front of him and, by swinging gently from side to side, he moved it like the feeler of a giant beetle.

  He fell only once, a stumble that spilled him his length and he lay, feeling the wet seep, cle
nching the sword in one hand and the leather scabbard ties in his teeth so that he would not lose either. He strained to hear; laughter in the near distance calmed him a little and he reached out his free hand to lever himself up – then recoiled at the sensation of rough wet hair.

  It was the deerhound, the one he’d called Riach because it meant ‘brindled’. The beast’s throat had been cut and Dog Boy felt a great welling sadness – he had not brought the dogs in to the keep, for there was not much more useless a creature in a siege than a dog, which ate meat people needed and provided, in the end, poor fare of its own.

  Dog Boy was certain the other, Diamant, was also dead for neither of these hounds would have countenanced strangers in the garth without contesting it.

  He cursed the siegers then, promised vileness on them for it and a deal of his anger was for himself; I am ill-named, he thought as he pinch-stepped away, for it seems I bring nothin’ but doom on decent dugs.

  The scabbard tapped the far garth wall gently and he flicked it away with the sword, then gathered it in and fastened it on his back; behind, the laughter rose enough for him to hear the drink in it and he smiled grimly. Be gaggling on the other side o’ yer face when I return, he thought. I will hang the doddles o’ yon dug-murderer from the kennel door.

  It took him all night to reach the Auld Chiel’s Chelleis, a long, dark slog through whin and bracken in a wet drabble of night until the milk-glow horizon brought a marriage of birds and their joy of song to the dawn.

  The thick, clumped bushes and trees that fringed the Chelleis grabbed his clothes and he had gone no further than a fingerlength in when he heard the rustle and then the voice.

  ‘Swef. Bide doucelike else ah’ll arrow ye.’

  ‘God be praised,’ Dog Boy gasped out at once and, after a pause, had back the reply.

  ‘For ever and ever.’

  It was Scabbit Wull, easier in his mind that what he had in front of him was human and not Faerie – then delighted and relieved to see it was Dog Boy. All the cold, wet folk in the Chelleis were delighted, for they thought matters had been resolved and they could leave their crude, damp shelters and come home to warm fires – which they dare not light themselves – and decent food, which they were running out of.