The Kingdom Series – The Lion at Bay

by Robert Low

  Creishie Marthe had turned her attention to the yielded serjeant, and drawn a swift second smile under his chin with a dagger she’d taken. Ignoring the blood and the kicking, she was rifling under the hem of his maille for hidden wealth.

  ‘Bigod,’ said Chirnside admiringly to Dog Boy, ‘your choice in weemin’ is growin’ dangerous, my lad.’

  Kirkpatrick saw the ring when Marthe peeled back the man’s maille mittens; the knife flashed and the bloody finger was already vanishing inside her considerable bosom when Kirkpatrick caught her wrist.

  ‘Dinna even think o’ it,’ he hissed into her savage glare and flourished dirk and she saw the eyes on him, knew instantly who it was and whimpered, giving up the grisly prize and the ring on it.

  Hal saw it all and shot a quick look at Dog Boy to see if he had noticed that Creishie Marthe had been ‘violeted’ – but Dog Boy was staring blankly back at the whirling battle. Men sprinted past; a horseman galloped furiously further down and it was clear to everyone that the fighting was closing in on the royal tents. Creishie Marthe knew it and was already gathering her skirts and running off.

  ‘Jamie,’ Dog Boy muttered, gathering the reins of his garron, and Hal, half-way into the saddle of one of the patient rounceys, looked back to the black thundercloud of struggling men.

  ‘The King,’ he said, though he knew there was nothing that would make him drag the remains of his mesnie into that mess.

  The King was in trouble and he knew it. Truth was he had known it from the moment the messenger rode up, the one he recognized as Dog Boy. It had given him and the others enough time to struggle into maille hauberk, though he had thrown the awkward leggings to one side. He had a coif attached to the hauberk and long sleeves with mittens, and now blessed the one-piece garment he had roundly cursed in the past for its weight while trying to get it on.

  Dog Boy’s arrival had given him time to issue orders sending the Queen to safety, to have a palfrey saddled – his warhorses all went with the Queen, having just been fed and now useless for battle – and take up the bascinet with the golden circlet.

  Balliol’s, of course, as was so much of his royal finery, though that king had never worn it. Truth was, it was a little loose for Bruce but he gave up on comfort for the advantage of being seen easily by his own side, who would take heart from their battling king.

  The other side of that spun coin, he thought to himself in the sweating, belly-clenching moments before the English knights closed on them, was that being tumbled off would rip the heart out of them.

  He thought of that in the eyeblink before the charging figure came down on him, featureless in his bucket helm, waving a battleaxe and trying to rein in the over-eager warhorse. Bruce danced to one side, slashed out with his sword and spun the palfrey as the warhorse went plunging mad, half its tail sheared off and all of its rump bloody and fired with agony; the knight sailed off and hit the ground with a clatter. The German Method …

  Bruce had little time to exult and none at all to see if the knight got up, for others were on him and his own mesnie closed in protectively. He realized at once that this was no battle and was lost whatever you called it – there was only a mêlée now and Bruce was master of that.

  He ducked a swinging blade, banged the man out of the saddle with his shield, cut right, cut left, took a blow that made him grunt and hope his maille was good and the sword blunt. A man plunged out, on foot, to grab the bridle of his horse, helmetless and roaring with triumph that he had taken the King.

  Bruce slashed down and the man shrieked and fell away, while the rouncey threw up its head and panicked at the grisly ornament of hand and wrist that dangled, clenched and bloody in the bridle. Bruce lost a foot from one stirrup and sat deep while the rouncey plunged itself to a trembling halt.

  The knight who had first attacked suddenly lurched from the other side, having thrown away his bucket helm and dragged out a sword. He was bleeding from a broken nose and snoring in desperate breaths, but he reached out a free hand and tried to grab Bruce by his leg, missed and grasped the free stirrup.

  ‘He is mine,’ he bellowed in a spray of blood. ‘Yield yerself sirra –aaaaah.’

  His triumph ended in a shriek when Bruce rammed his booted foot back in the stirrup, grinding fingers into the metal and trapping the hand; when he spun the rouncey the knight was dragged off his feet and whirled sideways, screaming, until he bowled into a knuckle of men, scattering them and tearing his fingers free.

  Then a blow seemed to stave in the whole side of Bruce’s face, a crash as if the world had fallen on him and he reeled at the edge of consciousness, hanging on to the palfrey by some last reserve of tourney skill.

  ‘I have him,’ yelled a voice. ‘I have him.’

  He saw a silver lion on a red shield and thought it might be Mowbray – but he was dimly aware that everything was red on the left side, felt the sudden strange coldness there. God help me, he thought wildly, I am blinded …

  He felt himself dragged off the horse, saw hands frantic to grasp him – then there was a roaring sound which he thought was his own blood in his ears and he lay, staring blindly up at the red-misted sky, watching the flurry of legs. Mailled, hooved, booted, they stamped and circled –there was a rushing crash and someone fell full length, so that when Bruce turned – oh, so laborious and slow – he saw the twisted agony that was Mowbray falling from a vicious blow, blood washing down over unfocused eyes.

  Hands gripped him, hauled him up.

  ‘Into the saddle, Your Grace,’ said an urgent voice and Bruce felt himself hefted up, found a reflex that cocked a leg and dropped him into the cantled security of a fresh horse. He looked dazedly down through the blood, saw the black figure of Simon Frazier grinning back at him.

  ‘Seton – tak’ the King to safety. He is sore hurt.’

  Sore hurt. Bruce did not want to know how sore his hurt was; he could feel it like a great numbing on the side of his face and was sure he had lost it, eye, cheek and all.

  Lost. All was lost on this Malachy-cursed day …

  Methven

  Late evening, the same day

  The priests droned like flies in the growing dim and de Valence thought of the abbot, somewhere back in Perth, carefully out of the way of matters, so he could not see what sins were being done here under the dragon banner.

  There were a lot of sins, de Valence knew, as many as there were flies, and the flattened fields of rye and barley around Methven were as good as a pewter plate smeared with meat juice to them. Flies and shadows flitted in the dark, both of them stripping the corpses.

  De Valence sat on his warhorse, surrounded by grim-iron men and sweating in the heavy drape of his heraldry, wishing the last dregs of this mummery were done with and he could climb off the beast and out of the war gear.

  It was as well he had won here, he thought, otherwise he would have to face the wrath of Longshanks for failing to capture Bruce – or anyone else who mattered – and losing Badenoch’s murderer en route to Berwick.

  The bitter sauce of it all was having to sit here and smilingly acknowledge and reward all the galloping fools who came up clutching a pennon, or hauling in some luckless lordling of no account until it became dark enough to admit that the battle was over.

  Sourly, he watched the lone figure come up on foot, the torch he held bobbing as he strode in a curious, long-limbed way. He knew the walk, though the face of the Welshman, Addaf, was made no easier on the eye in the dancing shadows from the torch. Christ’s Bones, he thought, now even the contract captains are behaving like chivalry.

  ‘Your Grace,’ the man said, offering as little a head nod as he thought he could get away with and de Valence smiled wryly to himself. The Welshman was still of use, him and his mountain dwarves, even if he used the ‘Your Grace’ like a spit in the eye, so de Valence gave the man his due.

  ‘Mydr ap Mydvydd,’ he said, the title given by admiring Welsh archers to someone they trusted to lead them.

 
‘Found this, Your Grace,’ Addaf said in his sing-song English and handed the object up. De Valence examined the bascinet and Robert Tuke leaned over, squinting for a better look, then gave a short bark of laughter at the sight of the battered helmet with its twisted circlet of gold, only half of it still remaining.

  ‘We have his usurper’s crown,’ he crowed over his shoulder to the others. ‘Soon we’ll have his head to match it.’

  The laughter rolled out into the night, over the scatter of darkened corpses and the wounded, desperate for relief, yet trying not to groan because it would bring the throat-cutting scavengers.

  De Valence looked at the ruin of the helmet and did not need to wonder where the missing half of the crown was, though he would not pursue Addaf on the matter. More to the point was the damage done to it, a hard sword blow.

  A man who had worn that had taken a harsh face cut, he thought. It will be a ruined head when we eventually find it.

  Bruce woke from a nightmare where his loving daughter’s kisses had turned to sucking wolf bites, ripping his skin, grinding into the bones. He woke to pain and mad, flickering torchlight, a sickening tugging and pulling on the left side of his face, which he tried to dash away with one hand.

  ‘Hold him,’ growled a voice.

  ‘Howk the torch higher, yer honour,’ said a woman. ‘Else I will sew up his bloody neb.’

  Get off me, Bruce said. Get away – I am the King …

  He was appalled at his own weakness and heard only gug-gug sounds coming from his mouth; a face swam into view, big and sheened with sweat with a grin like a sickle moon. The light danced mad, lurid shadows of blood on it, but he knew it all the same. Edward, he thought. Brother Edward. He said it, feeling his mouth strange on one side, almost sick with the relief of hearing something approaching sense from himself.

  ‘Swef, Rob,’ said Edward. ‘Ye ken me – that’s good. At least yer wits are still in yer head, though it’s a miracle – God’s Holy Arse, wummin, do not pull his face to bits.’

  ‘A wee bit bone – it fell oot,’ Bruce heard the woman answer, indignantly shrill. Dear God, he thought, what has been done to me? What is being done to me?

  There was sharp pain, one fierce sliver after another and he tried to cry out but could only make incoherent sounds, tried to thrash the pain away then found he was gripped by strong hands. Eventually, his face seamed with fire, the hands relaxed.

  ‘Done, yer honour,’ the woman’s voice said and he saw her briefly in the torchlight, sallow skinned, a tangle of hair which she brushed back from her face with bloodied hands; there was a needle held in the thin clench of her lips. Edward loomed into view again, peering.

  ‘Not bad, Creishie Marthe. Neat as a hem.’

  ‘A wish my ma were here to see,’ the woman answered with a shrill cackle. ‘She swore at my stitchin’ betimes – now it is part o’ a king’s face forever.’

  ‘Aye, weel – now there are two things ye are good at,’ someone said and the woman huffed indignantly at this affront to her honour.

  Edward grinned cheerfully at Bruce and nodded.

  ‘Rest. We must be away from here, brother, and swiftly.’

  ‘What happened to me?’ Bruce managed to ask, coherent at least. Edward dismissed it with a casual wave.

  ‘Lost a wee tourney fight with the English,’ he answered, ‘and took a dunt. Your eye is fine, mark you – the cut is above and below it. It will leave a fine scar – you have a naming face now, brother.’

  A naming face. Bruce heard the others laugh, daringly suggest names their king would be remembered by – Robert the Scarred, Dinged Rob, King Hob the Screed … the voices faded and Edward, frowning, patted his shoulder.

  ‘We left your fancy war hat behind, mark you,’ he said. ‘The crown is lost.’

  The crown is lost. Bruce struggled and Edward looked alarmed as his brother sat up.

  ‘I have not lost the crown,’ he shouted, before pain wrenched his face and sank his swimming head down on the pallet again.

  I have not lost, he thought through the swirling agony. By God, I have not.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Lanercost Priory

  Ferial day following the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, September, 1306

  It was white-knuckle cold in the Priory, a place of high, shadowed walls, chill fluted stone and wide floors of glacial flags. The room held a meagre fire which only accentuated the damp and the only decoration was a bleak-eyed statue of Mary Magdalene, staring from a niche with one hand raised.

  Asking, no doubt, for another log on the fire, Edward thought to himself as he approached the man seated at the table, his back to the King. A priory servant, hunkered by the flicker of flame in the huge fireplace, leaped to his feet and bowed, so that the seated man immediately knew who was behind him.

  He stood, scraping back the bench and turned, bowing.

  ‘Your Grace,’ he said, then wiped gravy from his moustaches.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ growled Edward, flapping one hand and shuffling up to perch opposite, his back to the fire. He hunched himself a little, then rounded on the servant.

  ‘Fetch some logs and build that blaze, damn your eyes.’

  Marmaduke Thweng thought the King and a two-day old corpse had much in common, but the rouge and prinking made Edward look worse.

  ‘Eat, eat,’ Edward declared expansively. ‘You have come a long way to deliver your charges, Sir Marmaduke, and deserve a decent pie, by God. Tell me everything.’

  Thweng looked with sadness at the half-eaten bacon and beef pie, which was delicious, aware that he could not follow both commands at the same time.

  ‘The women follow on slowly, Your Grace, in carts as befits their station. Your son decided to send the Earl and the Bruce brother ahead with me, on horseback. He knew you would wish to see them at your soonest convenience.’

  ‘No doubt to ingratiate himself. Bastard boy,’ Edward scowled, eyeing the pie and feeling his belly gripe. No more food like that for me if the physickers are to be followed, he thought to himself bitterly. Crowfoot powder for the belly gripe and fare that loosens the bowels, so the act of losing a turd did not bring excruciating agony – damned black biled humours of the arse would not even allow him to sit in comfort.

  His malady was well known and Thweng thought back to the moment the King had quit Scotland after stripping Balliol, the moment he had sneered that ‘a man does good business when he rids himself of such a turd’. Like the ones he strained to pass now, that one, too, had been painful and costly.

  Thweng knew better than to speak on that, or about why the King scowled over his son; Sir Giles D’Argentan and a whole slew of knights, who were supposed to be scouring the north in the host commanded by the prince, had all decided to go to France. For an Important Tourney. The prince, of course, had permitted them and it was only a Holy Miracle that he had seen sense enough not to go himself.

  The memory of it clearly rankled stilll. Twenty-two arrest warrants had been spewed out from the King’s wrath – even for his son-in-law, the elegant fop Humphrey de Bohun. The others were all the gilded youth, the new breed Edward had so painstakingly fastened to his son at the Feast of Swans.

  Even that he contrives to subvert and ruin, Edward thought. Even that …

  Thweng watched him reach out and scoop up the meat of the pie and stuff it in his mouth, gravy dripping down his curled beard and off his fingers.

  ‘Have they found Bruce?’

  Thweng shook his head.

  ‘Not at Kildrummy, nor Dunaverty,’ he answered and the king hunched and brooded, sucking the delicious gravy over his teeth. Gone, like the mists of those damnable hills, he thought. Vanished. Dunaverty and Kildrummy – bloody barbaric names they had there – were the last strongholds where the usurper could possibly have lurked.

  It meant he was hiding in the woods and hills, with places that translated to ‘loch of the ambush’, ‘wolf’s burn’ and ‘murder hole’.

  ‘
You could find him,’ Edward declared, sucking his fingers. ‘You are a thief-taker in your own Yorkshire lands, are you not? For the bounty?’

  Thweng’s eyes narrowed, for he did not like the thrust of this; he would not be thief-taking at all if he did not need the money it brought, for decades of service to the King had been less than lucrative.

  ‘Trailbaston and outlaws, Your Grace,’ he replied flatly. ‘In a country I know with my eyes closed and one which seeks to help me. A different matter to hunt down one man in a strange land whose folk offer every resistance.’

  ‘He must be found,’ the King persisted, helping himself to more of the pie. Thweng nodded, trying not to show the inward weary sigh he felt. It would, he thought, be best if Bruce were found and dealt with if only to stop the welter of dragon-banner blood that had already claimed so many. There were a score or more and the gutters had stank with blood for two days, according to the reports. Thweng had known most of the noble dead.

  ‘Will you speak with the Earl of Atholl, my lord?’ he asked.

  ‘I will not,’ the King declared savagely. ‘He will try to plead his case, no doubt, tell me he is a kinsman of mine through his mother, who is some king’s bastard. He is for the axe, by God.’

  Now Thweng was alarmed; no earl had been executed in England for two hundred years and more and he said as much. The King regarded him sourly, the drooping eye flickering with a tic, gravy sliding down his fingers.

  ‘The Bruce brother – Niall, is it? Yes, him. I will axe him, certes and send his head to Berwick for spiking. Atholl must also suffer, earl or no. He can hang instead. If he is higher in rank than any of the others, then we can add thirty feet to his gallows drop, for benefit of his station.’

  He smiled greasily. ‘As for the Bruce women – well, I have an Italies punishment for them.’

  He saw Thweng’s bewilderment.

  ‘After Fossalta – you recall the battle? The Bolognese imprisoned Henry of Sardinia in an iron cage. It took him twenty-two years to die.’