The Lion at bay tk-2

by Robert Low

  Malenfaunt, dazed and bruised, felt rough hands on him; someone tried to tear off the bucket helm, but it was laced to his shoulders. Then a voice, rough as a badger’s rear-end, bellowed into the breathing holes for him to yield. He waved one hand, sore and sick with the knowledge of what this might cost him — and at the hands of the Bruces, whom he already hated. Even the satisfaction of having saved de Valence from capture did not balm it much.

  Bruce saw the man’s device, knew the man for Malenfaunt and rounded on his grinning brother.

  ‘We struck for an eagle,’ he said bitterly, ‘but ended with a chick.’

  Edward scowled; the friendly scramble of tourney continued to whirl like the mad scrapping of dogs, to celebrate the birthday of Christ.

  Abbey of Evesham, Worcester

  The same night

  Kirkpatrick slid to Hal’s side.

  ‘Gone to London,’ he grunted softly out of the side of his mouth, rubbing his hands at the flames of the great fire and not looking at Hal. He hawked, then spat in the fire so that the sizzle made those nearest growl at his bad manners. Kirkpatrick’s grin back at them — travellers and pilgrims all — was feral, as befitted his pose as a hireling soldier, rough as a forge-file and not to be trifled with.

  ‘Had that from three of his kind, bone-hunting wee shites like himself. Heading for Compostella, says one o’ them.’

  ‘They ken it is him?’ Hal demanded and Kirkpatrick nodded.

  ‘Aye,’ he said in a whisper. ‘An ugly dung-drop who speaks strangely and is named Lamprecht? Not hard to find even if he keeps his name hidden. Besides, he was a known face to the wee priests here.’

  Hal stared moodily at the fire, while the wind howled and battered. There was snow in that wind and the travel next day would be hard and slow — they would probably have to lead their horses for most of it, so there was another curse to lay at the door of the wee pardoner, whose cunning had robbed an earl and almost led Hal and Kirkpatrick and others to their death. Hal shifted and winced; the cut under his ribs was still scabbed and leaking.

  ‘Should have watched him closer in the first place,’ Kirkpatrick said, as if in answer. ‘Should have dealt with him and Jop both in that night.’

  Hal turned brooding eyes on him.

  ‘Easy as that, is it? Killed then or killed soon,’ he replied bitterly. ‘Scarce makes a difference — murder is murder.’

  ‘Weesht,’ hissed Kirkpatrick, looking right and left. ‘Keep that sort o’ speech laced.’

  He leaned forward, so that his lips were closer, his breath tickling the hair in Hal’s ear.

  ‘That bell did not ring itself and it was clear that was what wee by-blow Lamprecht came for, not any Rood or rubies. He rang it out and set us in the path o’ the English garrison for revenge and now he has the power to do the Bruce a bad turn, for the Earl has revealed himself in his desire for the Rood, as plain as if he had nailed his claim to the crown to the door of St Giles. And if the Bruce suffers, we suffer.’

  ‘Jop is beyond us. Lamprecht is a creishy wee fox,’ Hal replied, ‘who has contrived to get us killed and failed. He is running and will want to take his ill-gotten goods away. We should let him.’

  Kirkpatrick made a head gesture to say perhaps, perhaps not. There was merit in the Herdmanston lord’s appreciation of matters — the wee pardoner was certainly headed south, from monastery to abbey, priory to chapel, all places where he was sure of a free meal and a safe bed for the night. But the wee bastard had the Rood and Bruce, for all that pursuing it was a danger to him — and so all those round him — could not see it pass him by and do nothing.

  Returning to London was certainly not safe for Lamprecht, Kirkpatrick thought, so it may be that Hal has it right and Lamprecht was planning to carry on to the coast and a ship to France. Back to the eastern Middle Sea, where his riches could be sold with no questions asked and where his way of speaking would not mark him.

  ‘He was daft to try what he did,’ Hal muttered. ‘He must hold a hard hate for what we did to him that night in the leper house of Berwick.’

  Kirkpatrick flapped a hand, keeping his voice low as he hissed a reply.

  ‘We did nothing much — showed him a blade and slapped him once or twice. He was fortunate — for his partnering of that moudiwart bastard Malise Bellejambe he should have been throat-cut there and then.’

  ‘Your answer to all,’ Hal replied tersely and Kirkpatrick looked back at him from under lowered brows.

  ‘That way we would not now be dealing with a nursed flame that will not be put out as easily as spit on a spark,’ he said. ‘Our saving grace is that the wee pardoner is stupid enough to try and play intrigue with the nobiles, whose lives entire are spent in makin’ and breakin’ plots and plans more cunning than any Lamprecht may devise.’

  ‘Like Buchan?’

  Kirkpatrick nodded grimly.

  ‘Throw a Comyn in the air and ye discover a wee man thumbin’ his neb at a Bruce when he lands. Buchan has sent yon Malise in pursuit of Lamprecht, to find out what he has that the Bruce chases.’

  ‘Death for the wee pardoner, then,’ Hal growled sullenly, ‘no matter who reaches him first.’

  Kirkpatrick, swaddling himself in cloak, surged with irritation.

  ‘Christ, man, ye are a pot o’ cold gruel,’ he spat in a sibilant hiss. ‘Make your mind to it — the wee pardoner is a killed man and ye had better buckle to the bit if it is yourself has to do it. Else it will be us killed. As well that Jop is cold — as yon wee Riccarton priest should be betimes.’

  ‘Yon priest kens nothin’,’ Hal muttered bitterly, ‘though Jop might have explained what Lamprecht intended, had he been allowed to live a wee while longer.’

  ‘Aye weel,’ Kirkpatrick growled, aware that he had been hasty with the knife — but Christ’s Bones, the man was coming at him. The wee priest, on the other hand, was neither here nor there. For certes, Kirkpatrick said to himself with grim humour, he will, by now, wish he is no longer here — and explained to Hal, patient as a mother, why it would have been better if he had died.

  ‘The wee priest kens folk were spyin’ Jop out. He kens the name Lamprecht, which was spoke out for all to hear,’ he whispered, flat and cold. ‘That name has already reached Comyn ears, which is why Malise is sent out. It will, for certes, be whispered in Longshanks’ own by now.’

  Hal said nothing, for the truth of it was a cold burn, like the wound along his ribs. Jop was better dead, if only for his own sake; the King’s questioners would not have stinted on their store of agony — for all Edward Longshanks proudly pontificated about there being no torture in his realm — and the priest would be telling all he knew to anyone who would listen.

  The more Hal thought on it, the more he wondered about what might have been inadvertently revealed that night. His dreams were cold-sweated with what the priest might be saying, but Hal knew he would have been hard put to kill the man for it. Nor was he sure he could kill Lamprecht as coldly.

  Yet the nagging why of it was a skelf in the finger. Why had Lamprecht come back to the north in the first place, after all that had happened to him? Just to risk himself for the chance of revenge on those who had wronged him, as he saw it? It was possible, as Kirkpatrick put it, that he nursed a flame of hate. And Buchan would be interested because a Bruce was involved in it.

  ‘Aye, weel,’ Kirkpatrick said in answer to the last, a short chuckle saucing his bitter growl, ‘as to that last, you underestimate the sour charm you exert on that earl — he might be spying the chance of vengeance on you himself. The bright shine on this is that Buchan, who can never resist the charms of seeing Bruce or yourself discomfited has sent Malise Bellejambe after Lamprecht and so he is let loose from being the chain-dog o’ your light of love.’

  ‘A perfect chance for me to rescue her,’ Hal replied laconically, ‘save that I am here.’

  And five years lie between us like a moat, he added to himself; she may not even welcome a gallant knight’s res
cue, never mind a worn lover with blood on his hands.

  ‘Besides,’ he added, bitter with the memory, ‘Buchan has already had vengeance on me. Why would he suddenly want more?’

  Kirkpatrick, shuffling himself comfortable in the middle of a snoring, growling pack of other pilgrims, did not say what he thought — that perhaps, even now, the Earl’s bold countess had mentioned Hal’s hated name aloud. Worse yet, cried it out when her husband broke into her, as Kirkpatrick heard he was wont to do, like a drover earmarking a prize heifer.

  It would be enough, he thought, to drive the Earl to visit some final judgement on the man who so cuckolded him. Christ’s Bones, if it were mine I would be so driven.

  Yet it was not only the lord of Herdmanston that Buchan pursued, but Bruce. The wee Lothian knight was simply a hurdle in the way of that, for the Comyn would do all they could to bring down a Bruce. And the same reversed.

  Somewhere, the monks began a chanting singsong litany and a bell rang.

  ‘No rest for any this night,’ he muttered in French.

  ‘It is the Christ Mass,’ Hal answered him, with a chide in the tone of it.

  ‘Aye, weel,’ Kirkpatrick growled back, ‘like most weans, He benefited from the peace o’ silence in the cradle. A good observance for these times, I am thinking.’

  ‘Yer a black sinner,’ Hal replied, with a twist of smile robbing the poison of it.

  ‘Ye are a dogged besom o’ righteousness, Hal o’ Herdmanston,’ Kirkpatrick answered, ‘but ye are mainly for sense, save ower that wummin.’

  ‘Christ,’ Hal growled back at him, ‘enough hagging me with that. If you had a wummin you cared an ounce for yourself, man, you would know the sense in what I feel for Isabel of Mar.’

  Kirkpatrick laughed, though there was little warmth in it.

  ‘You once asked me as to what I wanted from serving the Bruce,’ he said suddenly. ‘So I ask you in return, Hal of Herdmanston — what is it keeps you here, if you carp at the work Bruce has for us? Siller? Your fortalice restored? Yon wee coontess?’

  I miss Herdmanston, thought Hal. And Bangtail and Dog Boy, sent out to chase after Wallace and neither of them up to the task of it. And Sim, who oversees Herdmanston’s rebuilding. And women to talk to rather than swive in a sweaty, meaningless rattle. And bairns laughing, with sticky faces. And men building rather than tearing apart. And an end of folk the likes of Malise — aye, and Kirkpatrick himself.

  Above all, there was her and the music of laughing she had returned to his life, a music that had ended when his wife and son slipped out of the world. A music that, for five years, he had lived without, with no prospect of it in the black void that was today, would be tomorrow and would be still the next God-damned year. That’s what he wanted back, what he hoped Bruce would somehow help him achieve.

  ‘Music,’ he said to Kirkpatrick and left the man arrowing frowns on his face.

  Music?

  In the end, sleep stole Kirkpatrick away from making sense of it.

  Lincoln

  The same night

  Music flared loud as light, half-drowned by talk in the Great Hall, where banners wafted like sails and the sconces jigged in the rising haze. Sweating servants scurried in the sea of people, bright finery and roaring chatter while the musicians strummed and blew and rapped out Douce Dame Jolie as if Machaut himself were there to hear played what he had written.

  Sir Aymer de Valence, limping and lush with glee, told the tale — yet again — of his daring escape from the clutches of Bruce by the mad expedient of hurling himself from his own horse into the middle of the melee. All the gilded coterie, the King’s close friends and those who wanted to be, applauded, laughing — all save Malenfaunt, bruised and furious that the sacrifice he had made for de Valence was no part of the tale.

  ‘Turned the German Method back on you,’ de Valence yelled across and Bruce raised his goblet in smiling acknowledgement of the feat, all the while studying the ones around the bright-faced young heir to the earldom of Pembroke.

  Had de Valence paid Malenfaunt’s hefty ransom? Bruce pondered it; though his mother held the Pembroke lands, de Valence had the family holdings in France and so could well afford it.

  If not him, then who? It was certes Malenfaunt himself did not have such coin, nor any call on someone rich enough, for all he was part of the mesnie of de Valence. Yet he had ransomed himself and his horse and his harness, which had not been cheap.

  The music shrilled; dancers, circling in a sweaty estampie, bobbed and weaved and laughed. The slow drumbeat thump-thump, insistent as nagging, finally silenced the players; one by one the last of the half-drunk dancers stopped stamping, blearily ashamed. Heads turned to where the Lincoln steward stood with his iron-tipped staff rapping a steady beat and, behind him, the King.

  He looked every inch regal, too, Bruce thought. He stood with one mottled hand on a dagger hilt of narwhal ivory and jacinth, coiffed and silvered, prinked and rouged, brilliant in murreyed Samite and orphrey bands, but draped in a fine blue-wool cloak — no Provence perse here, of course, but good English wool; even in dress, Edward was politic.

  He had good reason to look pleased with himself, too and the lavish Swan Feast was simply the statement of it, fit for the monarch of two realms. With the French king humbled to peace and with his Gascony lands secured, Edward straddled a sovereignty over the island nation that none before him had ever enjoyed.

  He was sixty-six years old — less than half a year would take him past the point of being the longest-lived king England had known. Nor, Bruce added moodily to himself, was he showing any signs of ailing anytime soon — it was clear to everyone that his young queen was pregnant again.

  The Plantagenet voice was equally firm and ringing loud when he spoke, of discordance made harmony, of lambs returned to the fold. Bruce watched some of the lambs — Buchan and the recently freed Lord of Badenoch for two, smiling wolves in fine wool clothing, watching him in return and offering their lying, polite nods across the rushed floor.

  Then there was Wishart, wrapped in prelate purple as rich as his complexion, and Sir John Moubray with his lowered scorn of brow. My ox team, Bruce thought to himself, the three of us shackled to Longshanks to bring the Kingdom — no, the land — of the Scots to order for his nephew, John of Brittany, to rule as governor. That was a platform Bruce had a use for.

  Yet even now the Comyn were exerting themselves, insidious as serpent coils, and Bruce could feel them undermining him with an inclusion of extra ‘assistance’ on this concordat of nobiles. Like mice, he thought, eating the cake from the inside out.

  One by one, the summoned Scots lords came forward, knelt and swore their fealty in return for the favour of the silvered king and the restoration of their lands with only hefty fines as punishment. Bruce was last of all; once he would have bridled at this affront to his honour and dignity — he had once before, signing the Ragman Roll — but he had been younger and more foolish then.

  Smiling, a beneficent old uncle, Longshanks raised him up pointedly, so others would see the favour — Bruce saw the silk and velvet Caernarvon scowl as Gaveston whispered something in his ear; Gaveston was a mistake, Bruce saw, and not the bettering influence Edward had hoped for his son.

  The music returned, the talk, the bellowed laughter and the mingling. It was then that Edward sprang the steel trap, signalling Wishart and Moubray and Bruce close to the high seat. In front of him was a wrapped bundle, which he twitched open with a small flourish.

  Bruce’s heart faltered a beat, then started to run at the sight of the battered gilt. The rubies had been removed, but the Rood reliquary, blackened and charred still glowed with gilt; Jop’s half, Bruce thought, trying to gather the wild scatter of his thoughts.

  ‘Taken from Riccarton, my lords,’ Edward growled, his drooping eye baleful, ‘which was a Wallace holding in the lands of the Scotch.’

  Behind him, the prince and others craned curiously to see better and it was a mark of things that
Edward let them.

  ‘Indeed?’ Wishart replied, frowning, his voice innocent. ‘That looks greatly like the cover for the Black Rood, which Your Grace took to the safety of the minster.’

  ‘It is the same,’ snapped Edward, then waved one hand dismissively. ‘Removed by thieves last year. Now it seems likely your Scotch were responsible, my lords. A chapel was left in flames at Riccarton and a man murdered, a certain Gilbert of Beverley also known as Jop; a search of his belongings discovered this. A miracle it was not consumed by flame, my lords.’

  ‘Christ be praised,’ intoned Wishart.

  ‘For ever and ever.’

  ‘Gilbert of Beverley,’ Moubray pointed out sourly, ‘is an Englishman.’

  The drooping eye raked him.

  ‘Kin to the Wallace.’

  The King presented the fact significantly, like a lawyer ending his case.

  ‘Has Your Grace made enquiries?’ Wishart asked blandly and the King’s drooping eye twitched a little as he considered if the bishop’s innocence was real. In the end, he made a small flicking gesture of dismissal.

  ‘The local priest claimed only to be witness to the invasion and torching of the house of God. He might have said more than he did, save that God gathered him to His Bosom. His heart gave out.’

  ‘Aye,’ sighed Wishart with beatific sadness, ‘the Question will do that to a man.’

  The King looked hard at him.

  ‘There is no torture permitted in this realm,’ he declared. ‘Only the rule of Law.’

  No-one spoke and the lie hung there.

  Bruce remained silent, trying not to let the relief that flooded him rise up and swamp his face, wondering wildly how long the priest’s heart had lasted before it had stopped the mouth. What had the priest told Longshanks, Bruce wondered? Not enough, certes, or I would not be standing here, watching that eye droop like a closing shutter…

  In the end, Edward was forced to continue.

  ‘Find the rest of this reliquary and the relic that was in it,’ he demanded. ‘Find Wallace — mark this, my lords, the Scotch who wish to return fully to my grace, who wish remittance of their fines and full return of their lands, have until forty days from now to hand Wallace over. They will be watched to see how they do.’