The Lion at bay tk-2

by Robert Low

  ‘Amen,’ Bruce answered and a muttered chorus followed it. Jacobus stirred a little, his hands shoved into his sleeves, but remained silent, a cowled mastiff leashed for the moment.

  ‘But you are less interested in this and more in what the English commander in Perth has to say,’ the abbot went on. ‘He agrees to meet you on the field — but not on the morrow. It is the Sabbath and the Feast of St Gervase, the Martyr.’

  ‘Of Margaret, saintly queen of Scotland and the translation of her relics,’ Bruce corrected, that strange lopsided twist of a smile on his face. To avoid stretching the scar on the other, the abbot realized suddenly, which meant it was not healed, even after all this time…

  ‘So — we have a truce until the morn’s morn?’ Edward Bruce persisted.

  The abbot hesitated, a heartbeat only that he would not have got away with in the cowled politicking of Rome. What caused it was — yet again — the vision of the burning Templar. That, coupled with the uncaring stone face of de Valence as he excused it, sure in his writ from pope and king, sanctioned by the fluttering of as pagan a symbol as anyone might find — a dragon banner which permitted men to risk any sin.

  Yet the heartbeat went unnoticed here and the abbot nodded, for a truce was what he had been told and chivalry dictated the truth of it, even from the thinned, dubious lips of the lordly Aymer de Valence.

  There was nothing else to be said; Bruce watched them ghost their way out again and waited for the clamour that would swamp him when they were out of earshot. It was not held back for long and the charge was led, as ever, by Edward.

  They throw ‘chivalry’ at me like an accusation of heresy, Bruce thought, turning into their concern and outrage. There would now be an argument which would, in the end, come to eat itself because there was no way out of the circle.

  They all knew it, too, even if they jerked and strained — de Valence was locked securely in Perth with an army roughly the size of the one Bruce had scraped together. The English lords, Percy and Clifford, were scouring the west with another and, somewhere to the south, like a distant stain of thundercloud, the Covetous King himself gathered yet another force with his son.

  ‘If we do not force a fight here and win, my lords,’ Bruce declared to their scowls and frowns, ‘then we will gain no further support and will be too weak to face Longshanks when he comes. We must defeat de Valence here and to do that, we must persuade him to come out of his fastness and fight.’

  If they did not, then my kingship is ended, he thought. Fleetingly, he saw the purse-lipped moue of his wife, preparing the ‘I-told-you-so’. King and queen of summer only, she had once said. Unspoken had been the other part of that old pagan custom, where the King of Summer was ritually sacrificed, his blood making the Kingdom and all in it fecund.

  Well, that would not be. Winning here, at Methven, would bring some solidity to his throne and, to do that, he needed someone to beat in an honest tourney. He needed to force apokalupsis.

  He said as much, but only the scholarly Alexander understood that it did not mean the catastrophe it implied, simply a revelation, a new light. A new world.

  Chivalry would bring de Valence out for a fair fight, he thought. The joust a l’outrance, writ large, would do it.

  Because God is always watching at the edge of extremity.

  Hal watched the train of priests and their escort coil between the fires, heading out of the camp and the road back to Perth. He heard one mutter ‘ Te deum ’ but they passed in a wraith of silence for the most part, sinister as darkness. He did not care for these Dominie Canes much and remembered the ones who had brought Cressingham’s ultimatum to Wallace and Moray at Stirling… God’s Wounds, almost ten years to the day.

  Ten years. It weighed on him, sudden and heavy as an anvil and he sighed under it, so that Sim Craw glanced up from under his own shaggy brows — then surprised Hal with his own thoughts.

  ‘I remember thon chiels,’ he muttered. ‘At Abbey Craig. Christ, Sir Hal, that was a wheen o’ years ago.’

  ‘Aye, ye were sprightly then,’ chaffered Chirnside, grinning.

  ‘Sprightly still,’ Dog Boy replied. ‘If you keep charkin’ your gums on such, you will find how he can stop your yatter.’

  Sim stirred a little, fed a stick and some dried grass to the fire.

  ‘My thanks for yer care, Dog Boy,’ he answered, slow and serious, ‘but Chirnside is not wrong. A man gets to feel the years pile up an’ I am not so spry sometimes in the morn, while I have to roll out at night to let out watter and my bones are mostly ache.’

  Men stared, amazed and Hal felt a flicker of uncertain fear, seeing the lines on Sim and the grizzle that was more grey than black these days. He was old, Hal thought suddenly — Christ, he is a handful of years more than me and I am old myself. If he was starting to fail, then the world was trembling…

  Then he saw the sly look peeping out from under the shag of eyebrow and almost leaped to his feet with the delighted relief of it.

  ‘But I can still maul the sod with the likes o’ a cuntbitten hoorslip such as yersel’, Chirnside Rowan.’

  The hoots and laughter flamed the face of Rowan, while the nudges from his neighbours threatened to topple him off his log seat. He eventually acknowledged Sim’s mastery of the moment with a flap of one hand, which turned into a slap against a nipping midge.

  ‘Christ,’ he growled. ‘We must be the blissin’ o’ Beelzebub on his Lowland midgies, and if their dinner would only cease slapping them it would be a midgie paradise.’

  ‘These are wee yins,’ growled Sim Craw. ‘Where Black MacRuiraidh is from they are bigger and thicker, with a stinger like a tourney lance.’

  The Lothian men laughed and the butt of the joke joined in. In months past all the Lowlanders would have stared at the Islesman, Black MacRuiraidh, his tangle of jet hair and his big axe, as if he had landed from the Moon itself, but already they were used to him and the others of his kin who had come to join King Robert. Christina of Garmoran had sent them and there were nudges and winks about what their new king had done to this Isles queen to have had such richesse lavished on him.

  Scots all, Hal noted, from Chirnside Rowan of the Border, busy feeding a twist of dried bracken into the fire, to the near-unintelligible men of Dingwall beyond The Mounth, who had come, freely enough, defying the Earl of Ross who was not a declared supporter of the Bruce.

  Not yet — tomorrow would decide all things.

  The galloping horse that was Jamie Douglas burst on them, stirring them like a wind shifting embers from the fire. He stuck bread at the Dog Boy, had shared meat in return and, within minutes, the pair of them were off, restless as hounds into a dusk like smoke and the faint music and screeches of women’s laughter.

  Life was all in the way a man thought of it, Hal had decided. The way a young man thought of it, in fact, for when the blood was strong and hot the whole earth was new, like a calf waiting to be licked dry.

  When he got some years on him, all the same, it was different. Down deep, bone-deep, Hal knew the world was old, so old he wondered sometimes what chiels and lords had been on it before civilized people came to it, before even the dark, fey Faerie.

  Jamie Douglas made a man feel old with the knowing that the younger ones believe the world was new and that they alone were discovering it, as if no-one else ever had.

  The squeals and shrills of women — God alone knew where they came from, or how they survived — brought grins and the backs of hands to dry mouths from men considering their luck or their siller.

  Sim Craw did not think of thighs and quim. He thought of the shrieks of the Welshman, the shit-smeared archer brought in as prisoner and put to the Question; not hard, Sim recalled and, in fact, not hard enough for Sim’s liking, for he was sure the man had more he might have told.

  Let off light, Sim had thought — until Edward Bruce’s retinue men had held the man down, cut off the first two fingers of his right hand, the drawing hand, and seared the wound shut
with pitch, for mercy.

  ‘You will never shoot another Scot,’ one of them had declared, hands on hips and straddle-legged as the Welshman was set free, hugging his pain to his breast and hirpling off scarce able to see through tears and snot, yet blessing his luck that he was alive. Sim had seen Edward Bruce’s scowl at it.

  ‘You should have cut the tongue from him as well,’ he had growled, ‘so he could not tell what he saw here.’

  Hal, on the other hand, was glorious with thoughts of Isabel, somewhere in the rich panoply behind the King’s own tent attending to the Queen. In a while he would go off and find her, when he was sure the Queen had been bedded down for the night and that he could claim Isabel for his own.

  For now he lay back and looked at the darkening sky, already shot with sharp, bright stars like fresh-struck tinder, listening to the men slap and complain about the whirling moths and midgies.

  ‘If ye listen close,’ Bull rumbled, ‘ye can hear their war cries. If they were as big as we, no army would stand agin them.’

  ‘Aye, weel,’ answered Erchie Scott, ‘we needs offer a soul to some wee imp o’ Bellies-bub, Lord of Flies, in return for such an army. Then we leave them to fight the English and we can all ride home.’

  ‘God be praised,’ declared his brother, Fingerless Tam as he crossed himself. ‘To speak it is to summon it — clap yer gums on that, brother.’

  ‘Besides,’ yawned Chirnside, ‘it is clear there will be no fight on the morn. Yon wee priests will have come to beg King Robert not to break the Sabbath.’

  ‘Away,’ scoffed Sim Craw. ‘The Sabbath is it? When has that made a difference? When God handed Wallace yon fat Treacherer Cressingham on a silver platter, we fought wee fights with them from one Holy Sabbath Day to the other at Stirling Brig — and the big battle itself was fought on the Ferial Day after Finian’s feast, which is also holy.’

  He beamed into their chuckles.

  ‘Holy Days, my wee rievin’ ribald,’ he added, ‘is when we fight best — in the sight o’ God.’

  Those who remembered the tale of Wallace’s triumph nodded into the soft chorus of ‘amens’, then sat, smeared with the honey memory of that glorious day.

  It came to Hal that there were few who had actually been there at the time, kneeling on the wet grass to receive the Sabbath pyx from the monks of Cambuskenneth Abbey. The promise of that day had vanished in hunger and death and defeat so that here they all were, too many years later, still fighting and no closer to victory.

  A figure loomed, turning all eyes. He was a middling man in all respects, from height to years, dangled about with maille that seemed more collected than worn and with a battered shield on his back, deviced with something almost too faded to read.

  ‘God be praised,’ he said from a weary threadbare face, bushed with grizzled beard.

  ‘For ever and ever,’ came the rote reply, then Hal rose up and grasped the man, wrist to wrist. There was a brief exchange of greetings, a request answered at once and the man skliffed off through the trampled grass with a peck of oats for his warhorse.

  ‘Christ betimes,’ grumbled Wynking Wull, his tic working furiously with annoyance. ‘Bad enough that the likes of the landless Douglas boy can steal our meat. We will all have buckles clappit to backbones if we give out hard-gotten fodder to any raggy chiel who asks.’

  ‘No raggy chiel, but Sir John Lauder of the Bass,’ said Sim Craw and proceeded to put them right on the matter while Hal lay back and thought on the likes of Sir John Lauder of the Bass, the least scion of the Lauders who held Bass Rock from Patrick of Dunbar.

  Sir John had a wee manor at Whitekirke, a half-stone affair where his ‘baists’ were quartered below and his family above, a holding barely raised above the level of a villein, though he was a nobile.

  Yet he had sacrificed even this for the Bruce, slaughtering his beasts, burning his crops and hall, sending his family off to their kin and marching to Methven with the raggles of his father’s armour and his grandda’s sword.

  He had no servants and certainly no warhorse — the peck of oats was for himself and the only food, mixed with a little water, he would eat unless he could beg better without losing the last ragged cloak of his dignity.

  In the morning — if there was to be a fight at all — he would take station with a solid square of pikes, shoulder to shoulder with barefoot sokemen and others of lesser rank, closing files and keeping the unwieldy phalanx together until they won or died.

  Beside him somewhere would be young Jamie Douglas, a powerful nobile of Scotland in his own right, yet no richer now than Lauder of the Bass because the English sat in his castle and took rent from his lands.

  Hal thought of Herdmanston under a blue sky, blue as the paint they used on the Virgin’s mantle on a church wall, with the good brown earth rolling beneath it and himself between. He put himself in the tower that was his own, with a great feeling that threatened to burst his chest. But for all he tried, squeezing his eyelids tight shut, he could not rid himself of the last rotten-tooth black vision of its stones and the crow-feather smoke staining the sky like a thundercloud.

  Gone and gone, like the wee house of Lauder of the Bass by now. All gone, save for the great feeling in his chest and the reason for that lay in the gathered dark, tending to a queen. He got up then, urgent with the need to see her, hold her.

  He found her spreading bracken in a bower of bent hawthorn at the back of the proud tents and she straightened from the task as he approached; he saw the weariness in her.

  ‘How is Her Grace?’ he asked and had a Look for it, even as he drew her into the cage of his arms.

  ‘Stoic,’ Isabel told him, muffled against his chest, then surfaced for breath.

  ‘Behold, a wee love nest.’

  ‘Brawlie,’ he admired, trying to keep the smirk from his face and failing. She struck him lightly on the chest.

  ‘Less to do with your voracious appetite than not wanting to spend another minute in that wee cloister o’ weemin,’ she informed him and he nodded, sinking on to the soft bracken and feeling her stretch out the length of him.

  ‘Bad is it?’

  ‘Enough to make me consider passing time in the company of any of the men round a fire,’ she snorted and he laughed.

  ‘Best not, love,’ he advised. ‘I would then spend the evening fighting them all, one by one.’

  ‘Ah, gallant knight,’ she replied in a strained falsetto. ‘Hold me not so tight, you are crushing the rose blossom of me.’

  ‘There will be a few round those fires who would desire to nip your rosy buds,’ Hal answered wryly. ‘Little they know of the thorns they risk.’

  ‘I need all my thorns for the Queen and her women, so it is hard to put them away easily at the end of day.’

  ‘You need them still?’

  Isabel made a ‘tsschk’ of annoyance.

  ‘The Queen is stoic, as I say. Like some auld beldame faced with fire, flood and famine, for all she is a girl yet. She does not care for it much, but she will dutifully follow her man, to Hell if that is where he is headed. I am sure she believes it lies beyond the next hill.’

  ‘The King’s sister is not so bad — Lady Mary is of an age not to have her head turned by events. It is the others,’ she went on sourly. ‘Good dames o’ the court whom I have to remind that I am a countess, even if they sneer at the title these days. An’ Marjorie…’

  She broke off to shake a sorrowful head.

  ‘She is a recent elevation to princess, yet still enough of a bairn to pout about the lack of ermine and pearls, or warm hall being feted by all the young men.’

  ‘Which she would be,’ Hal noted, knowing the attraction rank added to a woman, ‘for all her chin.’

  They grinned at each other, sharing the sly spite on the chin of Bruce’s daughter, a heavy inheritance for such a flower. ‘You have an interest there?’ Isabel demanded archly. ‘If you can suffer the chin you will have a princely reward.’

  ‘And le
ave you to pine in some hawthorn arbour?’ he countered. ‘Alone and weeping?’

  ‘I am told that has attractions for some.’

  ‘Ach weel — pray for luck that kills me then. Men love to comfort a mourning lover.’

  The game ended with her sudden, fierce clutch.

  ‘Weesht on that,’ she said, her eyes big and round. ‘I am not so stoic a matron that I can listen to that sort of talk.’

  ‘Swef, swef,’ he soothed. ‘Lamb. Shall I comfort you with the poetry of the Court of Love? Demand you turn the moon of your countenance on the misery of my night?’

  ‘God forbid,’ she answered and lay back, suddenly loose and lush. ‘I would concentrate on unlacing instead.’

  He began, then paused.

  ‘The King will send his queen away in the morn, for safety,’ he said into the moonlit pools glowing in her face. ‘This may be the last time we see each other for some time.’

  ‘I know it,’ she said and buried her face in the curve of his neck and shoulder — then dropped back on to the bracken.

  ‘Are you having trouble with the knots?’ she demanded. ‘I have dirk if ye need to cut them.’

  Afterwards, lying in the strewn bracken bed, he listened to the soft laughter and the sudden chords as Humfy Johnnie struck up a harp tune, his crooked back as bent as his gaping grin.

  There was still the wild, strange feeling in Hal as he listened to her breathe softly beside him and, when he fell asleep, he dreamed that the blue sky and the brown earth were tilting him away from her altogether.

  He woke in the dark, afraid.

  Methven

  Translation of the Relics of St Margaret, June, 1306

  In the lush of morning, the summer lay on the ground, delicate and soft as a cat’s paw. The sun drifted lazily in a sky like deep water, soaking the spread of fields round Methven so that it seemed to Hal that the land lost the pinched skin of itself, softening and rolling under the hooves of the horses. Larks sang, hovering.

  They were coming round in a wide sweep, out north and west from the raggle of poverty that was Methven vill, swinging round in a forage that had found nothing but horse fodder and beans.