The Lion Rampant (The Kingdom Series)

by Robert Low

  ‘Kill me, would ye? Ye bliddy wee limmer, I will maul the sod wi’ ye.’

  De Grafton, reeling and shrieking, gave up trying to reach the prong and started to swing round on the unarmed Sim – Hal’s desperate, lunging two-handed stroke tore his own sword from his weakened grasp, but not before it had cut the Templar from his wounded shoulder almost to his hip. He fell in two directions and his heels drummed.

  The birds whirled and called and the heels danced to stillness. Sim wiped the mess on his face into a horror mask of streaks and heaved in a breath; his teeth were bright in the moonlit scarlet of his cheeks.

  ‘Aye til the fore,’ he panted and Hal blinked from his numbness.

  ‘I thought he had killed you,’ he said and Sim scowled.

  ‘The blow hit the arbalest – look, his cut has ruined it entire.’

  He prised the weapon from the ruin of De Grafton and flourished it with disgust.

  ‘He has severed the string and put a bliddy great gash in the stem. I will never find another.’

  ‘Ye are all bloody,’ Hal managed to say and Sim wiped his gory face again.

  ‘From the pool – Piculph’s blood. Apart from a dunt on my back, I am unhurt – more than can be said for yerself.’

  Hal allowed himself to be led away from the corpses and the stink of blood and exotic blooms. Sim struck up a light, which made them blink, and presented Hal with his sword, worked free from de Grafton’s corpse. Then he examined the arm with a critical eye.

  ‘Nasty and deep, but the lacings in yer arm are intact, so ye will get the use of it back.’

  Hal tried not to let the pain wash him, concentrated on staring at the sword and wondering at the keen edge which had slashed de Grafton to ruin. Too fancy, Rossal had admitted when he had handed the sword over and now Hal saw the extent of it: the Templar cross in the pommel and letters etched down the blade and now outlined clearly in de Grafton’s blood: C+S+S+M+L. Across the hilt was N+D+S+M+L and Hal wondered if there was a Templar left who could tell him what they meant.

  Sim searched de Grafton for the key and vanished with it; not long afterwards the place was suddenly filled with the Bon Accord sailors. Hal let Pegy have his head, listened dully to him sending Somhairl and some men to check on the ship while he sat, fired with the agony of his arm and trying not to move at all.

  The big Islesman was back all too soon; the ship was foundered and half-sunk at its moorings, the steering whipstaff cut.

  ‘Baistit,’ Pegy swore and kicked the bloody ruin of de Grafton so that the head lolled sickeningly. ‘He knew he had won afore ye arrived, Sir Hal.’

  Hal, crushed with the black dog of it, fell back to studying the sword, half-numbed, watching the gleet and blood crust into the grooves of the letters in a haar of weariness, until light and voices burst over him, driving him up and out of it, as if breaching from a dark pool.

  ‘Christ betimes,’ said a familiar voice, ‘what a charnel hoose.’

  It was an effort to raise his head and stare into the wide grin.

  ‘Kirkpatrick,’ Hal slurred like a drunk. ‘You are late.’

  ISABEL

  Thou deckest Thyself with light as if it were a garment and spreadest out the Heavens like a curtain. A sign, Lord, to silence my weeping and I thank You for it. I saw him, through the smoke, through the crowds howling at the shrieks of the burning woman, a dark and strange angel, hooded and careful but the only one not looking at the poor soul writhing on the pyre, but up at me. He knows I saw him, too. O Lord. Joy of joys – a sign. Matters are changing; winds are shifting.

  Dog Boy.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Berwick Town, Berwick

  Ember Day, Feast of the Visitation, May 1314

  He should not have been there, in the thronged Marygate. He could hear Jamie say it even as he walked into the crowd of the place. You are not meant to be strolling inside Berwick town, Aleysandir. You are supposed to be observing the folk in it, their movements and their bought truce. You are supposed to be me, Aleysandir – so says the King – and I am too kent a face for you to be waving its like at the English in Berwick.

  I am supposed to be kin, Dog Boy answered himself, grimly exultant with the daring of it, though he would never say it to Jamie’s face. My blood is your blood, Jamie Douglas – and your blood would bring you here if you were in my boots.

  His boots were clotted with filth of alleys and wynds choked with ‘English sojers’, though the truth of matters was that they were not English at all, but the mesnies of those Scots lords still loyal to the Plantagenet and fearing for the loss of their lands in the north. Unable now to go home, they were lost men, all of their old lives torn from them and only soldiering left. Swaggering and roaring, they lurched through the streets in search of drink and whores and, above all, food.

  That was part of what had brought Dog Boy into the town, mingling easily with the other travel-stained, just one more well-worn fighting man with an iron hat, a gambeson that had seen better days and a festoon of hand weapons dangling from belt and back.

  He and Jamie knew the place was starving already, with ale a sight cheaper than bread, yet those Scottish nobiles bound to King Edward were clearly mustering – and food was arriving, grain and meat and ale, in carts guarded by English wearing the badge of Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke.

  The presence of his own mesnie meant the Earl was here, but with just enough numbers to garrison the castle and keep all the food and drink safe. Not for the town, nor even for the garrison, nor the Scots lords, but for others – supplies, stockpiling here for the bulk of the army because the fortresses they usually relied on for invasion were all gone. That meant the English were due here in force soon – but where were they now?

  Dog Boy had heard that labour on the Berwick town-wall defences had stopped because the workers were too weak and he saw for himself the ditch and rampart, half-finished and no more than a dyke. You could take the town, he thought to himself, with a jester’s bladder on a stick – though the castle was still formidable.

  He had heard, too, that Isabel MacDuff was the sight to see, dangling from the Hog’s Tower in her cage, but in the time it took to battle for a leather jack of warm ale at Tavish’s Tavern, Dog Boy learned that her charms had been overcome by a new entertainment.

  They were burning a witch under the walls of the castle.

  The mob gathered in the moody dim of a day gone to haar off the sea, expectant and lusting with the desperation of those who need bread but will take blood if it is offered.

  Dog Boy filtered along with them, the Napiers and Harpers and Butlers from Edinburgh and the Lothian March roistering alongside the sullen MacDougalls and McNabs from beyond the Mounth, who patently wished they were not here at all, in a soft southern place where no one spoke the True Tongue.

  Dog Boy was elbowed and shouldered, growling so that folk knew he was no easy mark, with his dagger and old sword, an axe and a rimmed iron hat dangling from his belt. He searched the battlements, squinting in the growing fog and premature pewter dim and not expecting to see her at all, having heard she could only be viewed if you stood in the bailey, which was a step too far for him. Surprise stiffened him, then, when he saw her.

  Cage-freed, she stood high on the battlemented wall beside Malise – grey-haired now that one, Dog Boy saw – with a loop of cloak over her own head, which still seemed fox-russet bright. They stood like lord and lady above the crowds and anyone who did not know the truth would have been fooled by it.

  Dog Boy dragged at her with his eyes, willing her to look – and then she did. He was sure of it, saw the jerk in her like a hooked fish, was certain she had seen and recognized him – but the arrival of the witch threw up a surge and a roaring bellow that snapped the lock between them.

  The woman moved in the midst of a coterie of censer-swinging priests and an intoning canonical. She stumbled forward draped in a clinging shift and a hagging terror between spear-armed, grim-faced guards lent by the ca
stle; her face was a cliff, grey with the numb of fear.

  Dog Boy knew her. Knew her and her accuser, the wee pinch-faced man who walked with his chin triumphant and defiant, basking in having caused all this. Frixco de Fiennes looked right and left and never behind at the woman he had condemned. Dog Boy wondered dully where Aggie’s bairn was.

  It was easy to read the truth between the long, rambling pronouncement, half-drowned in the shrieks and howls of the baying mob. Frixco had declared Aggie the traitor who had let the Scots into Roxburgh, using foul Satanic spells to hide them from view. The fact that the Church was promoting the woman’s death and not the seneschal of Berwick showed that the Common Law considered the evidence flimsy at best. The Church needed no other evidence than the woman’s confession and her bloody fingers and bruised face showed how that had been achieved.

  Now she was a witch. Not a woman, for each inquiring priest would have to look himself in the mirror glass of his soul after what had been done to a woman, but you shall not suffer a witch to live so the broken, split-lipped, weeping ruin they fixed to the stake was a witch, spawn of Satan and not any human thing at all.

  Fastened with chains, Dog Boy noted dully, since ropes would burn through and roll her messily to the feet of her accusers and the gaping, howling mob. If Christ Himself walked among them, they would deceive Him, he thought.

  The priests smeared her soles and jellied legs with pitch, daubed it on the shift and made it cling more provocatively; a red-faced soldier, all drink-broken veins and bad teeth, clutched his groin and bellowed out that this was her last chance for a decent fuck outside of Hell.

  ‘Ye brosy-faced hoorslip,’ Dog Boy growled and elbowed him hard enough to double the man over, gasping and boaking cheap ale over all the shoes nearest him.

  Nivver violet a lady. Never was a lady more violated than Aggie, finding the harsh truth of what lay beyond the confines of Roxburgh. Not adventure and freedom, but turning slowly to a shrieking horror of black, with a sweet stink so like pork as to make you retch at the saliva it brought to starving mouths. The priests solemn and canting, invited the last blister of Aggie to repent her sins; it was, Dog Boy realized with a sour curl to the lip of him, an Ember Day.

  Through the haze of smoke and witch-hair tendrils of haar, Dog Boy found Isabel’s eyes again – or thought he did – before he turned away and slouched through the crowd, heading back down to Scotch Gate and the bridge, hunched and moody and careless.

  Frixco de Fiennes was more than a little drunk, on wine and fame both. He had watched his brother die of the festering wound he had taken at Roxburgh and discovered that, without him, he was that worst of creatures, a noble so low and Gascon he might just as well have been dung.

  He had taken work – welcome to a man with scarce two coins to rub against each other – with the harassed officials still trying to carry out King Edward’s writs in a land where he had no power. It had taught him, in short order, that the years of juggling accounts in Roxburgh had honed a talent for tallying, where a merk was two thirds of a pound, a shilling of twelve silver pennies one-twentieth of a pound and the penny the only actual coin in all of it.

  It had taught him, too, that there was a new-fangled way of tallying, using some foul heathen Moorish numbering system which made it all easier, according to the young, thrusting clerks who promoted it. Frixco saw the tallying up for his own talents and the bleak future of it soured him.

  It was Aggie’s misfortune to stumble on him at that moment, pleading for help for ‘his bairn’. Turning her in had been desperation – but it had also netted him a reward, which he had spent on clothes and wine. Now he was staggering from the burning stink and wondering where he could make more such coin.

  He collided with the man, the pair of them as much at fault as the other. Frixco, alarmed at having annoyed one of the hundreds of rough, armed men slouching and reeling about the streets, stammered out an apology – and then saw the face.

  He blinked, puzzled, for he knew the face but could not place it … the knowledge crashed on him like the apple in Eden flung at his forehead; he saw the black, dagged hair and the bearded face, saw it as he had at Roxburgh, the scowl arched over a fistful of steel.

  Dog Boy and Frixco stared at one another for a long moment and Dog Boy knew he had been recognized, knew it was all up with him in Berwick and felt a sudden, savage exultation.

  ‘Nivver violet a lady,’ he growled and slammed a horny-handed fist into Frixco’s face, wishing he had a dagger in it. He leaped over the mud-spattered sprawl of the man and was off down the street like a new lamb. He ran no more than a few paces, fell into a swift walk and filtered on down through the throng lurching away from the remains of the pyre.

  He was a hundred ells away before he heard the distant shouts, but they floated clear and eldritch through the encroaching sea-haar.

  ‘The Black is in Berwick. Ware. The Black Douglas is in Berwick.’

  The sea, off Colonsay

  At the same time

  The Señor Glorioso was like a ship, Pegy declared, in that it floated and had sails. Other than that it might well have been an ox cart to him and, despite the alleged generosity of Grand Master Ruy Vaz in presenting it in exchange for the half-sunk Bon Accord, Pegy was sullen and convinced that they had had the worst of the deal.

  He said it loud and often, all the struggling way back towards Scotland, and Hal, drifting in and out of wound fever, knew it was because the new beast was a long-runner more suited to the Middle Sea, whose ropes and spars and sails were as strange as a six-legged foal to the cog-men of the old Bon Accord. They knew it as a carib, the best way they could pronounce the Moorish word for it: qaríb.

  The lateen rig, with its huge, unwieldy yardarms, defeated the best efforts of Niall Silkie, Angus and Donald, while the single big rudder confused Somhairl. Pegy, unable to judge the speed of ‘the ugly baist’, was barely able to work out where they were never mind where they were going; he knew the cargo was overloaded, too, and prayed for good weather.

  Somewhere, the Devil laughed.

  A wind rose and freshened as they came up round the shoulder of Colonsay – Pegy was fairly sure it was Colonsay – and the sailors brought in as much sail as they thought might work, only to find the Señor Glorioso blundering and pitching like a mad, blind stot.

  Then, whirling away the sea-haar and the sunshine, the gale backed up with a witch’s shriek, backed up full south and west and hurled them like a driven stag towards the coast.

  Berwick town

  Some hours later

  His back hurt from crouching, so that he swore he heard it crack when he finally straightened and began to move into the dark and the fog, out of the stinking alley he had been hiding in since God forged the world, it seemed.

  Surely, Dog Boy thought, they would have given up by now. It had been hours since the alarm was raised, was now dark and the sea-haar had witch-fingered in and grown thicker and stronger. He had heard the soldiers calling for couvre-feu at least an hour ago, so the streets were dark, wet and should have been empty.

  Save that they were not. Torches, lambent in the swirling mist, showed the bobbing presence of men in packs, still searching, relentless as an avalanche; the Black Douglas was trapped in Berwick and, sooner or later, would be found. Dog Boy cursed his likeness to Jamie. Then, for the first time, he cursed his own stupidity.

  Not long after that he was found.

  He came creeping out of the shadow of the Holy Trinity and practically ran into a barrel of a man with a sputtering flambeau and a face which had the pucker of an old scar running from the patch of his left eye down through cheek and jawbone.

  ‘The Bla—’ he yelled before Dog Boy’s wild lashing smashed the hilt of his sword into the man’s forehead, felling him like an ox. But it was enough; the cries went up, the marsh-light flames trailed towards him and he ran.

  Flitting into the wynds, night-black as Auld Nick’s serk, up steps, skidding on cobbles, over courtya
rds and through deep wynds like writhing tunnels, Dog Boy wraithed like a running fox.

  He turned and twisted away from every pale light which appeared, trying, always, to work his way to the bulk of stone that had once belonged to the Friars of the Sack, for next to it was the Briggate, portal to the ford and freedom.

  He swooped like a mad crow from space to space, leaped up wynd stairs and paused once to tip a waterbutt down on too-close pursuers. Later he paused again, long enough to unsneck the door of a sty to let out a charge of swine, and then left them, laughing.

  Balked by a blind alley, he sprang sideways to a lintel, then a balcony, along it with a leap into a new courtyard, bombarding his pursuers with mad curses and laughter, pots and, once, a pie dish set out to soak in the rain. Doors and shutters banged, children and women shrieked, dogs barked and howled.

  He skipped and skidded along steep-pitched roofs, tore off slates and flung them, swung down past the leering, open-throated faces on the fine guttering and, once, swung into a carelessly unshuttered window.

  The women inside shrieked like harpies and he stopped only long enough to offer them a mocking bow and a grin from a sweat-sheened face before scooping up the night-bucket and emptying it out of the window. He heard the gratifying curse and sizzle as he headed for the door, the stairs and the way out to the back court.

  Finally, somewhere in Silver Street, he sprang for a lintel, swung up to a folly of a balcony, then up the newel post of that to the slated roof, where he sat, astraddle the steep pitch as if on a horse, his back to the gable stack. He panted and the sweat trickled down him like running mice, but the torches milled and confused voices shouted.

  He had foiled them. For now.

  For all that, he was only a little closer – he saw the bulk of the Red and White Halls of the foreign wool merchants and knew them. That placed him close to the Maison Dieu, which had its own gate through the ditch and stockade walls, near enough to the ford to chance it when the torches slid away.