by Robert Low
Then Dog Boy came up and the man blinked out of the numbing shock, opened his dry mouth and bellowed.
‘Ware afore. Ware afore.’
‘Christ and His bliddy saints …’ Jamie hissed and threw the dirk. It whirled, struck the man in the face haft first and sent him staggering. Dog Boy, with a grim grunt, hurled forward and rammed the man to the wet walkway; the spear flew free, rolled off the edge and clattered noisily on to the cobbles below.
The guard struggled and spat and cursed, but Jamie was on him now too and helped pin one arm and a leg, leaving Dog Boy, fighting the mad, fluttering panic of the man, to free up his dagger hand and drive the weapon into the man’s ear, the most vulnerable spot.
For a moment he was years back, leaping on the back of a man fighting the Bruce – and winning – in a dark corridor of a leper house. He had knifed into an ear then, too, felt the same gush of blood over his hand, so hot he was amazed it did not scald him …
Panting, slick with blood and rain, the three of them wrestled and grunted and gasped until, at last, one kicked frantically and then was still. Jamie, dashing rain from his eyes, grinned and got to his hands and knees, was about to say how Dame Fortune was smiling when the bitch betrayed them with the iron clang of an alarm.
Dog Boy looked at the cage, where Sweetmilk clung like a barnacle, then to where men were spilling out of butter-yellow doorways below and up the stone stairs, more coming along the ramparts so that they would pass through the Hog Tower and along to where the ladder snaked to safety. There was no way he or Jamie could stop them.
‘Away,’ Jamie declared, clapping Dog Boy on the shoulder and half dragging him to his feet. ‘Or we are taken.’
‘We cannot leave them,’ Dog Boy spat and Jamie whirled him until they were face to face.
‘Too late, Aleysandir. All we can do is give them the best chance of escaping on their own.’
Dog Boy did not see it. If the guards already spilling up to the Hog Tower passed through it they would send some up one level, to check on the prisoner. When they did, all would be lost for the trapped Hal and Isabel, Kirkpatrick and Sweetmilk.
Jamie saw all that in the Dog Boy’s face. He grinned and sprang along the walkway towards the guards, spreading his arms wide and bawling like a rutting stag.
‘A Douglas. A Douglas. The Black is here. Come ahead if you think yourselves warriors.’
Even as he sprinted for the ladder, two steps behind Jamie, Dog Boy knew that the guards were elbowing each other to get through the door of the Hog Tower, desperate to close with the legendary Black Douglas, to capture or kill him, for ransom or reward. All of them, Dog Boy thought with a savage moment of exultation as he slid down the ladder, his palms and fingers scorching.
Hal and Isabel clung to each other, breath pinched off. Kirkpatrick, half-crouched and with his knife out, looked from their gleaming faces to the dark shape of Sweetmilk, hanging on to the outside bars of the cage. It was so quiet Kirkpatrick could hear the hiss of the rain – and the loud shouts of ‘A Douglas’.
Clever Sir Jamie, he thought as the thunderous clatter of men below spilled through from one walkway to the next, too eager to think; the throat-cut body of the guard below only spurred them on to more vengeance.
There were loud shouts – but no one came up. Everyone clattered on through, bawling loudly about the castle in danger from the Black Douglas. They would be balked at pursuit, all the same, for the White Wall had a postern gate at the foot of a set of steps known as the Breakneck Stairs, with good reason. The only other way was to follow the Black down his own ladder in the dark.
‘We must go,’ he hissed and Hal looked, agonized, at Sweetmilk. He is doomed, Kirkpatrick wanted to say, but the nun groaned and focused all attention on her.
‘Strip her.’
Isabel moved swiftly on her own advice, while the others gawped for a moment, before helping her. It took hardly a moment to pull off the nun’s outer habit and scapular, then Isabel had Hal and Kirkpatrick drag the woman into the cell. She came round as Isabel’s face came out of the scapular and they looked at each other, the nun round-eyed with astonishment; her mouth opened as if to scream.
‘I would not do that, Sister Alise,’ Isabel said and looked to where Kirkpatrick stood with the dagger in his fist. The nun’s eyes went huge and round with fear, and then Isabel spoke to Kirkpatrick.
‘I would not like to hear that she had died,’ she said coldly. ‘A wad in her mouth, tied with a bit of her habit cord, will suffice. Her wrists and ankles too, I think.’
Kirkpatrick obeyed her and Alise was trussed and staring, snoring through her damaged nose.
‘How the world turns, Sister,’ Isabel said, her gentle voice no less of a scathe than a hot iron. ‘If you had not contrived to have Constance kept from me, out of spite, it would be her across my door and not you. Malise will not be pleased – his power may have been removed, but his hate is not and he will visit it on you. It seems that you may burn in Hell before I do.’
‘Time we were away,’ Kirkpatrick interrupted and Hal stared miserably out at Sweetmilk, who pressed his face close to the bars and grinned a wet, wan farewell.
‘On yer way, lords. I will scrauchle free of this, dinna fret.’
‘Down to the bailey and out the gate,’ Isabel declared, shoving Hal out of the tower cell. ‘A nun and her braw escorts, headed back to her convent and away from all this Godless trouble.’
‘Bigod,’ Kirkpatrick declared admiringly, ‘you can strop your wits when you walk with your ladyship and no mistake.’
They slithered like dancing shadows down to the level where the guard lay, down the spiral of stairs further still; somewhere beyond they heard men cursing and picking their way carefully down the worn-smooth, steeply pitched Breakneck Stairs.
At the foot of the tower, Hal led the way out into the bailey, walking smartly, but more casually than his thundering heart; behind came Isabel, hands folded piously in the sleeves, scapular hood drawn up against the rain and to hide her face. Kirkpatrick, at the tail end, saw the great gates of the castle start to close, and Isabel called out sharply to let her and her escort through. The gate commander, a long-time garrison resident, looked at the black-shadowed Bride of Christ and shook his head.
‘Sorry, Sister, while the alarum is up, the yett is shut and the bridge raised as well in a meenit. You mun wait.’
The tile clattered at his feet and made them all leap away from it, looking round wildly. Above, Sweetmilk swung and capered and launched another so that the guards scattered. Someone yelled to fetch a latchbow and the gate commander, squinting up through the rain with a face like bad whey, crossed himself. It was an imp of Satan, for sure – Christ’s Wounds, this was a night when Hell had unlatched its door …
A man ran up with a crossbow spanned, slid in a leather-fletched bolt, aimed and shot. Just as he did so, the gate commander remembered the nun and turned to warn her to get to safety – but she was gone.
Then the body fell, a whirl of arms and legs crashing to the cobbles with a sickening wet thud; the gate commander was disappointed to see that it was no imp at all, just a man with his face twisted in agony and his head leaking into the gutter like a broken egg.
Hal knew Sweetmilk was dead and the sour sick of it dogged his heels as he wraithed through the last crack of the gate and across the bridge, which trembled and creaked under the raising windlass even as they scurried.
‘He saw we were shut in and contrived to help,’ he muttered. ‘God forgive us, he could never have survived the fall.’
Kirkpatrick, feral eyes flicking this way and that as they moved along the lee of buildings, growled back that the bolt would have killed him before that; it was meant as a soothe but did not balm the loss much. Isabel snapped the glare between them.
‘Best we do not stand here like a set mill, for I am resolved never to go back in that cage.’
Hal blinked the rain from his face, felt it scamper, erratic as running mi
ce, down through his collar and back. She never would, he vowed, for he would die before he let it happen and, when he said it, had back the glow of a smile and a kiss on his wet cheek.
The streets were dark – they had called couvre-feu hours before – but not empty; the place was stuffed with the debris of war, the sour wash of those flung out of their old lives and forced to run for the dubious shelter of Berwick, with nothing more than hope to cling to.
Huddled in doorways and up covered wynds, soaked and starving, they made a mockery of the orders that were supposed to keep folk indoors, by law of the Governor. Too miserable even for the oblivion of sleep, they stretched pale hands out of the shadows: ‘Alms, for the love of Christ.’
‘Here is aid for us,’ Kirkpatrick voiced. ‘A nun, delivering succour to the poor, with two braw lads to keep her from harm …’
‘Until the cry is raised and Alise found like a goose trussed for a Yule table,’ Isabel answered. ‘Then two men and a nun will be all they look for.’ She looked pointedly at Hal and added: ‘One with a bloody great crossbow slung on his back.’
‘It was Sim Craw’s,’ he answered and she heard the bleak in his voice, knew it for what it was and brought one hand to her mouth as if to choke the misery that wanted to spill from it. Sim. Gone. There was no time for the tale of it, but she knew the truth and simply nodded silence on the matter of the crossbow.
They moved as swiftly as they dared, away from the brooding bulk of the castle, pausing now and then like mice on a dark larder floor when they saw the lambent sputter of torches that marked the Watch on their rounds.
‘Dog Boy did this,’ Isabel said suddenly, sinking into the lee of a rough wall. ‘I saw him when he came here and heard the alarm raised later – yet he escaped.’
‘Well minded,’ Hal said admiringly. ‘He did and was raised in station for his daring. The way he told the tale involved rooftops and running.’
He was half our ages, Kirkpatrick wanted to add but did not.
‘How did he get out?’ Isabel persisted patiently and Hal, nodding, frowned and thought.
‘The Briggate.’
The distant clanging of the alarm iron brought their heads up, like stags hearing a baying. There was shouting.
‘Shut fast now,’ Kirkpatrick mourned bitterly.
They went on all the same, walked round a corner and into four men of the Watch. They knew nothing yet and Isabel was on the point of saying so when Kirkpatrick, panicked, gave a sharp yelp like a dog. Hal saw the hackles of the Watch come up, already bristled by the alarm.
‘Run,’ he said.
They ran, she gathering up her wet habit and looping it through her belt as she went, making a pair of fat breeches to the knee so her legs moved more freely. They went down streets and up alleys like gimlets through butter, half stumbling over the cursing sleepers seeking the shelter of the narrowest of places, where the houses almost came together like an arch against the rain.
Up steps, over courts, and Kirkpatrick, turning to tumble a water-sodden butt in the path of their pursuers, was stunned to hear her laugh and Hal’s answering wild cry of ‘gardyloo’. Like bliddy weans, he thought bitterly, with no idea of the dangers here.
Panting, drenched, they paused to gasp in air and Hal clung to Isabel, who grinned back at him from her pearled face. The warp has found the weft, he thought, the song the throat. No matter what happens now I am as happy as when the sun first found shiny water and I know it is the same for her.
They moved on, at a gentler trot now, burst into a wynd and shrank back from fresh rush lights, mounted on a cart. Behind, the Watch flames bobbed – one less, Hal noted with grim satisfaction – and circled in confusion.
There was a smell here, a stink they all knew well, and Isabel covered her nose, while Hal and Kirkpatrick fell into the old trick of it, breathing through their open mouth.
The dead were here.
There were a heap of them. Brought and dumped, they were the ones too weak from hunger or disease to stay in this world any longer. Two men in rough sack overtunics worked with grunts under the poor light of damp torches to load them on the cart.
Kirkpatrick looked at Hal.
‘They will not be taking them to anywhere inside Berwick,’ he said pointedly and Hal, after a pause, nodded and drew out his dagger. Isabel laid a hand on his arm and strolled forward, folding her hands into her nun’s tunic, hearing Hal and Kirkpatrick slide sideways into the dark.
The two men paused and looked up, saw what it was and waited deferentially. One even hauled his rough hood from his head.
‘Sister,’ the taller of the pair said. ‘Ye are ower late to bring succour to these.’
There was bitterness there, but whether at convent charity or his own condition at having to manhandle the nuns’ failure was a mystery; his comrade nudged him sharply for his cheek.
‘I am sorry for it,’ Isabel said piously. ‘Right sorry for this and everything else that will happen.’
The first man shuffled, made ashamed by the vehemence of her words.
‘Ye cannot tak’ the weight of God’s judgement all on yerself, Sister,’ he said.
‘I am glad you feel so,’ Isabel answered. ‘And so doubly sorry for this.’
They were puzzled as long as it took for the tall man to feel the savage wrench that took his head back, baring his throat for Hal’s dagger. The other, bewildered, half turned and took Kirkpatrick’s thin, fluted dagger through the eye.
There was silence for a moment or two, broken only by ragged breathing, the whisper of rain and the choke of dying men; blood washed down the cobbles into the open gurgling trench of the drain. Isabel looked at the two men and tried to feel some pity for innocents, but failed. The world was full of innocents, all as dead as these, she thought. A wheen of them are scattered nearby – and more are on the cart. They, at least, would serve the living one last time.
Then, in a flurry of movement, they stripped the rough tunics from the men and put them on. Isabel flung off the nun’s habit and stood soaking in her undershift while Kirkpatrick tried not to stare at the cling of it. She shot him a warning glance as she climbed up on the cart and silenced Hal with another, so that he saw the inevitability of it.
‘If you make a single comment on what has been exposed here, Black Roger of Closeburn, I will blind you, so I will.’
Kirkpatrick, with a wan grin, held up his hands in mock surrender and watched, admiringly, as Isabel laid herself down amid the loaded corpses, as if settling for the night in a feather bed.
‘Roll on your side, lady,’ Hal advised, ‘lest the rain get in your eyes and make you blink.The right side, mind.’
So you do not have to look into the blue-tinged wither of an old woman with her own marbled stare, Hal thought. Christ’s Wounds, I have missed the courage of this woman among all else.
They each took a shaft and heaved; the cart ground reluctantly away, the torches bobbing and trailing sparks into the night.
Malise hurried through the slick streets, wrapped in a dark cloak and a hot fury. He might be a great lord, he ranted to himself, but de Valence had no right to speak to him the way he did. Jacob the Jew, indeed.
He wished he’d had the courage to spit Gaveston’s old nickname for de Valence right in the Earl’s face when Pembroke had looked down his long, hooked nose at him. It had been hard enough getting entry to the castle at all and his anger and fury at that had been fuelled by the fact that he had been sent from it in the first place by the same Earl.
But the guard knew him and let him in – eventually – growling that the ‘enemy was at the gate’. Malise suspected differently, saw the Earl himself in the bailey, naked sword in hand but unarmoured and sending men right and left with barely concealed irritation.
He had elbowed through them and demanded to know what had happened to Isabel MacDuff. Then he had had the Look.
‘Gone, though the matter is nothing to do with you,’ the Earl had spat coldly and rounded on a luck
less passing serjeant.
‘You – Hobman, is it? Yes. Go to the gate, find out who let this man in and arrest him. Then take the gate yourself and let no one in. You hear? No one. We are under attack here.’
He turned back to Malise.
‘You will go with him and leave. If I see you again I will make you suffer for the irritation in my eye.’
‘There is no attack. They came to free her,’ blustered Malise. ‘You must send men to the town gates or she will escape …’
A look brought Hobman’s hand on his shoulder and his firm voice in Malise’s ear.
‘Come along now, there is a good sir.’
The soaking rain trickled down Malise’s neck and brought him back to the moment, the night and the wet. He recoiled away from the dark mouths of alleys, fearing the feral eyes and worse that he imagined lurking there, and tried to work out what the bitch would do.
Not alone, he thought and the savage exultation of it drove into him like a spike: the Lothian lord, Hal of Herdmanston. It had to be him, silly old fool, come to rescue his light o’ love as if he was Sir Gawain plucking the Grail from a high tower.
There was no way for her to escape, he thought. But if it were me, I would head for the gate nearest the Tweed where the old bridge, destroyed so often that Berwick had given up rebuilding it, was no more than a staggering line of black stumps like rotting old teeth.
Now folk had to ford the Tweed instead, but the postern that led to it kept its old name.
The Briggate.
He came down through the surging streets, worried at first by the knots of flame-lit men with grim faces and iron hats but realizing they were stumbling burghers, called out to the half-done walls and trembling at the idea of the Scots breaking in. Even if many of them were Scots themselves, Malise thought as he hurried through the trail of their torch embers, they had families and livelihoods here that Bruce’s army would not treat kindly.
At the Briggate, he paused uncertainly; the area around the gate was thick with armed men now, at least twenty and perhaps more, all bristling with spears and crossbows, rain dripping from the rims of their helmets and soaking padded jacks.
