by Robert Low
Malise spotted the serjeant in charge by his maille and his attitude, bawling orders left and right, his bucket helm under one arm and his surcote dark with rain and bright with the badge of de Valence.
‘Have some men and a woman gone out the gate?’
The serjeant turned at the sound of the voice, saw the dark, dripping figure and thought at once of a wet weasel in a dark wood.
‘Who are you?’ he demanded, only half interested. The men he had were all call-outs, barely of use even when placed behind merlons. God help us if the Scotch come at us out of the dark, he thought …
‘Sir Malise Bellejambe.’
That snapped the serjeant’s head round and he stared more closely at the wet weasel. It was possible this man was a nobile. Just possible enough to allow caution in dealing with him.
‘Well,’ the serjeant said and added, with a hint of scathe, ‘my lord. Nothing has gone through this gate. Nor will it, coming or going.’
‘The deid kert.’
They both turned to the voice and the owner of it blinked from under his soaking hood, looking from one to the other uncertainly and wishing now that he had never spoken.
‘The what?’
Gib heard the tone of the serjeant and wished even more fervently that he had kept his lips snecked on the matter. But it was out now, so he stammered out the truth of it: the dead cart had been manhandled out through the open gate just before everyone had arrived.
‘You opened the gate?’ the serjeant demanded and now Gib heard the growling thunder, so that he started to sweat, despite the rain.
‘Aye, for a brace of auld chiels. I telt them the gate could not be opened, for the alarm was sounded. So they said they would leave the bliddy thing, for they were not inclined to roll it back the way they had come.’
He looked imploringly at the serjeant, willing him to see the shock of it.
‘I didnae want a pile o’ corpses blocking up the way and stinking my door all night.’
‘Ye opened the gate,’ the serjeant replied in a disbelieving knell of a voice.
‘I said they would not be allowed back,’ whined Gib, ‘but they laughed and answered that it was a fine excuse for their wives and they would spend the night at the Forge.’
Malise knew the Forge, a smithy just across the ford set to capture the passing trade. It provided a howf for travellers too late to gain entry to the town and was a notorious stew, providing drink and food and whores, even in times like these. More so, he added to himself, for folk trapped beyond Berwick’s walls needed to lose their fears in drink and lust. Even the women.
‘They were rebels,’ he explained to the frowning serjeant, ‘who have freed a prisoner from the castle and are now headed for escape. If you provide some men, we can overtake them …’
‘Open the gate?’ thundered the serjeant. ‘Again?’
‘In pursuit …’ Malise began and the serjeant closed one eye and scowled.
‘Aye, you would like that, I am sure, if you were a rebel spy. Get me to open the gate and spill in a lot of your friends.’
‘I am Sir Malise Bellejambe …’
‘So you say.’
‘He is, though,’ Gib interrupted helpfully and withered under the glare. ‘The Witch-keeper.’
Now the serjeant knew who the man was: the jailor of the witch in the cage; an idea struck him.
‘Is she the one sprung, then?’
Malise, all nervous impatience, nodded furiously and the serjeant, wiping the rain from his face, thought with agonizing slowness and then nodded.
‘You can go alone,’ he said, ‘out the postern. If there are only two old men and a woman, you should have little trouble. Mind – you will not be allowed back in this night.’
No one will, he added to himself, watching Malise scuttle to the small door set in one of the large ones. He gave a nod and the man unlocked it with a huge key while Malise fretted at his slowness; it was barely open before he wraithed through it.
‘Fair riddance to you,’ the serjeant declared and spat, listening to the comfort of the lock clunking shut.
She rolled, stiff and shivering, off the cart and accepted the rough sodden sacking which Hal stripped off and gave to her.
‘Time we were not here,’ Kirkpatrick muttered, looking back towards the distant gate; Isabel nodded, and then looked dubiously at the huge steel-pronged arbalest Hal handed her.
‘It is spanned. All ye need do is slot a bolt in it,’ he said and handed her one with a look as sharp as its point; she nodded again, feeling the dragging weight.
‘Move yerselves,’ Kirkpatrick hissed and Isabel paused once more and signed the cross over the tipped-forward cart of lolling dead.
‘God be praised,’ she said.
‘For ever and ever,’ they muttered and turned into the river. It only came up to their shins, but had spated with the rain and the force of it was enough, with the stone-littered gravel bed, to stumble them. They moved like sleepwalkers towards the distant flickering lights of the Forge, Kirkpatrick in the rear and concentrating on his footing, cursing the dark and the wet and bad cess of the whole business.
Lucky to get away with it, he thought to himself, just as he heard the scatter of pebbles sliding under an unsteady foot. He turned, saw a dark shape and started to duck – and then the world exploded the side of his head into a bright light.
Hal and Isabel turned as Kirkpatrick reeled backwards and hit the water with a great spray; Isabel screamed and part of the rainsoaked dark seemed to tear itself away and lunge at Hal. He had time to see the winking flash that sliced the explosion of water, had time to realize that the wild, flailing hilt of that dagger had felled Kirkpatrick. Had time for the crazed eyes to sear a name into his head …
Malise.
Then the black shape was on him and all was mayhem.
Isabel saw the shadow and screamed again, knowing who it was even as Hal took the rush of it and Kirkpatrick toppled into the water like a felled tree. She saw him, arms out and loose, launched away on the shallow water and turning like a log, so that she knew he was unconscious and would drown unless she helped.
She floundered to him, underkirtle and sacking and the slung arbalest conspiring to suck her to a stop, levered him face up, hearing the splash and grunt of the two men fighting.
‘Wake,’ she roared at him, slapping his whey cheeks, aware of the great bloody bruise on one side of his face, but his head rolled back and forth and she shrieked her frustration at him, and then began hauling him to the nearby bank in a fury of panic that she would not get back to help Hal in time.
Hal thought Malise was the ugliest thing in creation, his greasy pewter hair plastered to his skull, his face a braided knot of hate, studded and pitted and marked down one side with nicks and glassy pocks and a nose bent sideways like a ruined spoon.
They held each other like fumbling bad lovers, Hal’s fist clamped on Malise’s wrist as he tried to bring the dagger down, Malise’s other arm flailing wildly and blocked, time and again, by Hal’s forearm. Hal felt the dull pain there and, in desperation, struck out between Malise’s blows, felt the man stagger; for a moment they lurched and lumbered in the fountaining water, before Malise recovered and they strained, almost still.
‘I will finish you, Lothian.’
His breath was fetid as a dragon’s; Hal remembered watching Bruce in a fight long ago and spat his own sourness into Malise’s face, which made the man roar and tug. Malise tried to bite and gouge.
A mistake, Hal thought, clinging on with a panicked sense of his failing strength, the sear of the old wound along his ribs, the trembling ache of his wrist – he has turned rabid …
Malise, in a maddened, careless fury, tried to butt Hal; then he swung round, tumbling them both into the water in a spray fine as diamonds. Spitting and growling like soaked dogs, they rolled apart and came up looking for one another.
Hal turned an eyeblink too late and took a blow meant for his throat on his wildly flung
hand, so that Malise’s forearm smashed into the wrist Badenoch had damaged at the Pelstream fight. The shock and pain made him cry out; Malise gave a bellow of triumph and kicked, but the water hampered him enough to cushion the blow. Yet Hal, off balance, stumbled and fell, floundering.
Malise gave an exultant howl and started forward – only for something to drop round his neck and haul him up short, so that he almost fell backwards. Furious, puzzled, he twisted round in the grip of what felt like a noose – into the wet, grim face of Isabel, her hair a Medusa of wild wet snakes over her face and the arbalest held in both hands.
She had struck with it, but it was spanned and she had missed, dropping the loop of a prong and the taut braided cord over Malise’s shoulders like a noose; there was no quarrel in it, for she had dropped that. He saw the lack, looked at her and snarled. He started forward and she pushed back, keeping him away as he came hard up against the braided cord. He reached up his dagger-free hand and started to lever it over his head.
‘You will burn in Hell,’ he screeched and she heard the wild, strange cry, almost like a plea – and all that he had done to her, all the foul things he had poured on her body and in her ears, washed up like old sick. He saw it in her eyes.
‘Then I will meet you there,’ she said and pressed the sneck.
The arbalest bucked and thrummed. The string took Malise in the throat like a ram, crushing apple and pipe and forging such a searing pain that he shrieked away from it and tore free, ripping the weapon from her grasp. He fell in the water, floundering free of the tangle of the arbalest and rolling over.
She picked up Sim’s legacy, planning to club Malise with it, but instead she stood and watched him gasp. Like a fish, she thought. Drowning in air. Hal climbed to his feet, staggering a little, and she moved to him, supporting him, aware that riders were approaching.
So near to escape … She wondered if she could find Malise’s dagger in the spate and stones of the Tweed, for she would not go back to the cage. Not with breath in her …
The riders came up and a great grin split the face of the leader, the black hair plastered to the diamond-netted beard.
‘Bigod, ye made it then. Who is that chiel?’
The Black Douglas. Isabel sagged, so that now Hal had to hold her up.
‘Malise Bellejambe,’ he answered numbly and now he saw Dog Boy and Parcy and the others. He thought of Sweetmilk and felt the souring loss of him.
‘Is it, bigod?’ Jamie Douglas said, looking down at the man making gug-gug sounds as he tried to suck breath into a throat long past caring, floundering in the rush of river. ‘I thought he would be bigger.’
Kirkpatrick came up, half staggering and with blood all down his face.
‘Time,’ he began and could not finish it.
‘Past time,’ Jamie Douglas agreed, ‘for we have fired the Forge. Mount up and let him drown here.’
But Dog Boy was off his horse and wading to the side of the gasping Malise. He looked down at him, looked down into the desperate rat eyes of him and, when he had recognition, nodded slowly.
‘Aye,’ he said, strangely gentle. ‘Ye mind me, I can see. The wee boy from Douglas. You poisoned the dogs and red-murdered Tod’s Wattie.’
Those old sins washed back into the fevered brain of Malise and he tried to explain that he had not meant to kill the dogs nor Tod’s Wattie, which was a lie. But all that came out was a horrible rasping gurgle that appalled him – as did the blade appearing in the man’s hand. The lurch of harsh realization sucked the final strength from him and he knew he had no future to speak in.
He saw flames flare and the Witch, outlined stark and eldritch as she turned on the back of the horse, her wet hair blown by a rain wind into a halo of snakes. The sudden sharp fear that he had lost her, his only love, was swamped by a sharper, disbelieving sorrow that everything would go on as before, save that now he would not be part of it.
Dog Boy slit the ruined throat, one hand over the man’s eyes to still him, as you did with a dog that was too old or done up to live; the blood skeined away in the spate like an offering.
Then he rose up and went silently to his horse, swung up into the saddle and splashed back across the ford to safety without a backward glance.
EPILOGUE
Herdmanston
Feast of St Anthony, Father of All Monks, January 1315
It had started snowing on St Andrew’s Feast and had scarcely stopped since, so that the world was all rime and white drape. Birds fell from under the eaves, killed by cold and leaving no more than a brief hole in the snow piled up round Herdmanston.
Folk moved slowly, less to do with the difficulty of forcing through the sifted banks than with the lack of energy. They were living now on nettle roots and burdock, which helped fill the belly and tease out the largesse of Herdmanston’s lord, who still had oats and barley to give in a world where gold was easier to come by.
God’s world starved and froze and those who knew the truth of it blessed the fact that they huddled round Herdmanston, where there was still food and warmth to be had.
Hal was in the undercroft looking at stores and calculating what he could keep as seed for next year, for he was sure that every villein and cottar on his land was eating their own stocks. They kept the weans in the dark as much as possible, to fool them into staying under poor covers and sleeping, but when they woke and wailed, bellies griping, Hal could not condemn parents for feeding them with next year’s hope.
The calling summoned him up into a welcome heat; the undercroft was colder still than anywhere else, even the yett hall which needed a constant charcoal brazier to keep Parcy Dodd’s teeth from rattling out of his head.
Swathed in wool, his face mottled like spoiled mutton, Parcy was out on the short stretch of walkway, manhandling the wooden bridge between it and the stairs. Below, sitting like a pile of washing on a rouncey, a familiar face squinted up into a clear, cold sky with enough blue to make a robe for every Virgin. A blood-sun sparkled diamonds from an endless world of white.
‘Kirkpatrick,’ Hal said and the man acknowledged it, before waving to the even more shapeless bundle on an ass.
‘It would be good for myself and young Rauf here to sample some of your warm hospitality.’
Hal waved them up, sent Horse Pyntle to see to the mounts and brought the pair into the hall where the fire was banked. Folk, contriving to find work close to it, parted to let Hal and his visitors come up.
Hal waited while the pot of wine that stood near enough the flame to keep it warm was emptied into cups and seared with a hot iron, Mintie grinning at the trembling youngster called Rauf as she stirred in spices.
‘This’ll thaw your cods,’ she said, handing it to him, and he nodded, speaking in bursts between the chitter of his teeth.
‘Cauld. Ride. Long way frae Roslin.’
‘Why suffer it?’ Hal asked pointedly and Kirkpatrick, unwrapping himself, waved an insouciant hand.
‘I was passing.’
It was a lie so blatant that the cold Hal felt on him was more chilled than anything God had handed the world so far. He waved Mintie away, waved all of them away, so that they moved off, reluctant and sullen at leaving the fire. In the end there was himself, Kirkpatrick and Rauf, who became aware of the eyes on him, looked from one to the other and grunted his way upright, clutching the precious warmth of the cup; melting droplets sparkled in the slight of his beard as he turned and lumbered off, trailing woollens.
‘A good lad,’ Kirkpatrick noted. ‘Nephew to my wife and raised to squire, a station he could hardly have realized afore.’
‘I heard you got wed,’ Hal replied easily, taking the sting out of the reminder that neither he nor Isabel had been invited to the September affair. Kirkpatrick had the grace to look embarrassed.
‘It was hastily arranged,’ he said, but did not elaborate on why. ‘I hear your own is due in the spring,’ he added by way of balm and Hal nodded. He and Isabel had planned it for May and he added,
for the politeness of it, that Kirkpatrick was welcome.
‘Aye, it will be a rare event, I am sure,’ Kirkpatrick added. ‘The King was pleased to sanction it. You will be equally pleased to know that he will not attend it and so save you a deal of expense.’
Hal raised his cup to that; the arrival of the King meant the arrival of the court, newly freed Queen, sister and all: a host of mouths eating like baby birds in a land of famine. They had been in Edinburgh for the Christ’s Mass feast, which Hal had attended with Isabel because it was expected of him; he had, to his surprise, been given the gift of a sword, fancy-hilted and engraved on the blade with the words ‘Le Roi me donne, St. Cler me porte’.
‘To replace the one you delivered to Glaissery with the Beauseant banner,’ the King had said and Hal had acknowledged it with a bow of thanks and a concern that his visit there had been so noted. His own gift – a silver medallion of St Anthony, said to have been worn by his namesake, the blessed Anthony of Padua – seemed less than worthy after that, particularly in the light of St Anthony being the patron saint of lepers and the scabby peel of the royal face.
‘The court now moves to Perth,’ Kirkpatrick went on, ‘afore it eats Edinburgh down to the nub. Yet we fair better than the English, since oats and barley are a hardy crop and wheat is not. They are starving beyond the Tweed.’
‘They are starving because Randolph and Jamie and the King’s brother scourge them of all they have left,’ Hal pointed out. Kirkpatrick waved a placating palm.
‘The winter has done for all that stravaigin’,’ he reported. ‘They have gone to their own homes. Jamie is back in Douglas, putting it in order.’
Hal had seen Douglas and Randolph at the Christ’s Mass feast, red-faced and greasy with joy and victory, reeling to their feet every so often to throw toasts at Bruce, the hero king. Isabel, as ever, had been quietly scathing.
‘You would think they had fought the Philistines,’ she muttered. ‘Instead, they took a kingdom from the son when, in all his life, they never managed to take as much as an ell of good Scots dirt from the father.’
