by Robert Low
‘Christ, Malise – can ye not even do a simple thing like lift a dead man to his final place?’
Malise rounded on her.
‘Ye are to come with me,’ he said firmly and Isabel laughed and rubbed another streak across the wimple and her forehead.
‘I am busy, as you can see,’ she said and turned back to the next man being brought in, holding the side of his face together with both hands and screaming bubbles through the blood.
‘Now, lady,’ Malise roared, driven past the reasonable now. He grabbed her by the muscle of her arm, squeezing viciously as he did so, and she yelped, turning into the twisted mask of his face close to her own. The men who had brought their screaming friend in bellowed at him.
‘Enough of this, ye wee hoor,’ he hissed. ‘Yer man, the earl, sent me to bring ye home and, by God wummin, you come willing or tied, but you’ll come.’
The blow sent him sprawling into the mud and blood and entrails, face first so that he came up out of it soaked and spitting, to see the Dog Boy, triumphant eyes blazing at having shoved him in the mire.
He had no words, only a shrieking incoherent rage of noise as he whipped out the long dagger and headed for the Dog Boy, who looked wildly around. Isabel saw the red murder in Malise’s eyes and tried to step between him and his prey, but he slapped her sideways with his free hand.
The blow took her hard on the side of her head, burst stars and red into her and, for the first time, a real fear. Malise had never dared touch her before…
Men growled at that, Malise rushed at the boy, slipped and slithered, regained his balance – then the world came flying out of the corner of one eye and exploded with a clang in his face.
Men cheered as Red Jeannie lowered the skillet and spat on the crawling, choking man on his knees, his nose flattened and his breathing snoring blood in and out. He lurched to his feet, the dagger still locked in his white fist and the world reeling; Red Jeannie stood with the skillet held like a Lochaber axe, while other faces, pale, ugly blobs swimming in and out of Malise’s focus, snarled and spat.
They watched him back away, the dagger wavering in one fist. The Dog Boy looked wildly round for the Countess, but she was gone.
Malise found himself leaning against a tree and did not know how he had reached the place. The bark was rough and damp, the moss on on it cool on the crushing agony that was his face. He knew that he had been struck by something and was afraid of it, afraid to touch what had been done to him. He spat out two teeth, wondered how many more he had lost and hirpled away, to where a flicker of fires offered some comfort; he realised it was twilight and that, somewhere, he had lost an hour or two.
He had a horse somewhere, but he did not expect to find it anytime soon. Eaten, he suspected, by these animals from the far north. He sank down, away from the fire, starting to shiver with all that had happened to him, cursing the pain, the earl, the countess and God, who had all forsaken him.
Then he discovered that the Devil, at least, held true. The fire he half-crawled to, wary as a fox round a kennel, had two men at it, one lying in a shelter, one tending something in a pot.
‘Not be long, your lordship,’ the fire tender declared cheerfully. ‘Good kail brose and a wee tait of black bread will return the life back in ye, eh?’
‘My thanks,’ answered the man wearily and Malise saw the torn yellow surcoat, the arms on the front. A prisoner, he thought, and then saw the face of the fire-tender, red-stained with flame as he leaned forward to taste the brose on a horn spoon.
Tod’s Wattie. The belly clench of it almost made him whimper and he bit his lip, bringing more pain to his face. He started to back away, then stopped. The Lothian has taken a lord for ransom; the thought of such riches for the likes of Hal of Herdmanston and his crew burned fear and pain out of Malise in an instant. And Tod’s Wattie had his back to him…
‘Could use some meat, mark ye,’ Tod said. ‘But, parole or not, my lord, I dare not leave ye.’
The slumped figure moaned slightly and Tod leaned down to rake through the contents of a pack, hoping the lord Hal had captured would not die; he felt the burn of shame for having failed to protect the Auld Sire of Herdmanston, paused as if frozen, his mind locked back to the madness of pikes and screaming, the bloody dying and that cursed, tangling blue banner.
John Fenton had died, falling under the iron-shod hooves of those English knights escaping across the brig, and Tod’s Wattie still found it hard to believe the steward of Roslin was gone. He had known John Fenton all his life and now he was gone, as if he had never walked and breathed at all.
He shook himself; there was, he was certain, a peck of oats which might thicken the broth, shove some life into the English lord who would be exchanged for the Auld Sire…
The blow was hard and low on one side of his back, hard enough to make him grunt and pitch forward on to his knees. Furious, bewildered, he staggered upright and turned to see Malise standing there, his face bloody and misshapen.
‘Ye gobshite,’ he snarled and started toward the man, only to find himself falling. He thought he had tripped and tried to spring up, aware that the blow on his back had started to burn.
‘Not so cantie now, houndsman,’ Malise hissed, wincing at the pain it caused him, and now Tod saw the dull winking steel in his hand, knew he was knifed and that it was a bad wound. He couldn’t seem to get up, though he kept trying, watching Malise’s booted feet move to the slumped, groaning figure of the knight.
Malise found the pulse of the moaning man’s neck with his fingers. The knight stirred, half-opened his eyes, wet and miserable in their pits of bruising.
‘Who is there?’ he asked in French and Malise cut the throat and the life from him in a swift, easy gesture of point and ripping edge.
He turned back to Tod’s Wattie, gasping and clawing up the mulch with one hand, the other trying to reach round to the pain in his back. Malise’s grin was feral and bright.
Slick as lamp oil, viscous with fluids, thick with dead like studs on a leather jack, the causeway to the brig was Hell brought to the surface of the earth and Isabel staggered along it, half-blind with fear and tears, falling as often as she walked and with no clear idea of where she was, or where she was going. Away. Just away from the unleashed monster that was Malise.
Figures moved in the twilight of the dying day, flitting like crouching demons, spitting out incoherent curses whenever they encountered another of their kind as they crow-fought over the dead.
The smell was rank and there was a noise, a low hum like the wind through a badly fitting door, as those still alive moaned out the last of their lives, calling on God, their mothers, anyone. They had lain here all through the day, dying hard and slow and untended save for the birds and the pillagers.
Isabel stumbled, fell, got up and staggered on, the silent terror behind her pushing her forward like a hand in her back. He had never hit her before. Never. The leash on him was off and Isabel knew Malise only too well, knew what he was capable of.
She weaved like the shadow of a drunk, found herself staring, slack-mouthed, at a knot of half-crouched figures, growling beast-shapes, half-silhouettes against the last greying light of the day, half gilded by the yellow light of a guttering horn lantern. One turned and she saw the knife, blood-sticky in a clotted hand. His other fist held a long, raw, wet strip of flesh and his eyes a crawling madness; the others never looked up, simply went on cutting and growling, as if butchering a fresh-killed sheep.
‘Get away from here, wummin,’ the man said and watched her lurch away before bending to his work again. It was only later, when the stories began to circle like a black wind, that Isabel realised that they had been flaying the English Treasurer, Cressingham.
Not then, though. She realised nothing but shapes and terror. A shadow fell on her as she collapsed, finally, to her knees and she whimpered; Malise had caught her. She looked up, squinting into the twilight and, with that part of her brain not screaming, she realised there was
a splinter in her knee and that she was halfway across the brig.
‘You hag,’ said a voice out of the great black shape, a snorting Beelzebub whose cloven hooves stamped on the splintered planks. ‘There is no plunder on this side of the bridge, only death.’
Behind him, she saw the flames of hell leap up. Not Malise at all, but the Devil…
‘Mercy,’ she sobbed. ‘Have mercy on a poor sinner.’
She said it in French and the black shape paused, then leaned down. A strong arm grasped her own, hauling her upright. A face, sharp, black-bearded and weighing, thrust itself into her blurred vision, studied her for a long, curious moment, then turned his horse, so that she was hauled after him in a grip of iron.
‘Move if you want to live,’ the demon answered and she careered after him, shackled to his hand while the flames gibbered and danced, only vaguely wondering, in that small peach pit of sense left to her, why the Devil spoke French.
Chapter Eight
Balantrodoch, Templar Commanderie
Feast of St Andrew Protoclet, November 1297
Death came soft and gentle, yet harsh as haar, on the snow’s back. The news of it filtered down like the sifting flakes and crushed everyone with the chill of it.
The Hardy was dead in the Tower. The Auld Templar’s son was dead in the Tower. It was clear that the English Justinian, even though he was now in Flanders, had a long and petulant reach.
Worse still, the Auld Sire of Herdmanston was dead in Hexham Priory. Of his wounds, the messenger from Roslin said, but Hal knew better – his father, he was sure, had died of having been taken for ransom, at the realisation that he had fought bravely but with little skill and no strength, for age had robbed him of both.
He died from the knowledge that he had ruined Herdmanston, too, for the ransom would beggar the place and that, more than anything, Hal knew, had broken the life from the Auld Sire, like marrow from a snapped bone. The last thing Sir John could do to rescue the situation and all those who depended on him was to die.
And all because he had jumped off the fence, straight into the mire of a war where no-one was sure of his own neighbour. At the behest of the Auld Templar, too, which was worse still, for Hal was twice robbed of folk he held in high regard.
Now Herdmanston was threatened, because Hal had stayed and fought with his father, become a rebel for the Kingdom. The only saving grace in it was that the high wind of victory had stirred all the others off the fence. Bruce and Buchan, Badenoch and all the others – even the Scots lords who had argued the bit with Wallace and Moray the night before the battle – were all now committed to the Kingdom.
At least Wallace and Bruce and myself are all facing the same direction and foe, Hal thought.
The Dog Boy saw the misery etch itself into the face of Sir Hal, so that even the joy of the yapping, squirming terriers of Herdmanston’s kennels was driven from him by the sight.
‘Christ’s Bones,’ he heard Sim growl when he thought no-one could hear. ‘God and all his angels are asleep in this kingdom.’
The kingdom itself seemed asleep, as if so stunned by the victory at Stirling Brig that no-one could quite believe it. Yet the nobiles of the realm shifted and planned while the world draped itself in a mourn of frost.
Hal rode out from Herdmanston in a black trail to recover the body of his father. It had been brought by the Auld Templar to the Templar Commanderie at Balantrodoch in a lead-lined kist from Hexham and under a Templar writ which no sane man, Scot or English, would challenge.
The dour cavalcade from Herdmanston held Hal, Sim, Bangtail Hob, Ill Made Jock, Will Elliott and Lang Tam Loudon, all the men bar two from the square fortalice. The Dog Boy drove the jouncing, two-wheeled cart which would take the kist back to Herdmanston, tagging along like a terrier at Hal’s heels.
Sim knew that, for all Hal affected indifference, he was constantly aware of the boy and it was made clear when Sim saw him manage a wan smile at the sight of the Dog Boy’s face when they rode up to the Commanderie at Balantrodoch.
It was the first time the Dog Boy had been to the Templar headquarters in Scotland and it dropped the mouth open on him. Even the spital was a wonder. The roof was shaped like the hull of a ship turned upside down, to symbolise charity sailing about the world as a boat does on the sea. From the flagstoned floor to the apex of the roof was as tall as six men standing on each other’s shoulders and coloured glass windows spilled stained light everywhere. Even Hal was impressed, for it was the first time he had been inside the spital with enough light to see it clearly.
It was as wide as three men laid end to end, with king posts carved with gargoyles and the beams brightly painted and marked at regular intervals with the Beau Seant, the white banner with its black-barred top that marked the presence of the Order. Over each doorway was etched Non nobis, Domine, non nobis sed nomini tuo da gloriam, the beginning of the first verse of Psalm 115, ‘Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory.’
Each bedspace, motifed in dark red and gold, was an alcove with drawn curtains for privacy and a table with its own pewter bowl, goblet and copper vessel. Across one end was a small but beautifully appointed chapel, so arranged that, when the door was opened and the rood screens drawn back, patients could attend Mass and follow the service without moving from their beds.
It was, Hal thought, a good place to be ill-healthed, was the Commanderie Hospital of Balantrodoch. There were six people trained to heal those Poor Knights wounded or fallen sick in the charge of the Chaplain – but they were not for the shivering mass outside the garth.
Like an accusing stare, they were huddled and ragged, the sick and well cheek by jowl and no way of really telling which was which. Hands and eyes pleaded for food, or water, or hope and the voices were a long, low hum of desperation -but these were the Knights Templar, not the Knights of the Hospital; charity was not their reason for being and the fine spital was for care of the Templars’ own. Yet the Hospitallers’ own headquarters at Torphichen was swamped and the ones around Balantrodoch were the truly desperate and abandoned.
Outside, the garth of the Commanderie was a silent, still wasteland of rime, a world shrouded in a winter mist that turned the sun to a silver coin. The worst poor, first victims of the unreaped, burned-out harvests and the early winter, had come here looking for hope and the plunder the army had wrenched from the English March – but there was little enough for fighting men, let alone bairns and women and the old. They had already started dying.
The sensible stayed in their homes and battened them; even then there were bodies found, frozen dead, with desperate hands bloody from scrabbling in the iron ground of kitchen gardens for the last remnants.
The world was gaunt and hungry, a dark rune of women and bairns and men, all half-starved, ragged and dirty with the carts they had trundled this far stuffed with the useless-ness of their old lives – wooden stools, tin pots, ploughshares, tools for smithing, for farming, for carpentry. Mostly, the carts were full of misery and draped with makeshift shelters, the people in them clotting the lands round the Temple with their rubbish, their pleading, the smell of their sullen threat and fear.
There were fires and folk fought to defend the wood of their old tables, their carts and chairs. There were no horses or ponies – if there ever had been for some of them – and the meat was either carefully hidden, or bartered for other foods and fuel.
This was the price of red war, on both sides – the victorious Scots starved because the harvests rotted unreaped in the fields. The defeated English starved because the Scots harried them in the herschip, vicious raids for the plunder of food as much as riches, raids that ravaged Northumberland from Cockermouth to Newcastle.
They ravaged the lands under the sheltering bulk of Barnard Castle and, if any noted that this was Balliol’s English fortress, they stayed their lip and kept to a slaughter made bloodier still by the vengeful battle cry of ‘Berwick’.
All this barely kept the army alive,
though there was little of it left; men were taking what they could and going home in the hope of feeding their own kin through the winter.
The desperate came after the army like crows round a plough, risking the danger in it for the chance of a meal. Hal watched well-armed men arrive with a cart and start doling out maslin bread, the flour mixed with sawdust, saw the snatching hands and darting feet of those clutching the prize and wary of others lurking on the fringes to take it from them.
Hal, Sim and the others from Herdmanston had been stunned to find themselves riding into the midst of the slowly disintegrating Scots army and the desperate hopeful who trailed after it like gulls following a fishing boat. It was the Dog Boy who pointed out the lack of children, which made everyone realise it and look the harder, finding none; like their parents, the children were too cold, too tired from lack of food and there was no play, only forage.
A child found gnawing the stone of the chapel at Balantrodoch was taken to the Chaplain himself, Walter de Clifton, and, before the girl died, she claimed that the walls were made of gingerbread and that she was in the Land of Cockaigne, where fences were made from sausages and grilled geese flew directly on to your tongue.
She said this, smiling through a mouth of blood, and even the stern Sir Walter felt beaten by the hopelessness of it all -though the Templar Master of Scotland himself was unmoved and more concerned about the interruption to the Order’s routine. He called himself Brother John of Sawtrey and, for all his pious devotionals, Clifton thought, was a haughty void of Christian charity.
‘Christ’s Bones, Hal, this is a poor sight,’ Sim growled, shaking his head. ‘Winter has not even bitten hard yet.’
Hal had half expected something like this and was not so surprised by it, though the bleakness wasted his heart.
He and the other Herdmanston men had quit the herschip in mid-October and gone home. Wallace had permitted it, Hal knew, because he had seen the sickness in Hal’s soul over the capture of his father, the death of Tod’s Wattie and the knight, Fitzralph – and the loss of Isabel, who had simply disappeared from view. Not even Wallace knew if she lived or died – but offered the consolation that she had last been seen in the company of a knight fleeing Stirling, which meant ransom sooner or later. No-one would pass up the cost of a Countess.
