by Robert Low
‘Now you know the truth of matters,’ he declared, ‘yet you still, it seems, esteem me well enough to be concerned by my fate. I am glad of that for I would have you as a friend, young Hal. The Sientclers are noted for protecting kings, after all – did not one take an arrow for King Stephen?’
‘Sir Hubert,’ muttered Hal, remembering the family history dinned into him by his father. Young Hal – God’s Bones, he had five, even six years on the Bruce and the man pats me like a new pup. He glared back at him and then at Kirkpatrick.
‘I am no shield and ye are no king,’ he replied and saw Bruce scowl at that.
‘I esteem you well enough as a belted earl of the kingdom, my lord. Even if you were a poor cottar, I would not want you walked into the teeth of your enemies. I cannot wish the same for your henchman, all the same.’
Kirkpatrick growled, but Bruce laughed, as mirthless as a wolf howl and both their gazes turned on him.
‘It is not me they want,’ he said and leaned a little into Hal’s uncomprehending frown.
‘They have the wrong Sir Henry Sientcler,’ he declared and sent Kirkpatrick off to fetch horses while the haar of that settled like a raven on Hal’s soul and a name thundered in his head like a great bell.
Malise Bellejambe.
Chapter Ten
Berwick
Feast of St Opportuna, Mother of Nuns, April 1298
They had the wrong Henry Sientcler. Malise would have split the little pardoner in two, save that he thought the foul little turd might still have a use. Now he and the thugs he had hired had to huddle in the leper house, holding to ransom monks already frightened by the deaths of Sir Henry’s two escorts. For ease of guarding, Sir Henry had been put in the same room as the gasping Savoyard, the priest who was caring for him and the bewildered uncle.
‘This is idiocy,’ Henry Sientcler had puffed, when matters had become clearer to him. ‘You will have the young Bruce down on you, not to mention Fitzwarin. Christ’s Bones, man, if you do not let me go free, you will have the English and Scots lords both coming at you. Your head is already on a spike, though you do not know it yet.’
Malise, gnawing his knuckles, could believe it – the Red Comyn, entrusted by the Earl of Buchan with this mission, had sent Malise into Berwick to seek out a certain Robert de Malenfaunt and hand over the ransom for the Countess Isabel. He would not do it himself, for he feared capture by the English, being Lord of Badenoch in all but name, but he had curled a lip when Malise expressed the same concern.
‘You are of no account to them,’ he declared with cutting assurance. ‘Take the Templar writ, hand it to Malenfaunt, take the Countess and return to me. This is a task a trained mastiff could carry out.’
Malise remembered the Red Comyn’s sneer, smeared on his freckled, red-haired face. Like all the Comyn, he was short, barrel-bodied, with the sort of fiery red hair that would turn, like his kin the Earl of Buchan, to wheat-straw with age. Like all the Comyn he was full of himself.
The Earl was another problem, Malise thought moodily. Unknown to the Red Comyn, who had been waiting a while and would fret for longer, the Earl had given further, private instructions to Malise regarding the Herdmanston lord who had been escorting the Countess all over Scotland until he had lost her at Stirling.
‘It is inconcievable, of course,’ the Earl declared silkily, ‘but even the rumour of a liaison is damaging to the honour of Buchan. Bad enough to have her linked to the young Bruce – but a ragged gentilhomme of no account? The Countess must be returned and shown the error of her ways. It is important that the lord of Herdmanston understand his own. Forcibly. And that the young Bruce, who is clearly this Herdmanston lord’s patron, receives a message he cannot fail to understand.’
Berwick was, ostensibly, controlled by the English, but they huddled in the castle, the town going about its business with little hindrance, couvre-feu or even law. Malise had tracked the Savoyard to it and thought, at last, to put the stupid little chiseller to the question – only to find him sicker than Pestilence on his Plague Horse. The idea of using the man to trap Hal of Herdmanston here had been too good to pass up… save that an idiot pardoner could not tell one Henry Sientcler from another.
A shape slid into the seat opposite and offered a brown smile. Lamprecht; Malise regarded the little man with a mixture of awe and distaste, not knowing whether he really did have Christian relics of power, not liking him because he was a snail who left a trail behind him as he moved.
‘My ripeness, my mouse,’ Lamprecht lisped in what he fondly believed was the way of the court in France. ‘I have my bargain fulfilled. D’argent, certes. Bezzef d’argent, tu donnara.’
It had been God’s Own Hand, Malise had thought, that brought him to the side of Lamprecht, a man he had used in small ways once or twice before. Useful, he had thought at the time – now he looked at the pardoner with distaste, seeing how he might have been handsome once, though all his years had played hop-frog with each other and landed on an ugly heap on his face, which was venal and pouched. He had once had long, clean hair, but it had been too fine to last and was now plastered in a few greasy wisps on his skull, which he covered, when he was not wringing it in his hands, with a soft, broad-brimmed hat lauded with a pilgrim’s shell.
‘I know what you want,’ Malise spat moodily, ‘and you are as far from it as always. Sir Henry Sientcler of Herdmanston, I said. You bring me Sir Henry Sientcler of Roslin.’
Lamprecht’s eyes never warmed to the smile he gave.
Non andar bonu,’ he began, then laboriously turned out the thick-accented English of it. ‘It is not going well. This is no fault of mine. Henry Sientcler you demand. Henry Sientcler you receive. Please to pay me, as agreed.’
He saw the aloes look he had back and realised he was not going to get his money. It was not, he thought to himself crossly, his fault that he had been sent to fetch a named man from a place where all the people, it seemed, were called the same. Now this man with a face like a kicked arse was scowling at him and denying him fair payment; not for the first time, he wished he had never met Malise Bellejambe.
He was no stranger to abuse, all the same; everyone seemed to believe they could gull, con or spit upon the likes of him, for all his pilgrim’s badge. You would think folk would honour someone wearing the shell that told of a trip all the way to the Holy Land and, to be fair, most of the simple folk did. The ones with some money and a little power always assumed he was a liar and had never been to the Holy Land at all, but had stolen the shell badge.
Which was not true, he thought indignantly to himself. He had traded for it – a tooth of the Serpent from Eden, no less, only slightly chipped but a fine specimen. Not as fine as the other three he had, admittedly, but a fair exchange for the shell of a pilgrim. And, if he had not been to the Holy Land exactly, he had been to the Sicilies – which still had paynim influences everywhere – and to Leon in Spain, which was the next room to the heathen Moors.
‘Dio grande, he said with weary bitterness to Malise. ‘God is great. I carry out my task and this is my reward. A esas palabras respondieron los ignorantos con decirle infinitas injurias como ellos acostumbran, llamdndole perro, cane, judio, cornudo, y otros semejantes…’
‘Speak English,’ Malise finally spat, irritated beyond measure, and Lamprecht shrugged, as if the man was a fool for not comprehending either the Lingua, or decent Castilian, tongues understood by every traveller around the eastern Middle Sea.
‘The ignorant,’ he said haughtily, ‘reply by uttering numerous insults as they are accustomed to do, calling me hound, dog, Jew, cuckold, and similar epithets. Mundo cosi – such is the world.’
‘Give me no airs, you purveyor of St Pintle the Apostle’s ball hairs,’ snarled Malise, angry now. ‘I have known you for a time – long enough to know that you would steal the contents of a dog’s arse and put it in a pie if you had found someone with a taste for such a thing and had a handy bag.’
He glared at Lamprecht.
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‘You would sell the stolen skull of an infant and claim it to be Jesus when he was a baby,’ he added viciously and saw that he had stung Lamprecht, who did not like his wares denigrated.
‘Questo non star vero,’ he protested, then shook his head with exasperation and translated it into English. ‘That is not true. Que servir tutto questo? You should not say such things, even in anger, for God is watching. Dio grande. Besides, se mi star al logo de ti, mi cunciar… bastardo. If I was in your place, I would wait. The other Sir Henry will come, certes, to see after his amico, and here you hold him. Dunque bisogno il Henri querir pace. Se non querir morir. So the Henry will want peace. If he does not wish to die. CapirY
Malise understood and Lamprecht saw it. He yawned ostentatiously.
‘ Mi tenir premura,’ he said. ‘I am in a hurry. Let me dip my beak a little, then I go. Mi andar in casa Pauperes Commilitones.’
Lamprecht did not need to translate the latter, for he saw Malise had understood perfectly. The Pauperes Commilitones – the Poor Brother-Knights – was a name he calculated would make Malise think twice about keeping him here.
Malise knew what Lamprecht was up to, knew also that the pardoner was headed to Balantrodoch purely in the hope of persuading the Order knights there to add their seal to the provenancies of the relics he carried; the Templars made part of their fabled wealth from selling relics.
Malise glanced to where his scrip sat carelessly on a bench, the Templar writ snugged in it. He marvelled at how a piece of parchment with some seals and words could be worth the astonishing amount of 150 merks of silver.
The money, he knew, had been deposited at Balantrodoch and Malise wrestled dimly with the concept of how you could take the parchment to any Templar Commanderie, present it – and be given the money, as if it had magically transported itself there while folk slept. He shivered; from what he had heard of the Templars, such a thing was not beyond them.
No matter – if Lamprecht had the divine favour and miracles of the Pope himself, it would serve him no better.
‘You remain,’ Malise declared curtly and Lamprecht managed an insouciant shrug and a smile, while inwardly seething. He had been doing well recently in a land turmoiled by war and the rumour of it, for people were eager for quatrefoil amulets of St Thomas and St Anthony, the former proof against just about everything, the latter particular to ague and fever.
These were just enough to afford him vittles, but not enough for the finer things. Lamprecht had a box filled with plenary indulgences, pinches of the ashes of Saints Martin and Eulalia of Barcelona, Emilianus The Deacon and Jeremiah The Martyr. He still had a tooth of the Serpent – actually, he had several such teeth – a portion of the robe of Saint Batholomew The Apostle, a pinch of the earth on which the Lord Himself had stood, plus many others.
He had his finest cache, which he hoped the Templars would buy – three fingernails of St Elizabeth of Thuringia, only raised to sainthood thirty-odd years ago, so her relics were powerfully potent.
He was no fool, as Malise had declared – though Lamprecht had to admit that trying to sell the likes of Malise the thong of Moses’ sandal had been a bad error – but no-one who could afford it wanted plenary indulgences, or a thorn from Christ’s Crown these days. They preferred earthly necessities, like food and fuel for fires. As usual, the poorest were the ones who sickened first and they could barely afford the lead quatrefoil amulets.
So he smiled, though the purse he had been promised seemed to fade slowly away and he knew that his best chance of salvaging anything from this was to remove himself, in secret, far from the coming wrath of this wrong Sir Henry’s friends.
Outside, it rained on the dark of a Berwick glazed with a few pallid worms of light, the rat-eyed red wink of the castle braziers squirming through the rain as the garrison kept watch. It wasn’t the Scots they feared so much as the wrath of Longshanks if they lost the fortress.
For all the rain and dark, Hal thought, you could find Berwick easily enough by the smell, a heady mix of smoke, clot and rot that sifted out a long way, like the snake-hair of Medusa, barely shifted by a wind that was little more than a damp nudge.
They splashed across the ford with the old ruins of the bridge to their right, troll shadows in the dark. No-one challenged them and they came up through the repaired defences of wooden stockade, ditch and wall, under a gate that should have been guarded but was not – Bruce had predicted as much and garnered silent admiration from the others in the small cavalcade.
They climbed off the wet, mud-spattered garrons and led them up the sliding cobbles, ankle deep in fishbones and the old spill of dogs, pressed closer and closer by the leaning walls of the poorer houses, where the strewn rushes were never cleared and stank with the humours that brought on liver-rot, worms, palsy, abscess, wheezing lung and every other filthy ague.
Fitting, then, that this street, bordered by lurching houses that drifted like timber-rotted ships in a slow wind of alley, should puke them out at the leper house of St Bartholomew, a shrouded ghost of stone in the shadows – save for one area, spilling butter-yellow glow out through the cracks of great double doors that led to a garth and then under an archway to the street.
The dripping band stopped and Bruce offered a grin to the Dog Boy. Dressed like the rest of them in plain tunic and rough cloak fastened with an iron pin, with no blazoned jupon or blaring heraldic shield, the Earl of Carrick looked like the Dog Boy’s da and was clearly enjoying the entire event.
Unlike Kirkpatrick, who did not like the idea of the heir to Annandale and the rightful throne of Scotland dressed like a peasant and putting his life in such danger.
He had said as much at length, about the foolishness of an earl of the kingdom plootering about, risking his neck in a foolhardy adventure with a band of scum. The band of scum had growled back at him for that – Bangtail Hob, Lang Tam, Sim and Will Elliott, all scowling angry. Even Hal had curled his lip, seeing he was included in the insult until Bruce had told Kirkpatrick, in a voice like the flat slap of a blade, to keep his teeth together.
Now they handed the reins of their stolid, dripping garrons to Will and slithered wetly away to their assigned tasks. Sim and Hal took up positions on either side of the great doors; no-one spoke and the Dog Boy, a loop of rough cloth over his head as a hood, took a deep breath and moved forward.
Hal felt his throat constrict at the sight of the lad, looking smaller than ever against the great double door, heavy with beams and thick with studded nails. Beyond it was the cookhouse, the yellow-red glare of it unable to be contained even by a door like this, because it was the one part of the spital that never slept.
From somewhere in the town, faintly pressured by the limp wind, came the drifting sound of instrument and motet voice – ahi, amours, com dure departie. It spoke to Kirkpatrick, achingly, of ale and wine and warmth and fug – more than that, it spoke of Oc and what he had done with the Cathars there, so that he almost grunted with the kick of it. Suddenly, this unknown little pardoner Lamprecht seemed to have conjured up all the smoke-blackened memories Kirkpatrick had thought long since nailed up behind the door in his head.
The Dog Boy had known about cookhouses from his time in Douglas. The way to get in had been his idea and the only reason he had voiced it at all was because a great earl, an individual so far above him as to be lost in clouds, had shared a cup and his innermost thoughts one night. The Dog Boy had been his man from that moment and spilling out his plan to approving nods had filled him with a sudden flooding sense of his own new value, so that the rush of it left him reeling and light-headed.
He hammered on the door with his nut of a fist, then kicked it hard because he wasn’t sure he had made enough noise.
Inside, the cookhouse sweaters paused as if frozen. Abbot Jerome looked at the helpers, lepers all in various stages of illness, yet with skills needed to bake bread and prepare food. The only cuckoo in the nest was the big-bellied Gawter, charged by Malise with watching this door a
nd the kitchen staff. He blinked once or twice at the thump, but when it came a second time, he moved to the postern set into one of the huge gates and slid back the panel that let him look out.
At first he could see nothing, then a voice dragged his eyes down to where a ragged boy stood, hunched under a piece of sodden sacking, rain dripping off the end of his nose. Gawter had seldom seen a more miserable sight.
‘Away with ye,’ he growled, relieved to see it was only a laddie. ‘No alms from here.’
‘Beggin’ only the blissen’ of God an’ a’ His saints on ye sir,’ he had back. ‘I am here deliverin’, not askin’ – a good lady whose man has recently passed on delivers her grace on the spital, for the elevation of his soul.’
Gawter paused, licking his lips with confusion.
‘A brace of lambs,’ the boy persisted and Gawter turned in confusion to Abbot Jerome and had back an approving nod. The Abbot tried to make it all seem as natural as breathing, but the truth of the matter was that his heart leaped, for he knew a ruse when he heard one. The spital depended on donatives and was guaranteed a lamb and a pig every ten days, from the guild of merchants.
They were delivered, butchered and hung, since no sensible man eats freshly killed meat – and the last delivery had been four days since; the remains of carcasses hung and swung in plain view and his cook teams were, even now, slathering joints of it with fat, herbs and mint.
But Gawter did not know this and, though there was a chance that there really were two lambs from a grief-stricken widow, Jerome fervently prayed there was not, that this was help, by Divine Grace.
‘Aye,’ Gawter said, uneasy and uncertain, but aware that refusal of such bounty would arouse suspicion. ‘That’s brawlie, wee lad – be smart with it. As weel suin as syne, as my ma said…’
Hal heard the clack and clunk of the beam locks coming off, then the grunt as Gawter heaved the beam out of the supports.
‘Bring in your lambs, then…’ he began and the door heaved in on his face, crashing him backwards to slide across the floor into a cauldron, whose contents spilled and sizzled on his legs. Gawter yelled and scrambled away, beating uselessly at the scalding soak, staggered round and came face to face with a beard like a badger’s arse and a great broad grin splitting it.
