The Lion at Bay

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Abbey of Scone

The same day…

He made a face and twisted the scar into a snake writhe.

‘Christ’s Bones, that’s foul.’

Isabel’s glance at the King was fouler still as she collected the bowl.

‘Yon Cathar never fed me anything so sour,’ Bruce persisted, smacking his mouth in a grimace of disgust.

‘He never fed you anything worthwhile,’ Isabel answered tartly, ‘and has run off besides. A wee proscribed French Cathar Perfect, heart-afraid for his life now that he has shackled himself to a usurping king declared red murderer and about to be cast loose from Holy Mother Church. Now you have only me.’

‘Aye, speak plain why don’t you? Never bother sweetening it, woman.’

‘You are a king and supposed to be stronger than others. Besides, I sweetened the brew I gave you with honey and spices and it seems to have made little difference to the taste.’

‘What was in it?’ he asked suddenly, his voice quiet; she heard the fear threnody in it.

‘Rue, valerian, fox’s clote, lady’s bedstraw and laurel among others. This is an ointment of radish — do not swallow it, rub it on.’

‘Will it work?’

She looked at him and smiled.

‘It is not a cure for lepry,’ she said, ‘if that is indeed what you have. For that, any blessed water will be as good.’

‘Then why am I poisoning myself with it?’ he demanded, truculent as a babe.

‘Because it will help with the skin complaint you do have, which is common enough and nothing to do with the lepry,’ she answered. ‘At worst the lady’s bedstraw might dye your beard yellow, while the radish ointment, if you spread it on Lady Day, will keep you in funds all year if Hildegard of Bingen is to be believed.’

He heard her tone and lost his irritation in an instant. She had always dabbled in herbs and potions, he knew, but he thought it was merely a mild woman’s interest, like they had in wool thread or good needles. He said as much, while managing to marvel at her expertise enough to rob the patronising sting of it.

‘Better still,’ she answered, ‘is that you can trust me with the secret. That scar is a worry, certes, but there is nothing here that makes me believe in lepry, Robert.’

‘The signs are slow,’ Bruce replied and it was clear he had found out all he could. ‘They take years to manifest.’

That was true, but Isabel refrained from pointing out that the usual first signs were when the appendages started to rot — the end of the nose and fingers. And the prick.

‘I would stop hiding it,’ she said. ‘Once the skin clears, you can let the air and sun to that scar, which will do more than your hodden hoods. Besides — the mark of a great tourney knight is to have at least one scar on the face, to make women swoon and men cower.’

‘Christ, Izz,’ Bruce said, shaking his head and smiling. ‘I should have married you.’

‘Instead, you cast me back to my husband and married an earl’s daughter. That will learn you.’

‘I am a king now,’ he growled, eyeing her sideways. ‘You are not supposed to speak so.’

‘You are a great bairn,’ she answered lightly, ‘who cannot sup a wee grue without making a face. Besides — we have both made our respected beds and now must lie in them.’

Bruce relaxed, tried not to pick skin from his cheeks.

‘Aye — how is the master of Herdmanston?’

‘More bitter these days than the brew you swallowed,’ she replied brutally. ‘His lands are scorched, his castle slighted, his folk scattered — and that done by those he has sworn fealty to. God help him when his enemies get to work.’

‘I hope he knows the necessity of it,’ Bruce answered suspiciously, then sighed wearily. ‘I do not need to lose more good men. There are few enough as it is.’

Faintly through the thick walls, they both heard the sound of the few good men, drilling frantically in pike squares while their women stitched and sewed thick gambeson coats, the quilted flutes stuffed with straw.

‘He will stick,’ she said firmly, then gathered up her jars and packets. ‘Now I must attend your wife in the role you gave me — lady to a queen.’

‘An honour well earned,’ he answered and she smiled wryly.

The last time she had seen the Queen she had been riding a palfrey using a sambue, a sidesaddle so elegant and so useless that the horse had to be led because the rider had no control of it. She and her new coterie were discussing the chansons of Guilhem and pointedly fell silent when Isabel approached; it annoyed Isabel, but only because all the other women were local wives and daughters who should know better — but the court, she knew, had a way of corrupting.

‘An honour that does not sit well with Her Grace,’ she answered, ‘which you might have known. Bad enough I placed the crown on her head without constantly attending her as a reminder of how I was once her husband’s hoor.’

‘God in Heaven, Izzie — moderate yer tongue.’

He rose and paced for a moment, then rounded on her.

‘Is she aggrieved?’

Her look was enough and he shook his head.

‘I do not know what…’ he began, then stopped and let his hands drop to his side.

‘Start mending that fence,’ she answered. ‘Dine with her. Spend time with her. Else you will find the chasm too broad to leap.’

He straightened, breathed deeply, then nodded and turned to her with a smile.

‘Good advice and good treatment. God keep you, Isabel — and your Herdmanston lord.’

‘I trust he is safe,’ she said and felt the deep, welling panic that he was not.

When she was gone, he went to a scrip on the table and pulled out the small, stoppered bottle, opened it and put a finger in. It came out bloody and he sniffed it suspiciously. Was that rot?

He sighed. Probably. He should have known better, even if the bottle was gilded and the cap jewelled, to have bought it from his confessed heretic Cathar physicker, even if it came wrapped in vellum and sealed with the Order’s double-mounted knights as provenance. Yon wee pardoner, Lamprecht, would probably have sold me the same, he thought wryly.

He glanced at the crumpled parchment, knowing the Latin on it by heart — Hoc quicumque stolam sanguine proluit, absergit maculas; et roseum decus, quo fiat similis protinus Angelis.

Whomsoever bathes in the divine blood cleanses his sins and acquires the beauty of angels.

He looked at the beautiful little bottle which had done nothing at all for him. What had he expected? That the blood which flowed from His Hands and Feet had been collected in this, then translated across the centuries, miraculously, to arrive at Bruce’s moment of need?

Perhaps it was. Perhaps it really was His Divine Blood and not the escape fund of a cunning, desperate physician. He felt a chill at the idea — better it was chicken or pig, for if even the Blood of Christ Himself had failed, where did that leave King Robert Bruce?

Yet, he thought, can Christ still save the world? All the signs are against it, Lord, and there are so few righteous left in a kingdom ravaged by endless strife, where Your flock is reduced to individuals and petty tribes suffering and killing one another.

But there was a Plan. If I am not here then barbarism and madness become law, the weak have their throats cut or become slaves and the future is a terrible nightmare of cruelty and bloodletting.

I am the leash, he thought. The leash and the lash and even tormented by the Curse of Malachy I will never give in. He thought of Wallace, saw the twist of his bloody face on the day they gralloched him like a caught stag. He thought of his part in it.

I think, he said aloud, that the wee Cathar was right — this world is, in fact, Hell.

And there is no other.

Near Cupar, Fife

That same moment…

Hell vomited over the ridge. Malise saw it, falling like some huge wave of horses that seemed to snarl, ridden by open-mouthed men desperate with fear and an anger that was as good as courage.

He had been watching Kirkpatrick, stumbling along behind Malenfaunt’s horse, falling now and then to be dragged when Malenfaunt, vicious and laughing, spurred it a little to make it too fast for Kirkpatrick to keep up.

‘Walk faster,’ he would yell, ‘else you will be dragged to Carlisle.’

No-one but Malise understood the gabble of him, but all understood what he was doing. A few of the other serjeants laughed, harsh as old crows, but most did not and the leader of them frowned disapprovingly, for it was his charge to get this prisoner alive to Carlisle and then to the King himself.

What happened then, Sir Godard Heron thought, is none of my concern — but one of the red murderers of the Comyn leader would not be treated lightly. Still, he did not care for this Malenfaunt, a foresworn knight who should have lost his right hand, at the very least, for losing a joust before God.

Malise was thinking that he would have to begin to persuade Malenfaunt to find a horse for Kirkpatrick, not least because they were ambling along as if on a ride through a deer park, too slow for anyone’s liking. Mostly because Kirkpatrick looked the worse for being dragged by a thin rope fastened round Malenfaunt’s waist and he knew the Earl of Buchan wanted this one alive to face the King’s questioners; it was essential Kirkpatrick admit his witness to the usurper Robert Bruce’s murder of Badenoch.

He was on the point of saying so when the riders sprang up over the ridge and poured down on them, shrieking like the bean-shidh.

Hal saw that the mesnie were well-armed and armoured, serjeants mounted on decent horses, though he thanked the good God that there were no warhorses among them, not even under the knight with the herons on jupon and shield.

He saw all this in the eyeblink it took to cover the twenty or so strides down the gentle slope, the garrons half-stumbling through the gripping-beast bracken, to plough into the centre of the milling mass of riders, a stone in the confused pool of it.

Hal rode close, almost belly to belly with the taller palfrey, which was wild-eyed and pawing the air. Hal backhanded the rider with a sweep of his shivering-crossed shield, cut across himself and missed, then was plunged on by the squealing, half-panicked garron he rode.

He reined it in viciously, trying to turn, saw Chirnside Rowan hook a serjeant out of the saddle while Nebless Sandie half-trampled, half-stabbed the luckless man with a furious flurry of blows. The knight with silver herons on his blue shield cut hard and savage and Nebless arched, howled and went off the garron like a half-filled sack of grain. Hal lost them in the sudden whirl of bodies, saw Jamie Douglas charge down on the head of the column, his face wild with mad delight — and then his world reeled.

The man who did it wore a new blue cloak and a feral snarl under a bristle of moustache, battering Hal’s bascinet with the wheel pommel of his sword while fighting to keep his horse facing front. Hal got his sword in the way of another cut, the bell clang of it loud even in the shriek and scream of the fight; the snarling-dog whirl of it broke them apart, then Blue Cloak surged back.

What did I ever do to him, Hal thought wildly, as the blows thundered on his shield, that he seeks me out?

Because he sees you as leader, he answered himself in the calm centre of the maelstrom within him. If you are downed, they win.

He flailed with the sword, stabbed, felt it hit, saw the grimace of pain that twisted the black moustache and felt a surge of triumph at that. He took a blow on his shield, another that whipped the ailettes off one shoulder, a third that cut a deep groove in the cantle of the saddle. The sweat rolled in his eyes, he slashed hard, saw the edge dent the arming cap and rattle Blue Cloak’s head sideways, saw the sudden limpness of the man as he fell away into the storm of hooves and mud.

‘ Deus lo vult.’

The cry brought Hal’s head up briefly, as he fought for control of the garron, which just wanted to be away from this horror and was fighting the bit so hard he had to use both hands, awkward with sword and shield, to hold it steady. With the clear part of his blood-flushed head, he saw that Rossal de Bissot had timed it perfectly, waiting until the rear of the column had started to spur forward into the fight before launching his attack, bellowing the Templar warcry.

It was that which broke them — that and Malise. He had watched, stunned, as the riders fell on them, saw the shivering blue cross and knew who it was at once. There had been a long, long time of sitting, it seemed to him, watching the men on their little horses dart in with their long, vicious spears which seemed to include a hook and an axe as well. It was no longer than a few breaths, but he would have sat there forever, like a huddled rabbit, watching the slow curl and snarl of it — save for the cry.

Deus lo vult. It snapped him from the moment like a bell in a sleeping man’s ear. He heard himself whimper, his head full of all the vengeance that could be visited on him from the owners of both the shivering cross and the warcry — then he reined the palfrey round so that it screamed with the pain of the bit and spur and sped away like a gazehound on a scent.

Some serjeants saw him, which took their panic to the winking brim, then spilled it over; they hauled their own mounts round and spurred away after him; Hal saw them go, felt the sheer exultant relief, the shock of it. We have actually won this, he thought to himself.

Kirkpatrick loomed up at the plunging feathered feet of Hal’s garron. He had turned his back on a rider, seemed to be hauling on a rope like a man pulling on a heavy cart and he glanced up at Hal and grinned through the bloody bruise of his face.

Malenfaunt, fighting the horse, cutting furiously at speeding figures on little horses who would not stand still, suddenly felt himself flying backwards as the animal surged forward, hitting the ground so hard it drove the air from him. He knew, with a sudden stab of fear, thin and cold as a blade, that Kirkpatrick had hauled him from the saddle by the rope that bound them both.

‘Kirkpatrick,’ Hal yelled, grabbing the horse’s bridle. A maddened rouncey plunged, bucking, from a knotted tangle of war and the rider, shield and sword both gone, hung on with both hands until a vicious backhand swipe took him in the ribs and swept him from the saddle.

Sim Craw, his face like a wineskin of blood and streaming sweat, whirled a sword in one hand to flick the gore from it and forced his garron to Hal’s side scowling down at Kirkpatrick like a father on an awkward son.

‘Move yersel’,’ he growled.

Kirkpatrick hirpled up and into the saddle of Malenfaunt’s horse, an agonizingly slow process to Hal, bouncing on the back of his own maddened garron. He could not believe his eyes when he saw Kirkpatrick pause, take the cord that fastened his lacerated wrists and loop it carefully round the cantle of the saddle.

‘In the name o’ God, Kirkpatrick,’ he bellowed, ‘ride, ye sow’s arse — we do not have all this day.’

They rode, breaking from the fray while Dirleton Will, Sore Davey, Mouse and others closed round them protectively. In another minute they were forging back up the slope, riders joining them in dribs and drabs as they broke off from the fight.

It took Hal another minute to realize that Kirkpatrick’s horse was ploughing harder than the others because he was towing something behind him, heavy as a log, rolling backwards and forward and shrieking.

Malenfaunt.

They rode on at a flogging canter for a few more minutes, then Hal brought them to a panting, sweating halt, the garrons splay-legged. Men dropped from the saddle on buckling legs; Hob o’ the Merse puked, bent over, hands on knees and Sore Davey was weeping like a bairn, his pustuled face twisted.

‘Find how many are missing,’ Hal ordered Sim and he nodded grimly.

‘We dinna have long,’ he warned. ‘They are good serjeants, who will be black affronted to have been bested by hobby horse like us. They will be after us when they have collected their wits.’

Hal nodded, crossed to where Kirkpatrick wobbled by the side of the horse; he cut the man’s wrists free with a swift gesture.

‘Ye are hurt?’

Kirkpatrick’s head echoed and he felt sick, while he only knew he was standing because he was upright, for his legs felt like wood, but he waved one hand and managed a grin. He could not understand why Hal had done what he had done and said so.

‘I am wondering the same,’ Hal answered grimly. ‘When I ken the cost, I will give ye an answer.’

‘Regardless,’ Kirkpatrick answered in French, ‘I am in your debt. I rescind our quarrel and am grateful to do so.’

That was something at least, Hal thought, stepping through the bracken to where the moaning figure writhed at the end of the cord. Malenfaunt looked up through a mist of blood and fire and saw the face.

‘Aeel,’ he said mournfully. ‘Aeel.’

‘What’s he say?’ demanded Chirnside Rowan, all bland curiosity.

‘He yields,’ Hal answered, then frowned. ‘I think.’

He was distracted by a knot of men riding in, including Rossal de Bissot and Jamie Douglas, still grinning from his sweating face and reliving the fight with the Dog Boy, the pair of them laughing as they did so.

‘Fower are gone,’ Sim muttered in Hal’s earshot. ‘Nebless Sandie, Andra, Roslin Rob an’ Blue Tam. Nebless an’ Andra are corpses, certes an’ the others will no’ survive the Heron’s hatred.’

Which accounted for Sore Davey’s snot and tears — Andra was his brother.

Kirkpatrick heard it, looked up and into the grey haar of Hal’s eyes. Four lost to save him; it was a harsh price for the Herdmanston lord and Kirkpatrick knew it. He heard de Bissot murmur ‘ Ave Maria, gratia plena ’ and found the Templar’s eyes with his own.

‘My thanks for your part in my rescue,’ he said in French. ‘I am afraid I am hardly suitable escort now.’

De Bissot looked at the figure, tattered and bloodied, his hands lacerated and his face lashed and scarred. There was a rib or two suffering in there, too, he thought and nodded.

‘I will make my own way, with the help of God,’ he said and turned to Hal.

‘You have the thanks of the Order,’ he said. ‘We will meet again, you and I.’

Then he rode away, leaving Hal staring at his back and wondering, chilled, if that had been some blasphemous Templar prophecy. Malenfaunt’s moans broke him from it and Sim’s voice, urging movement, was sharp.

Kirkpatrick lumbered stiffly over to Malenfaunt, bent and searched, then came up with a smile and his fluted dagger.

‘My knife — I thought so,’ he declared, blood welling from his lips with his burst grin. ‘Murderer and weapon both, to be presented in triumph to English Edward.’

He glanced at the misery that was Malenfaunt, now climbed to his knees and swaying.

‘How the world turns, Malenfaunt,’ he sibilated in blood-spitted French. Then, before anyone could move, the dagger flashed. Hal heard a hiss, like the puncture of a bloated sheep and Malenfaunt cried out, wide-eyed and staring, one hand clamped to the side of his punctured neck and blood spuming through his fingers. No-one else made a move, Hal saw.

‘I have ruined that part of you called “the heart in the throat”,’ Kirkpatrick said softly, almost dreamily as men stared, horrified, at the whimpering Malenfaunt, his mouth opening and closing like a gasping fish.

‘You will die and only God can halt it, though I doubt He will. They say you experience visions o’ great wonder an’ beauty, dyin’ in this slow, peaceful fashion.’

Malenfaunt tried to struggle to his feet, but he was already too weak and sank back, a strange, blissful look on his face as the blood poured like a cataract. Kirkpatrick’s face turned hard as a rolling millstone.

‘I would not give ye the gift,’ he added and took the dagger low and hard into Malenfaunt’s eye, straight through to the brain, so that the man’s last astounded look was open-mouthed with the horror and shrieking agony of it, the snake-fork of his ruined tongue flickering.

Folk turned aside as the knight collapsed and bled.

‘Christ,’ Jamie Douglas said, half in disgust and half admiration, ‘you are a hard man, Kirkpatrick.’

Kirkpatrick said nothing, simply looked at Hal with the wasteland of his face and hirpled back to his horse.

‘I have met corpse-strippin’ hoors with softer hearts,’ Sim called after him, ripe with disapproval. ‘Away home and nurse yer injuries — keep out of the road of decent folk for a while.’

Kirkpatrick turned, bleak as a long roll of winter moorland.

‘Like yersel’,’ he answered bitterly, ‘I have no home. Unlike yersel’, I have never owned to such a thing, so it is no loss.’

He crawled up on to the horse, the blood squeezing from between his ruined fingers as he took up the reins and cast away the rope that tied himself to a corpse.

‘Never fear, Sim Craw,’ he said, his voice thick with new weariness, ‘I will be back among ye afore long. Mark me.’

‘Ride,’ Hal ordered brusquely, wondering if anyone would have a home when all this was done. He climbed wearily on to the trembling, sweated garron and paused to look down at the raggled remains of Malenfaunt, lying in a slow-spreading viscous tarn of his own blood.

This was red war, he thought, a war of the dragon unleashed and chivalry, even for the yielded, was now as lost as the Grail itself.