The Lion at Bay

CHAPTER EIGHT

Herdmanston Tower

Invention of St Stephen, August, 1305

Lammas came and went, with trestles on the green groaning with meat, bread and cheese. The harvest had involved everyone, lines of men with scythes, gaggles of women and bairns gathering and tying and stooking.

Hal, stripped to the waist, joined in and, for some hours, reduced his world and the problems in it to a green wall and an avenue of amber stubble. Sim Craw on his right, Ill-Made on his left. Blisters swelled and broke on his hands, life became pain, in the back, across the shoulders.

At the end of it, Hal was sorry to have to leave, drenching himself with water from a bucket handed by a giggling Bet’s Meg, while the men competed for the kirn, the last cut of corn, and drank deep of Maggie’s new brew, frothed and thick as soup.

Increasingly mazed, they threw their scythes at the last stand until Dog Boy cut it through; grinning, he presented the sheaf to Bet’s Meg, who would make it into the kirn-baby, a sure sign that she was next for wedding.

Next for bairning, Hal thought, for sure — Dog Boy was ploughing that willing furrow already, he was sure, just as Sim Craw and Alehouse Maggie could be heard all over the tower.

The whole world was rutting, he thought, including himself. He lay with her russet spill of hair across his chest, aching and exhausted in the best way, from work and love. The wool was good, the harvest was good, the only deaths were those expected and the rents for Roslin ready for the start of next year, in March.

Yet the nag was there, of when the blow would fall and how hard and who Buchan would get to do it. There was no question of the Earl openly demanding his wife back; she had been put aside in a nunnery, after all, like a discarded pair of shoes. Still, they were Comyn shoes and stepping into them gained parts of Fife, so they would not be left in a corner of a tower in Lothian for long.

A hoolet screeched, threading the night with terror. A wind blew, cool and holding the promise of rain, rattling the shutters of that folly of a window, built by his father for his mother and a breach in the defence of a tower. Hal thanked his da for it, all the same, as his mother had when she sat in the nook of it, sewing and looking out. Now Isabel did the same.

If there was no war, he thought, sliding towards sleep, I would not worry so much about that silly window. But Bruce is moving and war is on the wind…

He wondered, sinking into the sweet softness of sleep, where Kirkpatrick was.

Next day, he tried to slough off the unease with a deer hunt, though the chances of success were slight and the manner of it was not to his liking — a ‘bow and stable’, which was usually the province of the old and infirm. I am both, he had to admit to Sim Craw, who merely grunted as he climbed aboard his garron and heaved up his monster crossbow across one shoulder. Only Dog Boy, young and fit, revelled in the moment of it, in sole charge of the deerhounds he had been training.

They rode out to Roslin’s deer park through a glory of stubbled gold where rooks and crows rose up, protesting loudly. They nodded to wardens and shepherds while clouds swelled over the land from the Firth.

‘Weather is comin’,’ Sim noted, when they were in the deer park’s coppiced edges, negotiating the formidable earth barriers and leaps that allowed the roe and hart in but not out.

‘Is it now?’ Hal noted mildly and with some humour, for Sim Craw fancied himself a foreteller of rain and storm though the truth was he would know it poured at the same time as everyone else.

They paused at the entrance to a long, coppiced stretch, while the two deerhounds panted with lolling tongues, tasting the stink of the wolf head nailed high on an oak. It was a warning to poachers on two or four legs, Hal knew and would have paid it no regard — save that the sight reminded him of Wallace.

‘It is how every wolf’s head ends up,’ Sim declared when Hal spoke his thoughts. ‘Unless it is wise enow to run out o’ the country entire.’

It was then that the roe leaped from one side of the wood, paused to stare at them, no more than a lance-length away, so that Hal swore he saw himself reflected in the beautiful deep pool of perfectly-fringed glaucous eye.

Then, with a powerful heave, it leaped up into the far side of trees. After the first stunned moment — the dogs shot forward, baying exultantly, ripping their leashes from Dog Boy’s hands.

‘Ah, ye hoor slips…’

Dog Boy danced with the pain of the weals on his palms, cursing his charges who disappeared into the trees, trailing leashes and howls. Sim Craw, reeling with laughter, almost fell from the garron, which set Hal laughing and even the Dog Boy joined in, alternately blowing on his palms and on the hunting horn, the sound he had been training the dogs to return to.

What had sent the deer out into the path? The question was rolling like spit on Hal’s tongue when he felt the garron judder as if kicked, felt it rise up under him with a shriek — then there was only a birling of sky and trees and a great blast of pain as he landed, driving the breath from him and the pain of his half-healed ribs through him like a lance.

Sim Craw knew in an eyeblink what had happened, so that the two men who spilled from the trees, one casting aside the crossbow and dragging out a long knife, came as no surprise to him.

He kicked his own horse hard, feeling its shock and the surge of it, then rode at the men. They balked; one had a spear and waved it, but Sim Craw hurled the heavy, unloaded crossbow at him, spilling him backwards even as Sim launched himself from his horse at the second man, dragging out his own long knife and roaring like a mad bull.

Hal, struggling and wheezing upright, slapped a dazed Dog Boy hard on the shoulder as two more men closed in, all wild hair and red mouths and frantic, desperate eyes and sharp steel in their hands

The one who came at Dog Boy thought he had rolled winning dice, for he saw a strapping youth, but one with no weapon on him; his snarl was a feral grin, which he lost when Dog Boy rammed his hunting horn in it.

Yelping, the man went over on his arse; Dog Boy stepped forward, booted the man perfectly in the cods, then sprang on him to tear the long knife free. They rolled in a maelstrom of wet leaves and mulch.

The man who came for Hal was the biggest bastard of them all, and armed with a spear. He knows how to use it, Hal thought to himself, seeing the hold the man had on it; Hal struggled to get back the breath driven out of him, but the man bored in, flicking the spear like a snake’s tongue, using the slicing edge of the head as much as the point.

Something slammed Hal sideways; the rump of his own plunging garron, mad with fear and pain; there’s traitorous for you, Hal thought and watched the butt end of the reversed spear come at him, clipping his thigh and throwing him the other way.

Babbling and dribbling, face twisted from the pain, Hal reeled away, fumbled his sword out at long last and had it clear of the sheath in time to fall over backwards like a great felled tree. The big spearman gave a howl of triumph, spun the spear back to the blade end with a masterly flick of the wrist, then took it in two hands and raised it high for the killing stroke.

Stupid, Hal thought with that part of his mind not shrieking with the exultant realization of the man’s mistake. He drove the sword into the man’s keg belly, rammed it hard, for the point was a little blunt, rammed it hard until he felt the jar of it hit backbone.

The big man’s howl turned to a querulous whimper, he dropped the spear and went into a panicked jerking, as if getting rid of the bar of iron driven into him would put things back the way they were.

His writhing tore the sword from Hal’s grasp and he could only lie there and watch as the man realized nothing was going to be put back and that the sword wasn’t coming out. The sheer unfairness of it all roared enough anger into him to keep him stumbling forward, even as his legs were failing. Hal felt himself plucked up in an iron grip, a fist hauling him up into the dying rage of the man’s bearded face, a second raising up like a forge hammer to come down on Hal’s face.

The little knife went in the man’s ear. In and out, faster than an adder’s lick and Hal was suddenly drowning, flooded with blood and the man’s own last flecked froth, so that he panicked and thrashed against the falling weight until, mercifully, it was gone and he rolled over, retching.

‘Aye til the fore,’ said a voice and Hal cleaned enough of his eyes to see, red-misted, the grin of Dog Boy, bloody dagger in one hand. He is getting awfy handy at stickin’ folk in the lug, Hal thought and flopped back on the grass until Sim Craw loomed over him, dangling two bags.

At first Hal thought wildly that Sim had cut the bollocks from his victims, then realized that the bags were purses.

‘Taken from each of they moudiewarts,’ Sim growled, shaking the sweat runs from his face. ‘The same amount of coin in either, give or take a farthing.’

‘Aye,’ Dog Boy echoed, almost cheerfully, looking up from searching the others, ‘it is the same here.’

Hal and Sim looked at each other, then Hal took the proffered arm and was hauled back to his feet.

‘Buchan,’ said Sim and Hal nodded, wiping the streaks of the big man’s blood from his face. Sent by Buchan, for sure, even if they were fealtied to Earl Patrick of Dunbar, or Badenoch, or some other lord who owed the Comyn favours. Of course, none of the four dead men were identifiable and none were simple brigands — with so much coin a brigand would be drinking and hooring, not taking on three armed men in a wet wood.

The deerhounds came loping back, slinking ashamedly under Dog Boy’s gaze.

‘Well ye might,’ Dog Boy admonished, while the hounds sank to their bellies and crawled to him. ‘Where were ye when ye were needed? Ye didna even get the stag.’

Sim, chuckling and tucking away purses and anything else of value from the dead, could not be persuaded that it had not been a good day, even if the string of his hurled latchbow was half-severed and so wholly ruined.

Hal helped drag the bodies off the path and into the trees, for they would not be reported save to Bruce and their vanishing would keep others from the same hunt for a while — why pay more men when you have four already on the spoor?

He will come at you sideways, like a cock on a dungheap. Hal heard the warning words of his father about Buchan, trailing down the long years like chill from an open grave.

The fortress at Kirkintilloch

The same evening, 1305

The hand was grimy even in the dark, the face half-shadowed, half-gore in the sconce light, so that the twist of nobbed nose gave Lang Jack the look of a weathered gargle, spewing high under the eaves of some church.

It was an apt look for him, who had vomited all the venomous bile he had stored up about Wallace and his failures and perceived betrayal — bokked it up for a purse of gold until all he had left to spit out was a time and a place. Kirkpatrick dropped the purse in the hand, which closed like a trap, weighed it, then made it vanish. Lang Jack nodded and wraithed into the dark, while the rain gurgled through the gutters and merlons of the fortalice, turning the old wood black.

Kirkpatrick turned his face briefly to the lisping cool lick of the rain, then shook himself like a dog and walked back under the gateway and into the maw of the place.

In a room smoky and sick with tallow light, he came on Sir John Menteith slopping wine into a pewter mug.

‘I wish ye had not brought this to me,’ the knight declared and Kirkpatrick sighed, since it was not the first time Sir John had said it. That had been when Kirkpatrick had brought the where and when and how of it all, laying it in front of the man appointed Governor of Dumbarton Castle by Longshanks and so responsible for the area. Responsible for the arrest of a betrayed Wallace, lying in a house not more than a handful of miles away.

Four hours later, the soldiers — all English of the garrison, for Menteith could not trust the Scots in it to carry it out — bundled a giant in chains back through the door, with only minor bruises and one slashed arm to show for it.

‘You are the man of the hour and place,’ Kirkpatrick said to him — again.

‘They will revile me for it,’ Menteith answered bitterly and Kirkpatrick frowned. Sir John Menteith — and his brother, Alexander — were already reviled, for throwing off the Stewart name and adopting that of Menteith. False Menteith was the least of the epithets hissed at the back of Sir John and the arrest of Sir William Wallace was neither here nor there in it.

‘You will be raised by it,’ he replied. ‘King Edward will see to that, advised by his good men in the Kingdom — the Earl of Annandale being one of the more powerful.’

Menteith had long since worked out that, no matter who ruled in Scotland, his rise was assured, because of a handful of soldiers and a secret night descent on a lonely house.

Yet Kirkpatrick sensed the wavering in Menteith, saw him swill the wine as if something foul would not be washed away from his mouth. The knight did not care for it — but Kirkpatrick had planned for this, too, so that the news of the betraying Apostle, the Pope’s letter, the bag of coin — though not where it had come from — was already known to Longshanks.

Wallace, snatched timely from an escape, to be paid for by the proceeds of robbery from the King’s Treasury? With a safe conduct from the Pope so vague it could easily be ignored? It was a tale that could not fail — all Menteith had to do was deliver the man safely to those who would take him south to London and he could not avoid doing that without ending in irons himself.

Menteith knew it, too, for all his desperate wine-swilling.

‘Will you see him?’ he demanded and Kirkpatrick tried not to react violently at the suggestion.

‘Best he does not know of my part in it,’ he said, as if the entire affair did not hang on Wallace knowing nothing of Kirkpatrick’s involvement, which would lead him to the Bruce part in it.

‘Best to let him believe Lang Jack did him in. That way, word will get out to those Wallace men left and there will be further division among them — and no further rebellion in this part of the realm.’

Menteith nodded sullenly and Kirkpatrick eased a little. If Wallace discovered that Kirkpatrick had betrayed him nothing would convince him that Bruce had not ordered it and there was no telling what secrets he might spill.

This way, the Wallace was sent off, growling and tight-lipped, for a date with the executioner, while Lang Jack would last as long as it took for Kirkpatrick to track him to a dark alley, reeling drunk with his new riches. No-one would mourn the traitor who had led Wallace to the English, or help find the vengeful killer.

And Bruce had his road to the throne unblocked.

A big risk, of course — but Bruce had sat, quiet and still when Kirkpatrick had voiced this, the pair of them alone.

‘He will not betray anyone he believes holds the freedom of the Kingdom in regard,’ he had replied and so clearly, breathtakingly, considered that to be himself that Kirkpatrick had no answer to it. He had left Bruce kneeling, head bowed in prayer, or penitence, for what he was about to do.

Or mayhap he tries to appease the Curse of Malachy, Kirkpatrick thought to himself with a bitter twist of humour, for forcing him to weigh his soul with so great a sin. I doubt he will, but it would be good of him to offer a prayer for the sins he has heaped on my soul.

He stepped out into the rainwashed night, wanting to put distance between himself and the shackled giant he could feel through the stones of the keep.

Yet, all the long, wet night’s ride away from the place, he felt the heat of Wallace’s unseen, accusing stare through the dark of his prison and felt something he had not felt for a long time, something calloused over long since and now split open, raw and red.

Shame.

He stared at the stones as if he could dig through them with only his gaze, as if his eyes could search out those left and shame them into rescue.

In the dark, he knew most of them were dead. Those who had stuck by him, that is — the others would deny him faster than Saint Peter did Christ. He crossed himself for the blasphemy, but could not stop the wry thought creeping in, that even God had forsaken Will Wallace faster than he did Christ on the Cross.

Who else had forsaken him? He thought of them then, the faces coming at him like dead leaves whirling in a wind. Fergus the Beetle, arguably the most loyal of all, had died of the coughing sickness last winter, slick with sweat and pain and fear and still able to call Wallace ‘the best chiel he had ever walked with’.

There had been others there to meet Fergus when he slipped into God’s Grace, good men — aye, and women as well — who had followed him for the belief in it. They had fought and laughed, taken hunger and plenty in equal measure and had found the understandings that come with a life so close together, so shared in the one desire — a good king in a realm that was their own.

Gone. All gone, snuffed like a guttering candle and the best part of him with it. He looked at his hand, grimed and shackled; once it had slashed Hell into his enemies, had pressed an arrogance of seal into letters on behalf of the Kingdom. Now it was fastened to the wall of the cell they called Lickstone, because the only way of quenching your thirst was to suck the damp from the run-off near the lintel.

He knelt in the darkness, shivering and silent and wondered who had betrayed him. Lang Jack Short, of course — but he would have been put to it, by appeals to vengeance as much as a fat purse. Should not have broken his neb before, Wallace thought. Even if the wee moudiewart bastard had deserved it, carping on and on about what should be done and what should not, as if he had been leader…

Leader of nothing now. Left to pay the price for it — his fist closed, as if on the hilt of the sword he no longer had. Everything worked for, gone like smoke.

Like dreams.

Who had betrayed him? A woman, possibly, though he could not recall any he had treated particularly badly — nor any he had loved particularly well.

Menteith, mayhap. No, he was only the luckless chiel who had to carry it out and was clearly unhappy at it. He had come to Wallace not long after he had been huckled into the cell, loaded with enough chains to stagger a pachyderm. Poor Sir John, Wallace had thought at the time, seeing the man standing with his mourn of a face and his feet shuffling in the filthy straw, trying to summon up the words to say how sorry he was.

‘When you decide that peace is best at any price,’ Wallace had told him, ‘the price you pay is in chains.’

‘It is you in chains,’ Sir John had spat back, unable to contain his pride, even now.

‘Here,’ Wallace had replied, shaking his shackled wrists, not yet fastened to the wall.

‘No’ here or here,’ he added, touching his heart and his head.

Clever Will, who could not button his arrogant lip. Menteith had flushed to the brim of his fading hairline and ordered ‘the prisoner’ fastened to the wall.

Not Menteith, then. Buchan or Badenoch, playing some cat’s cradle game of their own in which they saw Will Wallace’s end as some new beginning for the Comyn.

But if it was new beginnings we are speaking of, he thought to himself, then Bruce is at the heart of it. He heard himself say it, clear as running water, when they had crossed swords at Haprew.

If I remain, you cannot get started.

In the end, it did not matter which black heart had done it, for he knew that his time was done and that all he had fought and bled for — aye, and all the bodies he had stepped over, on both sides, to achieve what he did — was come to nothing.

Freedom was as far from the Kingdom as it now was from himself and he knelt in the sodden dark and felt the black years of it leak from him in a series of hacking sobs, a brief collapse into pity for poor Will Wallace, abandoned and alone and facing sure death.

Just as quickly, he reeled back from it. A last few sobs, a snort of snot into the back of his throat and he hoiked out his fear and loss in a disdainful spit. That life was gone and what was broken could not be mended. All he could do now was die well, so as to leave some flame for others to follow.

He knew they would — and if they had to do it over his body, then it was no more than he had done over others. It does not matter if I fall as long as someone else picks up my sword and keeps fighting.

He climbed unsteadily to his feet, though there was no-one to see. Better to die standing than live on your knees.

London

The Vigil of St Bartholomew, August, 1305

The great pillared aisles sweated with those craning to see, genuinely curious even if many had only come because the King wished it. They watched him, sitting in state, in ermine and gold circlet, one hand stroking his curled silver beard, the drooping eye like a sly, winsome invite to the giant who stood alone and overloaded with chains on the top step of Westminster.

The great and the good, crusted with finery and stiff in their curule chairs, stared back at Wallace with fish eyes while le Blound, Mayor of London, cleared his throat and read the indictment, uncurling the considerable roll of it as he did so.

‘… trial at Westminster before Johannes de Segrave, P. Maluree, R. de Sandwich, Johannes de Bakewell, and Jean le Blound, Mayor of the Royal City of London, on the vigil of St Bartholomew, in the thirty-third year of the reign of King Edward, son of Henry…’

Bruce watched Segrave, who had brought Wallace to London in an overloading of chains and would take away the pieces of him afterwards — and be handed a purse of silver for his expenses.

Bruce wondered if there were thirty pieces in it, which would be in keeping with the mummery of the affair — he looked at the figure on the steps, sagging with exhaustion, dripping with shackles and crowned with a wreath. Oak, to signify that he was king of brigands and had dared try and usurp the rule of Scotland from King Edward.

A poor decision, he thought to himself. Edward has made a mistake and one which will rebound on me, too, for that oak wreath gave Will the air of Christ himself, bound and scourged and crowned with thorns — and this day might be dedicated to St Bartholomew, but it was also the Feast of St Longinus, the defiant soldier who had thrust a spear into Christ’s side for mercy and was later martyred as a Christian.

A Christ-like Wallace did not bode well and Bruce, even as he marvelled at the strength still left in Will, frowned at the thought of him as a martyr in the name of King John Balliol.

Treason, murder, robbery, incendiarism, the felonious slaying of William de Heselrig, Sheriff of Lanark… the long litany of it rolled on, interrupted only once, when Will raised the bruise of his face.

‘Treason?’ he thundered back, taking everyone by surprise with the power in his voice. ‘I never swore to you, Longshanks. John Balliol is my king. Treason there never was.’

Mayhap — the wee legals could argue the finer points of it until Judgement Day. Yet there is enough, Bruce thought, in all the rest.

‘… and after this, joining to himself as great a number of armed men as he could, he attacked the houses, towns and castles of that land, and caused his writs to run through the whole of Scotland as if they were the edicts of the overlord of that land… and he invaded the Kingdom of England and especially the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland, and all whom he found there loyal to the King of England he feloniously slew in different ways… and he spared no-one who spoke the English tongue, but slew all in ways too terrible to be imagined, old and young, brides and widows, babes and their mothers…’

Edward, brooding as a raven waiting for a sheep to die, listened to the meticulous detail of it all, thinking only of the one felony which remained unmentioned and never would be, though the single eye of that ruby Apostle glinted balefully in front of the King every day.

By God’s Holy Arse, this Wallace had contrived to reach out from the north and rob him in his own treasury — the sly, ingenuous term ‘brought unease to the King’ was a shouted laugh of understatement.

Wallace said nothing more in answer to any of the charges, which brought a deal of cold satisfaction to Edward. Did he think a legal wriggling off the hook of treason would save him?

Bruce sat and looked at the stone face of Wallace, his thought racing like wild horses. He once vowed to march on London, Bruce recalled, so this was a sour jest by God on the man — the best view of Edward’s capital, elevated above all of London, was hanging where the crows circle the gate spikes.

‘So resolved that the above-mentioned William Wallace should be dragged from the Palace of Westminster to the Tower of London and from the Tower of London and thus through the middle of the city to the Elms at Smoothfield and as a punishment for the robberies, murders, and felonies which he has committed should there be hung and afterwards decollated. And because he had been outlawed and had not been afterwards restored to the King’s peace he should be beheaded. And afterwards as a punishment for the great wickedness which he had practised towards God and His holy church by burning churches, vessels and reliquaries, his heart, liver, lungs, and all internal organs should be thrown into the fire and burned…’

Segrave read the verdict loudly, smugly, revelling in his moment in the light, with his king approving at his back and his son, Stephen, admiring on one side. Bruce, even though he had been expecting such a verdict, winced at little, so that Monthermer glanced sideways, feeling the jerk.

‘Harsh,’ he murmured, ‘but fair enough. This should set the seal on matters. There will be no rebellion in the north again and that land might raise some sensible chief to advise the governor, Sir John de Brittany. Good — now that this Passion Play is ended, we can go and find some wine.’

Bruce offered the man a smile. He liked Monthermer — counted him a friend — but he was Edward’s man, which tie limited how far Bruce’s friendship went.

‘I will join you presently,’ he said, received a shrug and a stare in response as he went out in the throng, nodding here and there, acknowledging a bow, feeling his hooded face numbed in a fixed smile.

He thought to go alone, just another hooded figure in a crowd following the sorry mess that was Wallace dragged on an oxhide by four horses all the way to Smoothfield, through the gawpers who had gathered to jeer and those who just wanted to get out of the path of it, not realizing who was dying in Cow Lane.

Even those ones fell in with the mob, for Wallace was now a grim-faced freak that they wanted to hear scream, would applaud like an audience at a performance of mummers. It was the last look Wallace would get of his fellow man, a thousand black-rotted mouths spitting and jeering, shrieking at the hangman to get to the next act, the handful of privates held high and dripping.

Bruce, elbowed sideways and jostled, scowled at the man next to him and the man disappeared, replaced by Kirkpatrick.

‘Ye are at risk in all this,’ he said and Bruce, his thoughts fevered, realized he was easy prey for a secret blade in the crowd. He did not care, felt that it did not matter much and his head echoed with Wallace’s words at Happrew, delivered with the lopsided cynical grin, as if he had known all along how matters would turn out.

If I remain, you cannot get started.

Kirkpatrick saw it in Bruce’s eyes as the executioners began their work on their victim, turning God’s brilliant creation into offal, unwrapping the secret, the mystery whose viewing changed everyone who saw it, the cloak of skin drawn back to let the light walk where it had no right to step.

Wallace threshed and kicked and gurgled on the gallows. Not quite dead when they cut him down, he was not dead enough when the executioners, expert surgeons in their way, sliced his cock and balls off, holding the bloody mass up for the gawpers to shout at in triumph.

He was certainly not dead when they opened his belly and drew out his tripes and, with horrific marvel, they heard him protest only once, when the assistants drew back his arms so that the ribcage was raised enough for the executioner to reach in through the gaping belly wound and up to grasp the heart.

‘Ye are gripping my arms too hurtful,’ he said and neither Kirkpatrick nor Bruce could speak for the choke of listening to a man complaining of his elbows as another’s hand clawed at his still beating core.

Bruce did not know why he was there. He had had half an idea to catch the last look of Wallace, to stare the man in the face at least, to share the final pain. Now he did not want to be seen by him while they gralloched him like a stag and the blood grew sticky and deep enough to suck the shoes off one of the executioners.

His mind, flashing like a kingfisher wing in sunlight, spun him back years, to a night by a campfire with the men from Herdmanston, one of whom — a ragged wee lad, no more — had questioned him about the vows of knighthood.

He recalled it vaguely, for he had been drunk — but he remembered the bitter bile of realizing how many of those vows he had broken even then, even as he listed them solemnly, dropping them like water on to the upturned petal of a dirt-grained face that thirsted for something finer.

Dog Boy, he recalled suddenly. The lad had been called Dog Boy. Didn’t even own a real name, yet had made me feel less than he.

He felt the same way now and, in the end, stumbled away, the thick metal stink and the flies in his mouth, so that he spat and had to stop himself from gagging. Then, eventually, he straightened, looked ahead and walked away from the baying and the blood, only half aware of Kirkpatrick at his back.

Who would know Hector, he litanied to himself all the way back to safety, if Troy had been happy?