The Lion Rampant

CHAPTER SEVEN

Berwick Town, Berwick

Ember Day, Feast of the Visitation, May 1314

He should not have been there, in the thronged Marygate. He could hear Jamie say it even as he walked into the crowd of the place. You are not meant to be strolling inside Berwick town, Aleysandir. You are supposed to be observing the folk in it, their movements and their bought truce. You are supposed to be me, Aleysandir — so says the King — and I am too kent a face for you to be waving its like at the English in Berwick.

I am supposed to be kin, Dog Boy answered himself, grimly exultant with the daring of it, though he would never say it to Jamie’s face. My blood is your blood, Jamie Douglas — and your blood would bring you here if you were in my boots.

His boots were clotted with filth of alleys and wynds choked with ‘English sojers’, though the truth of matters was that they were not English at all, but the mesnies of those Scots lords still loyal to the Plantagenet and fearing for the loss of their lands in the north. Unable now to go home, they were lost men, all of their old lives torn from them and only soldiering left. Swaggering and roaring, they lurched through the streets in search of drink and whores and, above all, food.

That was part of what had brought Dog Boy into the town, mingling easily with the other travel-stained, just one more well-worn fighting man with an iron hat, a gambeson that had seen better days and a festoon of hand weapons dangling from belt and back.

He and Jamie knew the place was starving already, with ale a sight cheaper than bread, yet those Scottish nobiles bound to King Edward were clearly mustering — and food was arriving, grain and meat and ale, in carts guarded by English wearing the badge of Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke.

The presence of his own mesnie meant the Earl was here, but with just enough numbers to garrison the castle and keep all the food and drink safe. Not for the town, nor even for the garrison, nor the Scots lords, but for others — supplies, stockpiling here for the bulk of the army because the fortresses they usually relied on for invasion were all gone. That meant the English were due here in force soon — but where were they now?

Dog Boy had heard that labour on the Berwick town-wall defences had stopped because the workers were too weak and he saw for himself the ditch and rampart, half-finished and no more than a dyke. You could take the town, he thought to himself, with a jester’s bladder on a stick — though the castle was still formidable.

He had heard, too, that Isabel MacDuff was the sight to see, dangling from the Hog’s Tower in her cage, but in the time it took to battle for a leather jack of warm ale at Tavish’s Tavern, Dog Boy learned that her charms had been overcome by a new entertainment.

They were burning a witch under the walls of the castle.

The mob gathered in the moody dim of a day gone to haar off the sea, expectant and lusting with the desperation of those who need bread but will take blood if it is offered.

Dog Boy filtered along with them, the Napiers and Harpers and Butlers from Edinburgh and the Lothian March roistering alongside the sullen MacDougalls and McNabs from beyond the Mounth, who patently wished they were not here at all, in a soft southern place where no one spoke the True Tongue.

Dog Boy was elbowed and shouldered, growling so that folk knew he was no easy mark, with his dagger and old sword, an axe and a rimmed iron hat dangling from his belt. He searched the battlements, squinting in the growing fog and premature pewter dim and not expecting to see her at all, having heard she could only be viewed if you stood in the bailey, which was a step too far for him. Surprise stiffened him, then, when he saw her.

Cage-freed, she stood high on the battlemented wall beside Malise — grey-haired now that one, Dog Boy saw — with a loop of cloak over her own head, which still seemed fox-russet bright. They stood like lord and lady above the crowds and anyone who did not know the truth would have been fooled by it.

Dog Boy dragged at her with his eyes, willing her to look — and then she did. He was sure of it, saw the jerk in her like a hooked fish, was certain she had seen and recognized him — but the arrival of the witch threw up a surge and a roaring bellow that snapped the lock between them.

The woman moved in the midst of a coterie of censer-swinging priests and an intoning canonical. She stumbled forward draped in a clinging shift and a hagging terror between spear-armed, grim-faced guards lent by the castle; her face was a cliff, grey with the numb of fear.

Dog Boy knew her. Knew her and her accuser, the wee pinch-faced man who walked with his chin triumphant and defiant, basking in having caused all this. Frixco de Fiennes looked right and left and never behind at the woman he had condemned. Dog Boy wondered dully where Aggie’s bairn was.

It was easy to read the truth between the long, rambling pronouncement, half-drowned in the shrieks and howls of the baying mob. Frixco had declared Aggie the traitor who had let the Scots into Roxburgh, using foul Satanic spells to hide them from view. The fact that the Church was promoting the woman’s death and not the seneschal of Berwick showed that the Common Law considered the evidence flimsy at best. The Church needed no other evidence than the woman’s confession and her bloody fingers and bruised face showed how that had been achieved.

Now she was a witch. Not a woman, for each inquiring priest would have to look himself in the mirror glass of his soul after what had been done to a woman, but you shall not suffer a witch to live so the broken, split-lipped, weeping ruin they fixed to the stake was a witch, spawn of Satan and not any human thing at all.

Fastened with chains, Dog Boy noted dully, since ropes would burn through and roll her messily to the feet of her accusers and the gaping, howling mob. If Christ Himself walked among them, they would deceive Him, he thought.

The priests smeared her soles and jellied legs with pitch, daubed it on the shift and made it cling more provocatively; a red-faced soldier, all drink-broken veins and bad teeth, clutched his groin and bellowed out that this was her last chance for a decent fuck outside of Hell.

‘Ye brosy-faced hoorslip,’ Dog Boy growled and elbowed him hard enough to double the man over, gasping and boaking cheap ale over all the shoes nearest him.

Nivver violet a lady. Never was a lady more violated than Aggie, finding the harsh truth of what lay beyond the confines of Roxburgh. Not adventure and freedom, but turning slowly to a shrieking horror of black, with a sweet stink so like pork as to make you retch at the saliva it brought to starving mouths. The priests solemn and canting, invited the last blister of Aggie to repent her sins; it was, Dog Boy realized with a sour curl to the lip of him, an Ember Day.

Through the haze of smoke and witch-hair tendrils of haar, Dog Boy found Isabel’s eyes again — or thought he did — before he turned away and slouched through the crowd, heading back down to Scotch Gate and the bridge, hunched and moody and careless.

Frixco de Fiennes was more than a little drunk, on wine and fame both. He had watched his brother die of the festering wound he had taken at Roxburgh and discovered that, without him, he was that worst of creatures, a noble so low and Gascon he might just as well have been dung.

He had taken work — welcome to a man with scarce two coins to rub against each other — with the harassed officials still trying to carry out King Edward’s writs in a land where he had no power. It had taught him, in short order, that the years of juggling accounts in Roxburgh had honed a talent for tallying, where a merk was two thirds of a pound, a shilling of twelve silver pennies one-twentieth of a pound and the penny the only actual coin in all of it.

It had taught him, too, that there was a new-fangled way of tallying, using some foul heathen Moorish numbering system which made it all easier, according to the young, thrusting clerks who promoted it. Frixco saw the tallying up for his own talents and the bleak future of it soured him.

It was Aggie’s misfortune to stumble on him at that moment, pleading for help for ‘his bairn’. Turning her in had been desperation — but it had also netted him a reward, which he had spent on clothes and wine. Now he was staggering from the burning stink and wondering where he could make more such coin.

He collided with the man, the pair of them as much at fault as the other. Frixco, alarmed at having annoyed one of the hundreds of rough, armed men slouching and reeling about the streets, stammered out an apology — and then saw the face.

He blinked, puzzled, for he knew the face but could not place it … the knowledge crashed on him like the apple in Eden flung at his forehead; he saw the black, dagged hair and the bearded face, saw it as he had at Roxburgh, the scowl arched over a fistful of steel.

Dog Boy and Frixco stared at one another for a long moment and Dog Boy knew he had been recognized, knew it was all up with him in Berwick and felt a sudden, savage exultation.

‘Nivver violet a lady,’ he growled and slammed a horny-handed fist into Frixco’s face, wishing he had a dagger in it. He leaped over the mud-spattered sprawl of the man and was off down the street like a new lamb. He ran no more than a few paces, fell into a swift walk and filtered on down through the throng lurching away from the remains of the pyre.

He was a hundred ells away before he heard the distant shouts, but they floated clear and eldritch through the encroaching sea-haar.

‘The Black is in Berwick. Ware. The Black Douglas is in Berwick.’

The sea, off Colonsay

At the same time

The Señor Glorioso was like a ship, Pegy declared, in that it floated and had sails. Other than that it might well have been an ox cart to him and, despite the alleged generosity of Grand Master Ruy Vaz in presenting it in exchange for the half-sunk Bon Accord, Pegy was sullen and convinced that they had had the worst of the deal.

He said it loud and often, all the struggling way back towards Scotland, and Hal, drifting in and out of wound fever, knew it was because the new beast was a long-runner more suited to the Middle Sea, whose ropes and spars and sails were as strange as a six-legged foal to the cog-men of the old Bon Accord. They knew it as a carib, the best way they could pronounce the Moorish word for it: qaríb.

The lateen rig, with its huge, unwieldy yardarms, defeated the best efforts of Niall Silkie, Angus and Donald, while the single big rudder confused Somhairl. Pegy, unable to judge the speed of ‘the ugly baist’, was barely able to work out where they were never mind where they were going; he knew the cargo was overloaded, too, and prayed for good weather.

Somewhere, the Devil laughed.

A wind rose and freshened as they came up round the shoulder of Colonsay — Pegy was fairly sure it was Colonsay — and the sailors brought in as much sail as they thought might work, only to find the Señor Glorioso blundering and pitching like a mad, blind stot.

Then, whirling away the sea-haar and the sunshine, the gale backed up with a witch’s shriek, backed up full south and west and hurled them like a driven stag towards the coast.

Berwick town

Some hours later

His back hurt from crouching, so that he swore he heard it crack when he finally straightened and began to move into the dark and the fog, out of the stinking alley he had been hiding in since God forged the world, it seemed.

Surely, Dog Boy thought, they would have given up by now. It had been hours since the alarm was raised, was now dark and the sea-haar had witch-fingered in and grown thicker and stronger. He had heard the soldiers calling for couvre-feu at least an hour ago, so the streets were dark, wet and should have been empty.

Save that they were not. Torches, lambent in the swirling mist, showed the bobbing presence of men in packs, still searching, relentless as an avalanche; the Black Douglas was trapped in Berwick and, sooner or later, would be found. Dog Boy cursed his likeness to Jamie. Then, for the first time, he cursed his own stupidity.

Not long after that he was found.

He came creeping out of the shadow of the Holy Trinity and practically ran into a barrel of a man with a sputtering flambeau and a face which had the pucker of an old scar running from the patch of his left eye down through cheek and jawbone.

‘The Bla-’ he yelled before Dog Boy’s wild lashing smashed the hilt of his sword into the man’s forehead, felling him like an ox. But it was enough; the cries went up, the marsh-light flames trailed towards him and he ran.

Flitting into the wynds, night-black as Auld Nick’s serk, up steps, skidding on cobbles, over courtyards and through deep wynds like writhing tunnels, Dog Boy wraithed like a running fox.

He turned and twisted away from every pale light which appeared, trying, always, to work his way to the bulk of stone that had once belonged to the Friars of the Sack, for next to it was the Briggate, portal to the ford and freedom.

He swooped like a mad crow from space to space, leaped up wynd stairs and paused once to tip a waterbutt down on too-close pursuers. Later he paused again, long enough to unsneck the door of a sty to let out a charge of swine, and then left them, laughing.

Balked by a blind alley, he sprang sideways to a lintel, then a balcony, along it with a leap into a new courtyard, bombarding his pursuers with mad curses and laughter, pots and, once, a pie dish set out to soak in the rain. Doors and shutters banged, children and women shrieked, dogs barked and howled.

He skipped and skidded along steep-pitched roofs, tore off slates and flung them, swung down past the leering, open-throated faces on the fine guttering and, once, swung into a carelessly unshuttered window.

The women inside shrieked like harpies and he stopped only long enough to offer them a mocking bow and a grin from a sweat-sheened face before scooping up the night-bucket and emptying it out of the window. He heard the gratifying curse and sizzle as he headed for the door, the stairs and the way out to the back court.

Finally, somewhere in Silver Street, he sprang for a lintel, swung up to a folly of a balcony, then up the newel post of that to the slated roof, where he sat, astraddle the steep pitch as if on a horse, his back to the gable stack. He panted and the sweat trickled down him like running mice, but the torches milled and confused voices shouted.

He had foiled them. For now.

For all that, he was only a little closer — he saw the bulk of the Red and White Halls of the foreign wool merchants and knew them. That placed him close to the Maison Dieu, which had its own gate through the ditch and stockade walls, near enough to the ford to chance it when the torches slid away.

The flames bobbed and circled. Dog Boy blessed the silversmith whose house this was, for his vanity in having a silly wee balcony, so built that you could only access it through windows both shuttered and barred and even then would have to half crouch to enjoy the view from it.

Yet it had permitted him access to the steeply pitched roof, hard slated to foil any wee thieves who might be tempted to dig their way into the smith’s home and down to the shop, where the shine would be.

Up here, Dog Boy thought, I am safe until the dawn and the vanished mist. Which gave him some hours yet to let the row die down. Below, he heard the pained calls of his staggering pursuers and smothered an exultant laugh at complaints of injuries and pigs.

Then he heard the horse, slap-clopping up the cobbles from the Briggate, heard the voices hail him — out after couvre-feu and mounted, Dog Boy thought, makes him a knight or a man-at-arms, a chiel of worth and on important business.

Not important enough, he saw with a sickening lurch of his belly, that he could not take a torch and join in the search, standing in the stirrups and raising the flame high to search the rooftops. For the reward, no doubt, Dog Boy thought, as well as the glory of being the man who captured the dreaded Black Douglas. The irony of it twisted a wry smile on his sweating face.

He watched the horseman and his trembling flambeau come closer, leaving the men on foot to search the ground-level shadows. Hot and encumbered, he managed to wriggle out of the padded jack, but was reluctant to lose it, so dropped to the cobbles as lightly as he could with it bulked in one arm like a shield, sword in the other; the chill fog cut into his sweat-drenched serk like a knife.

He saw the Silver Street courtyard with its little mercat cross, a squat affair ringed at the top and mounted on a dais of two steps — and the idea struck him with a clarity that made him laugh out loud.

He arranged it swiftly with his jack and his iron hat, frowned a little at the sacrifice of his estoc but rammed it left to right through the jack, the sharp needle of blade pinning the right sleeve up to the chest. He stood back, admired his handiwork briefly and laughed again, before darting out to where the slow, peering horseman could see him.

Then he turned, running back into the courtyard as if he knew he had just been spotted, was gratified to hear the sudden scrape and rasp of iron hooves as the beast was urged on by the horseman.

The rider came in at a trot and heaved up at the sight of the man standing, waiting, a blade winking faint light in a bar across his chest. He had an iron-rimmed hat on and did not look to be running, which made the rider grin; the horseman was mailed and coiffed and armed, and was a skilled fighter, as were all the royal couriers who wore the jupon with the pards of England. Bigod, the others would be envious of what the capture of the notorious outlaw Sir James Douglas would bring him.

‘Ho,’ he said and slid off the horse, sword out; he did not want to attack on horseback in the slippery, cobbled, confining courtyard and, besides, taking the outlaw on foot would add to the glory of it. God blind me, he thought, he is a big lad all the same.

‘Does tha yield?’ he demanded and had silence back, which unnerved him a little. He thought of calling to the others, the garrison men, but he wanted none to share this moment, so he shrugged and moved in swiftly, striking out.

The ringing clang of it sent a dreadful shock up his arm so that he recoiled, cursing and barely hanging on to his weapon with numbed fingers. Nom de Dieu, did the man have new-fangled plate underneath the padded jack?

The blow took him in the back and flung him face down to the cobbles, where he gasped and spluttered and writhed, all the air driven from him. In that part of his mind not mad with gibber at the thought of having been crippled or killed, he saw the figure he had attacked was a dressed stone cross and that the one who had struck him from behind was vaulting into the saddle of his horse.

Grinning down at him, black beard bright with pearled water, the man reined round and saluted him mockingly.

‘I could have killed ye. Remember that and tell them Aleysandir of Douglas has eluded them this day,’ the man declared loudly. ‘As daring as the Black Sir James — but better looking.’

Then he was gone, in a scrape of iron-shod hooves, a mad laugh and a mist that swirled in where he had been.

The Firth of Lorn

Feast of St Ronan of Locronan, June 1314

Unshaven, snowed with spindrift, hollow-eyed and tired beyond anything they had known, the crew staggered into the merciful wind-dropped morning and called greetings, messages and obscenities.

The bread was sodden and moulded, the cheese so rancid it was thrown over — and Hal realized how bad it had to be for sailors, who would eat almost anything, to contemplate that. They chewed bacon, which was as hard as the peas that went with it, washed it down with water filtered through a linen serk to get rid of the worst in it, while the Señor Glorioso pitched and rolled, heavy with cargo and sodden with leak.

Hal, the sweat rolling off him in drops fat as wren’s eggs, ate nothing and Sim was too busy boaking to try to put anything down the other way.

‘If it holds like this,’ Pegy said cheerfully, looking at the sky, ‘we will be in Oban in a week, or less.’

Hal, the arm throbbing in time to his every heartbeat, heard the false in Pegy’s voice.

‘If it holds?’

Pegy shrugged. The truth was that he did not like the iron and milk sky in every direction and thought they had pierced through to the eye of a vicious smack of weather which would be on them in less than half a day. He did not say any of this, but realized he did not need to to the lord of Herdmanston.

‘How is yourself bearing up?’ he asked instead. ‘Have ye had yer wound seen to this morn?’

Hal grunted, the memory of it sharp as the pain Somhairl had inflicted, his great face, braids swinging round it, a study of lip-chewing concentration as he squeezed the pus from it.

‘Green it was,’ Hal reported, ‘as Sim’s face. I take it there is slim chance of getting to Oban without worry, at this time of year and without weather?’

Pegy frowned and sucked his moustache ends.

‘Weel… we have to try, for there is little choice else, other than to put into some wee island and wait for it to blaw away.’

‘Which might take hours, or days — or weeks,’ Hal replied with a rueful smile, wincing as he adjusted his arm. ‘I have little liking to spend weeks in a driftwood shed, living on crabs and herring. Besides that, we will have failed in our endeavour.’

‘Aye, right enough,’ Pegy answered. ‘Ye are poor company for shed-life, but tak’ heart, my lord, at least the wind blaws away the midgies.’

‘If it blaws us back to where the Bruce waits,’ growled a familiar voice, ‘it can howl all it pleases. Where are we, Pegy?’

The captain turned to Kirkpatrick, his face a sour smear of disapproving.

‘Ye will change that tune when the howling wind makes ye jig to the dance it makes,’ he answered. ‘Besides, we are in the Firth o’ Lorn, coming up to the narrow of it and the last run to Oban. It is no place to be at the mercy of a storm wind.’

‘Christ betimes, this is summer,’ Kirkpatrick exclaimed bitterly. ‘You would think there would be kinder weather.’

Those nearest laughed, none heartier than Somhairl, shaking his head mockingly at Kirkpatrick, who gave him a scarring scowl in return and then turned to Pegy.

‘Clap on all sail, or whatever you mariners shout. Sooner we are back in Oban, sooner this cargo is in the keeping of the King.’

‘And Sim’s innards are back in his belly,’ Hal answered, sitting suddenly as the rush of fever-sweat swamped him.

‘Oh aye,’ Pegy replied, knuckling a forehead dripping as much with spray as sarcasm. ‘Clappin’ on sail, yer lordship, as ordered. Now if only any of us here had a wee idea of what that might actually do to this baist o’ a boat …’

They plodded on, heavy and sodden as a wet cow in pasture, with the wind full from the east, the men singing as much to raise their spirits as any sail.

Hal stayed on deck and up at the beakhead, until his face was stiff and salted, his eyes bloodshot and his brow ridged; Pegy found him there and had Angus and Donald cart him to the shelter for the storm was rising again. Hal already knew this, since his raggled hair was straight out and whipping either side of his face as he stared ahead and Pegy had to shout above the moan and whine of a rising wind.

The sea greened round the stern, washing over the stepped deck that rose up there — the nearest to a castle it had, since there was none at all in the fore — and the sails flapped and ragged, the men struggling to bring them in.

It became clear to everyone, with each man Pegy put to bailing and pumping, that the ship was taking on too much water, was too loaded to ride this out.

‘We are sinking,’ Pegy reported to Kirkpatrick and Hal, blunt as a blow to the temple. ‘We need to make landfall.’

‘Where?’

They were shouting, hanging on to lines, buffeted and shoved by a bulling wind. Pegy bawled out where he thought they were and Kirkpatrick squinted; it had started to rain, squalling and hissing, stippling the wet deck.

‘We are closer, then, to Craignish. We could be up that wee loch to Craignish Castle and the Campbells, who are good friends to our king.’

Pegy closed one eye and contemplated, and then spoke, slow and hesitant.

‘Aye, we are. If the weather and wind stay as they are we could be in Craignish watter as you say. Run up through the sound at Islay and then hope the wind has changed a wee, to beat back north.’

‘I dinna ken much,’ Kirkpatrick roared, ‘but I ken that is a long way for a short cut. Can we not go on as we are, straight up to Craignish, round Scarba?’

‘Shorter, but in this wind …’ Pegy bawled back, though the truth was that he did not think he or the crew could handle this bitch-boat well enough. He did not want to admit it, but it was clear in his seamed face, pebbled with spray and rain.

‘If she is sinking,’ Kirkpatrick persisted, with Gordian blade logic, ‘we have no time for a wee daunder to gawp at the sights, Pegy. Besides — taking her through the Islay Sound as she is risks being driven ashore and those island rats will strip her bare with nae thought for the ruin that will bring our kingdom. Run her truer than that.’

Pegy’s hesitation was underlined by the thrum and moan of wind, the crack of the lateen sails. Hal saw him wipe his mouth with the back of one hand and knew it was not wet he washed away, but exactly the opposite.

‘But?’ Hal answered, feeling the sudden dry crack of his own mouth.

‘Aye, yer lordship is smart as a whip,’ Pegy replied, half-ashamed at being so transparent. ‘But … if we are caught by the wind, on the tack it is on now, we will be hard put not to be driven on to the weather coast of Jura, or Scarba itself. Or through the Corryvreckan.’

Those who heard it stopped what they were doing. An eyeblink of pause only, it held more menace than any shriek of fear and both Hal and Kirkpatrick noted it and looked at each other; here was the real reason for Pegy’s concern.

‘Bad, is it?’

‘They say the Caillaich Bheur washes her great plaid at the bottom of the sea in that place,’ Pegy declared, ‘and makes the waves whirl.’

The Cally Vaar — even Hal had heard of this old pagan hag, icy goddess of winter, and he crossed himself.

‘Coire Bhreacain,’ Somhairl declared solemnly, and then added, with a face like an iron cliff. ‘The Corryvreckan: cauldron of the speckled sea.’

‘Ach, away with the pair o’ ye,’ Kirkpatrick replied shakily. ‘Bigod, sailors are worse auld wummin than my granny. Run round this cauldron and get us safe to Loch Craignish.’

‘Aye, aye, lord,’ Pegy replied and the crew moved aching muscles, unflaking ragged lateen-rigged sails and cursing the ropes that burst the pus-filled welts on their water-softened palms. Slowly, like a tired carthorse, the Señor Glorioso turned towards the unseen shores and wallowed on and Pegy, cursing and praying in equal measure, swore he heard the Devil laugh, though it could have been the wind.

Hours later, with a precision of navigation Pegy could only admire as hellish, the wind rose to a mad shriek, the Señor Glorioso balked like the filthy mule he had always considered her to be and started to run with the bit clenched firmly.

Nothing the sweating sailors could do would rein her in, not Somhairl’s skill and all the extra muscle on the tiller, not Angus, Donald nor any of the others daringly skipping on wet deck, swinging on wild, windlashed line, dragging in sail until there was practically no more than a bladder’s worth.

Slammed by a wind from the south and west, bent on the De’il’s course, Pegy thought, the chill of it settling in him like winter haar on his skin.

To the Corryvreckan.

Hal heard it before he saw it, a dull roaring that had him peering out at the outline of islands, hazed through the rainmist. Then he saw the white swirl of it, the great wheel of the maelstrom; a head appeared alongside his and Sim, white hair flying, face etched with misery, looked on the horror of mad sea they were driving towards.

‘Christ be praised.’

‘For ever and ever.’

The Corryvreckan was dirty with weather, gleeful with malice, ringed round with a loom of dark hills and the promised grit of unseen reefs.

‘The gullet of Hell,’ Pegy roared, almost in defiance, as the Señor Glorioso swirled into the throat of it and started on the harvest of the less able. The first vanished, slapped with a wave that came from nowhere, spiralled over in a despairing shriek and a whirl of arms and legs.

The next was his friend, who sprang to try and save him, calling out for them to stop and turn, which would have been a fine jest if it had not been a tragic misery; he half turned accusingly, let go the line he gripped to appeal with both hands and vanished with the next crashing pitch of the carib.

‘Hang on, lads,’ Pegy yelled. It was all they could do now, Hal realized. Hold on and ride the mad stallion of it, like a charging knight in a mêlée. He thought, suddenly and incongruously, of Isabel in her cage and hoped it was not raining like this where she was …

The wheel of dancing, capricious water caught the Señor Glorioso and flung the ship sideways — but the weight of the cargo, shifting below decks now, spun it back out of the wheeling water like a released dancer from a whirling jig, into the smack of a tidal race.

It seemed to Hal as if the water exploded beneath the ship; it flung up like a rearing horse, throwing spars and planks and men in the air like chaff from a winnowing and their shrieks were lost in the exultant gale.

Hal clung on, desperate and afraid, his arms shrieking louder than the wind or the doomed; the ship crashed down with a boom like a bell, half spun, rolled crazily. The mast cracked, the white wood of it like bone, and then splintered away to ruin, the rigging and sails falling half in and half out of the vessel, tangled with men. She jerked and lurched and fled out of the whirlpool, dragging the dying trap of her own ruin with her.

Hal heard Kirkpatrick yelling, half turned in time to see something huge and black swing round from his left, grow as large as the world and smack him into blackness and oblivion.

Newminster, Northumberland

Feast of St Erasmus of Formiae, June 1314

There was a drone and stink that John Walwayn had come to realize was the mark of a mustering host. The former was made up of mutter and demand, discontent and greetings, the latter of dung, leather, the rank sweat of too many unwashed and the acrid stench that he liked to imagine was fear but, in truth, was more than likely the great wash of pish that spilled from everything with legs.

The other mark of a muster was the sheer press of people, a smother of them which grew thick as damask the closer you got to the King and Walwayn elbowed and shouldered through them, scornful to his lessers — though there were not many of them — and bobbingly apologetic to his betters.

But he was a clericus peritus lege — a man skilled in the law, a scribe to the Earl of Hereford, permitted to attend assizes and given the commission of oyer and terminus — the right to examine and judge — on behalf of his master, the Constable of England.

Which was why the great and good, knowing whose little secrets-ferreting agent he was, were forced to give way and hem their mouths tight when he was preferred through them towards the presence of the King.

He felt their eyes searing his back. He heard growls and someone spoke in a thick, foreign way which was probably German or Brabant. Hainault’s men, he thought, and was mercifully glad he could not understand what had been said and so did not have to react to it.

Inside the sweltering room, he knelt dutifully and waited. It had been the abbot’s room, but the simple austerity of that monk had been washed away in the comforts of a royal household which took a score of wagons to transport.

Flames danced in the mantled hearth, which had seldom seen such a luxury of sparks — and did not need it on such a muggy night, Walwayn thought — while the blaze of expensive tallow gilded the oak panelling and a long table festooned with parchments and dangling seals. A dish of diced spiced meat covered with breadcrumbs was half-buried under the scrolls, the debris of it trailing here and there where careless fingers had spilled it.

The King was sitting at one side of the table, dressed in a simple wool robe of green, his hair curled and gilded, a habit he had begun years before in order to emulate the golden cap of the now-dead Gaveston. Surreptitious as any mouse, Walwayn glanced up from under lowered lashes and bowed head, thinking the King looked liverish, though that might have been the green robe.

The chamber jigged with mad shadows from the disturbed candles; another mark of muster, Walwayn thought to himself, is the way no one seems to sleep if the King does not — and he, for certes, is too feverish to sleep. Feverish, bordering on panic, to get his army gathered and on the move.

‘My lord John of Argyll is with the fleet?’ the King demanded and Walwayn heard the deferential, almost soothing affirmative from one of the cluster around the table; Mauley, he recognized, seneschal and commander of the King’s Royal Household troops.

‘The Red Earl is muttering about visiting his daughter,’ a voice interrupted — Beaumont, the one who wanted to be Earl of Buchan. Walwayn knew that his own master, the Earl of Hereford, had a grudging respect for Henry de Beaumont, if only because he was a fighting man with a long pedigree and a reputation for adventurous daring.

‘The Red Earl may ride where he pleases,’ the King answered waspishly. ‘It is not him I need, but the Irishers he brought with him. And his daughter remains safe in Rochester — tell him so.’

Walwayn knew the Red Earl of Ulster would be dealt with politely, since his support was vital and his situation awkward — the daughter safely shut in Rochester was Bruce’s wife and effectively the Queen of Scotland. Not that anyone there acknowledged there being a king in Scotland; their adversary was always, simply, ‘the Bruce’, or now and then ‘the Ogre’.

‘I need foot, my lords,’ Edward declared, his voice rising, almost in a whine of panic. ‘As fast as it accumulates, it melts. I need foot.’

‘We have two thousand horse, my liege,’ a voice answered, liquid with balm. ‘More than enough to crush the rebellious Scots.’

The King turned his drooping eye on this new face: the Earl of Gloucester, the young de Clare who vied with Despenser for the royal favour and who, despite being the King’s nephew, was losing out to the charms of ‘the new Gaveston’.

‘I have fought the Scotch before, my lord of Gloucester. Foot will be needed, trust me,’ Edward said flatly. He said it kindly, all the same, and Despenser scowled, but then saw his chance, leaping like a spring lamb into the silence.

‘Besides — we have Sir Giles back with us.’

The name buzzed briefly round the room and made the king smile. Sir Giles d’Argentan was the third-best knight in Christendom, it was said — with the other two being the Holy Roman Emperor himself and, annoyingly, the Bruce. Imprisoned by the Byzantines, Sir Giles had been freed because the King had paid his extortionate ransom and summoned him to fly like a gracing banner above the army sent to crush the Scots.

Walwayn saw the others — Sir Payn Tiptoft, Gloucester, de Verdon — nod and smile at the thought. As young men barely into their twenties they and others — Gaveston and his own lord, Humphrey de Bohun among them — had been in the retinue of the King when he was still a prince. Idolizing the older, brilliant dazzle of d’Argentan, they had all trooped off with him to a tourney in France, leaving the Prince’s army hunting out Wallace in the wilds. Twenty-two of them had been put under arrest warrants by a furious Edward I and they all wore that now like some badge of youthful honour binding them together.

That had been eight years ago and the gilded youth of then were tarnished and no wiser, it seemed. Particularly the King himself, who now turned to the patient, kneeling Walwayn.

‘You are?’ he began, but nodded and answered it himself. ‘Hereford’s clerk and lawyer — well, take this to your master.’

He paused, rummaged and helpful hands found and gave him the seal-dangling scroll he needed. Walwayn looked up then and, over the King’s shoulder, saw two faces. One was the triumphant leer twisting the handsome face of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester; the other the long mourn of bad road that belonged to Sir Marmaduke Thweng, his walrus moustache ends silver-winking in the light.

Like angel and Devil on the royal shoulders, Walwayn thought, wildly trying to gather himself as he took the scroll from the King’s hand.

‘Your master and the Earl of Gloucester are appointed commanders of the Van,’ the King declared, more for the benefit of any who did not already know than for Walwayn.

The clerk blanched, hesitated.

‘Your Grace?’ he quavered and the King’s eye drooped. Even as a parody of the fierceness of his father, it was frightening enough to the little Hereford lawyer.

‘Are you witless? Deaf?’

Walwayn caught the angel Thweng’s warning eye and simply bowed and backed out, sick to his stomach at what he had to carry back to his master.

Sir Marmaduke saw the clerk scuttle off, knew what he felt and why.

Joint commanders. The de Clares and de Bohuns were bitter rivals and appointing them to jointly command anything was a surety for disaster — yet Thweng knew the King had done it to promote his nephew, young de Clare. The Earl of Hereford, Constable of England, would be furious, but de Clare was the new Favourite. There is always a favourite with Edward, Thweng thought. For all the tragedy of Gaveston, the King has learned nothing — and, behind him, he could feel the flat hating gazes from the Despensers.

‘Pembroke,’ the King said suddenly. ‘Where is the Earl of Pembroke?’

‘Sir Aymer is in Berwick,’ Thweng replied flatly, and then remembered himself. ‘Your Grace sent de Valence to oversee matters in Berwick.’

The King had forgotten and did not like the fact of it, so Thweng moved back into the shadows and out of his eyeline.

He is losing control, he thought. He has even brought that stupid lion in a cage, the one he touted round in ’04, when he and the rest of this menagerie were young. He brought it in the last attempt to bring Bruce to battle, four years ago, he recalled, though the lion was toothless and mangy then. Now it was blind and bad-tempered and dying. A fitting banner for this campaign, in fact.

But the beast harks back to the gilded youth the King and all his company had, Thweng thought moodily, and are reluctant to let go. Christ’s Wounds, the King even calls it Perrot, the ‘loving name’ he gave to Gaveston. Stupid name for a favourite, be it dog, horse, bird or lion — and too Malmsey-sweet for a man.

Was he a sodomite? Thweng looked at the King and wondered. Tall and imposing — the picture of a warrior, but that meant little. Priests, Thweng knew, indulged in it and, by God, the Templars were given it as the second-worst accusation that could be levelled at them after spitting on the God they were supposed to protect and uphold. But magnates of the realm? A king?

Thweng remembered himself as a youth, draped round the neck of a loving brother in arms with nothing more in it than the bonds of battle-forged friendship. He shook the thoughts of royal sin away from him.

The King was no boy-lover, but neither was he a good king, or half the warrior he looked, Thweng thought, and then surreptitiously crossed himself for the sin in thinking it.

Mark you, he added to himself, if this army gets anywhere it will be because someone marches off and all the others will follow after, like sheep — but whether it reaches Scotland, Wales or bloody Cathay will be by accident and all are equally likely.

He straightened, as quietly as he could, to ease the stiffness in his back; he was too old for these late-night maunderings and, if proof were needed that matters were spiralling out of control, it was this need for frantic conferences well into the dark.

It was hot in the room, stank of sweated wool and desperation and Sir Marmaduke longed to be outside, questing for a bit of wind in the summer night.

Craignish, Argyll

At the same moment

He breached from the dark, like the ship out of the maelstrom, crashing back to a nightmare of creak and slow rending, a mad, pale light and the flicker of shadows.

‘Ah, blissin’ o’ heaven, yer honour — ye’re alive.’

Hal was not so sure of it; he struggled to rise and against the thundering pain of his head. A hand fumbled at the trap he seemed caught in, a voice cursed from the dark and Hal was suddenly free to sit up, listening to groans and pig-squeals; a face thrust itself into the light of the torch, grinning with mad relief, dripping sweat and sea-water.

‘Niall Silkie …’ Hal said and the torch bobbed.

‘Good, good — ye have yer wits. Now … careful. We are lying on our side here and everythin’ is arse to elbow.’

Hal saw he had been trapped by the strap of his baldric, which seemed fastened to the floor by an iron hook — until he realized that it had once been hung up alongside a truckle bed, but now the world was canted and crazy.

The ship …

The ship was beached and broken, the timbers snapped and splintered as gnawed bones. Like a rotted whale, it was a cave of dangerous dangle and sudden pits that he and Niall had to struggle through, while all the time the gentle sough and hiss of the merciful, calmly breathing tide set the last of the timbers to creak and moan.

‘Nothin’ so mournful as a stricken boatie,’ Niall said, when they paused the once, to get bearings. His face was sheened and gleaming.

‘Others,’ Hal managed from the great half-numbed strangeness that was one side of his face; there was a ragged, rasping catch inside his cheek that spoke of one or more teeth knocked out or splintered.

‘Kirkpatrick is on the beach. Pegy is gone and gone — Donald, too, unless God is merciful to his brother’s wails. Almost all the crew …’

Niall stopped, trembling.

‘It is after being the Feast of St Erasmus,’ he said wonderingly. ‘May the wee holy man keep them safe as he should.’

He shook it from him like a wet black dog and fumbled on through the dark, Hal at his heels and still clutching his sword and scabbard, all that he could find of his in this dragon’s cave of dark terror. St Erasmus, Hal thought, patron of sailors and known to them as St Elmo. Asleep, with all God’s other holiest, he added bitterly to himself.

Niall warned him; he dropped with a splash and Hal followed, the jar sending a great wash of pain up through his head, so that it seemed like a bursting blood orange. Then they sloshed on, out through the ribs of the stricken beast, where great blocks like stone lay scattered in the luminous tide. The cargo, thought Hal desperately. The cargo …

‘See if we can find any other poor souls,’ Niall hissed and Hal started guiltily from his thoughts of the wrapped weapons. Slowly, carefully, the torch flattening and flaring in the still-stiff breeze, they moved along, searching the dark and wet.

It was a desolate harvesting in the dim, by touch alone, of objects that might be waterlogged flesh and wool, or sheets of bladderwrack silting the waves like streaming hair. They might be heads fronded with cropped beards, or weeded rocks, all of them veined by the sea, surging and dragging, hissing over pebbles.

The only two men Hal discovered were dead and he gave up on dragging them out of the loll of surf. Somewhere further up he heard shouting, saw torches dance in the darkness and Niall Silkie plunged his own brand into the surf with a hiss, falling into a half-crouch of terror.

‘Wreckers,’ he said. ‘Come to loot the ship and slit the throats o’ any survivors.’

But Hal knew at once that the shouter was Kirkpatrick and rose, sloshing up through the surf to the stumbling pebbles, dragging his sword out. Niall, who did not want to be left alone in the dark, cursed.

Moving towards the sound, Hal felt the tug and treachery of tussocks, saw the torches coalesce and the shadows etched against them. He stumbled out of the dark and saw a man whirl towards him, the gleam of naked steel in his hands.

‘Friend,’ he yelped. Somhairl, both fists full of knife, gave a delighted grin and called out his name, so that all the shadows turned; there were not many of them, Hal noted.

One of them was Kirkpatrick, who turned once to acknowledge him, then faced front again and yelled out a long stream of Gaelic, patiently learned at the elbow of Bruce.

‘Bastard Campbells,’ he growled aside to Hal, the sodden dags of his wet hair knifed to his face. ‘Caterans and worse, who would try and steal the smell off your shit because it belongs to someone else.’

Hal saw the figures, uncertain under their torches, all wild hair and bare legs and wet, sharp steel.

‘I hope you are being polite,’ he said and knew the mush of his voice was a shock to them both when Kirkpatrick turned to him and raised his own sizzling torch for a better look; Hal did not want to hear his views on the batter of his face, but had them anyway.

‘Christ, ye look as if ye had the worst o’ an argument with a skillet,’ he declared. ‘Ye are more bruise and swell than face.’

‘A rope’s end will do that,’ Somhairl added sombrely, ‘whipped by a gale like we had.’

So that was what had hit him. Not the whole world

then …

Kirkpatrick’s warning shout buzzed pain through him and, finally, a voice called out in thick English from a throat not used to it.

‘Who is that there then?’

Hal, his head roaring with the pain of doing it, shouted back.

‘Sir Henry of Herdmanston, a friend to Neil Campbell and in need of hospitality.’

There was a pause, then a calmer, deeper voice, growing stronger as it moved closer, fought the wind to be heard.

‘Indeed? You claim the friendship of Niall mac Cailein, which is no little thing and a double-edged blade if you are proved false to it.’

The speaker was better dressed, surrounded by a clutch of bare-legged snarlers, crouching like dogs round him. He squinted, and then grinned.

‘I recall you now: Hal of Herdmanston. I was with you when Neil, son of Great Colin, brought you to the meeting in the heather we had when King Robert fled to the Isles.’

Hal remembered it, though not this man. It had been a low point.

The shadow-man paused and then bowed his neck slightly towards Kirkpatrick.

‘And yourself, who brought the news of our king’s escape and survival. The King’s wee man, though I have forgot your name entire.’

‘Kirkpatrick.’

‘That was it, right enough.’

He made a brief move and the caterans shifted back, lowering their weapons. The man stepped forward and bowed a little more.

‘Dougald Campbell of Craignish,’ he said. ‘You have the hospitality of my house.’

‘That’s a bloody relief,’ Kirkpatrick said as the man turned away to shout a liquid stream of Gaelic to his unseen men.

To Somhairl he said: ‘Gather up those we have found. When it is light, we will return and search for more.’

‘The cargo …’ Hal said and Kirkpatrick patted his arm.

‘Away you and get your face seen to. The cargo will be brought, safe and untouched. You heard the man; we have the hospitality of the Campbell of Craignish.’

‘Aye,’ Hal said. The pain seemed to ebb and flow with the tide now; a sudden thought lanced through it, sharp with the fire of guilt, and jerked his head up into Kirkpatrick’s concerned face.

‘Sim … where is Sim?’

Kirkpatrick’s bloodless lips never moved, his greased face never quavered. Yet Hal felt the leaden blow of it, hard as the rope’s end which had smacked his face, and he reeled, felt the great burning light explode in his head and bent over to vomit.

Then the light went out.

ISABEL

He came to gawp, the de Valence who is called Earl of Pembroke, hearing that I was a witch or worse. Even earls are not immune to scratching the scabs of their itching minds, to look on the strange wonders of the caged. Malise, fawning and bobbing his head like a mad chook, brought him to the Hog’s Tower, but even this rebounded on him, for Aymer de Valence’s distaste for what had been done to me was clear. Dark and scowling he was, so that I was reminded of the name everyone called him behind his back, the one Gaveston gave him: Jacob the Jew. I will resolve this, he said to Malise, after midsummer, when the current tribulations are settled. Malise did not like that and I should have been pleased for an earl’s help, like a thirsty wee lapdog for water. Of course I was not. Immediately after the tribulations of those days, I answered like a prophecy and before Malise could speak, the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light and the stars shall fall from Heaven and the power of the Heavens shall be shaken. Gospel of Matthew, I added as the Earl crossed himself. Chapter twenty-four, verse twenty-nine, I called after him as he fled; I saw the punishments flaming in Malise’s eyes.

It is almost midsummer.