The Lion Rampant

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Black Bitch Tavern, Edinburgh

Feast of St Columba, June 1314

The Dog Boy pushed through the throng and wished he was not here at all, nor headed where he was going; the one was altogether too crowded, the other such a trial that the setting for it was aptly named.

Edinburgh stank of old burning and feverish, frantic desperation. The castle bulked up like a hunchback’s shoulder, blackened and reeking from where it had been slighted; carts still ground their iron-shod wheels down the King’s Way, full of stones filched from the torn-down gate towers and bound for other houses or drystane walls.

Without a garrison, the town itself filled up with wickedness, with men from both sides of the divide and every nook in between, with those fleeing from the south and those filtering in from the north seeking loved ones or an opportunity. It packed itself with whores and hucksters, cutpurses, coney-catchers, cunning-men and counterfeiters, while the beadles and bailiffs struggled to keep order with few men and less enthusiasm.

What Dog Boy and the others had brought, of course, did not help, even though it was a handful of parchment, no more. Delivered to the monks of St Giles with instructions from their king, it was a spark to tinder, as far as Dog Boy was concerned.

Twelve parchments he had delivered, each hastily copied and sent here. Six were being further copied here, shaven-headed scribblers fluttering their ink-stained mittened fingers, while six were taken out by large-voiced prelates and thundered from altar and wynd corner.

The shriving pews would fill, soon. Those seeking absolution would creep from the shadows, heaped high with pride, avarice, lust and murder, to dump it at the rood screen in the hope of God’s forgiveness. The sensible sinners would flee.

Dog Boy could not read, but he knew the content of those parchments, the copies flying out to Stirling, Perth and every other ‘guid toon’ in the Kingdom. He had not known the jewel he had plucked from Berwick, bouncing around in the saddlebags of the courier’s stolen horse.

A letter, from the Plantagenet to de Valence:

… to spare Leith for the port, but burn Edinburgh town and so to raze and deface it as a perpetual memory of the Law of Deuteronomy lighted upon it, for their falsity and disloyalty. Also sack as many villages around and burn and subvert them, putting every man, woman and child to fire and sword, without exception, for they are creatures who have defied God and king both.

There was more, all in the same harshness, a great long slather of venom which had been read to Dog Boy when he had been taken in to see the King — as if that had not been shock and horror enough.

Bruce was laid up, propped on pillows in St Ninian’s with a face grey and blotched, peeling and unhealthy with sheen. He smiled as Dog Boy was brought to him, the ruin of his cheek gaping like a second mouth and his hand barely able to wave the fingers.

‘It looks worse than it is,’ he said into the wide-eyed concern of Dog Boy’s face, while the caring monks fussed, moving awkwardly round the great pillar of his brother Edward, who grunted like an annoyed boarpig.

‘Poison,’ he said flatly and the King fluttered weary fingers.

‘They would have been better at it,’ he wheezed. ‘Besides, this is not new, even if no one knows the cause.’

There was a silence where no one looked at anyone else, for the cause was already on everyone’s lips: lepry. No one dared admit it, all the same, just as they did not dare admit that this might be the end of the King. True, this had happened before and as bad — yet Edward had been made heir this time, just in case …

‘The Coontess would ken,’ Dog Boy blurted and the King managed another ruined smile.

‘She is no longer a countess, but Isabel MacDuff’s treatments were an ease, even though she fed me the worst of potions,’ he admitted, and then glared at the monks. ‘At least she sweetened them.’

He turned to the Dog Boy again.

‘You were daring and sprung a prize from Berwick,’ he said and indicated that Edward should read it. Even in the hot, fetid sickroom the words were rotted with hate.

‘Your reward is twofold,’ Bruce went on. ‘Take a dozen copies to the monks of St Giles and have them make copies and spread the word of this in Edinburgh. Other copies will be sent to all the good towns of the realm.’

‘It will cause panic,’ Edward argued, frowning. ‘Folk will flee Edinburgh like ants from a boiled nest.’

‘And so avoid a death that otherwise would have come on them unawares,’ Bruce replied stolidly. ‘I would rather have panic and mayhem, brother, than the deaths of those I am elevated to serve. Besides, if folk hear what the Plantagenet has marked down for them, they will grow as angry as they do fearful.’

‘The best of the realm’s men are already here,’ Edward insisted. ‘The ones who brought their own arms — men of substance, with a holding in this kingdom and a reason for needing its future.’

‘Not enough,’ Bruce said wearily. ‘I had three earls of the realm at my side — one is run off and two I made myself. The Plantagenet, even without half of his, brings thousands — twenty or more, it is said.’

‘God be praised,’ muttered Dog Boy and everyone fluttered a swift cross on their breast.

‘For ever and ever.’

‘On your return,’ Bruce went on, turning his head to Dog Boy, ‘comes the better part of the reward. I am advised, by Sir James Douglas, that you are a master with hounds, which accounts for your name.’

He smiled, lopsided this time for the cheek-drag was irritating him. Dog Boy saw that the portion of pillow under his neck, exposed by his turning head, was yellowed with old sweat.

‘You and I are auld friends,’ Bruce added. ‘Nivver violet a lady.’

Dog Boy jerked as if stung and then flushed; he had not known the King had recalled that campfire moment all those long years ago.

‘So you are now made houndsman to the King,’ Bruce declared. ‘Before witnesses. When I am well, we will hunt together, you and I, and you will breed the best dogs a king can have.’

Dog Boy had quit the place, stunned by it all. Afterwards, all during the swift ride to Edinburgh, he had been silent and numbed — raised, bigod, to be Royal Houndsman. Dog Boy crowned.

The word went out, of course, so that the others knew — Patrick and Parcy Dodd and the others all chaffed him about it and, finally, declared that they would wet the fortunate head of the Royal Houndsman in Edinburgh.

They chose the Black Bitch, as much for the aptness of name as for it being the worst stew in the town, and now Dog Boy shoved his way towards it, forcing through the frenzy of people; he could scarcely tell the difference between those frantic to leave and those frantic to squeeze the last measure of brittle pleasure from the place — but the fear was the same.

Yet there was a strange unreality. Silversmith apprentices paraded a wooden bier with a fat, ornate nef, a gorgeously worked fretwork ship of silver blazoned with Mary and Child and an enticement to customers to visit their shop. Butchers, slipping in their offal, bellowed the prices of pork and capon — originally high, they were falling rapidly because doom galloped at them and everything had to be gobbled. A pair of beadles led a whoremonger to the stocks, shuffling him through the dung close to a horse trough which would provide the dirty water he was to be soaked in.

Normal, as if the sky was not falling; Dog Boy ducked into the sweltering roar of the Bitch and his appearance swelled the bellow of it with a joy of noise from the six men who had ridden into Edinburgh with him and now dominated the tavern. The others in it, even the scarred and hard, kept to the sidelines of them.

Shining with sweat and drink, his men thrust a horn beaker of ale into one hand and hailed him loudly; he was their darling now, was the elevated Dog Boy.

‘The Royal Dog Boy he is now,’ bellowed Patrick and the others roared their approval once again, while Troubadour Tam Napier struck up his battered old viel in a tune that set everyone jigging.

Buggerback Geordie shoved forward a woman, dark-eyed and dark-haired, half-moon sweat under the arms of her dress and her smile only partly ruined by some missing teeth. She had the finest pair of breasts Dog Boy had seen in a time and, coyly batting her eyes, she pulled them out for him to see.

‘This is Dame Trapseed,’ said Archie Gower, known to everyone as Sweetmilk, for no reason anyone could fathom. ‘We brings her as Yer Honour’s gift on this night and hopes she elevates ye higher still.’

‘Ma Dame,’ Dog Boy said with a mocking, courtly bow and the laughter rang into the rafters. He went to a bench in the deeper shadows of the flickering tavern and took her on his knee, felt the heat of her through the dress as she wriggled on his lap and giggled at what she was creating underneath her; her breasts were slick.

‘If you do not sit still,’ Parcy Dodd yelled at her across the fug and noise, ‘you will stop our captain thinking entire, as God ordained.’

‘God? Whit has God to do wi’ this?’ demanded the woman, who had fumbled loose the ties on Dog Boy’s braies by feel alone. She adjusted herself, hiked her dress a little and Dog Boy could not believe the skill of her when he felt the heat and wet and knew what she had done.

‘God it was who created Man,’ Parcy went on, ‘and gave him both a pyntle and a keen and cunning mind. In His wisdom though, he ordained that Man could only use one of them at a time.’

The crowd roared and demanded more. Parcy obliged. Dame Trapseed wriggled and bounced a little, so that Dog Boy grunted in the half-dark.

‘Once,’ Parcy began, while folk shushed their neighbours, ‘there was a great rain, a gushing scoosh that some folk thought was the second Flood sent by the Lord.’

Dog Boy, anticpitating a gushing scoosh of his own, tried to concentrate on Parcy.

‘They ran to their priest, a good wee man, who went out into the pour of it all, even down to the banks of the burn, which rose in spate as he begged and pleaded with the Lord. The watter rose up roon his ankles and the reeve came up to ask if he would no’ be better climbin’ oot — the reeve would help. The priest refused, saying that the Lord would save him, and the reeve went on his way.’

The woman was in a rhythm now, a gentle sway, like reeds on a riverbank; Dog Boy gave up with Parcy.

‘The watter rose up to his waist and still the priest begged the Lord to save him. His own sire rode up on a fine horse, all drookit but come to save the wee priest from the flood. But the priest refused, allowing that only the Lord would save him, and the sire rode away as the river spouted on.’

Dog Boy bit the back of the woman’s shoulder, for the place was silent now save for the rhythmic swish of the woman and the sound of her ragged breathing. No head even bothered turning to them, all the same.

‘Finally, the watter was at the priest’s neck and up comes the King himself in a boatie, rowin’ like a bloody raider frae the isles, demanding that the priest save himself by climbin’ in. But the priest refused, claiming that God would save him — and the King swept on doon the river.’

‘What happened?’ demanded an incredulous voice and Parcy paused for the effect, spoiled by the sudden shrill whine of the woman, who felt Dog Boy’s moment arrive.

‘He drooned, of coorse,’ Parcy scathed and the place roared with laughter, drowning out the final noises from Mistress Trapseed.

‘Then he went to Heaven and stood before the Lord God Himself, a wee bit annoyed at not having had his prayers answered, for all he had been a good priest an’ Christian his entire life. God be praised.’

‘For ever and ever,’ the crowd answered in a rushing moth-murmur. Parcy held up one hand to silence them, a master of his art.

‘He carps about havin’ been abandoned. So the good Lord scowls at the wee priest. “I sent ye a reeve, a sire and the King himself to save ye. What more did ye want?”’

The crowd roared and thumped the tables in approval, demanded more; Dame Trapseed slithered off Dog Boy’s lap and he tried to cover himself as best he could, though he had to stand to lace his braies while the woman, sheened and smiling with triumph, turned out of the shadows to Buggerback Geordie and demanded her money.

Buggerback, grinning round his gap of gums, held out his hand to Patrick and had a scowl and a handful of coin, some of which went to the woman.

‘I did not believe she could hump ye in the middle o’ the tavern,’ Patrick complained bitterly to Dog Boy as Geordie went off, jingling the coin in his palm. ‘Ye may be practically nobile these days, but ye are worse than Horse Pyntle Johnnie there, who would swive a knothole. Yer foul, lowly lusts have cost me a pretty penny.’

Dog Boy, greasy with the ale and the moment, grinned back at him and then froze as the tavern door crashed open. Like a cold wind, the Black strode in and surveyed the silence, aware that those who did not know who he was knew what he was.

‘I am truly sorry to spoil yer doings,’ he said, nodding to Dog Boy. ‘But the English are at Berwick and on the move north. Shift yourselves.’

Then he closed the door on a boiling panic.

Kilmartin Glen

At the same time

Push. Drive. Plod. Tug, strain at wheels, eat dust and then eat the mud that sweat made of it on your face. Work the sun up and work it down again. Hal laboured at it, heaving into the grind of it so that his head thundered and his shoulder ached.

At the end, though, he could fall into a patch of scrubby heather, wrap himself in a cloak and sleep without dreaming of Sim, whirling down and round in the maelstrom with his white crown wisped like maidenhair.

In the days after he had fallen in a dead faint, slowly recovering while Kirkpatrick and Campbell dragged the weapons out of the stricken ship and gathered up every wheeled contrivance and pulling beast, Hal had stumbled down to the water’s edge and walked the breathing shingle in hope. Kirkpatrick sent a man with him every time, sometimes Niall, sometimes Somhairl, just to make sure he didn’t fall in another dead faint, this time face down in a rock pool. And Campbell sent one of his own, a cateran called, in the English, Duncan; he had been a drover and so spoke the southron enough to be understood.

They found bodies, but none Hal knew and only one Niall recognized, kneeling beside the fish-eaten, crab-gnawed face and squinting.

‘They are seldom returned by Carry Vaar,’ Duncan lilted, seeing Niall’s distress. ‘She is in her sleeping with them all.’

Hal was torn between finding Sim with his water-bloated face like curdled cheese and not finding him at all. In the end, it was as if he had simply vanished and, by the time they were ready to leave, Hal had to force himself away from the place.

‘It’s a sore loss,’ Kirkpatrick offered awkwardly on the day the Campbells set out to join the King, already having to lever the laden wagons up stony, rutted tracks. Kirkpatrick did not expect an answer; he had seen the yellow-blue ruin of the face and the haunt in the eyes and thought, with a sudden shift of concern, that Hal of Herdmanston was all but done.

The struggle of the next few days made him wonder at the fevered strength in the Lothian lord and, though he wished he could tell the man to slow himself, the truth was that they needed everyone’s strength.

There were not enough carts and beasts — Campbell of Craignish, frowning, said that his men did not make war in that way. Once the blazing cross had been fired from crest to crest and the men gathered, they would pack some oats, ready cooked into a slab with water, add a portion of herring for the salt in it, then make a fast lick across rock and heather.

Kirkpatrick could believe it; the Craignish men wore onion-dyed tunics in varying shades, from deep yellow to faded mustard, had bare legs like spurtles and bore burdens an ass would have scorned, forging over tussock and hill with corded muscle and the ease of having been born to it.

They bore the residue of what would not fit in the carts, a man-packed collection of iron hats, maille, spearheads and other items labouring down to meet Campbell galleys at Kilmory, which would sail them on to Largs. There, the angels would take the Lord’s share, a tithe that would mysteriously vanish, while every Craignish man would arrive at Stirling better accoutred than any man-at-arms.

Yet the journey down to Kilmory was fraught, a Satan twist of bad road and steepness through places with names like Black Crag and worse. When they entered the defile of Kilmartin Glen, the men fell silent, for this was a place of stone rings and underground kists, a land of the sidhean, the sheean, who could spirit you away in the night and not return you for a hundred years. Their great faerie hill of Dunadd dominated the area and the panting chatter and good-natured chaffering fell to silence.

Campbell of Craignish, though he preferred to be thought of as an enlightened Christian nobile, was as much worried about the sidhean as any of his men.

‘Pechs? Bogles?’ Kirkpatrick challenged, though gently, and Campbell, half-ashamed, waggled his head from side to side.

‘My folk believe it. Myself, though, I am after being more concerned about the time it is taking to get these carts to Kilmory. There are MacDougalls loose.’

Kirkpatrick’s head came up at that and he was sharp with Campbell when he spoke.

‘You kept that close to you — mark me, I can see why. Having your enemies stravaigin’ as they please through your lands is not a matter to trumpet.’

Campbell admitted it with a nod and no sign that he was put out.

‘They are like lice,’ he declared. ‘Ye think ye have combed them all out and suddenly they are back, annoying ye with their wee itch.’

He glanced at Kirkpatrick.

‘It is because I am taking so many of my own to join Sir Neil. There will be long hundreds of Campbell men standing with the King when he fights and little or none to protect our lands. My castle is safe, but these MacDougalls will plooter about for a while, causing trouble, then go home — bigod, most of them are fled to Ireland as it is but, mind you, if they see a chance at a lumbering great slorach of over-laden men and carts they will take it.’

Kirkpatrick acknowledged the commitment of the Campbells and fell silent, staring at the popping fire and knowing the lord of Craignish was right — if it hadn’t been for the arrival of Hal, Kirkpatrick and all this cargo, the Campbell men would already be in their galleys and sailing for the Ayrshire coast to join the army at Stirling.

A little way away, Duncan lay on one side of a fire and contemplated the sight of his lord in conversation with the dwarf-dark man called Kirkpatrick. The other, the brooding and wounded lord from the Lothians, sat apart even from that — even from himself, Duncan thought.

These southrons were different, right enough, and he had been away from the droving roads long enough to feel and see it almost for new. These men could not enjoy life as it moved through them; they wanted to take it and make something, as if they could shape it to their own way.

They did not talk of deer and cattle and hill, or let themselves soak in the weather; they spoke of crops and power and business and did not notice the different greens of leaves, or even the sun until its lack was enough to chill them.

Once, on the drove road, he had been sparking a southron woman at Carlisle and they had walked out beyond the gate, which he knew was a great daring for her in the first place, never mind to be doing it with a strange creature from beyond the Mounth.

He knew then, as now, that he could whisper filth in her ear in the True Tongue and she would wriggle and blush, for it was just a liquid trill to her ear, as seductive as it was strange. He recalled, as he spoke and slid an arm round her soft waist, that his free hand had found a winter-woken toad on the rock next to him.

It was sluggish and still cold, hoping for the sun on the rock to give it new life. It blinked its great gold-coin eyes, iridescently green throat pulsing and as beautiful as anything he had ever seen. So he was surprised when the woman, presented with the sheer jewel of it, screamed and ran away.

No woman of his own people would have done so, but the southrons were strange — even their names. But, then, names were dangerous matters and the knowing of a man’s true name gave you power over him, for he lay deep inside his name, underneath his talk and his acts, moving like everyone else, yet living in secret and alone. He wasn’t concerned that they knew his name was Duncan, for they did not know the whole of it, nor in the tongue of the True People.

The Lothian lord, he had decided, noticed nothing at all, as if some veil had dropped between him and the world. As if — and Duncan shivered at the thought — he is moving with unseen sidhean, who are lifting him quietly out of the midst of us and into their timeless kingdom.

He took comfort from the quiet murmur, the men sitting crosslegged or lolling round the flames, attending to a blackened pot and wiping smoke tears from their eyes. Somewhere, an owl screeched and Duncan lay back, tasting the woodsmoked night and letting his eyes close.

Tomorrow they would be at Kilmory, loading this southron matter on to the galleys and away from this place of faerie shadows.

When it came, the next day, the working of the sidhean was harsh and sudden.

Hal was stumbling along in the ruts of a cart which seemed to be his own particular curse, a wheeled imp of Satan which stuck more times than it rolled. He was enjoying the roll of it now, the fresh breeze on the sweated bruise of his face and the piping of peewits, while quietly marvelling at the bulging calf muscles of the bare-legged man ahead, the one called Duncan.

I find it hard enough to walk in serk and braies, burdened only by a baldric and sword, he thought, yet this one carries his own weight on his back.

The man, wearing only a sweat-darkened saffron tunic, belted so that a dirk could be thrust through a ring on it, hefted the waterproofed burden a little higher on his back and strode on. Then he gave a yelp, a stumble and fell over.

Hal moved to him, thinking he had tripped, bending to help him to his feet; the flick of the shaft over his head was like the crack of a whip and he knew the sound well, felt the clench and sickening plunge of his belly as he flung himself to the ground beside Duncan. The arrow that had felled the man was now clearly revealed, buried deep an inch below the man’s collarbone.

More arrows flew and men tumbled and yelped.

‘Sluggorm. Sluggorm.’

The call echoed, the bundles flew away as the Campbells went for their weapons and Hal, raising his head, saw the arrows had been only the heralds of a leaping mass of shrieking men, wild-haired, wet-mouthed and armed: the MacDougalls.

Kirkpatrick, a few carts down from the fallen Hal, heard the cries of ‘sluagh-ghairm’, the gathering cry. Campbell of Craignish hauled out a hand-a-half, waved it in a circle above his head and bellowed ‘Cruachan’; men flocked to him like a pack of wolves. He looked right and left to see how many he had, grinned at Kirkpatrick and then plunged exultantly forward. Wearily, cursing, Kirkpatrick was dragged in his wake.

Hal was half-crouched and rising when the wave of MacDougalls fell on him and the snarling Campbells round him, though Hal could not tell one from the other and did not care when faced with an armed man wanting to poke sharp metal in him.

The first one tried to spear him, clumsy and running, so that Hal only had to bat the shaft to one side, dip a shoulder and let the man run on to it; braced, he knocked the man off his feet and drove the wind out of him, so that the sword stroke that took him in the neck barely managed a last squeak from him.

Hal barely heard, half turned for the next rushing man, ducked the flail of a spear slash and cut back so that the man stumbled past, bewildered as to why his stomach was emptying out and tangling his ankles.

They were desperate with fear, Hal realized, too few and relying on speed and rush to overwhelm. They should not have done it at all, he thought wildly, but they were madmen from beyond the Mounth, as strange as two-headed calves. The saving Grace of God in all of this was that he was fighting alongside equally mad men, who had recovered from the shock of attack and flung themselves forward with eldritch screeching and a sheen of ecstasy.

Hal cut and parried and made a space round him — but then there was a sudden flurry and a new rush of men, so that Hal spun and slashed to keep the swordlength of space until, through the bewildering whirligig of faces and bodies, he saw one he knew.

Kirkpatrick held up his hands and Hal, sucking in breath in ragged gasps, let the swordpoint drop; gore slid greasily from it and pooled round the tip.

Christ betimes, Kirkpatrick thought, he can still find a fight in him, can the wee lord from Herdmanston. He said as much and had back a pouch-eyed stare from the yellow-blue side of Hal’s face.

‘Aye til the fore,’ he growled and then stopped, for it was not Sim he spoke to, would never be Sim again.

‘If it is like this all the way to Stirling,’ Kirkpatrick growled, watching the lamb-leaping, blood-howling Campbells pursue their hated enemies over the bracken and heather, ‘we will deserve earldoms at the least.’

Hal did not answer and, when Kirkpatrick turned, he saw the lord bend, then crouch down amid the spilled litter of pack which had burst from dead Duncan’s back. He peered and saw, with a sudden shock of poignancy, what Hal had found.

Wrapped and stowed when the stuff was packed, Sim’s ruined, scarred arbalest winked back into the light, carefully laid up for the day it could be repaired.

Kirkpatrick politely turned away from the sound of weeping.

St Mungo’s Kirk, Polwarth

Feast of Sts Marcus and Marcellianus, June 1314

The Hainaulters were drunk, which they claimed was a pious celebration of the martyrs whose day it was, even though most would not know the first thing about them. Addaf was betting sure that they would embrace the holiness of the next saint’s day as piously as this.

They were, as a result, a red-eyed, stumbling uselessness against the kirk, though they formed up raggedly enough, weaving in rough ranks, the spearshafts clacking like tree branches in a high wind.

‘Get it done,’ the old Berkeley had thundered to his son and Sir Maurice, red and tight-lipped, with his own smirking boys at his back, had snapped the same to Addaf. And all because some cont gwirion had shot off a bolt from the kirk; it had hit a horse in the flank and set it to plunging in the trace, upsetting a two-wheeled cart.

It would have been nothing at all, Addaf thought sourly. The coc oen who had done it as the English, still damp from fording the Tweed at Wark and straggling past the chapel door, could have been found, bruised a little and sent back to his monk’s cell with a kick up his arse.

Save for the fact that the cart held the royal banners, great folds of rich silk and brocade in the long hundreds. And the King was close enough to witness it, rounding on the Earl of Pembroke to ask, bland as frumenty: ‘Has this place not been secured, my lord?’

De Valence had spoken harshly to old Sir Thomas Berkeley, who was still smarting over the return of his own bloodied and torn banner, lost by Addaf and brought back by that gloomy walrus Thweng as a sneering gift from the Bruce. And so the chain of scowls came down to the Welsh and the drunken Hainault spearmen.

Addaf was already exhausted and the maille hung heavy on him. His arms ached and the sun was too hot in a day that stank of leather and sweat, dung and horse piss. His face, to the waiting archers, was haggard, dark shadows drawn round his eyes, his iron-grey hair plastered to his skull.

‘Smart yer bows,’ he called and there was a flutter of sound as the men nocked arrows. Addaf gripped his sword and wished it was a bow, but he was the captain here and his rank was marked by a sword. His Hainault counterpart, swaying a little, belched.

‘My men will cover your advance,’ Addaf said. ‘Break the bloody door down and be done with the business.’

The Hainaulter nodded and licked dry lips; Addaf was not sure he had been understood, but both men were old hands at this and the Hainault men were seasoned in long battles against the Flemings and knew the way of matters well enough.

‘Wait, wait — I beg you, in the name of Heaven.’

The voice brought them round, the big Hainaulter frowning in a slow, blinking way at the unshaven desperation of face looking up at him from the kneeling monk.

‘The man who shot the bolt was our reeve, a foolish man. There are only two monks within, old Fathers who could not find it in themselves to leave this place. They have been here thirty years and more.’

‘You are?’ Addaf demanded.

‘Father John,’ the man answered. ‘I also live here, but fled. Now God has brought me back to plead for the lives of those in His house. I beg the blessing of Heaven on you, your honour — let me go to them. Spare all this blood, I beg you.’

Addaf considered it. The Hainaulter shrugged, belched again and wiped the ale-sweat from his fleshy face; he didn’t understand all the English in it, but he knew what the little monk was doing.

‘Door vill opened be,’ he said and he made a good point; Addaf nodded.

Father John scuttled off. There was a hammering sound and everyone waited in the afternoon heat, filled with the creak and grind and shuffle of the edge of the army, passing up Dere Strete and headed for the pass through the Lammermuirs. Anxious about it, too, because this road was the only practical one for the great long trail of wagons and they expected the Scots to spring some surprise.

God curse it, Addaf thought, the train of wagons must stretch for leagues, filled with all manner of stupidity; he had seen a score of them full of the furnishing for a chamber and hall and eight score, no less, were packed with nothing but poultry. Wine and wax and saddlery, dancing slippers and candle-holders — the English were going not to war but a revel, Addaf thought. There was even a mangy old lion in a cage.

He had 104 archers under his command, with 126 horses and three carts — one for the men’s baggage, one for the saddlery, a firebox forge and anvil and one for fodder. And that was three too many as far as Addaf was concerned, for if you could not ride and fight with what you had in, around or under your saddle, you were of little use.

He glanced at them, this rough family, feeling the sweat run down the grooves etched on either side of his nose, filtering itchily into the grey of his beard.

They were relaxed, chaffering each other and the big oxen Hainault spearmen, who broiled in their leather and wool. One or two of the Welsh had dug out strips of dried beef and venison from under their saddles, where they had been marinading to softness with the animal’s sweat; they chewed with relish and fell into the old argument of whether gelding, mare or stallion sweat made the meat tastier.

Y Crach, as always, was poised like a trembling gazehound. He will hang these with his own hand, Addaf thought sourly, as his own offering to God; Addaf did not care to be reminded that there were too many who would stand with Y Crach.

Others, Addaf was pleased to see, were squinting at the distant riders on a hill. They were Scots, certes, trailing the army like ticks on sheep, but as long as they kept their distance that was fine. Their own prickers on their fast hobs might chase them off, or simply keep them at a distance — and if the rebels closed in on the debris of sick, halt, lame, camp-followers and plain deserters lurking at the rear, it was no great loss to the English army.

The church door opened and the Father, with a relieved and triumphant look back at Addaf, ushered out the rebels: two tottering priests holding one another up — an edgy defiance in grey wool and hodden hood.

‘There,’ said Father John, wiping his sweating face. ‘No harm done, no blood spilled — God be praised.’

‘For ever and ever,’ Addaf replied piously and heard the sound of hooves like a knell, turning into the black, hot scowl of Sir Maurice Berkeley, his two sons like pillars on either side.

‘Is the work done?’ he demanded and Addaf nodded, indicating the little crowd. Berkeley, still scowling, reined his mount round to ride off.

‘Not before time, Centenar Addaf,’ he bellowed over his shoulder. ‘Now hang them all and muster on me — the horse forges ahead.’

There was a pause and then Father John looked wildly from Addaf to the retreating back of Sir Maurice.

‘Your honour …’ he began and Addaf felt the cold stone of it settle in his belly. He had done this from Gascony to here and all points in between, knew there was no arguing with it; he was aware, at the edges of his vision, of Y Crach’s fevered grin of triumph.

The big Hainault captain saw the Welshman’s mourn of face and foraged his mouth with a grimy finger, found the annoying scrap and examined it before flicking it away.

‘Leaf viss us,’ he offered, grinning brownly. ‘Ve fix.’

Addaf hestitated. The Hainaulters wanted the plunder from the church — well, that was fair enough. Let them do the deed; Addaf turned abruptly away from the disbelief on the face of Father John, swept his gaze over Y Crach and his scowl and bellowed at his men to move out, trying to drown the little priest’s screechings.

God serves him badly, Addaf thought sourly, blocking the frantic protests from his ears. Stupid little priest, look you. He should have stayed away when he had the chance.

Up on the hill, Dog Boy and the Black sat at ease, one leg hooked across the saddle, with a mesnie of riders on either side. They watched the archers mount up and ride off, while the big red-faced sweaters flung rope over the graveyard elm; some moved into the church and began to splinter wood in their search for loot.

‘I am sure those are the Welsh we had stushie with,’ the Black offered. ‘The wee flag they carry is the same one we took — the King gave it back as a gift.’

Dog Boy could not deny it, watching as the priest who had been most animated and loud was hauled up in a fury of flailing ankles, two big men in metal-leafed jacks pulling on a leg each until his kicking stopped; one cursed when the priest’s dying bowels opened.

The other two monks, white-haired and patient, sat like old stones and waited to die, while the pungent, heady scent of yellow-blazing gorse drew in buzzing life all round them.

It was not right and Dog Boy said so. The Black, who had already hanged his share of priests, said nothing; if he thought of what he had done it was with the deep, banked burn of everything the English had taken from him. Even having the Cliffords scoured from Douglas and the promise of restoration to the slighted fortress was not nearly revenge enough.

The sight of the English was a stun to the senses, all the same, spread out round a backbone of carts that stretched for miles, hazed in a shroud of dust from thousands of hooves. Behind was a snail-trail of dung-churned morass, where the detritus of the army stumbled. Ahead, and forging ever faster, the horse and the mounted infantry — like the archers — shifted further from the foot.

‘They are in a hurry,’ the Black noted.

‘Even so,’ Dog Boy pointed out, ‘they will be hard put to make Stirling by midsummer — they have at least twenty good Scots miles to reach Edinburgh.’

Closer to twenty-five, James Douglas thought, and capable of making no more than twelve in a day’s march. By the time they get to Edinburgh, it will have been burned and scorched of any easy way of landing supplies from ships, and that will cost them dearly.

That would put them close to midsummer, so that they would have to push to reach the vicinity of Stirling’s fortress in time to claim the siege as lifted. With luck, they would arrive panting and dragging their arses in the dust and Dog Boy, grinning back as the Black voiced this, agreed with a nod.

Patrick, seeing these twin firedogs, marvelled at how they looked nothing at all, no more than dark, good-looking, pleasant youths who could be planning a night of revelry in Edinburgh instead of mayhem on an invading host.

The two old priests hardly kicked at all when the spearmen hauled them up. Parcy Dodd leaned forward on his horse at the sight and shook his head.

‘Ach well,’ he said, ‘let us hope they find a better welcome than auld Brother Cedric.’

‘I am hesitating to ask,’ the Black answered laconically. Parcy grinned, a farrago of gums and gap.

‘Brother Cedric died old and venerated. Upon entering St Peter’s Gate, there was another man in front, waiting to go into Heaven. St Peter asked the man who he was and what he had accomplished in his life and the man revealed that he was Blind Tam, ship’s steersman, who had spent his life on a vessel taking pilgrims to the Holy Land. St Peter handed him a silk robe and a golden sceptre, inviting him to walk in the streets of Our Lord.’

There was a sound of distant, frantic hooves which brought heads up. Parcy, unperturbed, shifted his weight on the horse a little.

‘St Peter’, he went on, ‘asked the same question of Brother Cedric, who tells him he has devoted the entire threescore span of his years to the Lord — and he is given a plain wool robe and wooden staff. Certes, he questions this — in a polite, Christianly way of course — and St Peter lets him know the truth. “While you preached, everyone slept,” he said. “But while Blind Tam steered, everyone prayed.”’

Yabbing Andra arrived in a flurry of foam-flecked horse and dust.

‘Prickers,’ he said and the Black unhooked his leg from the saddle.

‘Bigod, Parcy Dodd,’ he said, as they broke into a fast canter away from the threat, ‘you tell it better than a priest at a sermon.’

Everyone who had heard such heckled sermons laughed, but Patrick shook a mock-sorrowful head.

‘There is an inglenook of Hell’s bad fire set aside just for you, Parcy.’

Dog Boy, who had seen the great swooping banners, the sea of men and horses and power moving like a relentless tide towards Stirling, was sure that Parcy and everyone else would find out where they sat in Hell soon enough.

The Pele, Linlithgow

Feast of St Alban, June 1314

He had not stopped for the banners of St Cuthbert and St John of Beverley, nor visited the shrines; he knew he had avoided that campaign ritual simply because his father had done it before him and Edward knew, too, that such avoidance had been a mistake from the mutters and solemn head-shaking of his knights.

They were worse than any wattled beldame, Edward thought moodily as he chewed on the fish and enjoyed the sweet of the sauce. Christ betimes, he had banners aplenty — a whole cartload of them — and holy help from a slew of abbots and bishops. He was even eating fish, as any Christian knight would do in order to show his purity of body and soul. What was one flapping cloth more or less?

Besides, this was his army, gathered at vast expense and despite the refusal of the likes of Lancaster and Warwick. When this was concluded, Edward thought with savage glee, I will be able to deal with them as I wish — as a true king would wish — but, for now, there is the rare freedom of being out from under the Ordinances, with my own army at my back. Better still, it had men in it he could trust enough to have at his back.

Like Ebles de Mountz — Edward raised his cup to the Savoyard and saw the man flush with pride at being so singled out by his king. A valuable asset was de Mountz, whom Edward had set to watching his wife for a time and then appointed constable of Edinburgh. Too late, as it turned out, because the place fell to the Scotch before de Mountz could take command — but the man had fourteen years of experience in the Scottish wars and had served as constable of three castles in his time. Including Stirling.

De Mountz was bench-paired with Sir Marmaduke Thweng, that ancient warhorse who had also commanded at Stirling — I am not short of local knowledge, Edward thought, of the ground we will have to fight across.

But the men he felt a glow for, a warmth borne of old comradeship and safety, were roistering and roaring all round him: Sir Payn Tiptoft, d’Argentan, the de Clares and the de Bohuns and the lesser lights of chivalry, such as Lovel and Manse and the Ercedenes, all the gilded youth of yesterday who were now the golden warriors of the royal household.

Edward stood suddenly and saluted them loudly, feeling the exultant moment racing in him; they roared their appreciation back to King Edward, second of that name by the Grace of God, ringing the rafters of the rugged, solid storehouse built by his father as a supply base for the armies.

Endless armies, Edward thought, traipsing ever northwards. This would be the last of them. This would end it once and for all …

If Bruce stood to fight.

Thweng watched the King, flushed face singing with wine and the moment. The cheers of his salute to the ‘golden warriors’ were still echoing when the most golden of them all, the paragon of chivalry and the third-best knight in Christendom slammed his cup on the table, levered away from his bench and unlaced himself. Hitching up his tunic, he pissed into the floor-straw not far from the table and his neighbours scrabbled away from the vinegar-reek splashes of it.

‘Christ betimes, d’Argentan,’ protested Henry de Bohun, ‘can you not use the privy like a gentilhomme?’

‘Like you, little maid?’ d’Argentan replied and grabbed his cock so that the last of the stream arced higher and splashed more. ‘I give you a look at what a man is like. Compare with your own and be downhearted.’

Those nearest hooted and banged the table. Henry de Bohun’s face went stiff. He was young, not yet twenty, and crested with a curling mass of dark copper hair, which he kept like an arming cap on the top of his head, while shaving it all off round the ears.

It was a deliberate statement to all those who had grown their hair long in their gilded youth and still kept it that way, even if much of it was faded and thinner. It hinted at how Henry de Bohun was a warrior in the old Norman way while they were ageing fops, and it did not help that you could see how his hair, if left to grow, would ringlet magnificently round his ears with no need of the curling tongs.

Everything about Henry de Bohun was a slap to the others, from his youth to his cool efficient mastery of the lists and the avoidance of anything to do with the ‘golden warriors’. The biggest smack of all to them was his being the nephew of Humphrey, Earl of Hereford, Constable of England and bitter rival to the de Clare Earl of Gloucester, whose men were doing most of the hooting.

‘I think you have had too much wine,’ Henry answered flatly, his voice a scourge of distaste.

‘Not nearly enough,’ d’Argentan answered, and drank more to prove it, wiping the dribble off the five-inch scar on his chin — mêlée wound, tourney proper for the Honour of the Round Table, Brackley, five years ago. He licked the remains of the brew from the fingers of his left hand, all but the missing little one — a bohort, in some French town he could not even remember, eight years ago.

‘But already too much for you to match,’ he added and grinned raggedly at Henry from a mouth extended on the left by a three-inch scar — tourney proper, in Rhodes, all of a decade ago.

The memory soured him, as did the sight of Henry de Bohun, who was already an acknowledged master of the joust, that one-on-one test of arms altogether too popular for d’Argentan’s liking and replacing the mayhem of the mêlée these days.

He saw the splendour of youth in the de Bohun brat and wanted his own back again, so that he did not have to think about the three decades and more of his own life, least son of four and owning nothing but a name and the distinction of being the third-best knight in Christendom. Not even the second, which title belonged to the very Bruce they were going to fight.

The years were falling on him like a charging mass of knights and he did not like the fear it lanced him with.

‘You stick to almond milk, child,’ he growled, more harshly than he had intended and heard the mocking oohs and aahs from his coterie at this clear challenge. He also saw de Bohun half rise, before a voice cut through the din.

‘You provoke my nephew’s honour, Sir Giles, so you provoke mine own.’

Sir Giles acknowledged the Constable of England with an apologetic bow.

‘If your nephew wishes redress,’ he said, ‘I am sure we can find time to run a friendly passage at dawn.’

‘As you wish and when you wish,’ Henry retorted sharply.

A pantler went over suddenly, by accident or tripped by the howl of knights at another table, and the clattering clang of his dropping tray was echoed by the baying laughter. He picked himself up, collected as many of the pastries as he could and served them anyway, straw and all; servants and scullions fought the dogs to snatch those he missed.

It snapped the tension and Hereford went back to his close-head mutterings with his clerk, Walwayn; Thweng saw that little man, aware that he was being watched, turn and stare insolently back at him.

Walwayn sweated with secrets, so that any stare made him twitch, but the one from that droop-moustached cliff of a face made his bowels turn; Sir Marmaduke Thweng, he recalled briefly, a lord from Yorkshire reputed to be a hunter of trailbaston and brigands for the head-reward. The thought made him shiver and Hereford scowled, thinking he was not being paid enough attention.

‘Stir yourself. You say Lord Percy sent a man, a Templar heretic, to spy out some plot with that discredited Order and the Scotch?’

‘Just so, my lord,’ Walwayn answered in a softer hiss, appalled at the lack of discretion in Hereford’s voice. The Earl saw it and frowned, but tempered his volume.

‘What plot? Is the excommunicate King about to visit us with heretic Templars?’

Walwayn shook his head furiously.

‘I do not know, my lord. The Lord Percy understands it is more to do with acquiring weapons. Or treasure.’

Hereford stroked his beard while the noise swirled, thick and hot. The famed Templar treasure was a gleaming lure that would not be banished, but Templar weapons, even the expertise of the Order’s former knights, would be formidable — and God forbid that Bruce had enlisted fled Templars to his cause.

And Percy, already firmly in the camp of the King’s opponents, had said nothing. A thought hit Hereford.

‘Who is Percy’s spy?’

Walwayn, who wanted away to drink and women, blinked sweat from his eyes.

‘A Knight formerly of the Order is all I understand, lord.’

Hereford nodded, thought for a time longer, and then patted Walwayn on the shoulder.

‘Keep track of it and keep me informed.’

Walwayn, released at last, merely nodded and slid away. He did not ask if Hereford would inform the King; he thought it unlikely — all was rumour, though Walwayn could taste the truth of it. Hereford would wait until matters were firmer and there was advantage in it for himself, but Walwayn would have to be the one setting such an advantage. Until then, there was drink and women …

There were no women of any worth, Thweng noted, which accounted for the knights’ behaviour. There were serving trulls, who would be caught and tupped before the night was over, and a wet nurse sitting by the fire with someone’s babe, but no woman of quality to put a curb chain on the revels, for this was war and even if the entire court travelled with the King, the Queen and her women did not.

He dropped the fish and wiped his fingers on his tunic front; he thought the sweet taste was less to do with spices and cooking than incipient rot, which echoed the entire court as far as he was concerned.

He watched the great Sir Giles, scarred paladin of the first rank, his red jupon with its silver grail-cups stained with meat juice and his own piss, glowering at the fiery de Bohun nephew.

Young Henry’s uncle, finished with his clerk and his rank established like the big-ruffed wolf in a pack, returned to stabbing a finger at the younger Earl of Gloucester. No doubt pointing out that, as Constable of England and a veteran of the Scots wars, it should have been his right to command the Van alone and not in tandem with an inexperienced sprig of the de Clares. Politely and with due deference to rank, of course.

‘What say you, my liege lord?’ d’Argentan bellowed at the King. ‘A chivalric passage of arms on the morrow, to set the start of a glorious day?’

He spoiled the moment of it by belching and Thweng saw the droop of the royal eyelid. Bad idea to mention time to the King, he thought, since he was running out of it. They would be hard put to make it to within three leagues of Stirling by the Feast of St John the Baptist as it was and even then would have to leave all the foot and baggage behind. Delaying for a ‘passage of arms’ was not an option.

Sir Giles was too canny a court rat to argue the point, bowing graciously and then leering at Henry de Bohun. A hurrying wench, goosed by one of the Nevilles, clumsily dropped a torch and there was a furious moment of stamping, sparks and soot; a dog took the opportunity to filch Miles de Stapledon’s meat from his plate and he chased it round, bellowing and threatening until it gave up and dropped it.

Thweng, sweating in the leprous heat, looked at the mortrews and gristle on his plate, the nightlife fliers which seemed to congregate on it and wished he were somewhere else. Anywhere else.

The whole court was here, squeezed into the great ugly fortification of the Pele at Linlithgow, Longshanks’s unsubtle stake in the heart of Scotland. He had built it round a former royal residence and swallowed the church of St Michael as he did so, turning that holy place into a storehouse.

It had never been spacious or comfortable at the best of times, was less so now that the fleeing Scots had wrecked it as they had wrecked every other possible refuge and store, and so Hall struggled with Chamber.

The pantlers, cellarers, scullery and scalding house of Badlesmere’s stewardship fought for space with Chamberlain Despenser’s staff, who in turn elbowed with Charlton’s Office of the Privy Seal and ignored the growls of Brotherton’s Marshalsea, responsible for all the horses, carts and carriages that moved everyone. A hundred horses of them alone belonged to the King, forty of which were prime destriers.

I have two, Thweng thought moodily. Both of them cost a small manor apiece and the chances are that one or both will be ruined by the time this affair is over. He wished, again, that he was somewhere else.

For all the excitement and freedom this campaigning threw up, Edward also wanted to be somewhere else and would have been surprised to find that he and Sir Marmaduke Thweng were more alike than either of them imagined — they were both, at heart, country knights who preferred building a wall than coping with the backstabbing, fervid hothouse of intrigues that was the court.

It did not help that the clerics were carping on and on about the missing banners of Beverley and St Cuthbert and the grate of it was thrumming on Edward’s nerves; he could hear those two old farts, the Bishops Ely and Winchester, discussing it.

‘I am sure the Lord will overlook it,’ Bishop Sandale of Winchester said, but the fish-eyed stare he had back from John Hothum, Bishop of Ely, gave lie to it.

‘The Lord sees all,’ Hothum grunted, worrying at the remains of a bone. The weight of his ornate robes made sweat bead his brow — he did not need to wear them, but liked the trappings of his Treasury office; more than that, he liked people to see his power and none more so than the Chancellor Bishop of Ely.

‘It might still be possible to fetch the Beverley,’ Sandale offered hesitantly. ‘A fast rider …’

‘The Lord is not fooled.’

The voice was a thin rasp, like a nail on slate, the speaker swathed in black and white. Like a magpie, Edward thought sourly, looking at the Pope’s envoy, the Dominican Father Arnaud.

‘So the damage is done?’ he snapped and saw the Dominican’s tonsured head raise up, the fat little currant nose twitch like a coney. It was a plump, friendly, avuncular face and a lie; this was the Pope’s best Inquisitor and you had to tread carefully for he had flames in those blackcurrant eyes.

He had come with a party of Clement V’s Inquisitors — Dieudonné, Abbot of Lagny, and Sicard de Vaur, Canon of Narbonne — complete with finger-wag abjuration on how, despite there being no torture permitted under England’s Common Law, King Edward had better not interfere with the Church’s treatment of heretics. God willed it.

The combination of Pope and French King was too strong for Edward to oppose and he had been forced to relinquish the Templars he held into the grip of the Church. Now matters had changed and Edward was warmed by a secret smile he never allowed to get to his lips: Clement was dead and the cardinals couldn’t agree. There was no Pope. Sede vacante.

That will teach the Church to preach to me …

‘Do you preach so, Father Arnaud?’ he persisted, fired by the wine and moment. ‘As your late master did regarding heretics?’

‘The Holy See and the Inquisition have saved the lands of the west from heresies, my lord king,’ the Dominican replied. ‘I humbly offer that I have had a small part in this great work.’

‘You give yourself too little credit,’ Edward answered. ‘If you mean by “saved” that you have reduced the tax-paying tenants of France, you are correct. Though a little late for some, it seems, if you believe Grand Master de Molay was in league with the Devil.’

‘He was,’ Arnaud said, his voice rising. ‘And your lands are as palsied with such. Must be cleansed. God wills it.’

‘God forbid it,’ Edward snapped back, thinking what a sadistic child this new Inquisition was, a vicious dangerous toddler, petulant and prideful. Then he twisted his mouth in vicious smile. ‘I would concentrate on France, priest, where it seems a heretic’s curse can bring down king and Pope both.’

‘Of course,’ interrupted the smooth blandness of Sandale, sensing the banked fires rising in the Dominican, ‘His Grace the King is always cognizant of the decisions of the Pope regarding such matters. Even kings avow the necessity of bringing God’s Kingdom to fruition on earth.’

‘As your father acknowledged,’ Arnaud added to the King, smiling sweet as rot, ‘when he oathed himself to another Crusade. The holy places of Outremer must be returned to us.’

The implication of Edward taking on the role was clear and the King’s eye was jaundiced when he stared at Sandale; the Bishop wished the Dominican had taken a vow of silence.

‘Death absolves all oaths,’ the King replied eventually.

‘I am sure such matters will be more roundly discussed,’ the Bishop of Ely offered, ‘once the excommunicate Scotch are brought into the Grace of God and the Holy Father … when we have a Holy Father,’ he added slyly and Edward barked a mirthless laugh.

‘Aye — until then, Father Arnaud,’ he said, ‘there are only unholy Scotch. That land is full of heretics.’

He leaned forward, hawklike and stooping, it seemed to the Bishop of Ely.

‘But that land, pretend king or not, is part of my kingdom, which is not under abjuration and where we have no torture. Be aware of it, Dominican — especially since you have no Holy Father to appeal to.’

Arnaud said nothing, though the hatred hazed off him like sweat from a running horse. No, there was no torture permitted in England, he sneered quietly to himself, not when cold, starvation, chains and the odd over-zealous beating would suffice. You would not find a rack, a thumbscrew or a hot iron anywhere in Edward’s realm — yet men died being put to the Question, all the same.

Edward, losing interest in the argument, called for a song and his troubadour, Lutz, appeared from where he had been perched in some clean rushes. There were groans and a few mutters; Edward knew they were sneering at how the King surrounded himself with ‘Genoese fiddlers’ and even those he favoured said so.

They know nothing, Edward thought, gnawing his discontent like a bone. They sneer in secret at their king for having the ways of a simple country knight — and again for having the sensibilities to enjoy fine music, well played. None of them, of course, knew an Occitan master of music from a Genoese street performer. Or a lute from a lark’s tongue.

Lutz was a lark’s tongue with a lute, Edward thought and was pleased with the poetry of that, repeating it in his mind and working out ways to voice it for general approval. Then, like everyone else, he was captured by song.

The troubadour from Carcassone sang a few swift verses of the Fall of Troy, another couple of stanzas of the Quest for the Grail. Then he began the Song of Roland and, gradually, the place fell silent as his voice, sweet and silk-smooth, rose up and coiled round the expert fingering.

‘With Durandal I’ll lay on thick and stout,

In blood the blade, to its golden hilt, I’ll drown.

Felon pagans to th’ pass shall not come down;

I pledge you now, to death they all are bound.’

Thweng marvelled, then, at how it changed, how all those knights grew silent, how eyes misted. All in a moment, they were altered to something close to what they strove for and, when it was done, they embraced it with quiet, respectful pats on the table.

Even the lines that spoke of hardship in the service of a lord, of having to endure great heat and great cold.

Even of being parted, flesh from blood …

ISABEL

O for your spirit, holy John, to chasten lips sin-polluted, to loosen fettered tongues; so by your children might your deeds of wonder meetly be chanted. In honour of the eve and the day, the nun called Constance brought me St John’s wort and sat and combed my hair, a blessing in itself. Better yet was hearing the unseen street player, scaling out the monk’s chant on his instrument — Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La — to offer his own prayer to the blessed St John.

Ut queant laxis

Resonare fibris

Mira gestorum

Famuli tuorum,

Solve polluti

Labii reatum

Sancte Ioannes

I sang the words with him then: So that these your servants may, with all their voice, resound your marvellous exploits, clean the guilt from our stained lips, O St John.

As the blessed St John heralded the coming of Our Lord, so this feast heralds the coming of mine. Keep the hearts of Thy faithful fixed on the way that leads to salvation.