The Lion Wakes

Chapter Eight

Balantrodoch, Templar Commanderie

Feast of St Andrew Protoclet, November 1297

Death came soft and gentle, yet harsh as haar, on the snow’s back. The news of it filtered down like the sifting flakes and crushed everyone with the chill of it.

The Hardy was dead in the Tower. The Auld Templar’s son was dead in the Tower. It was clear that the English Justinian, even though he was now in Flanders, had a long and petulant reach.

Worse still, the Auld Sire of Herdmanston was dead in Hexham Priory. Of his wounds, the messenger from Roslin said, but Hal knew better – his father, he was sure, had died of having been taken for ransom, at the realisation that he had fought bravely but with little skill and no strength, for age had robbed him of both.

He died from the knowledge that he had ruined Herdmanston, too, for the ransom would beggar the place and that, more than anything, Hal knew, had broken the life from the Auld Sire, like marrow from a snapped bone. The last thing Sir John could do to rescue the situation and all those who depended on him was to die.

And all because he had jumped off the fence, straight into the mire of a war where no-one was sure of his own neighbour. At the behest of the Auld Templar, too, which was worse still, for Hal was twice robbed of folk he held in high regard.

Now Herdmanston was threatened, because Hal had stayed and fought with his father, become a rebel for the Kingdom. The only saving grace in it was that the high wind of victory had stirred all the others off the fence. Bruce and Buchan, Badenoch and all the others – even the Scots lords who had argued the bit with Wallace and Moray the night before the battle – were all now committed to the Kingdom.

At least Wallace and Bruce and myself are all facing the same direction and foe, Hal thought.

The Dog Boy saw the misery etch itself into the face of Sir Hal, so that even the joy of the yapping, squirming terriers of Herdmanston’s kennels was driven from him by the sight.

‘Christ’s Bones,’ he heard Sim growl when he thought no-one could hear. ‘God and all his angels are asleep in this kingdom.’

The kingdom itself seemed asleep, as if so stunned by the victory at Stirling Brig that no-one could quite believe it. Yet the nobiles of the realm shifted and planned while the world draped itself in a mourn of frost.

Hal rode out from Herdmanston in a black trail to recover the body of his father. It had been brought by the Auld Templar to the Templar Commanderie at Balantrodoch in a lead-lined kist from Hexham and under a Templar writ which no sane man, Scot or English, would challenge.

The dour cavalcade from Herdmanston held Hal, Sim, Bangtail Hob, Ill Made Jock, Will Elliott and Lang Tam Loudon, all the men bar two from the square fortalice. The Dog Boy drove the jouncing, two-wheeled cart which would take the kist back to Herdmanston, tagging along like a terrier at Hal’s heels.

Sim knew that, for all Hal affected indifference, he was constantly aware of the boy and it was made clear when Sim saw him manage a wan smile at the sight of the Dog Boy’s face when they rode up to the Commanderie at Balantrodoch.

It was the first time the Dog Boy had been to the Templar headquarters in Scotland and it dropped the mouth open on him. Even the spital was a wonder. The roof was shaped like the hull of a ship turned upside down, to symbolise charity sailing about the world as a boat does on the sea. From the flagstoned floor to the apex of the roof was as tall as six men standing on each other’s shoulders and coloured glass windows spilled stained light everywhere. Even Hal was impressed, for it was the first time he had been inside the spital with enough light to see it clearly.

It was as wide as three men laid end to end, with king posts carved with gargoyles and the beams brightly painted and marked at regular intervals with the Beau Seant, the white banner with its black-barred top that marked the presence of the Order. Over each doorway was etched Non nobis, Domine, non nobis sed nomini tuo da gloriam, the beginning of the first verse of Psalm 115, ‘Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory.’

Each bedspace, motifed in dark red and gold, was an alcove with drawn curtains for privacy and a table with its own pewter bowl, goblet and copper vessel. Across one end was a small but beautifully appointed chapel, so arranged that, when the door was opened and the rood screens drawn back, patients could attend Mass and follow the service without moving from their beds.

It was, Hal thought, a good place to be ill-healthed, was the Commanderie Hospital of Balantrodoch. There were six people trained to heal those Poor Knights wounded or fallen sick in the charge of the Chaplain – but they were not for the shivering mass outside the garth.

Like an accusing stare, they were huddled and ragged, the sick and well cheek by jowl and no way of really telling which was which. Hands and eyes pleaded for food, or water, or hope and the voices were a long, low hum of desperation -but these were the Knights Templar, not the Knights of the Hospital; charity was not their reason for being and the fine spital was for care of the Templars’ own. Yet the Hospitallers’ own headquarters at Torphichen was swamped and the ones around Balantrodoch were the truly desperate and abandoned.

Outside, the garth of the Commanderie was a silent, still wasteland of rime, a world shrouded in a winter mist that turned the sun to a silver coin. The worst poor, first victims of the unreaped, burned-out harvests and the early winter, had come here looking for hope and the plunder the army had wrenched from the English March – but there was little enough for fighting men, let alone bairns and women and the old. They had already started dying.

The sensible stayed in their homes and battened them; even then there were bodies found, frozen dead, with desperate hands bloody from scrabbling in the iron ground of kitchen gardens for the last remnants.

The world was gaunt and hungry, a dark rune of women and bairns and men, all half-starved, ragged and dirty with the carts they had trundled this far stuffed with the useless-ness of their old lives – wooden stools, tin pots, ploughshares, tools for smithing, for farming, for carpentry. Mostly, the carts were full of misery and draped with makeshift shelters, the people in them clotting the lands round the Temple with their rubbish, their pleading, the smell of their sullen threat and fear.

There were fires and folk fought to defend the wood of their old tables, their carts and chairs. There were no horses or ponies – if there ever had been for some of them – and the meat was either carefully hidden, or bartered for other foods and fuel.

This was the price of red war, on both sides – the victorious Scots starved because the harvests rotted unreaped in the fields. The defeated English starved because the Scots harried them in the herschip, vicious raids for the plunder of food as much as riches, raids that ravaged Northumberland from Cockermouth to Newcastle.

They ravaged the lands under the sheltering bulk of Barnard Castle and, if any noted that this was Balliol’s English fortress, they stayed their lip and kept to a slaughter made bloodier still by the vengeful battle cry of ‘Berwick’.

All this barely kept the army alive, though there was little of it left; men were taking what they could and going home in the hope of feeding their own kin through the winter.

The desperate came after the army like crows round a plough, risking the danger in it for the chance of a meal. Hal watched well-armed men arrive with a cart and start doling out maslin bread, the flour mixed with sawdust, saw the snatching hands and darting feet of those clutching the prize and wary of others lurking on the fringes to take it from them.

Hal, Sim and the others from Herdmanston had been stunned to find themselves riding into the midst of the slowly disintegrating Scots army and the desperate hopeful who trailed after it like gulls following a fishing boat. It was the Dog Boy who pointed out the lack of children, which made everyone realise it and look the harder, finding none; like their parents, the children were too cold, too tired from lack of food and there was no play, only forage.

A child found gnawing the stone of the chapel at Balantrodoch was taken to the Chaplain himself, Walter de Clifton, and, before the girl died, she claimed that the walls were made of gingerbread and that she was in the Land of Cockaigne, where fences were made from sausages and grilled geese flew directly on to your tongue.

She said this, smiling through a mouth of blood, and even the stern Sir Walter felt beaten by the hopelessness of it all -though the Templar Master of Scotland himself was unmoved and more concerned about the interruption to the Order’s routine. He called himself Brother John of Sawtrey and, for all his pious devotionals, Clifton thought, was a haughty void of Christian charity.

‘Christ’s Bones, Hal, this is a poor sight,’ Sim growled, shaking his head. ‘Winter has not even bitten hard yet.’

Hal had half expected something like this and was not so surprised by it, though the bleakness wasted his heart.

He and the other Herdmanston men had quit the herschip in mid-October and gone home. Wallace had permitted it, Hal knew, because he had seen the sickness in Hal’s soul over the capture of his father, the death of Tod’s Wattie and the knight, Fitzralph – and the loss of Isabel, who had simply disappeared from view. Not even Wallace knew if she lived or died – but offered the consolation that she had last been seen in the company of a knight fleeing Stirling, which meant ransom sooner or later. No-one would pass up the cost of a Countess.

The army had wandered, seemingly aimless, with little discipline and only one purpose – to winter itself on the English. After a few weeks of mindless burning and harrying had scorched the anger out of him, Hal wanted away and Wallace agreed, his own gaunt face blazoned with eyes as haunted as a midnight graveyard.

Hal and the others had ridden home with their share of plunder, to the cold comfort and tears of those left to care for the solid square tower and barmkin of Herdmanston. Tod’s Wattie, wrapped and kisted up, had been delivered weeks before and decently buried at Saltoun, so the Herdmanston men trooped out to pay their respects and then shouldered their bags and burdens, nodded to one another and went home to their pinch-faced weans and wattle-and-daub hovels.

The Auld Templar, wasted by cold and effort to a husk of himself, rode over from Roslin because he knew the burning concern folded into Hal’s soul – knew also that the young lord blamed him for the capture of his father.

He tried to make some amends, with news he knew Hal would want and, if the truth was told, had called in favours with Templars everywhere to find it out, driven by his own sense of guilt that Hal was right, that he had asked too much of others in pursuit of his own devisings. Pride, anger and worse, he thought, while he knelt in the cold of Herdmanston’s wee church, aware of the garishly painted tree, each branch holding one depiction of the Seven Deadly Sins.

God save me, he prayed, but there was no comfort in it and less in Hal’s face when, eventually, they met in Herdmanston’s hall.

‘Taken south, I hear,’ he said into the flat, cold stare of Hal’s welcome. ‘Her and yer father both. We have Stirling Castle under siege and, with a tait of luck, it will fall sooner rather than later, which will give us Sir Marmaduke Thweng, Fitzwarin and a wheen of lesser lights to trade.’

When Hal said nothing at all, the Auld Templar bowed his head.

‘We will get the Auld Sire back, never fear, and mayhap the Countess Buchan as well – whoever holds her will demand ransom soon enough.’

Then he raised it up, for nothing could keep him staring at the floor for long.

‘Though I doubt ye will find much happiness returning her to her husband.’

Then came the litany of deaths that left Hal in the great grey emptiness that was now Herdmanston and sent the Auld Templar south on his pilgrimage to fetch the body, scourged by guilt. He stopped at Herdmanston to tell Hal what he planned and spoke only to Sim, riding away with two servants and a cart, no more than dark figures on a rimed landscape.

On that same day, of hissing wind and snow swirling into the half-frozen mud, Hal stood by the grey stone cross and watched a robin sing lustily, flaming breast puffed out as if it was spring.

Nearby, the small, half-built stone chapel that his father had petitioned the Franciscans at Saltoun to build was a rime of ice, no more than a cold catacomb for his mother’s bones and a mortuary jar with her heart. Now her husband would lie beside her and Will Elliott patiently, painstakingly, carved out the marks that Father Thomas, the Franciscan from Saltoun who had been part of the price for the chapel, had scratched as a guide on the kist.

Hic est sepultus Sir John de Sientcler, miles militis.

In time, the bones of Hal’s wife and son would be translated into the chapel. In time, he was to enlarge it for the glory of the Sientclers of Herdmanston and, in time, he would lie in it himself. Yet, for all the black dog of it, Hal could not think fully on that chill place, or the cross itself, for thinking of where Isabel was and how she fared.

Sim had no-one waiting for him, save a brace or two of women who would welcome him, and no other home but the tower at Herdmanston. He found, to his surprise, that he and the others were greeted as lions and heroes, that anyone who had fought with Wallace at Cambuskenneth was entitled to respect and a fete.

The Dog Boy found the delight of a straw mattress by a fire and two hot meals a day, mean though they were. Yet he missed Tod’s Wattie, like the nag of something valuable mislaid.

When they clacked into Balantrodoch, they found the Auld Templar standing over the kisted up remains of Hal’s father, the lid off to show his swaddled body, bared face stiff with rime, sunken and blue. .. it was so cold there had been little need of the lead lining for the box, but the Auld Templar had done it anyway and rumour had it he had stripped it from the gutters and roof of Hexham Priory.

His own face shocked all who saw it, for the death of his son, following hard on the loss of John Fenton, chewed on him, harsh as a dog’s jaw. His pale cheeks were sunk, the eyes violet rimmed and, to those who had always thought the Auld Templar indestructible, the stoop of his bony shoulders frightened them. Hal remembered him, scant few months before, charging over the bridge with his hammer swinging left and right and, for a moment, felt some of the old love he’d had for this man.

It came to Hal that, if he thought grief hugged Herdmanston, then it must be throttling Roslin, where a woman wept now for her dead brother, her missing husband and the husband’s dead father, while her weans stood, bewildered. The Auld Templar, Hal thought, was the mortar that kept Roslin from dissolving into tears and for all I find him guilty of driving my da to his doom, I cannot hate him entirely.

And all this to the victors.

The Auld Templar greeted Hal with a nod, was surprised at the brief, shared moment of warmth that was no longer than the beat of a bird’s wing.

‘Christ be praised,’ the Auld Templar managed to husk out.

‘For ever and ever,’ came the litanied response and men crossed themselves.

There was precious little else to be shared round at Balantrodoch – when they came out of the crowded entrance to the Temple precincts, a sullen crowd, half begging, half resentful, watched them and their horses hungrily.

‘Stay here,’ Hal said to the Bangtail Hob, looking round. ‘Sim and I will find out if there is a possibility of quarters here. If we leave our mounts they will be eaten by the time we get back.’

Bangtail nodded, looking at Ill Made Jock, the Dog Boy, Will Elliott and the handful of others who made up the party; he wished they had come properly armed.

Inside, his breath smoking in the chill stone of the place, Hal came to a halt in mid-step, so that Sim had to dance to one side to avoid walking up his heels. He glared, then saw what had stopped Hal in his tracks.

‘Herdmanston,’ said Bruce, nodding in a grim way. He looked groomed and trimmed, healthy and young in his swaddling, fur-collared cloak, his shadow Kirkpatrick behind him. There were grim, spade-bearded knights behind him, crow-black save for the white cross that marked the Order of St John and that made Hal pause.

‘You made good time, my lord,’ Hal managed, ‘seeing as how my father is not more than a five-day dead.’

Bruce grunted, his lip pensive, thought about the lie of it, then decided Hal needed better.

‘I did not come for your father,’ he declared, ‘though it is a sore loss, all the same. A good man lost – though the cause he fought for was fine.’

He cocked his head sideways a little and smiled.

‘Ye fought in it, I hear,’ he added. ‘A born rebel Scot, it appears, Sir Hal – ye even contrived to rebel against me at the time.’

‘A happy anticipation,’ Hal answered flatly, which made Bruce lose his smile.

‘As well ye won, then,’ he countered, ‘otherwise you would not be back in the fold of my care.’

Hal said nothing, aware that he was still shackled to Bruce thanks to his fealty to Roslin. For all his passion to oppose the captors of his kin, the Auld Templar was not fool enough to attach himself to Wallace, victor or not. After what had transpired, Hal thought bitterly, it is good, if a little late, that the Lord of Roslin reins in his nature.

Bruce mistook Hal’s silence for passive acquiesence to his censure, which mollified him. He smiled at Hal, nodding his head to where a familiar figure, bulked in wool, rolled through the clamouring press of begging hands, ignoring them all with a bland, fixed smile.

‘I came down from the parliament at Torphichen with John the Steward there,’ Bruce said, his face like an ice wall, ‘to tell Wallace that Moray died. Since it seems he is too busy to attend it in person.’

‘Died on St Malachy’s day,’ the Steward boomed, coming into the tail end of this; Hal saw Bruce wince and wondered at it, but only briefly. Another death – but he was now so numbed by them that the loss of Sir Andrew Moray, who had been hovering at the edge of it since the battle at Cambuskenneth, was muted.

‘It was a curse for him, if no-one else,’ the Steward said pointedly and Bruce managed a wan smile, while inwardly heaping another curse of his own on the pile dedicated to all those who offered continual, harping references to St Malachy.

‘A curse for everyone,’ Kirkpatrick muttered, ‘since it leaves Wallace as the realm’s sole hero and commander of the army.’

The Steward shot him a glower, then drew his cloak round him, shivering.

‘Just so. Now we will confirm him a sole Guardian, as we agreed at Torphichen.’

‘In the name of King John Balliol,’ Bruce added, his voice slathered with bitterness.

‘Indeed,’ the Steward replied blandly. ‘Bishop Wishart would say the same were he not fastened up in Roxburgh, prisoner of the English – which is a sore loss to the Kingdom.’

He smiled into the storm of Bruce’s face.

‘At least all the nobiles of the Kingdom are together at last. You and the Earl of Buchan, the Comyn of Badenoch and all the rest of us gentilhommes will stand side by side as we did at Torphichen’s parliament, smile and agree to it. God’s Wounds, if I can thole it, then you can as well.’

They would, since the alternative, Hal saw, was either the Red Comyn of Badenoch or The Bruce as Guardian, and neither faction would agree on that. Small wonder that the parliament had been held at Torphichen, with its preceptory to the Knights of St John a long-known sanctuary unlikely to be breached by murder. He wondered what Wallace had to say and wished he had not come here at all, plootering back into the mire of it all. At least Herdmanston had been a relief from that.

He made enough small talk to be polite then left, conscious of the gimlet eyes of Kirkpatrick following him, making the small of his back itch. Hal did not care for Kirkpatrick, thought him no better than Buchan’s man, Malise. The death of Fitzralph and Tod’s Wattie both burned and haunted him, for he knew who had done it – Christ’s Wounds, they all knew who had done it – but had no proof to offer that would bring the man to justice.

It was a day for the black dog to howl, a dreich, frozen world of misery, from the hungry suffering of the living, to the cowled loss of the dead. Loading his father on to a cart was almost an afterthought in the swirl of events, for the real business of Balentrodoch was for the great and good to agree that Wallace be made sole Guardian now that Moray had died.

It was not an easy business for anyone, especially Hal and the Herdmanston men, for the Earl of Buchan stood no more than a score of paces away with his kinsman, the little stiff-faced Red John Comyn standing in for his father, the sick Black John, Lord of Badenoch.

For all Buchan was an Earl, it was the vain little strut of Red John who mattered, since he was, after Balliol himself, invested with the main claim to the Scots throne in opposition to the Bruces.

The Buchans and Comyn glowered at Bruce and Hal alternately, while Hal and the others had to stand, ruffed as guard dogs and barely leashed, watching Buchan and the skulker at his back – Malise Bellejambe. It gave them no pleasure to see his battered, broken-nosed face, though he had the sense to stay quiet and keep it out of the line of sight of men he knew trembled on the brink of springing at him with blades.

They had come to append seals to previous agreements, now written up in crabbed writing by a slew of inky-fingered clerks. There were few surprises in the entire affair save one and it was clear that it was not a surprise to the Steward or the Bruce entourage, though it stunned everyone else, even Wallace. Numbed with a genuine grief over the death of Moray, he walked like a man underwater, saying little while argument, mostly for the sake of it and to score points one off the other, rolled over his head between Bruce and the Comyn.

In the end it came down to a half-hearted excuse by the Comyn that Wallace was not a knight, so could hardly be elected sole Guardian, commanding the gentilhommes of the community of the realm.

‘A fair point,’ the Steward admitted, stroking his neat beard, his shaved-fresh cheeks like spoiled mutton in the cold of the Temple chapel. Buchan looked at Red Comyn and they both scowled suspiciously back at the noble; they had not been expecting agreement.

‘Time he was made a knight, then,’ the Steward decreed and Bruce, on cue, stepped forward grinning, to be handed a naked sword unsheathed by Kirkpatrick in a slither of noise that made everyone give ground a little and clap hand to hilt.

‘Kneel, William Wallace,’ Bruce commanded and the man did so, like some stunned ox about to be slaughtered. Hal saw the Comyn faces blazing with anger at having been so outflanked and upstaged – and having to swallow it until they choked.

The ceremony was over in an eyeblink. No vigil, or final blow either – even Bruce could not find it in himself to strike Wallace. Someone should, Hal thought, if only to wake the man up; he turned away, ruffled as a windblown cat by the whole affair.

He had planned on finding lodging for the night at the Temple, but that seemed unlikely and it was now late; it would be a long night’s ride back to the nearest shelter, a farmstead with a decent – and starving-empty – cruck barn on the road back to Herdmanston.

Hal was giving orders for it when the Chaplain came up, white robes bright in the twilight.

‘Sir William requested lodging for you and your party,’ he said. ‘He would deem it a considerable favour if you would stay and attend him later. Of mutual benefit, he says.’

For a moment, Hal was confused, then realised the ‘Sir William’ was Wallace. The title did not sit well even with the man himself, who was with three others in a cramped room of the guest quarters. One was Bruce, the second was the brooding Kirkpatrick and the third, Hal saw with some surprise, was the grim hack face of the Auld Templar.

‘Well,’ Wallace was saying as Hal was ushered in by a hard-faced kern, ‘ye have had your wee bit fun – now ye will have to live with it.’

Bruce flapped a dismissive hand.

‘That was Buchan and Badenoch,’ he answered curtly. ‘They will say black if I say white. I would not put much stress on what they think of your knighting.’

‘Sheep dressed as lamb,’ Wallace spat back. ‘At best. Gild it how ye will, tie what bright ribbons ye care on it – I am still the brigand Wallace, landless chiel of no account.’

He paused then and offered a lopsided grin out of the haggard of his face.

‘Save that I am king in the name and rights of John Balliol,’ he added softly. ‘And the commonality of this realm esteem me, even if the community does not.’

Hal saw Bruce’s eyes narrow at that; the idea of Wallace being king, in any name, was not something he liked to dwell on even if he saw that Wallace was being provocative.

The Auld Templar saw it too and tried to balm the wounded air.

‘Ye would have a hard time at a crowning, Sir Will,’ he said lightly. ‘No Rood, no Crowner – and no Stone of Scone.’

Wallace, taking the hint, offered a wan smile of his own.

‘That last is an especial loss to the Kingdom,’ he said. ‘Though it guarantees the surety of any Guardian – without the Stone there can never be a new king, only the one we have already.’

Hal braced himself for a snarling storm from Bruce, always jealous of his claims to Balliol’s crown, and was rocked back on his heels when the Earl smiled sweetly instead.

‘Indeed,’ he said, then turned to the Auld Templar. ‘As you say, Sir William – such a loss cripples kingship.’

‘Just so,’ the Auld Templar muttered, his face strange enough to make Hal look more closely, before the old man’s next words drove curiosity out of him.

‘Young Hal,’ he said with a bow, which Hal gave back. ‘I am right sore about your father. I hear he fought bravely.’

‘He is… was… an an auld man,’ Hal answered brusquely, which was as far as could go in forgiveness. The Auld Templar acknowledged it with a nod and a wry smile, though his eyes were still and steady on Hal’s face.

‘It was an ill day.’

‘For some more than others,’ Hal replied, sullen with the memory of Tod’s Wattie and John Fenton.

‘Fitzralph was also a hard loss to bear,’ the Auld Templar replied pointedly and saw Hal bristle; he cursed inwardly, for he did not want an enemy of this young man.

‘Come, come,’ Bruce clucked. ‘There was blood let on both sides and no blame accrues to you for the death of Fitzralph.’

‘We all ken who killed Fitzralph,’ Hal spat back. ‘And Tod’s Wattie. And my dogs at Douglas.’

‘Aye, aye, just so,’ Bruce interrupted. ‘And yon wee scribbler Bisset in Edinburgh, I have learned. And his sister and her man. And others, no doubt.’

He paused and turned his fist of a gaze fully into Hal’s face, which was cold and flattened by the news of Bisset. Another stone to the cairn, he thought bitterly. He had liked wee Bisset.

‘Unless ye have proof, or witnesses, ye might as well add the crucifixion of St Andrew, the betrayal of Our Lord and the forging of every crockard in the country at the man’s door,’ Wallace was saying. ‘None of it will stick to him.’

Hal winked on the brim of it for a moment, then the reality pricked him and he sagged. Bruce saw it and patted his shoulder, patronisingly soothing.

‘Aye, the loss of Fitzralph was sad,’ he said jovially, ‘but I am here to put some of that right – we have taken Stirling and can offer Fitzwarin as ransom for Henry Sientcler of Roslin.’

That was news – the fall of Stirling had been imminent for some time, but the sudden capitulation was a shock, all the same. And, thought Hal wryly, Bruce announces it and so links himself with the glory.

No-one spoke for a moment, then the Auld Templar shifted.

‘He had a mother living, and brothers,’ he said. Bruce looked bemused and the Auld Templar turned his long-moustached wail of a face on him, like black light.

‘Fitzralph,’ Hal added and Bruce, seeing he was being corrected, thrust out his bottom lip; he had been expecting beams of approval and effusive thanks and been rapped across the knuckles instead, but he managed a smiling face on matters.

‘You are over-solicitous of a wee knight’s death,’ he countered, ‘brave though it might have been. There is more at stake than this – your own grandson.’

‘God is gracious and merciful,’ the Auld Templar growled. ‘He is also watching.’

Bruce acknowledged the fact with a display of crossing himself, though his face was a stone.

‘The exchange will be conducted at Hexham. I will take Carrick men and Fitzwarin,’ Bruce went on, ‘once we have all the writs we need to traverse the country peacefully. Sir Hal – it would be good of you to join us… I am sure the young Henry will be glad to see a kinsman.’

Hal looked at the impassive Kirkpatrick, then to the Auld Templar and finally to Bruce. It was clear the Auld Templar was not up to the travel and that Bruce knew it. Proposing Hal into his retinue for the affair was a considerable honour, though one Hal could have done without.

He managed to stumble out enough thanks to draw the Carrick lip in and Bruce gathered his dignity round him like a cloak then left, trailing Kirkpatrick in his wake.

There was a long pause while the Auld Templar looked mournfully at Hal and seemed about to speak. After working his mouth like a fish for a moment or two, he suddenly clamped it shut, nodded brusque thanks and left.

There was silence afterwards, then Wallace sighed and rubbed his beard.

‘Young Bruce means well,’ he said, shooting a sideways look at Hal, ‘though he cannot help but seek some advantage from it.’

‘Which is?’ Hal asked, still brooding about Malise Bellejambe and how unassailable he seemed to be.

‘Leverage with yourself,’ Wallace replied and Hal blinked at that. For what end?

Wallace shrugged when it was put to him.

‘You will ken by and by. He will not be backward in coming forward on it. He will find something in exchange for him using Fitzwarin to ransom yer kinsman. Besides -he is stinging over his own father, who was removed from command of Carlisle because of his son’s antics. Not to be trusted now, it seems. So Bruce The Elder has gone off with his face trippin’ him and the young Bruce is facing the prospect of his Comyn rivals triumphant and does not care for it.’

He stopped and shook his head in weary, wry admiration.

‘Christ’s Bones,’ he added, ‘the Bruces have a mountain of prideful huff at their disposal, have they not?’

‘I thought Fitzwarin was yours to dispose,’ Hal responded. ‘Since it is yourself who is Guardian. Him and Sir Marmaduke Thweng both belong to the Kingdom and so to you.’

Wallace chuckled grimly, a rumble of sound Hal swore he could feel through his feet.

‘Bruce takes pleasure in removing Sir Marmaduke to spend the Christ’s Mass with himself; keeps me in my place, ye ken. Reminds me that I am, for all the new dubbing, not anythin’ like a nobile, no gentilhomme with lands north and south. Like Sir Marmaduke, who is Bruce kin by marriage. So I am constrained to give him to the care of the Bruce, which infuriates the Comyn.’

He broke off and worried his beard with one hand, almost thinking aloud rather than speaking directly to Hal.

‘In turn, mark ye, I have ordered that Sir Marmaduke will be ransomed for Comyn’s cousin, Sir John de Mowbray, instead of being set ransom-free as Bruce wishes – and that is only to put the Earl of Carrick in his place, for I have a strong regard for yon Sir Marmaduke.’

He twisted his beard and matched it with a wry smile.

‘Ye see the glaur I have to step through? So Fitzwarin’s exchange is fine by me, even if the bold Bruce takes credit for it.’

‘Ye are Guardian of Scotland,’ Hal answered, astonished and Wallace’s smile was bitter.

‘Aye. As I was pointing out when ye came in – few of the nobiles like the idea. Christ’s Wounds, the Steward is the ox pulling this along and you heard him at Cambuskenneth, the night afore that melee? How did it go? “A landless jurrocks with a strong arm and no idea of what to do with it until yer betters tell ye” if I recall. Spat from a face like a bag of blood.’

He stopped and sighed.

‘I need Bruce and I need Comyn both. It was fine when Moray stood at my shoulder. Sir Andrew was their first choice and, by Christ’s Wounds I wish he had lived, for I would rather it were him here and me in the grave.’

His vehemence and clear pain at Moray’s loss stunned Hal to silence and it stretched like a shadow at sunset, to the point of painful. Then Wallace broke it with a growl that cleared his throat.

‘Go to Hexham, get yer kin hame and then forget this business entire,’ he said in a sudden, savage hiss.

‘The Savoyard…’ Hal began.

‘He is dead or fled abroad, it seems to me. Yet wee Bisset, God rest his soul, was red murdered and put to some hard questioning first. If it was Malise Bellejambe, as we all suspect, then Buchan is on the track of matters.’

‘So – all this footering after the Savoyard has gone for nothing,’ Hal pointed out bitterly.

‘It may be no more than another red murder for profit, by trailbaston long vanished. Or it may be Bruce’s men. Or Red John, or the Earl of Buchan, or even Sir William The Hardy afore he was carted away to the Tower,’ Wallace answered moodily.

‘The community of the realm is a snakepit of plots, as I am findin’ – and even Bishops are not abune poking their nebs in. My money is on Bruce, though the why of it eludes me yet – and probably will forever now. Best ye keep away from it, like me.’

He stopped and stared into the middle distance.

‘Anyway – Longshanks is coming and, win or lose, everything will be birled in the air by that.’

The name itself seemed to chill the air. Longshanks was coming and when he reached the north, he would, for certes, raise the Dragon Banner and declare no quarter. Everything, as Wallace said, would be birled in the air. Including the Countess.

‘Isabel,’ Hal murmured and suddenly found the great grave-shroud face of Wallace close to his own.

‘That especial you should forget,’ the Guardian declared firmly. ‘Bad enough ye should be trailing after another man’s wife like a wee terrier humpin’ a leg – but that it should be the Earl of Buchan’s wife is a writ for ruin. Nor does he need Malise Bellejambe to commit his next red murder on you, for there are laws and rights that will break you just as readily.’

‘There is him, too,’ Hal said, recovering himself and feeling a cold slide into him, as if steel had been thrust into his belly. ‘If I was to tak’ tent with everything else ye say, I would not forget the business of Malise Bellejambe.’

Wallace sighed and waved a dismissive hand.

‘Weel, I have done my duty,’ he said, ‘and warned you, both as the Law of the Kingdom and as a friend.’

‘The Law?’ Hal repeated and glanced sideways, to the great sheathed sword beside Wallace’s chair. Wallace flushed; the tale of Cressingham’s flaying had whirled like a spark, become an ember, then a fire that said Wallace now used a strip of the dead Treasurer’s flesh as a baldric – other strips had been dispensed all over Scotland. The fact that Wallace never denied it told a deal about how the Kingdom was changing him, even as he changed the kingdom.

He paused and then grimed a weary, slack smile across his bearded face.

‘Get ye gone. Do what ye must and I will likewise. It is better that ye forget the business of the Savoyard, but I jalouse that your neb is longer than your sense. So, if ye find the wee Savoyard and the secret he holds, I trust ye will let me ken it. Mark me – if this places a rope on yer neck for breaking the law of the land, I will kinch it tight myself.’

Hal saw the gaunt pain behind his eyes at that and nodded, then managed a smile as he turned to leave.

‘Fine turn, this,’ he said, grinning bleakly over his shoulder, ‘when a brigand like yourself becomes the Kingdom’s Sheriff.’

Spital of St Bartholomew, Berwick

Feast of St Athernaise the Mute of Fife, December 1297

The wind battered on the walls like a sullen child on a locked door, the chill haar-breath of it guttering the candles so that shadows swung wildly. The two men stood by the pallet bed and listened to the man thrash and groan.

‘Stone,’ he said. ‘Stone.’

‘He has been saying that since you brought him in,’ the priest said, almost accusingly. He had a square face with a truculent, stubbled chin and eyes that seemed as black and deep as catacombs.

The wool merchant did not like to meet those eyes, but he did it anyway, with as blue-eyed and smiling a stare as he could manage, for he needed this priest, this place.

‘He is a carver of stones,’ the merchant answered blandly, ‘for the church at Scone. An artist. Scarce a surprise that it should be in his fevered mind a little.’

‘A little? He has been repeating it more thoroughly than any catechism.’

‘A facet of his illness,’ the merchant soothed, then frowned. ‘What exactly is wrong with him?’

The priest sighed, lifted the crusie higher, so that the flame danced wildly.

‘Best ask what is not,’ he replied, then looked squarely at the merchant.

‘I do not ask how you came by him, Master Symoen. I ken you brought him here because of the nature of his condition, but there are worse matters than leprosy and I have to ask you to remove him.’

Symoen stroked his neat beard, trying to cover his alarm. The arrival of a half-babbling Manon de Faucigny, smelling like a dog’s arse and clearly diseased, had been shock enough, but this was… disturbing.

‘Worse than leprosy?’ he said and the priest laughed to himself as he saw the merchant put a hand to his mouth and step back a pace. He had seen it all in his years serving the Spital of St Bartholomew, which even the ravaging English had avoided – the lipless, noseless, rotting, foul souls who pitched up at the leper hospital were old clothes and porridge to the likes of Brother John.

Yet this Savoyard had everything. His blood was viscous, hot, greasy and tasted of too much salt. He had lacerations, ulcerations, abscesses, skin affections, partial paralysis, at least four festering bites from vermin and, almost certainly, a fever from one or more agues, each capable of killing him on its own.

‘And intestical worms,’ Brother John finished, seeing the wool merchant’s eyes widen until his brows were in his hairline.

‘Worms,’ Symoen repeated, hearing the dull clank of the word in his head, like a cracked bell. ‘Intestical.’

Manon was his nephew… he’d had hopes for the boy.

‘I can do little,’ Brother John said. ‘All I do here is mop brows and pick up the bits that drop off.’

Symoen stared at the priest, who broadened his lips in a smile.

‘A jest,’ he said pointedly, but saw that Master Symoen was not laughing. Still, the man was a considerable patron of St Bartholomew’s, so Brother John did what he knew he must. He offered every help.

‘I will do what I can,’ he said slowly. ‘But it is as if he opened the gates of Hell and guddled inside it. Every sin has been visited on him.’

The wool merchant nodded, licking his lips and breathing through his fingers, while the gaunt, sheened face of Manon swung wildly on the yellowed pillow.

‘Oh Dayspring, Radiance of the Light eternal and Sun of Justice; come and enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,’ Brother John intoned, and Master Symoen, in a daze, descended to his knees and clasped his hands, grateful not to be looking at the tortured face of his nephew.

‘Oh King of the Kingdoms and their Desire; the Cornerstone who makest both one: Come and save mankind, whom thou formedst of clay. Come, Oh Emmanuel, our King and Lawgiver, the Desire of all kingdomss and their Salvation: Come and save us, Oh Lord our God.’

‘Stone,’ babbled Manon. ‘Stone.’

Nunnery of Saint Leonard, Berwick

Vigil of the Nativity, December 24, 1297

The woman with the cross sat at the head of the table, where the head man would usually sit; many other women, in similar grey clothes, sat around her. Isabel had seen brides of Christ before, though not in their setting and was shocked at the removal of headcovers, the shrieking laughter, the splashes of wine.

The woman who had brought her in saw her face and laughed as the woman with the cross got up and came to Isabel, dragging her from the room by an elbow. The door was closed on the gull-chatter.

‘You were instructed to take her to my quarters,’ the woman with the cross snapped at Isabel’s guardian, who gave back a sullen pout. The sharp crack of palm on cheek made Isabel leap and her grey guardian reeled back and fell, her headcover awry; she cowered on the flagstones, whimpering and holding her face.

‘Obey,’ the woman with the cross said, soft and sibilant, then turned to Isabel. If she strikes me, Isabel thought, I will rip the face from her.

The woman saw the fire in those eyes and smiled at it. Not for long, lady, she thought viciously.

‘I am Anna, Prioress of Saint Leonard’s,’ she said. ‘You will be taken to my quarters and made comfortable.’

The other nun climbed to her feet, nursing her face with one hand.

‘This way, mistress,’ she said numbly and Anna’s voice was a lash.

‘Countess. She is a countess, you dolt.’

The nun cringed and bobbed apologies, then scuttled off so fast that Isabel had to walk swiftly to keep up, through a bewilder of barely lit stone corridors sparkling with cold rime.

The nun led her through a door into an astonishment. Isabel stared at the fine hangings, the clean rushes, the benches, chairs and chests, the fine bed – and the fire. This was the warm room of a great lady, not a nun, even a Prioress.

‘Countess,’ the nun said in a dead voice and Isabel felt some pity then.

‘That was a hard blow,’ she said and the nun looked bitter as a thwarted rat, then to the left, then right. Finally, she moved to the wall, holding the light high and, satisfied, turned back to Isabel.

‘This place,’ she said in a whisper so soft Isabel could barely hear it, ‘is cursed.’

The light made mad shadows dance on her face as she indicated the wall she had just peered at.

‘There is a hidden way to watch,’ the nun said. ‘He likes it. All the women here are his.’

Isabel felt a sudden deadening sickness, for she knew the ‘he’ the nun spoke of, had endured the company of him since he had plucked her from the burning bridge at Stirling. A demon she had seen him as then and though sense and better light had revealed him to be a dark, saturnine man, that first impression was not far from the truth.

‘Sir Robert Malenfaunt,’ she said and saw the nun shiver, so that tallow from the candle spilled down on to the back of her hand; she never flinched.

‘All the women are for his pleasure,’ she declared suddenly and half-sobbed. ‘They are brought here and never allowed to leave.’

Isabel remembered the griming eyes of Malenfaunt, surveying her in better light. They had lit like balefires when he learned who she was and she had disliked him from that point, even though he had given her no cause and treated her with scrupulous politeness.

She watched the nun scurry out into the dark and sat on a bench while the tallow sputtered. She tried not to be beaten by the crush of loneliness, the realisation that she would go from here but only back to Buchan. She tried not to think of Bruce and failed, so that the added weight of that sagged her head limply on her neck. She tried not to cry and failed.

Then, to her own surprise, she thought of Hal of Herdmanston.

In a chamber off the main refectory of the nunnery, the Prioress listened to her charges laugh in wild shrieks, flamed by the wine brought by their benefactor, who stood half in shadow, half in the blood of the sconce light.

‘Keep her fed, wined and secure,’ Sir Robert Malenfaunt declared. ‘And away from those harpies.’

‘Special, is she?’ sneered the Prioress and Malenfaunt smiled.

‘A Countess. From Scotland, admittedly, but an important one. From a powerful family in her own right and married into another.’

He leaned forward, so that his sharp, shadowed blade of a face cut close to her own.

‘Special, as you say. Worth her weight in shilling, so keep her fattened and untouched.’

He took her chin in cruel fingers then.

‘Untouched,’ he repeated. ‘I want none of your charges to put their grimy fingers near that quim.’

She pulled away from him, though her heart thundered, even as he peeled off her headcover and ran his hands over her stubbled scalp; it excited him, that style, so she kept it close-cropped for that reason. Fear and lust made her breath shorten to gasps and she knew he would bend her over the only chair in the room, throw her grey habit up and over her head and take her, grunting and panting like a dog. He did it each Christ’s Mass, to as many of the nuns as his strength and fortified wine would allow.

She was at once repelled and frantic for it.

Herdmanston, East Lothian

Ash Wednesday, March 1298

Hal watched the plough from the roof of the square block of Herdmanston, feeling the smear of ash on his forehead itch. He watched it with a warmth that had only partly to do with the sun, was as happy as any man can be on the first day of Lent, seeing his fields being turned back like bedcovers.

The ploughman was Will Elliot’s da, his two brothers darting in and out to heel exposed worms back into the ground, or watching for the twitch of an ox tail that showed dung was coming, so the brace could be brought to a halt, to dump their precious cargo into the furrow.

The earth was new bread. The frost had cracked it, the thaw and rain had watered it, a week of late February sun had warmed it and it crumbled, heaving with furiously busy earthworms, little ploughs shifting the earth into a bed for oats and barley.

Gulls screamed, the coulter-knife scooped up clod against the mouldboard, a great wave of new-turned earth rearing up, curving over and falling into a furrow. Below Hal, the Dog Boy was trying to teach the yapping terriers, all mad wriggle and fawning tails, some obedience and, from the laughter of those watching, was not having the best of it.

There was laughter, too, from the stone chapel where Father Thomas exercised his skills with a brush to construct a glowing Saint Michael, patron of the church in Saltoun, on the internal plastered walls – and emerged covered in ochre-red and looking like a man who had fallen in a slaughterhouse pit.

It was easy, on a day like this, to forget the winter, the war, the deaths. Isabel. Yet the world would not be kept back and its herald was Sim lumbering up the last steps, panting with climbing the winding stair to the roof.

‘Rider coming,’ he grunted. ‘It will be the messenger from Bruce about the ransom for Sir Henry. At bloody last – God curse all notaries and inky-fingered clerks.’

An uneasy truce had been agreed with the English, but raids continued – more from the Scots side than the English – and only the winter weather had halted them. Getting agreement on ransom, then writs of safe conduct to travel south had taken a long time and the weather had closed in the north until no more than a few weeks ago. The Auld Templar will be fretting at the delay, thought Hal. Not to mention Sir Henry’s wife and bairns, spending the Christ’s Mass without husband and father.

He watched the horse and man come up over the great expanse of open ground, studded with copses, that surrounded Herdmanston, a rise and fall that hid the rider for a time. It was only when he got closer that Hal started to feel anxious; the horse was lathered and had been ridden harder than a mere message about an exchange warranted.

The rider was from Roslin, a broad-faced man Hal knew slightly, a labourer rather than a soldier, whose right thumb, Hal noticed incongruously, was cracked open by cold and work. That must hurt, he thought…

It was a message from Fat Davey, who had taken over John Fenton’s duties at Roslin.

The Auld Templar had turned his face to the wall.

Cloaked in misery, they rode over to Roslin, where the Lady stood with her bairns gathered into her skirts and her lip trembling at the edge.

‘I am sorry for your loss, mistress,’ Hal told her, hearing the dull pewter clunk of the inadequate words.

‘Aye,’ added Sim and then tried to brighten matters. ‘We will ride south and bring your man home, mind you, so have comfort in that.’

It was a comfort, too, Hal saw, but only a little one. He met Fat Davey in the main hall of the stone keep that was perched on an outcrop of rock and surrounded by the timber and ditch of the old motte and bailey. They had started rebuilding Roslin in stone, but work had ceased when the Sientclers were captured, the money hoarded for expected ransom. At least they can start anew on that, Hal thought bleakly. Two dead, one to be freed and no money paid out at all.

Fat Davey was grateful for Hal’s offer to take the Auld Templar to Balantrodoch, as was proper. Him and his clothes, his maille, his equipage and his warhorse all belonged to the Temple in common; another knight would have it.

But not everything, it seemed. Hal found Fat Davey’s face staring into his own like a bleak moorland that sucked the life from any muttered commiserations.

‘It was too much for him, the loss of John Fenton and then his son,’ Fat Davey said, shaking his head. ‘He just took to his bed and stared at the wall.’

He paused, fought for control and wrenched it into himself.

‘Save for the once,’ he added, fished in his pouch and brought out a small linen bag, handing it to Hal.

‘He said, just before the last, that you should have this,’ he said, his cheeks a shadow of the squirrel satchels that had once bulged there. ‘For varying reasons, he said. Not least of them being ye are the only grown Sientcler free and in the world.’

Hal thought of the Auld Templar’s son, dead in the Tower and almost certainly bowstring murdered, or starved like The Hardy. Grandson Henry, father to the three bairns still at Roslin, was held in one of Edward’s own castles, Briavel in Gloucester and, with luck, would be home soon – if Edward continued to think Fitzwarin more of a gain than the loss of a Sientcler prisoner. Or was not simply feeling waspish over the Scots affair.

His shadow was long, dark and unpredictable, Hal thought and soon Edward Plantagenet would be back, when matters would rush like a flood. There would be no exchanges then, when Longshanks turned all his energy to the Scots; Hal had a moment of panic to be on the move, to have Henry Sientcler back with his wife and weans before the raging storm of a vengeful king broke on the world.

Hal realised that Davey was right – with his own father dead and the Auld Templar himself stiff in the neighbouring chamber, Hal was the only adult Sientcler left out in the world; the linen bag suddenly started to burn the palm of his hand.

He tipped it out, saw that it was a ring and heard the thunder in his ears for the seconds it took him to realise it was not the seal of Roslin.

‘Aye,’ Davey said with a grin, ‘I admit I was a wee bit facered when I first saw it. I thought the Auld Templar was offerin’ ye the keys of Roslin. He was awfy quiet and prayerful when he heard John Fenton had died at Cambuskenneth and the news of his son’s death cracked his heart open.’

‘Christ’s mercy on us all,’ Hal declared, astonished. ‘Roslin belongs to his grandson, Henry, whom we will bring back safe. And after him are his sons.’

He studied the ring. Sim peered at it over his shoulder.

‘Silver, chalcedony,’ he declared loftily, then looked blandly into the stares of the others. ‘What? It is a wise man who kens the look of baubles. Saves ye guddlin’ in a dead man’s armpit for the cess when ye can lift the real shine.’

‘What’s the markings, then?’ Hal challenged and Sim squinted, then shrugged.

‘A wee fishie,’ he said and Davey shrugged when Hal questioned him with silent eyes.

‘No wisdom from me,’ he said. ‘The Auld Templar just gave it me and told me to deliver it to yourself. His only words on the matter were that it was an auld sin.’

Hal studied it carefully. A series of lines drawn into a fish shape. The old Christ symbol from Roman times, he recalled vaguely, though he could not bring the Latin of it to mind. He tried it on, but his knuckles were too big.

An auld sin. Hal shivered.