The Lion at Bay

‘Hold,’ called a voice and Kirkpatrick whirled and struck, rat-swift and hard – save that his wrist was suddenly shackled. He gave a roar and a jerk, but Sim held the grip.

‘Christ’s Wounds,’ he spat. ‘Would ye kill a priest now?’

The wee priest, woken and brought to the body of the chapel by the noises, had fallen in his shock and sat looking up in horror at the glittering dagger and the gripped wrist that stopped it coming down on him. Sim let it go, moving swiftly to put himself between the dirk and the priest, whom he hauled up by the front of his robe, staring down into the little man’s anguished twist of a face.

‘Do ye ken me?’ he demanded and had to repeat it before the priest blinked and focused on him.

‘Ye are thieves an’ violators o’ the house o’ God … oooff.’

The air was driven out of him by Sim’s belly-blow and a second massive fist crashed behind his ear and sent him slamming to the ground.

‘Good,’ Sim said and Kirkpatrick moved to go round him. Hal caught the man’s elbow and hauled him back.

‘Mak’ siccar,’ Kirkpatrick hissed and Hal jerked roughly on the arm he held.

‘No need. You heard the man – he does not ken who we are and so can tell them nothin’. Have you no’ had killing enough?’

‘He has lots he can spill …’ Kirkpatrick hissed back, trying to tear himself free.

‘Not blood this night,’ answered Hal grimly and locked his stare with a hard one of his own.

The boom of the pounded door opening racked them from the moment; Kirkpatrick cursed and they were off like hares for the crypt door, scurrying through as smoke spilled out of Jop’s room behind them, stumbling down the crypt stairs and between the kists, then out into the rain-washed night, where they sucked in air and a mirr of rain soft as the lick of a fawning dog.

There was no moon, no stars, just the wet of the grass beneath their feet; then behind, flames flicked and Hal realized that Kirkpatrick had tossed the lantern aside in the crypt. Beyond that, a dull glow showed where the church burned.

The guards had come up fast, for they had been waiting, night after night, in hourly expectation of capturing the creeping, sleekit Wallace, and the dull clanking of the church bell had spilled them out, ready armed. They were holding axe and sword – one had a spear – with heater shields, maille and helmets so they thought they had the edge on three men in drover’s rags with no more than knives.

Hal cursed; the English garrison from Riccarton had not been part of their plan – though it was clear to Hal that it had been an integral part of Lamprecht’s.

The guards closed in; there was a wild whirl of grunts and the belling of steel on steel. Sparks flew from the blades and a spear from the shadows, flung at Hal by a desperate hand and falling short to skitter madly along the rutted track.

Sim’s roar was so close it made Hal’s ear buzz and he jerked back as a sword came at him, managing to fend it off with the dirk, though the blow numbed his arm and all but ripped the weapon from his grasp.

He ducked, spun, slashed and felt the blade catch, heard a howl. A blade slithered at him and he only just managed to turn sideways so that it slid through his tunic, leaving a strange cold line under his ribs. The man behind it stumbled on, unable to stop and off balance so that Hal’s knife thrusts, three quick viper strikes in his unprotected neck dumped the man onto the muddy track.

Kirkpatrick was snarling like a pit-fighting dog in a mad jig with two guards. More were coming up and the bobbing lights of their lanterns were clear; behind, Hal heard curses and the crypt door splinter, half turned to see the last flare of flame as more guards stamped out the fish-oil flames of the thrown lantern and freed the entrance into the chapel cemetery.

They were in deep trouble, Hal knew, as two men came at him. He stepped, half-turned and slammed a shoulder into the nearest, sending him reeling back and cutting him with a slash. Then something hit him on the back of the head and the world wobbled, a place of whirling dirt and muddy water.

He found himself on his hands and knees, forced himself to rear upright, slashing wildly, feeling the back of his head start to burn, hearing the roar of his own sucking breathing. His mouth was full of the salted metal tang of blood and he felt the sudden talon grasp of fingers on his shoulder; he wondered, almost idly, what had happened to the Dog Boy.

The hand wrenched him round and he swung weakly, felt his knife hand clamped and a voice hissed:

‘It’s me. Sim. Leave off that.’

Then, in the misted haze of his head, Hal heard the bawling of cattle and almost laughed. Sim, on the other hand, was cursing and dragging him sideways; the pair of them fell in the mud and rolled over as black shapes clattered past, bellowing their annoyance. A slim, dark shadow yelped and nipped at their heels.

Hal shook himself back to the road and the night and the mud, in time to see the little black cattle, horns like curved scimitars, stampeding off down the road in a scatter of mud and water and English garrison.

‘Time to be away,’ said a calm voice – Dog Boy – and they wraithed off into the night, Dog Boy calling up his cattle dogs as he went. By the time lack of breath forced them to stop, he was frowning, for one of the pair had not responded.

‘I fear it is killed,’ he growled. ‘Good Beauchien,’ he added, patting the other.

Beauchien, Hal thought and laughed, then winced at what that did to his head. Sim was fussing round his ribs and muttering, so that Hal realized, with a sudden shock, that he had been badly cut. Kirkpatrick nodded admiringly to the Dog Boy.

‘Timely appearance,’ he said. ‘That trick wi’ the kine saved our hides, certes.’

‘I had the wit of Lamprecht’s intent too late,’ Dog Boy said mournfully apologetic. ‘I am sorry.’

‘What wit?’ Sim demanded, peering at the dark stain along Hal’s ribs and tutting disapproval.

‘The daftie boy,’ Dog Boy said. ‘He wanted the shell from yon pardoner’s hat but it was only later that I realized he had asked for it before and also been refused.’

He stopped and stared at the slowly comprehending faces.

‘Lamprecht came here before and the daftie boy saw him. I am betting sure the pardoner went to see Jop – and then went to find us and the Earl Robert. I dinna ken why, but I was sure no good was in it.’

A plaintive bawling snapped the silence and Sim cursed.

‘Stirk Davey’s coos are scattered,’ he moaned. ‘The Riccarton English will be sooking the juice off steaks afore the morn’s done – and we are out by a pretty penny.’

Hal thought that a harsh judgement on a timely use of charging cattle, but his head hurt so much that he felt sick and could not speak for a long time. When he did, it was not cows that he spoke of.

Instead, his question fell on them like a crow on a dead eye, made them realize who was missing.

‘Where’s Lamprecht?’

CHAPTER FOUR

Lincoln

Nativity of Christ (Christ’s Mass Day), 1304

Steam from horses and riders blended with the fine gruel of churned up mud and snow in a sluggish mist that was filled with shouts and grunts and clashes of steel so that the men behind Bruce shifted on their horses.

‘Wait,’ he commanded and he felt them settle – all but brother Edward, of course, who muttered and fretted on his right.

Bruce looked at the wild, swirling mêlée, men hammering one another with blunted weapons, howling with glee, breaking off to bring their blowing horses round in a tight circle and hurl themselves back into the mad knotted tangle of fighting.

‘Now,’ Edward growled impatiently. ‘There he is …’

‘Wait.’

Beyond the mud-frothed field loomed the great, dark snow-patched bulk of the castle, where the ladies of the court watched from the comfort of a high tower, surrounded by charcoal braziers, swaddled in comforting furs and gloved, so that their applause would sound like the pat of mouse feet.

‘Now,’ Edward repeated, his voice rising slightly.

‘Wait.’

‘Aaah.’

Bruce heard the long, frustrated growl, saw the surge of the powerful destrier and cursed his brother even as he signalled the others to follow the spray of kicked-up mud. With a great howl of release, Bruce’s mesnie burst from the cover of the copse of trees and fell on the struggling mass.

Too soon, Bruce realized. Far too soon – the target saw Edward descend, the trail of riders behind him, and broke from the fight to face them, howling from underneath the bucket helm for his own men to help him. De Valence, he bellowed. De Valence.

Edward’s light, unarmoured horse balked and swerved as de Valence’s powerful warhorse reared and flailed with lethal hooves, the blue and white, mud-stained caparison flapping. Coming in on the other side, Bruce leaned and grabbed a handful of de Valence’s surcoat, took a smashing blow on his mailed arm which numbed it, causing him to lose his grip.

De Valence, off balance on the plunging destrier, gave a sharp, muffled cry and fell sideways, raking one spur along the caparisoned back of the warhorse. It screamed and bolted; de Valence, his other foot caught, bounced off behind it, yelling once as he carved a rut through the mud and into the dangerous, prancing pack.

‘Him,’ yelled Edward and his brother screwed round in the saddle as a figure – the one who had hit him, he realized – tried to get away from the Bruce men. ‘Rab – get him.’

Bruce reacted like a stoat on a rabbit, without thinking, seizing the man round the waist and hauling him bodily out of the saddle ignoring the curses and kicks and flails. He carried the man out of the maelstrom mêlée and dumped him like a sack of metal pots.

Malenfaunt, dazed and bruised, felt rough hands on him; someone tried to tear off the bucket helm, but it was laced to his shoulders. Then a voice, rough as a badger’s rear-end, bellowed into the breathing holes for him to yield. He waved one hand, sore and sick with the knowledge of what this might cost him – and at the hands of the Bruces, whom he already hated. Even the satisfaction of having saved de Valence from capture did not balm it much.

Bruce saw the man’s device, knew the man for Malenfaunt and rounded on his grinning brother.

‘We struck for an eagle,’ he said bitterly, ‘but ended with a chick.’

Edward scowled; the friendly scramble of tourney continued to whirl like the mad scrapping of dogs, to celebrate the birthday of Christ.

Abbey of Evesham, Worcester

The same night

Kirkpatrick slid to Hal’s side.

‘Gone to London,’ he grunted softly out of the side of his mouth, rubbing his hands at the flames of the great fire and not looking at Hal. He hawked, then spat in the fire so that the sizzle made those nearest growl at his bad manners. Kirkpatrick’s grin back at them – travellers and pilgrims all – was feral, as befitted his pose as a hireling soldier, rough as a forge-file and not to be trifled with.

‘Had that from three of his kind, bone-hunting wee shites like himself. Heading for Compostella, says one o’ them.’

‘They ken it is him?’ Hal demanded and Kirkpatrick nodded.

‘Aye,’ he said in a whisper. ‘An ugly dung-drop who speaks strangely and is named Lamprecht? Not hard to find even if he keeps his name hidden. Besides, he was a known face to the wee priests here.’

Hal stared moodily at the fire, while the wind howled and battered. There was snow in that wind and the travel next day would be hard and slow – they would probably have to lead their horses for most of it, so there was another curse to lay at the door of the wee pardoner, whose cunning had robbed an earl and almost led Hal and Kirkpatrick and others to their death. Hal shifted and winced; the cut under his ribs was still scabbed and leaking.

‘Should have watched him closer in the first place,’ Kirkpatrick said, as if in answer. ‘Should have dealt with him and Jop both in that night.’

Hal turned brooding eyes on him.

‘Easy as that, is it? Killed then or killed soon,’ he replied bitterly. ‘Scarce makes a difference – murder is murder.’

‘Weesht,’ hissed Kirkpatrick, looking right and left. ‘Keep that sort o’ speech laced.’

He leaned forward, so that his lips were closer, his breath tickling the hair in Hal’s ear.

‘That bell did not ring itself and it was clear that was what wee by-blow Lamprecht came for, not any Rood or rubies. He rang it out and set us in the path o’ the English garrison for revenge and now he has the power to do the Bruce a bad turn, for the Earl has revealed himself in his desire for the Rood, as plain as if he had nailed his claim to the crown to the door of St Giles. And if the Bruce suffers, we suffer.’

‘Jop is beyond us. Lamprecht is a creishy wee fox,’ Hal replied, ‘who has contrived to get us killed and failed. He is running and will want to take his ill-gotten goods away. We should let him.’

Kirkpatrick made a head gesture to say perhaps, perhaps not. There was merit in the Herdmanston lord’s appreciation of matters – the wee pardoner was certainly headed south, from monastery to abbey, priory to chapel, all places where he was sure of a free meal and a safe bed for the night. But the wee bastard had the Rood and Bruce, for all that pursuing it was a danger to him – and so all those round him – could not see it pass him by and do nothing.

Returning to London was certainly not safe for Lamprecht, Kirkpatrick thought, so it may be that Hal has it right and Lamprecht was planning to carry on to the coast and a ship to France. Back to the eastern Middle Sea, where his riches could be sold with no questions asked and where his way of speaking would not mark him.

‘He was daft to try what he did,’ Hal muttered. ‘He must hold a hard hate for what we did to him that night in the leper house of Berwick.’

Kirkpatrick flapped a hand, keeping his voice low as he hissed a reply.

‘We did nothing much – showed him a blade and slapped him once or twice. He was fortunate – for his partnering of that moudiwart bastard Malise Bellejambe he should have been throat-cut there and then.’

‘Your answer to all,’ Hal replied tersely and Kirkpatrick looked back at him from under lowered brows.

‘That way we would not now be dealing with a nursed flame that will not be put out as easily as spit on a spark,’ he said. ‘Our saving grace is that the wee pardoner is stupid enough to try and play intrigue with the nobiles, whose lives entire are spent in makin’ and breakin’ plots and plans more cunning than any Lamprecht may devise.’

‘Like Buchan?’

Kirkpatrick nodded grimly.

‘Throw a Comyn in the air and ye discover a wee man thumbin’ his neb at a Bruce when he lands. Buchan has sent yon Malise in pursuit of Lamprecht, to find out what he has that the Bruce chases.’

‘Death for the wee pardoner, then,’ Hal growled sullenly, ‘no matter who reaches him first.’

Kirkpatrick, swaddling himself in cloak, surged with irritation.

‘Christ, man, ye are a pot o’ cold gruel,’ he spat in a sibilant hiss. ‘Make your mind to it – the wee pardoner is a killed man and ye had better buckle to the bit if it is yourself has to do it. Else it will be us killed. As well that Jop is cold – as yon wee Riccarton priest should be betimes.’

‘Yon priest kens nothin’,’ Hal muttered bitterly, ‘though Jop might have explained what Lamprecht intended, had he been allowed to live a wee while longer.’

‘Aye weel,’ Kirkpatrick growled, aware that he had been hasty with the knife – but Christ’s Bones, the man was coming at him. The wee priest, on the other hand, was neither here nor there. For certes, Kirkpatrick said to himself with grim humour, he will, by now, wish he is no longer here – and explained to Hal, patient as a mother, why it would have been better if he had died.

‘The wee priest kens folk were spyin’ Jop out. He kens the name Lamprecht, which was spoke out for all to hear,’ he whispered, flat and cold. ‘That name has already reached Comyn ears, which is why Malise is sent out. It will, for certes, be whispered in Longshanks’ own by now.’

Hal said nothing, for the truth of it was a cold burn, like the wound along his ribs. Jop was better dead, if only for his own sake; the King’s questioners would not have stinted on their store of agony – for all Edward Longshanks proudly pontificated about there being no torture in his realm – and the priest would be telling all he knew to anyone who would listen.

The more Hal thought on it, the more he wondered about what might have been inadvertently revealed that night. His dreams were cold-sweated with what the priest might be saying, but Hal knew he would have been hard put to kill the man for it. Nor was he sure he could kill Lamprecht as coldly.

Yet the nagging why of it was a skelf in the finger. Why had Lamprecht come back to the north in the first place, after all that had happened to him? Just to risk himself for the chance of revenge on those who had wronged him, as he saw it? It was possible, as Kirkpatrick put it, that he nursed a flame of hate. And Buchan would be interested because a Bruce was involved in it.

‘Aye, weel,’ Kirkpatrick said in answer to the last, a short chuckle saucing his bitter growl, ‘as to that last, you underestimate the sour charm you exert on that earl – he might be spying the chance of vengeance on you himself. The bright shine on this is that Buchan, who can never resist the charms of seeing Bruce or yourself discomfited has sent Malise Bellejambe after Lamprecht and so he is let loose from being the chain-dog o’ your light of love.’

‘A perfect chance for me to rescue her,’ Hal replied laconically, ‘save that I am here.’

And five years lie between us like a moat, he added to himself; she may not even welcome a gallant knight’s rescue, never mind a worn lover with blood on his hands.

‘Besides,’ he added, bitter with the memory, ‘Buchan has already had vengeance on me. Why would he suddenly want more?’

Kirkpatrick, shuffling himself comfortable in the middle of a snoring, growling pack of other pilgrims, did not say what he thought – that perhaps, even now, the Earl’s bold countess had mentioned Hal’s hated name aloud. Worse yet, cried it out when her husband broke into her, as Kirkpatrick heard he was wont to do, like a drover earmarking a prize heifer.

It would be enough, he thought, to drive the Earl to visit some final judgement on the man who so cuckolded him. Christ’s Bones, if it were mine I would be so driven.

Yet it was not only the lord of Herdmanston that Buchan pursued, but Bruce. The wee Lothian knight was simply a hurdle in the way of that, for the Comyn would do all they could to bring down a Bruce. And the same reversed.

Somewhere, the monks began a chanting singsong litany and a bell rang.

‘No rest for any this night,’ he muttered in French.

‘It is the Christ Mass,’ Hal answered him, with a chide in the tone of it.

‘Aye, weel,’ Kirkpatrick growled back, ‘like most weans, He benefited from the peace o’ silence in the cradle. A good observance for these times, I am thinking.’

‘Yer a black sinner,’ Hal replied, with a twist of smile robbing the poison of it.

‘Ye are a dogged besom o’ righteousness, Hal o’ Herdmanston,’ Kirkpatrick answered, ‘but ye are mainly for sense, save ower that wummin.’

‘Christ,’ Hal growled back at him, ‘enough hagging me with that. If you had a wummin you cared an ounce for yourself, man, you would know the sense in what I feel for Isabel of Mar.’

Kirkpatrick laughed, though there was little warmth in it.

‘You once asked me as to what I wanted from serving the Bruce,’ he said suddenly. ‘So I ask you in return, Hal of Herdmanston – what is it keeps you here, if you carp at the work Bruce has for us? Siller? Your fortalice restored? Yon wee coontess?’

I miss Herdmanston, thought Hal. And Bangtail and Dog Boy, sent out to chase after Wallace and neither of them up to the task of it. And Sim, who oversees Herdmanston’s rebuilding. And women to talk to rather than swive in a sweaty, meaningless rattle. And bairns laughing, with sticky faces. And men building rather than tearing apart. And an end of folk the likes of Malise – aye, and Kirkpatrick himself.

Above all, there was her and the music of laughing she had returned to his life, a music that had ended when his wife and son slipped out of the world. A music that, for five years, he had lived without, with no prospect of it in the black void that was today, would be tomorrow and would be still the next God-damned year. That’s what he wanted back, what he hoped Bruce would somehow help him achieve.

‘Music,’ he said to Kirkpatrick and left the man arrowing frowns on his face.

Music?

In the end, sleep stole Kirkpatrick away from making sense of it.

Lincoln

The same night

Music flared loud as light, half-drowned by talk in the Great Hall, where banners wafted like sails and the sconces jigged in the rising haze. Sweating servants scurried in the sea of people, bright finery and roaring chatter while the musicians strummed and blew and rapped out Douce Dame Jolie as if Machaut himself were there to hear played what he had written.

Sir Aymer de Valence, limping and lush with glee, told the tale – yet again – of his daring escape from the clutches of Bruce by the mad expedient of hurling himself from his own horse into the middle of the mêlée. All the gilded coterie, the King’s close friends and those who wanted to be, applauded, laughing – all save Malenfaunt, bruised and furious that the sacrifice he had made for de Valence was no part of the tale.

‘Turned the German Method back on you,’ de Valence yelled across and Bruce raised his goblet in smiling acknowledgement of the feat, all the while studying the ones around the bright-faced young heir to the earldom of Pembroke.

Had de Valence paid Malenfaunt’s hefty ransom? Bruce pondered it; though his mother held the Pembroke lands, de Valence had the family holdings in France and so could well afford it.

If not him, then who? It was certes Malenfaunt himself did not have such coin, nor any call on someone rich enough, for all he was part of the mesnie of de Valence. Yet he had ransomed himself and his horse and his harness, which had not been cheap.

The music shrilled; dancers, circling in a sweaty estampie, bobbed and weaved and laughed. The slow drumbeat thump-thump, insistent as nagging, finally silenced the players; one by one the last of the half-drunk dancers stopped stamping, blearily ashamed. Heads turned to where the Lincoln steward stood with his iron-tipped staff rapping a steady beat and, behind him, the King.

He looked every inch regal, too, Bruce thought. He stood with one mottled hand on a dagger hilt of narwhal ivory and jacinth, coiffed and silvered, prinked and rouged, brilliant in murreyed Samite and orphrey bands, but draped in a fine blue-wool cloak – no Provence perse here, of course, but good English wool; even in dress, Edward was politic.

He had good reason to look pleased with himself, too and the lavish Swan Feast was simply the statement of it, fit for the monarch of two realms. With the French king humbled to peace and with his Gascony lands secured, Edward straddled a sovereignty over the island nation that none before him had ever enjoyed.

He was sixty-six years old – less than half a year would take him past the point of being the longest-lived king England had known. Nor, Bruce added moodily to himself, was he showing any signs of ailing anytime soon – it was clear to everyone that his young queen was pregnant again.

The Plantagenet voice was equally firm and ringing loud when he spoke, of discordance made harmony, of lambs returned to the fold. Bruce watched some of the lambs – Buchan and the recently freed Lord of Badenoch for two, smiling wolves in fine wool clothing, watching him in return and offering their lying, polite nods across the rushed floor.