The Complete Kingdom Trilogy: The Lion Wakes, The Lion at Bay, The Lion Rampant

Headed, he saw with a sudden lurch of utter terror, for the ragged knot of wavering spears blocking the escape route, already beset by fleeing hordes of the desperate, where a familiar figure stood in the midst of a misshapen copse of shafts like a rock in a flood.

His father.

‘Sim,’ he bawled and started running, whether Sim followed or not. A figure cannoned into him, realised he was an enemy and spilled away, weaponless and panicked. Another came at him, swinging a sword; Hal took it on the shield, cut left, then right and lurched through the blood the man spewed down his front as he died.

His horse was flagging and, later, Thweng realised it had probably saved him, for it let Angels overtake him and smash into the pikes in front of him, a terrible rending, ripping sound of metal and splintering wood. The French Method, he thought again, seeing a warhorse leap entirely off the ground, as if trying to clear a fence. It smashed down and died almost at once, but the carnage it created broke the hedge of points apart.

Thweng hit the remnants, striking left and right, trotting through almost unopposed, a handful of knights trailing after him. The helmetless, white-haired man weaved out of the press, almost in front of him; behind him came a snarling, stocky figure in a torn, studded coat, who swung the tangle of a blue, white-crossed banner at the legs of Sir Marmaduke’s staggering horse and brought it down.

It was the tourney that saved him, the much-used roll from the saddle of a falling horse that had kept him in the fray many times before. He hit the scarred planks of the bridge and felt the pain lance into his shoulder – dislocated, he thought, perhaps even broken. Then he was up and on his feet, facing the white-haired man, who came at him, shield up, sword ready, his mouth open and gasping from weariness. Behind him, the man with the banner struggled to bring it upright in one hand and fend off the Angels clattering past.

A Sientcler, Thweng saw as his sword spanged off the cock rampant on the shield. Not the Auld Templar of Roslin, though – he took the weak return blow, stepped, half spun, smashed his shield forward despite the pain that stabbed him with and saw the old man go down, the sword spilling from his grasp.

‘My lord …’

An Angel had flung himself from his horse, his earnest bascinet-framed face flushed and concerned. He handed the reins to Thweng in a clear indication and Thweng felt a pang at the youthful, careless courage that put chivalry beyond life. He wondered where along the way he had lost it in himself -then the old man at his feet coughed and stirred.

‘Up,’ he said, dragging the man to his feet. ‘Sir Marmaduke Thweng.’

‘Sir John,’ gasped the man. ‘Herdmanston.’

‘Do you yield?’

‘My lord …’ the Angel said warningly, seeing men spill up the bridge to them. He cast the horse reins at Sir Marmaduke and moved to meet them, shield and sword up.

‘I yield,’ the old man declared.

‘Just as well,’ Thweng answered, dropping his sword and putting a supporting arm round him. He threw the reins away and, supporting the old man, hobbled after the ambling horse.

‘The pair of us are done up.’

Hal saw his father go down and roared. He hit the crush of men around the brig entrance, was caught and held by it like a fly in amber, struggled and cursed and raved to be free. He used his elbows and knees, snarling his way through them, stumbled and fell, found himself staring into the dead, blood-streaked face of John Fenton.

He forced himself up, there was a blow on his back that shot him forward, out of the press and on to his hands and knees again, then Tod’s Wattie was hauling him upright with one hand, the other still clutching the tangle of banner.

‘Yer da,’ he yelled in anguish and Hal followed his gaze, numbed.

Sir Marmaduke Thweng had hauled his father up and the pair of them were lurching away, like drunk friends from an alehouse. Hal screamed with frustration, for he knew his father had yielded.

The knight got in the way. He was off his horse, which wandered absently behind him and a brace of his friends stopped in the middle of the brig, uncertain as to whether to go to his aid, or continue protecting the back of Sir Marmaduke and his prisoner.

Hal knew, with a sinking lurch, that he was too late to free his father – then saw the knight in front of him, yellow surcoat stained and torn, the battered shield scarred, but up and set. Or, three chevrons gules, avec a fleur-de-lis – Hal had no idea who it was, only what it was.

‘Sim, Wattie – tak’ him alive. Alive, ye hear? Ransom.’

Sim heard and knew at once. Ransom this knight in exchange for the Auld Sire – he swung wide and Tod’s Wattie, cursing the flapping tangle of blue banner, went the other. Hal closed in, yelling, ‘Mine.’

Sim swore. If this chivalry matter was to be done right, it had to be Hal who did it, for he was a knight and Sim a commoner to whom no knight would properly yield.

They closed and the knight fell into a crouch, crabbing sideways; arrows wheeped and plunked round them – short dropshots, Hal realised, from the English bowmen on the far side, shooting overhead at their Scots counterparts.

He was fast and skilled, the knight. A tourney knight, Hal thought, used to rough and tumble, but not what was happening out in the pows and burns, where the kerns and caterans were butchering with no thought of ransoms, screaming ‘Berwick’ as a watchword.

Hal snarled and swung a sideways scythe that struck the knight’s sword and made the man yelp, the clang of it belling out. He fell back, hefted the shield and launched himself at Hal.

A point flashed, Hal twisted sideways, gasping as the cold slither of it rasped past his cheek, skidding along the maille coif, dangerously close to his eyes. He felt the skin-crawling lack of a helmet of any kind, turned fear to anger and swung; he felt the blow, heard the clang and then was away.

A cut left, then right; the knight whirled the sword in a fancy display of wrist and strength, closed in again, slammed his shield into Hal’s and staggered him, hooked it to one side, stabbed viciously so that his blade again glissaded along the maille on one side with a snake hiss.

The knight knew how to use sword and shield and Hal buckled under his attacks, while Sim growled, watching the men on the far side, trying to keep an eye on Hal, so that he could leap in if things went badly wrong.

The next blow tore wood and leather from Hal’s shield, bounced up and spanged off his helmet. Sweat stung his eyes and he could barely see, his breath loud and rasping in his ears. His limbs were made of melting wax and the sword seemed to have gained three times its old weight.

He knew he was done and the next blow ripped the sword from his grasp. He heard the knight cry out in triumph, thought of his father and gave a roar, hurling himself at the man like a battering ram. His head caught the man’s metal framed cheek and stars burst in his head; yet he heard the knight yell, high and thin with shock.

They went over in a crashing tangle of metal and grunts, Hal flailing his way past the knight’s shield, battering his bare face with quick, ugly stabs of his forehead, pounding the man with huge two-handed blows of his own shield.

He crashed the sharp end of it just below the man’s breastbone and heard the air drive out of the knight like a sick cow dying. He heard himself scream; his mouth was full of the salted metal taint of his own blood and his head throbbed with the thundering of his heart. He lost the shield, grabbed the knight’s bloody head and slammed it again and again into the timbers of the bridge, so that the bascinet turned slick with gore.

Then, suddenly, Hal was upright, weaving and staggering. The knight lay gasping, bloody, half-blind, dazed, astonished. This was not Tourney. Not even the worst of Melee was like this …

‘Sir Henry Sientcler,’ Hal yelled in French. ‘Do you yield?’

The fallen knight acknowledged it with a weak flap of one gauntlet.

‘Sir Richard Fitzralph,’ he replied in a weak voice, thick blood and mushed with the loss of teeth. ‘I am an Angel.’

‘If you do not yield,’ Hal bellowed, all courtly French lost, ‘ye will be singing with them, certes.’

‘I yield.’

Thank Christ, Hal thought and slumped, panting, to the slick planks of the brig.

‘My lord, where is Cressingham?’

Thweng turned as the rider came up, his face stiff with shock and bewilderment. The Main and Rear battles waited in serried ranks to cross, but fully a third of the army was gone and Thweng looked wearily up at him, then back across at the carnage.

‘Almost certainly dead,’ he said and the knight’s face paled, throwing his neatly clipped black beard into sharper focus ‘Taken, surely, my lord.’

Thweng turned to look at the maggot boil across the bridge, the howling, shrieking slaughter of it, then turned back into the knight’s shocked gaze and said nothing at all, which spoke loudly enough to turn the knight’s face paler still.

‘What should I do?’ the knight said uncertainly and Thweng pointed a weary flap of hand back to the eyrie perch of Stirling Castle, where he knew De Warenne watched.

‘Who are you?’ he asked and the knight, for all his shock, drew himself up a little. Proud, this one, Thweng thought wearily, to be so vainglorious in the face of all this.

‘Sir Robert Malenfaunt,’ the knight answered, his saturnine face sheened with sweat and so pale now that Thweng thought the man might faint at any moment. One of Lord Ughtred of Scarborough’s men, he recalled, and part of the retinue from Bamburgh.

‘Gather oil and anything that will burn,’ he said. ‘In a little while, a messenger will arrive and tell you to torch the bridge and retire.’

Malenfaunt nodded dumbly and Thweng could see the relief in him, that there had been a plan for this moment. There had not, Thweng knew, but it is what he would have done. In the end, it was what must be done – though God save us all when Longshanks hears of this.

There had been a moment when Malise felt the fire of it course in his blood, when he saw the blocked shapes crash on one another and heard the distant rumbling roar, the strange eldritch shriek of dying horses brought by a stray tendril of wind.

By Gods Wounds, he exulted, we are winning this. Scots are winning this. Then sense flooded back and doused any flames of triumphant passion. Rebels were winning this and so the Buchan and Comyn cause was not served by it, no matter how huggingly gleeful the thought of such a victory might be.

He hunched himself back on the horse and urged it on up the slope of Abbey Craig. This was none of his business, he reasoned. His business was with the Countess and a Savoyard mystery.

It took him until the sun was sinking to get to the baggage camp, which swarmed like crows on a ploughed field, and Malise was barely challenged, for the only men he saw were the ones hauling themselves in, or being helped by friends. Blood skeins slicked back and forth, giant slimed snail-trails marking the wounded and dying brought out of the fighting; no-one here knew who was winning.

He found himself numbed, almost fixed by the screaming, groaning, dying horror of it, managed to snag a passing brown-robed figure.

‘Countess of Buchan,’ he growled and the priest, his eyes haunted and the hem of his robe sodden with blood, blinked once or twice, then pointed to a bower with a drunken cross leaning sideways outside.

‘Hold him,’ he heard as he came closer. ‘Hold him – Jeannie, cut there. There – that’s it. Now stitch that bit back together.’

She turned as he came in and her eyes widened a little, then went flat and cold. She was bloody to the elbow, her green dress stained, her cheeks streaked. Hair fluttered from under the creased ruin of her wimple.

‘Come to help? Well done, Malise … take the legs of this one.’

Dumbly, Malise realised he had done it only when he was lifting the man. On the other side, the Dog Boy held the shoulders and tried not to look Malise in the eye.

‘Over there,’ Isabel said and was amazed when Malise obeyed like a packhorse to the rein. It was only when he realised that the man he carried was dead and he was stacking him with a host of others, like cut logs, that Malise stopped, then stared at the Dog Boy.

‘I know you,’ he declared, then curled his mouth in a sneer and dropped the legs. ‘The wee thief from Douglas.’

The weight of the released dead man dragged the shoulders from the Dog Boy’s grip and the man lolled, his head bouncing.

‘No thief now,’ the Dog Boy spat back, though his heart was a frantic bird in the cage of his chest. ‘Ye have drapped him short. Do ye pick him up, or leave me to struggle?’

Malise took a step, his mouth working and his face blackening, but found the Dog Boy crouching like a snarling terrier, not about to back away. It astounded him as much as it did the Dog Boy, but Isabel’s voice cut through the moment.

‘Christ, Malise – can ye not even do a simple thing like lift a dead man to his final place?’

Malise rounded on her.

‘Ye are to come with me,’ he said firmly and Isabel laughed and rubbed another streak across the wimple and her forehead.

‘I am busy, as you can see,’ she said and turned back to the next man being brought in, holding the side of his face together with both hands and screaming bubbles through the blood.

‘Now, lady,’ Malise roared, driven past the reasonable now. He grabbed her by the muscle of her arm, squeezing viciously as he did so, and she yelped, turning into the twisted mask of his face close to her own. The men who had brought their screaming friend in bellowed at him.

‘Enough of this, ye wee hoor,’ he hissed. ‘Yer man, the earl, sent me to bring ye home and, by God wummin, you come willing or tied, but you’ll come.’

The blow sent him sprawling into the mud and blood and entrails, face first so that he came up out of it soaked and spitting, to see the Dog Boy, triumphant eyes blazing at having shoved him in the mire.

He had no words, only a shrieking incoherent rage of noise as he whipped out the long dagger and headed for the Dog Boy, who looked wildly around. Isabel saw the red murder in Malise’s eyes and tried to step between him and his prey, but he slapped her sideways with his free hand.

The blow took her hard on the side of her head, burst stars and red into her and, for the first time, a real fear. Malise had never dared touch her before …

Men growled at that, Malise rushed at the boy, slipped and slithered, regained his balance – then the world came flying out of the corner of one eye and exploded with a clang in his face.

Men cheered as Red Jeannie lowered the skillet and spat on the crawling, choking man on his knees, his nose flattened and his breathing snoring blood in and out. He lurched to his feet, the dagger still locked in his white fist and the world reeling; Red Jeannie stood with the skillet held like a Lochaber axe, while other faces, pale, ugly blobs swimming in and out of Malise’s focus, snarled and spat.

They watched him back away, the dagger wavering in one fist. The Dog Boy looked wildly round for the Countess, but she was gone.

Malise found himself leaning against a tree and did not know how he had reached the place. The bark was rough and damp, the moss on on it cool on the crushing agony that was his face. He knew that he had been struck by something and was afraid of it, afraid to touch what had been done to him. He spat out two teeth, wondered how many more he had lost and hirpled away, to where a flicker of fires offered some comfort; he realised it was twilight and that, somewhere, he had lost an hour or two.

He had a horse somewhere, but he did not expect to find it anytime soon. Eaten, he suspected, by these animals from the far north. He sank down, away from the fire, starting to shiver with all that had happened to him, cursing the pain, the earl, the countess and God, who had all forsaken him.

Then he discovered that the Devil, at least, held true. The fire he half-crawled to, wary as a fox round a kennel, had two men at it, one lying in a shelter, one tending something in a pot.

‘Not be long, your lordship,’ the fire tender declared cheerfully. ‘Good kail brose and a wee tait of black bread will return the life back in ye, eh?’

‘My thanks,’ answered the man wearily and Malise saw the torn yellow surcoat, the arms on the front. A prisoner, he thought, and then saw the face of the fire-tender, red-stained with flame as he leaned forward to taste the brose on a horn spoon.

Tod’s Wattie. The belly clench of it almost made him whimper and he bit his lip, bringing more pain to his face. He started to back away, then stopped. The Lothian has taken a lord for ransom; the thought of such riches for the likes of Hal of Herdmanston and his crew burned fear and pain out of Malise in an instant. And Tod’s Wattie had his back to him …

‘Could use some meat, mark ye,’ Tod said. ‘But, parole or not, my lord, I dare not leave ye.’

The slumped figure moaned slightly and Tod leaned down to rake through the contents of a pack, hoping the lord Hal had captured would not die; he felt the burn of shame for having failed to protect the Auld Sire of Herdmanston, paused as if frozen, his mind locked back to the madness of pikes and screaming, the bloody dying and that cursed, tangling blue banner.

John Fenton had died, falling under the iron-shod hooves of those English knights escaping across the brig, and Tod’s Wattie still found it hard to believe the steward of Roslin was gone. He had known John Fenton all his life and now he was gone, as if he had never walked and breathed at all.

He shook himself; there was, he was certain, a peck of oats which might thicken the broth, shove some life into the English lord who would be exchanged for the Auld Sire …

The blow was hard and low on one side of his back, hard enough to make him grunt and pitch forward on to his knees. Furious, bewildered, he staggered upright and turned to see Malise standing there, his face bloody and misshapen.

‘Ye gobshite,’ he snarled and started toward the man, only to find himself falling. He thought he had tripped and tried to spring up, aware that the blow on his back had started to burn.

‘Not so cantie now, houndsman,’ Malise hissed, wincing at the pain it caused him, and now Tod saw the dull winking steel in his hand, knew he was knifed and that it was a bad wound. He couldn’t seem to get up, though he kept trying, watching Malise’s booted feet move to the slumped, groaning figure of the knight.

Malise found the pulse of the moaning man’s neck with his fingers. The knight stirred, half-opened his eyes, wet and miserable in their pits of bruising.

‘Who is there?’ he asked in French and Malise cut the throat and the life from him in a swift, easy gesture of point and ripping edge.

He turned back to Tod’s Wattie, gasping and clawing up the mulch with one hand, the other trying to reach round to the pain in his back. Malise’s grin was feral and bright.

Slick as lamp oil, viscous with fluids, thick with dead like studs on a leather jack, the causeway to the brig was Hell brought to the surface of the earth and Isabel staggered along it, half-blind with fear and tears, falling as often as she walked and with no clear idea of where she was, or where she was going. Away. Just away from the unleashed monster that was Malise.

Figures moved in the twilight of the dying day, flitting like crouching demons, spitting out incoherent curses whenever they encountered another of their kind as they crow-fought over the dead.

The smell was rank and there was a noise, a low hum like the wind through a badly fitting door, as those still alive moaned out the last of their lives, calling on God, their mothers, anyone. They had lain here all through the day, dying hard and slow and untended save for the birds and the pillagers.

Isabel stumbled, fell, got up and staggered on, the silent terror behind her pushing her forward like a hand in her back. He had never hit her before. Never. The leash on him was off and Isabel knew Malise only too well, knew what he was capable of.

She weaved like the shadow of a drunk, found herself staring, slack-mouthed, at a knot of half-crouched figures, growling beast-shapes, half-silhouettes against the last greying light of the day, half gilded by the yellow light of a guttering horn lantern. One turned and she saw the knife, blood-sticky in a clotted hand. His other fist held a long, raw, wet strip of flesh and his eyes a crawling madness; the others never looked up, simply went on cutting and growling, as if butchering a fresh-killed sheep.

‘Get away from here, wummin,’ the man said and watched her lurch away before bending to his work again. It was only later, when the stories began to circle like a black wind, that Isabel realised that they had been flaying the English Treasurer, Cressingham.

Not then, though. She realised nothing but shapes and terror. A shadow fell on her as she collapsed, finally, to her knees and she whimpered; Malise had caught her. She looked up, squinting into the twilight and, with that part of her brain not screaming, she realised there was a splinter in her knee and that she was halfway across the brig.

‘You hag,’ said a voice out of the great black shape, a snorting Beelzebub whose cloven hooves stamped on the splintered planks. ‘There is no plunder on this side of the bridge, only death.’

Behind him, she saw the flames of hell leap up. Not Malise at all, but the Devil …

‘Mercy,’ she sobbed. ‘Have mercy on a poor sinner.’

She said it in French and the black shape paused, then leaned down. A strong arm grasped her own, hauling her upright. A face, sharp, black-bearded and weighing, thrust itself into her blurred vision, studied her for a long, curious moment, then turned his horse, so that she was hauled after him in a grip of iron.

‘Move if you want to live,’ the demon answered and she careered after him, shackled to his hand while the flames gibbered and danced, only vaguely wondering, in that small peach pit of sense left to her, why the Devil spoke French.

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.