Kingdom 01 - The Lion Wakes (33 page)

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.’