The Complete Kingdom Trilogy (145 page)

Kirkpatrick had agreed while shooting Hal warning glances to stay quiet; he knew the Lothian lord would go anyway. He was sure Bruce knew that, too.

So, while Edward Bruce and Randolph stumbled down the muddy roads to Wark and out to Carlisle as the mailled fist, the King returned the bodies of Gloucester and Clifford – and the boiled bones of Humphrey de Bohun – with all due care and mercy, as the lambskin gauntlet. And turned a blind eye to Sir James Douglas, Kirkpatrick and Sir Hal of Herdmanston, riding off on their own towards Berwick with a knot of hard-eyed men.

The day dripped on, and then a rider flogged a sodden garron through the grey and skidded to a halt in a shower of clots.

‘He is left,' Dog Boy declared, wiping his streaming face while the steam came off him like haze. ‘Headed out to Bamburgh and then York with a great escort against capture.'

Jamie's face brightened with the possibilities at once, but caught sight of Hal's own and shrugged, shamefaced, abandoning the glory that might have been.

‘Well,' he said, ‘Love it is then, though you can scarce blame me for thinking of scooping up such a prize as Edward of England.'

‘Less risk in that,' Kirkpatrick growled morosely, but Dog Boy, shaking water from him, grinned into his damp-smoke mood.

‘Would ye not risk the same for your own wummin, then?' he demanded. ‘For love?'

Kirkpatrick gave him a jaundiced eye. He had a woman he would marry before too long and the bounty of that and the lands she brought was a glow in the core of him. He would risk much for that – but love? He had never considered love in the matter of getting wed and said so.

Dog Boy, bright with the joy of Bet's Meggy, little Bet and Hob, laughed at how the
nobiles
arranged such matters. Yet he had to agree with Kirkpatrick regarding the risk: he had watched the cavalcade quit Berwick, the hunched and smouldering King Edward in the centre of it, so there was a better chance of sneaking up the walls than if he had been there. A slight shift in risk, but welcome all the same and he said as much, to give heart to everyone.

‘King Edward has been given the advice the Holy Father gave to the beggar,' Parcy Dodd answered and folk shifted expectantly, for a story was as warming as the fire they dared not light.

‘I am half afraid to enquire,' Jamie Douglas said laconically and Parcy grinned his wide grin, the rain pearling on his nose.

‘The Pope is visiting town,' he began, ‘and all the people are turned out and dressed up in their best cloots, all lining the way from the gate, hoping for a personal blessing from the Holy Father. One stout burgher, a man of stature and local note, has put on his best fur-trimmed cloak and gold chain for the moment, for he is sure that sight will pause the Pope and that the Holy Father will bless him.'

‘A bad plan,' Horse Pyntle grunted, ‘for your clerical is a magpie for the shine and yon burgher will not, I suspect, own it long if he flaunts it at such a high heidyin.'

‘Ah,' Parcy declared, as if he had been expecting that very point, ‘but he is standing next to a beggar, a man with more stain and rag than cote and who smells like a privy on a hot day. The stout burgher thinks to impress His Holiness by handing such a man a coin at the crucial moment. Certes, as the Holy Father comes walking by, the burgher ostentatiously offers the coin, the beggar takes it, bites it with the one black tooth he has left and vanishes it into his rags. The Pope leans out of his litter then – and speaks softly to the beggar. The burgher is stunned; the Holy Father ignores him and passes on, having spoken only to the beggar.'

‘Aye, well,' muttered Yabbing Andra, uneasy at Parcy's constant blasphemies, ‘the Holy Father is more interested in the poor and feeble ones.'

‘Just what the burgher thinks,' Parcy declared cheerfully, ‘so he thrusts the rest of his bag of coin at the beggar and trades cloots with him. Then he sprints down the street – for certes, the crowd parts before a man who smells so badly – and flings himself almost into the path of the Pope's processing litter. Sure enough, the litter stops, the ringed hand beckons and the burgher proudly walks up to get the blessing he has worked and paid so dearly for.'

Parcy paused and grinned.

‘Then he hears, hissed in his now flea-bitten ear: “I thought I told you to get yourself to Hell away from my path, you beggarly misbegotten pile of shite.”'

There were a few loud barks of laughter, a lot of headshaking and admiration for Parcy risking his soul with such a tale. But they were cheered by it, all the same, Jamie saw – and they would need such heart for what they intended.

‘When it is darker, then,' Hal declared, capping the laughter like a candle snuffing flame.

They went back to sitting, dripping in the rain, and the Dog Boy thought of what he had learned: Berwick had been put in the charge of Sir Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke. The knight with stripes and little red birds, Dog Boy recalled, whom I almost tumbled off his fancy horse.

He is like snot on your fingers, de Valence said to himself. You think you have got rid of it and then, the Lord alone knows how, it appears again, on the other hand. He looked at the Dominican and wished him as gone as the Italian abbot and the King, both ridden off to the safety of the south.

Leaving me, he added bitterly to himself, with the ruin of it.

And it was a ruin. What was left of the army straggled south by a dozen different routes, too fearful of what snarled at their heels even to find time for loot and rape, too sodden to burn anything. The lords who were left would be of no help in bringing them to order; those who were mounted had long since vanished and those unhorsed were either already dead or taken.

The vellum rolls lay like white mourning candles on the table in front of him, a litany of lost lives and shattered hopes painstakingly scraped out by the clericals. Even now they were not complete; new revelations of the fate of the barons who had fought at Stirling were still being discovered.

One at least was accounted for and de Valence was soured to his belly at what he would have to tell his sister, Joan. Your son, the young lord of Badenoch, is not coming home – slain by the same God-damned Scotch rebels who murdered your husband.

Faced with that, the canting cadaver that was Jean de Beaune, piously name-changed to Brother Jacobus, was a misery de Valence could have done without, but the matter the Dominican had thrown at him would not be lightly dismissed. Yet de Valence vowed he would scourge the Cathar-hunting little prelate back to Carcassonne if he had to wield the whip himself.

‘The lady Isabel,' he persisted, ‘is within the King's Peace.'

More so now than ever, he said to himself, for she could easily become a counter in the game of ransom.

‘She has been accused,' Jacobus growled. ‘You shall not suffer a witch to live.'

‘The accuser is more of a Devil's spawn than the lady in question,' de Valence spat back. ‘Malise Bellejambe has been the creature of the Comyn for as long as I can remember, God forgive my kin for it. I know him well enough for he came to me only recently, hoping to slither his way into my patronage, and I sent him away as I would the serpent in Eden.'

‘God be praised,' Brother Jacobus intoned at this last, crossing himself piously.

‘For ever and ever,' de Valence answered by rote. ‘Now this Malise seeks your patronage – is there not a reward for exposing a witch? Apart from the love of Christ and Mother Church?'

‘You stand in the path of the Inquisition,' the Dominican persisted.

‘I obey my king,' de Valence replied savagely, weary of the whole business. He saw his clerks hovering, arms full of rolls that almost certainly continued the litany of ruin for his king's cause.

‘She is a heretic.'

‘You have proof? Other than the word of a disenfranchised, dismayed worm like Bellejambe?'

‘I … that is …'

‘You mean no,' de Valence interrupted roughly, and waved a hand so that the candles guttered in the wind of its passage. ‘Get you gone, Brother.'

‘I will investigate further …'

De Valence glared at the Dominican.

‘You will not go against the King's Peace. Three miles, three furlongs and three acre-breadths, nine feet, nine palms and three barleycorns – within that, Brother, Lady Isabel MacDuff is inviolate until the King himself decides her fate.'

‘Or God,' Brother Jacobus persisted. ‘You may find that the good folk of this town consider the Lord's Will takes precedence over suffering a witch to live in the King's Peace.'

De Valence's ravaged hawk of a face made Jacobus recoil a little.

‘Should the good folk of this town voice this opinion,' de Valence said, soft as a blade slice on skin, ‘I will know where to look for the cause. Fomenting discord and riot in a town under my command is treason, Dominican, and I have been given the writ of Law here.'

He leaned forward a little, the candlelight turning his face to a twisted mask of shadows.

‘Break it, Brother, and you will discover that, for all there is no torture permitted in England, your Inquisition is a squalling baby compared with what I can inflict on those who thwart the King's writ. Pleading a knowledge of Latin will not help you.'

For a moment, they were locked in stares, and then Brother Jacobus turned on his heel and swung away. De Valence waited until he was almost at the door, the trailing wind of his fury making the sconces dance madly, before calling out.

‘Jacobus.'

The Dominican whirled, his face a scowl.

‘You forget your station.'

The prelate's face flushed so that the veins stood out, proud as corded rope. Then he bowed.

‘My lord earl.'

‘You may leave.'

The Dominican's face was a beautiful thing and de Valence took some vicious comfort from it before he turned from the closed door into the bustle of the clerks. For all that, he knew that Isabel MacDuff was in danger. If the game of kings being played out above their heads did not include her as a vital piece, then she would fall to the flames.

The clerks moved in with their blizzard of bad news in vellum and the room seemed suddenly stifling, every candle flame a sear. De Valence moved to the shuttered slit of window and pulled them open, so that the night breeze, sodden with damp, snaked in to shiver the sconces.

He stood for a moment, hearing the muffled noises of the castle settling for another night, saw the red eye of brazier coals flaring in the breeze and the figures moving past it, no more than shadows. A wall guard shifted into the lee of a merlon and left his dog to trot the walkway; de Valence felt a spasm of irritation at this slackness, just because the King had quit the place.

Then, however, he heard the dog bark and was reassured: a good dog more than made up for a bad guard.

Out in the cloaking dark, Jamie Douglas gave a muffled curse at the sound. No one needed reminding of the last time the Scots had attempted to stealth their way up the walls of Berwick's fortress – foiled by a barking dog.

‘It will be the same one,' Parcy Dodd muttered miserably. ‘Aulder by a bit and wiser than ever.'

‘Given Fair Days and petted,' Dog Boy agreed softly, his grin white in the dark. ‘Fat with the finest for having saved an entire wee town.'

‘I dinna see any cheer in this revelation,' muttered Sweetmilk.

‘Never fash,' Dog Boy answered. ‘Just make sure you move gentle as spider silk and get Sim Craw's marvel up under the wall without discovery. Leave the wee beastie to me – tonight I am more Dog Boy than Aleysandir.'

Hal heard the mention of Sim Craw and watched Sweetmilk scuttle into the dark, half-crouched and hunchbacked under the rolled-up ladder. As much as the arbalest, that ladder was Sim's legacy, he thought to himself, as the ache of loss settled in him again, bone-deep. He thought of Sim then, turning slowly in the bladderwrack and weed, his face wrapped in the wisps of his own white hair …

The slap of a hand on his shoulder wrenched him from the sorrow into the face of Jamie Douglas, the expression on it a large, silent question. Hal shrugged it off and went ahead, following Kirkpatrick, Dog Boy and Sweetmilk; somewhere, Parcy Dodd and Horse Pyntle held the horses.

‘We were kine the last time we did this,' Jamie muttered, ‘which let us get close to the walls.'

Not now, Hal thought. A cow this close to Berwick and still uneaten would excite more interest than not, while stumbling people, seeming starved and shut out from safety by
couvre-feu
and caution, were all too common in these times.

It took them a long time in the dark and wet, all the same, as they crept slowly to the foot of the mound, slipping into the wet ditch and up out the far side, shivering and cold. They carried no swords, only long dirks, and wore no armour other than jacks – though Jamie's had metal plates sewn into the padding, rather than just straw stuffing.

The only ones burdened were Sweetmilk with the ladder and Dog Boy with the long pike-spear – though Kirkpatrick eyed Hal's slung latchbow with a jaundiced stare. It had been Sim's and he had brought it more for remembrance than use, Kirkpatrick thought. Unnecessary and risky, he added sourly to himself as he climbed painfully up the castle mound. Above them the White Wall loomed ghostly in the dark.

Sweetmilk, panting like a mating bull, scrambled up the mound almost on his hands and knees with the Dog Boy close behind and everyone else trying to avoid the twenty-foot spear he carried low to the ground.

At the foot of the wall, Sweetmilk shed his load as silently as he could and then leaned his back to the ashlar, his face gleaming sweatily in the dark. He cupped his hands and Dog Boy, the spear notched into the neat socket at the top of the rolled ladder, stepped into the stirrup of them, then up on to Sweetmilk's shoulders. The man grunted and buckled a little, so that the others held their breath; then he straightened and braced, grinning.