The Lion Rampant (16 page)

Hal, swift as winking, hauled out his purse, held it up like the dangle of a fresh-neutered sheep bollock and jingled it; as if spellbound the two men stopped, faces broadened into brown grins and they stood aside like two opening doors.

Beyond, the yard was as much a mayhem as the street outside, though the worship was different; here, men bellowed and waved fistfuls of deniers and silver pennies,
tournois
and
grossi
while a Savoyard with a black cloth over one eye grabbed them, matched them and, in some way neither Hal nor Sim could fathom, accepted the bet and the odds.

Beyond this quarrelling shriek was a cleared square where two men half crouched, the docked birds churring and baiting in their hands, one gold and green, the other red and white, their shaved necks stretching and straining like serpents.

‘Cockfight, bigod,’ Sim declared with delight, just as the men let go and fell back. Released, the birds sprang forward like tourney knights, their gilded spurs glittering, dashing towards each other with a clash, beak to beak. There was a pause, a strange sound like a sheet in a mad wind and then they fell on each other, wings flailing, beaks snapping, leaping and twirling in a mad dance as they struck out with their deadly feet.

A man screeched as the white drew blood with a strike, flinging up his arms, knocking his neighbour’s hat off and elbowing Sim in the ear; Sim swore and elbowed him back, hard enough to make the man grunt and double up, but Sim’s heart was not in it, for he was roaring for the white and red.

Hal spared the winded man a glance, no more, just to make sure he was not about to take revenge when he got his breath back – and then he saw Piculph moving through the crowd, oblivious to their presence. Hal almost cried out, but buckled it in his mouth. Widikind had said Piculph was on their side, a spy for Ruy Vaz, but Hal was no longer sure whom to trust.

There was a great roar and a surge forward; the gold had sunk one spur into the neck of the white and red and the fight was all but done. When Hal looked back, Piculph was gone; he caught Sim’s arm and dragged him close enough to shout what he’d seen in the man’s ear. Sim swivelled madly left and right while, out on the mud-bloody sand, the white cock staggered.

‘Do not look round.’

The voice was pitched low, no louder than normal and almost in Hal’s ear, so the first thing he did was start to turn until a knuckle drove into his kidneys.

‘Do not look, I said.’

It was Piculph. Hal caught himself, stared to the front, where the white cock reeled, a splash of blood forming a red cross on its breast, the spurs glittering and flashing still in the dust and the roars. Like a Templar, Hal thought. Like Rossal and the others, dying in their own final pit.

‘I thought you were all dead.’

The voice was tense and harsh, close enough so that Hal could smell the man’s wine breath and feel the hot flicker of it on his lobe; any minute now, Hal thought, Sim will turn and see this, ruining any further subterfuge in it. He spoke quickly.

‘Kirkpatrick and myself and Sim escaped. Kirkpatrick is gone to your Grand Master, who will now have proof of Guillermo’s treachery.’

He hoped this was true, though he had last seen Kirkpatrick as a wraith in the dim, vanishing in the opposite direction from the one he and Sim took from the base of the tower.

‘Then my master has won and there is hope,’ answered Piculph. ‘I am watched and suspected – in truth, I was abandoning this enterprise when I saw you as you saw me. De Grafton has worked out that the treasure, if not in the carts, was some Order magic I do not understand. He now knows that your king was warned long beforehand. That trail leads to me.’

‘De Grafton has told of this?’ Hal asked and felt the nod behind him.

‘To Doña Beatriz. He wishes the Templar called Rossal brought to him here, but the lady does not entirely trust him.’

A snake-knot of plots, Hal thought. Out on the sand, the white’s beak fell open, gasping, and the tongue trembled like a snake; one wing trailed and the gold and green battered it with a frenzy of wingbeats and slashes.

‘Doña Beatriz saw him fell the big steersman with a blow behind the ear,’ Piculph declared, ‘and so forced him to join her. He is sent by the enemies of your king to make sure no weapons arrive for your army but he has long fallen from the Grace of God and his Order; I am sure he sees profit in this now for himself.’

‘The crew?’

‘Held in the lady’s house,’ the voice replied. ‘The big white one to the west of the harbour on the hill above it. They were led by the Judas goat of de Grafton, told they were to be feasted and fêted – drink, whores and all. Instead, they found themselves locked in the emptied wine cellars. Your ship is guarded by Guillermo’s men of the Alcántara, and the plan was to use them to kill your crew – but they will abandon Doña Beatriz if they find this plot is unveiled and Guillermo exposed.’

‘Someone should let them know,’ Hal replied, seeing Sim turn in his direction. The white raised its stained head, twitching and shivering and, in a single moment, a miracle of energy and courage and anger, hurled itself into the fray for the last time, the whirl of spurs scything round to strike its enemy’s golden, red-crowned head.

‘It is dangerous—’ Piculph began.

‘Anything you do now is dangerous,’ Hal pointed out, just as the light of recognition went on in Sim’s head and the scowl came down on his brows.

‘Here,’ he began and then a great bellowing roar went up, jerking him back to the fighting birds.

‘There is still de Grafton and Doña Beatriz,’ Piculph said uncertainly, his voice drowning in the clamour, but still loud enough for Hal to hear the fear in it. ‘I do not want go there.’

For terror of the Knight or the lady? Hal could not work it out, but told Piculph he must; Sim swung back, his face sheened with sweat and excitement.

‘Blinded, bigod. The white has blinded the gold … where is yon moudiewart?’

‘Whisht,’ Hal said and fingered his lips to strengthen it, He half turned. Piculph had vanished.

On the sand, the gold spun and reeled in its terror of sudden darkness while the white gathered the last of itself and slashed and slashed the green plumage to bloody ruin. Then, one wing dragging a bloody line in the sand, it half crawled on to the barely moving body and wavered out a crowing triumph while the crowd went mad.

They love to fight, Hal had heard folk say. Bred in the bone of them, an instinct. Like a parfait, gentle knight. Like a Templar.

As I am supposed to be.

The siege lines at Stirling

At the same moment

It was already warm and fly-plagued, Thweng saw. In a week, perhaps less, there would be real sickness here, as always when too many folk gathered with no sense of where to safely shit. It was not, he noted, what King Robert would want the likes of him to see, but exactly what Aymer de Valence and the others would want to hear.

Clustered round the slabbed fortress on its great raised scab of rock, the mushroom sprout of shelters and tents brought back a shiver of memory to Sir Marmaduke Thweng; the last time he had been at Stirling was the disaster at the brig, when Cressingham had died and de Warenne fled from Wallace. Then Sir Marmaduke Thweng had taken charge of the defence of the castle – and had had to surrender it and himself in the end.

Mowbray saw his look and thought Thweng was studying and worrying on the besieged castle.

‘We will hold, my lord,’ he said, reassuringly cheerful, ‘until Midsummer’s Day.’

He had back a look as mournful as a bull seal on a wet rock.

‘So I thought myself, once,’ Thweng replied. With a jolt, he realized that he had been ransomed after Stirling fell in return for one of this Mowbray’s kin. Comyn connections, he recalled, which accounts for their change of cote.

Seventeen years since; the thought made his bones ache and he wondered, yet again, at the wisdom of dragging his three-score plus years all the way from the peace of Kilton to another round of Scottish wars.

At least this duty was simple if onerous: escort the commander of Stirling’s fortress under safe writ through the Scots siege lines and back to his castle where he would await, as per his agreement with Edward Bruce, the outcome of events.

‘Take careful note as you go,’ de Valence, Earl of Pembroke had said to him. ‘Ascertain if Bruce will stand and fight.’

Stand and fight, Sir Marmaduke thought. Pembroke and Beaumont think it is all a matter of bringing the army north and forcing the Scotch rebels to battle. The King himself, a copy of his father in everything but wit and wisdom, scarcely cares what happens after, only that a victory here will settle matters with Lancaster, Warwick and all the other disaffected. The King’s worst fear is that the Scots will run back to the hills.

He and Mowbray had come up Dere Strete, as much on a scout as ambassadors charged with the official chivalry of the upcoming affair round Stirling. They had taken the straight road to the castle, as the army would when it arrived, with the great loom of Coxet Hill on their left, heading to meet Bruce and the other lords at St Ninian’s little chapel.

Mowbray, his face sharp and ferret-eager with watchfulness, pointed out the pots dug at the crossings of the Bannock stream, each hole’s flimsy covering hiding the sharp stake within; beyond, to the north, a line of men sweated and dug.

‘Dangerous for horse,’ he pointed out, as if Thweng was some squire in need of instruction. ‘Trenches and pots, my lord: it means the Scotch will stand and fight as the King wishes.’

After what he had seen, the drilling men and the numbers of them, the grim hatred and the entire families they had brought – which you did not do if you thought of defeat – Sir Marmaduke felt a small needle of doubt lancing into the surety of an English success.

And yet … he knew Bruce of old, from the stripling days when he had been a tourney fighter of note and the pair of them had clattered round the circuit in a welter of expensive saddlery, horses and gear. They had shared bruises, victory, drink and jests – he was Sir M, Bruce was Sir R, which sounded like ‘sirrah’ and was the laugh in the piece.

The tourney-fighting Bruce he knew had not liked a straight pitched battle then, the French Method of fighting where you trained horse and rider to bowl a man over. His was the German Method, mounted on a lighter horse and avoiding the mad rushes to circle round and strike from behind.

His tactic was to grab knights round the waist and drag them bodily from the saddle, so that the Kipper – the man on foot with a great persuading club – could invite the lord to surrender himself to ransom. He and Bruce had played Kipper for each other, time and about for one profitable, glorious season, and Thweng recalled it with a dreamy mist of remembrance.

He has waged war the same way, Thweng thought as they rode up through the litter of men and shelters, avoiding anything that looked like a full commitment of all his force. He did it in ’10 and long before that. He’d had Wallace as teacher for it – why would he contemplate changing it now?

They passed Bannock vill, a rude huddle of cruck houses and drunken fences, where men leaned on spears and watched them; one spat pointedly. Nearby, hung from the shaft of a tipped-up and weighted two-wheeled cart, a festering corpse turned and swung, smoked with flies.

A black reminder about pillage, Thweng thought; the wee households in this hamlet had not fled, though they risked kitchen gardens and chooks, because armed men and Bruce’s bright writ ensured no looting.

That was order and organization and Thweng felt a slim sliver of cold slide around his backbone; when you see your enemies in discord, fill your cup and take your ease. When they are grim and resolved and of one mind, gather your harness and set your shield …

They dismounted outside the small stone chapel, garlanded with a splendid panoply of bright tents and banners. They had been brought the last little way by Sir James Douglas, though Sir Marmaduke found it hard to equate the lisping cheerfulness of dark youth with the man he had heard was a scowling scar on the lip of the world and whose very name, the Black, set men and women and bairns howling.

The small
mesnie
of English men-at-arms remained by their horses, nervous as levrets in a snakepit, while Mowbray and Sir Marmaduke clacked along the stones to the door of St Ninian’s and ducked under the Douglas smile into the musty dim of the chapel.

‘You will wait to be called,
gentilhommes
,’ said a voice from a shadow. ‘Then you will step forward and bow. You will not parley unless asked a question. Understood?’

‘Understood, my lord Randolph,’ Thweng answered, recognizing the voice and forcing the man into better light, where his unsmiling face could be clearly seen. ‘My lord earl, I should say. You have risen in the world since you betrayed one king for another, it appears.’

Randolph flushed.

‘I am loyal to the King,’ he blustered, but Thweng had made his point and waved, at once apologetic, insouciant and dismissive, which deepened Randolph’s flush – but their names were called and the Earl had no chance to reply.

Bruce was standing behind a table littered with papers, half-rolled, unfolded and pinned – the corner of one by a dagger. Beside him was his brother Edward, a coarse copy hewn of rougher stone, and behind was a coterie of shadows, waiting and watching.

‘My lords,’ Edward declared. ‘Present your writ.’

Mowbray passed across the rolled vellum, had it taken, examined and placed to one side.

‘You may proceed to the castle. Take no detours. Once inside, you will be considered quit-claimed from this writ. Is that understood?’

Edward was matter-of-fact and harsh, much changed from the smiling, eager man who had negotiated the midsummer surrender of Stirling, Mowbray thought and almost smiled at what must have passed between the brothers at the news of it. Instead, he merely inclined his head and hovered uncertainly until he realized he had been dismissed; he shot Sir Marmaduke a stiff look and vanished. There was a silence, thick as gruel.