The Lion Rampant (20 page)

‘Nivver violet a lady,’ he growled and slammed a horny-handed fist into Frixco’s face, wishing he had a dagger in it. He leaped over the mud-spattered sprawl of the man and was off down the street like a new lamb. He ran no more than a few paces, fell into a swift walk and filtered on down through the throng lurching away from the remains of the pyre.

He was a hundred ells away before he heard the distant shouts, but they floated clear and eldritch through the encroaching sea-haar.

‘The Black is in Berwick. Ware. The Black Douglas is in Berwick.’

The sea, off Colonsay

At the same time

The
Señor Glorioso
was like a ship, Pegy declared, in that it floated and had sails. Other than that it might well have been an ox cart to him and, despite the alleged generosity of Grand Master Ruy Vaz in presenting it in exchange for the half-sunk
Bon Accord
, Pegy was sullen and convinced that they had had the worst of the deal.

He said it loud and often, all the struggling way back towards Scotland, and Hal, drifting in and out of wound fever, knew it was because the new beast was a long-runner more suited to the Middle Sea, whose ropes and spars and sails were as strange as a six-legged foal to the cog-men of the old
Bon Accord
. They knew it as a carib, the best way they could pronounce the Moorish word for it: qaríb
.

The lateen rig, with its huge, unwieldy yardarms, defeated the best efforts of Niall Silkie, Angus and Donald, while the single big rudder confused Somhairl. Pegy, unable to judge the speed of ‘the ugly baist’, was barely able to work out where they were never mind where they were going; he knew the cargo was overloaded, too, and prayed for good weather.

Somewhere, the Devil laughed.

A wind rose and freshened as they came up round the shoulder of Colonsay – Pegy was fairly sure it was Colonsay – and the sailors brought in as much sail as they thought might work, only to find the
Señor Glorioso
blundering and pitching like a mad, blind stot.

Then, whirling away the sea-haar and the sunshine, the gale backed up with a witch’s shriek, backed up full south and west and hurled them like a driven stag towards the coast.

Berwick town

Some hours later

His back hurt from crouching, so that he swore he heard it crack when he finally straightened and began to move into the dark and the fog, out of the stinking alley he had been hiding in since God forged the world, it seemed.

Surely, Dog Boy thought, they would have given up by now. It had been hours since the alarm was raised, was now dark and the sea-haar had witch-fingered in and grown thicker and stronger. He had heard the soldiers calling for
couvre-feu
at least an hour ago, so the streets were dark, wet and should have been empty.

Save that they were not. Torches, lambent in the swirling mist, showed the bobbing presence of men in packs, still searching, relentless as an avalanche; the Black Douglas was trapped in Berwick and, sooner or later, would be found. Dog Boy cursed his likeness to Jamie. Then, for the first time, he cursed his own stupidity.

Not long after that he was found.

He came creeping out of the shadow of the Holy Trinity and practically ran into a barrel of a man with a sputtering flambeau and a face which had the pucker of an old scar running from the patch of his left eye down through cheek and jawbone.

‘The Bla—’ he yelled before Dog Boy’s wild lashing smashed the hilt of his sword into the man’s forehead, felling him like an ox. But it was enough; the cries went up, the marsh-light flames trailed towards him and he ran.

Flitting into the wynds, night-black as Auld Nick’s serk, up steps, skidding on cobbles, over courtyards and through deep wynds like writhing tunnels, Dog Boy wraithed like a running fox.

He turned and twisted away from every pale light which appeared, trying, always, to work his way to the bulk of stone that had once belonged to the Friars of the Sack, for next to it was the Briggate, portal to the ford and freedom.

He swooped like a mad crow from space to space, leaped up wynd stairs and paused once to tip a waterbutt down on too-close pursuers. Later he paused again, long enough to unsneck the door of a sty to let out a charge of swine, and then left them, laughing.

Balked by a blind alley, he sprang sideways to a lintel, then a balcony, along it with a leap into a new courtyard, bombarding his pursuers with mad curses and laughter, pots and, once, a pie dish set out to soak in the rain. Doors and shutters banged, children and women shrieked, dogs barked and howled.

He skipped and skidded along steep-pitched roofs, tore off slates and flung them, swung down past the leering, open-throated faces on the fine guttering and, once, swung into a carelessly unshuttered window.

The women inside shrieked like harpies and he stopped only long enough to offer them a mocking bow and a grin from a sweat-sheened face before scooping up the night-bucket and emptying it out of the window. He heard the gratifying curse and sizzle as he headed for the door, the stairs and the way out to the back court.

Finally, somewhere in Silver Street, he sprang for a lintel, swung up to a folly of a balcony, then up the newel post of that to the slated roof, where he sat, astraddle the steep pitch as if on a horse, his back to the gable stack. He panted and the sweat trickled down him like running mice, but the torches milled and confused voices shouted.

He had foiled them. For now.

For all that, he was only a little closer – he saw the bulk of the Red and White Halls of the foreign wool merchants and knew them. That placed him close to the Maison Dieu, which had its own gate through the ditch and stockade walls, near enough to the ford to chance it when the torches slid away.

The flames bobbed and circled. Dog Boy blessed the silversmith whose house this was, for his vanity in having a silly wee balcony, so built that you could only access it through windows both shuttered and barred and even then would have to half crouch to enjoy the view from it.

Yet it had permitted him access to the steeply pitched roof, hard slated to foil any wee thieves who might be tempted to dig their way into the smith’s home and down to the shop, where the shine would be.

Up here, Dog Boy thought, I am safe until the dawn and the vanished mist. Which gave him some hours yet to let the row die down. Below, he heard the pained calls of his staggering pursuers and smothered an exultant laugh at complaints of injuries and pigs.

Then he heard the horse, slap-clopping up the cobbles from the Briggate, heard the voices hail him – out after
couvre-feu
and mounted, Dog Boy thought, makes him a knight or a man-at-arms, a chiel of worth and on important business.

Not important enough, he saw with a sickening lurch of his belly, that he could not take a torch and join in the search, standing in the stirrups and raising the flame high to search the rooftops. For the reward, no doubt, Dog Boy thought, as well as the glory of being the man who captured the dreaded Black Douglas. The irony of it twisted a wry smile on his sweating face.

He watched the horseman and his trembling flambeau come closer, leaving the men on foot to search the ground-level shadows. Hot and encumbered, he managed to wriggle out of the padded jack, but was reluctant to lose it, so dropped to the cobbles as lightly as he could with it bulked in one arm like a shield, sword in the other; the chill fog cut into his sweat-drenched serk like a knife.

He saw the Silver Street courtyard with its little mercat cross, a squat affair ringed at the top and mounted on a dais of two steps – and the idea struck him with a clarity that made him laugh out loud.

He arranged it swiftly with his jack and his iron hat, frowned a little at the sacrifice of his estoc but rammed it left to right through the jack, the sharp needle of blade pinning the right sleeve up to the chest. He stood back, admired his handiwork briefly and laughed again, before darting out to where the slow, peering horseman could see him.

Then he turned, running back into the courtyard as if he knew he had just been spotted, was gratified to hear the sudden scrape and rasp of iron hooves as the beast was urged on by the horseman.

The rider came in at a trot and heaved up at the sight of the man standing, waiting, a blade winking faint light in a bar across his chest. He had an iron-rimmed hat on and did not look to be running, which made the rider grin; the horseman was mailed and coiffed and armed, and was a skilled fighter, as were all the royal couriers who wore the jupon with the pards of England. Bigod, the others would be envious of what the capture of the notorious outlaw Sir James Douglas would bring him.

‘Ho,’ he said and slid off the horse, sword out; he did not want to attack on horseback in the slippery, cobbled, confining courtyard and, besides, taking the outlaw on foot would add to the glory of it. God blind me, he thought, he is a big lad all the same.

‘Does tha yield?’ he demanded and had silence back, which unnerved him a little. He thought of calling to the others, the garrison men, but he wanted none to share this moment, so he shrugged and moved in swiftly, striking out.

The ringing clang of it sent a dreadful shock up his arm so that he recoiled, cursing and barely hanging on to his weapon with numbed fingers.
Nom de Dieu
, did the man have new-fangled plate underneath the padded jack?

The blow took him in the back and flung him face down to the cobbles, where he gasped and spluttered and writhed, all the air driven from him. In that part of his mind not mad with gibber at the thought of having been crippled or killed, he saw the figure he had attacked was a dressed stone cross and that the one who had struck him from behind was vaulting into the saddle of his horse.

Grinning down at him, black beard bright with pearled water, the man reined round and saluted him mockingly.

‘I could have killed ye. Remember that and tell them Aleysandir of Douglas has eluded them this day,’ the man declared loudly. ‘As daring as the Black Sir James – but better looking.’

Then he was gone, in a scrape of iron-shod hooves, a mad laugh and a mist that swirled in where he had been.

The Firth of Lorn

Feast of St Ronan of Locronan, June 1314

Unshaven, snowed with spindrift, hollow-eyed and tired beyond anything they had known, the crew staggered into the merciful wind-dropped morning and called greetings, messages and obscenities.

The bread was sodden and moulded, the cheese so rancid it was thrown over – and Hal realized how bad it had to be for sailors, who would eat almost anything, to contemplate that. They chewed bacon, which was as hard as the peas that went with it, washed it down with water filtered through a linen serk to get rid of the worst in it, while the
Señor Glorioso
pitched and rolled, heavy with cargo and sodden with leak.

Hal, the sweat rolling off him in drops fat as wren’s eggs, ate nothing and Sim was too busy boaking to try to put anything down the other way.

‘If it holds like this,’ Pegy said cheerfully, looking at the sky, ‘we will be in Oban in a week, or less.’

Hal, the arm throbbing in time to his every heartbeat, heard the false in Pegy’s voice.

‘If it holds?’

Pegy shrugged. The truth was that he did not like the iron and milk sky in every direction and thought they had pierced through to the eye of a vicious smack of weather which would be on them in less than half a day. He did not say any of this, but realized he did not need to to the lord of Herdmanston.

‘How is yourself bearing up?’ he asked instead. ‘Have ye had yer wound seen to this morn?’

Hal grunted, the memory of it sharp as the pain Somhairl had inflicted, his great face, braids swinging round it, a study of lip-chewing concentration as he squeezed the pus from it.

‘Green it was,’ Hal reported, ‘as Sim’s face. I take it there is slim chance of getting to Oban without worry, at this time of year and without weather?’

Pegy frowned and sucked his moustache ends.

‘Weel… we have to try, for there is little choice else, other than to put into some wee island and wait for it to blaw away.’

‘Which might take hours, or days – or weeks,’ Hal replied with a rueful smile, wincing as he adjusted his arm. ‘I have little liking to spend weeks in a driftwood shed, living on crabs and herring. Besides that, we will have failed in our endeavour.’

‘Aye, right enough,’ Pegy answered. ‘Ye are poor company for shed-life, but tak’ heart, my lord, at least the wind blaws away the midgies.’

‘If it blaws us back to where the Bruce waits,’ growled a familiar voice, ‘it can howl all it pleases. Where are we, Pegy?’

The captain turned to Kirkpatrick, his face a sour smear of disapproving.

‘Ye will change that tune when the howling wind makes ye jig to the dance it makes,’ he answered. ‘Besides, we are in the Firth o’ Lorn, coming up to the narrow of it and the last run to Oban. It is no place to be at the mercy of a storm wind.’

‘Christ betimes, this is summer,’ Kirkpatrick exclaimed bitterly. ‘You would think there would be kinder weather.’

Those nearest laughed, none heartier than Somhairl, shaking his head mockingly at Kirkpatrick, who gave him a scarring scowl in return and then turned to Pegy.

‘Clap on all sail, or whatever you mariners shout. Sooner we are back in Oban, sooner this cargo is in the keeping of the King.’

‘And Sim’s innards are back in his belly,’ Hal answered, sitting suddenly as the rush of fever-sweat swamped him.

‘Oh aye,’ Pegy replied, knuckling a forehead dripping as much with spray as sarcasm. ‘Clappin’ on sail, yer lordship, as ordered. Now if only any of us here had a wee idea of what that might actually do to this baist o’ a boat …’

They plodded on, heavy and sodden as a wet cow in pasture, with the wind full from the east, the men singing as much to raise their spirits as any sail.

Hal stayed on deck and up at the beakhead, until his face was stiff and salted, his eyes bloodshot and his brow ridged; Pegy found him there and had Angus and Donald cart him to the shelter for the storm was rising again. Hal already knew this, since his raggled hair was straight out and whipping either side of his face as he stared ahead and Pegy had to shout above the moan and whine of a rising wind.