The Lion Rampant (46 page)

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.

Dog Boy, perched on Sweetmilk, raised the spear high, straining against the tipping weight of the ladder, until the padded prongs slid softly over the crenellation. Slowly he withdrew the spear and passed it back down to the hands of Hal, who disposed of it in the grass. Wiping his lips with the back of one hand, Dog Boy tugged gently on the length of cord, heard the soft click of release and then the ladder pattered down the wall like a cat after mice.

Almost before it had cascaded on to the muffled curses of Sweetmilk, Dog Boy had tugged a test on it and then was up it like a rat up a spital drain.

He was almost at the top when he heard the growl and froze. Now came the hardest task…

He reached into the dangle of his scrip, broke off a piece of what was there and tossed it up over the merlon to the walkway. The growl stopped; Dog Boy climbed until his head was up above the level and dog and man stared at each other in the dripping mirk. It growled.

Dog Boy threw more, mumuring gently. The dog snapped it up and whined uneasily; the tail flickered. Dog Boy climbed up to waist height and held out his hand, so that the animal had to creep close for the prize – which it did.

‘Swef, swef,’ Dog Boy soothed and the dog whined and let him come over to feed another delicious morsel. Dog Boy sat in the dark-shadowed lee of the merlon and fed the last to the dog, fondling its ears while it ate, tail wagging.

Is a dog bound by a blood pudding? It is, Dog Boy thought sadly, caressing the animal and drawing it close while it licked his fingers and whined, tail working furiously. Bound and tied by it, especially if it had tasted such before, when it was fêted.

But folk are fickle and forgetful, he thought, slowly, gently, drawing his knife. That was then and this is now and the wee beastie craves what once it enjoyed.

It does not deserve this, he added sorrowfully, feeling the blade of the knife cold as poor charity. The animal gave a choke, no more, as voice and life were cut from it, and before it could take its last wheeze of breath, Dog Boy had it by the scruff of the neck while its heart pumped thickly out of the gaping throat, trailing like ribbons as he threw it over the wall.

Below, the rush and thump of it falling made everyone jump and Sweetmilk, spattered with blood, had Jamie’s hand clamped on his mouth to muffle the curses.

‘Gardyloo,’ Jamie growled. ‘That will be our signal.’

‘Not yours,’ Hal replied flatly. ‘You are forbidden to set foot on the wall …’

‘Away with you,’ Jamie said, releasing Sweetmilk so suddenly that the man stumbled. ‘I did not come to this jig to stand at one side and admire you lassies.’

Hal looked from him to Kirkpatrick, but any help he sought from there was stillborn with the man’s weary shrug.

They started up the ladder.

Hal led the way, panting and sweated by the time he reached the top. Wet inside and out, he thought laconically as he heaved himself as quietly as he could over the crenellation. The misery of Dog Boy’s face brought him up short and he stared as the man looked bitterly at his bloody palms and then wiped them on his tunic.

‘I am ill named,’ he growled to Hal. ‘I am the curse of dogs. Every one I meet dies.’

Never mind the men – aye, and women, too – that have regretted bumping into you, Hal thought, but he held his tongue in his teeth and merely patted Dog Boy on his sodden shoulder, glancing up and down the length of gleaming, empty walkway as he did so.

A distant brazier glowed to his left; to the other side was the bulk of a tower, one of the nine Berwick’s fortress possessed and the one they wanted: the Hog Tower. Below, the bailey courtyard flickered in the dancing shadows from stray lights, pale as corpses in the sea-haar – forge, brewhouse, bakehouse, Hal recognized. The dark mass would be the stables, where no light was permitted. No one moved.

Jamie Douglas slithered to his side and grinned, before wiping his streaming face.

‘Bigod,’ he hissed. ‘I should have brought more men. We could capture it easy.’

‘We could not,’ Hal flung back at him. ‘We could try and capture it and it would be hard and bloody. It would also ruin any rescue. Mind that, Sir James, when your heid is bursting with glory.’

‘In and out,’ added a panting voice as Kirkpatrick came up alongside them, ‘quiet and quick.’

He beamed mirthlessly at Jamie Douglas.

‘Like you were taking the favour of someone else’s wife,’ he added.

‘You might have thought of another way to put that,’ Hal glowered back at him and Kirkpatrick acknowledged his lack of tact with an apologetic wave.

‘Aye, weel – the husband is long deid, Devil take him …’

‘Whisht, the lot of you.’

Dog Boy’s glare froze them all and they obeyed him, regardless of station and suddenly, shockingly, aware of where they were perched. Like eggs on a high ledge, Hal thought, and cackling like gannets.

‘Bide here,’ he declared to Jamie, who scowled and looked about to protest.

‘We need to protect the way out,’ Hal pointed out. Besides, he added to himself, you should not be here at all and your lust for glory and your bloody-handed temper will carry you away when we least need it.

Jamie, unused to taking orders from the likes of Hal, looked about to protest and Dog Boy thrust himself into the path of it.

‘I will also stay,’ he announced, ‘to guard our way to safety.’

Jamie, suddenly realizing that this was not his quest and given a suitable task of bravery and honour, nodded and grinned. With a brief look of raised-eyebrow relief, Kirkpatrick passed Hal and led the way towards the Hog Tower, skulking along the walkway, pressed to the crenellations.

There was a door and he imagined it would be shut and barred, which was the way if the castle was guarded, all perjink and proper. He tested it, heard the bar behind it clunk softly in the pins and did not know how they would get it open. He turned to say so to Hal, found that man’s face turned up and pebbling with moonlit rain.

Hal stared up at the cage, clamped like a barnacle to the outside of the tower. She was there, the thickness of a wall, a few long strides away …

Kirkpatrick saw it, too, and blinked the rainmist off his eyebrows.

‘A quick and strong young man’, he hissed, ‘could be up on that and inside in no time.’

It took a moment for Sweetmilk to realize Kirkpatrick was staring at him and he blenched when he did so.

‘Aye, right,’ he whispered back scornfully. ‘In through the door it does not have, for what would be the point of that on the outside of a cage hung a long drop from the ground?’

‘It has a wee slanty half-roof,’ Kirkpatrick pointed out, ‘to shed the rain. With wooden shingles, easily removed. The bars, too, are wooden – ye might snap yer way in.’

Sweetmilk eyed the half-roof, no more than a ledge to shoot rain into the courtyard below, and then the wrist-thick timber grill of the cage. He looked at Hal and saw the misery there, the rain like tears; he does not want to tell me to do something so foolish, Sweetmilk thought. But he wants his woman free.

All folk’s plans for the best seem to involve me putting myself in the hardest places, he thought, moving to the wet rock of the tower and looking for handholds. Well, I came through the bloody horror at Stirling, so I will come through this also. He fumbled the dirk into his belt, ignoring Kirkpatrick’s advice to take it in his teeth. An idiot would suggest that, he wanted to say, for all it does is make you look like a red murderer and put cuts on your tongue and lips.

He felt between the weathered mortar of the stones for crevices and nicks and little ledges. Christ’s Wounds, this would not be easy.

Hal watched him swing up and out; he held his breath, seeing that Sweetmilk had removed his shoes and tied them round his neck. Clever – slick-smooth leather soles were no help at all and Sweetmilk’s shoes were more status than necessity for a man with such horned and calloused bare feet.

As if to mock them, the rain started in earnest, a hissing curtain that shrouded everything to a few feet and sent rivulets and streams coursing down between the stones of the tower. Sweetmilk, arms and feet screaming in strained agony, reached up one wobbling hand and grasped the underside supports of the cage.

For a moment he swung free, dangling by one hand like a limp banner while everyone held their breath. Then he swung up the other hand and slapped it on to the timber. Slowly, laboriously, he drew himself up and then hung on the outside of the cage, a grey figure in the misting rain.

‘Bigod,’ Kirkpatrick declared admiringly, ‘he climbs like a babery ape.’

‘He will fall like a bliddy stone,’ Hal muttered.

Then the bar clunked out of the pins and and the door started to open outwards. Kirkpatrick, swift as shadow, moved into the swinging lee of it while Hal, caught like a thief in a larder, could only crouch and freeze, the rain dropping in his dry, open mouth, looking up into the shrouded, murderous stare of Sweetmilk, who clung to the outside of the cage, not daring to move.

A man shouldered through the open doorway, cloak shrouding his head and shoulders, unlacing his braies and hunched up against the rain so that he saw only the tops of his own shoes.

‘Dinna loit on anyone,’ a voice called out from behind him and the man, head down and drawn in, cursed and stood between the merlons, fumbling out his prick.

‘No sensible soul is abroad on a night like this,’ he growled back, and grunted as his stream joined the rain. There was a moment, a long moment, when he stood and emptied himself, enjoying the feel and wishing it would hurry – he would have gone into the Witch’s cell and used her pot if it had not been for the sleeper across her door. That and the fact that she was called the Witch, of course.

He shivered at the thought. Fine-looking woman, mark ye, for all her age … He turned sideways and stared into the face of a rainsoaked man, crouching like a hare on the walkway where he should not have been. The man grinned a sickly grin, his hair plastered wetly down his face in pewter daggers.

‘Who the f—’

He was cut off, mid-flow, from speech, piss and life as Kirkpatrick took a step from the shadows and shoved.

‘Gardyloo,’ he muttered as the man fell off the wall, his last curse trailing behind him as he whirled his arms and legs in a futile dance in the air. There was a distant thud.

Hal was already past them both, into the dark of the tower. Stairs, circling up and down; Hal went up, to where a light flickered.

‘Hurry up and close the door, else the candle will go out.’

The voice was booming loud in the enclosed space and Hal froze; then he edged up and round until he could peer over the last edge of the floor level above. The man sitting at the table, idly working at a leather strap, stared straight back at him, astonished.

They sprang for one another at the same time and Hal’s wet soles slipped, so that he fell on the last part of the stair. Should have hung my shoes round my neck, like Sweetmilk, he thought wildly, and had to fall back a few steps as the man came down at him, sword out.