Kingdom 01 - The Lion Wakes (24 page)

Then they were through the pack and Balius, who knew the business as well as Hal – better, Hal decided – was skidding on his haunches, iron hooves scoring ruts as he scrabbled to brake, spinning round even as he did so.

As suddenly as they had come, they were thundering back and Hal had time enough to see three men in the mud and a horse flailing on its back before he was plunged into the swirl of them once more, his breath rasping and his arm coming up, the maille-backed gauntlet full of bloody blade.

Balius shunted into a pony, which went backwards, but the huge horse lost momentum and was balked, so he reared and struck out, the fearsome hooves cracking the pony’s shoulder and a man’s knee.

Another rider had hauled out a wicked sword and was flogging an unhappy mount to get alongside and land a blow. On Hal’s other side, one rider flung an axe as he sped off, almost turned completely backwards on the running hobby; the weapon clattered off Hal’s shield.

Hal took the battering sword cut on the metal-bar vambrace on his right forearm, a homemade bar-iron cage from wrist to elbow, then found himself face to face with his attacker, a scarlet-mouthed screamer with a leather helmet, a mad beard the colour of old bone and angry slits for eyes.

He popped the fat wheel pommel of his sword between the slits and then cut viciously backwards as Balius took a mighty leap and shot out of the pack. He felt the blade tug, but did not know what he had hit.

Then they were back at the lead wagon and turning again, Balius blowing and snorting and stamping. Up in the sumpter wagon, Sim Craw levelled his crossbow and shot, but Hal did not see what he hit.

Then the riders were gone. There was a flurry of confusion and shouts from the cavalcade and the women would not stop screaming, but the attackers suddenly vanished as swiftly as they had appeared. Ahead, a horse limped off, trailing reins. Three bodies lay like bundles of old clothes.

Sim dropped from the wagon and walked to where Ill Made Jock sat, his arse wet and his arm wrenched.

‘A sair dunt, but not broken,’ he remarked to the ugly wee fighter. ‘All that’s damaged is your pride, for birlin’ off yer cuddy on to your arse.’

‘Moudiewart arse of a sway-backed stot,’ Jock agreed sourly, massaging his arm.

Sim clapped him the shoulder, which brought a wince from Jock and a laugh from Sim. A man crawled out from under the wagon, offered Sim a wan, bob-headed smile and scurried off like a wet rat looking for a hole, clutching a leather bag tight to him.

Hal had dismounted and was stroking Balius’s soft muzzle, the stiff hairs sparkling with the diamonds of his own hot breath; Hal led him, Sim on the other side, down to the bodies.

‘Imps from Satan’s nethers, right enough – what are they, d’ye think?’ Sim asked, stirring one with his foot. They were grim, filthy corpses, all yellow-brown snarls and hung about with bits and pieces of filched armour.

‘Unfriendly,’ Hal replied shortly and Sim agreed. In the end, both were decided that these had been some of Wallace’s raiders, out on the
herschip
and seeing what looked like an easy and profitable target.

There had been four killed – three women and Pecks the ostler. One of the women had been Ill Made Jock’s, so he was having a right bad day, as his friends were not slow to point out. Someone else asked about the man with the crutch, but no-one expected to see him again.

Hal rode to Isabel, who fought her wet skirts back over the wagon to where the Dog Boy, her devoted slave, waited to leg her up on to her horse again.

‘Are you well?’ Hal asked, suddenly anxious at her limp. Isabel turned, a poisonous spit of a reply already wetting her lips, when she saw the concern on his face and swallowed the bile, which left her flustered, as did the sudden leap inside her, a kick like she had always imagined would come from a child in the womb.

‘Bruised,’ she replied, ‘but only from riding, Sir Hal. Who were they?’

Hal was admiring of her acceptance of events and almost envied the Dog Boy his closeness to her when she got back into the sidesaddle.

‘Wallace men,’ Hal said, ‘the worst of them, if they are still Wallace men at all and not just trail baston, club men and brigands off on their own. There will be a deal of that from now on.’

‘As well The Bruce thought of sending me with yourself,’ Isabel replied. ‘You seem to have acquainted yourself well enough with a warhorse for a ploughman.’

Hal acknowledged the compliment and the implied truce, then carefully inspected Balius, relieved to find not a mark. He handed it to the care of Will Elliot and mounted Griff, then found the garron suddenly too low and too slow and wished he had never ridden the big warhorse at all.

They collected themselves, loaded the dead ostler on to a wagon, got Jock back on his horse, then slithered cautiously down the muddy road to the inn.

It was, as Hal had feared, burning, though the sodden timbers and thatch of it had conspired to reduce it from a conflagration to a slow-embered, sullen smoulder. There was a fat man at the entrance with his throat cut. A woman lay a little way away, stuck with arrows so deliberately that it was clear she had been used as sport.

‘Ach, that’s shite,’ declared Bangtail Hob, hauling off his leather arming cap and scrubbing his head with disgust.

‘What?’ demanded Will Elliott, but Hob simply turned away, unable even to speak at the loss of Lizzie. He had been rattling her silly only a few hours before and it did not seem right to be standing there seeing her like a hedgepig with arrows and the rain making tears in her open, sightless eyes.

Out on the road, Hal was of the same mind.

‘Well,’ he said grimly, ‘there is no shelter here, for sure. We will push on across the bridge to the town and politely inform the English commander here that he has Scots raiders on the road.’

Sim nodded and stood for a while, watching the caravan of wagons and horses and frightened people rushing past the inn and down the road after Hal and the unfurled Templar banner, the Beau Seant, held high by Tod’s Wattie in one massive fist.

Despite ‘baws’nt’, that fancy flag, Sim was sure they were sticking their heads in a noose the further north they stravaiged. He just wondered how tight the kinch of it would be.

Chapter Six

Edinburgh

Feast of St Giles – August 1297

The church of St Giles was muggy, blazing with candles and the fervour of the faithful. Hot breath drifted unseen into the incense-thick air, so that even the sound of bell and chant seemed muted, as if heard underwater. The wailing desperate of Edinburgh crowded in for their patron’s Mass, so that the lights fluttered, a heartbeat from dying, with their breathy prayers for intercession, for help, for hope. There were even some English from the garrison, though the castle had its own chapel.

The cloaked man slipped in from the market place, slithering between bodies, using an elbow now and then. In the nave, the ceiling so high and arched that it lost itself in the dark, the gasping tallow flickered great shadows on stone that had never seen sunlight since it had been laid and the unlit spaces seemed blacker than ever.

In the shade of them, folk gave lip-service to God and did deals in the dark, sharp-faced as foxes, while others, hot as salted wolves, sought out the whores willing to spread skinny shanks for a little coin and risk their souls by sweating, desperate and silent, in the blackest nooks.

‘O Lord,’ boomed the sonorous, sure voice, echoing in dying bounces, ‘we beseech you to let us find grace through the intercession of your blessed confessor St Giles.’

The incense swirled blue-grey as the robed priests moved, the silvered censers leprous in the heat. The cloaked man saw Bisset ahead.

‘May that what we cannot obtain through our merits be given us through his intercession. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. St Giles, pray for us. Christ be praised.’

‘For ever and ever.’

The murmur, like bees, rolled round the stones. The cloaked man saw Bisset cross himself and start to push through the crowd – not waiting for the pyx and the blessings, then. No matter . . . the cloaked man moved after him, for it had taken a deal of ferreting to get this close and he did not want to lose him now. All he needed to know from the fat wee man was what he knew and whom he had told.

Bartholomew was no fool. He knew he was being followed, had known it for some time, like an itch on the back of his neck that he could not scratch. Probably, he thought miserably, from the time he had left Hal Sientcler and the others at Linlithgow long days ago.

‘Take care, Master Bisset,’ Hal had said and Bisset had noted the warning even as he dismissed it; what was Bartholomew Bisset, after all, in the great scheme of things?

He would travel to his sister’s house in Edinburgh, then to Berwick, where he heard the Justiciar had taken up residence. He was sure Ormsby, smoothing the feathers that had been so ruffled at Scone, would welcome back a man of his talents. He was sure, also, that someone had tallied this up and then considered what Bartholomew Bisset might tell Ormsby, though he found it hard to believe Sir Hal of Herdmanston had a hand in it – else why let him go in the first place?

Yet here he was, pushing into the crowded faithful of St Giles like a running fox in woodland, which was why he had turned into Edinburgh’s High Street and headed for the Kirk, seeking out the thickening crowds to hide in. He did not know who his pursuer was, but the thought that there was one at all filled him with dread and the sickening knowledge that he was part of some plot where professing to know nothing would not be armour enough.

He elbowed past a couple arguing about which of them was lying more, then saw a clearing in the press, headed towards it, struck off sideways suddenly and doubled back, offering a prayer to the Saint.

Patron Saint of woodland, of lepers, beggars, cripples and those struck by some sudden misery, of the mentally ill, those suffering falling sickness, nocturnal terrors and of those desirous of making a good Confession – surely, Bisset thought wildly, there was something in that wide brief of St Giles that covered escaping from a pursuer.

The cloaked man cursed. One moment he had the fat little turd in his sight, the next – vanished. He scanned the crowd furiously, thought he spotted the man and set off.

Bartholomew Bisset headed up the High Street towards the Castle, half-stumbling on the cobbles and beginning to breathe heavy and sweat with the uphill shove of it. The street was busy; the English had imposed a curfew, but lifted it for this special night, the Feast of St Giles, so the whole of Edinburgh, it seemed, was taking advantage.

In the half-dark, red-blossomed with flickering torches, people careered and laughed – a beggar took advantage of a whore in the stocks, cupping her grimed naked breasts and grinning at her curses.

Bisset moved swiftly, head down and peching like a mating bull – Christ’s Wounds, but he had too much beef on him these days – half-turned and paused. He was sure he saw the flitting figure, steady and relentless as a rolling boulder; he half-stumbled over a snarling dog tugging at the remains of a bloated cat and kicked out at it in a frenzy of fear.

That and the sheer tenacity of the pursuer panicked Bisset and he swept sideways into Lachlan’s Tavern, a fug and riot of raucous bellowing laughter and argument. He pushed politely into the throng, to where a knot of drovers, fresh down from the north, were starting in to singing songs off key. Big men, they smelled of sweat and earth and wet kine.

The cloaked man ducked in, blinking at the transfer from dark to dim light, the sconce smoke and the reek of the place attacking his nose and eyes – sweat, ale, farts and vomit, in equal measure. He could not see the fat little man, but was sure he had come in here – sure also that the fat man now knew he was being followed, which made matters awkward.

Bisset saw the man, a shadow with a hood still raised, no more than two good armlengths away. He whimpered and shoved the nearest drover, who lurched forward, careering into a clothier’s assistant, spilling ale all down his fine perse tunic and knocking the man off-balance into a half-drunk journeyman engraver, who swung angrily, missed his target and smacked another of the drovers on one shoulder.

The cloaked man saw the mayhem spread like pond ripples from a flung stone. He cursed roundly as a big man, a great greasy shine of joy on his fleshy face, lurched towards him swinging. He ducked, hit the man in the cods, backed away, was smashed from behind by what seemed the world and fell to his knees.

Bisset was already in the backland, stumbling past the privy, hearing the shouts and splintering crashes from inside Lachlan’s. The Watch would arrive soon and he hurried off until he was sure he was safe, then he stopped, hands on thighs and half-retching, half-laughing.

He reached the safety of his sister’s house moments later, found the door unlatched and fixed it carefully behind him, leaning against it and trying to stop the thundering of his heart – yet he was smiling at what he had left behind. That will teach the swine, he thought with savage joy.

He was still laughing quietly to himself when the hand snaked out of the dark and took him by the throat, so hard and sudden that he had no time even to cry out, even as he realised he had not been as clever as he had thought. An unlatched door. On a silversmith’s house – he should have known better . . .

‘Happy, are we?’ said a voice, so close to his ear he could smell the rank breath. From the side of one eye, he caught the gleam of steel and almost lost the use of his legs.

‘Good,’ the voice went on, soft and friendly and more frightening because of it. ‘A wee happy man is more likely to give me what I need.’

The shadowed man came in through the back court, limping slightly and almost choked by the smell from the garderobe pit. The windows here were wood shutters over waxed paper and no match for the thin, fluted blade of his dagger, but there were bars beyond that, installed by a careful man, with wealth to protect. He moved to the backcourt door, which was stout timbers, nail-studded to thwart savage axes – yet it was unlatched, so that he was in the dark, still room in a few seconds.