Lion at Bay (37 page)

‘I thought the earth was the centre of things,’ said Edward Bruce, frowning and the abbot indulged him with another smile, his withered cheeks knobbed as winter apples.

‘Just so. This … heresy, as the good brother would have it … is a heathen affair, as he says. Moorish, though it was Saracen before that and, in fact, Persian before that. They were all Godless worshippers of fire then and the Sun, being the largest of fires, was a deity to them; thus they placed it at the centre of things.’

He laced his fingers.

‘In fact, it is no heresy. If I state that a galloping horse does not move forward, but rather the ground goes backwards – is that heresy? Or simple stupidity?’

‘If enough believe it …’ Brother Jacobus muttered and the abbot ignored him.

‘So the Poor Knights of the Order are innocent of the charges against them?’ Bruce asked.

‘What charges are these?’ countered the abbot. ‘No charges have been made. The Order is guilty of arrogance, idleness, outlandish secrets and excessive wealth. What I have are copious sworn statements by come-lately initiates who allege that they refused to spit on the Cross, or kiss an idol of Baphomet. So far, I have seen no evidence of either.’

‘Yet heresy exists,’ Bruce declared grimly and waved a hand. ‘Ask any of these
nobiles
and they will tell you of the sin of the Order.’

The abbot frowned, not understanding.

‘Most of them had kin, or were themselves with Wallace at Callendar Woods,’ Bruce explained stonily. ‘Where the Order rode in the retinue of King Edward and slaughtered our people. Christians, Abbot Alberto, descending like wolves on Christians. Is that not a heresy worthy of the Holy Father’s sanction?’

Now the abbot understood and nodded slowly, like a man falling asleep.

‘Not heresy. More of that arrogance I mentioned and certainly a sin – that and the other sins they have fallen into are reason enough for them to merge with the Order of St John. Perhaps then these warriors can turn their sights back to God and the relief of his Holy Places.’

‘The Order of St John wishes nothing to do with them,’ Bruce replied. ‘Wisely.’

The abbot tutted.

‘We should be wary of casting the first stone,’ he said gently. ‘The sin of envy is in great part responsible for the problems of the Order – too wealthy by far, as I have said, even to the whispered rumour of usury. Brother Jacobus would have them scorching for that alone, but he and others of his calling have forgotten the teachings of Saint Bernard – “Persecution shows who is a hireling and who a true pastor”.’

He paused, his sentiment genuine if only because of the vision of the Templar, strapped to his horse and burning …

‘Amen,’ Bruce answered and a muttered chorus followed it. Jacobus stirred a little, his hands shoved into his sleeves, but remained silent, a cowled mastiff leashed for the moment.

‘But you are less interested in this and more in what the English commander in Perth has to say,’ the abbot went on. ‘He agrees to meet you on the field – but not on the morrow. It is the Sabbath and the Feast of St Gervase, the Martyr.’

‘Of Margaret, saintly queen of Scotland and the translation of her relics,’ Bruce corrected, that strange lopsided twist of a smile on his face. To avoid stretching the scar on the other, the abbot realized suddenly, which meant it was not healed, even after all this time …

‘So – we have a truce until the morn’s morn?’ Edward Bruce persisted.

The abbot hesitated, a heartbeat only that he would not have got away with in the cowled politicking of Rome. What caused it was – yet again – the vision of the burning Templar. That, coupled with the uncaring stone face of de Valence as he excused it, sure in his writ from pope and king, sanctioned by the fluttering of as pagan a symbol as anyone might find – a dragon banner which permitted men to risk any sin.

Yet the heartbeat went unnoticed here and the abbot nodded, for a truce was what he had been told and chivalry dictated the truth of it, even from the thinned, dubious lips of the lordly Aymer de Valence.

There was nothing else to be said; Bruce watched them ghost their way out again and waited for the clamour that would swamp him when they were out of earshot. It was not held back for long and the charge was led, as ever, by Edward.

They throw ‘chivalry’ at me like an accusation of heresy, Bruce thought, turning into their concern and outrage. There would now be an argument which would, in the end, come to eat itself because there was no way out of the circle.

They all knew it, too, even if they jerked and strained – de Valence was locked securely in Perth with an army roughly the size of the one Bruce had scraped together. The English lords, Percy and Clifford, were scouring the west with another and, somewhere to the south, like a distant stain of thundercloud, the Covetous King himself gathered yet another force with his son.

‘If we do not force a fight here and win, my lords,’ Bruce declared to their scowls and frowns, ‘then we will gain no further support and will be too weak to face Longshanks when he comes. We must defeat de Valence here and to do that, we must persuade him to come out of his fastness and fight.’

If they did not, then my kingship is ended, he thought. Fleetingly, he saw the purse-lipped moue of his wife, preparing the ‘I-told-you-so’. King and queen of summer only, she had once said. Unspoken had been the other part of that old pagan custom, where the King of Summer was ritually sacrificed, his blood making the Kingdom and all in it fecund.

Well, that would not be. Winning here, at Methven, would bring some solidity to his throne and, to do that, he needed someone to beat in an honest tourney. He needed to force
apokalupsis
.

He said as much, but only the scholarly Alexander understood that it did not mean the catastrophe it implied, simply a revelation, a new light. A new world.

Chivalry would bring de Valence out for a fair fight, he thought. The joust
à l’outrance
, writ large, would do it.

Because God is always watching at the edge of extremity.

Hal watched the train of priests and their escort coil between the fires, heading out of the camp and the road back to Perth. He heard one mutter ‘
Te deum
’ but they passed in a wraith of silence for the most part, sinister as darkness. He did not care for these
Dominie Canes
much and remembered the ones who had brought Cressingham’s ultimatum to Wallace and Moray at Stirling … God’s Wounds, almost ten years to the day.

Ten years. It weighed on him, sudden and heavy as an anvil and he sighed under it, so that Sim Craw glanced up from under his own shaggy brows – then surprised Hal with his own thoughts.

‘I remember thon chiels,’ he muttered. ‘At Abbey Craig. Christ, Sir Hal, that was a wheen o’ years ago.’

‘Aye, ye were sprightly then,’ chaffered Chirnside, grinning.

‘Sprightly still,’ Dog Boy replied. ‘If you keep charkin’ your gums on such, you will find how he can stop your yatter.’

Sim stirred a little, fed a stick and some dried grass to the fire.

‘My thanks for yer care, Dog Boy,’ he answered, slow and serious, ‘but Chirnside is not wrong. A man gets to feel the years pile up an’ I am not so spry sometimes in the morn, while I have to roll out at night to let out watter and my bones are mostly ache.’

Men stared, amazed and Hal felt a flicker of uncertain fear, seeing the lines on Sim and the grizzle that was more grey than black these days. He was old, Hal thought suddenly – Christ, he is a handful of years more than me and I am old myself. If he was starting to fail, then the world was trembling …

Then he saw the sly look peeping out from under the shag of eyebrow and almost leaped to his feet with the delighted relief of it.

‘But I can still maul the sod with the likes o’ a cuntbitten hoorslip such as yersel’, Chirnside Rowan.’

The hoots and laughter flamed the face of Rowan, while the nudges from his neighbours threatened to topple him off his log seat. He eventually acknowledged Sim’s mastery of the moment with a flap of one hand, which turned into a slap against a nipping midge.

‘Christ,’ he growled. ‘We must be the blissin’ o’ Beelzebub on his Lowland midgies, and if their dinner would only cease slapping them it would be a midgie paradise.’

‘These are wee yins,’ growled Sim Craw. ‘Where Black MacRuiraidh is from they are bigger and thicker, with a stinger like a tourney lance.’

The Lothian men laughed and the butt of the joke joined in. In months past all the Lowlanders would have stared at the Islesman, Black MacRuiraidh, his tangle of jet hair and his big axe, as if he had landed from the Moon itself, but already they were used to him and the others of his kin who had come to join King Robert. Christina of Garmoran had sent them and there were nudges and winks about what their new king had done to this Isles queen to have had such richesse lavished on him.

Scots all, Hal noted, from Chirnside Rowan of the Border, busy feeding a twist of dried bracken into the fire, to the near-unintelligible men of Dingwall beyond The Mounth, who had come, freely enough, defying the Earl of Ross who was not a declared supporter of the Bruce.

Not yet – tomorrow would decide all things.

The galloping horse that was Jamie Douglas burst on them, stirring them like a wind shifting embers from the fire. He stuck bread at the Dog Boy, had shared meat in return and, within minutes, the pair of them were off, restless as hounds into a dusk like smoke and the faint music and screeches of women’s laughter.

Life was all in the way a man thought of it, Hal had decided. The way a young man thought of it, in fact, for when the blood was strong and hot the whole earth was new, like a calf waiting to be licked dry.

When he got some years on him, all the same, it was different. Down deep, bone-deep, Hal knew the world was old, so old he wondered sometimes what chiels and lords had been on it before civilized people came to it, before even the dark, fey Faerie.

Jamie Douglas made a man feel old with the knowing that the younger ones believe the world was new and that they alone were discovering it, as if no-one else ever had.

The squeals and shrills of women – God alone knew where they came from, or how they survived – brought grins and the backs of hands to dry mouths from men considering their luck or their siller.

Sim Craw did not think of thighs and quim. He thought of the shrieks of the Welshman, the shit-smeared archer brought in as prisoner and put to the Question; not hard, Sim recalled and, in fact, not hard enough for Sim’s liking, for he was sure the man had more he might have told.

Let off light, Sim had thought – until Edward Bruce’s retinue men had held the man down, cut off the first two fingers of his right hand, the drawing hand, and seared the wound shut with pitch, for mercy.

‘You will never shoot another Scot,’ one of them had declared, hands on hips and straddle-legged as the Welshman was set free, hugging his pain to his breast and hirpling off scarce able to see through tears and snot, yet blessing his luck that he was alive. Sim had seen Edward Bruce’s scowl at it.

‘You should have cut the tongue from him as well,’ he had growled, ‘so he could not tell what he saw here.’

Hal, on the other hand, was glorious with thoughts of Isabel, somewhere in the rich panoply behind the King’s own tent attending to the Queen. In a while he would go off and find her, when he was sure the Queen had been bedded down for the night and that he could claim Isabel for his own.

For now he lay back and looked at the darkening sky, already shot with sharp, bright stars like fresh-struck tinder, listening to the men slap and complain about the whirling moths and midgies.

‘If ye listen close,’ Bull rumbled, ‘ye can hear their war cries. If they were as big as we, no army would stand agin them.’

‘Aye, weel,’ answered Erchie Scott, ‘we needs offer a soul to some wee imp o’ Bellies-bub, Lord of Flies, in return for such an army. Then we leave them to fight the English and we can all ride home.’

‘God be praised,’ declared his brother, Fingerless Tam as he crossed himself. ‘To speak it is to summon it – clap yer gums on that, brother.’

‘Besides,’ yawned Chirnside, ‘it is clear there will be no fight on the morn. Yon wee priests will have come to beg King Robert not to break the Sabbath.’

‘Away,’ scoffed Sim Craw. ‘The Sabbath is it? When has that made a difference? When God handed Wallace yon fat Treacherer Cressingham on a silver platter, we fought wee fights with them from one Holy Sabbath Day to the other at Stirling Brig – and the big battle itself was fought on the Ferial Day after Finian’s feast, which is also holy.’

He beamed into their chuckles.

‘Holy Days, my wee rievin’ ribald,’ he added, ‘is when we fight best – in the sight o’ God.’

Those who remembered the tale of Wallace’s triumph nodded into the soft chorus of ‘amens’, then sat, smeared with the honey memory of that glorious day.

It came to Hal that there were few who had actually been there at the time, kneeling on the wet grass to receive the Sabbath pyx from the monks of Cambuskenneth Abbey. The promise of that day had vanished in hunger and death and defeat so that here they all were, too many years later, still fighting and no closer to victory.

A figure loomed, turning all eyes. He was a middling man in all respects, from height to years, dangled about with maille that seemed more collected than worn and with a battered shield on his back, deviced with something almost too faded to read.

‘God be praised,’ he said from a weary threadbare face, bushed with grizzled beard.

‘For ever and ever,’ came the rote reply, then Hal rose up and grasped the man, wrist to wrist. There was a brief exchange of greetings, a request answered at once and the man skliffed off through the trampled grass with a peck of oats for his warhorse.

‘Christ betimes,’ grumbled Wynking Wull, his tic working furiously with annoyance. ‘Bad enough that the likes of the landless Douglas boy can steal our meat. We will all have buckles clappit to backbones if we give out hard-gotten fodder to any raggy chiel who asks.’