The Lion Rampant (47 page)

Disadvantaged in every way, Hal thought, armed only with a knife, below a man with a longer weapon on a spiralling stair designed to suit him and not me. Sparks flew as the man struck and missed; Hal saw him glance wildly over his shoulder, saw the iron rod dangling from a hook, waiting to be struck like a ringing bell.

The man slashed once more and sprang back, heading for the alarm iron; Hal was after him, stumbling, stabbing wildly. He felt the blow up his arm, the grate of it on bone and the man gave a sharp cry and fell, slamming face-first on to the table even as he groped for a soothing grasp on his pinked heel. Hal leaped on him, heard the air drive out with a choking gasp and battered his own head on the table so that it whirled with bright light and stars.

Dazed, he rolled free, blood in his mouth, and felt the man scrabble up – and a dark shape moved past him like a wind from a grave; the man yelped as Kirkpatrick’s arm snaked round his neck and drew it back. The dagger gleamed in the guttering candle flame like a basilisk eye before the man’s throat smothered the wink of it.

‘Mak’ siccar,’ Kirkpatrick muttered and held the kicking man until the breath left him; there was blood everywhere, spattering in pats as the man struggled his last.

Hal rolled on to all fours, spitting, to see Kirkpatrick wiping his bloody hand on the man’s tunic, following it up with the dagger; his entire sleeve was sodden with gore.

‘Aye til the fore,’ he growled and Hal, blinking the last of his daze away, climbed wearily to his feet and started up the stairs, Kirkpatrick behind.

The shape was wraithed and black, hidden in the shadows and would have clattered the pair of them back down the stairs if a sharp warning voice had not called out.

‘Look out for her.’

Hal saw the black shroud of nun rush from the shadows and had time to stick out a fist so that the woman, already starting to shriek, ran her face on to the ram of it. Her scream choked off into a grunt, her legs flew out from under her and she clattered limply to the flags at the foot of the door.

That voice, Hal thought. It is her.

The door was barred from the outside and he lifted it easily and wrenched it open.

She saw the dark shape and felt her heart catch in her throat. There was so little light that he was all planes and shadows, might have been anyone – but she knew it was him. Hal. At last …

She was not ready for it, had always seen this moment in her mind as something much different, with her in barbette and sewn-sleeved gown, her face immaculate, her hair glowing like autumn bracken. Sitting in her little room with her hands in her lap, all composed beauty.

Not rousted from her bed, with straw in the greying raggle of her hair and barely dressed at all …

‘Lamb.’

The old term flung all that away like shredding mist and he took a step to where a shard of flitting moonlight sliced across his face. Lined, grey-bearded, even in a moonlight never kind to colour, but with the eyes she remembered, focused like flames on her.

‘Am I so changed?’ he asked and she heard the uncertainty, the tremble, and the inside of her melted with knowing that he felt exactly the same as she.

‘I would know my heart’s delight anywhere,’ she managed and then they clung, fierce as tigers. She tasted iron and salt on his lips – blood, she realized.

‘
Estat ai en greu cossirier, per un cavallier q’ai agut
,’ he said, husky and muffled into the top of her head and she smiled. ‘I was plunged into deep distress, by a knight who wooed me’ … the words, in
langue d’oc
, belonged to the famed troubairitz the Countess of Dia and Hal and Isabel had played this game of line and line about before, when they and the world were younger and each moment almost as precious as this.

‘
Eu l’autrei mon cor e m’amor, mon sen, mos huoills e ma vida
,’ she replied and looked up at him, a smile blurred by tears. ‘To him I give my heart and love, my reason, eyes and life.’

‘Bigod, be done with sucking kisses aff her and find a way to get me in …’

Isabel whirled, startled at a voice where none should be and saw the black shape clinging to the outside of her cage, outlined in rain.

‘Sweetmilk,’ Hal growled, and called out to the man, his voice hoarse and low: ‘Break the roof tiles, man, and keep yer voice down.’

Cursing, Sweetmilk clung with one hand and worried the slick, stiff wooden tiles with the other; one came free with a crack and he forced it between the grilled bars of the cage, not wanting to clatter it like an alarm iron into the bailey. Then he stopped, craned his head to see and then back to where Hal and Isabel held each other.

‘Jamie and Dog Boy are discovered.’

He came along the walkway through the rainmist, making kissing sounds and cursing between wheedles, wrenched from the comfort and warmth of his distantly glowing brazier and makeshift shelter. Dog Boy knew it was the owner of the hound he had throat-cut, wondering where his wee guard pet had got to. He shook his head, more at the bad cess of the dog’s revenge than to get the water out of his eyes.

Beside him, Jamie crouched, balanced on the balls of his feet; in three more steps they would be seen.

Jamie darted forward, lunging out of the shrouding water in the hope that surprise would conquer all – but the guard was a good man and trained well enough that the spear he was holding in one fist came down and level before he had even registered who or what was coming at him.

Jamie, armed only with a long dirk, skidded to a halt, fell backwards and scrabbled upright; for a long moment they stared at each other, the guard with water dripping off the rim of his iron hat, studded jack soaked black, the spear pearling water from shaft and tip.

Then Dog Boy came up and the man blinked out of the numbing shock, opened his dry mouth and bellowed.

‘Ware afore. Ware afore.’

‘Christ and His bliddy saints …’ Jamie hissed and threw the dirk. It whirled, struck the man in the face haft first and sent him staggering. Dog Boy, with a grim grunt, hurled forward and rammed the man to the wet walkway; the spear flew free, rolled off the edge and clattered noisily on to the cobbles below.

The guard struggled and spat and cursed, but Jamie was on him now too and helped pin one arm and a leg, leaving Dog Boy, fighting the mad, fluttering panic of the man, to free up his dagger hand and drive the weapon into the man’s ear, the most vulnerable spot.

For a moment he was years back, leaping on the back of a man fighting the Bruce – and winning – in a dark corridor of a leper house. He had knifed into an ear then, too, felt the same gush of blood over his hand, so hot he was amazed it did not scald him …

Panting, slick with blood and rain, the three of them wrestled and grunted and gasped until, at last, one kicked frantically and then was still. Jamie, dashing rain from his eyes, grinned and got to his hands and knees, was about to say how Dame Fortune was smiling when the bitch betrayed them with the iron clang of an alarm.

Dog Boy looked at the cage, where Sweetmilk clung like a barnacle, then to where men were spilling out of butter-yellow doorways below and up the stone stairs, more coming along the ramparts so that they would pass through the Hog Tower and along to where the ladder snaked to safety. There was no way he or Jamie could stop them.

‘Away,’ Jamie declared, clapping Dog Boy on the shoulder and half dragging him to his feet. ‘Or we are taken.’

‘We cannot leave them,’ Dog Boy spat and Jamie whirled him until they were face to face.

‘Too late, Aleysandir. All we can do is give them the best chance of escaping on their own.’

Dog Boy did not see it. If the guards already spilling up to the Hog Tower passed through it they would send some up one level, to check on the prisoner. When they did, all would be lost for the trapped Hal and Isabel, Kirkpatrick and Sweetmilk.

Jamie saw all that in the Dog Boy’s face. He grinned and sprang along the walkway towards the guards, spreading his arms wide and bawling like a rutting stag.

‘A Douglas. A Douglas. The Black is here. Come ahead if you think yourselves warriors.’

Even as he sprinted for the ladder, two steps behind Jamie, Dog Boy knew that the guards were elbowing each other to get through the door of the Hog Tower, desperate to close with the legendary Black Douglas, to capture or kill him, for ransom or reward. All of them, Dog Boy thought with a savage moment of exultation as he slid down the ladder, his palms and fingers scorching.

Hal and Isabel clung to each other, breath pinched off. Kirkpatrick, half-crouched and with his knife out, looked from their gleaming faces to the dark shape of Sweetmilk, hanging on to the outside bars of the cage. It was so quiet Kirkpatrick could hear the hiss of the rain – and the loud shouts of ‘A Douglas’.

Clever Sir Jamie, he thought as the thunderous clatter of men below spilled through from one walkway to the next, too eager to think; the throat-cut body of the guard below only spurred them on to more vengeance.

There were loud shouts – but no one came up. Everyone clattered on through, bawling loudly about the castle in danger from the Black Douglas. They would be balked at pursuit, all the same, for the White Wall had a postern gate at the foot of a set of steps known as the Breakneck Stairs, with good reason. The only other way was to follow the Black down his own ladder in the dark.

‘We must go,’ he hissed and Hal looked, agonized, at Sweetmilk. He is doomed, Kirkpatrick wanted to say, but the nun groaned and focused all attention on her.

‘Strip her.’

Isabel moved swiftly on her own advice, while the others gawped for a moment, before helping her. It took hardly a moment to pull off the nun’s outer habit and scapular, then Isabel had Hal and Kirkpatrick drag the woman into the cell. She came round as Isabel’s face came out of the scapular and they looked at each other, the nun round-eyed with astonishment; her mouth opened as if to scream.

‘I would not do that, Sister Alise,’ Isabel said and looked to where Kirkpatrick stood with the dagger in his fist. The nun’s eyes went huge and round with fear, and then Isabel spoke to Kirkpatrick.

‘I would not like to hear that she had died,’ she said coldly. ‘A wad in her mouth, tied with a bit of her habit cord, will suffice. Her wrists and ankles too, I think.’

Kirkpatrick obeyed her and Alise was trussed and staring, snoring through her damaged nose.

‘How the world turns, Sister,’ Isabel said, her gentle voice no less of a scathe than a hot iron. ‘If you had not contrived to have Constance kept from me, out of spite, it would be her across my door and not you. Malise will not be pleased – his power may have been removed, but his hate is not and he will visit it on you. It seems that you may burn in Hell before I do.’

‘Time we were away,’ Kirkpatrick interrupted and Hal stared miserably out at Sweetmilk, who pressed his face close to the bars and grinned a wet, wan farewell.

‘On yer way, lords. I will scrauchle free of this, dinna fret.’

‘Down to the bailey and out the gate,’ Isabel declared, shoving Hal out of the tower cell. ‘A nun and her braw escorts, headed back to her convent and away from all this Godless trouble.’

‘Bigod,’ Kirkpatrick declared admiringly, ‘you can strop your wits when you walk with your ladyship and no mistake.’

They slithered like dancing shadows down to the level where the guard lay, down the spiral of stairs further still; somewhere beyond they heard men cursing and picking their way carefully down the worn-smooth, steeply pitched Breakneck Stairs.

At the foot of the tower, Hal led the way out into the bailey, walking smartly, but more casually than his thundering heart; behind came Isabel, hands folded piously in the sleeves, scapular hood drawn up against the rain and to hide her face. Kirkpatrick, at the tail end, saw the great gates of the castle start to close, and Isabel called out sharply to let her and her escort through. The gate commander, a long-time garrison resident, looked at the black-shadowed Bride of Christ and shook his head.

‘Sorry, Sister, while the alarum is up, the yett is shut and the bridge raised as well in a meenit. You mun wait.’

The tile clattered at his feet and made them all leap away from it, looking round wildly. Above, Sweetmilk swung and capered and launched another so that the guards scattered. Someone yelled to fetch a latchbow and the gate commander, squinting up through the rain with a face like bad whey, crossed himself. It was an imp of Satan, for sure – Christ’s Wounds, this was a night when Hell had unlatched its door …

A man ran up with a crossbow spanned, slid in a leather-fletched bolt, aimed and shot. Just as he did so, the gate commander remembered the nun and turned to warn her to get to safety – but she was gone.

Then the body fell, a whirl of arms and legs crashing to the cobbles with a sickening wet thud; the gate commander was disappointed to see that it was no imp at all, just a man with his face twisted in agony and his head leaking into the gutter like a broken egg.

Hal knew Sweetmilk was dead and the sour sick of it dogged his heels as he wraithed through the last crack of the gate and across the bridge, which trembled and creaked under the raising windlass even as they scurried.

‘He saw we were shut in and contrived to help,’ he muttered. ‘God forgive us, he could never have survived the fall.’

Kirkpatrick, feral eyes flicking this way and that as they moved along the lee of buildings, growled back that the bolt would have killed him before that; it was meant as a soothe but did not balm the loss much. Isabel snapped the glare between them.

‘Best we do not stand here like a set mill, for I am resolved never to go back in that cage.’

Hal blinked the rain from his face, felt it scamper, erratic as running mice, down through his collar and back. She never would, he vowed, for he would die before he let it happen and, when he said it, had back the glow of a smile and a kiss on his wet cheek.

The streets were dark – they had called
couvre-feu
hours before – but not empty; the place was stuffed with the debris of war, the sour wash of those flung out of their old lives and forced to run for the dubious shelter of Berwick, with nothing more than hope to cling to.