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He had a long tunic and a belted surcoat over that, no helmet and bare legs and feet; he was hardly different from the wild men he led save that he was head and shoulders above the tallest and carried a hand-and-a-half, a sword most men would have clutched in two fists but which he carried in one.
Hal and Sim and the Herdmanston men were on foot for there was little point in trying to plooter through flames and back courts on horses, but Bruce and his Carrick men were mounted, trying to force through the mob up the main track to Scone priory. Hal heard him yelling ‘A Bruce, a Bruce,’ to try to keep his men from spilling off the road into the foundering tangle on either side.
‘Christ save us,’ Sim Craw panted, shouldering some dark shape away from him with a curse. ‘What a mob. An army, bigod? A sorry rabble – the English will scatter this like chooks in a yard, first chance they get.’
It was true, but the English had no army here, only fleeing clerks, monks who wished they had never taken Edward’s offer of Scottish prebenderies and a few soldiers. There were screams ahead and Hal saw Wallace’s head come up, like a hound licking scent from the air. A snarling maurauder, wool cloak rolled up round his neck like a ruff, leaped a rickety fence, the woman he was chasing stumbling over her skirts and shrieking, he laughing with the mad joy of it.
Wallace never seemed to pause, but shot out his free hand and caught the man by the thick wool plaid, hauling him clean off his feet to dangle like a scruff-held cat, his toes scraping the road as Wallace walked steadily along.
‘I warned ye,’ Wallace growled into the man’s face and, in the light of the flames, Hal could see the utter terror burned into the man’s eyes. Then Wallace hurled him away like an apple core, striding on as if nothing had barred his way.
‘He’s feeling a wee bit black-bilious,’ Sim Craw offered, but Hal never had a chance to reply, for the first serious resistance burst on them.
They roared out from the great dark bulk of the stone priory, a handful of desperately charging soldiers, the sometime-men hired to help collect taxes or bring in accused. They had padded jacks, heater shields, spears and all the skills of one-armed cripples. They were local men, who did not want to fight at all and were not English – save the one who led them, waving a sword and shouting; Hal couldn’t hear what he said.
Surprise worked for them, all the same; they hit the leading straggle of Wallace men, who scattered away from them, too late. One, turning to run, was skewered and fell, screaming. The sword-armed leader hacked at another, who leaped away, cursing.
Wallace ploughed into them as if he was iron, the great sword whirring left and right, hardly pausing. He parried a spear thrust; his men rallied, sprang forward with hoarse shouts and daggers and spears of their own.
The soldiers scattered in their turn and a knot came stumbling towards Hal, who had blundered darkly into the midden of a back court, dragging his handful of men with him. Cursing, he saw Bangtail Hob and Ill Made Jock leaping as if in a dance with three men, while Sim Craw, spitting challenges and taunts, hurled himself at two more. Somewhere, he could hear Maggie’s Davey screaming.
Hal found a single dark shape in his way, saw the thrust of spear and batted it away with a yell, cut back, ducked, whirled and felt his second blow catch as if on cloth. There was a whimpering yelp and Hal saw the dark shape stagger away from him, run a few steps, then fall.
He followed, feeling the clotted black rot of the midden squelch under his boots. The shape mewed and clawed away from him, the fish heads and offal squeezing up between his fingers as he crawled.
Hal hit him on the back of the head, feeling the eggshell crunch of it, hearing the sharp cry. The shape went slack and still; Hal rolled him over, to make sure he was dead.
An unexceptional face, beardless and streaked with midden filth, a wish-mark clear on one cheek. A boy, no more.
Alive, but barely.
‘Mither,’ he said and Hal swallowed the bile rising in him, for he knew what his sword had done to the back of the boy’s head and that he would never see his mother.
‘Stop gawpin’ at him like a raw speugh,’ Sim growled in his ear. ‘Finish it . . .’
He broke off when he saw how old the boy was and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, looked at Hal’s face and knew his head was full of wee Johnnie.
Sim knelt and whipped out his boot knife, slit the throat, swift and expert, closing the boy’s eyes as he did so. Then he straightened, stepping in to break the shackle of Hal’s stare on the boy’s face.
‘Done and done – lose the memory o’ it,’ he gruffed, and Hal, blinking, nodded back into the screams and the flames. Bangtail Hob and Jock came up, supporting a third man between them.
‘Aye, we are braw rebels us, for we have gave this place freedom, certes,’ Bangtail offered cheerfully and the sagging man in the middle cursed. Hal saw it was Maggie’s Davey, then caught the reek of him and backed off a step.
‘Aye,’ declared Ill Made Jock bitterly, ‘well may ye shy away – you do not have to lug him around.’
‘I fell ower a privy,’ Davey moaned. ‘I have broke my neb, sure.’
‘I wish to Christ I had broke mine,’ Sim offered viciously, ‘so that I could not smell your stink. That must have been the De’il’s own jakes ye fell in.’
‘Bide here,’ Hal said to the three men, then jerked his head savagely at Sim Craw to follow him. He wanted away from the smell and the memory of the dead boy’s wish-marked face.
Sim looked at the dead boy. Nothing like wee John, he thought bleakly, but every young lad stared back at Hal with his dead son’s face, Sim knew. There will be more and more of wee dead boys when this rebellion takes hold, he added to himself, ducking under the eyes of the boy which, though closed, seemed to stare at him accusingly.
They came up through the screams and the flame-stains, crouching against lurid shadows that might have been friend or enemy – but, in the end, Hal and Sim realised there were no enemies left, only the madmen of Wallace’s army, fired by blood and running prey.
Hal stepped over a corpse, visible only in the dark because of the grey hair – a dark-robed Augustinian monk, his scapular sodden with his own blood. Sim grimaced and looked round at the fire and shadows and shrieking. Like Hell he thought, as painted on the wall of any church he had ever been in.
‘Priests yet,’ Hal said and left the rest unsaid. Boys and priests, a fine start to resistance and made no better by the sight of Bruce, sitting on his arch-necked, prancing warhorse in the kitchen gardens, scattering herbs and beets while waving a sword, his jupon glowing in the light so that the chevron on it looked as if the dark had slashed it. Christ’s Bones, he thought savagely – I will quit this madness, first chance I have . . .
‘Look,’ Sim said suddenly. ‘It’s yon Kirkpatrick.’
Hal saw the man, sliding off the back of a good horse and throwing the reins to Bruce, an act which was singular in itself – an earl holding the mount of his servant? Hal and Sim looked at each other, then Sim followed after, into the splintering of wood and breaking glass that was now the priory. With only the slightest of uneasy pauses, Hal padded after him.
They turned warily, swords out and gleaming; a shape lurched past, arms full of brasswork, saw them and turned away so hastily that a bowl dropped and clanged on the flagstones. Somewhere, there was singing and Hal realised they had lost Kirkpatrick in the shadows.
They moved towards the sound, found the door, opened it as cautious as mice from holes and felt the shadowed shift of bodies as the monks inside saw their two meagre candles waver in the sudden breeze from the open door. Someone whimpered.
‘A happy death is one of the greatest and the last blessings of God in this life,’ said a sonorous voice and Hal saw the black-robed Prior step into the light of one candle, his arms raised as if in surrender, his face turned to the rafter shadows.
‘We dedicate this Vigil to St Joseph, the Foster Father of our Judge and Saviour. His power is dreaded by the Devil. His death is the most singularly privileged and happiest death ever recorded as he died in the Presence and care of Jesus and the Blessed Mary. St Joseph will obtain for us that same privilege at our passage from this life to eternity.’
‘There is cheery,’ Sim muttered and someone came up close behind Hal and stuck his face over one shoulder, so that Hal saw the sweat-grease painted on it and smelled the man’s onion breath. A cattle-lifting hoor’s byblow, Hal thought viciously.
‘Here is the English and riches, then,’ the man spat out of the thicket of his beard and turned to call out to others.
Sim’s sword hilt smashed the words to silence, broke nose bones and sent the man to the flagstones as if he was a slaughtered ox.
‘May St Bega of Kilbucho have mercy on me,’ Sim declared, waving a cross-sign piously over the stunned man as he snored through the blood. Hal closed the door on the refuge of slow-chanting monks and looked at the felled cateran; he was sure his friends would come sooner rather than later and they had given the clerics a respite only.
‘Kirkpatrick,’ he said, shoving the fate of the monks to one side. Sim nodded. They went on.
‘Who is St Bega and where the bliddy hell is Kilbucho?’ demanded Hal as they crept along into the great, dark hall of the place, where only the shift of air allowed the impression of a lofty ceiling. Sim grinned.
‘Up near Biggar,’ Sim said mildly, peering left and right as they moved. ‘Very big on St Bee there, they are. I thought we could do with her charms here, for her only miracle.’
‘Oh aye? Good, was it?’
‘If ye had seen it,’ Sim said in a hissed whisper that did not move his lips, ‘ye’d have begged a blessin’. Seems there was a noble who handed a monastery a wheen o’lands, but a lawsuit later developed about their extent.’
He moved in crouching half-circles, stepping carefully and speaking in a hoarse whisper, half to himself.
‘The monks feared that they’d be ransacked. The day appointed for boundary-walk arrived – and there was a thick snowfall on all the surrounding lands but not a flake on the lands of the priory, so you could see where the boundary really was. The monks were smiling like biled haddies.’
‘We could use some of her frost in here,’ Hal answered, wiping his streaming face.
‘Christ be praised,’ Sim declared, chuckling.
‘For ever and ever,’ Hal responded piously, then held up a warning hand as they rounded a dark corner and came into an open area with an altar at one end and a series of fearsomely expensive painted glass windows staining the flagstones with coloured light from the fires that burned beyond. To the left was a door, slightly open, where light flickered and flared, falling luridly on the faded, peeling painting that graced one wall.
Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Hal noted. Apt enough . . .
Sim thumped him on the shoulder and nodded to where, clear and blood-dyed by flames, Kirkpatrick shoved papers methodically into a fire he had started in the middle of the room. His shadow bobbed and stretched like a mad goblin.
Hal started to move when one of the glass windows above the altar shattered in an explosion of shards and lead which clattered and spattered over the altar and flagstones. There was a burst of laughter from beyond, then a series of angry shouts.
Hal glanced back into the room and cursed – Kirkpatrick was gone. He and Sim went in, their boots crunching on broken pottery and more glass; Sim circled while Hal stamped at the flames of the fire, which threatened to spread along the thin rushes over the flagstones. In the end Sim suddenly poured the contents of a pot on it and the fire went out, sizzling and reeking of more than char.
‘What was in yon?’ Hal demanded and Sim glanced at the pot and made a face.
‘Ormsby pish, or I am no judge,’ he answered, and Hal, looking round, realised this was the Justiciar’s bedroom, with table, chair and straw-packed box bed; a wall hanging stirred in the night breeze through an open-shuttered window. Sim looked at the hanging, saw that it was a banner with a red shield of little crosses split diagonally by a gold bar.
Hal, making grunting noises of disgust, fished in the damp char for documents, squinting at them in the half-light and stuffing one or two inside his jack. There was a dovecote of similar rolls against one wall, the contents half-scattered on the straw, but Sim dragged down the fancy hanging, taken by the gilding work in it.
‘Ormsby’s arms,’ growled a voice, making both men whirl round to where Wallace bulked out the staining light beyond the doorway. He had sword and dagger in each hand and a smear of blood on a face split by a huge grin. He nodded at the limp cloth clutched in Sim’s fist.
‘Ormsby’s arms,’ he repeated. ‘We will add his head to them, by an’ by and mak’ a man of him.’
No-one spoke as Wallace stepped in, careful in bare feet, his head seeming to brush the roof.
‘A good thought, comin’ here, lads, but Ormsby has fled his bedroom. Out of yon unshuttered wind hole in his nightserk, so I am told. That must have been a sight – what have ye there?’
‘Papers,’ Hal declared, feeling the ones he had hidden burn his side as if still aflame. ‘There was a fire.’
Wallace peered and nodded, then looked at the chambered library on the wall.
‘State papers, nae doubt,’ he declared, ‘if the Justiciar of Scotland saw fit to try and burn them. So they might be of use – when I find a body that can read the Latin better than me.’
‘It will be hard,’ Hal said, not correcting Wallace on who had been doing the burning. ‘Sim put the flames out with a pint of the great man’s pish.’
‘Did he so?’ Wallace laughed and shook his head. ‘Well, I will find a wee clever man with a poor nose to read them.’
Hal, who was also uncomfortably aware that he was not admitting his own reading skills, laughed uneasily and Wallace strode back to the door, then paused and turned.
‘Mind you,’ he said, innocent as a priests’s underdrawers, ‘I am wondering why yon chiel of The Bruce – Kirkpatrick is it?’
Hal nodded, feeling the burn of the eyes, while the sconce torch did bloody things to the Wallace face.
‘Aye,’ Wallace mused. ‘Him. Now why would he birl his hurdies out that self-same unshuttered window not long since, as if the De’il was nipping his arse?’
He looked from Hal to Sim and back. Outside, something smashed and there were screams. Wallace shifted slightly.
‘I had best at least try to bring them to order,’ he said, his smile stained with fire, ‘though it is much like herdin’ cats. I will seek you later, lads.’
His departure left a hole in the room into which silence rushed. Then Sim let out his breath and Hal realised he had been holding his own.
‘I do not ken about the English,’ Sim said softly, ‘but he scares the shite out of me.’
Nor is he as green as he is kail-looking, Hal thought and decided it was time the pair of them were elsewhere.
The quiet of the chapel refuge was feted with a blaze of expensive waxen light and the soft hiss of babbled prayers, so that the flames flickered as the huddled canons gasped for air.
Cramped as it was, a clear space existed where Bruce knelt, though he did not bow his head. There was a fire in him, a strange, glowing flow that seemed to run through his whole body, so fierce at times that he trembled and jerked with it.
He looked at the painted walls of the chapel. In a cowshed, Mary nursed the newborn Child by her naked breast in a bed, while Joseph watched from a wooden chair to the right. They smiled at Bruce. In the foreground, the heads of an ox and an ass turned and regarded him with their bright, mournful eyes. An angel stood and regarded him coldly in the background and above, in Latin, the words The Annunciation to the Shepherds seemed to glow like the fire in his body.
Bruce bowed his head, unable to look at the face of the smiling Virgin, or the disapproval of the angel. The deed was done, the secret safe according to the gospel of Kirkpatrick, breathing hard from having had to run from burning the evidence.
More sin to heap on his stained soul. Bruce thought of the man he had killed, a perfect stroke as he cantered past the running figure; it was only afterwards he had seen it to be an old priest. Longshanks had replaced a lot of the livings here with prelates of his own and these were, Bruce knew, much hated and fair game for the lesser folk – but a priest, English or not, was a hard death on the soul of a noble, never mind an earl.
The Curse of Malachy – his hands trembled and the candle in it spilled wax down on to the black-haired back of it, cooling to perfect pearls.
The Curse of Malachy. His father had given the Clairveaux church where the saint was buried a grant of Annandale land in return for perpetual candles, and Bruce, for all he sneered at the spine his father seemed to have lost, knew that it was because of the Curse of Malachy. Every Bruce feared it as they feared nothing else.
The canons chanted and he tried to blot out the Curse and the thought that it had led him to slay one of their brothers on holy ground. Innocents, he thought. The innocents always die.
He saw the tiles in front of him, an expanse of cracked grey. Letters wavered, small and faint, in the top corner of one and felt a desperate need to see them clearly. Squinting, he read them: ‘D i us Me Fecit. The mark of the maker, Bruce thought. Alfredius? Godfridus?
Then it came to him. Dominus Me Fecit. God Made Me. He felt his hand tremble so violently that the candle went out and wax spilled on to his knuckles. The mark of the maker. God Made Me. I am what I am.
‘My lord of Carrick.’
The voice brought him round and his sight wavered, blinded by staring at the candle and the tiles.
‘God Made Me,’ he muttered.
‘As he did us all,’ the voice answered, gruff and fruited with good living. Wishart, he recognised.
The chanting stopped as all the heads turned; the Prior stumbled forward and knelt while Wishart thrust out one hand to have his ring kissed. The ring was not visible under the armoured gauntlet and the Prior hesitated, then placed his lips on the cold, articulated iron segments.
Wishart hardly looked at him, watching Bruce get up. The Malachy Curse, no doubt, he thought to himself, seeing the grim face on the young lord of Carrick. It had hagged his father all his life, but Wishart had hoped it had passed this one by.
He knew the tale of it, vaguely – something about a previous Annandale Bruce promising a priest that he would release a condemned felon and then hanging him in secret. The said priest was angered and cursed the Bruces – which did not seem very saintly to Wishart, but God moves mysteriously and that is what Malachy eventually became. A saint.
The Bruces had been living under the shadow of it ever since and there was something, Wishart admitted to himself, in young Robert’s assertion that it had unmanned his father completely. Hardly surprising, Wishart thought, when you find that a canting, irritating wee priest you have as a thwarted dinner guest later turns out to be Malachy, one of God’s anointed, with the power of angels at his disposal. At the very least, you would have to question your luck. More seriously, every sick cow, murrained sheep and blighted crop was laid at the door of the Curse, so that the Bruces had sullen and growling commons to constantly appease.
‘I was praying,’ Bruce declared accusingly, and the Bishop blinked, looked down and waved the Prior to his feet.
‘So you were,’ he replied, as cheerfully as he could manage, ‘and I will be joining you afore long, mark me. Prior, your robing room will be perfect for a quiet meeting.’
The Prior bobbed. He was not about to beg for what he knew all the canons wanted – an end to the plunder and pillage and an assurance that no more robed prelates would be killed – for it did not seem the time for it, when the Bishop of Glasgow stood in maille coat and braies and coif. Ironically, the mace dangling from one armoured fist was the only reminder that he was a Bishop of the Church in Scotland and forbidden to use an edge on any man – though not, it seemed, forbidden to bludgeon one to death.
Bruce looked at the warrior Bishop, thinking the old man might expire of apoplexy wearing all that padding and metal in this heat. Thinking, also, that Wishart had the strained look of a man either unable to cope with a bad turd or bad news.
He followed the lumbering Bishop into the cramped, hot robing room and was surprised to find Wallace there, sitting on the only bench and leaning on his hand-and-a-half. He made no move to get up with due deference, which irritated Bruce, though he forgot it the instant Wishart spoke.
‘The Lords Percy and Clifford have raised forces and are marching up through Dumfries,’ Wishart said without preamble. ‘Fifty thousand men, or so I am told.’
Wallace never blinked, but his fists closed tighter on the hilt of the sword and Bruce heard the point of it grind into the stone floor. He saw Wishart’s stricken face and knew the truth of matters at once.
‘You had counted on more time,’ he accused and Wishart nodded grimly.
‘Until next Spring,’ he growled. ‘Edward is far to the south with an army he wants to take to Flanders to fight the French and he and the likes of the Earls of Norfolk and Hereford are in a sulk ower baron rights and tolts on wool. I didnae think there would be a force got ready until too late in the season, so would wait out the winter and come in Spring. I had . . .’
‘You had forgot the English Marcher lords,’ Wallace interrupted, and his stare was cold on Wishart’s red, sweat-sheened face. ‘You had forgot the shadow of Longshanks is long, Bishop, and growing ever closer. How is that from a man who is, folk tell me, a master of cunning?’
Wishart clanked as he flapped one dismissive hand.
‘I did not expect Percy nor Clifford to raise forces,’ he grunted. ‘I thought they would not thole the cost of it, since they made such noises about the money for Edward’s French affair. Besides – Percy is De Warenne’s grandson and would not want to make the old Earl of Surrey look a fool for governing Scotland as Viceroy from his estates in England.’
Bruce laughed, nasty and harsh.
‘Aye, well,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘There is you, scheming away and thumping every pulpit about how this is a kingdom, a realm separate from the English and with its own king – so much, it seems, that you have lost sight of what the English think.’
‘Aye, ye would ken that well enow,’ Wallace answered blackly, and Bruce’s smile had no mirth in it that any of the other two could see.
‘Percy and Clifford do not like Edward’s foreign wars,’ Bruce said bitterly. ‘But this is not a foreign war. Edward treats these lands not as another realm but as part of his own – so Percy and Clifford cannot avoid raising forces to put down a home rebellion, no matter how it makes grandda De Warenne look. To do otherwise is treason. Besides – Edward is coming and none of his lords in the north will want to face him without having done something. Even the Earl of Surrey will have to lever himself off his De Warenne arse and play the soldier once more.’
Wishart looked miserably at the floor, then straightened, blew out of pursed, fleshy lips and nodded.
‘Aye, right enough,’ he said. ‘It was a misjudgement. Now we have to deal with it.’
‘Deal with it?’ Bruce bellowed. ‘How do manage that, d’ye think? Even allowing for your spies seeing triple, the English have too many men, it appears. A fifth of fifty thousand would be enough, for nothing I have seen persuades me that this rabble Wallace leads will stand in the open field against them.’
He broke off, breathing heavily, then nodded grimly at Wallace.