The Black considered Dog Boy when he had voiced this in the growing dark, frowning to show he was giving it serious thought, because that last part had made his men think. No one was fooled as to what he would decide in the end, all the same.
After a long moment of considered mummery, he had shrugged and met the knowing, feral grins of the others with one of his own.
‘As you ken, I hate the Welsh worse than the English and God will stand witness that I truly hate the English.’
He paused for the effect of it.
‘But I hate yon Plantagenet Scots worse than either.’
‘Is there any your lordship likes?’ asked a voice, daring in the dim. Patrick, Dog Boy thought. It will be Patrick and the mouth that will get him hanged this day or the next.
‘I am not overfond of you,’ Jamie Douglas answered, soft and sibilant. ‘But if you fasten your lip and follow where I lead, you will earn my liking by and by.’
The laughter was quiet and knowing, from men willing to follow the Black anywhere so that those left holding the horses were sullen at being left out of it. The others filtered a little closer to the red flowers of enemy flame, creeping like foxes on a coop; the Black shrilled out a piercing whistle and they rushed down on ragged men, blowing on barely cooked lumps of meat to cool them enough to cram down their throats.
No finesse, no spearwork in the tight formations they had been drilling in for weeks, just a slavering, howling madness of long knives and little axes, a growling rush that came up between tethered horses, Jamie bawling to ‘look out for rope’.
Dog Boy was so busy watching for the thin sliver of dark that would betray the horse tether, belly height and as good as a gate, that he did not realize these men had staked their horses to their own reins until he tripped on one of the pegs and fell, sprawling like a new-born calf to roll almost to the feet of an astonished man.
Gaping, the half-raw beef falling slowly from his open mouth, the man was so stunned that Dog Boy was able to spring to his feet, slashing with the little axe; that woke the man up and he fell back, screaming a spittled cream of pink froth, scrabbling away from this horror.
Dog Boy followed, battering him with the axe, hearing the flung-up forearm crack, the shriek of the man as the blade chopped lumps off his hands, flailing like desperate bird wings to ward off the swings to his head.
A blow finally cracked his skull and he rolled away, moaning; Dog Boy saw a flicker among the mad, dancing shadows and screams around him and half turned into the snarl of a new opponent, a rusted sword up and falling on him.
He jigged sideways, fell into the man and heard the long puffed roar of the air being driven out. Staggering, he had time to recover and backhand a swipe with the axe, for the man was on his knees and trying to suck in breath from lungs that were not working. The blow slipped the top of his head off, neat as tapping out a boiled egg, but Dog Boy had no time to admire the work of it; another snarler was coming from his left.
He flung the axe, watched it whirl, saw the man jerk his head sideways so that the weapon whined past his ear and struck the woman behind him in the chest, a dull thump Dog Boy could hear above the rest of the howling din.
He had time to see the woman fold round the blow like a half-empty bag — and then the man he had missed was on him, slashing right and left with a long knife as notched as a broken dyke.
Dog Boy only had the estoc left. That and the axe were the preferred weapons of men who stood in tight spear ranks, for when you dropped the spear and went for the fallen men-at-arms, you wanted a blade to bash in a face unprotected by a fancy bucket helm, or a thin flat needle to shove through the eyeslit of one that was.
The man Dog Boy faced was not a fancy man-at-arms, with maille and a bucket helm, though he dreamed of it, Dog Boy was sure. Instead, he was a garrison man in hodden grey, whose metal-flaked leather jack lay somewhere nearby with his iron hat and who had snatched out the knife because he had nothing else to hand.
He would be good at standing gate guard, or raiding the defenceless, Dog Boy thought, crabbing round in a half-circle, but he is no match for a good knifer in a deadly wee jig such as this. He said so and the man already knew it, licked his dry lips and kept his eyes fixed on Dog Boy’s blade as if the winking light fascinated him.
Should be watching my eyes, as I watch his, Dog Boy thought. Yet it was Dog Boy who made the mistake; he heard the woman gasp and cry out, the one who had taken his axe in the chest with a noise like a stone dropped on a slack drum, and he half turned his head. The man sprang forward and Dog Boy saw it at the last, knew it to be the last — but then the man careered sideways, stood for a moment and shook his head.
‘Warra?’ he demanded and Dog Boy saw Patrick stare at the back of the man’s head where he had thrust his own estoc; then he gazed at the bloody length of thin blade he had shoved into the base of the man’s neck and finally, bewildered as to why the man had not gone down like a felled ox, looked at Dog Boy.
‘Gurrurr,’ the man said, the side of his face gone slack. One eye had drooped almost shut, but he grasped his knife and rushed at Dog Boy. Away sideways, like a mad crab, straight through the fire where he fell over and lay, slobbering softly and smouldering up smoke as his limbs moved pointlessly, still running and not even aware that he lay on his side, burning.
‘Nivver seen that afore,’ Patrick declared, grinning madly, moving to finish the man. ‘Must have cut somethin’ loose in his head.’
Dog Boy was only vaguely aware of it, for he was with the woman. She was already dead, blood all over her mouth and her chest cracked inside, for sure. Not old nor young, once pretty and now nothing at all, as if she had never been.
He sat now and looked at where she had lain before the other women — captives, it was clear — came and took her away to be decently buried in the dark. He watched them filter back to the fires while his fingers turned and turned the axe that had killed her. He wondered if she had been kin to the other women, or even known to them.
They were wary, these women, but had nowhere else to go, as they said to Patrick and the others round the fire.
‘These yins you slew took us from our hearths,’ one declared, a big beldame with arms she could barely fold over her bosoms. ‘They were too hungered to bother us much — but it is timely, your arrival.’
‘You may not think so,’ Leckie’s Tam leered loudly, ‘for we have already eaten.’
‘You daur approach myself an’ I will clap yer lugs, you muckhoon’,’ countered another, equally formidable woman, jutting her chin out defiantly. ‘I had thought better of you, with our own menfolk off to the aid of King Robert.’
It could have been true, Dog Boy thought. The ragged-arse folk had never been needed for wars before, since armies were gathered up from tenants and burghers who could afford at least an iron hat and a stout spear. Not now, though. Now there were bare-footed chiels arriving in the siege litter round Stirling at the behest of their lieges, stripping vills and farms bare and looking to be fed and armed and trained, for the call had gone out that the Invader was coming with the biggest host ever seen and their king needed them. That and the ruin war had made of their lives made most of them bring their families, following their own stolen fodder and cattle in the hope of leaching a little of it back.
‘Aye, weel, we are braw, brave fighters for the King,’ Rowty Adam declared to the women, ‘so what you give to us, as it were, is no loss to your menfolk and a service to His Grace, King Robert.’