‘There will be no harm done to you,’ said a firm voice and Jamie stepped in to be blooded by firelight, his black dags of hair down round his cheeks. He put one foot up on a log bench and neck-bowed politely to the big beldame with the bosoms. ‘You have the word of Sir James Douglas on it.’
You could see men’s crests fall at the sound of that, but no one as much as whispered against it, while the big beldame grew red in the face and the other women simpered. Dog Boy was sure any one of them, gripped by an arm and led into the dark by the Black Douglas, would have gone eagerly, swaying her hips and with no thought of her missing man.
‘Weel,’ Leckie’s Tam said bitterly when Jamie had gone, ‘since the Black has put the reins on us, it seems we will have need of entertaining ourselves — a tale it is and your turn to tell it, Parcy Dodd.’
Dog Boy sat and twirled the axe as Parcy Dodd began his tale, thinking on how he had once sat with Bruce himself, before he was king and a wheen of years since. They had discussed the merits of knightly vows and Bruce had been drunk. ‘Nivver violet a lady,’ Dog Boy had said then, for he had been younger and more stupid; well, younger, at least.
He glanced to where the dead woman had lain, the stain on the grass merely one more shadow in the shadows. He had ‘violeted’ a lady now and though it was more than stupid to dwell on it, he thought he could feel the stain on him, as if he had foresworn some knightly vows.
‘So,’ Parcy Dodd was saying, ‘I am stravaigin’ with Ill-Made Jock, when-’
‘Ill-Made?’
They all turned to Dog Boy and Parcy, flustered and left threadless in his tale, blinked once or twice.
‘Aye — him who was with Bangtail Hob when he was murdered by the Wallace …’
He tailed off, aware of the frantic, silent eyes like headshakes; he sat with the air of a man who had plootered into a sucking bog and could neither go forward nor back.
‘That was me that was with Hob,’ Dog Boy said, bitter with the awareness that Parcy did not, in fact, know Ill-Made and had probably never met him. ‘Ill-Made died at Herdmanston, during the siege of it. Button your lip on folk ye never knew.’
‘Aye, aye,’ Parcy answered suddenly and Leckie’s Tam hauled him free of the morass with a joke and the conversation flowed shakily back.
‘You are ower harsh,’ said a voice and Dog Boy turned into Jamie Douglas’s half-amused stare. ‘He only gilded his tale a wee bit, with some name he thought the others would recall.’
‘Ill-Made?’ Dog Boy answered, bewildered, and Jamie chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder.
‘Ill-Made Jock, Bangtail Hob, Sir Hal Sientcler,’ Jamie recited. ‘All famous men who fought with the Wallace and some now with the King.’
Then, seeing the bemused stare persist, he leaned a little closer.
‘Yourself, Aleysandir of Herdmanston,’ he declared with a wry grin. ‘A legend, with a name folk huddle closer to, as if they can take some heat and comfort out of it, like a good fire.’
Stunned, Dog Boy could only sit and think about Ill-Made Jock, who had died coughing in his own blood while folk hammered axes on the door of Herdmanston. He had not looked anything like a hero all the long, sore time he took doing it.
Now he is a hero warrior of the Kingdom. Like Aleysandir of Herdmanston.
I am not, neither one nor the other. I am Dog Boy, worn to a nub by war and who has just ‘violeted’ a lady. It will not be the last vow broken, he thought, for this struggle has grown mean.
Crunia, Kingdom of Castile
Feast of the Siete Varones Apostólicos, May 1314
Sun-ripened, breathing air heady as peaches, they came down to the mottled, dun-coloured roofs of the port amid the bang and clatter of the Seven Apostolic Men, a perfume of incense clinging to every sill of the unshuttered windows brocading the street.
Anonymous as dirt, Hal and Sim blessed the foresight that had paid two Compostella-sated pilgrims for their ragged filth of robes, they happy with the knowledge that not only had they extirpated their sins but they now had the silver to go home by ship — blessed be the Name of God.
Now those robes blended in with the rest of the throng as Hal and Sim came down to the chanting town, a sound at first muted as sea-surf, rising and falling like a distant marker bell on wrack, barely a disturbance to the birdsong and the smell of warm green and myrrh.
By the time Hal and Sim had traded ruts and dust for rough cobbles, heading for the last clear sight of the ships crowding the harbour, they were plunged into a sweaty noise and a swirl of perfumed smoke.
Torquatus, his painted nose already dented, wavered uncertainly, rising and falling in a sea of eager hands; Ctesiphon ploughed grimly through the throng, with Sts Hesychius and Secundius seemingly battling each other for some undetermined precedent. The rest of the Seven Apostolic Men were lost in the chants and the shouts.
‘Christ betimes,’ Sim bawled out, ‘how are we to achieve anythin’ in this conflummix?’
‘Keep moving,’ Hal said, shoving and jostling. Find the Bon Accord first — down to the harbour. In the end he had to bellow and point. Sim elbowed his way through, cursing folk roundly until they reached the fringes of the crush and popped out like pips from a squeezed apple.
‘Bloody lumes,’ Sim fumed. ‘Moudiewarts — look at my cloots.’
He pulled the filthy ragged robes out indignantly and Hal eyed him back with a raised brow until even Sim had to laugh ruefully; if there was a new stain or tear on his robe there was no way of telling.
Hal looked at the haven they had found, discovered the stone faces of men with brown arms folded across their chests and knives prominently displayed.
‘It looks like a tavern or an inn,’ he said and then realized why the men stared; paid to keep out the riffraff, they were plainly considering which way Hal and Sim should leave: upright or horizontal, with balance favouring the latter. Sim scowled back at them, which was no help and only served to have the men look one to the other and, as if on some unseen signal, start to move.
Hal, swift as winking, hauled out his purse, held it up like the dangle of a fresh-neutered sheep bollock and jingled it; as if spellbound the two men stopped, faces broadened into brown grins and they stood aside like two opening doors.
Beyond, the yard was as much a mayhem as the street outside, though the worship was different; here, men bellowed and waved fistfuls of deniers and silver pennies, tournois and grossi while a Savoyard with a black cloth over one eye grabbed them, matched them and, in some way neither Hal nor Sim could fathom, accepted the bet and the odds.
Beyond this quarrelling shriek was a cleared square where two men half crouched, the docked birds churring and baiting in their hands, one gold and green, the other red and white, their shaved necks stretching and straining like serpents.
‘Cockfight, bigod,’ Sim declared with delight, just as the men let go and fell back. Released, the birds sprang forward like tourney knights, their gilded spurs glittering, dashing towards each other with a clash, beak to beak. There was a pause, a strange sound like a sheet in a mad wind and then they fell on each other, wings flailing, beaks snapping, leaping and twirling in a mad dance as they struck out with their deadly feet.
A man screeched as the white drew blood with a strike, flinging up his arms, knocking his neighbour’s hat off and elbowing Sim in the ear; Sim swore and elbowed him back, hard enough to make the man grunt and double up, but Sim’s heart was not in it, for he was roaring for the white and red.
Hal spared the winded man a glance, no more, just to make sure he was not about to take revenge when he got his breath back — and then he saw Piculph moving through the crowd, oblivious to their presence. Hal almost cried out, but buckled it in his mouth. Widikind had said Piculph was on their side, a spy for Ruy Vaz, but Hal was no longer sure whom to trust.