‘Niall Silkie …’ Hal said and the torch bobbed.
‘Good, good — ye have yer wits. Now … careful. We are lying on our side here and everythin’ is arse to elbow.’
Hal saw he had been trapped by the strap of his baldric, which seemed fastened to the floor by an iron hook — until he realized that it had once been hung up alongside a truckle bed, but now the world was canted and crazy.
The ship …
The ship was beached and broken, the timbers snapped and splintered as gnawed bones. Like a rotted whale, it was a cave of dangerous dangle and sudden pits that he and Niall had to struggle through, while all the time the gentle sough and hiss of the merciful, calmly breathing tide set the last of the timbers to creak and moan.
‘Nothin’ so mournful as a stricken boatie,’ Niall said, when they paused the once, to get bearings. His face was sheened and gleaming.
‘Others,’ Hal managed from the great half-numbed strangeness that was one side of his face; there was a ragged, rasping catch inside his cheek that spoke of one or more teeth knocked out or splintered.
‘Kirkpatrick is on the beach. Pegy is gone and gone — Donald, too, unless God is merciful to his brother’s wails. Almost all the crew …’
Niall stopped, trembling.
‘It is after being the Feast of St Erasmus,’ he said wonderingly. ‘May the wee holy man keep them safe as he should.’
He shook it from him like a wet black dog and fumbled on through the dark, Hal at his heels and still clutching his sword and scabbard, all that he could find of his in this dragon’s cave of dark terror. St Erasmus, Hal thought, patron of sailors and known to them as St Elmo. Asleep, with all God’s other holiest, he added bitterly to himself.
Niall warned him; he dropped with a splash and Hal followed, the jar sending a great wash of pain up through his head, so that it seemed like a bursting blood orange. Then they sloshed on, out through the ribs of the stricken beast, where great blocks like stone lay scattered in the luminous tide. The cargo, thought Hal desperately. The cargo …
‘See if we can find any other poor souls,’ Niall hissed and Hal started guiltily from his thoughts of the wrapped weapons. Slowly, carefully, the torch flattening and flaring in the still-stiff breeze, they moved along, searching the dark and wet.
It was a desolate harvesting in the dim, by touch alone, of objects that might be waterlogged flesh and wool, or sheets of bladderwrack silting the waves like streaming hair. They might be heads fronded with cropped beards, or weeded rocks, all of them veined by the sea, surging and dragging, hissing over pebbles.
The only two men Hal discovered were dead and he gave up on dragging them out of the loll of surf. Somewhere further up he heard shouting, saw torches dance in the darkness and Niall Silkie plunged his own brand into the surf with a hiss, falling into a half-crouch of terror.
‘Wreckers,’ he said. ‘Come to loot the ship and slit the throats o’ any survivors.’
But Hal knew at once that the shouter was Kirkpatrick and rose, sloshing up through the surf to the stumbling pebbles, dragging his sword out. Niall, who did not want to be left alone in the dark, cursed.
Moving towards the sound, Hal felt the tug and treachery of tussocks, saw the torches coalesce and the shadows etched against them. He stumbled out of the dark and saw a man whirl towards him, the gleam of naked steel in his hands.
‘Friend,’ he yelped. Somhairl, both fists full of knife, gave a delighted grin and called out his name, so that all the shadows turned; there were not many of them, Hal noted.
One of them was Kirkpatrick, who turned once to acknowledge him, then faced front again and yelled out a long stream of Gaelic, patiently learned at the elbow of Bruce.
‘Bastard Campbells,’ he growled aside to Hal, the sodden dags of his wet hair knifed to his face. ‘Caterans and worse, who would try and steal the smell off your shit because it belongs to someone else.’
Hal saw the figures, uncertain under their torches, all wild hair and bare legs and wet, sharp steel.
‘I hope you are being polite,’ he said and knew the mush of his voice was a shock to them both when Kirkpatrick turned to him and raised his own sizzling torch for a better look; Hal did not want to hear his views on the batter of his face, but had them anyway.
‘Christ, ye look as if ye had the worst o’ an argument with a skillet,’ he declared. ‘Ye are more bruise and swell than face.’
‘A rope’s end will do that,’ Somhairl added sombrely, ‘whipped by a gale like we had.’
So that was what had hit him. Not the whole world
then …
Kirkpatrick’s warning shout buzzed pain through him and, finally, a voice called out in thick English from a throat not used to it.
‘Who is that there then?’
Hal, his head roaring with the pain of doing it, shouted back.
‘Sir Henry of Herdmanston, a friend to Neil Campbell and in need of hospitality.’
There was a pause, then a calmer, deeper voice, growing stronger as it moved closer, fought the wind to be heard.
‘Indeed? You claim the friendship of Niall mac Cailein, which is no little thing and a double-edged blade if you are proved false to it.’
The speaker was better dressed, surrounded by a clutch of bare-legged snarlers, crouching like dogs round him. He squinted, and then grinned.
‘I recall you now: Hal of Herdmanston. I was with you when Neil, son of Great Colin, brought you to the meeting in the heather we had when King Robert fled to the Isles.’
Hal remembered it, though not this man. It had been a low point.
The shadow-man paused and then bowed his neck slightly towards Kirkpatrick.
‘And yourself, who brought the news of our king’s escape and survival. The King’s wee man, though I have forgot your name entire.’
‘Kirkpatrick.’
‘That was it, right enough.’
He made a brief move and the caterans shifted back, lowering their weapons. The man stepped forward and bowed a little more.
‘Dougald Campbell of Craignish,’ he said. ‘You have the hospitality of my house.’
‘That’s a bloody relief,’ Kirkpatrick said as the man turned away to shout a liquid stream of Gaelic to his unseen men.
To Somhairl he said: ‘Gather up those we have found. When it is light, we will return and search for more.’
‘The cargo …’ Hal said and Kirkpatrick patted his arm.
‘Away you and get your face seen to. The cargo will be brought, safe and untouched. You heard the man; we have the hospitality of the Campbell of Craignish.’
‘Aye,’ Hal said. The pain seemed to ebb and flow with the tide now; a sudden thought lanced through it, sharp with the fire of guilt, and jerked his head up into Kirkpatrick’s concerned face.
‘Sim … where is Sim?’
Kirkpatrick’s bloodless lips never moved, his greased face never quavered. Yet Hal felt the leaden blow of it, hard as the rope’s end which had smacked his face, and he reeled, felt the great burning light explode in his head and bent over to vomit.
Then the light went out.
ISABEL
He came to gawp, the de Valence who is called Earl of Pembroke, hearing that I was a witch or worse. Even earls are not immune to scratching the scabs of their itching minds, to look on the strange wonders of the caged. Malise, fawning and bobbing his head like a mad chook, brought him to the Hog’s Tower, but even this rebounded on him, for Aymer de Valence’s distaste for what had been done to me was clear. Dark and scowling he was, so that I was reminded of the name everyone called him behind his back, the one Gaveston gave him: Jacob the Jew. I will resolve this, he said to Malise, after midsummer, when the current tribulations are settled. Malise did not like that and I should have been pleased for an earl’s help, like a thirsty wee lapdog for water. Of course I was not. Immediately after the tribulations of those days, I answered like a prophecy and before Malise could speak, the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light and the stars shall fall from Heaven and the power of the Heavens shall be shaken. Gospel of Matthew, I added as the Earl crossed himself. Chapter twenty-four, verse twenty-nine, I called after him as he fled; I saw the punishments flaming in Malise’s eyes.