I shall defend myself with the longest stick I have, Bruce thought.
Duncan Kirkpatrick, his face twisted as if in pain, blinked the sweat out of his eyes and knelt dutifully, thinking to himself that he was damned by Hell itself to be the one having to explain to his king what Sir Thomas Randolph, Earl of Moray, was doing.
Bruce felt the rise of panic in him, welling up like shit from a privy as he stared at Duncan. Kirkpatrick’s kinsman, he recalled. Where is that auld dug — and Hal of Herdmanston? If we do not get them back, their mission successful, then we are done with this day and possibly this life. And where is Randolph with the best-armed men we have? The thought that he might have deserted like Atholl almost crushed him, but he heard Jamie Douglas give a surprised grunt and then a snort of derision.
‘What in the name of Christ’s Wounds is he thinking?’
‘May the Lord forgive you,’ said fat little Gilbert de la Haye piously and Jamie barked out a crow laugh, pointing with one hand down across the Dryfield.
‘Not me that needs forgiveness, my lord,’ he answered. ‘Him.’
They all looked. Out on the Dryfield, long hundreds of men skeined forward, their spears glinting, the Randolph bedsheet banner fluttering boldly alongside the saltire. It was his own mesnie, stripped from this command, all the well-armed and best-armoured men committing the unthinkable — the unforgivable — and marching unsupported out into the open against heavy horse.
Coming at them, hard and fast, Bruce saw, the pennons and streamers and blazing flags, the lances and tippets and heraldry glowing brightly through the golden haze.
Clifford’s checky banner he recognized. And Beaumont’s. The black fork-tailed lion of the Stapledons. The Leyburns. Tailleboys. Christ’s Bones — three hundred or more heavy horse of Clifford’s command, bearing down on a little knot of men, already coalescing into a shield ring, as seeming vulnerable and small as a robin’s egg in the middle of a busy stone path. Bruce felt the breath squeeze from him with the vice-crush of it.
‘What possessed him?’ gasped an incredulous de la Haye.
Carelessness, thought the Dog Boy, panting in the heat-flushed ranks of men behind Jamie; The Earl of Moray was supposed to watch for this and has missed it. Now, too late, he puts himself out like a stopper in a leather bottle to prevent the English going further towards Stirling’s fortress.
Glory, Jamie Douglas thought laconically. Randolph has heard what the King did with the rearguard and seeks to outdo it, rub all our noses in his paladin splendour. He did not know what would be worse: that the Earl of Moray be ridden into the dust like a martyr or skewer the English to ruin like a hero. Either way, he thought moodily, we will never hear the end of it.
‘He sought to prevent them reaching the castle, Your Grace,’ Duncan Kirkpatrick offered miserably.
Bruce had his own answer to the why of it, watching with a sick, stone-heavy lump of fear in him as the English closed like a fist on the schiltron.
The Curse of Malachy.
Clifford could not believe it and said so. Beaumont, shaking sweat from his eyebrows like a dog does water, agreed with him, yet the sight gave him a sudden burst of savage exultant triumph.
‘Let them come on further,’ he bawled out, red-faced and beaming. ‘The more ground we give them, the easier they are cut off and cut up.’
‘Give them any more,’ Gray answered wryly, ‘and they will have it all, my lord.’
He meant nothing by it that anyone else could ascertain, but Beaumont swelled like an angry toad and astonished everyone by his ugly snarl; those who knew the tale of it were doubly shocked, for if anyone deserved Sir Henry de Beaumont’s undying respect it was the man who had saved his life.
‘If you are so concerned about them,’ Beaumont savaged out, his face sweat-greased and dark with suffused blood, ‘then feel free to flee.’
Now Gray boiled up, almost standing in the stirrups as he quivered with fury.
‘You dare?’ he demanded. ‘You dare say that to me, sirrah. To me?’
‘If it fits, wear it,’ Beaumont growled, realizing he had been too harsh, yet unable to retreat from it.
‘By God, Beaumont,’ Deyncourt burst out, his own face raging. ‘That is mean — this is the man you owe for being here at all.’
That did not help. Deyncourt, as Beaumont hissed out, was nothing at all and should mind his station when addressing an earl. That drew a sharp seal-bark of laughter from the furious Deyncourt and his brother, Reginald, came scowling up to make his presence felt.
‘Earl? You may style yourself Earl of Buchan, Beaumont,’ Deyncourt bawled, ‘but when you have more than a wife’s portion and a parchment to show for it, then you may have your due from me.’
‘Gentilhommes,’ Clifford shouted. He had three hundred mounted men on plunging horses which — already highly strung — not only sensed action but the nervousness of their riders; it meant that men were cavorting in circles to keep them from bolting; Clifford needed calm and did not get it.
‘Be damned to you, Beaumont. I never ran from a fight and none should know that better than yourself.’
Gray spat it out with all the venom he could make, wrenched savagely at the reins, dragging the squealing warhorse round. Before anyone could understand what he was doing, he had turned, couched his lance, set his shield and was trotting out, breaking into a canter. Behind him, like a grim shadow, trailed the Deyncourts, fumbling helms on as they went; young Reginald whooped with mad delight.
Alone, they thundered down on the hundreds of men forming into a bristling circle of spears.
In the circle it was blazing. Hot, Will thought. I hate the heat. I have always hated the heat, the way it prickled the skin and turned it dark as a saddle, as a Moorish heathen. When the rest of the bairns longed for the endless days of summer, when barefoot did not mean cold blisters, when they needed to swim in the river to cool off rather than get the dirt and shite off, I knew what it was doing to Da’s stock.
My da would be fretting now, Will thought. Down in the undercroft, wondering if it was cool enough and fretting mad. This was more fiery than any heat Da had known, mark you, made worse because I am pressed fore and aft, shoulder to shoulder with men as boiled as me, sweating fear out in a nose-pinching stink. Smelling rank in ranks, he thought and nearly laughed.
Yet my da is to blame for me being here, squashed and melting like mutton tallow in a roaring ring, waiting for Hell to fall on me.
It’s not our fight, I told him. What do we care who wears the crown — would the priory not need candles under an English king? And my da put me right on it, as he always did, as he did when he taught me how to measure to the last drop the tallow needed for a candle clock — a proper one, not the thin streaks of piss stuck in a graded pewter sconce that some folk affect.
‘Who do we pay rent to?’ my da demanded and there it was, perfect as coloured wax; the priory owned us and the rent, though I had never known this before, included service as a man-at-arms. My da had gone before, back in ’07 and again in ’10 and was lucky to escape with his life both times.
I was nine when he first went, Will thought, and understood nothing. Now I am sixteen and since Da is too old, it is me chosen — so here I am, dripping as if rained on, in Da’s rusting rimmed iron hat, patched old gambeson, rattle-hilted sword and a long pike-spear given me by the King.