‘Bigod,’ Patrick declared, ‘the Auld Carl himself never told such fibs. I am not surprised your ma made brews to make ye boak, if you kept telling her tales like that.’
‘I had a physick once,’ Yabbing Andra began and people groaned. Dog Boy got up and moved away, feeling strange, at once part of them and not part of them. Perhaps it was their talk of mothers. Perhaps it was the new livery he wore, a smart jupon that was still fresh enough to be clean, fixed with the badge of a royal houndsman.
He had taken it from the hands of Bernard the Chancellor, whom he’d been advised to see as soon as possible and had found as a dry thin stick of a priest in plain brown wool, worse dressed than the gaggle of clever clerks who served him.
‘Aleysandir,’ he declared when the name was given to him, consulted the rolls and frowned. He issued orders and, in short order, Dog Boy had his new badged clothes and a chinking bag of money.
‘You have a stipend, paid quarterly,’ the Chancellor declared. He had a face dominated by pink-rimmed eyes and a knife-cut of a mouth, a manner made haggard by the amount of work he had before him. Yet he managed what passed for a smile.
‘The King’s hounds are at Turnberry. Or Lochmaben — no one is sure. Once this unpleasantness is dealt with, you may take up your duties proper.’
And that was it. Stipended, by God. A rich man …
And severed by it from the others, he realized as he moved off through the fires, drawn back over Coxet to the baggage camp. He hung like a mote between Heaven and earth, too low-born for the company of Jamie Douglas, too raised for the likes of Patrick and Parcy Dodd to feel comfortable with.
Now he was looking for Hal and, if truth be told, it was not simply because he wanted to speak of the loss of Sim Craw, or hear the adventure of how Kirkpatrick and the lord of Herdmanston had brought a great load of weapons and armour all the way from Spain. He knew where Spain was — beyond England and further south through Gascony until folk stopped speaking either English or French — but he could not envisage how far it was, or of ever going there.
The truth was that Dog Boy was happy that Hal had survived it all, while the hurting loss of Sim Craw had sunk in him like a wound and would scab over in time. No, the truth of what irked him was that the lord of Herdmanston had not sought him out.
Why should he? We were parted long before he went into Roxburgh’s depths, he thought, and he was seven years in that; he is nothing to me, nor me to him. Yet he recalled that once they had been close and wished for that comfort again.
So here I am, he admitted wryly, looking.
The lord of Herdmanston’s banner was not hard to find even in the confusion of the baggage camp, tight huddled like sheep in the lee of Coxet, stuck to the side of it like a bloom of fungus. Dog Boy threaded a way through the skeins of doggedly patient men and harassed clerks of Bernard the Chancellor, working by rush lights and against the swoop of a night too short to properly darken, tallying and issuing the weapons and armour. He reached the panoply of Sir John Airth, commander of the camp, where a bored, half-asleep guard stood hipshot under a limp banner on a pole.
He was friendly and informative, which let Dog Boy marvel at the power of his new station in life; before, he would have been told to shift away but now he had a cote with a royal badge on it and was treated politely.
He learned that ‘auld Sir John’ was asleep, while Sir Henry of Herdmanston had gone off with another Sientcler lord, the one from Roslin. They had gone to the Sientcler camp — the engrailed cross banner was plain to see, the guard added, since the high and mighty Sientclers raised it on a taller pole than anyone else.
There were fires under the shivering cross and a dull regular clang that spoke of a smith somewhere. Folk moved like drifting shadows and one, sudden as a hunting owl, was facing him and smiling.
‘Bigod, Dog Boy, you’re as braw as shiny watter still, so you are.’
Dog Boy blinked at the woman, her hair a raggle, wearing only a shift dress in the heat and a shawl with a memory of blue in it shrugged across her shoulders. She carried a knife and a basket, while a bairn stood looking up at him with solemn eyes, thumb in her budded mouth.
The face was blurred with years, but the beauty in it was there yet. Bet’s Meggy. The sight of her crashed him back to Herdmanston in the heat of another summer, when he and others had played at the kirn, throwing scythes to cut the last stook of corn. He had won and presented it to Bet’s Meggy amid the cheers and jeers, for her to make into the kirn-baby, a sure sign that she was next for a wedding.
‘Meg,’ he said awkwardly and she cocked her head to one side and then shook it with mocking disbelief.
‘Come high in the world, Dog Boy. How do I call you these days?’
He found himself and grinned back at her.
‘Now we are reacquainted,’ he said, ‘ye dinna have to call at all — just reach out a hand.’
He beamed at her obvious delight and burst of laughter. She had lost the bloom of youth he remembered, the perfect heart of her face had roughened and coarsened a little, the body was thicker — a wean will do that, he thought. Yet he was older himself and the feral-thin girl he’d known then was no longer such a rampant attraction, while the woman who swayed back to her fire was.
She spooned gruel into a bowl, just as a boy came up, staring at Dog Boy with a watchful, defiant eye; Bet’s Meggy looked at him and then at Dog Boy as she lifted bread from the basket.
‘Fetch a bowl and spoon,’ she said. She indicated the thumb-sucking girclass="underline" ‘This is Bet,’ and Dog Boy smiled; of course it would be, he thought.
‘And this is Hob,’ she said to the boy. He was dark, Dog Boy thought, and rangy, though there was the promise that good food and care would slide some real muscle on him. He thought the lad was about nine, but his skill in judging age was nearly all to do with dogs, so he could have been mistaken.
‘Where have ye been?’ Bet’s Meggy demanded and Hob blinked away from Dog Boy’s face and thrust out his hand, which had a coin in it.
‘I took the Sire to the forgeman, as he asked,’ he replied. ‘He gave me a whole siller penny.’
The wonder in his voice was dreamy as Bet’s Meggy took the coin and dropped it into her cleavage; it would not find a way out of the bottom of them, Dog Boy thought admiringly and remembered that Midsummer’s Night when she had danced the Horse Dance, naked under a green shift dress fixed with madder ribbons and wearing the straw mummer’s horsehead.
Clear across the stubbled fields she had pranced, to no more than a whistle and drum, the chants of others dancing and singing behind her and the faint, sonorous prayers of the priest, determined not to let folk lose sight of God in this whiff of heathenism.
She had danced until her feet bled on the stubble, which was the point of it, blessing the fields with her virgin blood. Then, when the field had been acknowledged as watered, Dog Boy had gathered her up and carried her into the night while folk called good-natured filthy advice after them. He had washed her feet gently in the burn on that Midsummer’s Night, the pair of them wearing rue against the threat of Faerie pixie-leading them off to spend a hundred years or longer in their hidden sidhean mounds.
Despite the rue, something had touched them that night; perhaps they had truly been transformed into virgin Queen and handsome King of Summer, for they had coupled like writhing snakes and, in between, rubbed fern seed on their eyelids and sat crosslegged and naked with the rue tight in their fists, in the hope of seeing the Faerie but escaping being taken by them.
Towards dawn — too short a night, Dog Boy recalled, same as this one — she had sighed and laughed about how she would never dance the Horse Dance again now, for he had broken her yett gate for ever.