There was never any doubting, even in the dream, what the hooded figure was, standing there with head bowed and a pail at his feet. The white hand which held the clapper flapped like a gull wing and the faint smell of rotten meat rose up, even over the stench from the bucket.
Yet it was a dream and he knew it even in his sleep, a skewed version of the true events — but the essential parts of it were always the same and always as they had happened.
It was Liston in the late autumn two years ago, where he had gone with a select band to try the waters of the place yet again and, though no one spoke it, everyone knew the point of the journey was that Liston’s well was noted for its efficacy with lepers.
The dream played out: the rider demanding the hooded leper withdraw from the path, the patient priest agreeing and then kneeling, as he had done, in abject, appalled apology when he saw his king. The leper had tried to kneel, a painful display that Bruce had halted.
He remembered the shock of it, the sight of that white hand and, at one and the same moment, wanted to see the face and did not want ever to set eyes on it.
‘Who are you?’ he asked and the priest began to reply until Bruce’s raised hand cut him off. There was silence from the leper.
‘Can he speak?’ Bruce asked the priest and then the leper cleared a thickness from his throat, a rot of rheum that turned his voice into the growl of a beast.
‘Still,’ he said, ‘though I do not, for I am considered as dead.’
This was only true and Bruce had forgotten it; lepers were always considered as dead men and had to convey themselves as such. He wondered, trying not to shiver, how old the man was and asked but it was as if the man had used up all his allotment of words for that day; his mouth opened and closed and no sound came.
‘He was born in the year the Norse were defeated at Largs, Your Grace,’ the priest offered helpfully.
Forty and nine, Bruce had calculated. Eleven years older than me — is this me in eleven years?
‘What is his name?’
The priest told the details of it; he was called Gawter, came from Tantallon where he had been a sailor, a skilled man at the navigation. Now he was at Liston for a time, working as a gongfermour for the priory.
From sea to shit, Bruce thought. A skilled man brought down to one fit only to handle other people’s leavings. In the dream, sometimes, he gave the leper a coin, sometimes a benefice to keep him for the rest of his life without shovelling dung. He could not remember if he had done that for true — but he always knew the last part, for it had happened and was seared on his mind.
The priest, apologetic, said that because Gawter had encountered someone on the path and not warned them away sufficiently, the leper had to be publicly abjured and reminded of his station. So Bruce had sat in the chilling haar and listened to the priest tell Gawter the leper what he must do. Which seemed to consist of telling him what he must not do.
Forbidden to enter a church or brewery or bakery or butcher or anywhere Christian souls use. Forbidden to wash in a stream or drink unless water has been placed in a vessel. Forbidden to touch food, or clothing, or even the ground barefoot. If you buy food, the payment coin is to be placed in a bowl of vinegar and you must eat or drink in the company of others like yourself, or alone. Forbidden to have intercourse with any woman, or to approach any child, or any person on the road, or pass down a narrow alleyway, lest you encounter a decent Christian soul and brush against them.
You must warn Christian souls away from you with your clapper, wear the garb appointed so that all are in no doubt of what you are and must be buried outside the parish bounds when you die. God grant you grace in endurance.
The words echoed still, more chill than the cold mist. Grace. Grace …
He woke to hear Bernard, gentle and soft in his urgent call. It was dim save for the yellow pool of Bernard’s fluttering candle.
‘Your Grace. Your Grace …’
‘I am awake. What is it, Chancellor?’
‘Your brother is here and Lord Randolph.’
‘Is it time?’
‘Almost — but it is not that. They have news …’
He swung out of the bed, splashed water from a basin, pulled on braies and his underserk; his arm and shoulder hurt still and, in the candlight, the hand was dark and mottled with bruising.
Yet he could feel the fingers and the hand would be blue and yellow in proper daylight, not white. He could feel all his fingers and his toes and flexed them thinking ‘one more day’.
The night, which had never been truly dark, was a smoked sapphire sparkled with diamonds when he moved to the panoply entrance and signalled for the fretting, impatient pair to be let in. In the distance, puzzling him, was a dull red glow which he took to be part of the English camp.
They were fully dressed; Edward was in maille and jupon and Bruce thought he had probably never got out of it, nor slept. Randolph was dressed, but uncombed, without a belt round his tunic and barefoot; spilled out of sleep like me, Bruce thought.
‘You saw it, brother?’ Edward demanded brusquely and Bruce blinked a little, trying to rout the last shreds of the leper from his mind.
‘Saw what?’
‘The glow. Cambuskenneth burning.’
This was a dash of cold water and Bruce sucked in his breath at it, while a slight figure padded silently in bringing a tray with wine and some slices of cold fish and bread.
‘The English have dared to fire the priory?’ Bruce demanded, feeling the anger well in him and then die of confusion at Randolph’s headshake; Edward splashed wine into a cup and handed it to his brother.
‘Atholl, Your Grace,’ Randolph said, almost languidly. ‘One of our men survived the attack and brought news of it. The Earl of Atholl has burned it. The storehouses are in flames but not the priory itself, though the wee monks are having a sleepless night making sure it does not spread. A right balefire for Midsummer’s Night, in truth.’
There was little enough at Cambuskenneth — stuff used in the siege and lifted when the English army drew close; straw hurdles, picks, shovels, fodder for horses, a few lengths of timber in the hope of building some sort of siege machine in time. Guarded, Bruce recalled, by no more than six men.
‘A survivor?’ he asked and Edward wiped his moustaches with the back of one hand.
‘Sole,’ he answered gruffly. ‘The Frenchman Guillaume, whose piety saved him — he was holding vigil for St John in the chapel. The other five are slaughtered … Christ, Sir William Airth is killed. God’s Wounds, Rob, young Strathbogie deserves the worst punishment. Bad enough that he runs off on the eve of battle, but this act is the foulest treason.’
‘The Earl of Atholl is young,’ Bruce murmured, ‘and afraid. And I am your king, brother. Not Rob.’
‘Not so young that he cannot tell right from wrong, my lord king,’ Randolph answered as Edward scowled. ‘Forfeiture is the least he can expect.’
Aye, Bruce thought wryly. Dispossess him of his lands to the Crown, so I can hand them out like sweetmeats to the favoured. With Randolph, Earl of Moray, at the head of the line.
‘No great loss,’ Edward added. ‘If he thought to harm our cause by burning stores, he has missed the mark.’
‘Sir William Airth,’ Bruce pointed out. ‘And four other good men.’
Edward had the grace to flush, a darkening of his skin under the yellow candle glow, while Bruce thought of what he would say to old Sir John, William’s father. Your son is slaughtered, not by the English, but by the Earl of Atholl — God’s hook swung exceeding slow, but it snagged bitterly, for all that.
‘There is other news,’ Randolph said into the chill which followed. ‘A balance of the pan, as it were.’
Bruce waited and saw Randolph stride from the panoply, while the broad grin of his brother gave nothing away. It was the same grin, Bruce recalled with a sharp pang, when he was toddling on fat little legs, bringing some strange insect or animal to present for inspection.