Unable to see, he had dragged out his sword and swung it wildly left and right, cursing his own foolishness in ever having thought to ride as a knight, at ever having thought he was one, for all his dubbing.
Suddenly, through the slit, he had seen Vipond, half turning towards him and reeling in the saddle. The knight seemed to slip sideways, put out one arm and grasping hand, as if to clutch Kirkpatrick, and then fell and disappeared from view.
Kirkpatrick had hauled the warhorse to a halt, cursing it. He had been told that it was beautifully trained and biddable, worth every penny of thirty marks, but Kirkpatrick would have fed the beast to the pigs he kept on the manor which this warhorse represented in price.
He climbed off it, half sliding, half falling, threw down the shield and unlaced the helm and hauled it off, whooping in air as if he had breached from water. Then he tore off the bascinet, forced the maille hood back and ripped off his arming cap, glorying in the feel of air on his sweat-tousled bare head.
When he managed to focus, he found himself looking at his own shield; two broken shafts were in it, neatly puncturing the fist with the upraised dagger. Those were the blows I felt, Kirkpatrick thought with a sudden lurch. If they had not hit the shield …
Then they would have hit me, he thought when he found the body of the fallen Vipond. As they had hit him — the knight lay on his back, metal face pointed to the sky, a shaft so deep in the bicep of his right arm that Kirkpatrick knew it had gone through and then snapped off in the fall. A second arrow was buried almost to the fletch in his right side.
Kirkpatrick’s legs were buckling as the weight of maille fell on them. He lumbered up to Vipond, not knowing what he was about to do with a dead man — and then he heard the metal rasp of breathing from the faceless creature and dropped his sword. He grunted his way down to one knee, fumbling with the knight’s helmet lacings; when he drew it off, Vipond’s sweat and gore-streaked face stared up at him, the smile on it crimson; he had vomited blood, Kirkpatrick saw.
‘Thank … you,’ Vipond wheezed and Kirkpatrick looked him up and down, went to touch the arrow in his side, thought better of it and grasped the one in the knight’s bicep; the man groaned and Kirkpatrick let it go as if it had been on fire.
He sat down with a hiss of maille links and the clank of pauldron and ailette, aware that he was as useless at physicking this man as he was at knightly combat, that he was flapping his arms like a hopeless chicken and no help to anyone.
‘I will get help,’ he muttered. ‘Water …’
He found Vipond’s fierce clutch on his wrist.
‘Stay.’
The knight’s eyes had become hot and afraid.
‘Do not … let … me die … alone.’
You are not alone, Kirkpatrick wanted to say. God is watching. But it sounded trite and hollow, so he said nothing at all and sat there holding Vipond’s hand while his destrier cropped contentedly, picking delicately at the grass not trampled or soaked to muddy gore.
Vipond’s own mount had vanished, but three others moved across the sprawled bodies, their trappings torn and streaked. A fourth limped back and forth, every now and then making a plaintive screaming whinny from a snaked-out neck, as if shouting for help.
Somewhere, time slipped away. Kirkpatrick was half aware of the sudden increase in the noise of battle to his right but it did not seem important enough to turn and look. He was fixed, frozen, staring at nothing at all, yet aware of surge, like a flood tide, as the fighting moved away from him. The heat beat on him, melted him to dull lethargy.
When he snapped out of his daze, it took him a moment to realize that movement had done it; a horseman was coming, wavering through the heat haze, all faerie and stretched.
‘A rider — help is coming,’ he said, turning to Vipond. He had intended to remove his hand from the knight’s clutch and pat it soothingly, reassuringly — but the death grip was fierce and Kirkpatrick had to prise it free, shocked at the fact that the knight had died and he had not known when it had happened. He might as well have died alone, Kirkpatrick thought bitterly, for all the help I have been; he smelled the rankness of himself, remembered what he had done and felt sick shame.
The rider stopped. Kirkpatrick was suddenly aware that there was only himself and the man on the horse in this part of the world; to the left was the great hump of Coxet Hill where, incongruously, birds sang and insects whined and hummed, headed for the feast. To his right, the battle was a carpet of dead and the moaning dying, with a great mass of heat and dust haze beyond where figures flitted and roared sullenly.
The English have been forced back … We have won, Kirkpatrick realized with a sudden heartleap of exultation. We have actually won …
The rider was closer and now Kirkpatrick saw that the warhorse was plodding, head bowed with weariness, the trapper on it stained and torn so that dags and tippets of material trailed on the ground. The rider had lost all head coverings — torn them off, Kirkpatrick thought, as I have done, to get some relief from the heat — and his surcote was streaked and splashed with fluids. He had no shield, but held a sword in what appeared to be a tired fist, dangling dangerously close to the horse’s unsteady feet. He looked as if he had ridden out of some ancient barrow mound.
Kirkpatrick watched the rider pick a careful way round the litter of dead here — mainly archers, he realized. So we did as we were bid, he thought bitterly, even though I had no good part in it. He stood up, levering himself to his feet and feeling the dragging weight of maille chausse and hauberk; the horse stopped a moment later, the rider straightening in the saddle and bringing the sword up.
He thinks I am a danger, Kirkpatrick thought to himself and laughed with the irony of that. He opened his mouth to call out — but froze, gaping as the sword came up and pointed at him.
He knows me, Kirkpatrick thought, and felt the blood in him stop, had a surge of mad panic as he saw, through the blood-spatters and stains, the man’s device; three gold wheatsheafs on red. No cadet marking of any lesser branch of the Comyn, so this was the lord of Badenoch himself.
Red John, he thought wildly. I killed you. At least I slid a wee dagger into your heart, though the Bruce had already done the work. I watched your vain wee raised bootheels spatter up the tarn of your own heart’s blood in Greyfriars, years since …
He caught himself. No ghost, he told himself firmly and looked round for his shield and sword. Worse than that.
The son, delivered by the Devil to the one part of the field of struggling men where he would find Kirkpatrick, the man he hated above all others.
The man who had murdered his father. Aye, Kirkpatrick added bitterly, and would have done for the boy, too — the boy now grown to stand opposite me — if Hal had not intervened.
Badenoch sat for a moment and Kirkpatrick, glancing wildly left and right to see if any help was close, saw his sword sticking in the sere turf like a grave cross. He eyed it, but did not move; like a mouse to the cat, the act of going for it might spring the puss forward and Kirkpatrick did not want that. Not a man on a warhorse, he thought desperately, with blood in his eye …
Then Badenoch, slowly — painfully, Kirkpatrick thought with a sudden thrill — clambered off the beast, which stood, legs splayed and head bowed. The man patted it fondly before he turned, straightened, twirled the sword lightly in one hand and started forward.
Not wounded then, Kirkpatrick thought, just weary, though not as done up as his mount. He sprang then, tore out his sword and turned. Badenoch stopped, close enough for Kirkpatrick to see his face, which was straw-coloured and sheened slick with sweat so that the beard seemed darker and was pearled with droplets. Perhaps he is injured after all, Kirkpatrick thought. Or heat-struck. Not that he was in any better state himself, stiff with sitting and crushed by the unfamiliar weight of maille and pieces of plate steel.