Robert Low - The Lion Rampant

Kirkpatrick watched the grey-faced Hal peel off the maille coif and then bend at the waist to shake himself like a dog until the hauberk slithered off and pooled at his feet. It took the tunic with it, so that Hal sluiced water from a bucket on his naked top half.

Ill-used, Kirkpatrick thought, seeing the glassy weals. And too lean, so that the muscle is wasted. He felt ashamed, as he always did when he remembered that last night, the night Hal was taken; it was hard to speak of it to anyone, let alone Hal himself, though they had done it in the quiet of dark, talking as if their words were halt and lame, remembering the murder and betrayal that had taken them into and then out of Closeburn Castle. Almost to safety …

What happened, Kirkpatrick had asked, after you sat me on the horse and sent it off? Hal had heard the depths of shame and bitterness in his voice and was surprised at it; to him it had been no more than sense: Kirkpatrick had secrets best not tested with the Question, there was one horse that would not carry them both and, besides, Kirkpatrick was wounded. Of course, there was the sick in it, the callous way Kirkpatrick had used him for his own ends by pretending that they were rescuing Isabel rather than red-murdering another target of the Bruce.

Even so, there had not been a conscious tallying of all that, merely a matter of seconds to leg the bleeding Kirkpatrick on the beast and slap it into a gallop, and turn to face the men and dogs coming for them.

He had killed the snarling dogs, losing the sword in the last of them, so that all the men who came up rushed him and forced him to the ground. When he told this, in fits and starts, Kirkpatrick nodded.

‘It must have been sore,’ he said simply and Hal wanted to tell him the truth of it. Kicked and punched and smacked with sword hilts, with John Fitzwalter bellowing out to take him alive, by God. Smashed by the studded gauntlet of the Hospitaller Oristin del Ard, while young Ross of Wark screamed at him to get up. Get up — why? So you can knock me down again?

A boot into his cheek and nose, so that his head rang; that’s for the killing of the Master of Closeburn. Not me, Hal thought. Kirkpatrick did that. To his own kin, no less.

A flurry of kicks in the ribs and half of his face; that’s for the Jew prisoner. Not a Jew, Hal thought, a wee Languedoc Cathar, physicker to Bruce and holder of some secret that could not be allowed out, the true nature and condition of the Bruce’s sickness. The Master, his own kin, Kirkpatrick did for pleasure, Hal had wanted to shout, but he was sent to do the physicker down to Hell, dragging me in his wake with his lies. All the same, Hal only yelped and groaned as he took the painful price for Kirkpatrick’s killings: a vicious flurry of stamps that broke fingers and an elbow.

A further series of savage whacks with something heavy — a spearshaft or the flat of a sword — which drove the air from him and agony in, so that he threshed and gasped, thinking, Jesu, they have done for me now. For Dixon, someone yelled. Poor auld Dixon.

The gaoler, clanking his keys, Hal thought. Kirkpatrick did that. Or perhaps it was the servant who had lain across the door to the Master’s solar and was killed in his sleep — Kirkpatrick did that as well. Or one of the guards on the postern gate — I confess it, I killed the pair of them, though Kirkpatrick helped.

Blood on blood, a trail of it and most left by Black Roger Kirkpatrick. I should not even have been there, Hal had wanted to tell them, save that Kirkpatrick led me to believe I was rescuing Isabel, who was long gone.

To a cage in Berwick.

Hal had thought of that every day he woke in Roxburgh, nursing his injuries and his anger, trying to stare through the dark, imagining a similar cage mere feet of stone away, where Bruce’s sister languished. By the time they had allowed him to hobble up to the battlements for air and exercise, Bruce’s sister was gone. Just like that, cage and all, and it had taken a deal of wheedling persuasion to discover that she was not dead, merely so sick that she had been removed to the care of nuns to recover.

Hal had wondered if Isabel had sickened; for a long time he did not even know if she still lived and had only been sure of it when the King had spoken of her. King Robert … the title was still strange to Hal.

He wondered, having recently seen the King’s face as everyone else must have seen it, if the murder to cover up whether Bruce had lepry or not had been worth seven years behind Roxburgh’s stones. He wondered it aloud now, sitting on the tarred deck under the flapping belly of the sail, staring into Kirkpatrick’s face.

There was silence for a moment, smeared with the creak of rigging and rope, the slap of wave on the cog’s hull and the dull flap of the huge square sail, puffing with weak breath, like a man dying.

‘Well,’ answered Kirkpatrick at length, ‘it seemed so at the time, with our backs to the wall and the ram at the gates. Later, when the King fell ill — near to death, in fact — the rumours grew stronger than ever. Worth it? Not for you, I am thinking, but you will have a warmer welcome at Closeburn these days.’

Hal had heard how Bruce had handed the liberated Closeburn lands to his faithful dog, Roger Kirkpatrick, so that he was now Lord Roger Kirkpatrick. Same name as the kin he had killed on that night and there was the Devil’s hand in that contrivance.

‘All I need is a knight’s dubbing, promised this very year, and I am achieved of all,’ Kirkpatrick went on proudly. ‘Nigh on twenty years’ service to the Bruce, mark you.’

‘Aye,’ Hal answered slowly. ‘You have been raised.’

Kirkpatrick fell silent, realizing how far Hal of Herdmanston had fallen and ashamed and angry at himself for letting his pride get in the way of appeasement. He smiled, trying to recover a little.

‘I will change my device,’ he said, attempting to make amends. ‘Those fat sacks on a shield are too arrogant and mercantile for my taste.’

‘Arrogant and mercantile,’ Hal repeated and found himself smiling at this new-found knightly fire from Kirkpatrick, who had the decency to flush a little and make a wry smile of his own.

‘I hear you are eyeing up a wife as well,’ Hal added and Kirkpatrick nodded, trying to make light of it, though the lady in question was an heiress with a good few acres.

‘What happened to the wummin whose man stabbed you for yer dalliance?’

The question was, as usual from Hal, a bolt that took away Kirkpatrick’s breath, though he reeled away from it and recovered quickly, the memories fleeing through him like panicked deer. He had used an old love as cover for their task and shamelessly taken advantage of her former regard. He remembered Annie and himself in the cellar before they gained entrance to Closeburn’s castle. Nicholl, her man, coming out of the dark later, weeping angry at Kirkpatrick’s ruining of his nice life and taking revenge.

He was supposed to have horses for their escape, but delivered a dagger instead; Kirkpatrick felt the burning memory of where it had gone in his back and all but crippled him. It had taken a long time to recover and he never fully had — but it had given him time to plan vengeance.

‘Fled,’ he answered thickly, though it was only half the truth and he had spent a deal of time and silver tracking them both down. ‘He could scarce remain in Closeburn with me as lord and master.’

‘And the wummin — what was her name? Annie?’ Hal queried and saw the flat stare of Kirkpatrick, so that he knew the truth of it; Annie’s man, Nicholl, had not survived Kirkpatrick’s wrath. It was the mark of the man that Hal could not be sure that Annie had, childhood sweetheart or no. Blood and blood, Hal thought, a trail of it, thick and viscous as a snail track, leading always back to Kirkpatrick.