Robert Low - The Lion Rampant

‘For your new device,’ he said harshly, ‘you should consider a hand with a bloody dagger in it. Fitting.’

Kirkpatrick did not even blink.

‘You must take better care of that maille,’ said a voice in French, splitting the moment like a wedge in a tree; they both turned into the spade-bearded face of Rossal de Bissot.

‘The sea air will rust it unless you do,’ he went on blandly, ‘though it is good that you wear it constantly, to get used to the weight again.’

Hal, in the act of heaving it up and slithering back into its cold embrace, was less smiling about the affair, but de Bissot’s approval was genuine and his enthusiasm uplifting.

‘By the time we reach Crunia,’ he beamed, clapping Hal on his metalled shoulder, ‘you will be as before — fit to be a Poor Knight of the Order.’

‘Slight chance of that these days,’ Hal replied shortly and Rossal nodded.

‘God wills,’ he answered, and then smiled again, thinly. ‘There was a time when you were considered for such an honour,’ he went on, to Hal’s astonishment. ‘Your kinsman, Sir William, approached your father on the matter.’

‘Sir William? The Auld Templar?’

De Bissot frowned at the term, but nodded.

‘Yes, so you called him. It was shortly after the loss of your wife and child. Sir William asked to approach you and was refused, since you were sole heir to Herdmanston and your father did not want to lose you as well.’

Hal was astounded. Sir William Sientcler of Roslin, the Auld Templar, had never mentioned it, nor had his father. It could easily have been done, too, for Hal’s grief at losing his wife and young son had been great enough to have driven him to the monkish life of a Templar, while Sir William, as Gonfanonier — banner-bearer — of the Order, had the clout to arrange it.

De Bissot saw his look and his smile broadened the grey-streaked spade beard.

‘Yes. You might have been standing here with us,’ he said and Kirkpatrick shifted a little at that.

‘Kneeling,’ Kirkpatrick corrected and de Bissot turned to see de Villers and Sir William de Grafton at prayer.

‘Terce,’ Rossal said, still smiling. ‘Time is given by God and should not be wasted. I will join them.’

‘They spend a deal o’ time on their knees,’ Kirkpatrick noted sourly, watching de Bissot join his fellow knights. ‘If they had climbed up off them long enough they might still be in the Holy Land.’

‘They fight well enough when they are on two feet,’ Hal noted, remembering. ‘Callendar Woods.’

Kirkpatrick let the words drift like acrid smoke. Callendar Woods, where Wallace’s army had been helped to shattered ruin by Templars, a Christian Order fighting Christians; Kirkpatrick had not been there, but knew that the odious taint of it had stained the Order and added to its final ruin.

Yet here they were, sailing with disbanded heretics of the Templars, carrying Templar treasure to a former Templar stronghold in Spain to fetch stored Templar weapons.

It was a deal brokered on behalf of the King of Scots with the Order of Alcántara, the Spanish who had taken over the former Templar fortress; in return, Hal knew, de Bissot and the others had been given a rickle of land and a castle somewhere in the north that they might call their own, provided no mention was made of Poor Knights.

It was, to say the least, the strangest quest he had been on with Kirkpatrick and he had been on a few. A royal request, of course, which is to say only slightly less of a command than from God.

Desperate, too, Hal had realized. Bruce sends out his two faithful auld hounds because he can trust no one else to exert their utmost, in ingenuity, strength and, above all, loyalty; he felt his grin twist wryness into his face.

Loyalty. Kirkpatrick will do it for a dubbing, a blade on the shoulder that ranks him with the other nobiles of the Kingdom. I would give mine back, if it were possible, he thought, to not be here at all.

Only for Isabel. Only for her.

He and Kirkpatrick sat in silence for a while as the ship wallowed on, the crew trying to make themselves look busy so that Pegy Balgownie would not give them something worse to do in his scowling temper at the lack of wind.

‘Matins to Compline and during the night as well,’ Kirkpatrick muttered, watching the kneeling men and reluctant to let go of his Templar bone.

‘“O Lord, You will open my lips and my mouth shall declare Your praise,”’ Hal intoned with mock piety. ‘The Order Knights have a deal of questions to ask of God, who seems to have abandoned them. Unlike the King.’

Kirkpatrick shook his head.

‘The King will not openly support the Order of Poor Knights, which no longer exists, according to the Pope. But he will not cast aside folk he owes — nor will I.’

The last was said with quiet vehemence and Hal knew why. De Bissot had once plucked Kirkpatrick from certain death and had been quietly instrumental in garnering support and information for the beleaguered Bruce, even before Hal’s capture.

And now, Hal thought, he brings even more. He met Kirkpatrick’s eyes and was sure they shared the same golden thought; snugged up in the depths of the Bon Accord ’s foul swill of ballast was a nest of stout, bound boxes as full of riches as any eggs. Templar riches, plucked from the ruin of their collapse.

A stir on deck made them turn to see the other richness that nestled in the cog’s belly: a fragrant drift of periwinkle-blue dress, a lush curve of lip, two large eyes, dark as olives in a fine, breath-stopping beauty of a face. Her black hair was caught up in a net of pearls and she moved sinuously, aware that every eye was on her.

Yet Hal thought the Doña Beatriz Ruiz de Castro y Pimental’s beautiful face had a sharp look, like a razored heart. She was the one sent by the Order of Alcántara to finalize the details of this secret deal and if ever anything marked the difference between the two religious commands, it was Doña Beatriz, walking like a gliding dream, shadowed by her Moor, Piculph. The Templars did not care for Moors — and for women even less.

Kirkpatrick’s soft chuckle turned Hal’s head to where the man gazed: the supposed Benedictines, rising hastily and moving away, as politely as they could, but pointedly nevertheless.

‘If nothing else betrayed them,’ Kirkpatrick said, ‘then their Order’s disdain for weemin is as clear as a Judas kiss.’

They watched as Rossal de Bissot, braced stiffly, walked to the lady and inclined his head in a curt bow, and had it in return. Piculph, after a short pause, moved away — out of earshot, Hal thought — and the lady began to walk quietly along the deck, with Rossal falling in beside her, his every celibate step as if he walked barefoot on nails.

Hal saw that the other black-robed knights watched Piculph, while the rest of the crew moved from their path, throwing surreptitious looks at Doña Beatriz which left little to anyone’s imagination. They were a rag-bag collection of ill-favoured lumpen pirates, Hal thought, but Pegy Balgownie keeps them in line and he, according to Kirkpatrick, is to be trusted.

He had an idea what Rossal and the lady discussed, but he only knew that Doña Beatriz had come to Rossal from Villasirga in Castile, a Templar hold now handed to the new Order of Alcántara; the lady’s brother, Guillermo, was high in it, close to the Grand Master.

There was little brotherly love or fellow Christian charity here, Hal thought moodily. The Order of Alcántara needed money and was prepared to sell the former Templars their own weapons and the unlikely pairing now strolling the deck were brokering the deal.

‘“The company of women is a dangerous thing,”’ Kirkpatrick muttered, quoting from the Rules of the Order.