Robert Low - The Lion Rampant

A distant brazier glowed to his left; to the other side was the bulk of a tower, one of the nine Berwick’s fortress possessed and the one they wanted: the Hog Tower. Below, the bailey courtyard flickered in the dancing shadows from stray lights, pale as corpses in the sea-haar — forge, brewhouse, bakehouse, Hal recognized. The dark mass would be the stables, where no light was permitted. No one moved.

Jamie Douglas slithered to his side and grinned, before wiping his streaming face.

‘Bigod,’ he hissed. ‘I should have brought more men. We could capture it easy.’

‘We could not,’ Hal flung back at him. ‘We could try and capture it and it would be hard and bloody. It would also ruin any rescue. Mind that, Sir James, when your heid is bursting with glory.’

‘In and out,’ added a panting voice as Kirkpatrick came up alongside them, ‘quiet and quick.’

He beamed mirthlessly at Jamie Douglas.

‘Like you were taking the favour of someone else’s wife,’ he added.

‘You might have thought of another way to put that,’ Hal glowered back at him and Kirkpatrick acknowledged his lack of tact with an apologetic wave.

‘Aye, weel — the husband is long deid, Devil take him …’

‘Whisht, the lot of you.’

Dog Boy’s glare froze them all and they obeyed him, regardless of station and suddenly, shockingly, aware of where they were perched. Like eggs on a high ledge, Hal thought, and cackling like gannets.

‘Bide here,’ he declared to Jamie, who scowled and looked about to protest.

‘We need to protect the way out,’ Hal pointed out. Besides, he added to himself, you should not be here at all and your lust for glory and your bloody-handed temper will carry you away when we least need it.

Jamie, unused to taking orders from the likes of Hal, looked about to protest and Dog Boy thrust himself into the path of it.

‘I will also stay,’ he announced, ‘to guard our way to safety.’

Jamie, suddenly realizing that this was not his quest and given a suitable task of bravery and honour, nodded and grinned. With a brief look of raised-eyebrow relief, Kirkpatrick passed Hal and led the way towards the Hog Tower, skulking along the walkway, pressed to the crenellations.

There was a door and he imagined it would be shut and barred, which was the way if the castle was guarded, all perjink and proper. He tested it, heard the bar behind it clunk softly in the pins and did not know how they would get it open. He turned to say so to Hal, found that man’s face turned up and pebbling with moonlit rain.

Hal stared up at the cage, clamped like a barnacle to the outside of the tower. She was there, the thickness of a wall, a few long strides away …

Kirkpatrick saw it, too, and blinked the rainmist off his eyebrows.

‘A quick and strong young man’, he hissed, ‘could be up on that and inside in no time.’

It took a moment for Sweetmilk to realize Kirkpatrick was staring at him and he blenched when he did so.

‘Aye, right,’ he whispered back scornfully. ‘In through the door it does not have, for what would be the point of that on the outside of a cage hung a long drop from the ground?’

‘It has a wee slanty half-roof,’ Kirkpatrick pointed out, ‘to shed the rain. With wooden shingles, easily removed. The bars, too, are wooden — ye might snap yer way in.’

Sweetmilk eyed the half-roof, no more than a ledge to shoot rain into the courtyard below, and then the wrist-thick timber grill of the cage. He looked at Hal and saw the misery there, the rain like tears; he does not want to tell me to do something so foolish, Sweetmilk thought. But he wants his woman free.

All folk’s plans for the best seem to involve me putting myself in the hardest places, he thought, moving to the wet rock of the tower and looking for handholds. Well, I came through the bloody horror at Stirling, so I will come through this also. He fumbled the dirk into his belt, ignoring Kirkpatrick’s advice to take it in his teeth. An idiot would suggest that, he wanted to say, for all it does is make you look like a red murderer and put cuts on your tongue and lips.

He felt between the weathered mortar of the stones for crevices and nicks and little ledges. Christ’s Wounds, this would not be easy.

Hal watched him swing up and out; he held his breath, seeing that Sweetmilk had removed his shoes and tied them round his neck. Clever — slick-smooth leather soles were no help at all and Sweetmilk’s shoes were more status than necessity for a man with such horned and calloused bare feet.

As if to mock them, the rain started in earnest, a hissing curtain that shrouded everything to a few feet and sent rivulets and streams coursing down between the stones of the tower. Sweetmilk, arms and feet screaming in strained agony, reached up one wobbling hand and grasped the underside supports of the cage.

For a moment he swung free, dangling by one hand like a limp banner while everyone held their breath. Then he swung up the other hand and slapped it on to the timber. Slowly, laboriously, he drew himself up and then hung on the outside of the cage, a grey figure in the misting rain.

‘Bigod,’ Kirkpatrick declared admiringly, ‘he climbs like a babery ape.’

‘He will fall like a bliddy stone,’ Hal muttered.

Then the bar clunked out of the pins and and the door started to open outwards. Kirkpatrick, swift as shadow, moved into the swinging lee of it while Hal, caught like a thief in a larder, could only crouch and freeze, the rain dropping in his dry, open mouth, looking up into the shrouded, murderous stare of Sweetmilk, who clung to the outside of the cage, not daring to move.

A man shouldered through the open doorway, cloak shrouding his head and shoulders, unlacing his braies and hunched up against the rain so that he saw only the tops of his own shoes.

‘Dinna loit on anyone,’ a voice called out from behind him and the man, head down and drawn in, cursed and stood between the merlons, fumbling out his prick.

‘No sensible soul is abroad on a night like this,’ he growled back, and grunted as his stream joined the rain. There was a moment, a long moment, when he stood and emptied himself, enjoying the feel and wishing it would hurry — he would have gone into the Witch’s cell and used her pot if it had not been for the sleeper across her door. That and the fact that she was called the Witch, of course.

He shivered at the thought. Fine-looking woman, mark ye, for all her age … He turned sideways and stared into the face of a rainsoaked man, crouching like a hare on the walkway where he should not have been. The man grinned a sickly grin, his hair plastered wetly down his face in pewter daggers.

‘Who the f-’

He was cut off, mid-flow, from speech, piss and life as Kirkpatrick took a step from the shadows and shoved.

‘Gardyloo,’ he muttered as the man fell off the wall, his last curse trailing behind him as he whirled his arms and legs in a futile dance in the air. There was a distant thud.

Hal was already past them both, into the dark of the tower. Stairs, circling up and down; Hal went up, to where a light flickered.

‘Hurry up and close the door, else the candle will go out.’

The voice was booming loud in the enclosed space and Hal froze; then he edged up and round until he could peer over the last edge of the floor level above. The man sitting at the table, idly working at a leather strap, stared straight back at him, astonished.

They sprang for one another at the same time and Hal’s wet soles slipped, so that he fell on the last part of the stair. Should have hung my shoes round my neck, like Sweetmilk, he thought wildly, and had to fall back a few steps as the man came down at him, sword out.