Robert Low - The Lion Wakes

‘Where’s the boy?’

The boy had gone left, for he had paused to pluck the long thin dagger from Gawter’s dead hand, as much trembling at that as the sudden sight of swaddled folk, like dead risen in their grave rags, who came to stare.

With a last wild look at the smiling Abbot Jerome, the Dog Boy flung himself after Hal and Sim, turning left and birling up the passage, trying to look back and ahead at the same time.

He knew he had lost them a few heartbeats later, but by then he heard the loud roar of ‘A Bruce’ and the bell clangs of steel. He moved towards it, heard the grunts, came up behind the fighters and watched a huge man close in on a hapless victim, who could only wave a sword and back away.

He saw it was the earl and, beyond him and struggling with another man, the earl’s black-visaged man, who was clearly not able to help. He did not hesitate – this was the great lord who had shared wine with him, who had told him the vows of knighthood.

Bruce, backing away, desperately wondering if he would reach a more open area, hoping to get to the door, even if it meant going outside, saw the ox with a knife was about to rush him and end the affair. The French Method, he thought bleakly…

Then a wildcat screeched out of the dark and landed on the back of the ox, so that he half-stumbled forward and yelled with surprise and fear. He whirled and clawed with one free hand up behind him, but the wildcat hung on.

The Dog Boy. Bruce saw the frantic, snarling face of the boy and, just as the ox thought of crashing backwards into a wall to dislodge him, the little nut of a fist rose up, stabbed once, then the boy rolled free, the long sliver of dagger trailing fat, flying blood drops.

The ox howled, clapped a hand to his ear, the blood bursting from between his knuckles. He turned, the savage pain and anger of his face turning, as if washed by it, to a bewildered uncertainty. Then he collapsed like an empty bag, the blood spreading under his head.

There was silence save for ragged panting. Bruce saw the Dog Boy, half-crouched on all fours, feral as any forest animal, dagger bloody in one fist.

‘Good stroke,’ he managed hoarsely.

Hal and Sim burst in the door of the Dying Room to a tableaux of figures frozen in butter-yellow light, the shadows guttering wildly on the wall as the tallow was blasted by the wind of their entrance.

A little priest was untying Henry Sientcler from a chair, while a third figure knelt by a truckle bed, cradling the head of a man who gasped and gargled. He raised a face, bewildered and afraid, at the new arrivals.

‘Sir Henry,’ Hal declared and the lord of Roslin flung off the last of the ropes and staggered upright.

‘Hal – by God’s Wounds, I am pleased to see you.’

‘Malise…’ Sim declared, for it was clear the man was not here.

‘Gone, moments hence,’ Sir Henry declared, rubbing his wrists. Hal cursed and Sim was about to fling himself out of the door again when Bruce came in, the Dog Boy behind him and, behind that, Kirkpatrick clutching a man by the neck like a terrier with a rat.

‘Malise – did he pass you?’

‘He did not.’

Hal looked at Sim and the man grinned, then loped out to hunt Malise down. Bruce came to the truckle bed and looked down.

‘The Savoyard?’ he asked and Hal nodded.

‘I suspect so.’

‘Malise knifed him,’ the priest declared bitterly. ‘Not that he would have lived anyway… this is his uncle.’

The man by the bed stood up and Hal saw that he had a fine tunic stained with his nephew’s blood. His face was grimmed with weary lines of bitterness and resignation.

‘He is alive still,’ Bruce declared and knelt, shoving his face close to the dying man’s. ‘He is trying to speak…’

The man’s mouth opened and closed a few times; Bruce bent closer, so that his ear was almost to the lips of the man, and Hal was shamed that the earl was so bent on uncovering the secret of his Stone that he defiled the last peace of a dying man.

Then the man vomited a last wash of blood, on which sailed the wafer of the Last Rite like a little white boat. Bruce sprang up, his face peppered with bloody spray, which he wiped away with distaste. The uncle bowed his head and knelt, while the priest began to intone prayers.

Bruce blinked once or twice, then flung himself out and Hal went after him. Kirkpatrick, his hand numbing from clutching the sagging pardoner, thought to make sure that the man was, indeed, the Savoyard they had sought and not some luckless leper.

‘Manon de Faucigny?’ he rasped.

The uncle raised his head from his pious revery, gently brushed the sweat lank hair from the dead man’s paling forehead.

‘Malachy,’ he said and Kirkpatrick jerked.

‘His name was Malachy de Faucigny,’ the uncle went on softly. ‘He thought that had too much Jew in it for an England where they were banned, so he changed it.’

Kirkpatrick’s mouth went dry, then he shook the thoughts away from him. Best not to mention this, he thought.

Bangtail and Lang Tam were pitched into a nightmare. They had come up on a door, which did not yield, then ploughed on through the wet and the mud to stumble into the backcourt privy. Where there is a shitehouse, Bangtail hissed in Lang Tam’s ear, there is a wee door to get to it.

They found it, a darker shadow against the black – and it opened smoothly enough. Bangtail grinned as he stepped inside; no man liked to have a barrier between him and emptying his bowels when it came to the bit.

The pair of them halted in the dark of what seemed to be a large room, a hall or refectory. The air was fetid and rank and the dark yielded up the contents reluctantly – the flags of the floor, vague shapes on either side; the rushes shushed as they stepped.

A bed with a bench at the end of it. Another. Yet one more on the other side of them.

The figures loomed up suddenly, vengefully, the stuff of nightmares.

‘Ye baistits,’ screeched a voice and a blow struck Bangtail on the arm. Another whacked his knees. He heard Lang Tam curse.

Then he saw what attacked them. Noseless. Festering. Some with rags binding the worst of their wounds, some fresh from their dormitory beds and unswaddled, the fish-belly pale of them smeared with the black stains of rot.

The lepers, whose touch was condemnation, whose very breath was death.

Bangtail howled like a mad dog then and fought through them, panicked and flailing. He heard Lang Tam yelling, felt his fists strike something that he did not even wish to see.

Light flared at the far end, silhouetting the mad horde of lepers, whose dormitory sleep Bangtail and Lang Tam had shattered. Bangtail saw it and plunged towards it, finding, like a miracle from Christ Himself, that those who had been snarling in front of him had vanished like snow from a sunwarmed dyke.

Then he saw the figure scurrying forward, the naked-fang gleam of long steel waving like a brand in the dark.

Malise knew he had escaped from the Dying Room with seconds only. He had snatched up his cloak and slung the scrip over his shoulder at the sound of the Bruce warcry, heading down the corridor that linked the Dying Room, conveniently, to the leper dormitory; from there, he knew, he could reach the outside. His plans were thrown in the air and there was nothing now but escape and the gibbering fear of what was plunging at his heels drove him on.

The riot inside confused him and he hacked his knife at the mass of figures until they scattered, then hurled himself through before they could recover enough to counter. Suddenly, he was close to a face he knew, saw it was one of the Herdmanston men and lashed out with his other hand, a wild shriek of terror trailing it like flame.

Bangtail saw the blow only at the last, managed to duck the worst of it, but was still flung full length, stars whirling into him.