Robert Low - The Complete Kingdom Trilogy - The Lion Wakes, The Lion at Bay, The Lion Rampant

‘Wallace is no priest,’ he answered. ‘No red spurs nor dubbing neither, but his father owns a rickle of land and his mother is a Crawfurd, dochter of a Sheriff of Ayr – so he is no chiel with hurdies flappin’ out the back of his breeks. Besides, he is a bonnie fighter – as bonnie as any I have ever seen. As a solution to the thorny problem of Bruce or Balliol it takes preference over murder plots on a chasse, my lord.’

‘Is that all it takes, then?’ Bruce demanded thickly. ‘You would throw over the Bruce claim for a “bonnie fighter”?’

‘The Bruce claim is safe enough,’ Wishart said, suddenly steely. ‘Wallace is no candidate for a throne – besides, we have a king. John Balliol is king and Wallace is fighting in his name.’

‘Balliol abdicated,’ Bruce roared and Kirkpatrick laid a hand on his arm, which the earl shook off angrily, though he lowered his voice to a hoarse hiss, spraying Wishart’s face.

‘He abdicated. Christ and All His Saints – Edward stripped the regalia off him, so that he is Toom Tabard, Empty Cote, from now until Hell freezes over. There is no king in Scotland.’

‘That,’ replied Wishart, slowly wiping Bruce off his face and staring steadily back at the pop-eyed earl, ‘is never what we admit. Ever. The kingdom must have a king, clear and indivisible from the English, and Balliol is the name we fight in. That name and the Wallace one gains us fighting men – enough, so far, to slay the sheriff of Lanark and burn his place round his ears. Now the south is in rebellion as well as the north and east.’

‘Foolish,’ Bruce ranted, pacing and waving. ‘They are outlaws, cut-throats and raiders, not trained fighting men -they won’t stand in the field and certainly not led by the likes of Wallace. Your desperation for a clear and indivisible king blinds you.’

He leaned forward and his voice grew softer, more menacing while the shadows did things to his eyes that Hal did not like.

‘Only the nobiles can lead men to fight Edward,’ he declared. ‘Not small folk like Wallace. In the end, the gentilhommes – your precious “community of the realm” – is what will keep your Church free of interference from Edward, which is really what you finaigle for. Answerable only to the Pope, is that not it, Bishop?’

‘Sir Andrew Moray is noble,’ Wishart pointed out, bland as a nun’s smile, and that made Bruce pause. Aha, Hal thought, the bold Bruce does not like the idea of Moray. Moray and Wallace as Guardians of the Realm would go a long way to appeasing nobles appalled at the idea of a Wallace alone.

Bruce would not then be at the centre of things – he had not been party to any of it so far, nor would he have been if he had not turned up on his own, dangling The Hardy’s family as security of his intentions and looking for the approbation of the other finely born in Wishart’s enterprise. Hal, dragged along in the Auld Templar’s wake, had wondered, every step of the way, what had prompted Bruce to suddenly become so hot for rebellion and Sim had remarked that Bruce’s da would not care for it much.

Bruce the son had not got much out of it. The Hardy had been grudgingly polite, the Stewart brothers and Sir Alexander Lindsay had been cool at best while Wallace himself, amiable, giant and seemingly bland, had looked the Earl of Carrick up and down shrewdly and wondered aloud why ‘Bruce the Englishman’ had decided to jump the fence. Now they were all glowering on the other side of the door, still wondering the same.

It was exactly what Wishart now asked.

‘If you have set your face against this enterprise and my choice of captain,’ Wishart grunted, slopping wine on his knuckles, ‘why are you here when your da is in Carlisle, no doubt setting out his explanations to Percy and Clifford of why his son has gone over to Edward’s enemies? I would have thought, my lord, that you would be bending your efforts against Buchan – and a body found in the woods.’

Hal leaned forward, for this was something he wanted to know as keenly – Bruce was young, his father’s son in every way until now, and his family had been expelled from their Scottish lands by the dozen previous Guardians, only just returned to them by Edward’s power. Why here? Why now?

Hal was sure the uncovered corpse had something to do with it, surer still that Wishart and Bruce shared the secret of it. He was also more certain than ever that he should not be here, mired in the midden of it all – how in the name of God and all His Saints had he become a rebel, sudden and easy as putting on a cloak?

He became aware of eyes, turned into the black, considered gaze of Kirkpatrick and held it for a long while before breaking away.

Bruce frowned, the lip pouted and the chin thrust out, so that the shadows turned his broad-chinned face to a brief, flickering devil’s mask – then he moved and the illusion shattered; he smiled.

‘I am a Scot, when all said and done. And a gentilhomme of your community of the realm, bishop,’ he answered smoothly, then plucked the prelate’s glass from his fat, beringed fingers and drained it, a lopsided grin on his face.

‘Besides – you have your fighting bear,’ he answered. ‘You need, perhaps, someone to point him in the right direction. To point you all in the right direction.’

Wishart closed one speculative eye, reached out and took the glass back from Bruce with an irritated gesture.

‘And where would that be, young Carrick?’

‘Scone,’ Bruce declared. ‘Kick England’s Justiciar, Ormsby, up the arse, the same way we did Heselrig.’

Hal heard the ‘we’ and saw that Wishart had as well, but the bishop did not even try to correct Bruce. Instead he smiled and Hal was sure some subtle message passed between the pair.

‘Aye,’ Wishart said speculatively. ‘Not a bad choice. To make sure of … matters. I will put it to the Wallace.’

He lifted the empty glass in a toast to Bruce, who acknowledged it with a nod, then smiled a shark-show of teeth at Hal.

Chapter Three

Scone Priory

Feast of Saints Castus and Aemilius, martyrs – May, 1297

Dusk was hurrying on and dark clipping its heels, so that the heads and shoulders were stained black against the flames. Hal could hear the guttural snarls and spits of them, as fired as the sparks that flew; it had been a long time since he had heard such a large crowd of men all speaking Lowland and it brought back ugly memories of last year, when he and others had padded, cat-cautious and sick to their stomachs, in the fester that was Berwick after the English had gone.

The cooked-meat smells didn’t help, for Hal knew the sweet, rich smell had nothing to do with food.

They came up through the huddle of wattle and daub that clustered round the priory like shellfish on a rock, crashing through the backland courts and the head riggs, splintering crude privy shelters, tossing torches, their own yelling drowned by the screams of the fleeing.

No looting or rape until the fighting is done, Wallace had said before they had set off, and Bruce, frowning at the impudence of the man, had been forced to agree, since the host was clearly his alone to command. At least there was no Buchan salting the wound of it – he was gone into his own lands, ostensibly to prevent Moray from joining with Wallace and managing to look the other way at the crucial moment.

Hal strode alongside outlaw roughs from all over Ayrshire, kerns and caterans from north of The Mounth, all here for love of this giant called Wallace and what he could do. Hal saw him stride up the rutted track between the mean houses, blood-dyed with flames, surrounded by whirling sparks.

He had a long tunic and a belted surcoat over that, no helmet and bare legs and feet; he was hardly different from the wild men he led save that he was head and shoulders above the tallest and carried a hand-and-a-half, a sword most men would have clutched in two fists but which he carried in one.