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

‘We dedicate this Vigil to St Joseph, the Foster Father of our Judge and Saviour. His power is dreaded by the Devil. His death is the most singularly privileged and happiest death ever recorded as he died in the Presence and care of Jesus and the Blessed Mary. St Joseph will obtain for us that same privilege at our passage from this life to eternity.’

‘There is cheery,’ Sim muttered and someone came up close behind Hal and stuck his face over one shoulder, so that Hal saw the sweat-grease painted on it and smelled the man’s onion breath. A cattle-lifting hoor’s byblow, Hal thought viciously.

‘Here is the English and riches, then,’ the man spat out of the thicket of his beard and turned to call out to others.

Sim’s sword hilt smashed the words to silence, broke nose bones and sent the man to the flagstones as if he was a slaughtered ox.

‘May St Bega of Kilbucho have mercy on me,’ Sim declared, waving a cross-sign piously over the stunned man as he snored through the blood. Hal closed the door on the refuge of slow-chanting monks and looked at the felled cateran; he was sure his friends would come sooner rather than later and they had given the clerics a respite only.

‘Kirkpatrick,’ he said, shoving the fate of the monks to one side. Sim nodded. They went on.

‘Who is St Bega and where the bliddy hell is Kilbucho?’ demanded Hal as they crept along into the great, dark hall of the place, where only the shift of air allowed the impression of a lofty ceiling. Sim grinned.

‘Up near Biggar,’ Sim said mildly, peering left and right as they moved. ‘Very big on St Bee there, they are. I thought we could do with her charms here, for her only miracle.’

‘Oh aye? Good, was it?’

‘If ye had seen it,’ Sim said in a hissed whisper that did not move his lips, ‘ye’d have begged a blessin’. Seems there was a noble who handed a monastery a wheen o’lands, but a lawsuit later developed about their extent.’

He moved in crouching half-circles, stepping carefully and speaking in a hoarse whisper, half to himself.

‘The monks feared that they’d be ransacked. The day appointed for boundary-walk arrived – and there was a thick snowfall on all the surrounding lands but not a flake on the lands of the priory, so you could see where the boundary really was. The monks were smiling like biled haddies.’

‘We could use some of her frost in here,’ Hal answered, wiping his streaming face.

‘Christ be praised,’ Sim declared, chuckling.

‘For ever and ever,’ Hal responded piously, then held up a warning hand as they rounded a dark corner and came into an open area with an altar at one end and a series of fearsomely expensive painted glass windows staining the flagstones with coloured light from the fires that burned beyond. To the left was a door, slightly open, where light flickered and flared, falling luridly on the faded, peeling painting that graced one wall.

Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Hal noted. Apt enough …

Sim thumped him on the shoulder and nodded to where, clear and blood-dyed by flames, Kirkpatrick shoved papers methodically into a fire he had started in the middle of the room. His shadow bobbed and stretched like a mad goblin.

Hal started to move when one of the glass windows above the altar shattered in an explosion of shards and lead which clattered and spattered over the altar and flagstones. There was a burst of laughter from beyond, then a series of angry shouts.

Hal glanced back into the room and cursed – Kirkpatrick was gone. He and Sim went in, their boots crunching on broken pottery and more glass; Sim circled while Hal stamped at the flames of the fire, which threatened to spread along the thin rushes over the flagstones. In the end Sim suddenly poured the contents of a pot on it and the fire went out, sizzling and reeking of more than char.

‘What was in yon?’ Hal demanded and Sim glanced at the pot and made a face.

‘Ormsby pish, or I am no judge,’ he answered, and Hal, looking round, realised this was the Justiciar’s bedroom, with table, chair and straw-packed box bed; a wall hanging stirred in the night breeze through an open-shuttered window. Sim looked at the hanging, saw that it was a banner with a red shield of little crosses split diagonally by a gold bar.

Hal, making grunting noises of disgust, fished in the damp char for documents, squinting at them in the half-light and stuffing one or two inside his jack. There was a dovecote of similar rolls against one wall, the contents half-scattered on the straw, but Sim dragged down the fancy hanging, taken by the gilding work in it.

‘Ormsby’s arms,’ growled a voice, making both men whirl round to where Wallace bulked out the staining light beyond the doorway. He had sword and dagger in each hand and a smear of blood on a face split by a huge grin. He nodded at the limp cloth clutched in Sim’s fist.

‘Ormsby’s arms,’ he repeated. ‘We will add his head to them, by an’ by and mak’ a man of him.’

No-one spoke as Wallace stepped in, careful in bare feet, his head seeming to brush the roof.

‘A good thought, comin’ here, lads, but Ormsby has fled his bedroom. Out of yon unshuttered wind hole in his nightserk, so I am told. That must have been a sight – what have ye there?’

‘Papers,’ Hal declared, feeling the ones he had hidden burn his side as if still aflame. ‘There was a fire.’

Wallace peered and nodded, then looked at the chambered library on the wall.

‘State papers, nae doubt,’ he declared, ‘if the Justiciar of Scotland saw fit to try and burn them. So they might be of use – when I find a body that can read the Latin better than me.’

‘It will be hard,’ Hal said, not correcting Wallace on who had been doing the burning. ‘Sim put the flames out with a pint of the great man’s pish.’

‘Did he so?’ Wallace laughed and shook his head. ‘Well, I will find a wee clever man with a poor nose to read them.’

Hal, who was also uncomfortably aware that he was not admitting his own reading skills, laughed uneasily and Wallace strode back to the door, then paused and turned.

‘Mind you,’ he said, innocent as a priests’s underdrawers, ‘I am wondering why yon chiel of The Bruce – Kirkpatrick is it?’

Hal nodded, feeling the burn of the eyes, while the sconce torch did bloody things to the Wallace face.

‘Aye,’ Wallace mused. ‘Him. Now why would he birl his hurdies out that self-same unshuttered window not long since, as if the De’il was nipping his arse?’

He looked from Hal to Sim and back. Outside, something smashed and there were screams. Wallace shifted slightly.

‘I had best at least try to bring them to order,’ he said, his smile stained with fire, ‘though it is much like herdin’ cats. I will seek you later, lads.’

His departure left a hole in the room into which silence rushed. Then Sim let out his breath and Hal realised he had been holding his own.

‘I do not ken about the English,’ Sim said softly, ‘but he scares the shite out of me.’

Nor is he as green as he is kail-looking, Hal thought and decided it was time the pair of them were elsewhere.

The quiet of the chapel refuge was feted with a blaze of expensive waxen light and the soft hiss of babbled prayers, so that the flames flickered as the huddled canons gasped for air.

Cramped as it was, a clear space existed where Bruce knelt, though he did not bow his head. There was a fire in him, a strange, glowing flow that seemed to run through his whole body, so fierce at times that he trembled and jerked with it.

He looked at the painted walls of the chapel. In a cowshed, Mary nursed the newborn Child by her naked breast in a bed, while Joseph watched from a wooden chair to the right. They smiled at Bruce. In the foreground, the heads of an ox and an ass turned and regarded him with their bright, mournful eyes. An angel stood and regarded him coldly in the background and above, in Latin, the words The Annunciation to the Shepherds seemed to glow like the fire in his body.