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

In the butter-yellow and shadowed dim, he sat and, prickled with heat and half-ashamed, half-driven, kneaded his own tight groin while he stared at the mournful brown eyes of Mykel, head on paws and unconcerned that Agnes’s knees were locked behind the pillars of Tod’s Wattie’s arms. With every thrust Wattie grunted and Agnes squealed an answer; gradually the squeals grew higher in pitch.

Veldi snuffled hopefully, but Dog Boy had nothing for them to eat, nor looked to be getting anything until Tod’s Wattie was done. So he sat in the strawed dim of the stable, right up against the back wall and almost under the huge iron-rimmed wheels of the wagon, with the ghost-coloured deerhounds waiting patiently on their leashes, heads on the huge, long-nailed paws.

He and Tod’s Wattie and the hounds had been there two months, left behind by Sir Hal and the others, and he wondered why. Yet the idea of leaving Douglas was strange and frightening enough to catch his breath in his throat.

The castle at Douglas was all he had ever known and the people in it the only ones he had met, besides the odd peddlar or pardoner, until the arrival of Hal and all the other strangers. Now he was about to go off with this stranger, this Tod’s Wattie.

The squeals grew louder and faster. Dog Boy, uncomfortably aware of his groin, traced the iron rim of the cartwheel with one grimy forefinger faster and faster, while unable to tear his gawp-mouthed gaze from her feet and the fancy slipper bobbing furiously. A window-slipper, Agnes had called it, because it had elegant cut-outs designed to show off the red hose that went with them, like the stained windows of a grand cathedral.

Agnes had been told this by the Countess of Buchan, who had given them to her when she had left, as a gift for her tirewoman help; Agnes had worn red hose and slippers ever since – until now, Dog Boy thought, for the hose garters lay like streaks of blood nearby and the slipper he watched had slipped from her bagged heel and wagged frantically on her toes. Her last shriek was almost so piercing as to be heard only by the dogs and she jerked and spasmed so furiously that the slipper flew off.

Tod’s Wattie made a curious, childlike series of whimpers and slowed the mad pulse of him, then stopped entire. The straw stopped rustling like a rainstorm and Dog Boy shut his mouth with a click and heard their breathing, harsh and ragged.

‘Aye,’ said Agnes, in a thick, dreamy voice Dog Boy had never heard from her before. ‘Ye’ve rattled me clean oot of my shoe.’

They laughed and then the straw rustled as they tidied themselves together. Tod’s Wattie lumbered out, wisped with straw sticks, and looked over to where the dogs were, seeing Dog Boy and blinking.

‘There ye are,’ he said and Dog Boy knew he was wondering how long he had been sitting. In the end, he shrugged and passed a hand through his thick hair, combed out a straw and grinned.

‘Go to the kitchen and see if you can find some scraps for the dugs,’ he said and Dog Boy scampered off.

‘I still have a shoe on the other foot,’ said the throaty voice behind him and Tod’s Wattie blinked a bit and shook his head. He knew he and Dog Boy and the deerhounds were at Douglas because Hal thought it safer to leave his expensive dogs away from the Scots camp at Annick, where Bruce and the others sat in wary conclave with Percy and Clifford and both armies tried hard not to break into pitched battle. Worse still was to try to travel alone on dangerous roads back to Lothian.

But, he added to himself, if Sir Hal delays longer in sending for us this hot-arsed wee besom will have me worn to a nub end.

The kitchen was a swelter. At the large table, Master Fergus the Cook and his helpers split a side of salt beef for the boiling pit, spitted geese, kneaded bread; Dog Boy saw that there was milled sawdust being mixed in with the rye, which meant grain was scarce.

A scullion elbowed his way past Dog Boy with drawn water, piped cleverly from the stone cistern somewhere above; another lugged an armful of wood for the fire, which was bigger than the smith’s furnace and hotter, too. Near it, the potboys withered, trying to stir without roasting themselves, huddled behind an old damped-down tiltyard shield. In the high summer some had been known to faint from the heat and only quick hands saved those from certain death; almost all of them had the glassy weals of old burns.

‘Well, what do you want, boy?’ demanded Fergus looking up. He was no advert for his craft, being a thin, pinch-faced man from Galloway, shaved bald on head and chin to better rid himself of vermin and stay cool.

‘I beg the blissin’ of ye sir,’ Dog Boy said, ‘Tod’s Wattie asks if you can spare some meat and cleidin for his dogs.’

‘Christ’s Bones,’ Fergus interrupted in his Gaelic-lilted English. ‘Cleidin? Scraps for dogs, yet? Ask for a cone of sugar, why not? Everything is running low and little chance of it being replenished that I can see. Glad it is that almost all the visitors are after having gone, for another day would have seen us chewing our own boots.’

The implication was that some unwanted guests remained and it was a sudden, sharp pain to Dog Boy to realise that he was now one of them. In an eyeblink and a series of words from the mouth of the Lady, he had gone from the company of the castle to being a stranger.

‘It will be for him, Master,’ added one of his helpers with a grin as he worked at carefully stacking and tallying a pyramid of honeycakes without breaking them. ‘He looks as if he would eat raw meat.’

‘Perhaps if yon hunt weeks back had actually routed out something worthwhile,’ Fergus grumbled, ‘but hunted stag meat is tough and a brace of fine coneys make better eating and easier cooking. Now the game is scattered and wary and there will be no good hunting for weeks. All we had from it was a dead body and a mystery.’

He broke off and thrust a round pot at Dog Boy, bright and reeking with bloody pats, some of the blood and grease slathered on the outside.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Bring the pot back sharp, mind.’

Dog Boy grinned, nodded – then shot out one hand and grabbed a honeycake, fleeing from the new catcalls and the barrage of feral curses that brought. He was almost at the door when he slammed into something dark and a hard object that whacked him on the temple.

Dazed, he staggered, found himself held up by a strong hand clamped painfully round his thin arm and looked up, past the hilt of the dagger which had smacked him, into a smear of smile.

It was on a fox-sharp face, the eyes cold and dark, the nose speckled with old pox-marks. There was a chin but not much of one and it made the man’s teeth stick out like a rat’s from between wet lips limned by a wisped fringe of beard and moustache.

‘A wee thief,’ he said with suet-rich satisfaction and looked triumphantly at Fergus. ‘It seems my arrival is timely.’

Fergus cleaned his hands on his apron and looked at the newcomer, whom he disliked on sight. He glanced pointedly at the blood-clamp fist that gripped Dog Boy’s arm and the man raised an eyebrow and opened it with a sudden, deliberate gesture.

Dog Boy, pot in one hand, cake in the other, wanted to rub the affected bit but could only wriggle it, looking warily from the man to Fergus, who jerked his head silently at him to go. Heedless of the blood on his hands, Dog Boy crammed the honeycake in his mouth, then darted for the kennels, holding his puny biceps.

‘You are?’ Fergus said and the man lifted his head haughtily.

‘Malise Bellejambe,’ he declared. ‘Sir Malise Bellejambe,’ he added pointedly. ‘And you will lose a kitchen full of honey-cakes if you keep that attitude with wee thieves.’

‘Sir,’ Fergus declared, in a tone that made it clear he did not believe the title for a moment. ‘I remember you from before. You came with the Earl of Buchan. Now you are back. Whit why?’