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

Deus lo vultV the knight bellowed, the words crushed and muffled inside the great, flat-topped barrel heaume. He thundered up past Hal and his pillar of Sim, while men scattered away from him. He circled his wrist with quick flick, so that the hammer in his armoured gauntlet, an elegance of gleaming steel with a fluted head and a pick on the other side, glittered like ice.

The great warhorse hardly balked at the splintered wreckage and the bell, leaping delicately over the first and round the second; a wounded man screamed as an iron hoof cracked his shins, others tried to scramble from underneath the delicately stepping beast.

The ranks on the bridge broke like a dropped mirror. They turned and ran and the knight rode them down, while the handful of men he brought charged, red mouths open, faces twisted in savage triumph. Bodies flew over the parapet of the bridge and crashed into the stream, others were bounced into the splintered planks and mashed with iron hooves, and, all the time, the arcing gleam of hammer swung right to left and back again; with every swing a head cracked like an egg.

Deus lo vult. God wills it, the cry from the time Jerusalem fell, a potage of vulgar Latin and French and Italian, the lingua franca everyone used to make themselves understood on crusade.

‘Sir William,’ Hal said dazedly.

‘Blessed be his curly auld Templar pow,’ Sim muttered and they looked at each other, heads down, hands on knees. Will Elliot was throwing up and Thom was dead; in the river, Dand turned and floated like a bloated sheep, while John the Lamb hauled himself, dripping, out of the other side. A cow bawled plaintively.

‘Aye til the fore, then,’ Sim said and Hal could only nod. Still alive. God had willed it. They almost laughed, but the great white knight reappeared, his horse high-prancing delicately over the debris and blood, the great helm tucked under his shielded arm, offering them a salute with the gore-clotted silver hammer.

His snowy robes and the horse’s barding were spattered red, so that even the small cross over his heart seemed like a splash of gore; his face, framed by maille coif and the steel of a bascinet, was as blood-bright as the cross and sheened with sweat.

‘I am thinking,’ he said, as if remarking on the rain, ‘that if ye shift, ye can gather up some of they kine and drive them across the bridge. I am thinking that the Templars of the Ton deserve a whole coo to themselves.’

Then he grinned out of the scarlet, streaming, grey-bearded face

‘Best no stand like a set mill,’ Sir William Sientcler added, ‘for it is my opinion that this brig can no longer be held.’

‘I am standing beside you there, Sir Will,’ Sim declared and went off to fetch the sumpter horse. Hal stood on wobbling legs and looked up at the Templar knight.

‘Timely,’ he declared, then sagged. ‘More than timely …’

‘Ach,’ Sir William said, his voice clearly alarmed that Hal was about to unman himself. ‘I had a fancy to some beef.’

Beef, Hal thought, watching men sort out the mess, picking their way back over the litter of corpses and blood-stained timbers, guddling in viscous muck for what they could plunder. All this was just for something to eat. He said as much aloud.

‘Ave Maria, gratia plena,’ Sim declared cheerfully, backing the horse between the cartshafts. ‘And may the Lord God help us when all this starts to get serious.’

They left the bloody-wrapped body of Red Cloak Thom to be buried at Temple Ton, whose quiet, grim-faced warrior monks went about the gentle business of piously collecting, washing and burying the English they had so recently fought. Everyone, especially John the Lamb, was painfully aware that Dand had drifted far down the Annick, but took some comfort from the assurances that he would be found and decently buried.

‘You will be in a peck of trouble for riding the Temple against King Edward,’ Hal said to Sir William and the Master, a man in a black robe and the soft hat of a monk, with the hard eyes beneath hinting at how he had been a wet-mouthed, spear-wielding screamer not long before.

‘We defended our Temple,’ the Master declared. ‘Crossing the bridge placed you on Commanderie ground and in our hospitality, so they have no-one to blame but themselves for attacking those under the protection of the Order.’

The soft-voiced Master, iron-grey beard like wool, bowed his neck to Sir William.

‘It was fortunate that the Gonfanonier was present,’ he said, and Hal heard the respect in his voice for the presence of one of the Order’s Standard-Bearers.

‘I will send money for the relief of Thom’s soul,’ Hal said awkwardly, but the Master shook his head.

‘No need. We are entitled to the escheat of the slain, though we will restrict this to weapons and equipment, so that the personal items of these poor souls can be returned. Likewise the body of their leader – Sir John Furneval, was it? He shall be returned with all possessions, save for the warhorse.’

The Master smiled, a complex rearrangment of reluctant muscles; it never quite made it to his eyes.

‘For two Poor Knights to ride,’ he added and Hal thought it a jest and almost laughed; then he saw Sir William’s sober, long-moustached face and swallowed the chuckle.

‘Ave Maria, gratia plena,’ Sir William said.

‘Christ be praised,’ answered the Master and blessed them both as they intoned, ‘For ever and ever.’

‘Anyway,’ Sir William declared when he and Hal were moving out into the mirr again, ‘all this is moot – I was coming to find ye, to let ye know that terms have been agreed.’

‘Terms?’ Hal muttered, only half-listening. He had seen the body of the English knight being lugged in, four men sweating with the weight of the man in his sodden clothing and armour. The face was a fretwork of shattered bone and flesh, fine as clergy lace.

‘Aye,’ Sir William went on cheerfully. ‘Bruce and the rest are welcomed back into the community of the realm, lands intact – though Bruce is charged to appear at Berwick and Wishart stands surety for him. Douglas is taken into custody so that his wife and weans are not taken as hostage, though Bruce is still debating as to whether he will allow his wee daughter, Marjorie, to be held at the king’s pleasure and surety for his future behaviour.’

He frowned and shook his head. ‘As well he might. Wee mite is awfy young to be so caught up in this, so you can see the point of his arguing against it.’

Hal blinked. Terms.

‘When?’ he asked.

‘Three … nay, I lie, four days since,’ Sir William said, scowling at the bloodstains on his white robes.

Three or four days ago. This bloody mess had been pointless; the war was over.

‘Aye, well,’ Sir William said when Hal spat this out, bitter as bile, ‘not quite, young Hal. Wallace is not included and is warmin’ the ears of English from Brechin to Dundee and beyond. Bands of riders skite from the hills and woods, two or three long hundreds a time. They climb off their nags and proceed to the herschip with a will.’

The herschip Hal knew well enough – he had taken part in his share of those swift, burning raids for plunder and profit – but it seemed now that the army of the noble cause was inflicting it on the very people it was supposed to defend.

‘This is true war,’ Sir William said, pulling Hal round by the arm to stare into his face with watery-blue eyes, his grey-white beard twitching like a squirrel tail. ‘Red war, Hal. Forget yer notions of chivalry – Wallace does what we did in the Holy Land against the heathen; ye scorch them, Hal. Ye leave them nothin’ and then, when they are gaspin’ with their tongues lollin’ like hot wolves, their belts notched to the backbone, ye ride out and smack them into the dust.’