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

A girl was wearily slopping water on the slab of wood and raking it back and forth with a cloth; she looked up as he stood blinking, his hood still up. She was dirty, the ingrained dirt of a long time of neglect and her eyes were dull, her hair lank, lusterless – yet it was tawny somewhere in the depths of it and those dead eyes had sparkled blue as water once.

‘We are not open,’ she said and, when he did not respond, looked up and said it again.

‘Please yourself,’ she added with a shrug when he stood there with his mouth open. He almost started towards her with a fist clenched, then remembered what he was after and stopped, smiling. Honey rather than Hell.

‘What have we here, then?’ demanded a loud voice and a shape bulked out a door at the far end of the room. Naked from the waist, the man was a huge-bellied apparition, hairy as a boar, with the remnants of a moustache straggling greasily through many chins, though the hair on his head was cropped to iron-grey stubble. He was lacing up braies under the flop of the belly and beaming in what he fondly imagined was genial goodwill.

Malise was appalled and repelled. The man looked like a great troll, yet the swinging cross on his chest belied that. ‘Tam,’ he announced.

‘You don’t look blind to me,’ Malise managed and the man chuckled throatily.

‘My auld granda,’ he declared proudly, ‘dead and dead these score of years. A father-to-son wee business this.’

‘Sit,’ he said, then slapped the dull-eyed girl on the arm. ‘Stir yourself – start the fire.’

Malise sat.

‘Come from far?’ Tam rumbled, scratching the hairs on his belly. ‘Not many travel up this road since the Troubles.’

‘Douglas,’ Malise lied, for he had actually travelled in from Edinburgh, where he had spent a fruitless time searching out the Countess after the events at Douglas. He had missed her there, tracked her to Irvine and knew she was headed for The Bruce, the hot wee hoor. But he had missed her there, too, and the money the earl had given him was all but run out; soon, he would have to return north and admit his failure. He did not relish the idea of admitting failure to the Earl of Buchan, even less admitting that the bloody wee hoor of a Countess had not only outwitted him by escaping, but continued to do so.

‘A long journey,’ Tam said jovially. ‘You’ll bide here the night.’

Then his brows closed into a single lintel over the embers of his eyes and he added, ‘You’ll have siller, sure, and will not mind showin’ the colour of it.’

Malise fished out coin enough to satisfy him, then had to seethe silently as it was inspected carefully. Finally, Tam grinned a gap of brown and gum, got up and fetched a flask and two wooden cups.

‘Fine wine for a fine gentle,’ he declared expansively, splashing it into the cups. ‘So the road is safe? Folk are travelling on it?’

He would be interested in the trade, of course. Malise shrugged.

‘What is safe?’ he replied mournfully, graciously accepting the cup of wine. ‘A man must make a living.’

Tam nodded, then called out to the girl to fetch him a shirt, which she did, dusting her hands of ash. Malise drank, though he did not like the thin, bitter taste.

‘What is your business?’ Tam demanded, licking his lips.

‘I negotiate contracts,’ Malise said, ‘for the Earl of Buchan.’

Tam’s eyebrows went up at that.

‘Contracts, is it? For what?’

Malise shrugged diffidently.

‘Grain, timber, wool,’ he answered, then glanced sideways at the man, watching the chins of him wobble as he calculated how much he could dun and how much profit there was to be had out of this meeting. Malise handed him an opportunity.

‘I also look out for his wife,’ he said carefully. ‘When she is travellin’ up and doon the roads, like, on the business of Buchan.’

Tam said nothing.

‘I was thinking, perchance, ye had heard if she’d passed this way,’ Malise persisted. ‘A Coontess. Ye would know her in an instant – she rides a warhorse.’

Tam turned the cheap red earthenware round and round, pretending to think and studying Malise. A weasel, he decided, with a tait of terrier there. No contract scribbler this – a rache, huntin’ the scent of some poor soul. A Coontess, he added to himself, my arse. Alone? On a warhorse? My arse.

Malise grew tired of the silence eventually and spread his hands, choosing his words carefully.

‘If the road keeps clear and the garrison at Bothwell chases away its enemies, ye might get a customer or two.’

‘God preserve the king,’ Tam said, almost by rote and leaving Malise to wonder which king he was speaking of. Malise was about to start placing coins on the table when a frightening apparition appeared at the head of the staircase.

The face had once been pretty, but was puffed and reddened by late nights and too much drink. Malise saw a body made shapeless by a loose shift, but a breast lolled free, darkened by a bruise.

‘What a stramash,’ she whined, combing straggles of hair from her face. ‘Can a quine not get sleep here?’

She saw Malise and made an attempt at a winning smile, then gave up and stumbled down to slump on a bench.

‘Where’s your light o’ love?’ demanded Tam sarcastically.

‘Snoring his filthy head off – Tam, a cup?’

Tam grunted and poured.

‘Just the single Lizzie, my sweet. I want you at the work the day.’

‘What for is wrong with that bitch upstairs?’ Lizzie whined and Tam grinned, lopsided and lewd.

‘You ken the way of it. It is your affair if you stick yer legs in the air when you should be sleepin’, but this is your day for the work.’

Lizzie’s teeth clacked on the cup and she drank, coughed, wiped her mouth, then drank again.

‘Ye have to have rules,’ Tam said imperiously to Malise, ‘to run a business in these times. This place will be stappit with sojers the night, seeking out a wee cock of the finger an’ a bit of fine quim.’

He nudged Lizzie, who forced a winsome smile, then looked at Malise, sparked to curiosity now that wine was flooding her.

‘What are you selling – face paints and oils?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Seeking, not selling,’ Malise answered and the whore pouted and lost interest.

‘So,’ said Tam expansively, sliding into the shirt which had been brought to him at last. ‘Ye were sayin’. About a Coontess.’

‘The road is clear,’ Malise answered. ‘though few travel. Too many sojers of the English, who are just as bad as Wallace’s rebels.’

‘Never speak of him,’ Tam spat, thinking moodily of wagon drivers bringing stone for the completion of the castle, their thirsty helpers, the woolmen and drovers and pardoners and tinkers, all the trade he was not getting.

‘The road would be clear save for they bastits, God strike them,’ he added. ‘They’ll not come here, though, so close to the castle.’

‘I heard it was not completed,’ Malise mused.

‘The walls are big enough,’ Tam retorted, wondering if this stranger was a spy and regretting what he had said about Wallace. Then the stranger wondered out loud if the Countess had gone there.

‘Coontess?’ Lizzie declared before Tam could speak. ‘No Coontess has rested here. No decent wummin since the Flood.’

She shot Tam a miserable look and he parried it with a glare, seeing his chance at money vanish. If he had planned to inflict more on her, it was lost in a clatter and a curse from upstairs.

‘So he’s up,’ muttered the whore, glancing upwards. ‘A malison on his prick.’

‘To speak the De’il’s name is to summon him,’ chuckled Tam as a second figure appeared at the top of the stairs, took two steps, stumbled and slithered down another four, then managed to make it to the table, whey-faced and with a beard losing its neat trim. He had a fleshily handsome face, dark hair fading to smoke and spilling in greasy curls to his ears, a stocky body and wore shirt, boots and not much else – but Malise saw the bone knife-handle peep from the boot top.