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

The Dog Boy went into the night. Hal heard the tent rustle again as Moray left it and then Wallace’s bass rumble slipped through the canvas.

‘Ye can stop skulking at the eaves, Hal Sientcler, and come and tell me about a stonecarver.’

Wearily, Hal levered himself up and went in to where the air reeked of stale sweat and wet wool. Wallace lay slumped in a curule chair, the hand-and-a-half no more than a forearm length from his right hand. He listened as Hal told him about the Savoyard stonecarver.

‘Forty days, is it? We never have forty days, Hal. We have the night and the morn and, God willing, if battle be joined as we wish it, the morn’s morn.’

Hal shifted slightly and inwardly cursed the great giant lolled opposite. He wore better clothes these days – even hose and shoes, as befitting one of the saviours of the realm – but it was still the same brigand Wallace.

‘I can hardly assault Cambuskenneth,’ Hal declared. ‘The man has sanctuary for forty days. He has thirty-seven of them left. He cannot get out without being seen, for I have posted men to watch every way away from the place.’

Wallace heaved a sigh and shook his shaggy head.

‘The army had been here a week waiting for the English to relieve out threat against Stirling. I cannot believe the man was under my nose for that time,’ he said and then grinned ruefully. ‘Ye did good in tracking him, more praise to ye for that.’

Hal did not feel comforted; it had not exactly been difficult to work out that Manon de Faucigny would head for the abbey at Stirling – Cambuskenneth was perfect for a man of some quality, with skills and tools specific to kirk stonecarving and the history of having worked at Scone.

Since he was a Savoyard, it was not hard to find out that he was in residence – but the questioning had revealed their presence and the abbot, initially smiling and helpful, returned grim-faced to tell Hal that the man they sought was now in sanctuary. In forty days, he would have to leave, until then he was inviolate. He did not want to see or be seen by Hal or anyone else.

‘Well,’ Wallace answered. ‘After the morn, all matters will be resolved, win or lose. The abbey included.’

Hal did not doubt it; here was a man who had sacked Scone, who had burned Bishop Wishart’s house – in a fit of temper some said, after hearing that his mentor had given in at Irvine. The likes of an abbey was no trouble to the conscience of a man like that, yet Hal did not like the idea of sacking it and said so.

‘A wee bit too much brigand for ye, Sir Hal?’ said Wallace, his sneer bitter and curled.

‘Did clerics do ye harm afore?’ Hal countered, stung to daring. ‘When ye were up for the priesthood?’

Wallace stirred from his scowling and grinned, slack with weariness.

‘No, no – I was a bad cleric always – though a good man, John Blair, tried to put me on the path. But my wayward young nature had mair affinity with Mattie.’

He glanced up and smiled wryly.

‘Son of my uncle, who was a priest,’ he added. ‘Like all such, he was neither sheep nor wolf and suffered because of it. Wanting no part of priesthood and yet stepping into the robes, like myself. What dutiful sons we were – I am sometimes sure that bairns weep at birth because they know the estate they are born into.’

Hal recalled the few priests sons he had known, pinch-faced boys living in a nether world where they were unacknowledged and yet given the advantages of rank as if they had been. Even Bishop Wishart had sons, though no-one called them anything other than ‘nephews’.

‘Mattie,’ Wallace went on, dreamy-voiced with remembering, ‘showed me the way of survival as an outlaw, mind you, so the life clerical was not all wasted time.’

Hal had heard vague tales of the wayward Wallace, of the robbing of a woman in Perth. He mentioned it, quivering on the edge of fleeing at the first sight of black on the Wallace brow.

‘She was a hoor,’ Wallace admitted ruefully. ‘She robbed us – but it did not look good, a fully fledged cleric regular and a wee initiate boy visiting her in the first place. So we took what we could and ran. Not fast enow, mind – but since Mattie was a priest and I was so young, they let us off.’

‘Is that why ye gave Heselrig a dunt, then?’ Hal asked. ‘I had heard it was because of a wummin.’

‘I have heard this,’ Wallace answered slowly. ‘No wummin and no petty revenge for an assize that freed us. I went after Heselrig because he went after me – I had a stushie with a lad who fancied I had no right to wear a dagger and made his mind up to remove it.’

He paused and shook his head – in genuine sorrow, Hal saw.

‘I was a rantin’ lad then, a hoorin’ brawler in clericals and aware that the cloots did not fit me. I did not want the Church, Sir Hal, nor did it care much for me – but there was little other course open for a wee least son of a wee least landholder.’

He paused, frowning and pained.

‘I did no honour to my father with such behaviour and am not proud o’ it.’

‘What happened?’ Hal asked. ‘With the lad ye argued with?’

Wallace glanced up from under lowered brows, then stared back at the scarred planks of the floor.

‘He was a squire to some serjeant in Heselrigg’s mesnie, who contrived the quarrel in order to put down a wee strutting cock of a Scottish lay priest.’

He stirred at the memories of it, hunched into himself like a great bear.

‘It should have been a matter for knuckles and boots, no more,’ he went on bleakly. ‘Yet there was a dirk involved in the quarrel and, in the end, I gave it to him – though it did him little good, since it was buried in his paunch. He did not deserve such a fate and the Sheriff of Lanark agreed. No matter my guilt – aye and shame over the affair – I was not about to stand around like a set mill and be assized for it. So matters took their course.’

He was silent for a time, then shook his head and stirred.

‘Such tales do not endear me to the nobiles, he noted grimly. ‘They have no use for a wee outlaw, a landless apostate clerical of the Wallaces.’

‘Hardly wee,’ Hal returned wryly. ‘Betimes – ye have a wealth of brothers and cousins, it appears.’

‘Peculiarly,’ Wallace said bitterly, ‘this is timely with my elevation to the status of Roland and Achilles. I could not beg a meal at Riccarton, Tarbolton or any other Wallace house afore now. Only Tam Halliday in Corehead ever gave me room and board and he was kin only by being married on to my sister.’

He yawned and his eyes half-closed, so that Hal saw the weariness slide into the etched face of the man. Tomorrow, this giant would take the weight of the kingdom on his broad shoulders and lead Scotland’s army against their enemy.

Tomorrow, I will be gone from here, Hal thought. I can leave the Countess here and say I delivered her as far as safety allowed – which was no lie, he tried to convince himself. If I had taken her to the English in Stirling, only to find her husband was now actively a rebel, I would have delivered her into the hands of his enemies. Taking her to the rebels on Abbey Craig, on the other hand, placed her in hands which, at least, would not use her as ransom. Yet.

Not for the first time, Hal cursed the whole uncertain business, as he had done, silent and pungent under his breath, all through the town, under the brooding scowl of the English-held castle and out over the brig to Abbey Craig.

Yet he remembered the long days up to Stirling as ones marked by glory. As Sim said when they were rumbling up Bow Street, you would not think the world was about to plunge into blood and dying.

‘You will be wishing yourself back behind the plough, Lord Hal,’ Isabel said to him, gentle and smiling. He was glad of the smile, since it had been fading the closer they got to the northland of Buchan.