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

‘Pigs?’ asked Hal. Talking to this woman was like learning to skate on thin ice.

‘Nearest to humans in anatomy and skin and bone,’ Isabel replied. ‘In Bologna, real corpses are kept for examinations and most everyday work is done on pigs. Strangled, burned, poisoned and buried for a day, a week, longer. Bologna is a dangerous place to be a pig, sir Hal.’

‘If I ever take sim Craw to the Italies, I will bear it in mind,’ Hal said laconically, ‘since his manners clearly endanger him with dissection. Mark you – it seems Balmullo is no place to root for acorns either.’

she looked at him sideways a little.

‘You are not fond of physickers?’

Hal started to deny it, unwilling to annoy this woman, but the truth choked him. The ague was a pest which began as innocent as a shiver on a warm day, as if some sudden unseen breeze had caressed the spine. In three days or less, the shiverers were rattling their teeth on a rack of sweat-soaked bedding, the air in their chest wheezing like leaky forge bellows. They complained of the cold and burned away to a greasy husk before your eyes.

Others got it, too – from the vapours of the fetid, warm marshes according to the physickers and lazar priests – and some of them died swiftly, while others were abandoned even by their fearful priests and died of neglect.

One, the lovely young Mary of the saltoun Mill, crawled from her sickbed and slipped into the river, drawing the cool water over her like a balming coverlet. After they found her, the same saltoun priests who had abandoned her refused her consecrated burial, since she had taken her own life.

Not that they were any use when they found the courage to remain with their charges. Rosemary and onions, wormwood and cloves, vinegar and lemons, all mixed with henshit like some bad pudding or capon stuffing and smeared on the forehead and under the arms.

A live toad, fastened to the head. A live pullet, cut in two and held, bleeding and squawking, to anything that looked like a sore – though sores were no part of the ague that took Hal’s wife and son, only a shaking sickness that boiled them away to wasted sweat, to where death was a merciful release.

She listened to him in silence, feeling the bile, the venom pus of it. When he had finished, she laid a hand on his arm and he felt strange and light-headed.

Another scream echoed and he saw her leap up, then waver uncertainly before recovering.

‘Have you eaten?’ he asked and she stared at him for a moment, then shook her head.

‘Well, if you provide the wine, I will provide some oatcakes and a little cheese,’ he said with forced cheer.

She didn’t argue, so that they sat in a makeshift House of God and ate.

‘Cygnets’ Hal said, rinsing the cling of oatcake from the roof of his mouth.

‘What?’

‘Cygnets,’ Hal repeated. ‘A teem of cygnets. The game you like to play.’

He saw her face flame and her head lower. The oatcake turned to ash in his mouth.

‘Pardon,’ he stuttered. ‘I thought …’

It tailed off into silence and he sat, mouth thick with oats he could neither spit nor swallow.

‘It was a silly game for lovers,’ Isabel said at last and raised her head defiantly, staring him in the face. ‘To see who would be horse and who the rider.’

Hal forced the lump down his throat, remembering as he gagged, the high table at Douglas and her triumphant shout as she beat Bruce with her blush of boys. Ha, she had declared. I come out on top.

He found her hand thrust at him and a cup in it.

‘You will choke,’ she said and he forced a smile.

‘Water,’ said Hal with certainty, ‘has fish dung in it.’

Then raised the cup in salute and drank.

‘Which is as good a reason as any to avoid it and keep to wine.’

‘That is Communion wine,’ Isabel said wryly and Hal spluttered, then put the cup down carefully, as if would bite him. Isabel chuckled.

‘You have already swallowed enough to be allowed to sit at the feet of Christ Himself,’ she said and Hal found himself grinning. They could both be ducked, or even burned at the stake for what they did here, drinking Holy wine and laughing blasphemously, her unchaperoned.

‘shrews,’ she said suddenly and Hal blinked. The silence stretched and then she raised her head and looked into his grey eyes.

‘A rebel of shrews,’ she declared and added softly, ‘I win.’

The thunder of blood in his ears drowned the sudden arrival, so that only the blast of air snapped the lock of their gaze. Like the opening of a chill larder door, the man crashed in on them.

‘Ah might have weel kent ye would find the cosiest nook,’ growled the voice. ‘Wine and weemin – I taught ye well, it appears.’

Hal whirled, as if caught fondling himself in the stable, stared up into the fierce, grey-bearded hatchet face.

‘Father,’ he said weakly.

The Abbey Craig, Stirling

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity – August 11, 1297

They came to him just before dawn, as the sky lightened in a sour-milk smear, two earnest men already accoutred for war and clacking as they walked. Thweng watched them, seeing the grim eagerness in their hard young eyes, flicking over the blazons that let him know who they were. In the midst of their differing heraldry, a little badge in common – st Michael with flaming sword.

‘The Wise Angels request a boon,’ one of them said, bowing, and Thweng sighed, trying not to let it out of him in a weary puff. Mummery. Chivalric posturing from folk gripped by Arthur and the Round Table – yet, beneath it, the very real courage and skill that might win the day. So he forced himself. ‘Speak, Angel.’

‘The Wise Angels request to be your boon companions in the Van this day, lord.’

‘How many angels ride at my shoulder?’

‘Twenty, lord. Sworn under Christ.’

‘Welcome, Angels.’

He watched the men clack happily away. The Wise Angels were one of many little companies of knights who swore oaths to do great deeds of bravery on the eve of battle, although Thweng knew these were one of the better ones, composed of tournament-hardened knights. They had come to him, one of the foremost fighters on the circuit – and commander of the Van horse.

They had taken their name after Christ’s rebuke to Paul when men arrived to arrest them and Paul wished to fight. ‘Do you not think,’ Christ had said, ‘that, if I had asked, my Father in Heaven would not send me a legion of wise angels, against whom no man will stand?’

Today, a legion of twenty Wise Angels, against whom no man will stand, would ride at Thweng’s shoulder, swelling the numbers of barded horse under his command. The Fore-Battle, the Van, would be led by Cressingham, around two thousand foot and Thweng’s one hundred and fifty heavy horse designed to plant themselves firmly on the far side of the long brig and allow the Main and Rear battles, another two hundred knights and sergeants and four and a half thousand spearmen and archers, to form up under Barons Latimer and Huntercombe.

After that, it would simply be a matter of shooting the Scots to ruin and then riding the remnants into the dust.

It would have been simpler still if half the army had not melted away on the road up from Roxburgh and most of the rest sent home by the Treasurer on grounds of cost. Now the forces arrayed opposite each other were roughly equal, though Thweng knew the heavy barded horse and their lances would be the deciding factor. All the same, there were far fewer than he would have liked and Cressingham bore the blame for that.

Thweng heard the low, beast-grumbling groan of the army surfacing into the day, saw the spark of hasty fires in an attempt by some to get warmth in their bellies. Somewhere across the slow, ponderous loops of the river, he heard bells pealing. It is the Sabbath, he remembered suddenly.