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

Tailed dogs.

As a rousing speech, Hal thought, it probably fell far short of what the chroniclers wanted and they would lie about it later. Six thousand waited to be lifted and not more than a hundred would hear some rousing speech on liberty, with no time to repeat it, ad infinitum.

‘Tailed dogs’ repeated all the way along the long line did it this time: the ragged, ill-armoured horde, half of them shivering with fear and fevers, most of them bare-legged and bare-arsed because disease poured their insides down their thighs, flung their arms in the air and roared back at him.

‘Tailed dogs,’ they bellowed back with delight, the accepted way to insult an Englishman and popularly believed as God’s just punishment on that race for their part in the murder of Saint Thomas a-Becket; the Scots taunt never failed to arouse the English to red-necked rage.

Hal leaned out to look down the bristle of cheering pikes to where his father stood, leaning hip-shot on a Jeddart staff which had the engrailed blue cross fluttering from a pennon. He had his old battered shield slung half on his back, the cock rampant of the Sientclers faded and scarred on it – that device was older even than the shivering cross.

Beside him stood Tod’s Wattie, offered up as standard-bearer in a cunning ploy by Hal to get him close enough, so that he now struggled with both hands to control the great wind-whipped square of blue slashed with the white cross of St Andrew. He had that task and the surreptitious protection of the Auld Sire to handle and he did not know which one was the more troublesome.

The great cross reminded Hal of the one he wore and he looked at the two white strips, hastily tacked over his heart in the X of St Andrew. A woman with red cheeks and worn fingers had done it when he had taken Will Elliot to Isabel in the baggage camp, finding her with the woman and the Dog Boy, moving among those already sick.

‘This is Red Jeannie,’ Isabel declared and the bare-legged woman had bobbed briefly and then frowned.

‘Ye have no favour,’ she said and proceeded to tack the strips on Hal’s gambeson while he told Isabel that Will Elliot was here to guard her and the Dog Boy should the day go against them.

‘He will keep ye safe,’ he added. ‘Mind also you have that Templar flag, so wave that if it comes to the bit.’

She nodded, unable to speak, aware of the woman, tongue between her teeth, stitching with quick, expert movements while Hal looked over her head into Isabel’s eyes. She wanted to tell him how sorry she was, that it was all her fault that he was here, trapped in a battle he did not want, but the words would not come.

‘I …’ he said and a horn blared.

‘You had best away,’ Isabel said awkwardly and Red Jeannie finished, stuck the needle in the collar of her dress and beamed her windchaped face up into Hal’s own.

‘There, done and done,’ she said. ‘If ye see a big red-haired Selkirk man with a bow, his name is Erchie of Logy and ye mun give him this.’

She took Hal’s beard and pulled him down to her lips so hard their teeth clicked. He tasted onion and then she released him as fiercely as she had grabbed him.

‘God keep him safe,’ she added and started to cry. ‘Christ be praised.’

‘For ever and ever,’ Hal answered numbly, then felt Isabel close to him, smelled the sweat-musk of her, a scent that ripped lust and longing through him, so that he reeled with it.

‘Go with God, Hal of Herdmanston,’ she said and kissed him, full and soft on the lips. Then she stepped back and put her arm round the weeping Jeannie, leading her into the carts and sumpter wagons and the wail of women.

The kiss was with him now, so that he touched his gauntlet to his mouth.

‘Here they come again,’ Sim declared and Hal looked down the long, slope, sliced by the causeway that led to the brig. On it, small figures moved slowly, jostling forward, spilling out like water from a pipe and filtering up.

‘Same as afore,’ Sim said. ‘It seems they are awfy fond with walking back and forth across the brig.’

‘Good of them to show us the way of matters afore they did it for true,’ said a voice and they turned into the round red face of John Fenton, steward to the Auld Templar. He was nicknamed The Son Of Roslin by Hal and Sim and the others who had all gone rabbiting or hare coursing together, long days ago.

A good joke for young boys, since John’s cheeks were always fiery as the sun at summer noon; now they flared in the constriction of the bascinet helm, his dark-brown beard sticking over the lip of his maille coif like horsehair from a burst saddle.

The sight of it brought back smiling memories for Hal, of himself and John Fenton, young Henry Sientcler and his wee brother William, who had gone to the Church in England. The Sientclers, all Henrys, Johns and Williams, had rattled around the lands of Roslin and Herdmanston in company with the older Sim Craw and other lesser lights, sons of herdsman, ploughman and miller, causing mischief and being young. Hal grinned at the memory.

‘How’s your sister?’ Sim asked and John nodded his thanks for the inquiry.

‘Bearing up,’ he said. ‘The children keep her busy – Margaret is a handful.’

Fenton’s sister, Alice, was married to the imprisoned Henry Sientcler. She would be sitting close to tears in Roslin, Hal knew, trying to find soothing explanations for a toddling girl and two boys – John and William. Christ’s Wounds, Hal thought – John, William and Henry, do we have nae better names to pick for Sientclers? What was the collective for Sientclers, he wondered? A gaggle? A clutch? A brooding?

John Fenton looked up at the sky, squinting, then smiled.

‘Nice weather for it,’ he said. ‘A wee bit rain earlier to add damp and make it hard going for men on heavy horse, dry enough for foot to skip when it comes to it.’

‘Are we skippin’ then, young John Fenton?’ Sim asked laconically.

‘In a whiley, Sim Craw,’ John Fenton answered mildly. ‘You’ll hear a horn blaw when my Lord Moray decides enough English have been served up for breakfast. Then we will fall on them, like the wolf on the fold.’

‘Christ betimes,’ Sim declared with a lopsided grin, ‘ye have become a fair battler since the days when Fat Davey used to wrestle ye into the mud.’

There was a moment of shared memories, of the reeve’s great bully of a son, bigger even than Sim, who had terrorised them for years until, under Hal and Henry Sientcler, the other lads had joined forces and jumped him. They had tied him to a tree in the bull’s field, with a long red streamer of cloth whipping in the wind and, when his furious father had finally released him, Fat Davey the Reeve’s Boy was a wiser shadow of himself.

John Fenton took a breath or two, slapped the bascinet harder on his head and looked from Hal to Sim and back.

‘Fat Davey,’ he said with a grin, ‘is a score of paces from ye, grippin’ a bull’s horn and waiting on me to tell him when to blaw.’

Then was gone from them, shouting.

Chapter Seven

Cambuskenneth Brig, Stirling

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

This was no place for a bowman, and Addaf, jostled and elbowed, was not the only one to think it. As he cradled the bow-bag to his front, protecting the fletches and shafts from the crush as if it was a babbie, he heard other voices curse in Welsh.

‘Make room for us,’ Heydin Captain bawled, red-faced. ‘Make room.’

There was no room; the horse had crossed and the foot after that, but the line of enemy was a distant raggle of spearpoints – about ten times our killing range, Addaf thought, measuring it with one closed eye as they staggered in the press.