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

Then, suddenly, Hal was upright, weaving and staggering. The knight lay gasping, bloody, half-blind, dazed, astonished. This was not Tourney. Not even the worst of Melee was like this …

‘Sir Henry Sientcler,’ Hal yelled in French. ‘Do you yield?’

The fallen knight acknowledged it with a weak flap of one gauntlet.

‘Sir Richard Fitzralph,’ he replied in a weak voice, thick blood and mushed with the loss of teeth. ‘I am an Angel.’

‘If you do not yield,’ Hal bellowed, all courtly French lost, ‘ye will be singing with them, certes.’

‘I yield.’

Thank Christ, Hal thought and slumped, panting, to the slick planks of the brig.

‘My lord, where is Cressingham?’

Thweng turned as the rider came up, his face stiff with shock and bewilderment. The Main and Rear battles waited in serried ranks to cross, but fully a third of the army was gone and Thweng looked wearily up at him, then back across at the carnage.

‘Almost certainly dead,’ he said and the knight’s face paled, throwing his neatly clipped black beard into sharper focus ‘Taken, surely, my lord.’

Thweng turned to look at the maggot boil across the bridge, the howling, shrieking slaughter of it, then turned back into the knight’s shocked gaze and said nothing at all, which spoke loudly enough to turn the knight’s face paler still.

‘What should I do?’ the knight said uncertainly and Thweng pointed a weary flap of hand back to the eyrie perch of Stirling Castle, where he knew De Warenne watched.

‘Who are you?’ he asked and the knight, for all his shock, drew himself up a little. Proud, this one, Thweng thought wearily, to be so vainglorious in the face of all this.

‘Sir Robert Malenfaunt,’ the knight answered, his saturnine face sheened with sweat and so pale now that Thweng thought the man might faint at any moment. One of Lord Ughtred of Scarborough’s men, he recalled, and part of the retinue from Bamburgh.

‘Gather oil and anything that will burn,’ he said. ‘In a little while, a messenger will arrive and tell you to torch the bridge and retire.’

Malenfaunt nodded dumbly and Thweng could see the relief in him, that there had been a plan for this moment. There had not, Thweng knew, but it is what he would have done. In the end, it was what must be done – though God save us all when Longshanks hears of this.

There had been a moment when Malise felt the fire of it course in his blood, when he saw the blocked shapes crash on one another and heard the distant rumbling roar, the strange eldritch shriek of dying horses brought by a stray tendril of wind.

By Gods Wounds, he exulted, we are winning this. Scots are winning this. Then sense flooded back and doused any flames of triumphant passion. Rebels were winning this and so the Buchan and Comyn cause was not served by it, no matter how huggingly gleeful the thought of such a victory might be.

He hunched himself back on the horse and urged it on up the slope of Abbey Craig. This was none of his business, he reasoned. His business was with the Countess and a Savoyard mystery.

It took him until the sun was sinking to get to the baggage camp, which swarmed like crows on a ploughed field, and Malise was barely challenged, for the only men he saw were the ones hauling themselves in, or being helped by friends. Blood skeins slicked back and forth, giant slimed snail-trails marking the wounded and dying brought out of the fighting; no-one here knew who was winning.

He found himself numbed, almost fixed by the screaming, groaning, dying horror of it, managed to snag a passing brown-robed figure.

‘Countess of Buchan,’ he growled and the priest, his eyes haunted and the hem of his robe sodden with blood, blinked once or twice, then pointed to a bower with a drunken cross leaning sideways outside.

‘Hold him,’ he heard as he came closer. ‘Hold him – Jeannie, cut there. There – that’s it. Now stitch that bit back together.’

She turned as he came in and her eyes widened a little, then went flat and cold. She was bloody to the elbow, her green dress stained, her cheeks streaked. Hair fluttered from under the creased ruin of her wimple.

‘Come to help? Well done, Malise … take the legs of this one.’

Dumbly, Malise realised he had done it only when he was lifting the man. On the other side, the Dog Boy held the shoulders and tried not to look Malise in the eye.

‘Over there,’ Isabel said and was amazed when Malise obeyed like a packhorse to the rein. It was only when he realised that the man he carried was dead and he was stacking him with a host of others, like cut logs, that Malise stopped, then stared at the Dog Boy.

‘I know you,’ he declared, then curled his mouth in a sneer and dropped the legs. ‘The wee thief from Douglas.’

The weight of the released dead man dragged the shoulders from the Dog Boy’s grip and the man lolled, his head bouncing.

‘No thief now,’ the Dog Boy spat back, though his heart was a frantic bird in the cage of his chest. ‘Ye have drapped him short. Do ye pick him up, or leave me to struggle?’

Malise took a step, his mouth working and his face blackening, but found the Dog Boy crouching like a snarling terrier, not about to back away. It astounded him as much as it did the Dog Boy, but Isabel’s voice cut through the moment.

‘Christ, Malise – can ye not even do a simple thing like lift a dead man to his final place?’

Malise rounded on her.

‘Ye are to come with me,’ he said firmly and Isabel laughed and rubbed another streak across the wimple and her forehead.

‘I am busy, as you can see,’ she said and turned back to the next man being brought in, holding the side of his face together with both hands and screaming bubbles through the blood.

‘Now, lady,’ Malise roared, driven past the reasonable now. He grabbed her by the muscle of her arm, squeezing viciously as he did so, and she yelped, turning into the twisted mask of his face close to her own. The men who had brought their screaming friend in bellowed at him.

‘Enough of this, ye wee hoor,’ he hissed. ‘Yer man, the earl, sent me to bring ye home and, by God wummin, you come willing or tied, but you’ll come.’

The blow sent him sprawling into the mud and blood and entrails, face first so that he came up out of it soaked and spitting, to see the Dog Boy, triumphant eyes blazing at having shoved him in the mire.

He had no words, only a shrieking incoherent rage of noise as he whipped out the long dagger and headed for the Dog Boy, who looked wildly around. Isabel saw the red murder in Malise’s eyes and tried to step between him and his prey, but he slapped her sideways with his free hand.

The blow took her hard on the side of her head, burst stars and red into her and, for the first time, a real fear. Malise had never dared touch her before …

Men growled at that, Malise rushed at the boy, slipped and slithered, regained his balance – then the world came flying out of the corner of one eye and exploded with a clang in his face.

Men cheered as Red Jeannie lowered the skillet and spat on the crawling, choking man on his knees, his nose flattened and his breathing snoring blood in and out. He lurched to his feet, the dagger still locked in his white fist and the world reeling; Red Jeannie stood with the skillet held like a Lochaber axe, while other faces, pale, ugly blobs swimming in and out of Malise’s focus, snarled and spat.

They watched him back away, the dagger wavering in one fist. The Dog Boy looked wildly round for the Countess, but she was gone.

Malise found himself leaning against a tree and did not know how he had reached the place. The bark was rough and damp, the moss on on it cool on the crushing agony that was his face. He knew that he had been struck by something and was afraid of it, afraid to touch what had been done to him. He spat out two teeth, wondered how many more he had lost and hirpled away, to where a flicker of fires offered some comfort; he realised it was twilight and that, somewhere, he had lost an hour or two.