at his target. Bigod, age is a terrible thing, he thought, for I can scarce see more than a blur.
But a blur was fine, provided he could tell man from mast. He shot and the deep whung of the release brought heads round.
Up on the forecastle of the Marrot, Jack Crabbe’s expensively hired ingéniateur studied the roll of the wave, waiting for the second just before it started on the rise. He was a Gascon expert, was Ferenc Lop, even if shooting a mangonel from a moving ship was a new experience and he had, he was pleased to see, mastered it as he had mastered everything else to do with engines.
His hand was up and men watched for the cutting swathe of it, the signal to release. The bird-wing whirr of the crossbow bolt took them by surprise and they recoiled from it, the one with the release rope among them. The latch clicked, the mangonel arm flung forward – just as Ferenc slammed back into it, pinned through the chest.
The power of the muscular mangonel ripped him forward and sent him over the side in a bloody whirl of arms and legs. The carcass, balked out of the spoon, shot sideways, ploughed a burning furrow through the nearest men, spun off the castle and hissed into the sail, where it clung for a moment, before dropping to the deck and rolling a trail of sputtering fire, ponderous as a blazing snail. Flames and smoke shot up, broiled with screams.
Over on the Bon Accord, men stared in awe as the Marrot veered, the smoke obscuring her and the flames clearly leaping up the sail. They turned to where Sim was winding the arbalest, elbows working like two mad fiddlers, and broke into howls of delight. Sim affected nonchalance, shot one more bolt into the smoke, and slithered down to the deck as the first witch-fingers of comforting haar enveloped him.
‘Christ betimes,’ Kirkpatrick declared, beaming, ‘as fine a shot as any by a man half your age.’
‘Aye, aye,’ Sim acknowledged easily, pulling out a rag to clean the steel-bowed arbalest as the crew crowded in to admire it and him. It was only later and only to Hal that he admitted he had been aiming at what he thought was Jack Crabbe – a span of hands to the left of the man he hit.
Doña Beatriz stood, apart from the delight and shadowed by Piculph, watching Pegy and the two stupid brothers attending to the giant Islesman. She was frowning at what she had seen done to him and about the man who had done it, wondering how best to use the knowledge to her advantage.
Herdmanston
Two hours later …
They came up, fox wary and stepping in crouched, swinging half-circles, arrows nocked on smarted bows, heedless of the rain and what that would do to strings.
Addaf knew the Scotch would be gone and his lungs burned from the long run, a frantic hare-leap of panic amid the scattering of their own horses. Now, on foot, they padded back like slinking hounds, for Addaf had lost forty-five men, all the horses and a deal of dignity, which trailed in shreds behind him with the mutters of his men.
They had recovered four horses so far and found all their missing men, though it did them little good: most were dead and at least nine had their right hand or more missing and had died of the blood loss or the horror of it happening. Taken alive, everyone saw, and badly handled.
Five were alive, but none of them would see day’s end. They had used their one good hand and teeth and any thonging or laces they could find to tie off the raw stumps so that the blood did not pump out of them. But they had lost too much and Addaf ordered the bindings cut, to let them slip into the mercy of a long sleep as they lay in sluggish red tarns.
He was aware of Y Crach as a feverish heat at one side of him, but the man – wisely for once – kept silent round him; yet, when Addaf looked, he was head to head with others, who were nodding and scowling.
Addaf had not time for it. He knelt at Hywel’s side, seeing the grey face and the blued lips, the slantwise horror of his severed forearm.
‘No time, the man said,’ Hywel echoed in a soft, twisted wheeze, ‘for niceties. Like taking off our thumbs. The other one, the one called Dog Boy, said his leader would be hard. Hates archers above all his enemies, he said. Hates Welsh more than he hates English, for the Welsh should know better than to serve English Edward.’
Hywel gripped Addaf’s arm hard with the last bloody-fingered hand he had, so that the cloth bunched between his knuckles.
‘Dog Boy, he said he was. Said if any of us lived we should tell the others, all the Welsh, that they are on the wrong side.’
‘The right side is the one that wins,’ Addaf replied, looking into the misting eyes.
‘The other one lashed our right hands with ropes, had a man hold us and another haul our arms out. Then he went down the line of us with his axe. Like he was coppicing …’
‘Who? Who did this? This Dog Boy?’
Hywel was more out than in this world, Addaf realized, but his eyelids flickered and his voice was a last breath.
‘Douglas,’ he said, so slight that Addaf had to put his ear to the lips. ‘The Black himself.’
Then, suddenly, in a clear, strong voice with laughing in it, he said: ‘We will make them dance, we will make them kick …’
Addaf closed the eyes.
‘Bedd a wna bawb yn gydradd,’ he said grimly. The grave makes everyone equal.
ISABEL
O God, whose charity is more painful than Your harshness. In all the years since his father’s death in Greyfriars, the new lord of Badenoch has never visited, simply paid Malise his stipend for guarding me – as his Comyn father did before – on behalf of his kin, my long-dead husband. Yet, Lord, You brought Badenoch to the Hog Tower this year, accompanied by a simpering Malise, anxious for his quarterlies to be continued. A little mirror of his murdered father, this new Badenoch, freckled, red-haired and bantam. He looked round at my straw-strewn stone niche, the window that is a door and the cage beyond it. Then he looked me up and down and slowly wondered at my state and age, not having realized it before. Not quite the Hoor o’ Babylon, wee Johnnie, I told him and watched how prettily he pinked. He ordered my whim for pots and paints and women’s essentials ‘in remembrance of the man who spared me’ – but confirmed Malise in the constant caring of me. The man who spared wee Badenoch was Hal, on that day in Greyfriars when this frowning little lord was a lad, brought to say last farewells to his murdered da to find the killers returned to make sure of it. Kirkpatrick would have done for him, save for my Hal; Malise fled and young Badenoch clearly remembered it, for his look flushed Bellejambe to the roots of his pewter hair. Later, Malise took his revenge with me and, as always, lost more than he gave. I suffered his grunting, futile foulness and learned that Badenoch did not come only to see me, but to put Berwick in order; the English are coming in midsummer, to put an end to Bruce. You may dream of it, I told Malise, and, for once, he had no strength left to punish me. So a victory for endurance – let us hope, O Lord, that this is not a beguilement of empty hope for the Kingdom.
CHAPTER FIVE
Westminster
Feast of St George, April 1314
The Pope was dead and the shiver of it added to the cold ache in the bones. Drip and ache, that was Easter, thought Edward, every miserable cunny-rotted day of it, when the damp crept up your back and no amount of stoked fire could keep the wind from looping in and up your bowels until you coughed and shat hedgepigs.
Like Father. He threw that thought from him, as he always did when it crept in like a mangy dog seeking shelter. Shitting his life down his leg; for all his strength and longevity brought low by a foul humour up the arse, king or no.
Death did not care for rank. The Pope had found that, just as Jacques de Molay had promised from his pyre. Edward, even as the delicious chill of it goosed his flesh, could not help the hug of glee that he was not his father-in-law, the King of France,