and the festering corpses of men who were too far under the enemy bows to be recovered for decent burial.
Men moved in blocks, drilling under the bawls of vintenars; Hal saw that some had only long sticks, as if the spearheads had been removed from their shafts, and that too many were unarmoured, with not even as much as an iron hat.
‘Thrust – thrust. Push.’
The sweating men clustered in a block, hardly knowing right from left, half of them unable to speak the other half’s tongue and none of them having met before; they staggered and stumbled and cursed.
The ones who had done this before, the better-armed burghers and armoured nobiles of the realm, moved smoothly through the drills, but they did not laugh at the rabble; they would all depend on each other when push came to thrust.
Hal moved through this misty, half-remembered world of noise and stink and death, made more grotesque by the shattering bright of banners and tents and surcotes dotting it like blooms.
Brightest of all was the Earl of Moray’s flag, big as a bedsheet, fluttering in the dank breeze. It did not show the arms Hal remembered, but the old lessons dinned into him by his father surfaced like leaping salmon: or, three cushions within a double tressure flory counterflory gules. It was the arms of Randolph, right enough, but new-wrapped in the red and gold royal trappings of Scotland.
He saw Jamie Douglas jerk at his reins, black-browed, but then order his own banner dipped; Sim Craw, knee to knee with Hal, gave a quiet coughing bark of laughter and touched Hal’s arm as the entrance of the rich yellow panoply parted to reveal Randolph himself.
‘The paint is scarce dry on his new earl’s arms,’ Sim whispered hoarsely. ‘Jamie resents having to hand Randolph his due as Earl o’ Moray, him being a mere lord of Douglas. Resents, too, the royal mark in that shield that reminds folk Randolph claims the King’s kinship.’
‘Good Sir James,’ Randolph called in French, sweet as milk so that the grue in it was almost masked. ‘I hear you have triumphed at Roxburgh. Bigod, you are a byword for trickery, certes.’
Hal expected wildness and ranting, but Jamie lost his black brow almost at once and threw back his head; the mock of laughter he flung out was more stinging than any curse.
‘Bigod, Thomas, are you still sittin’ here?’ he lisped back. ‘Would you like some ideas on taking fortresses?’
Flushing, Randolph managed a twist of smile.
‘His Grace the King, of course, demands to see the Good Sir James – and the rescued Sir Henry of Herdmanston. Welcome, my lord. Seven years gone from us and now plucked forth like a plum from a pie.’
Hal, taken aback by the sudden focus on himself, managed only a weak nod, but Randolph had never been part of the circle round Bruce seven years ago, so neither man knew the other save by repute – and Hal’s had moss on it.
The moment was broken by a distant thud and all the heads swivelled and craned skywards.
‘There.’
Hal saw the shaped stone arc downwards, scurf up a huge wad of mud and bounce harmlessly almost to the foot of the hurdles; a protesting smoke of crows rose up off their old feasts.
‘They are trying lighter stones out of the fortress,’ Sim muttered. ‘You will note what is absent on our side of the siege.’
Engines. Not a trebuchet nor a mangonel – not so much as a springald. No towers or rams. Nothing.
Jamie Douglas inclined his head in a curt, mocking bow to Randolph.
‘You have sat here since last winter, my lord earl,’ he noted with mock sadness. ‘Shame there does not seem to be a balk of timber that can be laid one on the other, or any trickery to supplant it. Still, I have it that you will persevere, certes, though it is my fervent hope that your lordship manages it before a big stone rolls over your curly pow. It is no good look for an earl, that. God be praised, my lord.’
He went off, laughing and chattering either side to the adoring, trailing everyone after him and leaving the thundercloud of Randolph in his wake. They quit the dripping sour of the camp, cavalcading down from under the black rock along the sullen mile of cramped houses and wynds that led to the peace and dry of Holyrood Abbey, where the King demanded to see the darling captor of Roxburgh.
The way of matters, Sim explained on the way, is not as it was. Randolph and Douglas and the last brother, Edward Bruce, were mighty captains, seasoned in the wars with the Buchan and Comyn which had finally exterminated all Bruce’s enemies.
‘A sore slaughter that,’ Sim declared, grimed with the memory of it and shaking his head in sorrow. ‘The Comyn are harrowed and ploughed under; the Earl of Buchan himself fled south and turned his face to the wall years since, poor auld man that he was – killed of a broken heart, they say.’
He looked sideways at Hal, but saw only a blank stone stare back at him, though Hal had his own thoughts on the poor auld man who had died of a broken heart. If the Earl of Buchan ever had one, Hal wanted to say, you could not have smashed it with hammer and anvil – but he did not have to voice it and was aware that Sim was still able to read him even after seven years.
Buchan, Isabel’s husband and the nemesis of their loving for a decade and more, was gone like smoke. As if he had never been. Hal wondered if Isabel knew. It was as likely that someone would tell her for spite as they would keep her from the comfort of knowing, in marriage at least, she was free at last.
There was more, spilled out from Sim while Jamie Douglas climbed into his finery in order to come formally into the presence of the court. Hal, it seemed, had been forgotten already, though that suited him well enough, as did the corner of canvas and stick that Sim shared as part of the Douglas retinue. Sim, of course, was more outraged than Hal.
‘You are the lord o’ Herdmanston,’ he fumed. ‘Christ betimes, we rescued wee Jamie from the grip of the English when he was a snot-nose, carted him to safety and his da.’
‘Aye. You cuffed his ears if I remembrance it right,’ Hal said with a twist of grin. ‘Has he forgave you yet?’
Sim glowered.
‘He barely had fluff on his balls then, but I should cuff his lug again for this, which is no little insult to a lord of Sientclers. Ignored by the King ye served fine well and stuck in a corner of the Douglas panoply like lumber? It is not proper. And where is your kin of Roslin in this, eh?’
‘That was then, Sim Craw. This is now. Now I am lord of nothing at all, for Herdmanston is still a ruin, you tell me. Roslin’s Sientclers have done enough in keeping the wardship of the place alive at all. Besides, even a corner of this is better and lighter than the stone room I have lived in until recently.’
Sim had no answer to that. He sat with his head bowed, bleared by the memory of the last time he had seen Herdmanston, still black with the seven-year-old stain of fires, the floors fallen in and the weeds sprouting from the rotting-tooth of it. All the Herdmanston folk had gone to Sir Henry Sientcler of Roslin, yet their own field strips were at Herdmanston and too valuable to let lie, so some were back at the plough and the harvest, living in cruck houses under the ruins of the old tower.
‘It would not take much to return it,’ he added after telling Hal this, but then fell silent. None of the old riders remained, the ones who had once followed Hal, sure of that lord’s ability to pluck gold out of a cesspit; they had died at Stirling’s brig and Callendar’s woods and on every herschip since. Those who had survived had long since grown too old for the business after – Christ’s Wounds – fifteen years of fighting.
‘Nearer twenty,’ Hal corrected when Sim hoiked this up and Sim grew even more morosely silent at the truth of it. Out of all that time, Hal thought bleakly, Isabel and I have had no more than a year and a day in total together, tallied in months here, a week there.
Yet he would give as much for the same again.
‘The new lord of Badenoch