for the first serious resistance burst on them.
They roared out from the great dark bulk of the stone priory, a handful of desperately charging soldiers, the sometime-men hired to help collect taxes or bring in accused. They had padded jacks, heater shields, spears and all the skills of one-armed cripples. They were local men, who did not want to fight at all and were not English – save the one who led them, waving a sword and shouting; Hal couldn’t hear what he said.
Surprise worked for them, all the same; they hit the leading straggle of Wallace men, who scattered away from them, too late. One, turning to run, was skewered and fell, screaming. The sword-armed leader hacked at another, who leaped away, cursing.
Wallace ploughed into them as if he was iron, the great sword whirring left and right, hardly pausing. He parried a spear thrust; his men rallied, sprang forward with hoarse shouts and daggers and spears of their own.
The soldiers scattered in their turn and a knot came stumbling towards Hal, who had blundered darkly into the midden of a back court, dragging his handful of men with him. Cursing, he saw Bangtail Hob and Ill Made Jock leaping as if in a dance with three men, while Sim Craw, spitting challenges and taunts, hurled himself at two more. Somewhere, he could hear Maggie’s Davey screaming.
Hal found a single dark shape in his way, saw the thrust of spear and batted it away with a yell, cut back, ducked, whirled and felt his second blow catch as if on cloth. There was a whimpering yelp and Hal saw the dark shape stagger away from him, run a few steps, then fall.
He followed, feeling the clotted black rot of the midden squelch under his boots. The shape mewed and clawed away from him, the fish heads and offal squeezing up between his fingers as he crawled.
Hal hit him on the back of the head, feeling the eggshell crunch of it, hearing the sharp cry. The shape went slack and still; Hal rolled him over, to make sure he was dead.
An unexceptional face, beardless and streaked with midden filth, a wish-mark clear on one cheek. A boy, no more.
Alive, but barely.
‘Mither,’ he said and Hal swallowed the bile rising in him, for he knew what his sword had done to the back of the boy’s head and that he would never see his mother.
‘Stop gawpin’ at him like a raw speugh,’ Sim growled in his ear. ‘Finish it . . .’
He broke off when he saw how old the boy was and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand, looked at Hal’s face and knew his head was full of wee Johnnie.
Sim knelt and whipped out his boot knife, slit the throat, swift and expert, closing the boy’s eyes as he did so. Then he straightened, stepping in to break the shackle of Hal’s stare on the boy’s face.
‘Done and done – lose the memory o’ it,’ he gruffed, and Hal, blinking, nodded back into the screams and the flames. Bangtail Hob and Jock came up, supporting a third man between them.
‘Aye, we are braw rebels us, for we have gave this place freedom, certes,’ Bangtail offered cheerfully and the sagging man in the middle cursed. Hal saw it was Maggie’s Davey, then caught the reek of him and backed off a step.
‘Aye,’ declared Ill Made Jock bitterly, ‘well may ye shy away – you do not have to lug him around.’
‘I fell ower a privy,’ Davey moaned. ‘I have broke my neb, sure.’
‘I wish to Christ I had broke mine,’ Sim offered viciously, ‘so that I could not smell your stink. That must have been the De’il’s own jakes ye fell in.’
‘Bide here,’ Hal said to the three men, then jerked his head savagely at Sim Craw to follow him. He wanted away from the smell and the memory of the dead boy’s wish-marked face.
Sim looked at the dead boy. Nothing like wee John, he thought bleakly, but every young lad stared back at Hal with his dead son’s face, Sim knew. There will be more and more of wee dead boys when this rebellion takes hold, he added to himself, ducking under the eyes of the boy which, though closed, seemed to stare at him accusingly.
They came up through the screams and the flame-stains, crouching against lurid shadows that might have been friend or enemy – but, in the end, Hal and Sim realised there were no enemies left, only the madmen of Wallace’s army, fired by blood and running prey.
Hal stepped over a corpse, visible only in the dark because of the grey hair – a dark-robed Augustinian monk, his scapular sodden with his own blood. Sim grimaced and looked round at the fire and shadows and shrieking. Like Hell he thought, as painted on the wall of any church he had ever been in.
‘Priests yet,’ Hal said and left the rest unsaid. Boys and priests, a fine start to resistance and made no better by the sight of Bruce, sitting on his arch-necked, prancing warhorse in the kitchen gardens, scattering herbs and beets while waving a sword, his jupon glowing in the light so that the chevron on it looked as if the dark had slashed it. Christ’s Bones, he thought savagely – I will quit this madness, first chance I have . . .
‘Look,’ Sim said suddenly. ‘It’s yon Kirkpatrick.’
Hal saw the man, sliding off the back of a good horse and throwing the reins to Bruce, an act which was singular in itself – an earl holding the mount of his servant? Hal and Sim looked at each other, then Sim followed after, into the splintering of wood and breaking glass that was now the priory. With only the slightest of uneasy pauses, Hal padded after him.
They turned warily, swords out and gleaming; a shape lurched past, arms full of brasswork, saw them and turned away so hastily that a bowl dropped and clanged on the flagstones. Somewhere, there was singing and Hal realised they had lost Kirkpatrick in the shadows.
They moved towards the sound, found the door, opened it as cautious as mice from holes and felt the shadowed shift of bodies as the monks inside saw their two meagre candles waver in the sudden breeze from the open door. Someone whimpered.
‘A happy death is one of the greatest and the last blessings of God in this life,’ said a sonorous voice and Hal saw the black-robed Prior step into the light of one candle, his arms raised as if in surrender, his face turned to the rafter shadows.
‘We dedicate this Vigil to St Joseph, the Foster Father of our Judge and Saviour. His power is dreaded by the Devil. His death is the most singularly privileged and happiest death ever recorded as he died in the Presence and care of Jesus and the Blessed Mary. St Joseph will obtain for us that same privilege at our passage from this life to eternity.’
‘There is cheery,’ Sim muttered and someone came up close behind Hal and stuck his face over one shoulder, so that Hal saw the sweat-grease painted on it and smelled the man’s onion breath. A cattle-lifting hoor’s byblow, Hal thought viciously.
‘Here is the English and riches, then,’ the man spat out of the thicket of his beard and turned to call out to others.
Sim’s sword hilt smashed the words to silence, broke nose bones and sent the man to the flagstones as if he was a slaughtered ox.
‘May St Bega of Kilbucho have mercy on me,’ Sim declared, waving a cross-sign piously over the stunned man as he snored through the blood. Hal closed the door on the refuge of slow-chanting monks and looked at the felled cateran; he was sure his friends would come sooner rather than later and they had given the clerics a respite only.
‘Kirkpatrick,’ he said, shoving the fate of the monks to one side. Sim nodded. They went on.
‘Who is St Bega and where the bliddy hell is Kilbucho?’ demanded Hal as they crept along into the great, dark hall of the place, where only the shift of air allowed the impression of a lofty ceiling. Sim grinned.
‘Up near Biggar,’ Sim said mildly, peering left and right as they moved. ‘Very big on St Bee there, they are. I thought we could do with her charms here, for her only miracle.’
‘Oh aye? Good, was it?’
‘If ye had seen it,’ Sim said in a hissed whisper that did not move his