‘Whit why do ye serve the Earl?’
The answering smile was bland, with some puzzle quirking the edge of it.
‘Same as yersel’,’ he replied and saw Hal’s laconic lip-curl, faint in the growing dim.
‘Ill luck and circumstance then.’
‘Circumstance, certes,’ Kirkpatrick answered, the slow, considered words of it forged in a steel that did not pass Hal by. ‘Ill luck? Hardly that for you, my lord. What have ye suffered?’
A lost wife and son to ague. A light of love to politics. A keep to fire and pillage, done by those he counted kin and friends.
‘There is more,’ he finished sarcastically and Kirkpatrick stirred a little, then poked the fire so that flames rose and embers flared away and died like little ruby hopes.
‘Your wife and boy are a decade gone,’ he replied sudden as a slap. ‘Others have suffered loss o’ dear yins, from ague, plague an’ worse. Your light o’ love is someone else’s and you have been apart from her for five years at least, so the brooding is of your own making. Your wee keep was slighted a bit — it is lacking the timber floors and is blackened, but the folk still huddle around it, you still collect rents an’ your kin in Roslin manage it and oversee the repairs. Yourself provides the siller, from the rents, the money the Earl pays you as retinue… and what you can skim.’
He stopped and turned his firelit blade of a face, challenging and grim, towards Hal.
‘Where is the suffering in this?’
‘You think you are worse?’ Hal bridled and Kirkpatrick sighed.
‘Ye have a dubbin’ as knight, the arms to prove it and lands,’ he answered, the wormwood of his voice a thickened gruel of bitterness, his face shrouded. ‘Yer da, blessed wee man that he was, had no learnin’ beyond weaponry and a wee bit tallying — but he made sure ye could read and write like a canting priest and provided other learning betimes.’
‘I am a Kirkpatrick o’ Closeburn, kin to the Bruces — my namesake holds the place from the Annandale Bruces, yet he has been more seen in the company o’ those who are King Edward’s men through an’ through. My namesake is the lord, and I am the poor relation, who has no way with letters or writin’, for who would bother hiring a wee dominie to teach the likes o’ me that?’
Hal shifted uncomfortably, remembering his own teacher and how he had fretted against him; here was a man who was bitter that he never had the same.
‘I speak the French, mind you,’ he went on — breaking into that tongue and speaking as much to the fire and his own thoughts as to Hal. ‘And some of the Gaelic learned from the Bruce. And a little Latin, for the responses. And the lingua franca yon little toad Lamprecht uses, learned while in France and… elsewhere.’
He stopped, paused, then continued in French, as if to prove his point.
‘I have never been touched by sword on shoulder, nor handed a set of gilded spurs. I can bear the arms of Closeburn, but so tainted with lowly markings for my station that it is less shameful to bear none at all. I can use the weapons of a knight, but I have never sat a warhorse in my life, nor expect it.’
He broke off, bringing his stare back to fall on Hal’s face. He shook off the French, like a dog coming from a stream.
‘Yet the Bruce esteems me for the talents I have, which are considerable. I ken the hearts o’ men and women both, ken when they lie and when they plot. I ken how to use a sword, my wee lord o’ Herdmanston, but I ken best how to wield a dirk in the night.’
There was a chill after this that the flames could not dispel. Hal cleared his throat.
‘You expect advantage from all this, from the Earl when he is king?’
‘Weesht on that,’ Kirkpatrick answered softly, then sighed.
‘I did so,’ he added flatly. ‘Now I see that what an earl wants an’ what a king requires are differing things.’
He was silent for a little while, leaving the fire to speak in pops and spits. Then he stirred.
‘When I was barely toddlin’,’ he said, ‘I got into the habit of makin’ watter wherever I stood.’
He broke off at Hal’s chuckle, his scowl softening, then vanishing entirely into a smile of his own.
‘Aye, a rare vision, I daresay, but I was a bairn, for all that. My ma warned me never to piss in her herb garden, which were vegetables and did not benefit from such a waterin’. Being an obedient boy, I never did so, preferring to keep it in until I could spray the chickens, which was better fun entire. Until the day the rooster turned and pecked me on the pizzle.’
Hal’s laugh was a sharp bark, quickly cut off lest he offend. Kirkpatrick’s chuckle was reassuring.
‘Jist so. A painful experience and it was so for a time. Peelin’ scab and stickiness was the least o’ it — but my mither soothed me with ministrations and good advice she thought a boy like me might remember. Chickens is vegetables, she says to me.’
He stirred the fire again so that sparks flew.
‘Since then,’ he added, ‘I have been aware that nothin’ is as it appears.’
‘Nothin’ is, certes,’ Hal agreed morosely. ‘I fought at the brig o’ Stirlin’ and at Callendar woods with Wallace — yet these last months I have been fighting against the same men whose shoulders I once rubbed.’
‘So?’
The challenge made Hal bristle.
‘So it is no way for a future king of Scots to behave, cleaving his own folk. They will not care for it, I am thinking.’
Kirkpatrick waved one hand, which had the added effect of scattering the midges.
‘Sma’ folk,’ he growled and jerked his shadowed head at where Sim and Dog Boy sat, shadows against the last of the bloodstained sky. ‘D’ye think they care who rules them? As long as they have their livelihood, the De’il could wear the crown. It is the nobiles of this kingdom Bruce will have to worry ower.’
Hal thought about it. He had seen the sma’ folk, barefoot, shit-legged, trembling, yet determinedly hanging on to their long spears and immovable from the shoulders of the men next to them. Not noble, some not even landed, unable in many cases to understand the very speech of the man next to them and with the men from north and south of The Mounth suspicious of one another, they came together for one reason. They had cared enough to be angered.
Though it had been slow and long in the growing, a realization was sprouting in Hal that there was a kingdom here that the commonality marked enough to defend — more to the point, it was one where the bare-footed shitlegs considered they had as much say in who ruled them as any earl. He said as much to Kirkpatrick.
‘Mayhap,’ Kirkpatrick growled at this, trying to shrug the matter off and failing, for he was no longer as sure as he once had been.
Chickens is vegetables, he thought.
CHAPTER THREE
Balmullo, Fife
The same night
They brought him in the dark on a litter, a milling crowd of riders and footmen strangely silent save for a grunt here, a hissed warning there. They hefted the litter up the steep stairs and across the span of wooden walkway to the door of the stout stone house.
There were lights from torches that let the curious, peeping from the wattle buildings clustered around Balmullo, see who it was who had arrived, but not who they carried in. The Earl of Buchan, visiting his wife, they saw; one or two of the women, swaddled in shawls, added ‘puir sowl’ to that, for it was hard enough for the Countess of Buchan to have to endure the presence of the Earl’s creature as her gaoler without The Man Himself descending on her for his rights.
The creature met the litter at the door, spider-black and hair-thin with a face somehow twisted out of true. The nose, speckled with the fade of old pox-marks, was bent and twisted and there was a permanent stain, like a birthmark or blood bruise, on one cheek where he had once been hit with an iron skillet. There was a chin on the
