Herdmanston fell, Hal was sure — as sure as he was that the only part of himself that would be paraded would be his head.
Hal followed Sim’s wet-black backside to the hatchway and down the steep stairwell to his own bedroom, stood there for a moment, dripping rain and staring at the shuttered folly of a window with its niched stone seats.
Out there somewhere, Buchan would be waiting, impatient as a wet cat to see his gloating revenge on his wife’s lover. Malenfaunt brooded vengeance on all things Bruce, but Dunbar and the rest were here in a flush of righteous wrath for the killing of Badenoch — and that was yet another reason Hal would never make it from this place alive if it fell.
A shape shifted, dragging him back to the present, where the Dog Boy sat with a bow in one hand, peering out between the shutters to make sure no-one was thinking of scaling up to this great weakness in the wall. He turned and grinned, his face dark with new beard, his forearms muscled from working with the big deerhounds.
‘Aye til the fore, my lord,’ he said and Sim grunted acknowledgement of still being alive over his shoulder as he clattered down the stairs to the hall.
Hal paused a moment and forced a grin in return; the Dog Boy, as dark and saturnine as the day he had come from Douglas when he was twelve, still reminded Hal of the son who lay dead under the stone cross nearby, together with his wife and his father.
A stone cross, he recalled bitterly, about forty paces from the bloody springald, the graves trampled and spoiled by the boots of the ingeniator and his minions, who stored their gear in the stone chapel.
Down in the dim of the Big Hall Alehouse Maggie and a handful of mothers — a Jane here and a Bess and a Muriel there, all from nearby cottar huts — cluttered round the meagre fire in the large hearth, singing quiet songs to calm the fretting weans. Isabel was at a nearby truckle bed, checking on the occupant and turned as Hal clacked across the sparsely-rushed flagstones.
‘No worse,’ she declared and then bent and sniffed. ‘Still smells like a privy hole, mark you.’
The figure on the bed chuckled weakly and Hal stepped to where he could see him, dark hair wild and ruffled, lopsided face pale as poor hope and a stain still leaking into the clean wrappings Isabel had only just bound him with.
‘After three days,’ said Ill-Made weakly, ‘twa things stink — fish and an unwanted guest.’
Hal said nothing. Ill-Made had been hit three days ago by a crossbow bolt, a half-spent ricochet, the shaft shattered and the head ragged, which was why he had not died at once. Digging it out of his armpit had cost him more blood than he could afford, all the same and Hal knew, with sick certainty, that he would go to join the four others who had died in the seven days of siege.
There were at least a dozen less of the besieging hundreds who surrounded the tower, most of them casualties of the first day, storming up the stair to where the six foot gap had to be spanned to a lip at the foot of the oak door.
Splintering that door with axe and fire had cost them most of the dozen and others were picked off by Sim and Dog Boy from the roof, until the springald had appeared and the besiegers had drawn back.
It had taken most of a day to assemble the confection of sticks and metal — but after that it had started plunking great, long, fat-headed bolts at the ruined doorway entrance, hoping to smash the grilled yett beyond. Scabbed stonework showed they had not hit it yet, but the tireless whirr and bang of it, the creakingly painful reloading, grated on everyone.
Isobel came up to him, hair tendrilling out from under her headcover, her fingers bloody from ministering to Ill-Made; the springald bolt cracked again, though it was only the noise that jangled everyone for the walls of Herdmanston, at this level, were thick enough for rooms to have been scabbed out of the inside and still leave a forearm’s length of solidity.
‘What will they do now?’ she asked in French, so that his answer would not be understood by Maggie and the others and he could speak freely.
Hal thought of it. The tower was the height of ten tall men and stood on a mound that not only gave it more height but pushed out the approach of any siege tower to where a ramp could not cross from it to the top of Herdmanston, even if one could be built that tall.
There was nowhere for a ladder less than such a height to reach, and no hook-ended ropes could be flung up that far. The garth was plundered and every hut burned — though that usually only meant the thatched roof, for the wattle and daub simply hardened and the few entire stone buildings were left blackened and roofless.
The Herdmanston cellar had beef and barley and oats enough and, providing it kept raining, the stone butts in the undercroft would keep enough water in them. Still, there was only a handful of fighting men in Herdmanston and too many women and weans for a lengthy siege, so sensible enemies, Hal thought, would sit and wait.
Buchan, he knew, was not sensible. None of them out there were, too twisted with their own desires to consider sitting and waiting. So they would assault and the only way was under the arch where the oak door had been and then the iron yett. That was where they would come and only after they had destroyed the yett.
‘At which point they will offer terms,’ Hal told her with a wry smile, ‘it being a breach and honour requiring it. Young Patrick will so insist, being a right wee Arthur for the chivalry.’
She nodded, then stared at him with eyes velvet and liquid as blue pools.
‘I should go,’ she began weakly and he placed a finger on her lips.
‘You will not, lamb,’ he said. ‘The terms are only for the nicety in it and to put a polite face on it for Dunbar. There is no good outcome from our failure to hold here — whatever peace is offered will not be offered to me, nor you.’
She looked round at the bairns, now being shushed by Annie and herded cautiously to the steps winding to the undercroft, where it was safer but dark and dank even with torches, which they could ill afford.
‘The bairns,’ she said with a pleading crack in her voice that Hal had to steel himself against.
‘The children and women might be offered leave,’ he answered, ‘but they would have to scamper far and wide, with nothing to their backs or bellies or over their heads, to be safe from soldiery like this.’
He scrubbed his head and she saw the weary lines of him.
‘Besides,’ he went on, waving a hand at the covered Stone, innocuous as a nun’s shift, ‘there is that. Not only will Buchan have it, to display against Bruce’s kingship, he will have you to show likewise. Is that what you want?’
‘I would die first.’
He felt the tremble in her as he took her, let her lay her head on his breast; he smelled of sweat and leather and woodsmoke, but there was strength in him that she sucked at greedily. Like a lamb at the teat, she thought with a soft smile. It faded when she thought of what would happen.
They would die here.
The sudden explosion of noise, as if someone had flung an entire tin cauldron down a flight steps, flung them apart. Bairns shrieked and there were frantic shouts — cursing, Sim and Hal sprang for the stairwell that led below, to the Yett Hall.
Men milled, armed and ready but Hal saw that no enemy had burst in on them. But the yett was open and flapping like an iron bird wing, part of it bent and twisted; in one corner was a bloody smear on the wall and, at the foot of it, a rag-bundle that slowly leaked darkly into a puddle.
‘Wull the Yett,’ Sim informed no-one in particular, scowling darkly as if Wull had committed some crime.
Hal felt the cold stone of it sink in him. Auld Wull the Yett had been gatekeeper since his father’s time, a recalcitrant, shuffling old misery, never done complaining. Until now, Hal corrected.
It was not hard to work out that the springald had scored a hit, spearing a fat iron-headed shaft in through the ruined doorway and striking the yett somewhere above the lock, where the iron grill had bent but not broken.
The springald shaft had shattered, though, sharding into a lethal spray of wood and metal in whose path had been Wull the Yett, lopsided pot helm on his head, raddled hand clutching a filthy, notched sword whose hilt rattled when he shook it defiantly. The blast of metal and wood had torn him to bloody pats and burst the lock on the yett.
‘Fetch hammers,’ Hal ordered, seeing the ruin of it. ‘And Leckie the Faber,’ he added as men sprang to obey.
