De Valence did not like Bellejambe, the spy of the Earl of Buchan — but the Comyn earl was now England’s friend and so had to be appeased and his creatures treated with some courtesy.
De Valence had drawn the line at Malenfaunt, all the same, a knight who had foresworn himself before God in a tourney a l’outrance with Bruce himself. Well beaten, he had been thrown out of all respectable company, tongue-split in a just and fitting punishment. De Valence, who thought Malenfaunt should have been properly killed in the duel, did the foresworn knight the courtesy of treating him as if he were actually dead; he would not permit Malenfaunt anywhere near him.
The twist in that was that he had to accept this Bellejambe instead, though he did his best to ignore the man where possible. Like now, as he turned his back on Malise and looked at the muddied, dark apparition held firmly by two of his armoured serjeants. Swarthy, a secretive, sly-looking scum, he thought to himself. Just the sort to be up to no good.
‘You were with these Templars?’ De Valence demanded and Kirkpatrick saw Jehan being hauled upright and away, his toes furrowing the mud; senseless, but alive, he thought to himself. There’s a blessing at least.
‘Peaceful travellers,’ he began in French, which was designed to show his breeding but was brought up short when Malise snorted with derision, leaning forward with all the vengeance of the past welling like pus from his twisted soul.
‘Liar,’ he said and de Valence turned, his handsome face puckered in a frown of censure, for it was clear Kirkpatrick was something well-bred, if not a knight, and demanded some deference of rank. Malise wrenched all that from Kirkpatrick with his sneering hiss.
‘This is the red murderer of the Lord of Badenoch.’
Near Cupar Castle, Fife
Next day — the English Feast of St Margaret of Scotland, June, 1306
The monk’s face was inflamed, even over the wind-chilled redness that had chapped his cheeks and his dark olive eyes were brilliant with outrage. De Valence sighed and shifted in the saddle; his buttocks ached and the damp that was not quite rain, not quite mist seeped straight through the layers of leather and linen, maille and padding to gnaw his very bones.
He wanted a fire and hot food and something warm and spiced. He did not want an outraged Italian abbot.
‘In God’s holy name,’ this annoyance persisted stubbornly. ‘You must put a stop to this. It is against Heaven.’
Aymer de Valence agreed. He was also aware that this figure, trembling more with outrage and cold in his white wool swaddling, was Abbot Alberto of Milan, sent from York to ensure that the holy presences of Bishops Lamberton and Wishart were not harmed by their rebellion.
Before that, the shivering, sallow little priest had been sent from Rome to investigate the increasingly disturbing reports of outrage among the Templar knights in England — and the wilds of war-ravaged Scotland. He was finding more than he had expected, de Valence noted grimly, on that matter.
What outraged the good abbot was a murmur among the rain-darkened trees, trunks and twisted branches so black it seemed they had absorbed their own shadows. It was, in truth, a stark, eldritch horror which, under other circumstances, de Valence would have ridden down, shouting for God’s help and swinging a cleansing blade.
Not now, all the same. Now the dragon had been raised and the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ were caught in the vice of it — Aymer thought that was rather good. The vice of it; he had little sympathy nowadays with the Templars, whose arrogance and faked poverty had been annoying and whose blasphemies, if reports were to be believed, were vile — did his own men not say, grinning and nudging each other, that they were ‘going to the Temple’ each time they visited a brothel?
Still, what was being done was not exactly chivalrous, but that was the nature of matters when the dragon was raised by an angry king — it would breathe its fire on all, even an Order Knight who had contrived to entangle himself in a war he should have avoided.
Breathing fire was what the dragon was doing, if the Welsh could ever stir it to life. De Valence needed those dark, vengeful half-pagan little Welsh dwarves happy and, most of all, not focusing any resentment on himself. If that meant turning them loose to do what they pleased on a hated enemy, so be it.
Yet the abbot wore a ring on one finger which had the biscione engraved on it, a marvellous depiction of a coiled serpent seemingly eating a man but, in actual fact, giving birth to him — de Valence was sorely tempted to point out the heathen origins of that symbol.
He did not, for the symbol was the coat-of-arms of the Viscontis of Milan, one of the most powerful families in Lombardy and the conduit to papal sanction. Alberto may have been the least scion of it, but he was still a member and he had a slew of Inquisition priests at his back, the sinister black Hounds of God, the Dominicans.
‘My dear Abbot Alberto,’ he said through a smile like a sewer grating, ‘you must see that I cannot put a stop to it. This Templar has put himself beyond the pale and contrived to slay some of the Welsh in his attempts to evade capture. I have influence, no more — and it seems that my influence does not stretch to interfering with their… singular observances.’
‘Singular,’ shrilled the abbot, lifting the word out of himself so that de Valence fancied he saw the monk step out of his own shoes. ‘Observances.’
The little Italian opened and closed his mouth, the words so crowding his mouth, like gulls falling on abandoned fish, that he could not get a single one out. Taking advantage, Aymer waved one metal-gloved hand.
‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘These are Welsh, from the distant mountains of my lord’s kingdom and only recently gathered unto God’s blessing, for all that priests like yourself have waved censors and crosses and prayers over their peaks and forests for centuries. It is hardly surprising that they have… odd practices.’
‘Odd!’
It was a shriek now, so loud that it brought the heads of the Welsh round and de Valence closed his eyes and hoped they would not be offended. He felt the wolf stare of the one called Addaf fall on him and offered a prayer; if that one started in to be outraged, there would be a blood-bath and, though he had no doubt he and his handful of knights would kill them, it would certainly mean an end to the service of all his Welsh. The smoke of the badly- burning fire cloaked over them like a vile benediction.
Mark you, Aymer said to himself, ‘odd’ was perhaps the wrong choice of words for what was happening in the clearing a little way away.
In it was a piled heap of damp faggots that the Welsh were trying to fan into life. In the centre of it, staked fore and aft, was a mercifully dead horse — a fine destrier, Aymer noted wistfully, that had deserved a better fate than to be throat-slit and then staked upright, as if still alive. And one, he added viciously to himself, that a supposed Poor Knight should never have been riding.
The Poor Knight was riding it still, lashed to the dead animal in his armour, bucket helmet on, broken arms fitted with shield and a lance bound to his shattered fingers. Fully armed and mailled, the Templar sat the horse, his mouth gagged under the helmet, still alive and waiting to burn.
If the Welsh could ever get the fire lit.
A stocky, cadaverous man wearing a studded jack and a green hood shouted instructions and the Welsh obeyed Addaf, fetching more wood, more lit torches, fanning the flames while the pyre sputtered and smoked; the edifice rocked a little as the desperate knight struggled.
The Welshman and the abbot from Rome had bristled and scowled at each other when they had met, one making warding signs as well as the cross with string-calloused fingers, the other crossing himself and offering a clasp-handed prayer. Like barely leashed mastiffs, de Valence thought wearily; my money is still on Addaf, the Welsh archer they called Mydr ap Mydvydd — Aim the Aimer.
‘Madness,’ Abbot Alberto spat. ‘This is madness. The Pope shall hear of it.’
‘The Pope shall hear of the mischief of the Order,’ de Valence retorted, irritated now. ‘Besides — if you find the evidence you seek, what will become of those Templars Holy Mother Church finds guilty?’
There was silence, no-one wanting to admit, of course, that they would burn, no differently from what the Welsh were doing now.
