The other side of that spun coin, he thought to himself in the sweating, belly-clenching moments before the English knights closed on them, was that being tumbled off would rip the heart out of them.
He thought of that in the eyeblink before the charging figure came down on him, featureless in his bucket helm, waving a battleaxe and trying to rein in the over-eager warhorse. Bruce danced to one side, slashed out with his sword and spun the palfrey as the warhorse went plunging mad, half its tail sheared off and all of its rump bloody and fired with agony; the knight sailed off and hit the ground with a clatter. The German Method…
Bruce had little time to exult and none at all to see if the knight got up, for others were on him and his own mesnie closed in protectively. He realized at once that this was no battle and was lost whatever you called it — there was only a melee now and Bruce was master of that.
He ducked a swinging blade, banged the man out of the saddle with his shield, cut right, cut left, took a blow that made him grunt and hope his maille was good and the sword blunt. A man plunged out, on foot, to grab the bridle of his horse, helmetless and roaring with triumph that he had taken the King.
Bruce slashed down and the man shrieked and fell away, while the rouncey threw up its head and panicked at the grisly ornament of hand and wrist that dangled, clenched and bloody in the bridle. Bruce lost a foot from one stirrup and sat deep while the rouncey plunged itself to a trembling halt.
The knight who had first attacked suddenly lurched from the other side, having thrown away his bucket helm and dragged out a sword. He was bleeding from a broken nose and snoring in desperate breaths, but he reached out a free hand and tried to grab Bruce by his leg, missed and grasped the free stirrup.
‘He is mine,’ he bellowed in a spray of blood. ‘Yield yerself sirra — aaaaah.’
His triumph ended in a shriek when Bruce rammed his booted foot back in the stirrup, grinding fingers into the metal and trapping the hand; when he spun the rouncey the knight was dragged off his feet and whirled sideways, screaming, until he bowled into a knuckle of men, scattering them and tearing his fingers free.
Then a blow seemed to stave in the whole side of Bruce’s face, a crash as if the world had fallen on him and he reeled at the edge of consciousness, hanging on to the palfrey by some last reserve of tourney skill.
‘I have him,’ yelled a voice. ‘I have him.’
He saw a silver lion on a red shield and thought it might be Mowbray — but he was dimly aware that everything was red on the left side, felt the sudden strange coldness there. God help me, he thought wildly, I am blinded…
He felt himself dragged off the horse, saw hands frantic to grasp him — then there was a roaring sound which he thought was his own blood in his ears and he lay, staring blindly up at the red-misted sky, watching the flurry of legs. Mailled, hooved, booted, they stamped and circled — there was a rushing crash and someone fell full length, so that when Bruce turned — oh, so laborious and slow — he saw the twisted agony that was Mowbray falling from a vicious blow, blood washing down over unfocused eyes.
Hands gripped him, hauled him up.
‘Into the saddle, Your Grace,’ said an urgent voice and Bruce felt himself hefted up, found a reflex that cocked a leg and dropped him into the cantled security of a fresh horse. He looked dazedly down through the blood, saw the black figure of Simon Frazier grinning back at him.
‘Seton — tak’ the King to safety. He is sore hurt.’
Sore hurt. Bruce did not want to know how sore his hurt was; he could feel it like a great numbing on the side of his face and was sure he had lost it, eye, cheek and all.
Lost. All was lost on this Malachy-cursed day…
Methven
Late evening, the same day
The priests droned like flies in the growing dim and de Valence thought of the abbot, somewhere back in Perth, carefully out of the way of matters, so he could not see what sins were being done here under the dragon banner.
There were a lot of sins, de Valence knew, as many as there were flies, and the flattened fields of rye and barley around Methven were as good as a pewter plate smeared with meat juice to them. Flies and shadows flitted in the dark, both of them stripping the corpses.
De Valence sat on his warhorse, surrounded by grim-iron men and sweating in the heavy drape of his heraldry, wishing the last dregs of this mummery were done with and he could climb off the beast and out of the war gear.
It was as well he had won here, he thought, otherwise he would have to face the wrath of Longshanks for failing to capture Bruce — or anyone else who mattered — and losing Badenoch’s murderer en route to Berwick.
The bitter sauce of it all was having to sit here and smilingly acknowledge and reward all the galloping fools who came up clutching a pennon, or hauling in some luckless lordling of no account until it became dark enough to admit that the battle was over.
Sourly, he watched the lone figure come up on foot, the torch he held bobbing as he strode in a curious, long-limbed way. He knew the walk, though the face of the Welshman, Addaf, was made no easier on the eye in the dancing shadows from the torch. Christ’s Bones, he thought, now even the contract captains are behaving like chivalry.
‘Your Grace,’ the man said, offering as little a head nod as he thought he could get away with and de Valence smiled wryly to himself. The Welshman was still of use, him and his mountain dwarves, even if he used the ‘Your Grace’ like a spit in the eye, so de Valence gave the man his due.
‘Mydr ap Mydvydd,’ he said, the title given by admiring Welsh archers to someone they trusted to lead them.
‘Found this, Your Grace,’ Addaf said in his sing-song English and handed the object up. De Valence examined the bascinet and Robert Tuke leaned over, squinting for a better look, then gave a short bark of laughter at the sight of the battered helmet with its twisted circlet of gold, only half of it still remaining.
‘We have his usurper’s crown,’ he crowed over his shoulder to the others. ‘Soon we’ll have his head to match it.’
The laughter rolled out into the night, over the scatter of darkened corpses and the wounded, desperate for relief, yet trying not to groan because it would bring the throat-cutting scavengers.
De Valence looked at the ruin of the helmet and did not need to wonder where the missing half of the crown was, though he would not pursue Addaf on the matter. More to the point was the damage done to it, a hard sword blow.
A man who had worn that had taken a harsh face cut, he thought. It will be a ruined head when we eventually find it.
Bruce woke from a nightmare where his loving daughter’s kisses had turned to sucking wolf bites, ripping his skin, grinding into the bones. He woke to pain and mad, flickering torchlight, a sickening tugging and pulling on the left side of his face, which he tried to dash away with one hand.
‘Hold him,’ growled a voice.
‘Howk the torch higher, yer honour,’ said a woman. ‘Else I will sew up his bloody neb.’
Get off me, Bruce said. Get away — I am the King…
He was appalled at his own weakness and heard only gug-gug sounds coming from his mouth; a face swam into view, big and sheened with sweat with a grin like a sickle moon. The light danced mad, lurid shadows of blood on it, but he knew it all the same. Edward, he thought. Brother Edward. He said it, feeling his mouth strange on one side, almost sick with the relief of hearing something approaching sense from himself.
‘Swef, Rob,’ said Edward. ‘Ye ken me — that’s good. At least yer wits are still in yer head, though it’s a miracle — God’s Holy Arse, wummin, do not pull his face to bits.’
‘A wee bit bone — it fell oot,’ Bruce heard the woman answer, indignantly shrill. Dear God, he thought, what has been done to me? What is being done to me?
There was sharp pain, one fierce sliver after another and he tried to cry out but could only make incoherent sounds, tried to thrash the pain away then found he was gripped by strong hands. Eventually, his face seamed with fire, the hands relaxed.
‘Done, yer honour,’ the woman’s voice said and he saw her briefly in the torchlight, sallow skinned, a tangle of hair which she brushed back from her face with bloodied hands; there was a needle held in the thin clench of her lips. Edward loomed into view again, peering.
