ye temper your honour and remark on how nice the colour is and how is suits her – even if the plain truth is that it would gag a sow.’
The laughter was loud and long now.
‘Now we ken why ye are named Bangtail,’ Ill Made Jock shouted from the fringes of the fire.
‘A glance at yer face,’ Bangtail countered, swift and vicious, ‘and we are in no doubt why ye are called Ill Made.’
‘Bangtail counts cunny more than honour,’ Sim declared, ‘which everyone kens. This is his excuse for a lie – but it is still an excuse.’
‘Ach, Sim,’ Bangtail said, ‘the world is not as divided, like the border atween this Kingdom and the English, where ye can declare “here we are and there you are and we are different from you”. When it comes to the bit, though, ye cannae tell an English Dodd from a Scots yin, or a Kerr in Hexham from another in Roxburgh.’
‘Ye can always tell a Kerr,’ growled Sim, ‘since all that breed are left-handed.’
Bangtail leaned forward, his sharp, fox face guttering with shadows and light from the flames. Hal saw that Bruce was fascinated, listening intently.
‘Let me spier ye this, Sim Craw,’ Bangtail went on. ‘Is it good to misguide your enemy? To make him think, maybes, that ye are weaker than ye are, so that he makes a bad fist of attacking ye?’
Sim nodded, reluctantly.
‘So it is fine to lie to an enemy,’ Bangtail ended triumphantly and Bruce slapped one hand against the other with delight at Sim’s scowl.
‘By God’s Grace,’ he roared in English, ‘I am truly sorry I never sat with Herdmanston men before this, for the entertainment in it is finer than a tumbler and juggling act.’
‘Aye, weel, so ye say, your lordship,’ Bangtail responded, preening, and Hal could not resist leaping in.
‘Thanks to his lordship, we have learned a deal this night,’ he declared, nodding deferentially to Bruce, who acknowledged it with an elegant, slightly mocking, one of his own.
‘We have learned,’ he went on smoothly, ‘that Bangtail cannot judge which leg of a wummin is finer, the left or the right.’
Hal paused and let the puzzled frown of the man in question squeak on his forehead for a heartbeat.
‘The truth of it for him is somewhere atween, of course,’ he added and there was laughter at that.
‘Abune all, there is the truth about lies,’ Hal went on, warming to matters now and aware that Bruce was watching him closely. Never harms to stamp the mark of who leads Herdmanston, like a firm seal impress in warm wax, Hal thought.
‘As I jalouse the workings of it, from his lordship and Bangtail here,’ he continued, ‘it seems that if a pig- faced friend appears with some pretty ribbons, ye crack their heart with the truth. If a pig-faced enemy appears with some pretty ribbons, ye tell them how wonderfully fine they look – an’ strike from behind as they preen.’
Above all, Sim Craw thought as the laughter roared and circled like the wind round the fires, we have learned that young Bruce is also a man who can win the hearts of hard men of no station – the commonality of the kingdom who, until now, Sim believed to be the province of Wallace alone.
Here was a new thing, to find a man who was a powerful gentilhomme of the kingdom, yet who could share a cup, in companionable friendship, with a boy who did not even own a proper name.
Hexham Priory, Northumberland
Feast of St Donan the Martyr of Eigg, April 1298
Hal came up whooping and streaming water, dashed it from his eyes and dried his face on his serk, the sun warm on his back and a breeze with enough chill in it to remind him that this was the north in April.
He blinked back into the garth at Hexham, to the walls with their unpleasant stone the colour of dried blood, blackened here and there by fires set the year before – even Wallace had not been able to prevent the Galloway men’s looting and arson, though he had hanged a few afterwards.
Hal saw Kirkpatrick staring at him intensely, a needle glare that almost made him recoil. Even when he stared back, the man’s gaze did not shift and Hal grew irritated, both at the rudeness and the lick of fear the man’s eyes smeared on him.
‘If ye bring ribbons an’ some decent wine ye might have a chance,’ he snarled. ‘Though I would not put much store by your supposed charm.’
Kirkpatrick blinked and flushed to the roots of his hair at the implication.
‘Yon bauble,’ he muttered. ‘Round yer neck. Looked mighty fine, that is all. Where did ye come by it?’
Hal glanced down at the ring on the cord round his neck, a little surprised. Still flustered, he scowled back at Kirkpatrick.
‘No doing of yours where this came from,’ he harshed out and Kirkpatrick’s face darkened even further, the eyes narrowing. Hal cursed; his weapons lay three steps away… but a loud burst of shouting snapped the moment away and they both turned.
Fitzwarin, his face thick with flush, came storming out of the priory guesthouse, waving his arms and bellowing incoherently. Behind him came a flustered man-at-arms, making little bleats of protest, and, after that, Bruce himself, frowning darkly.
‘Gone,’ Fitzwarin roared, then strode on before the man-at-arms could reply. Then he stopped, whirling on the man as he trotted up, forcing him to skid to a halt.
‘Gone,’ he repeated and waved his arms wildly. ‘To bloody Berwick. Are you entirely in your mind?’
‘He is on parole, my lord,’ the man-at-arms bleated. ‘I sent two men with him – but if he wants to go to Berwick, there is little I can do save protect his person.’
Fitzwarin gave a final pungent curse and strode away, leaving the man-at-arms floundering in his wake, turning with a pathetic, appealing look to Bruce. The Earl of Carrick merely looked at him, shrugged and walked across to where Kirkpatrick and Hal stood, the latter climbing into his sweat-yellowed serk, aware of a sudden chill breeze.
‘Sir Henry has taken himself to Berwick,’ Bruce explained, his languid delivery belied by the grit of his teeth. ‘Fitzwarin is less than pleased to be kept drumming his fingers here.’
‘Berwick?’ Hal demanded, bewildered. ‘Why for?’
‘A message, lord,’ said the man-at-arms coming up to join them, his face anguished. ‘I tried to tell the Lord Fitzwarin, but he would not listen.’
The man-at-arms was a captain from the braid in his belt and, in the next bobbing and deferential second Hal learned that he was Walter Elton, charged by Norfolk to bring Sir Henry Sientcler of Roslin to Hexham for the exchange.
‘Then he had a message,’ Elton went on. ‘From a pardoner.’
‘Message?’ Hal demanded.
‘Pardoner?’ said Bruce at the same time and the captain’s frantic eyes whipped between the two, then worked out that Bruce was an Earl and Hal of little account.
‘By name Lamprecht,’ he answered. ‘Has a strange way of speaking, as if all tongues were used at once. French and Latin, I heard in it. Some of the Italies, too, by the sound and even words I do not know, though they might be from the Holy Land, which he has visited.’
‘Lingua franca,’ Kirkpatrick mused, ‘which at least proves he has journeyed the lands round the Middle Sea, if nothing else.’
As have you, Hal suddenly saw and added a new dimension to the figure of the Bruce henchman.
‘Oh, he is from the Holy Land,’ enthused Elton. ‘Has the shell to prove it and lots of relics and wondrous objects -here, look, noble sirs.’
He fumbled out a cord from round his neck to reveal a stamped lead medallion, a quatrefoil on one side and a fish on the other.
‘Proof against evil spirits and wandering demons.’
No-one wanted to gainsay it, for demons existed, as everyone knew. Only last year one had been caught in the Tweed, a nasty black, snarling imp tangled in the salmon nets and beaten with sticks by the brave fishermen until it finally burst free and fled, shrieking laughter all the way back to the water. A bishop had written of it, so it must be true.
‘Message?’ Hal repeated and Elton blinked.
‘Aye, sir. Came looking for Sir Henry by name. Said he had a message for him to get to the spital in Berwick.
