Tailed dogs, he heard, like the Devil whispering.
Jamie Douglas took the staff from the hand of the King and raised it high, so that it caught the morning sun and the welcome breeze blowing out of the wood. Freshly, ritually, shorn of its pennant streamers into the square of a banner proper, the flag rippled with the arms of Douglas and, even if there had been no breeze at all, the roar of thousands of voices would have been breath enough.
Bareheaded, Jamie vaulted into the saddle of his little rouncey, while Bruce watched and envied the man his youth and his moment. There was no other way for a knight to be created banneret, a step only slightly lower than an earl, than to have it done on the field of battle by the sovereign himself. Such moments were hen’s teeth, but part of the ritual of committing to battle and important, Bruce knew, because it let the army see the King raise folk to greatness in the panoply of the court; you did not do that if you worried about losing.
Now he saluted the darling of the host: the dreaded Black Douglas if you were on the opposing side, the Good Sir James if he stood with you. The great stained horde roared their pleasure, for all that half of them were shivering with fear and fevers. Bare-legged and bare-arsed because disease poured their insides down their thighs, they still flung their arms in the air and cheered back at him – and the King they were prepared to die for.
A Douglas, Jamie yelled, and they screamed it back at him. Tailed dogs, he bellowed with delight, riding the length of them with his banner in one fist and flung into the air – and they howled that back at him, too.
Tailed dogs, popularly believed as God’s just punishment on the English for their part in the murder of St Thomas Becket: the Scots taunt never failed to arouse their enemy to red-necked rage and Bruce, cantering on in the wake of Jamie Douglas, nodded and smiled even as he felt his ruined skin tighten at that coming anger.
The mummery was almost done and everyone saw the final act of it: Maurice, Abbot of Inchaffray, stumbled unsteadily across the tussocks with his coterie of priests, bearing the Mayne, St Fillan’s own arm bone in a silver reliquary; one cassocked boy trembled so much that his swinging censer almost brained the brindle-haired abbot and the prelate had to duck. Those nearest laughed, brittle and harsh, as the abbot raised his long-staffed crozier – the Coygerach, holy icon of St Fillan Himself, no less – as if to strike the boy, then thought better of it and passed along the line.
They knelt, the thousands crammed into three large blocks of bristling nails, Edward Bruce and Randolph, Douglas and de la Haye and the Bruce himself, while the vintenars and centenars took the opportunity, as the old abbot moved down the line blessing them with sonorous mumbles, to dress the ranks for the last time.
Dog Boy wondered if that bone inside the reliquary really was the famed left arm of St Fillan, said to glow in the dark so the wee holy man could read the Scriptures at night. Bigod, he would like to see that marvel one time! He crossed himself for the impiety of the thought.
When the priests had gone, this great forest of spikes would rise up and roll down on their enemy and, if the priests had done their job true, then God would hand them victory in the name of St Fillan.
Patron saint of the mad.
Thweng arrived into the jingling splendour that surrounded the King in time to have Badenoch thrust his beaming face forward, a manic grin fixed on it. Behind him, equally toothy, was another sprig of the seemingly endless forest of Comyns – Edmund, Thweng recalled suddenly. From Kylbryde.
‘My lord,’ Badenoch called out, ‘splendid news.’
Thweng eyed the Scot sourly; what the man considered ‘splendid news’ boded ill, he was sure. The next words confirmed it.
‘I have permission for the Knights of the Shadow to join the Van.’
Every fool was petitioning to join the Van, Thweng thought, because the Van was where the first glory and best of the ransom plunder was to be had. It was also the most dangerous place to be and sucked far too many into it, making it huge and impossible to order as well as impoverishing the other Battles.
And he has dragged me into it. The thought made Thweng’s scowl so venomous that Badenoch’s eyebrows went up in the coif-framed face.
Gloucester’s arrival broke apart any twisting tension and all heads turned to him. The King, splendid in his blood-crimson royal surcote with the three golden lions leopardes, sat tall in the saddle of an ice-white horse and knew exactly how he looked. Surrounded by the royal standards and the sinister, jewel-eyed, flickering-tongued Dragon Banner, he stared haughtily at Gloucester, who did not wear his spendidly blazoned surcote.
‘You are ill-dressed and late, my lord earl.’
Gloucester, his coif hooded down his back, flushed to the roots of his unruly hair.