‘There.’
Hal saw the shaped stone arc downwards, scurf up a huge wad of mud and bounce harmlessly almost to the foot of the hurdles; a protesting smoke of crows rose up off their old feasts.
‘They are trying lighter stones out of the fortress,’ Sim muttered. ‘You will note what is absent on our side of the siege.’
Engines. Not a trebuchet nor a mangonel – not so much as a springald. No towers or rams. Nothing.
Jamie Douglas inclined his head in a curt, mocking bow to Randolph.
‘You have sat here since last winter, my lord earl,’ he noted with mock sadness. ‘Shame there does not seem to be a balk of timber that can be laid one on the other, or any trickery to supplant it. Still, I have it that you will persevere, certes, though it is my fervent hope that your lordship manages it before a big stone rolls over your curly pow. It is no good look for an earl, that. God be praised, my lord.’
He went off, laughing and chattering either side to the adoring, trailing everyone after him and leaving the thundercloud of Randolph in his wake. They quit the dripping sour of the camp, cavalcading down from under the black rock along the sullen mile of cramped houses and wynds that led to the peace and dry of Holyrood Abbey, where the King demanded to see the darling captor of Roxburgh.
The way of matters, Sim explained on the way, is not as it was. Randolph and Douglas and the last brother, Edward Bruce, were mighty captains, seasoned in the wars with the Buchan and Comyn which had finally exterminated all Bruce’s enemies.
‘A sore slaughter that,’ Sim declared, grimed with the memory of it and shaking his head in sorrow. ‘The Comyn are harrowed and ploughed under; the Earl of Buchan himself fled south and turned his face to the wall years since, poor auld man that he was – killed of a broken heart, they say.’
He looked sideways at Hal, but saw only a blank stone stare back at him, though Hal had his own thoughts on the poor auld man who had died of a broken heart. If the Earl of Buchan ever had one, Hal wanted to say, you could not have smashed it with hammer and anvil – but he did not have to voice it and was aware that Sim was still able to read him even after seven years.
Buchan, Isabel’s husband and the nemesis of their loving for a decade and more, was gone like smoke. As if he had never been. Hal wondered if Isabel knew. It was as likely that someone would tell her for spite as they would keep her from the comfort of knowing, in marriage at least, she was free at last.
There was more, spilled out from Sim while Jamie Douglas climbed into his finery in order to come formally into the presence of the court. Hal, it seemed, had been forgotten already, though that suited him well enough, as did the corner of canvas and stick that Sim shared as part of the Douglas retinue. Sim, of course, was more outraged than Hal.
‘You are the lord o’ Herdmanston,’ he fumed. ‘Christ betimes, we rescued wee Jamie from the grip of the English when he was a snot-nose, carted him to safety and his da.’
‘Aye. You cuffed his ears if I remembrance it right,’ Hal said with a twist of grin. ‘Has he forgave you yet?’
Sim glowered.
‘He barely had fluff on his balls then, but I should cuff his lug again for this, which is no little insult to a lord of Sientclers. Ignored by the King ye served fine well and stuck in a corner of the Douglas panoply like lumber? It is not proper. And where is your kin of Roslin in this, eh?’
‘That was then, Sim Craw. This is now. Now I am lord of nothing at all, for Herdmanston is still a ruin, you tell me. Roslin’s Sientclers have done enough in keeping the wardship of the place alive at all. Besides, even a corner of this is better and lighter than the stone room I have lived in until recently.’
Sim had no answer to that. He sat with his head bowed, bleared by the memory of the last time he had seen Herdmanston, still black with the seven-year-old stain of fires, the floors fallen in and the weeds sprouting from the rotting-tooth of it. All the Herdmanston folk had gone to Sir Henry Sientcler of Roslin, yet their own field strips were at Herdmanston and too valuable to let lie, so some were back at the plough and the harvest, living in cruck houses under the ruins of the old tower.
‘It would not take much to return it,’ he added after telling Hal this, but then fell silent. None of the old riders remained, the ones who had once followed Hal, sure of that lord’s ability to pluck gold out of a cesspit; they had died at Stirling’s brig and Callendar’s woods and on every herschip since. Those who had survived had long since grown too old for the business after – Christ’s Wounds – fifteen years of fighting.