Sweating, trembling, Garm stood, the injured leg raised so that only the point of one hoof touched the ground. Cursing, Thweng levered himself out of the saddle, feeling his legs buckle as he hit the hard earth and the full weight of his harness fell on him. Too old, he thought. Too God-cursed old for this. And the Earl of Gloucester was down – taken, he hoped, but recalling the triumphantly waved shield he felt a sick horror at what that might mean.
He was examining Garm’s wound when he felt the sightless open eyes of a dead man staring at him. He turned to the gore-spattered ruin of a face. The arms on the tabard and shield belonged to the Comyn of Kylbryde, but Thweng would not have known the man after what spear and a tearing hook had done to his face.
‘Should not have thrown away his helm.’
The bleak voice spun Thweng round into the grim stare of Badenoch, his own face sheened with sweat and the loss of yet another of his kin. Yet his concern was all for Sir Marmaduke.
‘Are you injured, my lord?’
Thweng shook his head.
‘Need a new mount. I will lead this one off and find my squire.’
He paused, feeling the madness of the moment as he sought to find words of consolation while shrieks and bellows and dying whirled round them; the ground was now a churned red mud.
‘I am sorry for your loss.’
Badenoch nodded, as if he had expected no more. Then he took a breath, as if about to plunge underwater, slid the domed helm over his head and reined back into the fray.
Wearily, trying to avoid the mad, plunging arrivals of the rest of the horse, Thweng led the limping Garm back across the blood-red mud to where the ground firmed and the dust billowed like cloth of gold.
Deep in the clacking forest of spears, surrounded by the grunts and pants and squealed curses, Tam Shaws thought this the worst moment of his life. He had thought this before, from the moment the heidman of Shaws had picked him for the wool path.
It was bewildering then. Tam, who had never been away from Shaws, had travelled down to Coldingham Shore with six others and the staple, that year’s wool from Shaws. That had been a mazed journey, almost a dream to Tam and gilded with the knowledge that fifty pounds of the fleece-wrapped wool on those three pack ponies was his.
He remembered his old life as part of that same dream, now. At the height of that summer he had, with the others of the vill, driven the sheep in fours to the pool, ducked them, rubbed them with ashes, doused them with fresh water and then let the herders shoo them, complaining loudly, to a prepared fold in the hay meadow.
All that day the sun had smoked the water off them and the next Tam had joined in the back-aching work of shearing, trying not to scab them with careless clip and having to dab the wounds with hot tar when he failed. Then, their shaved arses daubed with a varying swirl of ochre shapes, the beasts were sent bounding and kicking back to pasture and men grinned wearily, backs aching but glowing with the knowledge that the job was done.
‘Up beyond the Mounth,’ Davey’s Pait announced, ‘they pluck the wool aff their sheep, like taking feathers from a chook.’
‘Away!’
But Davey’s Pait swore he’d had the truth from his auld grandsire and they went off, marvelling at the work involved in plucking sheep.
When the wool was delivered safe to Coldingham Shore, where packmen would take it on to Berwick and beyond, the heidman had come to Tam and told him he was chosen again – this time to go as a sojer. Lord had picked Tam as the Shaws obligation to their liege, Earl Patrick, because Tam had no wummin or bairns dependent on him.
So Tam, done up like a kipper in a padded jacket and iron hat, a big, awkward spear in one hand and a dirk bouncing strangely at his hip, had endured the jeers of the others and knew it had been more out of relief that it was him and not them.
He had been handed two silver pennies for the journey, told to report to the steward at Dunbar’s castle and announce that he was ‘the obligation from Shaws’.
Four years ago. Tam Shaws had thought, then, that the worst moment of his life was being sent as garrison, first to Edinburgh, then to Roxburgh, clearly never to be returned to Shaws after his forty days were up. He thought, often, of simply leaving but did not trust in the Law that much.
After a while, bitter as aloes, he realized he had been forgotten by the lord of Shaws and by God Himself; he had grown accustomed to the life, settled to it. Not long after that, the rebels had come to Roxburgh and Tam thought that had been the worst moment of his life, for he had come face to face with the dreaded Black Douglas and had actually surrendered the castle to him, because his commander was dying and unable to even speak.