‘Sir Hal,’ she shouted. ‘Is your army ordered to your lordship’s satisfaction?’
Full of cheek, that one, Hal thought, yet he found himself grinning. Then he saw the boy, serious as plague and gripping a dirk as long as his arm in one hand and the hand of a wee girl in the other.
‘Christ’s Wounds,’ he bellowed. ‘Did you need to bring the bairns to this?’
‘Who would look after wee Bet, lord?’ she yelled back at him, her grin wild as a cat snarl. ‘And you could not hope to keep Dog Boy’s son out of such an affair.’
Dog Boy’s son. Hal looked at the boy and laughed at the fierce look of the lad, drowning in a borrowed – stolen – maille coif, with his too-big Templar warhat and his long dirk. Hob, he remembered Dog Boy saying the boy was called. Hob. He was younger than the Dog Boy Hal had first met all those years ago in Douglas, but he had the same look. The look that had reminded Hal of his own son, John, dead and dead these many years.
Dog Boy had balmed the loss of John, and now here was another. He wondered if the new Royal Houndsman would countenance his son coming to Herdmanston. If Bet’s Meggy was going off with her new man, we will need a new baker, he thought. Or a new dog boy.
Hal saw a succession of them, all the way into the future of Herdmanston and laughed with the sheer joy of it; Bet’s Meggy joined in and, after a moment, Hob cackled out a laugh as well, shrill with the moment if not the complete understanding. Even wee Bet, finger up her nose, smiled beatifically.
Then, sudden as a cold wind, the loss of Sim scoured his joy away and his sudden blackness soured its way to the others, so that they stopped laughing, all at once. After a moment, they all put their heads down and plodded, as if through a rain squall, down to the war.
He had been sitting for some time, had lost any idea of how long, so that it came as a cold-water shock to snap back to reality. He blinked at the bloody teeth of the man he sat next to and realized he had the man’s hand in his own.
Vipond. Kirkpatrick remembered bobbing along in the knight’s wake, trying to control reins, shield and lance until, with a curse, he had thrown the latter away and then tried to screw his head round to see out of the narrow slit of the helm.
He hated it, the sweating cave of the helm, the jostle and bounce and desperate straining of the warhorse, which wanted to be moving faster after the others; in the end, Kirkpatrick had let it and hung on. He heard his breath rasp in and out in the furnace of his helmet, heard dull clangs, felt a blow on his shield and panicked, thinking they had contacted enemy.
Unable to see, he had dragged out his sword and swung it wildly left and right, cursing his own foolishness in ever having thought to ride as a knight, at ever having thought he was one, for all his dubbing.
Suddenly, through the slit, he had seen Vipond, half turning towards him and reeling in the saddle. The knight seemed to slip sideways, put out one arm and grasping hand, as if to clutch Kirkpatrick, and then fell and disappeared from view.
Kirkpatrick had hauled the warhorse to a halt, cursing it. He had been told that it was beautifully trained and biddable, worth every penny of thirty marks, but Kirkpatrick would have fed the beast to the pigs he kept on the manor which this warhorse represented in price.
He climbed off it, half sliding, half falling, threw down the shield and unlaced the helm and hauled it off, whooping in air as if he had breached from water. Then he tore off the bascinet, forced the maille hood back and ripped off his arming cap, glorying in the feel of air on his sweat-tousled bare head.
When he managed to focus, he found himself looking at his own shield; two broken shafts were in it, neatly puncturing the fist with the upraised dagger. Those were the blows I felt, Kirkpatrick thought with a sudden lurch. If they had not hit the shield …
Then they would have hit me, he thought when he found the body of the fallen Vipond. As they had hit him – the knight lay on his back, metal face pointed to the sky, a shaft so deep in the bicep of his right arm that Kirkpatrick knew it had gone through and then snapped off in the fall. A second arrow was buried almost to the fletch in his right side.
Kirkpatrick’s legs were buckling as the weight of maille fell on them. He lumbered up to Vipond, not knowing what he was about to do with a dead man – and then he heard the metal rasp of breathing from the faceless creature and dropped his sword. He grunted his way down to one knee, fumbling with the knight’s helmet lacings; when he drew it off, Vipond’s sweat and gore-streaked face stared up at him, the smile on it crimson; he had vomited blood, Kirkpatrick saw.