‘Thank … you,’ Vipond wheezed and Kirkpatrick looked him up and down, went to touch the arrow in his side, thought better of it and grasped the one in the knight’s bicep; the man groaned and Kirkpatrick let it go as if it had been on fire.
He sat down with a hiss of maille links and the clank of pauldron and ailette, aware that he was as useless at physicking this man as he was at knightly combat, that he was flapping his arms like a hopeless chicken and no help to anyone.
‘I will get help,’ he muttered. ‘Water …’
He found Vipond’s fierce clutch on his wrist.
‘Stay.’
The knight’s eyes had become hot and afraid.
‘Do not … let … me die … alone.’
You are not alone, Kirkpatrick wanted to say. God is watching. But it sounded trite and hollow, so he said nothing at all and sat there holding Vipond’s hand while his destrier cropped contentedly, picking delicately at the grass not trampled or soaked to muddy gore.
Vipond’s own mount had vanished, but three others moved across the sprawled bodies, their trappings torn and streaked. A fourth limped back and forth, every now and then making a plaintive screaming whinny from a snaked-out neck, as if shouting for help.
Somewhere, time slipped away. Kirkpatrick was half aware of the sudden increase in the noise of battle to his right but it did not seem important enough to turn and look. He was fixed, frozen, staring at nothing at all, yet aware of surge, like a flood tide, as the fighting moved away from him. The heat beat on him, melted him to dull lethargy.
When he snapped out of his daze, it took him a moment to realize that movement had done it; a horseman was coming, wavering through the heat haze, all faerie and stretched.
‘A rider – help is coming,’ he said, turning to Vipond. He had intended to remove his hand from the knight’s clutch and pat it soothingly, reassuringly – but the death grip was fierce and Kirkpatrick had to prise it free, shocked at the fact that the knight had died and he had not known when it had happened. He might as well have died alone, Kirkpatrick thought bitterly, for all the help I have been; he smelled the rankness of himself, remembered what he had done and felt sick shame.
The rider stopped. Kirkpatrick was suddenly aware that there was only himself and the man on the horse in this part of the world; to the left was the great hump of Coxet Hill where, incongruously, birds sang and insects whined and hummed, headed for the feast. To his right, the battle was a carpet of dead and the moaning dying, with a great mass of heat and dust haze beyond where figures flitted and roared sullenly.
The English have been forced back … We have won, Kirkpatrick realized with a sudden heartleap of exultation. We have actually won …
The rider was closer and now Kirkpatrick saw that the warhorse was plodding, head bowed with weariness, the trapper on it stained and torn so that dags and tippets of material trailed on the ground. The rider had lost all head coverings – torn them off, Kirkpatrick thought, as I have done, to get some relief from the heat – and his surcote was streaked and splashed with fluids. He had no shield, but held a sword in what appeared to be a tired fist, dangling dangerously close to the horse’s unsteady feet. He looked as if he had ridden out of some ancient barrow mound.
Kirkpatrick watched the rider pick a careful way round the litter of dead here – mainly archers, he realized. So we did as we were bid, he thought bitterly, even though I had no good part in it. He stood up, levering himself to his feet and feeling the dragging weight of maille chausse and hauberk; the horse stopped a moment later, the rider straightening in the saddle and bringing the sword up.
He thinks I am a danger, Kirkpatrick thought to himself and laughed with the irony of that. He opened his mouth to call out – but froze, gaping as the sword came up and pointed at him.
He knows me, Kirkpatrick thought, and felt the blood in him stop, had a surge of mad panic as he saw, through the blood-spatters and stains, the man’s device; three gold wheatsheafs on red. No cadet marking of any lesser branch of the Comyn, so this was the lord of Badenoch himself.
Red John, he thought wildly. I killed you. At least I slid a wee dagger into your heart, though the Bruce had already done the work. I watched your vain wee raised bootheels spatter up the tarn of your own heart’s blood in Greyfriars, years since …
He caught himself. No ghost, he told himself firmly and looked round for his shield and sword. Worse than that.
The son, delivered by the Devil to the one part of the field of struggling men where he would find Kirkpatrick, the man he hated above all others.