They watched as Rossal de Bissot, braced stiffly, walked to the lady and inclined his head in a curt bow, and had it in return. Piculph, after a short pause, moved away – out of earshot, Hal thought – and the lady began to walk quietly along the deck, with Rossal falling in beside her, his every celibate step as if he walked barefoot on nails.
Hal saw that the other black-robed knights watched Piculph, while the rest of the crew moved from their path, throwing surreptitious looks at Do?a Beatriz which left little to anyone’s imagination. They were a rag-bag collection of ill-favoured lumpen pirates, Hal thought, but Pegy Balgownie keeps them in line and he, according to Kirkpatrick, is to be trusted.
He had an idea what Rossal and the lady discussed, but he only knew that Do?a Beatriz had come to Rossal from Villasirga in Castile, a Templar hold now handed to the new Order of Alcántara; the lady’s brother, Guillermo, was high in it, close to the Grand Master.
There was little brotherly love or fellow Christian charity here, Hal thought moodily. The Order of Alcántara needed money and was prepared to sell the former Templars their own weapons and the unlikely pairing now strolling the deck were brokering the deal.
‘“The company of women is a dangerous thing,”’ Kirkpatrick muttered, quoting from the Rules of the Order.
‘Aye,’ said a savage growl of voice, ‘the pair o’ you would know that best, for sure.’
They turned into the tinged face of Sim Craw, clutching a huge bundle to him and looking liverish. If there is one who hates the sea more than me, Hal thought, it is Sim.
‘You have ceased feeding the fish,’ Kirkpatrick responded viciously and Sim nodded, though there was no certainty in it.
‘I am fine when matters are moving,’ he answered, ‘but wallowing here is shifting my innards.’
Hal looked at the sail, filling weakly and sinking again; down at the tillers, a muscled red-head teased the cog into what wind there was while the barrel-shaped Pegy Balgownie scowled at the fog bank, swirling ahead as proof there was no wind.
‘You should set that bairn on deck,’ Kirkpatrick mocked Sim, ‘afore you lose it ower the side when you are boaking.’
‘Would make little difference,’ Sim mourned back, glancing sadly at the swaddled bundle of his arbalest. ‘Soaked or safe, the dreich will rust it.’
He paused, looked Hal up and down meaningfully.
‘And your maille, lord …’ he began, but paused, blinked a little and headed feverishly for the side of the cog, clapping a hand over his mouth.
Pegy was scarcely aware of the retching and the good-natured jeers, too busy with fretting over the lack of wind. Next to him, Somhairl bunched the muscles needed to shift the heavy tiller and grumbled, in his lilting Islesman English, about wetting the sail.
He had the right of it, for sure, Pegy thought. A good man, Somhairl, who learned his craft crewing and leading birlinn galleys for Angus Og of the Isles. Somhairl was a raiding man every bit as skilled as any old Viking and called Scáth Dearg – the Red Shadow – by those who feared to see him oaring up swift and silent, with his red hair streaming like flame.
No chance o’ that here, Pegy mourned. Scarce enough wind to shift as much as the man’s brow braids and even soaking the sail would not gain them much; they were moving, but slowly. Now would be the time, he thought bitterly, when the Red Rover would appear out of yon fog, with myself close behind, to pluck some becalmed chick.
But the pirate scourge de Longueville, better known as the Red Rover, had long since thrown in his lot and was now married into the nobiles of Scotland and calling himself Charteris. While his auld captains, Pegy thought bitterly, were left scrambling for the favour of kings. I liked life better when I was a wee raider – though he crossed himself piously for the heresy of such thinking.
As if in answer, a sepulchral voice boomed out from above.
‘Sail ho, babord quarter.’
It was not God, it was Niall Silkie high in the nest, but even as Pegy sprang for the sterncastle for a better look, he knew that the De’il’s hand was in this.
ISABEL
My God, You have chastised me by this man’s hand and I have learned submission, I swear it on Your mother’s life. I have suffered and learned about the power of the body over us and how, by way of it, the soul is branded. Grant me, O Lord, that I have learned, that I may not have to bring this branded body to You broken also, as this Malise would wish, given away by him as waste goods. Your will has compassed me round, O Lord, and closed all other ways to me.
CHAPTER FOUR
Irish Sea
Octave of St Benedict of Montecassino, March 1314
A white flag with a red cross, that was what Niall Silkie, squinting furiously, declared he could see. On his mother’s eyes he swore it. Fluttering – limply – from the topmost mast of another cog. The pegy mast, ironically, which was what John of Balgownie was ekenamed after.
‘A Templar flag?’ Kirkpatrick demanded, and the black-robed figures looked at one another and chewed their drooping moustaches. The English flew three golden pards on red, so it was not them.
Finally, de Grafton stared meaningfully at Rossal de Bissot.