‘Can you do it?’ Jamie demanded and Dog Boy grinned at him, sharp-toothed as any wolf.
‘Bigod, does a wee hound go three-legged at a tree? I came down it once, so I can get up it as well.’
Nor far away, Addaf took a knee and rubbed his grizzled chin. He knew there were riders somewhere ahead of him, but he could not be sure what they were – the Scots put everyone they could on tough, half-wild ponies, so it was more than likely just a band of ragged-arsed raiders, for he was sure he had seen scrubby little black cattle with them.
Yet the thought that they might be men with maille and lances made him uneasy and he did not like the feeling, not least because he was called Addaf Hen these days, which meant both old and respected for the cunning and knowledge it brought. Henaint ni ddaw ei hunan – old age does not come by itself, he thought, which is a comfort every time I climb up off my aching knees.
He looked round at his own men, a long hundred of whey-faced and grey-grim Welsh archers. Well they might look like corpses, he thought moodily, which was no more than they deserved for drinking the soured wine given to them to wash the heads of their own horses.
Mixed with water and applied carefully, it repelled the vicious flies and soothed their bites – Addaf’s own little mare had a forehead of fat lumps from them – but drink, no matter how foul, was never to be wasted by a good Welshman on sluicing a horse.
So they had swallowed it down and now groaned and shat noxiously down their legs and over their horses, for Addaf, viciously, would not let them rest. Scout the area, he had been told, and so that is what he forced them to do, even though the task was tedious. The point of it was to deter the Scotch from scouring it clean of anything that might help the King’s army when it arrived.
Small good the drink had done them. Now they had soiled the good coloured tabards issued by Sir Thomas Berkeley, complete with his badge on the breast; they would wipe their arses with the banner, too, Addaf was sure, if they got the chance. Sir Thomas would not like that – but Sir Thomas was not within a hundred miles of this hot, damp, flyblown, God-cursed place.
Hwyel came to his elbow, silent and narrow-eyed, taking a knee with a grunt that let Addaf know his innards stabbed him. He spared the man a glance, taking in the dark, close-cropped beard and the filth-grimed lines; he remembered the man when he had been young and colt-eager, full of irrepressible humour. It had been a long time since he had heard Hwyel laugh and the men now called him Hwyel Cuchiog – the Frowning.
‘Dduw bod ‘n foliannus,’ he grunted – God be praised. Addaf stared unpityingly into his jaundiced eyes and gave him the rote response.
‘In ois oisou.’ For ever and ever.
‘Now that we know that enemies of Christ do not inhabit us,’ Addaf went on wryly in a fluid cough of Welsh, ‘save for the devils in your belly, have you any thoughts on who might be ahead of us and, more to the point, where?’
‘None,’ Hwyel growled back. ‘Does it matter? If we go to them, there they will be and we can shoot them to ruin, same as ever, Mydr ap Mydvydd, for we are better than they.’
Mydr ap Mydvydd. Aim the Aimer was another of Addaf’s hard-earned names, though the truth of that these days was less than honest, since Addaf’s eyes were not what they had once been and he was sure folk knew it but stayed quiet, out of deference.
He half turned, glancing at the sour sky and then at the men waiting patiently beside their horses; he heard one retch and saw Lowarch suddenly thrust the reins to his neighbour and dart off, half squatting and moaning even as he moved.
Then Y Crach moved to him like a scowl, his roseate face flaring in the leprous heat.
‘Ye needs must punish these,’ he said in his singsong way and now Addaf matched him for frowns. Y Crach – Scab – was thin and wiry, a good archer but with no great muscle on him. Some said he had been a priest, licked by a sickness known to be a killer, yet he had survived untouched but for his plaguey face and was convinced the Hand of God was in it. Now he was hot for the Lord and hotter still to do His work against the heathen Scotch, but it made him careless of hierarchy.
‘Bedd a wna bawb yn gydradd,’ Addaf answered, pointedly dismissive – the grave makes everyone equal. Y Crach bristled and Hwyel laughed, but then winced as another fierce reminder of his transgression rippled his bowels.
‘Well, are we after fighting, or can we go home?’ he asked and Addaf cursed him for cutting to the core of matters. Of course they could not go home, even if they had one, without having done what they had been told to do. They were now in the retinue of the Berkeleys and, even if Sir Thomas was not here, his son Maurice was, fretting about his sick wife back in England and unlikely to be consoled by failure.