Dog Boy was only vaguely aware of it, for he was with the woman. She was already dead, blood all over her mouth and her chest cracked inside, for sure. Not old nor young, once pretty and now nothing at all, as if she had never been.
He sat now and looked at where she had lain before the other women – captives, it was clear – came and took her away to be decently buried in the dark. He watched them filter back to the fires while his fingers turned and turned the axe that had killed her. He wondered if she had been kin to the other women, or even known to them.
They were wary, these women, but had nowhere else to go, as they said to Patrick and the others round the fire.
‘These yins you slew took us from our hearths,’ one declared, a big beldame with arms she could barely fold over her bosoms. ‘They were too hungered to bother us much – but it is timely, your arrival.’
‘You may not think so,’ Leckie’s Tam leered loudly, ‘for we have already eaten.’
‘You daur approach myself an’ I will clap yer lugs, you muckhoon’,’ countered another, equally formidable woman, jutting her chin out defiantly. ‘I had thought better of you, with our own menfolk off to the aid of King Robert.’
It could have been true, Dog Boy thought. The ragged-arse folk had never been needed for wars before, since armies were gathered up from tenants and burghers who could afford at least an iron hat and a stout spear. Not now, though. Now there were bare-footed chiels arriving in the siege litter round Stirling at the behest of their lieges, stripping vills and farms bare and looking to be fed and armed and trained, for the call had gone out that the Invader was coming with the biggest host ever seen and their king needed them. That and the ruin war had made of their lives made most of them bring their families, following their own stolen fodder and cattle in the hope of leaching a little of it back.
‘Aye, weel, we are braw, brave fighters for the King,’ Rowty Adam declared to the women, ‘so what you give to us, as it were, is no loss to your menfolk and a service to His Grace, King Robert.’
‘There will be no harm done to you,’ said a firm voice and Jamie stepped in to be blooded by firelight, his black dags of hair down round his cheeks. He put one foot up on a log bench and neck-bowed politely to the big beldame with the bosoms. ‘You have the word of Sir James Douglas on it.’
You could see men’s crests fall at the sound of that, but no one as much as whispered against it, while the big beldame grew red in the face and the other women simpered. Dog Boy was sure any one of them, gripped by an arm and led into the dark by the Black Douglas, would have gone eagerly, swaying her hips and with no thought of her missing man.
‘Weel,’ Leckie’s Tam said bitterly when Jamie had gone, ‘since the Black has put the reins on us, it seems we will have need of entertaining ourselves – a tale it is and your turn to tell it, Parcy Dodd.’
Dog Boy sat and twirled the axe as Parcy Dodd began his tale, thinking on how he had once sat with Bruce himself, before he was king and a wheen of years since. They had discussed the merits of knightly vows and Bruce had been drunk. ‘Nivver violet a lady,’ Dog Boy had said then, for he had been younger and more stupid; well, younger, at least.
He glanced to where the dead woman had lain, the stain on the grass merely one more shadow in the shadows. He had ‘violeted’ a lady now and though it was more than stupid to dwell on it, he thought he could feel the stain on him, as if he had foresworn some knightly vows.
‘So,’ Parcy Dodd was saying, ‘I am stravaigin’ with Ill-Made Jock, when—’
‘Ill-Made?’
They all turned to Dog Boy and Parcy, flustered and left threadless in his tale, blinked once or twice.
‘Aye – him who was with Bangtail Hob when he was murdered by the Wallace …’
He tailed off, aware of the frantic, silent eyes like headshakes; he sat with the air of a man who had plootered into a sucking bog and could neither go forward nor back.
‘That was me that was with Hob,’ Dog Boy said, bitter with the awareness that Parcy did not, in fact, know Ill-Made and had probably never met him. ‘Ill-Made died at Herdmanston, during the siege of it. Button your lip on folk ye never knew.’
‘Aye, aye,’ Parcy answered suddenly and Leckie’s Tam hauled him free of the morass with a joke and the conversation flowed shakily back.
‘You are ower harsh,’ said a voice and Dog Boy turned into Jamie Douglas’s half-amused stare. ‘He only gilded his tale a wee bit, with some name he thought the others would recall.’
‘Ill-Made?’ Dog Boy answered, bewildered, and Jamie chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder.
‘Ill-Made Jock, Bangtail Hob, Sir Hal Sientcler,’ Jamie recited. ‘All famous men who fought with the Wallace and some now with the King.’
Then, seeing the bemused stare persist, he leaned a little closer.