‘If Your Grace stands to fight,’ he added.
Bruce favoured him with a twist of smile.
‘Just so. If that is the case, you will attend in my own Battle on the day, with your mesnie. Until then, I want your men mounted and riding.’
‘We are not horse, Your Grace,’ Jamie argued lightly in French. ‘You have Sir Robert Keith’s men for that.’
‘The Earl Marischal’s horse are few and needed,’ Bruce answered. ‘Your men are good riders and I want them broken in two – yon Dog Boy will command the other half – and riding about the Lothians making a deal of noise and fire and smoke.’
‘Aleysandir? He is not stationed enough for command.’
‘Stationed or not, he is vital,’ Bruce replied. ‘I will tell you why, good Sir James, since I am your liege lord and king and can do so where others tremble – he is your double. The twig does not fall far from the tree and whether your difference in stations admits that you are sired by the same loins, the truth is palpable each time you stand side by side.’
He saw Jamie Douglas stiffen and frowned.
‘Loose your hackles, lad – I need the country in turmoil. I need every handful of horsemen as heralds of the terrible Sir James. If the Black can be in two places at once, all the better.’
Jamie Douglas saw it and his flattered anger subsided slowly. He glared round the other lords, daring them to comment on this shame on his father’s name – though the truth was that all of them could name some wee common woman tupped by a noble relative.
‘I need herschip, but of a particular sort,’ Bruce went on. ‘Fetch back all the iron you can carry from Northumberland’s smiths and forges. Strip it from the Church if needs be – we will need as much as we can, to beat ploughshares into swords.’
Nor will there be enough, he thought to himself, if the weapons fail to arrive from Spain.
‘Above all,’ Bruce added, ‘you watch. Put eyes on the road from Berwick and do not remove them until you can ride and tell me proud Edward is coming over the Tweed with his host, by which route and how many.’
He watched Jamie Douglas stride off and heard Randolph clear his throat.
‘The Earl of Atholl is a sore loss.’
Indeed. As if I had not realized that – Bruce almost spat it back, but swallowed it and offered an insouciant shrug instead.
‘If the great and good cannot be persuaded to fight for their king, then the sma’ folk can be persuaded to fight for their kingdom instead, my lord,’ he replied in English, and then turned to the shadows, picking one out from the others; Sir Henry Sientcler of Roslin bowed.
It was unkind and Bruce knew it as he spoke, but fear made him careless of the Roslin lord’s feelings.
‘And if your Herdmanston kinsman and namesake falters, my lord,’ he declared to the stricken lord of Roslin, ‘we will, in truth, be defending this realm with nothing better than long sticks.’
Crunia, Kingdom of Castile
That night …
They made a plan, of sorts; Sim levered himself up and flung himself into the turmoil of the streets like a man plunging into surf, while Hal stayed with a flask of watered wine in the maelstrom of cockfighters, waiting to see if Piculph returned.
The day slid to a groaning end, the sun a raw, bloodied egg trembling on the horizon. The cockfights filtered to an exhausted finish and the victors fed and watered their weary, wounded champions, before cosseting them carefully in the dark comfort of linen bags, which they hung high on posts to thwart the vermin. The losers made more pragmatic arrangements and chicken stew was cheap on the tavern bill of fare.
Sim ate his with considerable gusto, but Hal neither liked the taste nor the idea that the white and red might be mixed in with the green and gold – though the truth was that the dying light brought out hordes of fluttering insects, mad for the sconces and, in the dim, Hal could not tell what had started out in his stew and what had landed since, drunk with light.
Sim, presented with this, paused, shrugged and spooned on, observing only that the folk of Compostella could take perfectly good food and make it ‘as heated as the Earl of Hell’s hearth’. Yet he ate Hal’s bowl as well and, at the end, slid it away from him, belched and sighed.
‘They ken how to bliss saints, mark me well,’ he observed, swallowing watered wine and grimacing at the water. ‘The seven holy men have been duly worshipped, I can tell you. The wee saints they name Segundo and Tesifonte had a good stushie at the entrance to a street, though I think it had more to do wi’ the fact that tanners carried one and cobblers the other. And Cecilio cowped off his bier and crushed a wee nun, so she and God are not on speaking terms.’
‘God be praised,’ Hal said, to protect Sim from his own blasphemy.
‘For ever and ever – did yon Piculph come back?’