‘Ach, away with the pair o’ ye,’ Kirkpatrick replied shakily. ‘Bigod, sailors are worse auld wummin than my granny. Run round this cauldron and get us safe to Loch Craignish.’
‘Aye, aye, lord,’ Pegy replied and the crew moved aching muscles, unflaking ragged lateen-rigged sails and cursing the ropes that burst the pus-filled welts on their water-softened palms. Slowly, like a tired carthorse, the Se?or Glorioso turned towards the unseen shores and wallowed on and Pegy, cursing and praying in equal measure, swore he heard the Devil laugh, though it could have been the wind.
Hours later, with a precision of navigation Pegy could only admire as hellish, the wind rose to a mad shriek, the Se?or Glorioso balked like the filthy mule he had always considered her to be and started to run with the bit clenched firmly.
Nothing the sweating sailors could do would rein her in, not Somhairl’s skill and all the extra muscle on the tiller, not Angus, Donald nor any of the others daringly skipping on wet deck, swinging on wild, windlashed line, dragging in sail until there was practically no more than a bladder’s worth.
Slammed by a wind from the south and west, bent on the De’il’s course, Pegy thought, the chill of it settling in him like winter haar on his skin.
To the Corryvreckan.
Hal heard it before he saw it, a dull roaring that had him peering out at the outline of islands, hazed through the rainmist. Then he saw the white swirl of it, the great wheel of the maelstrom; a head appeared alongside his and Sim, white hair flying, face etched with misery, looked on the horror of mad sea they were driving towards.
‘Christ be praised.’
‘For ever and ever.’
The Corryvreckan was dirty with weather, gleeful with malice, ringed round with a loom of dark hills and the promised grit of unseen reefs.
‘The gullet of Hell,’ Pegy roared, almost in defiance, as the Se?or Glorioso swirled into the throat of it and started on the harvest of the less able. The first vanished, slapped with a wave that came from nowhere, spiralled over in a despairing shriek and a whirl of arms and legs.
The next was his friend, who sprang to try and save him, calling out for them to stop and turn, which would have been a fine jest if it had not been a tragic misery; he half turned accusingly, let go the line he gripped to appeal with both hands and vanished with the next crashing pitch of the carib.
‘Hang on, lads,’ Pegy yelled. It was all they could do now, Hal realized. Hold on and ride the mad stallion of it, like a charging knight in a mêlée. He thought, suddenly and incongruously, of Isabel in her cage and hoped it was not raining like this where she was …
The wheel of dancing, capricious water caught the Se?or Glorioso and flung the ship sideways – but the weight of the cargo, shifting below decks now, spun it back out of the wheeling water like a released dancer from a whirling jig, into the smack of a tidal race.
It seemed to Hal as if the water exploded beneath the ship; it flung up like a rearing horse, throwing spars and planks and men in the air like chaff from a winnowing and their shrieks were lost in the exultant gale.
Hal clung on, desperate and afraid, his arms shrieking louder than the wind or the doomed; the ship crashed down with a boom like a bell, half spun, rolled crazily. The mast cracked, the white wood of it like bone, and then splintered away to ruin, the rigging and sails falling half in and half out of the vessel, tangled with men. She jerked and lurched and fled out of the whirlpool, dragging the dying trap of her own ruin with her.
Hal heard Kirkpatrick yelling, half turned in time to see something huge and black swing round from his left, grow as large as the world and smack him into blackness and oblivion.
Newminster, Northumberland
Feast of St Erasmus of Formiae, June 1314
There was a drone and stink that John Walwayn had come to realize was the mark of a mustering host. The former was made up of mutter and demand, discontent and greetings, the latter of dung, leather, the rank sweat of too many unwashed and the acrid stench that he liked to imagine was fear but, in truth, was more than likely the great wash of pish that spilled from everything with legs.
The other mark of a muster was the sheer press of people, a smother of them which grew thick as damask the closer you got to the King and Walwayn elbowed and shouldered through them, scornful to his lessers – though there were not many of them – and bobbingly apologetic to his betters.
But he was a clericus peritus lege – a man skilled in the law, a scribe to the Earl of Hereford, permitted to attend assizes and given the commission of oyer and terminus – the right to examine and judge – on behalf of his master, the Constable of England.