‘You are?’ he began, but nodded and answered it himself. ‘Hereford’s clerk and lawyer – well, take this to your master.’
He paused, rummaged and helpful hands found and gave him the seal-dangling scroll he needed. Walwayn looked up then and, over the King’s shoulder, saw two faces. One was the triumphant leer twisting the handsome face of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester; the other the long mourn of bad road that belonged to Sir Marmaduke Thweng, his walrus moustache ends silver-winking in the light.
Like angel and Devil on the royal shoulders, Walwayn thought, wildly trying to gather himself as he took the scroll from the King’s hand.
‘Your master and the Earl of Gloucester are appointed commanders of the Van,’ the King declared, more for the benefit of any who did not already know than for Walwayn.
The clerk blanched, hesitated.
‘Your Grace?’ he quavered and the King’s eye drooped. Even as a parody of the fierceness of his father, it was frightening enough to the little Hereford lawyer.
‘Are you witless? Deaf?’
Walwayn caught the angel Thweng’s warning eye and simply bowed and backed out, sick to his stomach at what he had to carry back to his master.
Sir Marmaduke saw the clerk scuttle off, knew what he felt and why.
Joint commanders. The de Clares and de Bohuns were bitter rivals and appointing them to jointly command anything was a surety for disaster – yet Thweng knew the King had done it to promote his nephew, young de Clare. The Earl of Hereford, Constable of England, would be furious, but de Clare was the new Favourite. There is always a favourite with Edward, Thweng thought. For all the tragedy of Gaveston, the King has learned nothing – and, behind him, he could feel the flat hating gazes from the Despensers.
‘Pembroke,’ the King said suddenly. ‘Where is the Earl of Pembroke?’
‘Sir Aymer is in Berwick,’ Thweng replied flatly, and then remembered himself. ‘Your Grace sent de Valence to oversee matters in Berwick.’
The King had forgotten and did not like the fact of it, so Thweng moved back into the shadows and out of his eyeline.
He is losing control, he thought. He has even brought that stupid lion in a cage, the one he touted round in ’04, when he and the rest of this menagerie were young. He brought it in the last attempt to bring Bruce to battle, four years ago, he recalled, though the lion was toothless and mangy then. Now it was blind and bad-tempered and dying. A fitting banner for this campaign, in fact.
But the beast harks back to the gilded youth the King and all his company had, Thweng thought moodily, and are reluctant to let go. Christ’s Wounds, the King even calls it Perrot, the ‘loving name’ he gave to Gaveston. Stupid name for a favourite, be it dog, horse, bird or lion – and too Malmsey-sweet for a man.
Was he a sodomite? Thweng looked at the King and wondered. Tall and imposing – the picture of a warrior, but that meant little. Priests, Thweng knew, indulged in it and, by God, the Templars were given it as the second-worst accusation that could be levelled at them after spitting on the God they were supposed to protect and uphold. But magnates of the realm? A king?
Thweng remembered himself as a youth, draped round the neck of a loving brother in arms with nothing more in it than the bonds of battle-forged friendship. He shook the thoughts of royal sin away from him.
The King was no boy-lover, but neither was he a good king, or half the warrior he looked, Thweng thought, and then surreptitiously crossed himself for the sin in thinking it.
Mark you, he added to himself, if this army gets anywhere it will be because someone marches off and all the others will follow after, like sheep – but whether it reaches Scotland, Wales or bloody Cathay will be by accident and all are equally likely.
He straightened, as quietly as he could, to ease the stiffness in his back; he was too old for these late-night maunderings and, if proof were needed that matters were spiralling out of control, it was this need for frantic conferences well into the dark.
It was hot in the room, stank of sweated wool and desperation and Sir Marmaduke longed to be outside, questing for a bit of wind in the summer night.
Craignish, Argyll
At the same moment
He breached from the dark, like the ship out of the maelstrom, crashing back to a nightmare of creak and slow rending, a mad, pale light and the flicker of shadows.
‘Ah, blissin’ o’ heaven, yer honour – ye’re alive.’
Hal was not so sure of it; he struggled to rise and against the thundering pain of his head. A hand fumbled at the trap he seemed caught in, a voice cursed from the dark and Hal was suddenly free to sit up, listening to groans and pig-squeals; a face thrust itself into the light of the torch, grinning with mad relief, dripping sweat and sea-water.
‘Niall Silkie …’ Hal said and the torch bobbed.