‘Good, good – ye have yer wits. Now … careful. We are lying on our side here and everythin’ is arse to elbow.’
Hal saw he had been trapped by the strap of his baldric, which seemed fastened to the floor by an iron hook – until he realized that it had once been hung up alongside a truckle bed, but now the world was canted and crazy.
The ship …
The ship was beached and broken, the timbers snapped and splintered as gnawed bones. Like a rotted whale, it was a cave of dangerous dangle and sudden pits that he and Niall had to struggle through, while all the time the gentle sough and hiss of the merciful, calmly breathing tide set the last of the timbers to creak and moan.
‘Nothin’ so mournful as a stricken boatie,’ Niall said, when they paused the once, to get bearings. His face was sheened and gleaming.
‘Others,’ Hal managed from the great half-numbed strangeness that was one side of his face; there was a ragged, rasping catch inside his cheek that spoke of one or more teeth knocked out or splintered.
‘Kirkpatrick is on the beach. Pegy is gone and gone – Donald, too, unless God is merciful to his brother’s wails. Almost all the crew …’
Niall stopped, trembling.
‘It is after being the Feast of St Erasmus,’ he said wonderingly. ‘May the wee holy man keep them safe as he should.’
He shook it from him like a wet black dog and fumbled on through the dark, Hal at his heels and still clutching his sword and scabbard, all that he could find of his in this dragon’s cave of dark terror. St Erasmus, Hal thought, patron of sailors and known to them as St Elmo. Asleep, with all God’s other holiest, he added bitterly to himself.
Niall warned him; he dropped with a splash and Hal followed, the jar sending a great wash of pain up through his head, so that it seemed like a bursting blood orange. Then they sloshed on, out through the ribs of the stricken beast, where great blocks like stone lay scattered in the luminous tide. The cargo, thought Hal desperately. The cargo …
‘See if we can find any other poor souls,’ Niall hissed and Hal started guiltily from his thoughts of the wrapped weapons. Slowly, carefully, the torch flattening and flaring in the still-stiff breeze, they moved along, searching the dark and wet.
It was a desolate harvesting in the dim, by touch alone, of objects that might be waterlogged flesh and wool, or sheets of bladderwrack silting the waves like streaming hair. They might be heads fronded with cropped beards, or weeded rocks, all of them veined by the sea, surging and dragging, hissing over pebbles.
The only two men Hal discovered were dead and he gave up on dragging them out of the loll of surf. Somewhere further up he heard shouting, saw torches dance in the darkness and Niall Silkie plunged his own brand into the surf with a hiss, falling into a half-crouch of terror.
‘Wreckers,’ he said. ‘Come to loot the ship and slit the throats o’ any survivors.’
But Hal knew at once that the shouter was Kirkpatrick and rose, sloshing up through the surf to the stumbling pebbles, dragging his sword out. Niall, who did not want to be left alone in the dark, cursed.
Moving towards the sound, Hal felt the tug and treachery of tussocks, saw the torches coalesce and the shadows etched against them. He stumbled out of the dark and saw a man whirl towards him, the gleam of naked steel in his hands.
‘Friend,’ he yelped. Somhairl, both fists full of knife, gave a delighted grin and called out his name, so that all the shadows turned; there were not many of them, Hal noted.
One of them was Kirkpatrick, who turned once to acknowledge him, then faced front again and yelled out a long stream of Gaelic, patiently learned at the elbow of Bruce.
‘Bastard Campbells,’ he growled aside to Hal, the sodden dags of his wet hair knifed to his face. ‘Caterans and worse, who would try and steal the smell off your shit because it belongs to someone else.’
Hal saw the figures, uncertain under their torches, all wild hair and bare legs and wet, sharp steel.
‘I hope you are being polite,’ he said and knew the mush of his voice was a shock to them both when Kirkpatrick turned to him and raised his own sizzling torch for a better look; Hal did not want to hear his views on the batter of his face, but had them anyway.
‘Christ, ye look as if ye had the worst o’ an argument with a skillet,’ he declared. ‘Ye are more bruise and swell than face.’
‘A rope’s end will do that,’ Somhairl added sombrely, ‘whipped by a gale like we had.’
So that was what had hit him. Not the whole world
then …
Kirkpatrick’s warning shout buzzed pain through him and, finally, a voice called out in thick English from a throat not used to it.
‘Who is that there then?’
Hal, his head roaring with the pain of doing it, shouted back.
‘Sir Henry of Herdmanston, a friend to Neil Campbell and in need of hospitality.’