They can feel it, the irregular heartbeat of it. The seneschal here, a fat and fussy man, has banned Malise from my side by order of the new warden, John de Luka. It is not pity nor mercy that does it, but Your Hand, my Lord. That and the fact that, if all goes badly, I might be a counter for bargaining a truce of peace for this town, as good as gold to some folk. So here I am, curled in my cage like a cat, prinked and preened and dyed and painted and dressed, with one hand clutching an ivory sieve holding balls of musk and crushed amber, the other carefully hidden because of what Malise has done to the nails and fingers. I have a barbette edged with cloth of gold. Nestling between my breasts is a gift from the warden himself, a fat enamelled pendant which has two lovers kissing on one side and, on the other, a grinning Death; it is a common enough theme, but it reveals more sensibility than I saw in the hard face of that royal squire. I wonder if he chose it himself or had someone do it? Either way, Your Hand is in it, Lord. I am still on display, but more gilded and most of those who still come to gawp think I have a toad hidden somewhere the better to curse them, or suck on an emerald in my sleep to preserve my seeming youth.
Let them. I am Isabel MacDuff, with a dowry portion of Fife. I am a long ways past girlhood, yet I am ready to receive my lover. God wills it that he comes soon.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Bannockburn
Midsummer’s Night, June 1314
The dusk was soft and blue like woodsmoke, though there was a haze of that, too, from the small flowers of a thousand flames. Looking out, Dog Boy could see the scatter of English fires, like the tail of a long-haired star.
He ate from a wooden bowl, horn-spooning in oats and barley savouried with a good stock bone which had even had some meat on it. There was bread to sop it up and some small beer, but no ale or wine; Dog Boy thought that was deliberate, to prevent everyone getting drunk with little or no time to sleep it off.
He heard the whine and spang of music from a viel, accompanied by the heartbeat thump of a drum and great growling barks of laughter and raised voices; the Islesmen, or the Campbells, who had their own drink and would not be stopped from it. For all that they looked longingly and thought of the fiery drink, none of the Lowlanders would risk arriving uninvited at such a fire, so they sat and stared morosely at the flames until blinded by the light.
‘Good, this,’ Yabbing Andra declared, slurping the last and scraping the bowl noisily. ‘This is fine fare, is it no’, lads? I mind the time …’
People sighed, for the only time Andra was ever silent was when he was eating and, even if he scraped shavings off the inside of his bowl, there would be precious little left in it to occupy his mouth for long.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, Troubadour Tam interrupted him. He seldom said anything at all, seemed to speak only through the bowing of his viel, but he seemed to have lost his touch for it this night, for he crossed into Andra’s ramble with a slashing few words of his own.
‘Mak’ the best of it – there will be precious little else this winter. Hunger is coming.’
Those who worked the land knew it and nodded. Patrick, who worked cattle more than he did fields of oats and barley, announced that the saving grace of Our Lord in all this was that the English would be visited by the same bad-crop famine – and they had more fields given to wheat and less to livestock or hardy oats.
‘So? What use is that to us?’ demanded Horse Pyntle and Patrick explained it to him, shaving little cuts off a splinter and curling them into the fire for amusement.
‘They will only have beasts left to them. When we raid, as raid we must for food, then we will have meat and lots o’ it.’
There were grim snarls of laughter at this, save for Parcy Dodd, who said that too much meat made you sick. Since none there had ever had enough meat to make them sick, there were growling, jeering questions fired back at him.
‘Aye, aye,’ he declared defensively. ‘I never said I had ever been sick from too much meat. Tainted meat, aye – and it tak’s precious little of that to make ye boak. But my ma had experience in curin’ folk – rich folk, you ken – whose shitholes and insides were choked up with too much meat.’
‘Good, was she?’ demanded Sweetmilk, while everyone had that wary look you got round Parcy Dodd, since you could never trust anything he said at all, on any subject.
‘In a godly fashion,’ Parcy declared, frowning, ‘though I have long since hauled myself away from her notion that what galled ye or made ye boak was a blessin’.’