And if they do not withdraw, Thweng thought grimly, then the foot and, above all, that little line of white salt, would have to be reorganized to the front, which could take all day and them still weary from having marched into the night to get here.
Still, he mused, it would be as long a day as this night is short …
There were shouts in the dark and men rose up suddenly, overturning makeshift benches.
‘An attack?’ demanded Segrave, but no one thought that likely – they had contrived to place themselves inside a fortress of streams and woods on three sides for that very reason. Like the Stirling Brig affair, Thweng had thought when this was proudly announced and still felt a chill of fear at the memory of those rolling spearwalls coming down on the constricted, trapped horse.
That would not happen again, surely, he thought. The Scots never stand and Bruce is outnumbered considerably, so that only a fool would attack. He will be gone by morning if he has any sense at all.
It was no night sally, but a flaring light sparked the distance like a beacon; de Valence thought it was the castle itself on fire, but Thweng had a better lay of the land.
‘Cambuskenneth,’ he declared. ‘The priory is burning.’
ISABEL
Inter faeces et urinam nascimur – between piss and shit are we born and the way to God’s Grace in Heaven also lies between the two. I told Malise that when he came slithering out of the dark, knowing his time of power over me is almost gone. He has scarce any loins left and the strength of his arm is held from me by Your Grace, O Lord – and the orders of John de Luka – but he has venom still to spit. It takes only a word from me, he said with that twisted grin he has, and you will burn like the heretic we watched together. He made it sound as if we had stood, arms linked like spent lovers, quietly contemplating the moon and the future. All your finery then will be gone, he went on, slathering it out with spittle as if the rage in him could not be contained. But I knew, O Lord – had known for a time – that the rage was against himself. Once, a wolf-hunter came to Mar and told me how it was done. You take three inches of thin beech wood and sharpen either end, then bend it into a ring and fasten it with linen thread. This you hide inside a dead bird, or a lump of rotting meat, which a wolf will gobble, as they do, all at once, deadly ring and all. When the linen thread snaps, as it must, the sliver pierces the wolf’s insides and it bleeds to death, desperately trying to sick up its own life blood and unable to do so. That is Malise; speared by his own hate and bile and unable to boak it up. Yet he tried hard enough. Your hurdies will be sagging in the breeze long afore the De’il comes for you, he sprayed. He touched me then, a trail of fingers; I let him, though my flesh crawled. When the flames touch you, he hissed, your wee serk will shrivel away and this pretty hair with it. You will be trussed in chains on that fire, naked and hairless as a scalded pig. He will do it, too, if matters do not change. He can claim anything and folk already believe I am a cunning-woman. After he had gone, I split a vein with my eating knife and here is what was shown in the pattern of my blood on the floor – a woman who loves. A woman who dies. A saving grace either way.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bannockburn
Feast of St John the Baptist, June 1314
He heard the clack-clack through the swirl of mist and saw the heads of his men come up; one rode ahead and, by the time Bruce arrived a seeming instant later, there was the tapestry of it laid out: the rider – who was sometimes his brother, sometimes Jamie Douglas; the wee priest in his brown robes, patient as a nubbed oak; and the hooded figure.
There was never any doubting, even in the dream, what the hooded figure was, standing there with head bowed and a pail at his feet. The white hand which held the clapper flapped like a gull wing and the faint smell of rotten meat rose up, even over the stench from the bucket.
Yet it was a dream and he knew it even in his sleep, a skewed version of the true events – but the essential parts of it were always the same and always as they had happened.
It was Liston in the late autumn two years ago, where he had gone with a select band to try the waters of the place yet again and, though no one spoke it, everyone knew the point of the journey was that Liston’s well was noted for its efficacy with lepers.
The dream played out: the rider demanding the hooded leper withdraw from the path, the patient priest agreeing and then kneeling, as he had done, in abject, appalled apology when he saw his king. The leper had tried to kneel, a painful display that Bruce had halted.
He remembered the shock of it, the sight of that white hand and, at one and the same moment, wanted to see the face and did not want ever to set eyes on it.
‘Who are you?’ he asked and the priest began to reply until Bruce’s raised hand cut him off. There was silence from the leper.
‘Can he speak?’ Bruce asked the priest and then the leper cleared a thickness from his throat, a rot of rheum that turned his voice into the growl of a beast.