‘I thought Wallace had harried this place thoroughly,’ Bruce said, with a half-sneer, half-wry laugh. He sounded disappointed to see this evidence of life, even if folk hurried off, running out of their pattens to get away from the cavalcade.
‘Folks ken where to hide a brace of kine so that even the herschip misses it,’ Sim grunted back with his usual lack of deference. Hal said nothing, though he marvelled at the folk they passed, ploughing and husbanding, hoping to squeeze in a desperate harvest before war came in the summer and knowing there was a fair chance all that effort would go to waste. Yet they would burn fields and slaughter livestock themselves rather than see it fall into the hands of invaders – as the Scots would in their turn.
Like Saint Ebbe, he thought, who took a blade to her nose and face so that the invading Danes would think her too ugly to rape. The ones who suffer most are the innocent.
Some folk never made it as far as the dreaming summer and they came on the evidence of it a day later, moving through lush valleys and low woodlands, the sweat itching them, the insects humming and pinging. The smoke brought half dreaming heads up and the scouts – Hal’s men on their sturdy garrons – came galloping back with the news that a steading burned on the far side of the ridge.
‘I would see,’ Bruce declared and was off before anyone could tell him differently. With a muffled curse, Kirkpatrick followed after, looking wildly round and waving to Hal. Wearily, Hal kicked the sleepwalking garron into surprised life, heard Sim bawling for Bangtail and Lang Tam to move.
It was an outwork of Hexham’s holding; probably, Hal thought, the peasant who worked it thought that the further he was from the influence of the priory reeves, the happier his life would be. Well, he had paid a high price for the freedom to cut firewood rather than collect it, or poach for the pot and miss a few plough days for the lordship.
He and his family lay on the sheep pasture near the softly muttering stream, not far from the blackened bones of their home; the wattle had burned, but the daub had hardened and cracked, so that the roof had fallen in and the walls stood like the shell of a rotted tooth.
The dead were all close together, Hal saw, and the women – a mother and a daughter becoming a woman, he thought -were still clothed. Led from the house and murdered, with no chance to flee and no attempt at rape.
‘Baistards,’ Sim growled and waved a hand at the churned earth. ‘Took what they needed in a hot trod and did red murder for the sake of it.’
‘How many, d’ye think?’ Bruce demanded, circling his horse.
‘Twenty,’ Kirkpatrick declared after a pause to study the hoof chewed ground and Sim nodded agreement.
‘Why would they kill them?’
The question was piped clear from the Dog Boy’s bewildered voice and Hal saw his face – puzzled, but not so shocked as it should have been for a young lad of a dozen years or so, coming on death on a warm April afternoon. He was growing fast, Hal thought. And hard.
‘For the sport in it,’ Sim declared bitterly.
‘For the terror in it,’ Bruce corrected. ‘So that others will see this and fear the ones who did it.’
‘Scots, then, you think?’
‘Aye,’ Bruce answered, ‘though belonging to no army. Left behind and on the herschip for the profit.’
‘We should rejoin the main force,’ Kirkpatrick offered nervously, as Bruce stepped his horse delicately round the strewn bodies.
The mother looked old and death had not been kind to her, yet she was no older than his own wife when she had died, Hal thought. No older than Isabel . . .
‘A mercy the child was slain,’ Bruce said, his voice a cat’s tongue of harsh rasp, and Hal blinked, then realised Bruce was thinking of his own dead wife and Marjorie, the daughter left to his care.
‘A father is no nurse. A young girl needs a mother,’ Bruce went on softly, speaking almost to himself. He remembered his own daughter then, dark eyes, little full lips parting in a smile, the image of her mother; he closed his eyes against the memory of the chubby-faced mommet he had so neglected. The best he ever did for her was keep her from being taken as a thumb-sucking hostage after Irvine – which was as well, since he had broken all his oaths since.
‘Riders,’ Bangtail called out sharply.
There were three, padded and mailled, mounted on good horses, with latchbows bouncing at the saddle. They all had little round shields and rimmed iron helmets and one carried a banner, yellow with a red cross on it. Behind were more; around thirty, Hal tallied swiftly.