He popped the fat wheel pommel of his sword between the slits and then cut viciously backwards as Balius took a mighty leap and shot out of the pack. He felt the blade tug, but did not know what he had hit.
Then they were back at the lead wagon and turning again, Balius blowing and snorting and stamping. Up in the sumpter wagon, Sim Craw levelled his crossbow and shot, but Hal did not see what he hit.
Then the riders were gone. There was a flurry of confusion and shouts from the cavalcade and the women would not stop screaming, but the attackers suddenly vanished as swiftly as they had appeared. Ahead, a horse limped off, trailing reins. Three bodies lay like bundles of old clothes.
Sim dropped from the wagon and walked to where Ill Made Jock sat, his arse wet and his arm wrenched.
‘A sair dunt, but not broken,’ he remarked to the ugly wee fighter. ‘All that’s damaged is your pride, for birlin’ off yer cuddy on to your arse.’
‘Moudiewart arse of a sway-backed stot,’ Jock agreed sourly, massaging his arm.
Sim clapped him the shoulder, which brought a wince from Jock and a laugh from Sim. A man crawled out from under the wagon, offered Sim a wan, bob-headed smile and scurried off like a wet rat looking for a hole, clutching a leather bag tight to him.
Hal had dismounted and was stroking Balius’s soft muzzle, the stiff hairs sparkling with the diamonds of his own hot breath; Hal led him, Sim on the other side, down to the bodies.
‘Imps from Satan’s nethers, right enough – what are they, d’ye think?’ Sim asked, stirring one with his foot. They were grim, filthy corpses, all yellow-brown snarls and hung about with bits and pieces of filched armour.
‘Unfriendly,’ Hal replied shortly and Sim agreed. In the end, both were decided that these had been some of Wallace’s raiders, out on the herschip and seeing what looked like an easy and profitable target.
There had been four killed – three women and Pecks the ostler. One of the women had been Ill Made Jock’s, so he was having a right bad day, as his friends were not slow to point out. Someone else asked about the man with the crutch, but no-one expected to see him again.
Hal rode to Isabel, who fought her wet skirts back over the wagon to where the Dog Boy, her devoted slave, waited to leg her up on to her horse again.
‘Are you well?’ Hal asked, suddenly anxious at her limp. Isabel turned, a poisonous spit of a reply already wetting her lips, when she saw the concern on his face and swallowed the bile, which left her flustered, as did the sudden leap inside her, a kick like she had always imagined would come from a child in the womb.
‘Bruised,’ she replied, ‘but only from riding, Sir Hal. Who were they?’
Hal was admiring of her acceptance of events and almost envied the Dog Boy his closeness to her when she got back into the sidesaddle.
‘Wallace men,’ Hal said, ‘the worst of them, if they are still Wallace men at all and not just trail baston, club men and brigands off on their own. There will be a deal of that from now on.’
‘As well The Bruce thought of sending me with yourself,’ Isabel replied. ‘You seem to have acquainted yourself well enough with a warhorse for a ploughman.’
Hal acknowledged the compliment and the implied truce, then carefully inspected Balius, relieved to find not a mark. He handed it to the care of Will Elliot and mounted Griff, then found the garron suddenly too low and too slow and wished he had never ridden the big warhorse at all.
They collected themselves, loaded the dead ostler on to a wagon, got Jock back on his horse, then slithered cautiously down the muddy road to the inn.
It was, as Hal had feared, burning, though the sodden timbers and thatch of it had conspired to reduce it from a conflagration to a slow-embered, sullen smoulder. There was a fat man at the entrance with his throat cut. A woman lay a little way away, stuck with arrows so deliberately that it was clear she had been used as sport.
‘Ach, that’s shite,’ declared Bangtail Hob, hauling off his leather arming cap and scrubbing his head with disgust.
‘What?’ demanded Will Elliott, but Hob simply turned away, unable even to speak at the loss of Lizzie. He had been rattling her silly only a few hours before and it did not seem right to be standing there seeing her like a hedgepig with arrows and the rain making tears in her open, sightless eyes.
Out on the road, Hal was of the same mind.
‘Well,’ he said grimly, ‘there is no shelter here, for sure. We will push on across the bridge to the town and politely inform the English commander here that he has Scots raiders on the road.’
Sim nodded and stood for a while, watching the caravan of wagons and horses and frightened people rushing past the inn and down the road after Hal and the unfurled Templar banner, the Beau Seant, held high by Tod’s Wattie in one massive fist.
Despite ‘baws’nt’, that fancy flag, Sim was sure they were sticking their heads in a noose the further north they stravaiged. He just wondered how tight the kinch of it would be.
Chapter Six
Edinburgh