She listened to him in silence, feeling the bile, the venom pus of it. When he had finished, she laid a hand on his arm and he felt strange and light-headed.
Another scream echoed and he saw her leap up, then waver uncertainly before recovering.
‘Have you eaten?’ he asked and she stared at him for a moment, then shook her head.
‘Well, if you provide the wine, I will provide some oatcakes and a little cheese,’ he said with forced cheer.
She didn’t argue, so that they sat in a makeshift House of God and ate.
‘Cygnets’ Hal said, rinsing the cling of oatcake from the roof of his mouth.
‘What?’
‘Cygnets,’ Hal repeated. ‘A teem of cygnets. The game you like to play.’
He saw her face flame and her head lower. The oatcake turned to ash in his mouth.
‘Pardon,’ he stuttered. ‘I thought . . .’
It tailed off into silence and he sat, mouth thick with oats he could neither spit nor swallow.
‘It was a silly game for lovers,’ Isabel said at last and raised her head defiantly, staring him in the face. ‘To see who would be horse and who the rider.’
Hal forced the lump down his throat, remembering as he gagged, the high table at Douglas and her triumphant shout as she beat Bruce with her blush of boys. Ha, she had declared. I come out on top.
He found her hand thrust at him and a cup in it.
‘You will choke,’ she said and he forced a smile.
‘Water,’ said Hal with certainty, ‘has fish dung in it.’
Then raised the cup in salute and drank.
‘Which is as good a reason as any to avoid it and keep to wine.’
‘That is Communion wine,’ Isabel said wryly and Hal spluttered, then put the cup down carefully, as if would bite him. Isabel chuckled.
‘You have already swallowed enough to be allowed to sit at the feet of Christ Himself,’ she said and Hal found himself grinning. They could both be ducked, or even burned at the stake for what they did here, drinking Holy wine and laughing blasphemously, her unchaperoned.
‘shrews,’ she said suddenly and Hal blinked. The silence stretched and then she raised her head and looked into his grey eyes.
‘A rebel of shrews,’ she declared and added softly, ‘I win.’
The thunder of blood in his ears drowned the sudden arrival, so that only the blast of air snapped the lock of their gaze. Like the opening of a chill larder door, the man crashed in on them.
‘Ah might have weel kent ye would find the cosiest nook,’ growled the voice. ‘Wine and weemin – I taught ye well, it appears.’
Hal whirled, as if caught fondling himself in the stable, stared up into the fierce, grey-bearded hatchet face.
‘Father,’ he said weakly.
The Abbey Craig, Stirling
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Solemnity of the Most Holy
Trinity – August 11, 1297
They came to him just before dawn, as the sky lightened in a sour-milk smear, two earnest men already accoutred for war and clacking as they walked. Thweng watched them, seeing the grim eagerness in their hard young eyes, flicking over the blazons that let him know who they were. In the midst of their differing heraldry, a little badge in common – st Michael with flaming sword.
‘The Wise Angels request a boon,’ one of them said, bowing, and Thweng sighed, trying not to let it out of him in a weary puff. Mummery. Chivalric posturing from folk gripped by Arthur and the Round Table – yet, beneath it, the very real courage and skill that might win the day. So he forced himself. ‘Speak, Angel.’
‘The Wise Angels request to be your boon companions in the Van this day, lord.’
‘How many angels ride at my shoulder?’
‘Twenty, lord. Sworn under Christ.’
‘Welcome, Angels.’
He watched the men clack happily away. The Wise Angels were one of many little companies of knights who swore oaths to do great deeds of bravery on the eve of battle, although Thweng knew these were one of the better ones, composed of tournament-hardened knights. They had come to him, one of the foremost fighters on the circuit – and commander of the Van horse.
They had taken their name after Christ’s rebuke to Paul when men arrived to arrest them and Paul wished to fight. ‘Do you not think,’ Christ had said, ‘that, if I had asked, my Father in Heaven would not send me a legion of wise angels, against whom no man will stand?’
Today, a legion of twenty Wise Angels, against whom no man will stand, would ride at Thweng’s shoulder, swelling the numbers of barded horse under his command. The Fore-Battle, the Van, would be led by Cressingham, around two thousand foot and Thweng’s one hundred and fifty heavy horse designed to plant themselves firmly on the far side of the long brig and allow the Main and Rear battles, another two hundred knights and sergeants and four and a half thousand spearmen and archers, to form up under Barons Latimer and Huntercombe.