Like an accusing stare, they were huddled and ragged, the sick and well cheek by jowl and no way of really telling which was which. Hands and eyes pleaded for food, or water, or hope and the voices were a long, low hum of desperation -but these were the Knights Templar, not the Knights of the Hospital; charity was not their reason for being and the fine spital was for care of the Templars’ own. Yet the Hospitallers’ own headquarters at Torphichen was swamped and the ones around Balantrodoch were the truly desperate and abandoned.
Outside, the garth of the Commanderie was a silent, still wasteland of rime, a world shrouded in a winter mist that turned the sun to a silver coin. The worst poor, first victims of the unreaped, burned-out harvests and the early winter, had come here looking for hope and the plunder the army had wrenched from the English March – but there was little enough for fighting men, let alone bairns and women and the old. They had already started dying.
The sensible stayed in their homes and battened them; even then there were bodies found, frozen dead, with desperate hands bloody from scrabbling in the iron ground of kitchen gardens for the last remnants.
The world was gaunt and hungry, a dark rune of women and bairns and men, all half-starved, ragged and dirty with the carts they had trundled this far stuffed with the useless-ness of their old lives – wooden stools, tin pots, ploughshares, tools for smithing, for farming, for carpentry. Mostly, the carts were full of misery and draped with makeshift shelters, the people in them clotting the lands round the Temple with their rubbish, their pleading, the smell of their sullen threat and fear.
There were fires and folk fought to defend the wood of their old tables, their carts and chairs. There were no horses or ponies – if there ever had been for some of them – and the meat was either carefully hidden, or bartered for other foods and fuel.
This was the price of red war, on both sides – the victorious Scots starved because the harvests rotted unreaped in the fields. The defeated English starved because the Scots harried them in the herschip, vicious raids for the plunder of food as much as riches, raids that ravaged Northumberland from Cockermouth to Newcastle.
They ravaged the lands under the sheltering bulk of Barnard Castle and, if any noted that this was Balliol’s English fortress, they stayed their lip and kept to a slaughter made bloodier still by the vengeful battle cry of ‘Berwick’.
All this barely kept the army alive, though there was little of it left; men were taking what they could and going home in the hope of feeding their own kin through the winter.
The desperate came after the army like crows round a plough, risking the danger in it for the chance of a meal. Hal watched well-armed men arrive with a cart and start doling out maslin bread, the flour mixed with sawdust, saw the snatching hands and darting feet of those clutching the prize and wary of others lurking on the fringes to take it from them.
Hal, Sim and the others from Herdmanston had been stunned to find themselves riding into the midst of the slowly disintegrating Scots army and the desperate hopeful who trailed after it like gulls following a fishing boat. It was the Dog Boy who pointed out the lack of children, which made everyone realise it and look the harder, finding none; like their parents, the children were too cold, too tired from lack of food and there was no play, only forage.
A child found gnawing the stone of the chapel at Balantrodoch was taken to the Chaplain himself, Walter de Clifton, and, before the girl died, she claimed that the walls were made of gingerbread and that she was in the Land of Cockaigne, where fences were made from sausages and grilled geese flew directly on to your tongue.
She said this, smiling through a mouth of blood, and even the stern Sir Walter felt beaten by the hopelessness of it all -though the Templar Master of Scotland himself was unmoved and more concerned about the interruption to the Order’s routine. He called himself Brother John of Sawtrey and, for all his pious devotionals, Clifton thought, was a haughty void of Christian charity.
‘Christ’s Bones, Hal, this is a poor sight,’ Sim growled, shaking his head. ‘Winter has not even bitten hard yet.’
Hal had half expected something like this and was not so surprised by it, though the bleakness wasted his heart.
He and the other Herdmanston men had quit the herschip in mid-October and gone home. Wallace had permitted it, Hal knew, because he had seen the sickness in Hal’s soul over the capture of his father, the death of Tod’s Wattie and the knight, Fitzralph – and the loss of Isabel, who had simply disappeared from view. Not even Wallace knew if she lived or died – but offered the consolation that she had last been seen in the company of a knight fleeing Stirling, which meant ransom sooner or later. No-one would pass up the cost of a Countess.