Malenfaunt tried to struggle to his feet, but he was already too weak and sank back, a strange, blissful look on his face as the blood poured like a cataract. Kirkpatrick’s face turned hard as a rolling millstone.
‘I would not give ye the gift,’ he added and took the dagger low and hard into Malenfaunt’s eye, straight through to the brain, so that the man’s last astounded look was open-mouthed with the horror and shrieking agony of it, the snake-fork of his ruined tongue flickering.
Folk turned aside as the knight collapsed and bled.
‘Christ,’ Jamie Douglas said, half in disgust and half admiration, ‘you are a hard man, Kirkpatrick.’
Kirkpatrick said nothing, simply looked at Hal with the wasteland of his face and hirpled back to his horse.
‘I have met corpse-strippin’ hoors with softer hearts,’ Sim called after him, ripe with disapproval. ‘Away home and nurse yer injuries – keep out of the road of decent folk for a while.’
Kirkpatrick turned, bleak as a long roll of winter moorland.
‘Like yersel’,’ he answered bitterly, ‘I have no home. Unlike yersel’, I have never owned to such a thing, so it is no loss.’
He crawled up on to the horse, the blood squeezing from between his ruined fingers as he took up the reins and cast away the rope that tied himself to a corpse.
‘Never fear, Sim Craw,’ he said, his voice thick with new weariness, ‘I will be back among ye afore long. Mark me.’
‘Ride,’ Hal ordered brusquely, wondering if anyone would have a home when all this was done. He climbed wearily on to the trembling, sweated garron and paused to look down at the raggled remains of Malenfaunt, lying in a slow-spreading viscous tarn of his own blood.
This was red war, he thought, a war of the dragon unleashed and chivalry, even for the yielded, was now as lost as the Grail itself.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Methven
Vigil of the Translation of the Relics of St Margaret, June, 1306
In the murmuring night, spiced with woodsmoke and heavy as musk in the summer heat, the delegation came up between the lamplit panoplies, a series of shifting shadows flitting past the fumes of cooking fish and turnip, threading through the warm, fetid horse lines. They moved like ghosts in their dark robes to where the great pavilion stood with the yellow banner, the red lion on it limp.
The warleader’s tent, Abbot Alberto saw, was dressed as Brother Jacobus had told him to expect – studied, with all the treasured care lavished on a concubine. There were swinging lanterns with mica panels, clean planked flooring strewn with fresh grasses and wildflowers, small tables with bowls of expensive pistacia, sugared almonds and gingibar.
The faces that met him from under the fine, ribbon-sewn hangings were not hostile, simply those of men with work to do, impatient, confident and competent. Somewhere behind a curtained recess he heard the low murmur of women’s voices.
Bruce considered the little Italian Abbot carefully. Not much to look at, he thought, so all the more dangerous. A Visconti with the ear of the Pope and so doubly so, yet he had not come, as Bruce had feared, bringing the ferendae sententia – the sentence of the ecclesiastic court – and ready to remove Bruce from Holy Church with bell, Book and candle.
That was something, at least, thought Bruce, though that Papal Bull is charging on its way. It only remained to find out why this Visconti was here and if it was as he claimed – he bore a message from Aymer de Valence, currently crouched like a wary dog in Perth and challenged by Bruce to come out fighting.
‘I trust,’ he said, smooth and guarded, ‘your visit to our kingdom has been successful so far.’
The abbot ignored the ‘our kingdom’ and glanced at the one they called the Bruce. Tall, hard-faced – as they all were – with a bad scar on one cheek and a surprisingly neat beard. The one to his right was a squatter version, a dancing bear of a man with a bush of beard and he was sure this was the brother called Edward. The others were all the same to the abbot – warriors who followed.
‘So far,’ he answered urbanely, ‘though King Edward would dispute the claim that it is your kingdom. Even if you are prepared to defend it – what was it you wrote to him, my lord? With the longest stick you have.’
‘Your Grace,’ corrected a stern voice. ‘He is king.’
The abbot fluttered apologetic fingers.
‘Do you come from the Covetous King?’ asked Bruce coldly, forcing through the abbot’s breach of royal etiquette which, he knew, had been no mistake.
‘I come from the Holy Father, my son,’ the abbot replied smoothly, ‘to examine the commanderies of his Order of Poor Knights in the kingdoms of his brother in Christ, King Edward.’