‘We should be wary of casting the first stone,’ he said gently. ‘The sin of envy is in great part responsible for the problems of the Order – too wealthy by far, as I have said, even to the whispered rumour of usury. Brother Jacobus would have them scorching for that alone, but he and others of his calling have forgotten the teachings of Saint Bernard – “Persecution shows who is a hireling and who a true pastor”.’
He paused, his sentiment genuine if only because of the vision of the Templar, strapped to his horse and burning …
‘Amen,’ Bruce answered and a muttered chorus followed it. Jacobus stirred a little, his hands shoved into his sleeves, but remained silent, a cowled mastiff leashed for the moment.
‘But you are less interested in this and more in what the English commander in Perth has to say,’ the abbot went on. ‘He agrees to meet you on the field – but not on the morrow. It is the Sabbath and the Feast of St Gervase, the Martyr.’
‘Of Margaret, saintly queen of Scotland and the translation of her relics,’ Bruce corrected, that strange lopsided twist of a smile on his face. To avoid stretching the scar on the other, the abbot realized suddenly, which meant it was not healed, even after all this time …
‘So – we have a truce until the morn’s morn?’ Edward Bruce persisted.
The abbot hesitated, a heartbeat only that he would not have got away with in the cowled politicking of Rome. What caused it was – yet again – the vision of the burning Templar. That, coupled with the uncaring stone face of de Valence as he excused it, sure in his writ from pope and king, sanctioned by the fluttering of as pagan a symbol as anyone might find – a dragon banner which permitted men to risk any sin.
Yet the heartbeat went unnoticed here and the abbot nodded, for a truce was what he had been told and chivalry dictated the truth of it, even from the thinned, dubious lips of the lordly Aymer de Valence.
There was nothing else to be said; Bruce watched them ghost their way out again and waited for the clamour that would swamp him when they were out of earshot. It was not held back for long and the charge was led, as ever, by Edward.
They throw ‘chivalry’ at me like an accusation of heresy, Bruce thought, turning into their concern and outrage. There would now be an argument which would, in the end, come to eat itself because there was no way out of the circle.
They all knew it, too, even if they jerked and strained – de Valence was locked securely in Perth with an army roughly the size of the one Bruce had scraped together. The English lords, Percy and Clifford, were scouring the west with another and, somewhere to the south, like a distant stain of thundercloud, the Covetous King himself gathered yet another force with his son.
‘If we do not force a fight here and win, my lords,’ Bruce declared to their scowls and frowns, ‘then we will gain no further support and will be too weak to face Longshanks when he comes. We must defeat de Valence here and to do that, we must persuade him to come out of his fastness and fight.’
If they did not, then my kingship is ended, he thought. Fleetingly, he saw the purse-lipped moue of his wife, preparing the ‘I-told-you-so’. King and queen of summer only, she had once said. Unspoken had been the other part of that old pagan custom, where the King of Summer was ritually sacrificed, his blood making the Kingdom and all in it fecund.
Well, that would not be. Winning here, at Methven, would bring some solidity to his throne and, to do that, he needed someone to beat in an honest tourney. He needed to force apokalupsis.
He said as much, but only the scholarly Alexander understood that it did not mean the catastrophe it implied, simply a revelation, a new light. A new world.
Chivalry would bring de Valence out for a fair fight, he thought. The joust à l’outrance, writ large, would do it.
Because God is always watching at the edge of extremity.
Hal watched the train of priests and their escort coil between the fires, heading out of the camp and the road back to Perth. He heard one mutter ‘Te deum’ but they passed in a wraith of silence for the most part, sinister as darkness. He did not care for these Dominie Canes much and remembered the ones who had brought Cressingham’s ultimatum to Wallace and Moray at Stirling … God’s Wounds, almost ten years to the day.
Ten years. It weighed on him, sudden and heavy as an anvil and he sighed under it, so that Sim Craw glanced up from under his own shaggy brows – then surprised Hal with his own thoughts.
‘I remember thon chiels,’ he muttered. ‘At Abbey Craig. Christ, Sir Hal, that was a wheen o’ years ago.’
‘Aye, ye were sprightly then,’ chaffered Chirnside, grinning.
‘Sprightly still,’ Dog Boy replied. ‘If you keep charkin’ your gums on such, you will find how he can stop your yatter.’
Sim stirred a little, fed a stick and some dried grass to the fire.