Malise mourned it all bitterly. Lamprecht, the wee dung beetle. The last time we met he made my life a misery and now here he is bringing bad cess to it once again. I will put him to the Question, right enough, he thought.
First, hunt down the pardoner – not that it was hard to follow his trail. An ugly wee man with the conch of Compostella in a broad-brimmed hat, a strange way of speaking and a scrip full of wondrous relics could not hide in the places he preferred to haunt.
Malise had already discovered simple priory priests in possession of lead amulets stamped with Caspar, Melchior or Balthazar and guaranteed proof against plague and ague, not to mention an abbot convinced he had a feather from the very wing of a seraphim. All sold by Lamprecht and proudly shown to Malise, who had also learned of two other men asking about the pardoner; he was sure one of them was Kirkpatrick.
Malise had come across the bridge at York, along the Micklegate to the Bar with its empty-eyed corpse-heads – rebel Scots, Malise knew. Malise kept his lips clenched and his accent hidden until he had passed through and on to the Tadcaster road.
At St Mary’s in Tadcaster, Malise had learned that Lamprecht had sold the toebone of Moses, attested by a Templar-sealed parchment, and was moving on south. Malise had lost a day going in the wrong direction before he realized that the little coo’s hole of a pardoner was headed for London, slipping from abbey to priory and moving swiftly for a man on foot and with no fear of the weather.
Doubling back through Tadcaster, Malise was sullen at the pardoner’s lack of regard for what a north winter might do; ignorance is bliss, he thought and Lamprecht would pay for it when the north stormed out snow and froze his black heart.
Yet he knew the De’il looked after his own and the little pardoner would not suffer. Piously – fervently, as the first flake wafted on to the back of his gloved hand – he hoped God was also watching. He needed God’s help, for sure, since he had found out one more valuable item in doubling back.
There was someone else on the trail of the pardoner, ahead of Malise now, someone well mounted on a black horse and with a sword of particular type, incised with a cross on the wheel pommel.
A Templar sword.
Lincoln
The Feast of St John the Evangelist, December, 1304
He was on the wrong side of his dead horse, for the axe lay on the other and all Bruce now had was a forearm’s length of thin estoc, an edgeless weapon too long to be a dagger and too short to be a sword, but perfect for sliding in a visor slit, or punching through maille. Against an axe-armed man on a horse it might just as well have been a reed.
Malenfaunt was in a fever of triumph, tearing at the horse’s mouth to get it round, raking it cruelly to repeat the process, charge down his victim. Bruce was down, weaponless, unhelmed and helpless – he had won …
Bruce saw it in Malenfaunt’s frantic movement. Nothing left but the German Method, he thought grimly and positioned himself, feeling the desert of his mouth and the wrench in his guts.
The crowd was a bellowing beast as Malenfaunt came at him, all hooves and wicked axe, reversed so that the pick, brought hard down by a man raised up in his stirrups for the leverage, would spear through metal cervellier skull cap, the maille coif beneath it, the padded arming cap under that and, finally, the skull of his victim. Like a lance through a bladder, Malenfaunt exulted …
At the last, Bruce sprang to one side – to his right, away from the axe. He heard a metalled scream of frustration from under Malenfaunt’s helm – then watched as the horse ploughed on, into the dead Phoebus.
Malenfaunt was horrified as he felt his mount balk, stumble and then seem to sink, trying to thrash and heave back upright from its knees, while Malenfaunt perched in the saddle like an egg on a stick. In his panic he did not wait to find out if his mount fought free from the tangle of dead horse and drapery – he kicked out of the stirrups and stumbled to the ground.
The crowd roared their approval and both men closed with one another, Bruce shieldless and with his long, thin estoc, Malenfaunt with axe and shield. They moved cautiously on the kicked up sand.
They circled, Malenfaunt swinging in vicious swipes, Bruce crabbing away, looking for an opening. Malenfaunt heard his own breath rack and sob, deafening under the helmet, where the heat was smothering him and the sweat starting to run in his eyes. He realized, sickeningly, that he could not keep the axe in motion for much longer, that he would have to stop, to rest …