He and the young Patrick, heir to the earldom of March – here to legitimize the affair – had arrived at Herdmanston’s tower in a smoke of righteous power, ostensibly to assert the rights of Malenfaunt to Herdmanston and capture one of the foul slayers of the Lord of Badenoch – though the truth, as everyone on the besieging side was careful to step round, was more to do with Buchan’s wife and her lover.
There was a rustle and scrape as Sim scuttled to his elbow and both cautiously peered out between the roof merlons, the rain steady as sifting flour.
‘Is that the young Patrick there?’ Sim demanded and Hal raised himself a little to look. There was a dull thump of sound, a faint tremble up through the soles of their feet and both men instinctively ducked.
‘Mind yer head,’ muttered Sim, his badger-beard face dripping with sweat, rain and scowl. Hal slithered his back to the merlon, face to the wet-black sky; he did not think the springald bolts would be a danger to his head at this height, for they were aimed where they had been pointed since the arrival of the besiegers – at the Keep entrance.
The stout oak door, studded and banded with iron, had cost the enemy four dead and twice as many wounded to drench with oil and fire down to cinders and twisted hinge metal. Now the springald was trying to shoot through the archway to the metal grill of the yett, but had succeeded only in scabbing stone from round the entrance and putting everyone’s nerves on edge.
Sim promised himself that he would shoot one of the springald bolts up the arse of the wee hired mannie who had brought the bits and pieces of it to Herdmanston for the Earl of Buchan’s revenge.
He would like to have put a bolt from his own crossbow in him, but the range was too great – peering out cautiously he could see the timber-box shape of the springald, three clever wee Flemings painstakingly rewinding the contraption, checking the chucked tilt of it to raise it by another quim hair. Near it, proud on a prancing destrier draped with dripping heraldry, Patrick of Dunbar waved his arms and made suggestions which the Flemish ingeniators ignored.
Sim slithered round to sit, shoulder to shoulder with Hal in the wet misery of the roof.
‘The Earl o’ March’s boy himself, the wee speugh o’ Dunbar, sent to puff out his chest feathers on our fortalice,’ he voiced bitterly and left the rest hanging, thick as aloes in the wet air. Patrick of Dunbar was here because his da, the Earl of March, was too old for the business – and his mother Marjorie was a Comyn, sister to Buchan himself.
‘So – the Earl of March’s boy and Himself the Earl o’ Buchan. If a man is made great because of his enemies, then ye are the finest knight in Christendom, lord Hal. I hear Longshanks is comin’ here, too,’ Sim growled.
‘I hear he is in Berwick,’ Hal countered wryly. ‘And at Lochmaben, Stirling and Perth. And that he has grown horns to match his English tail.’
‘Still,’ growled Sim, ‘a brace of the Kingdom’s high nobiles is more than enow and a pair too many. D’ye think they have come for the Coontess – or the other?’
The very question that haunted Hal and the reason he had not fled and would stubbornly defend to the last. Below in the hall was Isabel and alongside her was a covered slab of sandstone – the ‘other’ Sim spoke of.
It seemed an age since Bruce had called him into the arched shadows of St Mungo’s, where the stretched shapes of Wishart and Bernard of Kilwinning argued with Lamberton, recently fled from Berwick and full of reports of stunned English unable, it seemed, to agree on what to do.
Bruce, full of fresh resolve and newly absolved of any Red Comyn murder by the old mastiff Bishop Wishart himself, was wry and sanguine about the supposed inability of the English.
‘Edward’s wrath may be slow, but it will be scorching when it comes. I have sent him a letter by the Lord of Tibbers, asking his forgiveness for certain matters and warning him that I will defend myself with the longest stick I have if he comes after me. I am not expecting forgiveness.’
None of which was what the bishops needed to hear while Wishart, all purpling indignation, was preparing sermons excusing Bruce’s actions and justifying his imminent coronation.
‘It is essential that the King is divorced from these actions. A king of this realm is not involved in low acts and red murder,’ he had pontificated at one of the many meetings and Kirkpatrick, with a bitter bravery that took even Hal by surprise, gave a bark of mirthless laughter.
‘No indeed – he has me for that.’
It was a truth no-one wanted to admit and the faces round the table blanked, then pretended it had not been said at all; Hal felt a sudden rush of sympathy for Kirkpatrick, saw the mesnie of new lords look sneeringly at his back and call him the ‘auld dug’ when they were sure he could not hear, because no-one was as feared as Black Kirkpatrick, or as close to the Bruce.
Yet Hal saw that the closer Bruce got to climbing on the throne, the more he distanced himself from his ‘auld dug’.