Beside him, Chirnside Rowan and Hob o’ the Merse loaded and shot the only two other latchbows they had besides the one Sim was using on the roof. The bolts flashed like kingfisher wings in the mirk, spanging and ricocheting wildly; a man cursed and reeled into another, clutching his ankle and hopping until someone barged him over. They trampled on him to get to the yett, crowding the narrow way while the flaming straw choked everyone.
Metal glinted and banged, men roared battle cries or just incoherent bellowings and Hal seemed to be underwater, where the noise seemed muffled and dull. He sweated inside the maille and padding, felt the powerful urge to run, to piss, to throw up, or all of them at once.
Then the yett broke open and sprang back under the piling weight of bodies, who surged through with fresh, exultant cries.
Hal and the others met them in a way their grandfathers would have nodded approval at – shoulder to shoulder in a shield wall. The shields were the wrong shape, but the wall of them was just as daunting as any who had sent the Norse scampering away at Largs nearly fifty years before.
A spear wobbled at him and Hal twisted to avoid it, landed a good hard chop with his axe on the shield of the man trying to wield it, while Sore Davey slashed a rent in the man’s gambeson, so that he tried to back away, grunting. The press was too great and the man was crushed forward, arms trapped so that he could see the needle point of Hal’s waraxe coming at his face but could no more avoid it than a cart rolling downhill can avoid the house. He squealed when it went in, shrieked when it came out and then vanished, sucked under the trampling feet.
There was a moment of swaying to and fro, where no-one seemed to do much more than curse and struggle, spluttering and choking in the reek – then, like a stone on a mirror, the attackers broke from the rear and stumbled away.
Feeling the pressure lift, those in front reeled away, blind and breathless with the smoke. For a moment, Hal saw the twisted smile and rat-desperate face of Malenfaunt, forced at last to take part and huddled behind his gashed, striped shield.
There was a moment when Malenfaunt was about to hurl himself at Hal, to end the business in the best heroic fashion – until he saw the axe. A blade with a pick on the other side curved like a bird beak and a point out of the top of the shaft, another at the foot. He blanched, remembering an axe just like it and how he failed to ruin Bruce with it during the tourney; he raised his shield against it and backed hastily away.
Coughing, spluttering, red-eyed and half blind, Hal and the others shouldered the yett door shut and held it while Leckie hammered round a new fastening – a sword this time, which was not only an expensive waste, but probably useless since the iron jamb was coming loose from the stone.
Leckie said all this like a chant to the accompaniment of hammer blows and no-one much cared who actually listened to it. By the time he was done, the air had cleared and women had brought water, to drink and wash faces in; it was as good as goose-grease balm, as Clem Graham announced.
The dark slithered over them like a merciful cloak. A man hailed them asking for truce to pick up those wounded and dead groaning at the foot of the steps and that was allowed, watched by a scowling Mouse holding a torch, backed up by Chirnside Rowan’s crossbow.
In the Lord’s Room with its folly window, the Dog Boy faced Sim Craw and Hal, while Isabel chewed a lip and looked on.
‘It is the only way,’ Dog Boy said again and Sim scrubbed his nit-cropped head, knowing the truth when he heard it and reluctant to admit it. He looked at the coiled mass on the floor, a mesnie of knotted bast, twisted linen and leather from belts and reins, one end looped and braided round the postered boxbed.
‘It will come to pieces like a hoor’s drawers,’ he growled, then bobbed apology to Isabel, who waved it away.
‘That’s why I must go,’ Dog Boy answered patiently, flashing a white grin in the dark, ‘since I am the lightest. Out and away, like a lintie off a branch. Easy.’
Hal knew someone had to get out, to find out if aid was coming, to remind Bruce what was at stake if he did not relieve Herdmanston. He nodded.
‘Go with God,’ he growled brusquely and, grinning ferally, Dog Boy hefted the coil and, helped by Sim, levered it to the window and over. Then he was out of it with a quick, neat movement, paused with his head and shoulders showing, grinned a last flash of teeth and was gone.
The bed groaned a little, shifted with a squeal. Sim, Hal and Isabel moved swiftly to it, adding their combined weight; it stopped; the makeshift rope trembled with Dog Boy’s unseen movement and the knots on it creaked.
‘If any daur tell how Isabel MacDuff lay in bed with Hal and Sim from Herdmanston, both at the one time,’ Isabel said grimly, ‘I will make his cods into a purse.’
‘Dinna tell Maggie,’ answered Sim vehemently and with more than mock fear.