The Complete Kingdom Trilogy Read online

  He would be interested in the trade, of course. Malise shrugged.

  ‘What is safe?’ he replied mournfully, graciously accepting the cup of wine. ‘A man must make a living.’

  Tam nodded, then called out to the girl to fetch him a shirt, which she did, dusting her hands of ash. Malise drank, though he did not like the thin, bitter taste.

  ‘What is your business?’ Tam demanded, licking his lips.

  ‘I negotiate contracts,’ Malise said, ‘for the Earl of Buchan.’

  Tam’s eyebrows went up at that.

  ‘Contracts, is it? For what?’

  Malise shrugged diffidently.

  ‘Grain, timber, wool,’ he answered, then glanced sideways at the man, watching the chins of him wobble as he calculated how much he could dun and how much profit there was to be had out of this meeting. Malise handed him an opportunity.

  ‘I also look out for his wife,’ he said carefully. ‘When she is travellin’ up and doon the roads, like, on the business of Buchan.’

  Tam said nothing.

  ‘I was thinking, perchance, ye had heard if she’d passed this way,’ Malise persisted. ‘A Coontess. Ye would know her in an instant – she rides a warhorse.’

  Tam turned the cheap red earthenware round and round, pretending to think and studying Malise. A weasel, he decided, with a tait of terrier there. No contract scribbler this – a rache, huntin’ the scent of some poor soul. A Coontess, he added to himself, my arse. Alone? On a warhorse? My arse.

  Malise grew tired of the silence eventually and spread his hands, choosing his words carefully.

  ‘If the road keeps clear and the garrison at Bothwell chases away its enemies, ye might get a customer or two.’

  ‘God preserve the king,’ Tam said, almost by rote and leaving Malise to wonder which king he was speaking of. Malise was about to start placing coins on the table when a frightening apparition appeared at the head of the staircase.

  The face had once been pretty, but was puffed and reddened by late nights and too much drink. Malise saw a body made shapeless by a loose shift, but a breast lolled free, darkened by a bruise.

  ‘What a stramash,’ she whined, combing straggles of hair from her face. ‘Can a quine not get sleep here?’

  She saw Malise and made an attempt at a winning smile, then gave up and stumbled down to slump on a bench.

  ‘Where’s your light o’ love?’ demanded Tam sarcastically.

  ‘Snoring his filthy head off – Tam, a cup?’

  Tam grunted and poured.

  ‘Just the single Lizzie, my sweet. I want you at the work the day.’

  ‘What for is wrong with that bitch upstairs?’ Lizzie whined and Tam grinned, lopsided and lewd.

  ‘You ken the way of it. It is your affair if you stick yer legs in the air when you should be sleepin’, but this is your day for the work.’

  Lizzie’s teeth clacked on the cup and she drank, coughed, wiped her mouth, then drank again.

  ‘Ye have to have rules,’ Tam said imperiously to Malise, ‘to run a business in these times. This place will be stappit with sojers the night, seeking out a wee cock of the finger an’ a bit of fine quim.’

  He nudged Lizzie, who forced a winsome smile, then looked at Malise, sparked to curiosity now that wine was flooding her.

  ‘What are you selling – face paints and oils?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘Seeking, not selling,’ Malise answered and the whore pouted and lost interest.

  ‘So,’ said Tam expansively, sliding into the shirt which had been brought to him at last. ‘Ye were sayin’. About a Coontess.’

  ‘The road is clear,’ Malise answered. ‘though few travel. Too many sojers of the English, who are just as bad as Wallace’s rebels.’

  ‘Never speak of him,’ Tam spat, thinking moodily of wagon drivers bringing stone for the completion of the castle, their thirsty helpers, the woolmen and drovers and pardoners and tinkers, all the trade he was not getting.

  ‘The road would be clear save for they bastits, God strike them,’ he added. ‘They’ll not come here, though, so close to the castle.’

  ‘I heard it was not completed,’ Malise mused.

  ‘The walls are big enough,’ Tam retorted, wondering if this stranger was a spy and regretting what he had said about Wallace. Then the stranger wondered out loud if the Countess had gone there.

  ‘Coontess?’ Lizzie declared before Tam could speak. ‘No Coontess has rested here. No decent wummin since the Flood.’

  She shot Tam a miserable look and he parried it with a glare, seeing his chance at money vanish. If he had planned to inflict more on her, it was lost in a clatter and a curse from upstairs.

  ‘So he’s up,’ muttered the whore, glancing upwards. ‘A malison on his prick.’

  ‘To speak the De’il’s name is to summon him,’ chuckled Tam as a second figure appeared at the top of the stairs, took two steps, stumbled and slithered down another four, then managed to make it to the table, whey-faced and with a beard losing its neat trim. He had a fleshily handsome face, dark hair fading to smoke and spilling in greasy curls to his ears, a stocky body and wore shirt, boots and not much else – but Malise saw the bone knife-handle peep from the boot top.

  He did not see the face until the man spilled down the steps and into the sour, dappled light dancing wearily through the shutters.

  His heart juddered in him; he knew the man. Hob, or Rob – one of the men from Douglas who had been with the Sientcler from Lothian. His mouth went dry; if he was here, then the other one might also be, the one called Tod’s Wattie, and he had fingers at his throat, massaging the memory of the gripping iron hand before he realised it and stopped.

  ‘Lizzie, my wee queen,’ Bangtail Hob said thickly, ‘pour me some of that.’

  ‘If you can pay, there is another flask,’ Tam declared and the man nodded wobblingly, then fished a purse from under his armpit and counted out coins. Malise fought to control his shaking, to stop glancing behind him, as if to find Tod’s Wattie there.

  ‘Ah, God take my pain,’ Bangtail said, holding his head. The wine arrived, the man poured, swallowed, puffed, blew and shuddered, then drank again. Finally, he looked at Malise.

  ‘I ken you, do I not?’ he asked and Malise could not speak at all, but wondered, wildly, if he could get to the dagger through the tangle of his clothes and under the table.

  Bangtail drank deeply again and wiped his mouth with the back of one hand as his brain caught up with his mouth and he regretted admitting he knew this man. In Bangtail’s experience, almost all the half-remembered men he knew were husbands or sweethearts of the quim he was stealing from them; he did not not want to press this in case memory returned for both of them.

  ‘See men?’ he asked, swallowing more wine. ‘Carts. Horses. Men on the road ye came up?’

  Malise swallowed, found words and croaked them out, nodding.

  ‘Took the turn for Elderslie,’ he lied and saw Bangtail jerk his head up.

  ‘Ach, no. Away. Ye are jestin’, certes.’

  Malise shook his head and then had to fight to stop shaking it. Bangtail Hob cursed and slammed away from the table, heading for the stairs.

  ‘You told me they would be here the day,’ Tam yelled truculently to the vanishing back of Hob. ‘A wheen of sojers an’ a knight, you said, needin’ lodgin. I have been sair put out to accommodate them.’

  ‘Away,’ scoffed Lizzie, slack smiled and bathing in warm pools with the drink. ‘Ye have had no visitors at all, ken.’

  Tam’s hand smacked her in the mouth, just as the cup was rising towards it. The cup and the wine went one way, Lizzie went the other and she lay for a moment, dazed. Then, slowly, she climbed back to her knees and then feet.

  ‘Any further lip from you, my lass …’ Tam added warningly.

  Malise sat still as rock. He could not have moved if he had wanted to and all the time he ached to turn round and yet did not dare, for fear of seeing Tod’s Wattie and
the face on him for what had been done to the dogs. Not pleasant, Malise admitted. Henbane, realgar and hermadotalis, better known as Snake’s Head iris, was a vicious poison on man or beast and they did not die peacefully.

  Hob clattered back down the stairs, this time dressed in boots and braies and shirt, with a studded leather jack, a long knife and a sword at his waist and a round-rimmed iron helmet in one hand. He shouted for his horse to be got ready and Tam jerked a sullen head at Lizzie to tell the ostler.

  Hob paused at the table and snatched up the flask he had paid for, grinning from his broad-chinned face.

  ‘Elderslie, ye say,’ he said, then frowned and shook his head. ‘Bastits. They were to come this way. No man tells me a thing.’

  Malise smiled nervously back at him and the man swept out. There was a pause, then the sound of hooves, speeding away. Malise forced himself on to unsteady legs and, as soon as he was up and moving, he was almost in a panic to be gone. The tavern keeper looked moodily at him.

  ‘God speed,’ he said sourly, ‘for it appears ye are no decent luck for business.’

  Malise would have slit him for his attitude on another day. This day, though, he only wanted distance between him and the Sientclers from Lothian and was so gripped and blinded by it that he never saw the flitting figures in the trees as he whipped the staggeringly exhausted horse out on to the muddy road.

  He did not know that they had let him by as too small a prize when there was an inn to be plundered.

  Bangtail Hob was not a happy man, as he kept telling everybody out of the sour scowl of his face. It did not help that it had rained on his ride from a warm, comfortable inn and that he had left his cloak behind.

  ‘When I find yon arse who swore he had come up this road and saw ye turn for Elderslie,’ he growled for the umpteenth time, ‘I will hand him a lick such as to dunt his head from his neck.’

  ‘She was a rare piece, then, this quine ye climbed off?’ demanded Will Elliott, who was licking his lips in anticipation of the delights of the inn Bangtail Hob had described.

  ‘She was,’ Hob enthused, then blackened his face with a new scowl. ‘Now we will be lucky to get a whiff, when these lads reach it. Elderslie road – the serpent-tongued hoor-slip.’

  ‘Enow, ye midden,’ Sim growled and nodded towards the palfrey, approaching at a posting trot, the Countess riding as easily as was possible on a sidesaddle. Hal and Sim Craw looked at each other, though there was only mild amusement in it for the entire affair was, as Sim put it when they’d set out, a guddle of nae good.

  ‘Master Hob,’ the Countess called and Bangtail turned obediently, smiling his most winsome.

  ‘You are certain of the description of this man? That it was Malise Bellejambe?’

  ‘I am, Lady,’ Bangtail replied firmly. ‘I kent his face, but he flustered me with his falsehoods and it was only when I reached here that I minded him. Malise, for sure. It is not a face I will forget again, mark me.’

  ‘He seeks me,’ she said and Hal heard the catch in her voice.

  ‘You’re safe with us,’ he said firmly and she shook herself, as if a goose had walked over her grave.

  ‘I am in no danger from him,’ she replied. ‘He would have the skin taken off his back by my husband if he as much as bruised me. That privilege belongs to Buchan.’

  Hal blinked at the bleakness of the last words and Isabel came out of the dark place she had gone, blinked and forced a new smile.

  ‘But he is not … pleasant,’ she said. ‘And he may do harm to others.’

  ‘I would worry about Tod’s Wattie if I were he, lady,’ piped a new voice and they looked at the Dog Boy, hovering round Isabel’s stirrup. ‘Tod’s Wattie loved they baists and yon man killed them with evil potions.’

  Sim studied the Dog Boy, seeing the pinch of his face, the bruised eyes. Seeing what Hal saw, that wavering faint image of wee dead Johnnie. God alone knew what had gone through this lad’s mind while he had been in the moatbridge pit but it had only been the grace of Our Lady that it had not been the moat weight itself. Yet the lad had had to listen to it crush Gib to bloody fragments and the Lord alone knew what that had done to him.

  The Dog Boy felt the eyes on him and grinned at Sim before turning back into Isabel’s fond stare. He was not sure what it was he felt for this high-born woman but he wanted, at one and the same time, to put his head on her breast and have his forehead stroked – and his hands on those same breasts. The combined raggle of these feelings frequently left him flustered, tight in chest and groin.

  Hal caught Bangtail’s eye and sent him off down the column. Twenty riders and four wagons had set off from Annick Water three days ago, following the arrival of Tod’s Wattie just as peace broke out and everyone went their way. Hal and his small mesnie were headed north, first to Stirling, then on into Buchan lands. Delivering, Hal thought, like a mercantile carter.

  Not all the men at Annick had traipsed homeward and the roads were shadowed with folk gone back to brigandry, either in the name of Wallace, or King John – or just themselves. Now there were at least a dozen carts and wagons, upwards of seventy folk, all trailing after for the protection of the armed men and despite Hal’s protests, cajoling and even threats.

  Travellers all, they were latched on for safety and with their own reasons for getting down this road; one even hirpled along on a crutch refusing all invites to be taken into a cart, since he had sworn to walk to the Priory of Scone, in penance and surety of a miraculous cure. Each day they left him behind, each evening, he hobbled painfully in to the nearest fire and Hal wondered if the Priory had recovered enough from the scouring of no more than a few weeks ago to offer him succour.

  Then there was the Countess. Hal sighed. Bruce had been almost wheedling, but it was Sir William who had finally persuaded Hal to escort the Countess back to her husband.

  ‘It has to be done and it were best done by someone unlike to be seen grinning at the husband’s cuckoldin’,’ the Auld Templar had said, then handed Hal a folded white square of fine linen with a thick black bar across the top.

  ‘That is a Templar gonfanon, he said. ‘Though you are not strictly a Poor Knight, ye are being asked to serve yin, namely masel’, so such a banner will keep ye safe frae both sides. Naebody with sense will want to irritate the Templars, even an earl havin’ his wayward wife returned by them.’

  Hal could not find a good reason for refusing the man who had come to their rescue at the bridge and, besides, Hal had had another request that sent him in the same direction and the irony of where that had come from did not pass him by. It seemed Sir William knew something of it, too, since he asked, polite and innocent, about the fat wee man, Bisset, who had arrived looking for Henry Sientcler and no-one else.

  ‘A wee relic from Douglas, Sir William,’ Hal declared, shrugging lightly. ‘Wallace promised to hunt the man – he was scrivener or somesuch to Ormsby at Scone and it was thought he might ken something about the murder of yon mason.’

  Sir William stroked his grizzled chin and nodded, only half listening.

  ‘Oh aye? And does he?’

  Hal shrugged.

  ‘Nothin’ helpful,’ he said and wondered then why he lied. Sir William grunted and patted Hal on the shoulder, a gesture that brought a memory of his father so sharp it nearly made Hal grunt. He wanted to get back to Herdmanston, to put the confusion of Bruce and Wallace and Buchan and Englishmen far away from him, and said as much.

  ‘Aye, well,’ Sir William said thoughtfully. ‘Deliver the Coontess and yer done with Bruce – though I would seriously consider where yer future lies. Wallace is off to Dunkeld, I hear. Or to besiege Dundee. Or Stirling. Ye see the way of it – his rabble flit like wee midgies and clegs here and there and everywhere. He is not the man to tak’ on the English in the field, no matter what Wishart thinks.’

  He patted Hal again.

  ‘Anyhow – not your problem. Let that flea stick to the wall,’ he said. ‘Tak’ yon wayward wummin home and
be done with matters until Bruce or myself send word. Send that wee scribbler Bisset away as well and forget about dead masons – Christ’s Bones, Hal, there are corpses enow in every ditch from here to Berwick.’

  It was sound advice and Hal was determined to follow it and praise God for having slid out from under the threat of Longshanks so easily. Yet the nag of the mystery stuck him like a stone in his shoe every now and then – when ‘yon wayward wummin’ gave it a chance.

  The Countess of Buchan, Hal thought miserably, was both an irritation and a delight. She was wearing her only dress, a fitted green affair whose sleeves flapped loose because she had no tirewoman to sew her into them. She wore the same battered riding boots Hal had seen at Douglas. Yet now she affected a barbette under her chin and a neat wee hat to go with it, a smile that never reached her eyes and a sidesaddle on a palfrey – handing Hal the bold Balius.

  ‘It is,’ she had declared winsomely, ‘not seemly for me to be returned astraddle a warhorse, according to the Earl of Carrick and Sir William Sientcler and every other one of the community of the realm who passes and seems to have an opinion on it.’

  She clicked her teeth closed, biting off more and widening the smile.

  ‘So, as a knight, you had better take the beast home to the Earl of Buchan’s stables.’

  Hal had stammered some platitude about treating the beast like silk and gold, but the truth was he felt a long way from the ground after Griff and felt the raw power of it in every step.

  He should not even have been riding the beast at all – no sensible knight used a warhorse except for battle and, besides, it was not his. As Isabel winsomely pointed out, cheerful as a singing wren, she had probably already ruined the beast by using it like a common palfrey and, because it had been stalled at Balmullo, which was hers in her own right, she could give permission and did so.

  Hal viewed this last with a jaundiced eye, but could not resist the chance of it.

  For all her cheer, the lady herself seemed clenched as a curled fern, full of brittle laughter and too-bright eyes, which only softened when she laid them on the Dog Boy – and there was a fondness they shared.