Authors: Robert Low
‘We believe it is a dangerous thing for any religious to look too much upon the face of a woman.’ He recited from memory the old catechism. ‘The Knighthood of Jesus Christ should avoid, at all costs, the company of women, by which men have perished many times.’
‘The Rule of Benedict,’ she answered, which astonished him; she saw it and smiled sweetly. ‘Though I remember the Rule as being that the Knighthood of Jesus Christ avoid, at all costs, the
embraces
of women rather than simply the company.’
Widikind felt himself prickle with an awkward heat and could not speak.
‘My brother is of the Order of Alcántara, whose knights have taken over your holdings in Castile,’ she went on. ‘He is, as are they all, Cistercian in his rulings and he says that all Templar Knights follow the Benedictine belief, which is altogether too harsh. He says you – when you were not a heretic, pardon me, Brother – slept in shoes, shirt and hose in order to avoid the sin of being catamites to each other. Do you still hold to that, Brother, even though your Order is dissolved?’
Widikind’s mouth opened and closed and he was aware of how stupid he must look, while his French grew thick with his Cologne accent, so that it sounded crow-harsh to his own ears.
‘Not seemly,’ he managed at last. ‘This talk. I must join my brethren. Battle.’
She waved a languid hand and slapped Piculph’s wrist as he tugged too hard.
‘La, sir, this is the slowest pursuit since Aesop’s Tortoise. There will be no fighting for an hour or more and none at all unless we are foolish enough to allow it. Which is worse?’
The last question sent Widikind reeling and he gaped, flustered and feeling his face flame.
‘Worse?’
‘Lying with men or with women? Which is worse for your Order … former Order?’
Widikind was staggering now, unable to think clearly or protest further. He wanted to turn and go, he wanted to spit out that all monastic life was a war against passions which women were ill equipped to resist. But he was rooted and saw, with the last edge of his eyes not locked like a stoat-fixed rabbit on the lady’s face, the slight mocking sneer on the lips of the Moor.
‘Men,’ he managed to gasp and Doña Beatriz snapped her fingers, a sharp sound that seemed to cut the strings that fixed Widikind to her face; he half fell, and then righted himself and, appalled, straightened. He felt the sweat roll down his back and forehead.
‘So,’ she said, softly vicious. ‘You avoid speaking or having contact with my sex, sir, because the Rule of Benedict considers the embrace of women to be … dangerous.’
She leaned forward, her beauty like a blade.
‘Yet the embrace of men is worse,’ she concluded, light as the kiss of a razor on a cheek, ‘and you are happy to consort with them freely. I do not understand this. Perhaps you can enlighten me, since I am a mere woman?’
Widikind blinked and grew suddenly cold. This was the Eden serpent, for sure, and an added coil was the sly, sneering Moor at her back. But Widikind von Esbeck was of the Order, his grandfather had been Master in Germany and, even interdicted and abandoned by the Holy Father, he would not be afraid of evil …
‘As you say, lady, you are a mere woman. Filling you with such enlightenment would be like pouring fine wine into a filthy cup. A pointless waste.’
He nodded briefly, turned on the spot and fumbled his way up the steps and on to the deck, feeling the sudden breeze like balm; behind, he heard the soft chuckle of the Moor.
Doña Beatriz waited until his shadow was gone.
‘Typical,’ she murmured, ‘and revealing. There is steel in these Knights of Christ, but a waft of perfume and a girlish laugh unmans them easily enough.’
She turned to smile at Piculph.
‘He imagines I am Satan’s own daughter, with a Moorish imp as a servant – did you see how he stared at you? If you had brought out a forked tail he would not have been surprised.’
Piculph, who was a good French Christian and a serjeant in the Order of Alcántara, nodded, though his smile was a bland cabinet that hid his own secrets.
‘This Widikind and his so-called brethren were once Templar Knights, the wearers of white. You should be wary of thinking them the same as those grey-clad lay dogs you saw scampering away from Villasirga, señora.’
‘When the time comes,’ Doña Beatriz replied, ‘wile will win over weapon, Piculph.’
She heard the drumming of feet on the deck above, felt the lurch and sow-wallow of the ship and frowned.
‘We are slowing. Surely these fools are not about to fight. They do not even know how many enemies lie in wait on that boat.’
Piculph’s eyes narrowed and he folded the net of pearls neatly.
‘That is what I mean, señora. Fighting is what they do and they do not consider odds.’
Herdmanston
An hour later …
The odds, as Y Crach had declared, loudly and with relish, were perfect… . four carts, a scatter of sumpter ponies, a milling herd of long-horned black cattle and a handful of men, half-crouched with spears waving, clustered with desperate courage in front of the wagons.
Hwyel – the traitor, Addaf thought blackly – had agreed.
‘We will make them dance,’ he bawled out and Addaf saw the men who agreed, grinning and nodding between sick belches. Too many sick belches and more so than last time.
Reluctantly, Addaf signalled for his men to dismount, the younger ones grabbing handfuls of reins and dragging the horses away as the old hands slid easily into familiar ranks and heeled their bows, running the string up to the nock in a smooth movement.
Addaf looked at his own bowstave, the ribbon on the tip fluttering softly so that he knew the wind speed and direction. Twenty men oppose us, he thought, no more. Twenty and a handful of dogs for driving the kine – five to one he outnumbered them and one single volley would pin them to the turf.
So why was he so fretted? Because Y Crach seemed to have taken charge of this? He eyed the black ruin of the tower, the weathered cross and the battered chapel and did not like the omen of this place at all; his men, bows smarted and drooped to the ground, waited for the command that would lift the arrow points up, draw back the braided horsehair and silk string to the ear and release an iron sleet on the enemy.
There was a flurry from the spearmen then and heads turned from watching Addaf to anxiously scan the enemy, for everyone knew that the only hope for the rebel Scotch was to run at the archers instead of standing like a set mill. They did not want these shrieking caterans closing on them, with their rat-desperate bravery and sharpened edges.
But there was no frantic, screaming rush. Instead, bewilderingly, the front rank seemed to have melted away, scurrying for cover behind the carts, leaving the others to face the arrows. One of them, dunted by a hurrying shoulder, tilted and fell over, the spear falling. Another leaned slowly sideways as if drunk.
False. Addaf saw it the same time as everyone else. A front rank of men, now under cover, had hidden the truth of hastily made dummies of lashed crosspoles and twisted grass, capped with a helmet, draped with a tunic.
False.
Even as it rang in him like a bell, he heard the savage shrieking yell, that blood-chiller the archers knew so well.
Then, behind them, the ground drummed with the mad gallop of garrons, every one with a nightmare of wet-mouthed savagery wielding that wicked Jeddart staff, with blade and spear and dragging hook.
And in front, wild dags of black hair flying, bearded face twisted in a snarl of anger and utter hate, a rider swung a hooked axe in one fist, split the skull of young Daiwyn and scarcely seemed to notice.
Addaf did not know who it was, only what it was. It was time to be somewhere else and in a running hurry.
Irish Sea
At the same moment …
It is, Niall Silkie declared in a shrill yell from the nest, showing a deal of smoke from the sterncastle. And it has lost its flag for another, a red horsehoe.
The cog was so close that Hal and everyone else could see that for themselves, peering out from behind the hastily lashed mantlets that provided cover from arrows. A thread of smoke and a red flag with a downward curve, like a droop of moustache.
Pegy went red-faced and furious then, bawling and screaming orders that sent men lurching at ropes; the sail banged down and filled, heaving the
Bon Accord
ponderously forward. Others of the crew fetched out long knives and two near-identical brothers, copper-haired and wiry, sprang up to the sterncastle, one with a bow, the other with arrows.
‘Not a horseshoe,’ Pegy growled at the grim assembly beside him. ‘A crab.’
He managed a mirthless smile at the anxious faces round him.
‘A wee jest on his name. Jack Crabbe was yin o’ Red Rover’s better captains afore the Rover embraced the Kingdom’s cause. Now Jack Crabbe’s ship, the
Marrot,
is a skulking moudiewart in the service of any who will pay – or more likely his own self.’
‘Hardly his own, I fancy,’ Rossal answered in steady, unaffected French. ‘He is not here by happenchance, flying a banner of the Order.’
He was not, Hal thought, and the thread of smoke nagged at him while the brothers, Angus and Donald, argued about who should shoot first.
‘The range is too great,’ Angus declared. ‘Give it to me – I have the muscle for the work.’
‘You? Ye couldna hit a bull’s erse if ye clung to its tail.’
‘In the name o’ Christ an’ all His bliddy saints – God forgive me – will yin o’ ye shoot.’
Pegy’s exasperated bellow made everyone wince, but Donald drew back until the bow creaked protest, then almost flung the arrow from him. It splashed a score of feet short.
‘Ye see? Ye bummlin fruster – wait until she closes.’
The brothers scowled at each other, but Hal had finally worked out what the smoke was and the chill of it tumbled the words from him like frost.
‘They will not close, nor have need to. They will fire off that engine they have up the sharp end and drop carcasses on us until we burn.’
‘Christ’s Blood.’
The words were out of Rossal’s mouth before he could stop them and he crossed himself at once and fervently offered penance for his sin at the first opportunity. Kirkpatrick grunted out a laugh at Hal’s elbow.
‘I hope you have the chance,’ he added and then glanced at the sail and the fog bank; he noted wryly that the more wind there was shoving the ship, the more the fog bank receded in front of them. It was a grim humour folk had come to expect from Kirkpatrick, but the rasp of it was a grate on the nerves for all that.
There was a dull thud of release, a deeper burst of smoke and a brief flowering of red. Then a tailed star shot up, trailing an arc across to them; it hit the water with a gout of sizzle and splash.
‘In the name of Christ,’ muttered Angus. ‘Yon’s a bad sight – but I am pleasured to see that they can shoot no better than you, brother.’
‘A warning,’ de Villers declared, adjusting the fold of his maille coif so that it covered all of the lower part of his face. ‘This Crabbe does not want us burned to the waterline. He knows what we carry.’
Yet again unspoken words hung above them like a corpse from a gibbet: they had a traitor.
Painfully, the pursuing ship overhauled them, for all Pegy’s bawling and the frantic bucket chain soaking the sail to garner more wind, for all Somhairl’s muscled skill at tillering the bulky cog to suck up the last puff.
Another star trailed smoke out and this time the gout of steam and the splash were far closer. Hal saw Sim climb to the forecastle, stick a foot in the stirrup of the arbalest and begin to wind it; he wanted to call out for the auld fool to watch his white pow, but smiled at himself, standing half-naked and ill-armed and almost as ancient.
‘They want us to heave to,’ Niall bawled from his mast-nest.
‘Signal them to eat shite,’ Pegy howled back and men laughed, though it was mirthless and tied with tension like a harsh twist of cord. Angus did his best to obey, baring his buttocks and pretending to eat the contents, so that the men laughed, harder and more shrill.
Hal could now see small figures on the other ship, using iron rods to carefully lift the burning ball of oil-soaked withies; it was so like the ribs of some beast that men called it a carcass. Drop it, he wished wildly; if you roll yon on your own deck there may be a chance for us this day.
He looked at the sail and then over his shoulder; the fog bank was a cable length away and he groaned – he knew that the pursuers could not risk them escaping in the haar and that this shot would be for a hit. They were close enough that they might actually manage it, too.
Rossal and the others knew it; knew also that the target would be the huddle of black-robed men on the sterncastle, so clearly the ones who mattered that they might as well have waved their own Beauseant banner.
‘Away,’ Rossal said gently. ‘If you value your lives.’
At the same time, Pegy hammered his feet on the deck in a mad dance to signal Somhairl, bellowing at him to heel over hard to farans, to put the enemy off their aim.
Somhairl was leaning hard on the tiller, obediently turning the heavy ship to starboard, when the world whirled from behind him and blasted him to blackness. Uncontrolled, the tiller waved and the cog floundered.
Pegy felt it, yelled out furiously and men turned from their tasks to see, amid the sudden flutter of men spilling from the sterncastle, the slumped form of the Red Shadow; at once Donald and Angus sprang to the tiller and strained, cursing.
‘Dunted,’ Kirkpatrick said, kneeling by the slumped form of the big Islesman. ‘There, ahint the ear. Bigod, it is as well his braid took the brunt, else he would be standing before his Maker.’
A blow, Hal thought, designed to kill, not just to lay the man out for a while. He and Kirkpatrick exchanged glances, each knowing the thoughts of the other at once, from long association; the traitor was here, on board. Hal’s eyes flitted from sailor to black-clad knight; de Villers met his stare and then turned away, while de Grafton laid his shoulder to the tiller and helped the straining brothers. It could have been anyone in the shadows under the sterncastle, Hal thought bitterly.