Lion at Bay by Robert Low Page A

sense, save ower that wummin.’
    ‘Christ,’ Hal growled back at him, ‘enough hagging me with that. If you had a wummin you cared an ounce for yourself, man, you would know the sense in what I feel for Isabel of Mar.’
    Kirkpatrick laughed, though there was little warmth in it.
    ‘You once asked me as to what I wanted from serving the Bruce,’ he said suddenly. ‘So I ask you in return, Hal of Herdmanston – what is it keeps you here, if you carp at the work Bruce has for us? Siller? Your fortalice restored? Yon wee coontess?’
    I miss Herdmanston, thought Hal. And Bangtail and Dog Boy, sent out to chase after Wallace and neither of them up to the task of it. And Sim, who oversees Herdmanston’s rebuilding. And women to talk to rather than swive in a sweaty, meaningless rattle. And bairns laughing, with sticky faces. And men building rather than tearing apart. And an end of folk the likes of Malise – aye, and Kirkpatrick himself.
    Above all, there was her and the music of laughing she had returned to his life, a music that had ended when his wife and son slipped out of the world. A music that, for five years, he had lived without, with no prospect of it in the black void that was today, would be tomorrow and would be still the next God-damned year. That’s what he wanted back, what he hoped Bruce would somehow help him achieve.
    ‘Music,’ he said to Kirkpatrick and left the man arrowing frowns on his face.
    Music?
    In the end, sleep stole Kirkpatrick away from making sense of it.
     
    Lincoln
    The same night
     
    Music flared loud as light, half-drowned by talk in the Great Hall, where banners wafted like sails and the sconces jigged in the rising haze. Sweating servants scurried in the sea of people, bright finery and roaring chatter while the musicians strummed and blew and rapped out
Douce Dame Jolie
as if Machaut himself were there to hear played what he had written.
    Sir Aymer de Valence, limping and lush with glee, told the tale – yet again – of his daring escape from the clutches of Bruce by the mad expedient of hurling himself from his own horse into the middle of the
mêlée
. All the gilded coterie, the King’s close friends and those who wanted to be, applauded, laughing – all save Malenfaunt, bruised and furious that the sacrifice he had made for de Valence was no part of the tale.
    ‘Turned the German Method back on you,’ de Valence yelled across and Bruce raised his goblet in smiling acknowledgement of the feat, all the while studying the ones around the bright-faced young heir to the earldom of Pembroke.
    Had de Valence paid Malenfaunt’s hefty ransom? Bruce pondered it; though his mother held the Pembroke lands, de Valence had the family holdings in France and so could well afford it.
    If not him, then who? It was certes Malenfaunt himself did not have such coin, nor any call on someone rich enough, for all he was part of the
mesnie
of de Valence. Yet he had ransomed himself and his horse and his harness, which had not been cheap.
    The music shrilled; dancers, circling in a sweaty
estampie
, bobbed and weaved and laughed. The slow drumbeat thump-thump, insistent as nagging, finally silenced the players; one by one the last of the half-drunk dancers stopped stamping, blearily ashamed. Heads turned to where the Lincoln steward stood with his iron-tipped staff rapping a steady beat and, behind him, the King.
    He looked every inch regal, too, Bruce thought. He stood with one mottled hand on a dagger hilt of narwhal ivory and jacinth, coiffed and silvered, prinked and rouged, brilliant in murreyed Samite and orphrey bands, but draped in a fine blue-wool cloak – no Provence perse here, of course, but good English wool; even in dress, Edward was politic.
    He had good reason to look pleased with himself, too and the lavish Swan Feast was simply the statement of it, fit for the monarch of two realms. With the French king humbled to peace and with his Gascony lands secured, Edward straddled