The Complete Kingdom Trilogy: The Lion Wakes, The Lion at Bay, The Lion Rampant. Robert Low
swept from his room.
The three sat at the high table benches in the huge hall, misted with faint blue smoke from badly lit fires and empty but for De Warenne, Sir Marmaduke and Brother Jacobus, Cressingham’s chaplain from the Ordo Praedicatorum.
Before Cressingham had even slippered his way across the flagged floor, Frixco scuttling behind him, he could hear De Warenne’s complaints, saw that Thweng stared ahead, forearms on the table, and with the air of a man shouldering through a snowstorm while Brother Jacobus, piously telling his rosary, listened without seeming to listen.
‘Plaguey country,’ the Earl of Surrey was saying, then broke off and looked up at Cressingham with watery, violet-rimmed eyes.
‘Here you are at last, Treasurer,’ he snapped. ‘Did you plan to sleep all day?’
‘I have been busy,’ Cressingham fired back, stung by his tone. ‘Trying to sort out the feeding and equipping of this rabble you have brought, claiming it to be an army.’
‘Rabble, sirra? Rabble …’
De Warenne bristled. His trimmed white beard was shaped into a curve and pointed; with his round arming cap he looked like some old Saracen, Cressingham thought.
‘Good nobiles, chided Brother Jacobus and the soft voice stilled everything. De Warenne muttered, Sir Marmaduke went back to staring at nothing and Cressingham almost smiled, though he resisted the triumph of it, for fear the priest would notice. Domini canes – God’s Dogs – folk called the Order of Preachers, but not to their face, since they had been given the papal permission to preach the Word and root out heresy, a wide and sinister writ.
Now this bland-faced little man sat in his frosting of habit and jet cappa, the over-robe that gave them yet another name, Black Friars. He let the polished rosewood beads slip, sibilant as whispers, through his fingers.
Shaven and washed so clean his face seemed to shine like a white rose, Jacobus was, Cressingham knew, using the rosary as a pointed reminder to everyone that this was the Thursday of the Transfiguration of Christ, one of the days of Luminous Mystery. He also knew those beads were just as easily used to tally and list in the service of the Treasurer; if Jacobus was a hound of God, Cressingham thought, then he is kennelled at my command – though it would be prudent to check his chain now and then.
The beads, click-clicking through the friar’s smooth fingers, brought tallying surging back to Cressingham.
‘Gascons,’ he declared viciously, startling De Warenne out of a slump so suddenly he could not form a response; the air hissed out of the Earl and he gobbled like a chicken.
‘Three hundred crossbows from Gascony,’ Cressingham went on accusingly. ‘Now more than half have no crossbows.’
‘Ah,’ said De Warenne. ‘The carts. Missing. Lost. Strayed.’
‘It was the Earl of Surrey’s quite proper military decision,’ Sir Marmaduke said suddenly, his voice a slice across them both, ‘to relieve the march burden on the Gascons by loading their equipment on wagons. After all, they were not to need it until Berwick, at least – unless your reports were misleading about the extent of the rebel problem and it was possible to have encountered this huge ogre Wallace somewhere around York.’
Cressingham opened and closed his mouth. De Warenne barked a short laugh.
‘Ogre,’ he repeated. ‘I am told he is as large as Longshanks – what say you to that, eh, Cressingham? As big as the king?’
Cressingham did not take his eyes from the long-faced Thweng. Like a mile of bad road in England – or two miles of good in Scotland, he thought.
‘What I say, my lord Earl,’ he said, biting the words off as if they had been dipped in aloes, ‘is that you claim some eight hundred horse and ten thousand foot on the rolls. If they are all as good as your Gascons, we may as well quit this land now.’
‘Equip them with new,’ De Warenne snapped back, waving one hand. ‘Make ‘em if you have none in stores.’
‘We have sixty crossbows only here,’ Frixco murmured.
‘Make ‘em bowmen then – one is as good as the other.’
‘We have some fifteen thousand arrows, my lord,’ Frixco declared humbly, ‘but only one hundred bows.’
‘Then make the damned crossbows,’ bellowed De Warenne. ‘Ye have wood and string, d’ye not? Folk who know the way of it?.
Cressingham’s jowls quivered, but he closed his mouth with a click as Jacobus cleared his throat.
‘If it please you, Lord Earl,’ the friar said, ‘we are short on sturgeon heads, flax threads and elk bones.’
De Warenne blinked. He knew flax was used in the making of the bowstrings, but had no idea why a crossbow needed elk bones or, God’s Wounds, sturgeon heads. All he knew of crossbows was that the lower orders could use them without much training. He roared this out, to the satisfaction of the smirking Cressingham.
‘One is for the sockets,’ Brother Jacobus explained quietly to the Earl. ‘The sturgeon heads supply a certain elasticity not found from any substitute.’
De Warenne waved a scornful, dismissive hand.
‘What do you know, priest? Other than one of your old Councils banned the thing.’
‘Canon 29 of the Second Lateran,’ Cressingham offered haughtily.
‘I understood,’ Sir Marmaduke said, his lips curled in what might have been a wry smile or a sneer. ‘that it was a ban only on foolish marksmanship. Shooting apples from heads and such. A ban on that seems sensible enough.’
Brother Jacobus nodded unctiously.
‘Even if it had been an entire ban,’ he replied, ‘such would not apply to use against unbelievers – Moor and Saracen and the like. Happily, English bishops have declared the Scots rebels excommunicate, which means we may use these anathema weapons freely.’
‘Unhappily,’ Thweng replied dryly, ‘I believe Scotch bishops have excommunicated us, which means the rebels can point them our way, too. The Pope is silent on the matter.’
Jacobus looked at Thweng. It was a look that had seldom failed to make folk quail, combining, as it did, displeasure and pious pity. Sir Marmaduke merely stared back at him, eyes blank and glassed as the black friar’s beads.
Sturgeon bones, De Warenne thought wildly. God’s Wounds, this whole enterprise could fall because we don’t have enough fish heads.
Men and food, the endless problem since armies had started marching. De Warenne felt the crushing weariness of it all – the whole business of this pestilential country was a clear message that Longshanks had displeased God and He had turned His Wrath on them. More to the point, De Warenne thought sourly, Longshanks has displeased the likes of me and, one day soon, I will turn my wrath on him, together with all the other lords fretting under the divine right.
Yet the king was not the throne and De Warenne, Earl of Surrey would defend that to the death. His grandfather had been uncle to the Lionheart himself, his father had been Warden of the Cinque Ports and every De Warenne had been a bulwark against the foes of God, for whoever attacked the throne of England assaulted God Himself. John De Warenne, Earl of Surrey, Warden of Scotland, would hold His Fortress against all the rebel scum of the earth.
The thought drew him up a little, even as a cold wind curled the length of the hall, stirring the smoke into swirls and eddies.
Strike north. Find this Wallace and cut him down shorter than Longshanks, so that the king would be pleased with his earl at that. The thought made De Warenne bark out a laugh.
‘Then there are the Welsh,’ Cressingham declared and De Warenne looked at him with a curled lip. Like a fly, he thought, buzz-buzzing in the ear. One good slap …
‘What of the Welsh?’ Sir