The Complete Kingdom Trilogy: The Lion Wakes, The Lion at Bay, The Lion Rampant. Robert Low
and he jerked awake, in time to see a man duck out of a sacking-covered doorway, unlacing his front and cursing as he stumbled over a discarded bucket. He gave Malise the merest bleary glance, then directed a stream of steaming relief on the dungheap, farted noisily and stared with unfocused eyes at the wattle-and-daub wall of what Malise realised was not a stable for the tavern, but the man’s home.
Malise blinked once or twice and forced the tired mount down the length of road where buildings straggled, separated by drunken fencing and strips of bare, turned-earth plots. Ahead lay the great ramshackle arrangement of an inn, two storeys high and timber-framed on stone; the smell of food flooded Malise.
A woman appeared from one of the houses, driving a cow to be staked on a small patch of communal grass. It dropped dung with a splatter and, without breaking stride, she scooped it up in a basket and went on, looking briefly at Malise, who glared back from under his hood until she dropped her eyes.
She might well have been pretty once – her dress had the memory of bright colour in it somewhere – but she was long severed from cleanliness or good manners, with a face roughened by wind and weather, yet pasty and pinched under the windchape. Malise slithered off the horse at the tether pole, hearing movement inside the inn and a burst of laughter; the horse sagged, hipshot and relieved.
The inn was dim inside and the moment of stepping from light to dark left Malise disorientated, so that he panicked and fumbled for the hilt of his dagger. Then the stink hit him – thick air, old food, spilled drink, farts, shit, vomit and, with a thrill that made him grunt, the thin, acrid stink of old sex. The place was also a brothel.
When his eyes adjusted, he was in a large room with a beaten earth floor and roughcast walls laced with timber. There were rushes strewn on the floor between the tables and benches, but it was clear they had not been changed in some time. Two great metal lanterns with horn panels hung on chains from the main rafters, together with tray-pulleys, for hauling drink and food to the gallery that went all round the square of the place. Up there, Malise reckoned, were sleeping rooms and the stair to them was behind the earthen oven and the slab of wood that served as a worktop. It was altogether a fine inn.
A girl was wearily slopping water on the slab of wood and raking it back and forth with a cloth; she looked up as he stood blinking, his hood still up. She was dirty, the ingrained dirt of a long time of neglect and her eyes were dull, her hair lank, lusterless – yet it was tawny somewhere in the depths of it and those dead eyes had sparkled blue as water once.
‘We are not open,’ she said and, when he did not respond, looked up and said it again.
‘Please yourself,’ she added with a shrug when he stood there with his mouth open. He almost started towards her with a fist clenched, then remembered what he was after and stopped, smiling. Honey rather than Hell.
‘What have we here, then?’ demanded a loud voice and a shape bulked out a door at the far end of the room. Naked from the waist, the man was a huge-bellied apparition, hairy as a boar, with the remnants of a moustache straggling greasily through many chins, though the hair on his head was cropped to iron-grey stubble. He was lacing up braies under the flop of the belly and beaming in what he fondly imagined was genial goodwill.
Malise was appalled and repelled. The man looked like a great troll, yet the swinging cross on his chest belied that. ‘Tam,’ he announced.
‘You don’t look blind to me,’ Malise managed and the man chuckled throatily.
‘My auld granda,’ he declared proudly, ‘dead and dead these score of years. A father-to-son wee business this.’
‘Sit,’ he said, then slapped the dull-eyed girl on the arm. ‘Stir yourself – start the fire.’
Malise sat.
‘Come from far?’ Tam rumbled, scratching the hairs on his belly. ‘Not many travel up this road since the Troubles.’
‘Douglas,’ Malise lied, for he had actually travelled in from Edinburgh, where he had spent a fruitless time searching out the Countess after the events at Douglas. He had missed her there, tracked her to Irvine and knew she was headed for The Bruce, the hot wee hoor. But he had missed her there, too, and the money the earl had given him was all but run out; soon, he would have to return north and admit his failure. He did not relish the idea of admitting failure to the Earl of Buchan, even less admitting that the bloody wee hoor of a Countess had not only outwitted him by escaping, but continued to do so.
‘A long journey,’ Tam said jovially. ‘You’ll bide here the night.’
Then his brows closed into a single lintel over the embers of his eyes and he added, ‘You’ll have siller, sure, and will not mind showin’ the colour of it.’
Malise fished out coin enough to satisfy him, then had to seethe silently as it was inspected carefully. Finally, Tam grinned a gap of brown and gum, got up and fetched a flask and two wooden cups.
‘Fine wine for a fine gentle,’ he declared expansively, splashing it into the cups. ‘So the road is safe? Folk are travelling on it?’
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