A fist of a face, the beard on it cropped to stubble, but with a great gristle of moustache, as if some giant black caterpillar had crawled under his nose. Cheekbones like knobs and a single scowl of eyebrow – typical Welsh, Sir Marmadule thought, from the south, where the archers are, for the north are mainly spearmen. He said so and De Warenne nodded. Cressingham pouted and scowled.
‘Look at him,’ he said, quivering. ‘Look at what he is wearing.’
Not much, Sir Marmaduke thought – a ragged linen tunic in a distant memory of red, a great shock of dark hair like a sprout of bush on a rock. Nothing on his legs but his bare feet, though there were shoes hung round his neck. He had a leather bracer on one arm, a bow the same size as himself in a bag of some strange-looking leather and a soft bag of the same hanging from one side of a belt, a long, wicked-looking sheathed knife from the other.
In the bag at his hip were arrows, though they were all neatly separated by leather to keep the fletchings from fouling, and the way the bag swung told Sir Marmaduke that it had damp clay shaped to the bottom of it, to prevent the points bursting through.
Across the powerful shoulders, one humped slightly as if he was deformed, hung a long roll and fall of rough wool fabric which had been russet-brown once and was now just dark.
‘A Welsh archer,’ Sir Marmaduke said, ‘with bow, a dozen good arrows and a knife. The thing round his shoulders is a called a brychan if I am not mistaken. Serves as cloak and bed both.’
‘Well, you would know that, certes,’ Cressingham declared with a sneer, ‘since you have spent a deal of your life fighting such. No help in present cirumstances, mark me.’
‘Is there a point to this, Treasurer?’ De Warenne sighed. Cressingham made a show of plucking a paper from Frixco’s fingers.
‘Item,’ he said. ‘Welsh archer, cap-a-pied, with a warbow of yew, one dozen goose-fletched arrows, a sword and a dagger.’
He thrust the paper back at Frixco.
‘This is what is being paid for from the Exchequer,’ he declared triumphantly. ‘And this is what I expect for the price. Cap-a-pied. Which means one hat of iron, one coat of war, either maille or a leather jack, studded for preference. One sword. One yew bow and a dozen finest shafts. That is what is being paid for and that is what we do not have. This man is a ragged-arsed peasant with stick and string, no more.’
Addaf had followed a deal of it, despite their being English, for that tongue was now heard more and more in Wales and it was a sensible man who learned it and spoke it well. Then, he thought, they turn round and speak an even stranger tongue, the French, which wasn’t even their own but belonged to the people they were fighting. Among others.
He had listened quietly, too, for it was also a sensible man who realised that fighting against these folk was now old and done, though the defeat in it was still a raw wound no more than a handful of years gone. Yet taking their money to fight with them was almost as good a revenge for Builth and the loss of Llewellyn and better than starving in the ruin war had made of the valleys.
Yet peasant was too hard for a man of those same valleys to bear.
‘I am Addaf ap Dafydd ap Math y Mab Lloit Irbengam,’ he growled in English, ‘and no peasant with an arse of rags.’
He saw the look on them, the same as the look on folk’s faces when they had seen the two-headed calf at the fair the year he had left. The fat one looked bemused.
‘Do. You. Speak. English?’ this one demanded, leaning forward and talking as if Addaf was a child. The tall one with the long face, the one pointed out as having fought Welsh once, twitched the mourn of his moustaches into a brief smile.
‘You are annoying a Welshman, Treasurer,’ he said, ‘for English is what he is already speaking.’
Addaf saw the fat one bristle like an old boar sow.
‘His name,’ Sir Marmaduke explained, speaking English, both clear and slow, Addaf noted, so that everyone would understand, ‘means Addaf son of David, son of Madog, though the last part confuses me a little – The Brown Lad With The Wrong Head?’
He knew the Welsh – Addaf took to this Sir Marmaduke at once, for he had once been a bold adversary and he knew the Welsh a little and the English as spoken by True People; Addaf heaved a sigh of relief.
‘Dark and stubborn, I am after believing it is in your own tongue,’ he said and added ‘Lord,’ because it did no harm to mark the trail of matters politely.
‘I am from the gwely of Cilybebyll,’ he explained earnestly, so that these folk would know with whom they dealt. ‘I have a cow and enough grazing land to feed eight goats for a year. I am a free man of the True People, by the grace of God, sharing an ox, a goad, a halter and a ploughshare with three others in common. I am not a serf with ragged arse.’
‘Did you understand any of that?’ Cressingham demanded waspishly. Sir Marmaduke turned slowly to him.
‘You have offended him, it appears. In my experience, Cressingham, it does no good to offend a Welshman. Particularly bowmen – see you the shoulder? That hump is pulling muscle, Treasurer. Addaf here has some twenty-odd summers on him and I’ll warrant at least seventeen of them have been used to train with that bow until he can pull the string on one taller than a well-made man and thick as a boy’s wrist, all the way back to his ear. The arrows, I will avow, are an ell at least and are fletched, not with goose, but with peacock, which means they are his finest. This man can put such a shaft through an oak church door at a hundred paces and then another ten or so of its cousins within the minute. If he does his job aright, he will not need iron hat or studded jack or maille – all his enemies will be dead in front of him.’
He broke off and stared fixedly at Cressingham, who did not like the look of him nor of the scowling black-faced Welshman.
‘Christ be praised,’ murmured Brother Jacobus and crossed himself into the twist of Addaf’s smile.
‘For ever and ever,’ they intoned – Addaf louder than the rest, just so the crow of a priest would get the point.
‘I would take our Welshman as is, Treasurer,’ Sir Marmaduke added gently, ‘and be glad of it.’
‘Just so,’ De Warenne added and thumped the table. ‘Now, Treasurer, you can carry on doing what you do best – scribbling and tallying up how to get my army, well fed and in good humour, to where I can meet this Wallace Ogre and defeat him.’
Sir Marmaduke watched Addaf the Welshman slap barefoot back across the flags, dismissed with barely controlled fury by Cressingham, who now closed his head with the Black Friar and his ink-fingered clerk. De Warenne, hugging himself in his cloak, fell back on complaint.
It was bad enough, Sir Marmaduke thought wearily, that the pair of them were in charge of this battue without there being a Wallace at the other end of it.
Blind Tarn’s tavern, near Bothwell
Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ, August 1297
He came down on the road on a tired horse, hood up and cloak swaddling him. The horse was being nagged on and did not like it much, balking now and then, tugging Malise’s arm and stumbling. It was no wise thing to be out on the roads alone at the best of times and certainly not now.
Even so, Malise was half-asleep and daydreaming of himself on one of the Buchan’s great warhorses, or a captured stallion of The Bruce, all fire and rearing, a stiff prick with iron hooves. He was riding down fleeing men and closing in on a woman, who ran screaming, until he got close and found himself, suddenly, off the powerful horse and staring at her. She lay helpless, bosom heaving after the running – but gave him a knowing smile and a look, then put one finger