Jamie rode alongside her, a lute in one hand; he winked at Dog Boy, who managed a wan smile and the pair of them shared the sadness of this, their final moments together in all their lives to this point.
‘Wife,’ growled Buchan with a nod of grudged greeting and had back a cool smile.
‘La,’ she then said loudly, cutting through all the noise of dogs and horses and men. ‘Lord Robert – finches.’
Buchan brooded from under the lowered lintel of his brows at Bruce and his wife, playing the same silly game they had played all through last night at table. He felt the temper in him rising like a turd in a drain.
‘Easy. A chirmyng,’ Bruce replied. ‘Now one for you – herons.’
Hal saw the way Isabel pouted, her eyes sapphire fire and her hair all sheened with copper lights; he felt his mouth grow dry and stared. Buchan saw that too, and that irked him like a bad summer groin itch that only inflamed the more you scratched it.
‘A siege,’ she answered after only a short pause. ‘My throw – boys.’
Bruce frowned and squinted while the hunt whirled round them like leaves, not touching the pair of them, as if they sat in a maelstrom which did not ruffle a hair on either head. But Hal watched Buchan watching them and saw the hatred there, so that when Bruce gave in and Isabel clapped her hands with delight, Hal saw the Comyn lord almost lift off his saddle with rage.
‘Ha,’ she declared, triumphantly. ‘I have come out on top again.’
Then, as Bruce’s face flamed, Hal heard her add, ‘A blush of boys.’
‘If ye are done with your games,’ White Tam growled from the knotted root of his face, ‘we may commence the hunt.
‘My lord,’ he added, seeing Bruce’s scowl and managing to invest the term with more scathe than a scold’s bridle. Since White Tam was the Douglas head huntsman and more valued than even Gutterbluid the Falconer, Bruce could only smile and acknowledge the man with a polite inclination of his head.
‘Now we will begin,’ White Tam declared and flapped one hand; the cavalcade moved laboriously off, throwing clots up over the grass from the track that led into the forest alongside the Douglas Water. Dog Boy watched Gib being pulled into the wake of the hound cart by the deerhounds.
‘Peace, o my stricken lute,’ warbled Jamie shakily and plucked one or two notes, though the effect was spoiled by his having to break off and steer the horse.
‘Bloody queer battue this,’ Sim Craw growled, coming up to Hal’s elbow. Buchan and Bruce were armed and mailled, though they had left helms behind as a sop to false friendship and because what they wore was already a trial in the damp May warmth.
Buchan even rode his expensive warhorse, Sim pointed out, as if he expected trouble, while the shadow of Malise Bellejambe jounced at his back on a rouncey fitted with fat saddle-packs on either side.
‘Or would mak’ trouble,’ Hal answered and Sim stroked his grizzled chin and touched the stock of the great bow slung to one side of his rough-coated horse, watching the constantly shifting eyes of Bellejambe. Kirkpatrick, he noted, was nowhere to be seen and the entire fouled affair made him more savage at the mouth of the barrel-chested Griff, a foul-tempered garron, small, hairy and strong.
All his men rode the same mounts, small horses ideally suited for rough trod and long rides in the dark and the wet, with only a handful of oats and rainwater at the end of it. They could run for hours and sleep in snowdrifts, but would not stand up to a mass of men on horses the like of Buchan’s Bradacus – but Hal was Christ-damned if he would be caught in a fight on a mere gelded ambler.
Sim and two hands of riders, wearing as much protection as they could strap on, followed him and they were not sure whether they were here for hunt or herschip, since they were armed with long knives and Jeddart staffs.
Bruce’s smile was wry when he looked at them. It was hardly a hunting weapon, the Jeddart, an eight-foot shaft reinforced with iron for the last third, fitted with polearm spearpoint, a thin sliver of blade on one side and a hook like a shepherd’s crook on the other. Men skilled with it could lance from horseback, or dismount and form a small huddle of points, capable of hooking a rider out of the saddle, or slicing his expensive horse to ruin. Bruce, for all he thought they looked like mounted ruffians, saw the strength and use of them.
‘If you were April’s lad-ee and I were Lord of May,’ Jamie twittered as they scowled along the river road, the sun shining like a jest on their mockery.
They swung off the road, the carts lurching and the caged dogs whining eagerly. Dog Boy saw the forest, dark and musked, pearled with dawn rain. The trees, so darkly green they looked black, sprawled over hills alive with hidden life, tangled with bracken and scrub.
A place of red caps, dunters and powries, Sim Craw thought to himself and shivered at the idea of those Faeries. He liked the flat, long roll of Merse and March, bleak as an old whore’s heart; forests made him hunch his shoulders and draw in his neck.
The trees closed in and the road vanished behind them as the sun turned faint, staining the woods with dapple; the flies closed in, whirring and nipping, so that horses fretted and twitched.
‘What do they eat when we’re elsewhere?’ Bangtail whined, slapping his neck, but no-one wanted to open his mouth enough to answer, in case he closed it on cleg.
The Lady smiled at Hal and he remembered her turning to him in the Ward after Buchan and Bruce had gone off, arm in arm like returned brothers. He remembered it particularly for the astonishment in seeing her snub-nosed, chap-cheeked pig of a face softened by concern.
‘I know what this day has cost,’ she had murmured in gentle, courtly French and both the language and the sentiment had shocked him even more. Then she’d added, in gruff Scots, ‘Not me nor the boy here will be after forgetting, either. Ye’ll be sae cantie as a sou in glaur whenever ye come to Douglas after this.’
Sae cantie as a sou in glaur – happy as a pig in muck – and not the best offer Hal had ever had; for all her courtly French and De Lovaine breeding, the Lady of Douglas had the mouth of a shawled washerwoman when she chose. Hal thanked her all the same, while watching Buchan watching Bruce and the pair breaking off only to watch Isabel MacDuff.
The Lady of Douglas turned and spoke to White Tam, waving flies from her face. The old huntsman was like some gnarled tree, Buchan thought, but he knew the business well enough still. White Tam signalled and the whole cavalcade stopped; the hounds milled in their cages, yelping and whining.
A nod from the huntsman to Malk, and the houndsmen struck off the road and up into the trees with the carts, the dog boys leaning in to push over the scrub and rough; everyone followed and in a few steps it seemed to everyone as if the forest had moved, stepped closer and loomed over them, sucking up all noise until even Jamie gave up on his love dirges.
White Tam stood up slightly in the stirrups, a bulky, redfaced figure with a cockerel shock of dirty-snow hair which gave him his name. He had a beard which reminded Hal of an old goat and had one eye; the other, Hal had heard, had been lost fighting men from Galloway, in a struggle with a bear and in a tavern brawl. Any one, Hal thought, was possible.
The head hunstman rode like a half-empty bag of grain perched on a saddle. His back hurt and his limbs ached so much nowadays that even what sun there was in these times did nothing for him. It would have astonished everyone who thought they knew the old hunter to learn that he did not like this forest and the more he had discovered about it, the less he cared for it. He liked it least at this time of year and, at this moment, actively detested it, for the stags were coming into their best and the hunt would be long, hot and tiring.
The huntsman thought this whole farce the worst idea anyone