He looked round at his own men, a long hundred of whey-faced and grey-grim Welsh archers. Well they might look like corpses, he thought moodily, which was no more than they deserved for drinking the soured wine given to them to wash the heads of their own horses.
Mixed with water and applied carefully, it repelled the vicious flies and soothed their bites – Addaf’s own little mare had a forehead of fat lumps from them – but drink, no matter how foul, was never to be wasted by a good Welshman on sluicing a horse.
So they had swallowed it down and now groaned and shat noxiously down their legs and over their horses, for Addaf, viciously, would not let them rest. Scout the area, he had been told, and so that is what he forced them to do, even though the task was tedious. The point of it was to deter the Scotch from scouring it clean of anything that might help the King’s army when it arrived.
Small good the drink had done them. Now they had soiled the good coloured tabards issued by Sir Thomas Berkeley, complete with his badge on the breast; they would wipe their arses with the banner, too, Addaf was sure, if they got the chance. Sir Thomas would not like that – but Sir Thomas was not within a hundred miles of this hot, damp, flyblown, God-cursed place.
Hwyel came to his elbow, silent and narrow-eyed, taking a knee with a grunt that let Addaf know his innards stabbed him. He spared the man a glance, taking in the dark, close-cropped beard and the filth-grimed lines; he remembered the man when he had been young and colt-eager, full of irrepressible humour. It had been a long time since he had heard Hwyel laugh and the men now called him Hwyel Cuchiog – the Frowning.
‘Dduw bod ‘n foliannus,’ he grunted – God be praised. Addaf stared unpityingly into his jaundiced eyes and gave him the rote response.
‘In ois oisou.’ For ever and ever.
‘Now that we know that enemies of Christ do not inhabit us,’ Addaf went on wryly in a fluid cough of Welsh, ‘save for the devils in your belly, have you any thoughts on who might be ahead of us and, more to the point, where?’
‘None,’ Hwyel growled back. ‘Does it matter? If we go to them, there they will be and we can shoot them to ruin, same as ever, Mydr ap Mydvydd, for we are better than they.’
Mydr ap Mydvydd. Aim the Aimer was another of Addaf’s hard-earned names, though the truth of that these days was less than honest, since Addaf’s eyes were not what they had once been and he was sure folk knew it but stayed quiet, out of deference.
He half turned, glancing at the sour sky and then at the men waiting patiently beside their horses; he heard one retch and saw Lowarch suddenly thrust the reins to his neighbour and dart off, half squatting and moaning even as he moved.
Then Y Crach moved to him like a scowl, his roseate face flaring in the leprous heat.
‘Ye needs must punish these,’ he said in his singsong way and now Addaf matched him for frowns. Y Crach – Scab – was thin and wiry, a good archer but with no great muscle on him. Some said he had been a priest, licked by a sickness known to be a killer, yet he had survived untouched but for his plaguey face and was convinced the Hand of God was in it. Now he was hot for the Lord and hotter still to do His work against the heathen Scotch, but it made him careless of hierarchy.
‘Bedd a wna bawb yn gydradd,’ Addaf answered, pointedly dismissive – the grave makes everyone equal. Y Crach bristled and Hwyel laughed, but then winced as another fierce reminder of his transgression rippled his bowels.
‘Well, are we after fighting, or can we go home?’ he asked and Addaf cursed him for cutting to the core of matters. Of course they could not go home, even if they had one, without having done what they had been told to do. They were now in the retinue of the Berkeleys and, even if Sir Thomas was not here, his son Maurice was, fretting about his sick wife back in England and unlikely to be consoled by failure.
Addaf looked pointedly at Y Crach until the man took the hint and went away. Then he levered himself up.
Hwyel rose up with Addaf, taking in the silver and iron look of the man, the hump of muscle on one shoulder that made him look like a crookback. Hwyel had been with Addaf for seven years of hard life and killing and knew it had infected his leader with a disease which had driven out joy.
He wondered what Addaf had once been like, in the part long burned away by war. For a moment, he remembered his own younger self and grinned as Addaf turned to him.
‘We will make them dance, we will make them kick,’ he said, ‘with a clothyard shaft and a crooked stick.’
The echo of the boy he had been fell like dull pewter between them; Addaf’s gaze was sour.
‘Teg edrych tuag adref,’ he answered – it is good to think of home. Which was a lie for him, who had not thought of his little patch, two brothers and mam in many a long year.
Mam will be dead and gone, he thought with a sudden, vicious wrench of all that he had abandoned. Brothers, too, likely … and if they live yet it will no longer be my patch, but will belong to them now and the babanod they have made who grew up into it after them. No one there would know me if I walked into the centre of the place.
He shook it all off like a dog from water and went rolling away on bad knees.
Hwyel watched Addaf’s lumpen back as he hirpled away towards the others, barking orders; he wondered how long it would take and what he must endure to become as black-avowed as him.
An hour later, he found out.
Irish Sea
At the same moment …
Niall Silkie skinned down from the mast-nest on a tarred rope, swinging on to the sterncastle like some long-armed babery. He landed lightly, almost on the toes of the scowling Pegy Balgownie.
‘It is my sure opeenion’, he said, ‘that yon weirman weltering astern is afire.’
Pegy blinked and Hal saw the bewilderment in Rossal’s eyes.
‘He says the warship astern of us is burning.’
‘There’s after being a wheen o’ smoke,’ Niall Silkie persisted and Pegy stroked his beard, scowling at Rossal.
‘Perhaps it really is the other ship, this Maryculter,’ de Grafton offered in French, his spade-bearded face heavy with concern. ‘In which case, we must help, surely, if only to discover why it is afire and who attacked it.’
‘A ruse,’ Kirkpatrick countered, tension thickening his Braid Scots. ‘Designed to play on the chivalry of your graces … aw, it is creishie wi’ cunning, for they must ken that we have proper Knights of the Order here, who once wore the white mantle rather than the grey of lesser lights. They will rely on your nobility and honour blinding you, sirs, whether you are disbanded or no’.’
Rossal’s brow lashed itself with frowns and Pegy, sensing the balance, glanced at the filling sail, then at the fog bank.
‘The wind is up a notch. Two nicks on the steerin’ oar to farans and we can be in the haar and vanished like wraiths, my lord.’
Somhairl, looking up through the castle planks at the booted feet and able to hear every word, leaned expectantly on the starboard-quarter tiller, bunching his muscles to turn the ship at Pegy’s order. Men waited with coiled rope to lend their muscle to haul the unwieldy vessel quickly on to a new course; the moment clung and sucked the breath away.
Then Rossal shifted.
‘Bring in your sail, captain,’ he said firmly. ‘We will await the arrival of this burning vessel.’
Kirkpatrick