After Flodden (13 page)

Her heart keeled over. Just out of sight a dark shape darted, keeping to the corner of her eye. She pushed her hood back, and the emptiness of the moors washed over her with its muffled wet
breath. She strained to see into the haar, but it eddied and swirled as if in a dance, and gave nothing away. The shape appeared again, the height of a bush, but moving. Too big for a fox, too
narrow for a deer. There it was again. Two legs. The vixen dropped into a crouch, and began to growl.

With a trembling hand, Louise pulled the dagger from her belt. ‘Who goes there?’ she cried. ‘Show yourself. I am armed.’

Hans came to a stop. Louise kept her eyes on the heath. There was nothing there, but now she could hear steps, the hush of feet on grass, the suck of air as if whoever was out there had been
running, and was breathless.

Suddenly, a face appeared at her knee, hair plastered over its eyes with rain. Louise screamed. The vixen sprang through the mist at the man and fixed her teeth on his arm. With a bellowing
neigh, Hans reared. As Louise fought to control him, a bony hand gripped the bridle, and pulled him down, seemingly unmoved by the dog clamped to his other arm. ‘Steady. Steady.’ The
voice was soft. Hans shied from the stranger’s touch, but after a moment’s scuffle, when Louise thought both she and the horse must fall, Hans allowed himself to be calmed. As the horse
regained his balance, the vixen let go her prey, and began to bark and snarl, darting in every few seconds to nip his heels as he held the horse’s head.

Shaking so hard she could barely keep her grip, Louise brandished the dagger at arm’s length. The stranger dropped the bridle and stepped back.

‘Wh . . . wh . . . who are you?’ Louise asked. ‘Wh . . . what do you want?’

‘Please,’ he said, ‘I didnae mean to frighten ye. I need help.’

The voice sounded more alarmed than she was, but Louise had heard of tricks like this. The Borderers were cunning. This could be a ruse, to lure her off her horse, away from her saddle pack. She
stared at the stranger, and saw he was a boy. He would be perfect bait for a trap. Yet he was scarcely more than a child. His eyes were rimmed with crimson, and rain coursed down his cheeks. Except
she now saw it was not rain but tears. His hand reached out for the vixen, whose snarling ceased. To Louise’s astonishment, the dog’s tail had begun to wag.

‘What help?’ she began to ask, when the lad dropped to his knees. ‘My faither,’ he sobbed. He covered his face with his hands. His fingers were smeared with blood, as was
his jerkin, bearing an assortment of stains old and fresh that told her he’d been on the road for weeks.

All thought of thieves and murderers fled. If the vixen trusted him, so could she. Louise jumped down beside him. She touched his arm. ‘Get up, boy. Come on, now. Please. Tell me
what’s the matter.’ But he could not speak. Instead he ground his palms into his eyes as if to blot out the memory of everything he had seen.

‘Show me, then,’ she said, pulling him to his feet. Hiccuping with tears, the boy stumbled off down the road, the vixen at his side. Leading Hans, Louise hurried to keep him in
sight. After a short distance he stepped off onto the moor, and the road evaporated behind them. Louise tensed, but she said nothing. Hans followed willingly.

The ground moved under their weight. Black water welled at their feet with each step and she saw the boy was barefoot. It would be worth his while killing her just for her boots. Who
couldn’t conjure tears and a pitiful story if they could not afford to buy shoes? Her heart began to thump. Where and to whom was he taking her?

The boy turned and spoke to her over his shoulder. ‘Close,’ he said, in a whisper, ‘Very close now.’

As he spoke, a huddle of figures began to emerge from the mist. An hour on the moor had taught Louise a little wisdom, and she did not falter. They were too still and angular for men. As the boy
led her nearer, they revealed themselves as a thicket of oaks, a rustling, sweet-scented haven on this desolate heath.

The trees grew out of a bowl of grass and moss, as if with their roots sunken deep out of sight they could summon the courage to face down the moor and its weather. Boy, dog, woman and horse
picked their way through the dripping oaks to the heart of the hollow. Their steps sounded rough and loud in this sheltered space. The boy came to a halt. Louise reached his side, and caught her
breath. At their feet, on a bank of moss, sprawled a man in ragged uniform. His back was braced against a boulder. His padded jerkin was black with blood, and his helmet, which hung from his neck
on a strap, was smeared with red. At his side was a studded shield, and a pike as long as a fishing rod whose blade gleamed in the grass.

The soldier’s chin had dropped upon his chest, as if he was about to sup from his helmet. His arms lay loose at his sides. He was dead, but newly, and the violence of his end was written
so fiercely on his face, and in his bitten fists it was hard not to believe his tormented spirit was still at large in the grove. Around him lay a litter of bandages, wet and scarlet.
Louise’s stomach shifted. When she saw a blood-stained dirk at his side, her legs turned weak. She looped Hans’s reins over a branch. The boy was already crouched at his father’s
side, clutching his fist to his breast. He rocked back and forward on his heels, eyes closed, as if begging him to come back.

Louise approached slowly. ‘How did this happen?’ she asked. She had to repeat the question before the boy answered.

‘He’s a soldier,’ said the boy. ‘He got hurt.’

‘Flodden?’

He nodded, without opening his eyes.

‘That’s a long way off. How did you get this far?’

‘I carried him.’

Louise looked at the figure rocking by his father’s body. He could be no more than twelve or thirteen: slight as a girl, thin as an urchin. His face had the pallor of a lifetime’s
poor food, and too little of it. Though his father was slimly built, he was twice the size of his son. How they got this far was unimaginable.

‘And when . . . ’ Louise put a hand on his shoulder. ‘When did your father die?’

‘Yestreen. Before dark. After he’d used the knife to cut out the badness. He said it was the only way. He said it would save his life. Told me not to watch, but I could hear.’
His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I heard everything.’ He stopped rocking, frozen in that memory.

Louise’s eye travelled the length of the soldier’s body, and saw a molten mess at the end of his leg where his boot had been removed. The foot had been almost, but not entirely,
severed. A maul of flesh, bone and blood melted into the moss and grasses like wax from a candle. Hot liquid rushed into her mouth, and she turned away to be sick.

It was some minutes before she could compose herself enough to speak.

She put a hand on his shoulder. ‘What’s your name, boy?’

‘Hob.’ He ran a hand over his face. ‘Same as faither.’

‘Well, Hob, we have to bury him,’ she said. ‘We can’t leave him here. And then we have to get away, find somewhere for the night.’ She picked at the torn sleeve of
his jerkin, where the vixen had bitten him. ‘This is a good jacket. Without it, she’d have hurt you.’

‘Found it in the camp,’ he said. ‘Faither told me to take it, said I needed it as much as anyone.’

Louise gave a grim smile. ‘He was right.’

The boy nodded, but did not move. He would not let go of his father’s hand.

Louise took out her sword, and carved a narrow grave in the grass. She began to dig with sword and hands, clawing her way as deep as the meagre earth allowed. After a while, as if recovering his
wits, Hob joined her, scrabbling at the roots and soil with broken nails until between them they had made a hollow deep enough for the wretched remains of his father. Together they dragged and
rolled him into his grave, taking as much care not to disturb the corpse as if it could still feel pain. When they had crossed his hands over his breast, they scraped earth and sods over him until
the clotted rags had disappeared under dust. They piled stones onto the earth to weigh it down and keep foxes and crows at bay. Then they looked at the mound, and fell silent.

‘You can come back some day and put up a cross,’ Louise said finally. The boy took her hand. His father’s helmet, his only inheritance, hung from its strap down his back, like
a steel hood. ‘Do we say a prayer?’ he asked.

Louise nodded, and they knelt, bowing their heads under the dripping oaks. The haar was beginning to lift, and the moor’s emptiness pressed in at their backs as the words of the
‘Miserere’ rose over the trees and out across the heath. It was as if the sadness of the chant and the bleakness of the scene had been created specially for each other:

‘Miserere mei, deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.’ Louise spoke gently. The psalm had been sung at her father’s and sister’s funerals, and she knew it too well.
‘Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam.’ Have mercy on me, Oh God, according to thy steadfast love; according to thy abundant mercy blot out my
transgressions . . . The boy did not understand the words but he had no trouble divining the bitterness of the message, the lack of hope, and the promise of nothing more to come but judgement. He
held her hand tighter.

As they rode from the graveside, Louise tied the soldier’s helmet onto her saddlebag, and wrapped her cloak around the child. The words of the lament swaddled them both in misery, yet she
found she was praying not for the dead soldier’s soul, which was beyond her help, but for the boy. She knew nothing about him, but it was all too clear that with his father gone, he had
nothing left in this world to call his own.

CHAPTER EIGHT

4 October 1513

Crumbling with neglect, Crozier’s Keep stood in the forested heart of the Borderlands. Built on the lip of a gorge, its back was protected from marauders by a vertiginous
fall, where buzzards glided beneath the keep’s arrow-slit windows. Seen from the valley floor, the tower rose from the forest straight as a Scots pine. Its turrets peeked from the canopy of
autumn leaves like eyebrows above a mirthless face. Only birds were familiar with these heights. They and the keep’s men, that is, who walked the ramparts every hour, casting an eye over
their land and out to the horizon, where the Cheviot hills were painted in blue.

This day, under steady rain, there was no view except of cloud. The trees shivered, and the keep’s walls ran with water. In the torch-lit hall, a posse of armed men gathered around a table
by the fire. They took it in turn to kick at the logs to coax out more heat, but nothing they did could turn the feeble tongues of flame into a roaring blaze, and the dank chill of the hall lapped
at their heels.

‘There’s more warmth in the devil’s prick than in this place,’ said one, pulling his cowl over his head. ‘Is it any wonder my bones ay ache up here?’ He
stamped, sending a wolfhound skittering across the flagstones from his boots and the only congenial spot before the hearth.

‘Quit your whingeing,’ said another. ‘Too many years in the saddle, that’s your trouble. Hard riding, and hard living have done for you. There’s none of the clan
who’s done his due that doesn’t feel his joints in this weather.’

‘Aye, you could be right,’ was the reply. ‘But it wouldn’t hurt to build a fire that reached ayont the grate, would it?’

‘Gentlemen,’ said the only man seated, whose white hair proclaimed his vintage, ‘kindly remember why we’re gathered. Our comfort is not important.’

There was a ripple of coarse laughter. ‘Gentlemen, eh?’ said the first speaker, taking a swig from his flask. ‘You’d think we was already in court afore the
judge.’

As if they’d been waiting for their cue, the men started upon a litany of stories from the dock and the dungeon, many of the tales recalled first-hand. Ancient grudges and unfulfilled
promises against march wardens and neighbours were revived with such practised swagger it was clear this was a familiar and bottomless pit of entertainment. When it looked as if the anecdotes would
last all morning, a lean man peeled himself off the wall, and made his way to the centre of the group. He rubbed his hands before the fire, his back to the men.

‘We all know why we’re here, right?’ His voice was quiet, but it cut across the hubbub, and the noise subsided. Young as he was, he was leader of this pack. He turned to face
them. He was more heavily armed than the rest, a sword on one hip, a cudgel on the other, and a dagger tucked into his boots. His hair was cut unfashionably close to his head, and his beard even
neater, framing a gaunt, high-cheeked face flushed with years of riding against wind and rain. He was not tall, but there was a horseman’s power in his shoulders and legs, and a
fighter’s heft in his arms. His eyes were cold and hard as he surveyed his men. He looked at each of them in turn.

His eyes swept the group. ‘So what do we do?’ No-one spoke. He waited for an answer even though he knew they were waiting for his. He raised his voice, as if addressing an army, not
a huddle of underfed, half-sottish relatives. ‘We do what we’re best at. We use our brains. We plan one jump ahead. We outwit the enemy. That way we might live to see another winter,
and maybe the one after that, if we’re lucky.’