Sim’s mask of disgust was ignored and, grinning broadly, Jamie hauled him to his feet, put his boot against the old man’s dead neck, using the leverage to drag his sword free; the blood crept sluggishly out in a viscous tarn, lapping at the apples and plums, the buttered capons, the Shrove griddle cakes and bread spilled from the tables.
Another bloody larder for the Black, Sim thought bitterly as he heard more shouting and turned to it, aware of his weariness. He saw Dog Boy and raised his bloody blade in salute.
Dog Boy had been charged with the woman and her bairn, though he did not know why the Black set such store by it. For all that, he kept her close and grinned as friendly as he could every time he caught her eye; it did not seem to help the tremble in her.
He lost the grin in the hall, with everyone running and shouting and clashing steel. He saw a party break away and head for the stairs and a measure of safety. He saw Sim and Jamie cut down a brace of fighters and thought it was all over until a last knot of men ran at him, wailing desperately. They were led by a big man with a bald head like a flesh fencepost, so that the knob of his original chin alone showed where there had once been a neck. He had a meat cleaver and a deal of trapped-rat courage.
Dog Boy thrust the woman behind him and leaped at this fat giant, hacking overhand with his sword to make the man block with his cleaver, the dirk curving round in his other hand and sinking into the fat man’s belly. He thought he heard a scream from behind him and fought the urge to look and see if the woman and her bairn were under attack.
The fat man reeled away, clutching his belly and looking alternately at Dog Boy and the blood on his palm, a bemused disbelief in his whipped-dog eyes. Another man surged in, Dog Boy struck out and had the blow parried with a small shield – it was only later that Dog Boy saw it was a pot lid – the man grunting as it took the blow. Then he stabbed out with a vicious carving knife.
They are servants, Dog Boy realized suddenly, getting his sword in the way and managing to turn the blow. At his side, Patrick slapped down the knife, smashed his studded leather shoulder into the man’s pot-lid shield and sent him staggering back; a bench caught him just behind the knee and he went over with a despairing cry.
Patrick, snarling like a mad hound, lunged after him, his elbow flailing like a fiddler at a dance, the longsword rising and falling, spraying gleet and blood.
Dog Boy turned and saw the woman, clutching her wailing brat to her and staring, open-mouthed with horror. Aye weel, he thought, hearing the wet, ugly sounds of Patrick making sure his opponent was truly dead, such sights would give you pause.
‘Dinna fash,’ he panted, leaning on his sword, knowing the worst of the matter was done with. ‘The Black ordered you safe and safe you shall be.’
Patrick appeared, his bluff face speckled with blood, and offered her a grin of his own as he cleaned gore and bits of brain from his blade with the hat of the man he had killed.
‘Hot work,’ he offered, but the woman merely buried her face in her swaddled bairn and wept, so he shrugged.
‘Ach – weemin,’ he said. ‘Have you told the quine she is safe?’
‘I have,’ Dog Boy answered firmly, but frowned and added loudly: ‘So it is a puzzle why she is weepin’ so.’
The woman surfaced, tear-tracks streaking through the grime of her face and pointed a shaking hand at the quivering giant, who had dropped his meat cleaver, sunk like a stricken ox and bled to death through the fingers clutching desperately at the hole Dog Boy had put in his belly.
‘That was my da.’
Hal marvelled on that vision of the two Jamies all the rest of that night, strangely detached from the fetid sweat of fear in the chapel, where men crouched like panting beasts listening to the thud and crash on their battened door.
Sir William roared curses back at them and wheedled courage into his own before he collapsed, breathing like a mating bull; one of his men-at-arms mercifully severed the last shreds of his eyestalk and then tried to hand it to Frixco, who shied away in horror.
By morning, it was clear to everyone that Sir William was dying and that Frixco was no leader, so Hal was unsurprised when a man – the same who had physicked the eye off Sir William’s cheek – came and knelt beside him in the stale dim, where the tallow candles gasped. He announced himself as Tam Shaws, a good Scot, and said as much with an air of challenge. Hal said nothing, though he had his own ideas on what made a good Scot.
‘Is he set on red murder, or will the Black spare us?’ Shaws demanded, which was flat-out as a sword on a bench.
Hal shrugged. Truth was, he did not know. He had heard, as had everyone, of Jamie Douglas and his savagery and could only vaguely equate it with the youth he had known. But Dog Boy was with him and, for the life of him, Hal could not see Dog Boy indulging in such tales as were told, with wide-eyed, breathless horror, under every roof in the Kingdom. He said as much and saw the man-at-arm’s eyebrow lift laconically.