She could not have heard, and kept walking, but then paused just before she entered and looked him over once more, whether or not with hostility he couldn’t tell.
Cardden, emerging by then, came down the steps, and although the knight asked nothing, he said, “My daughter. Janet.”
Cardden returned to him the parchment. Tucking it back inside his tunic, the knight felt that he was tucking away that name for safekeeping as well.
“So, you must have been a good soldier, then,” said Cardden as they rode along, paralleling the path of the Teviot Water. The land on their right turned from marsh to grassland, and soon they entered woods. The waters sparkled between the trees and shrubs.
Tàmhas Lynn replied, “I was a lucky one is all. Doesn’t matter how good you are if you’re standing where the sword thrusts or the arrow plunges. Right, Dubhar?” he asked his black horse.
Cardden seemed to dismiss his modesty, changing the subject. “Have you lived hereabouts? I ask because you sound to my ear very like a local man, and not someone from the west at all.”
“Do I?” was his reply. He had no ready answer to that, but after a while said, “I once worked near here. On an abbey.”
“Why, you must mean St. Mary’s at Melrose? My goodness. It’s just this season finished, you know. Wonderful, immense place.”
“So they did build it as swiftly as the king required. I suppose I should go have a look then, see if I can pick out the stones I shaped.” He smiled as at a memory.
Cardden looked him over critically. “How old were you that you worked stone?”
“A child, really. Lost and then found.”
“So are we all in this world who embrace Him.”
He made no reply. He was at war with himself over what he’d already said—a fool to have linked himself with the abbey, however innocently, though fortunately Cardden had heard a different confession in his words.
And then they were out of the thick woods and into a green and wild land of copses and stone-speckled soil. Cardden pointed. “Here’s where I’d recommend your oxgang start if you want to mark it. Surely for farming the better plot.” When he received no reply, he turned.
The knight was pressed tight against his horse’s neck as if they were racing along. He moaned.
“Soldier, what is it?”
Between gritted teeth he said:
“Where the coppice ends,
stones deep buried like bodies.
Plant me here and survive.”
He slid from the saddle and landed hard on his back.
“Young man, young man.” Cardden dismounted and waddled to him. “Tàmhas Lynn.”
But Thomas hardly heard him, far away in space and time, on Norman soil and in the thick of a battle that sizzled and cracked with the lightning in his head.
Alpin Waldroup and he stood on a rise among two dozen others, firing arrow after arrow upon Stephen’s charging knights, who were riding down the lines of foot soldiers rallied against them on the plain below. The knights barely slowed against the assault; they held their shields above to catch the descending arrows, and few got through, fewer still did any damage.
“Now’s the time,” Alpin called through the thunder of war. “Use your skills I’ve taught you.” And then he ran to the right. Others nearby broke and followed him. Did they know what he was doing, or did they think he was running away and sought to do likewise?
No time to wait and see. Thomas drew three arrows between his fingers and ran in the opposite direction, and found half a dozen others pursuing him. He fired as he ran, and so did they. The knights busily hacked away at the chaotic last lines of foot soldiers, cutting the poor untrained men and boys down like saplings while trying to keep those shields up against the arcing arrows ahead. Thus were they unprotected from straight-flying missiles shot from their right flank—arrows that pierced throats and thudded into the dark sockets above chain coifs. Find, focus, fire, and flee—again and again until his quiver was nearly exhausted. Their numbers decimated, the knights who burst through the foot soldiers’ ranks wheeled and sped furiously toward him and the others around him, while those on the far side of the field tore after Waldroup and his group.
Into the trees then and up another hillside, Thomas dodged between boughs, kept his wits, and made each shot count, dropping the nearest horsemen, his running aim assured and lethal now, almost the equal of Waldroup’s. So long as no enemy archer on the far side of the horsemen tracked his distance he could keep ahead of pursuit, lighter in his leather armor than the knights in their mail. A sword would have cleaved him, but nobody was going to get close enough to try. The others running kept up a similar barrage; the knights, most of them, gave up, swung about and charged back downhill for easier prey. They couldn’t shield from both low-flying and high descending arrows, but riding uphill toward these marksmen was suicide; better to ride hard and weave through the carnage, trust to luck and mail, and the inexperience of the enemy. Still a few, likely enraged beyond reason, spurred on up the hill at the archers clustered among trees.
When the surviving horsemen had almost reached the first cluster, everybody scattered across the hillside, and the knights were forced to pick their prey.
Thomas grabbed, found his quiver empty. He scrambled alongside the others, retreating higher up among the trees, where he watched helplessly as stationary archers below—some with arrows stuck in the ground beside them, ready to be grabbed—were cut down at close quarters, trampled, chopped, and those who did not flee fast enough were slashed or beheaded from behind. Satisfied at their handiwork, the knights abandoned those few higher up and near-impossible to get, soon turning to charge back down the hill, and Thomas immediately raced to the nearest body below, snatched up the contents of its quiver, and, kneeling, fired a volley at the retreating knights. He hurried to grab up abandoned arrows stuck one after the other in the ground, pulled and fired them as he went. Then he tore across the hillside, finally reaching the archers who’d held their ground. Most of them had paid with their lives. He replenished the quiver at his hip from those no longer being put to use.
By then Stephen’s forces were in complete disarray, and Thomas and other archers across the hillside sent a new lethal barrage into the chaos. Finally, the remaining knights abandoned their return assault upon the foot soldiers and fled the raining reeds. The archers cheered and shouted rude catcalls. Thomas paused and located Waldroup on the far side of the rise among the group who’d run that way. Together, they walked among their fallen comrades, tended to the wounded, and collected arrows from the dead. A few men swapped broken or inferior bows for new and stronger ones lying with their dead comrades.
That rout of Stephen’s forces was a good day. The survivors celebrated with stolen wine and a roasted pig over the fire that had been Stephen’s army’s encampment. But it was the end of their employment, too. King Stephen and the Empress Matilda had reached a stalemate, and, regrouping, would attempt diplomacy. He and Waldroup were paid the next day and released from duty, if such it could be called. He was given a script of scutage for two oxgangs of land should he ever manage to return home.
But that night he collapsed on his bedroll, drunk and grinning, his chin greasy, his arms aching, unaware that the morning would bring dismissal. They had expected it sooner or later, of course, and already had plans to head to Italia, where abbots were hiring mercenaries and stonemasons both. They’d hoped it would not arrive so soon.
Then it was Waldroup shaking him in the firelight, a look of wide-eyed terror on his face. He gripped his ördstone, which pulsed with sparkling blue lines. “Tàmhas,” he called, a variation of his name that Waldroup didn’t even know, because Thomas had only adopted it while on his ride back to Scotland.
“Tàmhas Lynn?”
He jerked awake upon a bed of straw. Wooden beams lay overhead. There were tapestries against the walls. Beside him sat Janet Cardden, who called out, “Father, he’s awake!” Her face flickered in the light of a central fire.
He was inside Cardden’s great hall.
Cardden appeared behind her, blanket-draped, and Thomas experienced one last moment that interposed Alpin Waldroup, similarly wrapped, coming toward him around the cooking fire the night after that battle, grinning and proud and drunk, a moment so splendid it almost brought him to tears.
Then Cardden stood over him, saying, “Had you a fit, son. Fell right from your horse, foam at your lips. Lucky your head didn’t land on stone.”
“Of course.” His head did feel strange, and he knew why. “I was . . . I was wounded in battle,” he lied. But he touched the scar above his right temple as proof. “I’ve suffered ever since with occasional fits. Not often, you understand. Bright light can sometimes cause them. Like the sparkling of a river through the trees. I didn’t think to shield my eyes. Rarely does it last more than a moment or two. I . . . Did I say anything?”
“Well, ehm, it were puzzling, sort of a riddle, like. Something about ‘bury me here if you want to be safe.’ Or, no, ’twas ‘plant me here’ and was the stones that was buried like bodies hereabout. I’m afraid till you fell I didn’t understand what was happening. Thought you’d just fallen asleep against your horse, tired as you were.”
