Which treatment was a deadly error, for one night, while all of the men slept deeply after a heavier-than-usual meal, the mad earl slipped the single ankle fetter, exited the cagfr— apparently by picking the huge iron lock—and silently strangled Abbot Fergus where he slept. Armed then with the too-trusting abbot’s razor, the madman slit the throat of a sleeping gillie and robbed his victim of all his effects-broadsword, targe, dirk, knives, tartan, shirt, rawhide brogues, wallet, and bonnet. Somehow avoiding notice of the drowsy, nodding horseguard, the madman saddled and bridled the dead abbot’s big mule and stole out of camp, not mounting until he was well out of hearing distance. Then, taking a heading from the twinkling stars above, he put the mule to his best gait, riding southeastward, in the direction of the port of Glascow.
Professor William Collier vowed to himself as he rode the dead abbot’s mule, dressed in the dead gillie’s clothes, that there would be no bringing him to bay like some beast of the chase and dragging him, naked and beaten and chained, to be caged and ill treated, this time. No, now he was armed with substantially more than a rude club of a broken branch and a shard of sharp flint. If they came after him this time, he would either win free with sword and dirk or force them to kill him on the spot.
If he could win free, however, sell the mule and its gear for enough to provide himself with some better clothing and a passage to Ireland, he could find there the Papal legate, spin some tale that could not be checked out, then find a way to get his deserved revenge on that damned thankless usurper, Arthur III Tudor, and on the bastard who had been at the root of all his troubles and woes, Bass Foster.
“I am, after all,” he thought as he rode, “the most intelligent and most highly educated man in this entire world. When once I’ve placed my innumerable talents at the service of the Roman Church, England and Wales will fall to Church armies armed with the weapons I’ll show them how to make and use properly almost overnight. Til not ask much in return, only a duchy or two, for my real reward will be watching Arthur and Foster slowly tortured almost to death, then crammed full of gunpowder and burned at the stake.”
In far-southern Munster, most of King Brian’s siege train and a portion of his army lay entrenched before the landward walls of Tamhas’burh, the ard-righ himself being off on other pursuits with the rest of his army. He realized that the siege was really a standoff when his first and only, to date, assault on the city was bloodily repulsed by a deadly combination of impressive gunnery by the wall batteries and a two-pronged sally by hard-fighting mercenaries—horse backed up by foot—that took his assault force in both flanks and routed them to race pell-mell back down the hill to safety beyond the range of the wall guns.
Brian knew that the city could be supplied ad infinitum as long as King T^mhas retained control of the river, but Brian’s present fleet included only two galleons, neither of them as big, well found, and heavily armed as the aptly named Impressionant, and he was not about to risk them against the Papal fleet that now served the interests of his old enemy. He just thanked God on high that the topographical layout was such that the batteries of the ships could not be used to menace his land forces.
He comforted himself with the thought that, after all, he had attempted to do it all peacefully. Shortly after his army’s arrival before the city, he had sent in a sacred herald with an offer to withdraw from out all of Munster—save only the border lands that were never really a part of Munster to begin with and were the basic reason for the generations-long bad blood and feuding between Meath and Munster—did King Tamhas but cede to the safekeeping of the cathederal vaults at Tara the Star of Munster.
King Tamhas’s answer had been to return the herald’s body in bloody chunks, by way of an old-fashioned trebuchet, which action, to Brian’s way of thinking, demonstrated the utter barbarity and complete lack of imagination in his enemy. And so he had marched away about other business with the best, more mobile elements of the army of the ard-righ. Should he have need of the siege train elsewhere, he could always send for them. Meanwhile, why not let them squat before Tamhas’burh, bottling the ever-troublesome Fitzger-aids safely up and living well off what their foragers could strip from the lands of Munster at no cost to Brian? He had forbidden them to fight against those within the walls unless first attacked, had left them a plenitude of gunpowder and a brace of priests who knew how to fabricate more, so they should be able to make it reasonably unpleasant for the folk of the city and their king with enough fighting men available to protect them from sallies, entrenchments that could be defended adequately from either side, and a ditched, ramparted, and well-fortified camp to house administration and supply functions.
At the age of five and thirty years, Ard-Righ Brian VIII had been engaged in war for two and twenty years in all parts of the island called Eire. Though mostly victorious, he had suffered a few defeats, but he had never lost an army or any substantial portion of one, or any single one of the precious and difficult-of-replacement bombards or siege cannon, and he had no slightest intention of now breaking that sterling practice through leaving his siege train undefended.
He marched off to attempt to overawe the smaller kingdoms and kings, gain their Jewels of Sovereignty, allegiances, and the loan of the their armies, then redescend on Munster with more force than even the stubborn Fitzgeralds would dare to oppose. He knew that he had scant time to assemble the Seven Magical Jewels of Eire and could but wish that he had a second army.
For many a long week after the Duke of Norfolk had ridden off southward with his galloglaiches and personal staff, Archbishop Harold of York and Rupen Ademian took turns supervising the three master stonemasons—two of them Northumbrians, one a Lowland Scot found for Sir Geoffrey by Laird Michael Scott—and the dozen or so journeymen and apprentices bringing in the inch-or-more-thick slabs of slate, marking and chipping and carving and smoothing them, before carefully laying them end to end and edge to edge in the handspan-deep bed of mortar that covered the old earthern floor of the tower keep’s ground level. The masons and other workmen, the oxmen and quarry men, none of them questioned this project or even thought to so do. It had been ordered by a mighty lord, and they were one and all more than happy to take his silver and thank God for the unexpected largesse that the work brought to them and their families. They all could be assured, now, of enough food to bear them through the coming winter, good harvest or ill.
Wain after wain trundled down from Scotland, behind spans of sturdy, slow-plodding red-and-white oxen, each loaded to near overflowing with fine-quality potter’s clay from the claypits on Laird Scott’s demesne. At Whyffler Hall, the clay was shoveled into sacks and baskets to be stored in various outbuildings until needed, safe there from rains and mists.
Laird Michael Scott did not question just what the Sasse-nachs at Whyffler Hall intended to do with so much clay. It was none of his business, for one thing; for another, Laird Michael was more than happy to get the silver that Sir Geoffrey Musgrave promptly paid him or his agents. Silver was hard to come by in Lowland Scotland by JegaJ means, and the new-crowned King James had offered dire consequences to any borderer clan or family so rash as to go a-rieving into England sans his royal say-so. And Laird Michael had two sons who must shortly be fitted out as became young Scots gentlemen, as well as a daughter who one day soon would be in need of a suitable dowry.
He was, however, of an inquiring mind and a consistently curious nature, so when he met with Sir Geoffrey on a day, he asked, half-jokingly, if the denizens of Whyffler Hall had the intent of cornering the chamberpot market for all of England, Wales, and Scotland.
But Musgrave had not risen to the joke. Dead-serious had been his answer. “1 dinnae ken what a1 the clay be for, Laird Michael. Belike, some project o’ his grace o’ York. A’ I ken be that my o’erlord, his grace of Norfolk, has ordered it so, and so it shall be, ‘pon my sacred oath.”
The archbishop had insisted that Master Rupen Ademian, though untitled as yet, was as wellborn in his own land as any present and must therefore he seated at the high table for meat. Central place at that elevated board went, of course, to the archbishop, whose rank was in most all ways the equivalent of that of a duke. Unless Laird Michael Scott was present for meat—his rank being the rough equivalent of an English baron—the archbishop was flanked by Sir Geoffrey and Don Diego. In addition to Rupen, two noble clerics of the archbishop’s staff were usually present with them.