In one spot between two separate encampments for horse and foot soldiers, men were gaming, pitting their skills against one another in contests ranging from wrestling to throwing horseshoes at iron spikes set in the ground, and the open spaces between the major contests were busy with smaller games involving dice, tossed coins, and bone tokens. The air was filled with raucous voices shouting and laughing, exchanging gibes and friendly insults and imprecations, and all too often, as bets changed hands, with jeers and bitter cursing that awed Rob with their range and fluency.
It finally grew too dark for the horseshoe games to continue, and as the boys left the ordered lines of tents with their roaring fires, it was approaching the tenth hour of the night. In the west, silhouetted against the lingering light in the summer sky, the distant mountains of Arran were sculpted in black. Encouraged by the invisibility the coming darkness would afford, the boys were making their way towards the seashore, attracted by the distant, melancholy sound of bagpipes. They were off the common path, skirting a cluster of stunted, wind-bent hawthorn trees on a grassy knoll, when Rob, leading the way, found himself suddenly close to a fair-sized knot of men—all Gaels, wearing shawls and plumed bonnets—who appeared to be quarrelling among themselves, their raised voices muffled by the distant breaking of the waves on the beach at their backs. He reached out a hand to stay Angus Og, but before he could alert the other boy he felt a heavy hand clamp onto his shoulder.
Rob twisted in the grip to look back. “Uncle Nicol!” he gasped in Gaelic, his knees threatening to give way. “I thought you were my da.”
“Aye, I can see that. You’re as whey-faced as a caught thief. What are you up to?” Nicol MacDuncan had turned his nephew to face him and now stood with his arms folded over his chest. “You two should be abed long since. If anyone notices you’re missing, the earl will plant his boot firmly in your arse, my lad, as ought I.”
Rob opened his mouth to reply, but before he could say anything he heard an angry curse and the sound of a heavy blow behind him, followed immediately by the rasping slither of a blade being drawn. He spun around, and what he saw was branded into his mind: two snarling men faced each other, one of them brandishing a long, bared dirk while the other tugged to clear a sword from the scabbard behind his shoulder.
The dirk-wielder leapt forward, the thrust of his entire body behind the stabbing lunge, then seemed to stop in mid-leap as his blade hit the solid bulk of the swordsman’s breast. The stricken man gasped at the suddenness of it and his upper body hunched violently, his shoulders seeming to curve down and around the weapon that had pierced him. He stayed there, motionless, for several heartbeats, poised as if held up on the dirk’s hard blade. Then, his teeth bared savagely, eyes glaring in rage that swiftly changed to disbelief, he turned slowly, stiffly, sideways to face Rob, as though to show him the thing that was lodged in his chest. He teetered grotesquely and his face changed, going slack and empty as the high, extended fingers of his yet upraised hand released his unused sword. Unable to look away, Rob watched the weapon fall, its heavy hilt and guard sending it tumbling, spinning within its own length to strike the ground point first between the two men and lodge there, swaying.
The murderer seemed appalled by what he had done, for he made no effort to pull his dirk free, merely releasing his grip on it as his victim turned away from him with the lethal blade protruding from his chest. The wounded man’s arm came down slowly, feebly, fumbling at the dirk’s hilt as though to grasp it and pull it free, but he had no strength in him by then. He made a gurgling sound in his throat and toppled forward, rigid as a tree, to hit the ground face down, driving the long blade home hard enough to punch clean through him.
Rob heard the meaty rip as the knife tore through the body, its exposed point strangely bloodless and bright between the dead man’s shoulders in the fading light; heard, too, the utter silence that followed, brief and quickly banished as a voice rang out in grief and fury and a third man sprang at the killer, whirling a short, broadbladed axe above his head. The killer, empty handed, did what Rob would never have expected. Instead of trying to leap away, he sprang at his attacker, almost on his toes, to place himself inside the axe’s sweeping arc. And as he went, quicker than thought, he snatched up the dead man’s swaying sword and thrust it straight-armed at his assailant, driving its point beneath the fellow’s chin. The blow was deadly, amplified by the momentum of both their bodies. The axewielder’s head snapped back as the blade pierced his neck, but his own hard swing and his determination were unstoppable. He was dead before his strike landed, but the lethal edge of his hard-swung axe took his opponent high on the shoulder, cleaving through cloth and flesh and bone and smashing him to the ground.