Free Lion at Bay by Robert Low

gave her a grin from a familiar face, sheened and grey.
    ‘Coontess. Good to greet ye, certes – though I am sorry to be trailin’ trouble to yer hall.’
    She had last seen him before the battle at Stirling and was shocked. The hunted years had leached the autumn bracken from his hair and streaked a grey turning to silver. The great size of him was the same, but there had never been much fat to start with, so that hunger had started in to wasting muscle that hard running was turning twisted and clenched like hawsers. The smell of him was rank, like the crew who surrounded him, overlayed with another, pungent stink that Isabel knew well.
    She inspected the leg, seeing the green-black lump on it just below the knee, the fret of little red lines.
    ‘Took a dunt some time back,’ Wallace said cheerfully. ‘At Happrew. Cracked the bone in my shin, but it seemed to knit well enough. Then came this.’
    ‘There is rot in it,’ Isabel said flatly and Wallace chuckled harshly.
    ‘I ken that, lady,’ he replied. ‘Pain, too – if ye as much as blaw on it, it hurts as bad as if ye had struck me.’
    ‘We will needs do more than blow on it,’ Isabel answered and Wallace’s throat apple bobbed twice, then he nodded. The smile was gone.
    ‘Ah spier ye, lady – fit’s gan wrang?’
    The voice was thick, the accent strange from the black-carapaced Fergus the Beetle. Isabel explained as best as she thought the man would understand and he nodded, blued bottom teeth sucking his top lip, brows lowered in a frown and eyes peering from the tangle of hair and beard, his face dark from sun and dirt, sheened with grease as protection against wind and rain.
    ‘Ah howkit oot a daud o’ muck frae it,’ he told her. ‘Black as the De’il’s erse, beggin’ the blissin’ o’ ye, lady. Wull he gan live yet?’
    ‘Away with ye, Fergus,’ Wallace said gently, hearing this. ‘Leave the good wummin to her skill.’
    She had water heated and brought, with cloths and a keen, sharp skewer; Wallace followed it with his eyes, then met hers. Isabel felt clammy at what she had to do to a wound that hurt with a breeze on it, but he swallowed once, then nodded.
    ‘Hold him,’ she ordered and his men went to shoulders and feet. She hovered the skewer over it and saw him brace – then she struck.
    He howled, thrashed, vomited and fainted. The skewer went flying from her hand and skittered across the rushed flags; even as it did she knew she had failed.
    It took ten minutes for him to recover. Slick with new sweat, he managed a wan grin from the whey of his face.
    ‘I have the idea o’ it, now, lady,’ he said and held out his hand for the skewer. ‘Ye have the strength o’ purpose but no arm for the deed.’
    She handed it to him and he wrapped all but the last fingerjoint length of it in a cloth while she watched, fascinated and appalled. Could she do this if it were her suffering?
    He placed the tip of the skewer gently, just where she indicated and the blue-black mass seemed to Isabel to be pulsing now. Then he nodded to Fergus and the others, who came up and placed their hands on him in readiness.
    ‘Bigod,’ he said, lifted one great fist and hammered it down on the handle of the skewer.
    When he came to his senses for the second time she had placed both fists on either side of the punctured wound and squeezed a festering, stinking mass of green-black pus until the blood flowed cleanly. Then she washed it in clean water and bound it in a warm bran poultice and made him a drink of henbane, knotgrass and yarrow.
    He drank it obediently, made a face.
    ‘What did ye lace into this?’
    She told him.
    ‘I stirred in some honey,’ she added, ‘which is what you do wi’ wee boys.’
    He grinned, though his face was still pale.
    ‘I thought ye had poured in a pint o’ my pish, rather than taste it yersel’ to find what is sufferin’ me.’
    She tidied up stinking cloths and bowls, moving soft so that the men, Fergus among