Free The Lion Rampant by Robert Low

like a razored heart. She was the one sent by the Order of Alcántara to finalize the details of this secret deal and if ever anything marked the difference between the two religious commands, it was Doña Beatriz, walking like a gliding dream, shadowed by her Moor, Piculph. The Templars did not care for Moors – and for women even less.
    Kirkpatrick’s soft chuckle turned Hal’s head to where the man gazed: the supposed Benedictines, rising hastily and moving away, as politely as they could, but pointedly nevertheless.
    ‘If nothing else betrayed them,’ Kirkpatrick said, ‘then their Order’s disdain for weemin is as clear as a Judas kiss.’
    They watched as Rossal de Bissot, braced stiffly, walked to the lady and inclined his head in a curt bow, and had it in return. Piculph, after a short pause, moved away – out of earshot, Hal thought – and the lady began to walk quietly along the deck, with Rossal falling in beside her, his every celibate step as if he walked barefoot on nails.
    Hal saw that the other black-robed knights watched Piculph, while the rest of the crew moved from their path, throwing surreptitious looks at Doña Beatriz which left little to anyone’s imagination. They were a rag-bag collection of ill-favoured lumpen pirates, Hal thought, but Pegy Balgownie keeps them in line and he, according to Kirkpatrick, is to be trusted.
    He had an idea what Rossal and the lady discussed, but he only knew that Doña Beatriz had come to Rossal from Villasirga in Castile, a Templar hold now handed to the new Order of Alcántara; the lady’s brother, Guillermo, was high in it, close to the Grand Master.
    There was little brotherly love or fellow Christian charity here, Hal thought moodily. The Order of Alcántara needed money and was prepared to sell the former Templars their own weapons and the unlikely pairing now strolling the deck were brokering the deal.
    ‘“The company of women is a dangerous thing,”’ Kirkpatrick muttered, quoting from the Rules of the Order.
    ‘Aye,’ said a savage growl of voice, ‘the pair o’ you would know that best, for sure.’
    They turned into the tinged face of Sim Craw, clutching a huge bundle to him and looking liverish. If there is one who hates the sea more than me, Hal thought, it is Sim.
    ‘You have ceased feeding the fish,’ Kirkpatrick responded viciously and Sim nodded, though there was no certainty in it.
    ‘I am fine when matters are moving,’ he answered, ‘but wallowing here is shifting my innards.’
    Hal looked at the sail, filling weakly and sinking again; down at the tillers, a muscled red-head teased the cog into what wind there was while the barrel-shaped Pegy Balgownie scowled at the fog bank, swirling ahead as proof there was no wind.
    ‘You should set that bairn on deck,’ Kirkpatrick mocked Sim, ‘afore you lose it ower the side when you are boaking.’
    ‘Would make little difference,’ Sim mourned back, glancing sadly at the swaddled bundle of his arbalest. ‘Soaked or safe, the dreich will rust it.’
    He paused, looked Hal up and down meaningfully.
    ‘And your maille, lord …’ he began, but paused, blinked a little and headed feverishly for the side of the cog, clapping a hand over his mouth.
    Pegy was scarcely aware of the retching and the good-natured jeers, too busy with fretting over the lack of wind. Next to him, Somhairl bunched the muscles needed to shift the heavy tiller and grumbled, in his lilting Islesman English, about wetting the sail.
    He had the right of it, for sure, Pegy thought. A good man, Somhairl, who learned his craft crewing and leading birlinn galleys for Angus Og of the Isles. Somhairl was a raiding man every bit as skilled as any old Viking and called Scáth Dearg – the Red Shadow – by those who feared to see him oaring up swift and silent, with his red hair streaming like flame.
    No chance o’ that here, Pegy mourned. Scarce enough wind to shift as much as the man’s brow braids and even