“And who taught David?” inquired the stranger.
“The birds,” Barty answered with a grin. “There’s a song.”
“Let’s have it,” laughed the minstrel, and Barty sang.
“I gaed awa’ to Holyrood, and there I bug a kirk,
And a’ the birds o’ a’ the air they helpit me to work.
The whaup wi’ her lang bill she pried out the stane,
The dove wi’ her short bill she brought them hame,
The pyet was a wily bird and bug up the wa’,
The corby was a silly bird and pu’d it down ava,
And then cam’ auld Tod Lowrie and skelpit them a’.”
“What’s all that, Ranulph?” queried the masterful man, pausing in his walk. Ranulph translated, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, for there was more in the song than Barty knew. Each of the birds stood for one or another of the Scotch lords who had figured in the recent trouble between William of Scotland and the English King, and Tod Lowrie is the popular Scotch name for the red fox. It is not every king who cares to hear himself called a fox to his face, even if he behaves like one. David and Farmer Appleby, coming through the orchard, were rather aghast.
As they came to a halt, and made proper obeisance to their superiors, the King addressed David in Norman such as the common folk used.
“So you hold it folly to pull down a wall? There’s not one stone left on another in Milan since Frederick Barbarossa took the city.”
“Ou ay,” said David coolly. “If he had to build it up again he’d no be so blate, I’m thinkin’.”
The King laughed and so did the others. “I wish I had had you seven years ago,” he said, “when we dyked the Loire. There were thirty miles of river bank at Angers, flooded season after season, when a well-built river wall would have saved the ruin. A man that can handle rubble in a marsh like this ought to be doing something better.”
“I learned my trade on that dyke,” said David. “They Norman priors havena all learned theirs yet. I was at the Minster yonder, and if I’d built my piers like they said, the water would ha’ creepit under in ten years’ time.”