The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  I smiled, but kept my response in Latin. “Nothing much to fret over there, my lord. I will meet and speak with the earl as soon as I can arrange it. Is he approachable, or does he hold himself aloof?”

  “Och, he’s easy enough to talk to.” My employer had no intention of being shepherded anywhere, even in matters of language. “Ye’ll hae nae difficulty there. It’s what ye’ll see when you look ahint the surface o’ the man that I’ll be waiting to hear about. I dinna expect you to find any grim secrets under there, but some men hae great talents when it comes to hidin’ things about themsel’s, an’ sometimes the last thing ye can do is tell that frae lookin’ at their faces or listenin’ to what they say. But that’s what you’re best at, seein’ what’s there under the surface, where maist men canna see.”

  “How old is the earl, my lord?”

  “He’s about an age wi’ you, I’d say. Mayhap a wee bit younger. You’re what now? Five and twenty? Aye, well, he’d hae been three and twenty in July. The two o’ ye will get along fine, ye’ll see.”

  He peered up at the sky, where most of the blue had been obscured by banked clouds. “It looks like rain,” he said. “And Father Martin will be thinking by now that we’ve abandoned him. We’d best stir our stumps and be awa, for it’s still a good two hours frae here to Turnberry.” He stood up and reached down to gather up his bag and walking staff.

  “One more question if I may, my lord, before we go? It has to do with the English force you mentioned, Percy’s people. I have never met Lord Douglas and know nothing of him other than by repute, but he is a known troublemaker of notoriously ill repute, not only to the English but even here in Scotland. He has been a chronic source of irritation and dispute to the Council of Guardians for as long as I can remember, and you yourself are acutely aware of that. So the fact that he is here now, siding openly with you and enjoying the support of the last two remaining Guardians in Scotland, will not go unnoticed by the English commanders.”

  The gravity of my remark tipped the bishop back into Latin. “We will deal with that when it arises, Father. If it ever does. It is my duty to care for my flock, especially when they are troubled. Sir William Douglas is a troubled man and I will minister to him as I would to any other in my care. And that is a matter between me and the God to whom I must answer. It has nothing to do with Henry Percy or his masters, and I will not be dictated to by any Englishman in the performance of my pastoral duty.”

  There was nothing I could say in response to such equanimity, and so I set about gathering up my own few belongings in preparation for the last stage of our journey to Turnberry.

  CHAPTER NINE

  INSURGENCY

  Turnberry Castle overwhelmed me when I first set eyes on it, and I would have stopped right there at the forest’s edge to examine the place more carefully, but Bishop Wishart had seen the view before and it held no mystery for him, and so he kept walking directly towards the drawbridge, and I had to hurry to keep up. Turnberry was a massive fortification built of local stone and situated on a rock promontory that thrust out into the Firth of Clyde, with the Isle of Arran in the distance and beyond that the indistinct shoreline of the Mull of Kintyre. The side of the castle that we approached was a high, unbroken wall penetrated by a single central entrance tunnel reached only by crossing a drawbridge over a wide, steep-sided moat. I saw a strong-looking, circular tower with a pointed roof at the northeast corner, and opposite that, at the southwest corner, I could see the roof of a lower but more substantial-seeming tower, which I assumed to be the keep, housing the Bruce family.

  We had to wait for the portcullis to be raised, even though the guards had clearly been expecting us and allowed us to pass without comment. The portcullis was enormously heavy, and its lower edge was lined with lethal, keen-edged spikes, yet it rose smoothly and almost noiselessly to allow us to pass beyond it to the bailey, the open space inside the curtain walls. We followed meekly as his lordship led us through the yard, between and around the various buildings that well nigh filled the place, until we came to the keep. There, the first of what turned out to be a small army of supplicants came running to claim the bishop’s attention.

  I gazed around while the bishop dealt with the most urgent matters being thrust at him, and I noted most of the facilities to be found in castles everywhere. I saw a cooperage and a carpentry shop, as well as several smithies, a bakery with rows of outdoor ovens, a number of granaries, an ox-powered mill, and even a brewery. There was a leather tannery, too, and a fuller’s pond farther away, for though I could see no sign of either one, my nostrils told me they were both close at hand. I was still taking stock of our surroundings when his lordship called us to his side and informed us that Lord Bruce had gone hunting but was expected to return soon, and in the meantime someone would show us to our quarters. The bishop himself had several pressing matters to attend to.

  As soon as we were inside our quarters—a long, narrow room containing eight cots and little else—Martin dropped to the hard surface of the bed he had selected and closed his eyes, and something about the beatific smile on his face told me he would not easily rise up again. I made my way back to the bailey yard to continue my exploration of the castle, where I found myself largely ignored by the locals, all of whom appeared to have a great amount of work to do and very little time in which to do it. While everyone around me bustled busily, I meandered aimlessly.

  I recognized a familiar noise that had been growing gradually louder as I walked, and I quickly found its source, a large enclosure in an angle of the curtain wall that was obviously set aside as a training area. Two men were fighting there with quarterstaves, watched by a small group of spectators who were shouting and jeering at both men in that manner that marked them all as friends. By the time I arrived they had been going hard at each other for some time. Both were big, tall men, one of them even bigger, it seemed to me, than my cousin Will, and they looked even larger than they normally would because they were wearing practice armour made of pads of densely felted wool strapped over boiled and hammered bull-hide coverings for their arms, legs, and torsos, while their heads were protected by large, heavy-looking war helms.

  No one paid me the slightest attention as I made my way towards the fighters, and the moment I sat on one of the upended sections of log that served as seats for spectators, someone among the watchers yelled, “Go on, Rob! Into him!” and both fighters redoubled their efforts, so that the whirling staves were barely visible at times, and the breathing of the combatants became louder and more ragged.

  The larger man feinted a high blow to his right, then changed direction in mid-thrust and whipped his staff down and around to the left, checked it, and pivoted tightly, slashing backwards with a short, savage jab that the other man could not counter quickly enough. The blow landed solidly beneath the fellow’s sternum, driving the wind out of him in an explosive gasp, and he dropped his quarterstaff as he staggered backwards for two steps, then fell to his knees and pitched forward onto his face to lie gasping and whooping for breath within three paces of where I sat watching.

  The spectators and the victor were already celebrating and exchanging wagers, paying little attention to the downed man, since he was no more than winded, but I stood up and moved quickly to help him because I knew, from experience, precisely what he was feeling. Will had once downed me the same way, with an identical sleight, driving the wind from me with a crippling, well-aimed jab, and I had never forgotten the pain and the surging panic of not being able to draw a breath. I bent over the man, seeing how he was convulsing but unable to turn his body because of the constrictive bulk of his padded armour. I flipped him over to lie on his side, and he immediately curled into a ball, whooping and cawing in agony. I left him to it, knowing he would soon recover, and went to pick up his fallen quarterstaff.

  The staff was a plain, unadorned thing of dried and hardened ash wood, virtually identical in weight and thickness to the one that had been mine a decade earlier, when I stil
l sparred with Will. In recent times I had seen more elaborate staves, some crowned with metal to make them even more lethal than nature had intended. I had even seen some that were longer and heavier than this. One of those, I recalled, had been more than six feet in length, and I had wondered at the time why its owner should have felt he needed anything that long, because the added length, to my eyes, made the weapon cumbersome and unwieldy. But swords and metal weapons had been hard to come by in Scotland since Edward had confiscated all the weapons lost at Dunbar, and many men had reverted to the comforting heft of a solid, well-cured quarterstaff, metal-shod or not. I hefted this one myself, gripping it with the ease of long familiarity, and swung it tentatively, left and right, before gliding into the traditional, rhythmical pattern of disciplined exercises basic to the use of the weapon. I ended by twirling it vertically in what had once been one of my favourite moves, with my arm outstretched to bring the weapon’s butt end up to slap gently and comfortably into my waiting right armpit.

  “Now that is impressive. Where would a priest learn to do that?”

  The voice snapped me back to awareness of where I was, and I swung about to find the fallen warrior sitting up and looking at me, his spread elbows resting on his upraised knees and his face invisible behind the cheek guards of his helmet.

  “I wasn’t always a priest,” I said, extending my hand to pull him to his feet.

  He swung himself up smoothly and released my hand. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice muffled by the helmet.

  I lay his quarterstaff against one of the nearby seats. “Father James Wallace, of Glasgow Cathedral.”

  “Wallace? Are you any kind of kin to the outlaw?”

  “He’s my cousin,” I said. “But I’m a priest, as you can see, not an outlaw. I’m here with Bishop Wishart, to meet with Lord Bruce.”

  The metal-covered head tilted towards me. “Lord Bruce of Annandale?”

  “No, the Earl of Carrick.”

  “Ah! They’re father and son, you know.”

  “I did know that,” I said.

  “Good, then. Help me off with this damned helm, will you?” He had been tugging uselessly at the thing for several moments but it was showing no sign of movement, and now he bent towards me, pushing against its lower rim. I grasped the crown and heaved twice before I finally pulled the helmet off his head.

  “Ah! Thanks be to Christ,” he said, blithely uncaring of taking the name of the Lord in vain. “There’s so much padding in that thing, I come close to suffocating every time I put it on. And there are times it feels so tight I doubt I’m going to get it on at all.” He spun the helm in the air and held it towards me for my inspection, showing me that its interior was, indeed, very tightly padded. He was young and pleasant looking, one of those men at whom it was easy to smile.

  “You should probably be grateful for that,” I said, “because the stuff looks thick enough to serve its purpose. Had that big fellow hit you on the head, you probably wouldn’t have come back together as quickly as you did, even with all that padding. That’s a big man. Who is he?”

  “Our Rob?” He swivelled around and looked across to where his former opponent stood watching us among the other men, and raised a hand in salute. “Rob is the biggest instigator of fights and the greediest manipulator of wagers in Turnberry. He’s Sir Robert Mowbray, and he’s our master-at-arms.”

  “Ah,” I said. “I heard someone call him Rob, and so I thought he might be Bruce, but then it came to me that here in Bruce country there might be no name more common than Robert.”

  “And right you are. We have no shortage of Robs and Roberts and even Rabs around here. I’m one myself.”

  “And what about the others? They must be knights, too, judging by the ease with which they speak to him.”

  “They are, and two of them are Roberts, too. All knights of the Bruce household, as am I.” He grinned at me then. “So, what think you of Turnberry?”

  I turned to look up at the lofty tower on the far side of the courtyard. “It is … impressive,” I said. “That’s the word that keeps occurring to me. I had some time to fill before I meet again with Bishop Robert—”

  “There, you see? Another Robert. They swarm like rats around here.”

  “Aye, well, as I said, I had some time on my hands and so I decided just to take a look around the castle. I was not expecting anything so grand.”

  One eyebrow rose slightly. “Grand? How, grand?”

  “How not? For one thing, I doubt I have ever seen anything quite as well made as that portcullis at the entry.”

  “Hah! If you think that portcullis is grand, you really must go down and see the other one. Now there is a portcullis on the epic scale.”

  “You mean there are two?”

  “I do. One at the front and one at the back, over there, facing seaward.” He pointed towards the south wall. “Just follow the main track through that arch over there and you won’t go far wrong. And now I’ll leave you to yourself again, because I need to get out of this damnable armour before I melt like a candle in the sun.” He raised a hand in salute and walked away to join the others, who had clearly been waiting for him, since they all trooped off together, laughing and bantering.

  If I had been impressed before, the remainder of what I saw that afternoon left me with a feeling of awe approaching reverence, for I had never seen anything to compare, even remotely, with Turnberry. The high, square tower I had guessed at earlier as the probable Bruce family quarters rose behind me to my left, but another rectangular tower filled one entire corner of the fortification, and it was far bigger than the one at my back. I followed the main roadway, which sloped gradually downwards deep into the dim bowels of the huge building.

  There were noises in the air all around me now, and the heights of the ceiling over my head were lost in darkness, but I was nevertheless stunned when I realized that I had entered a huge cavern, that I was listening to the unmistakable sounds of water, and that the strange shape I could see moving ahead of me was the mast of a large, oared galley. I went forward slowly, my eyes growing larger with every moment that passed, and came to a point where I could look down and see the entire vista below me. The galley was huge, its sides lined with oarlocks, thirty to a side. It was unmanned and unguarded, safe behind a huge portcullis, and it floated peacefully alongside a man-made stone jetty that must have stretched for thirty, perhaps even forty paces on either side. Above and beyond me soared the sea gate, with its lowered portcullis vanishing beneath the waters.

  I had admired the portcullis we had entered under, but this leviathan construction must have been three times the width and four times the height, with pairs of immensely strong-looking ropes attached to its top at either end, each rope the thickness of a grown man’s calf. I could do nothing but gape at it in wonder.

  I heard a sudden sound close behind me, and I swung around to find my injured companion from earlier watching me. “Forgive me,” I said. “You startled me.”

  He grinned. “So, are you impressed?”

  “I am. And I am amazed, too. I’ve never seen anything like it. And where did the galley come from, do you know?”

  “It came from Bute, yesterday. That’s the island just up the firth from here. It is an astounding place, I agree. How old it is, I have no idea. It’s been in the Bruce family for years. It’s a mormaer stronghold.” He hesitated. “D’you know what that means?”

  “Aye,” I said. “The old Gaelic nobility.”

  “That’s right. The ancient Earls of Carrick were all Islanders. Seafarers. And it was they who built all of this, a long time ago.”

  He was greatly changed from the young knight I had encountered earlier. All of his fustian and felt padding had disappeared, along with the dust and mustiness that went with it, and a very striking man had emerged, tall and well made, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. His shoulder-length dark hair had been brushed, and I noticed his eyes for the first time, dark blue and sparkling above wide, h
igh cheekbones. He was close to my own age, nobly born, beyond dispute, and clearly very wealthy. He wore a floor-length coat of rich, dark blue brocade with a filigreed yoke of silver wire woven across the shoulders, and a trailing length of bright yellow silk hung down his back on one side, pinned at his left shoulder with a broad, circular clasp of worked silver. A black belt of supple leather circled his waist, with a long-bladed, sheathed dagger hanging on one side and a black leather scrip on the other, and his feet were encased in finely worked boots of what looked like black kid skin.

  “I know your name is Robert,” I said to him, “and that you are a knight, but that’s all I know. So who are you, exactly?”

  He bowed from the waist, quickly and self-disparagingly, though that interpretation did not occur to me until long afterwards. “I’m Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, but don’t let that confound you. I would have told you when you spoke of being here to meet Lord Bruce, but I saw you had no notion who I was and I had no wish to embarrass you.” He held up a warning hand. “No, don’t say it. You’re here, and you’re a guest in my house, and I enjoyed meeting you. You’ll be having dinner with us, so you can call me Lord Carrick when we meet again. In the meantime, when there’s but the two of us, please call me Rob. Now come and walk with me and I’ll show you the quickest way of finding your bishop.”

  I spent the remaining few hours of that late afternoon and much of the evening looking forward to spending more time with the young Earl of Carrick at dinner, and so I was greatly surprised to find I had little time for him that night. I had liked him from the moment of first speaking with him, and had sensed that the amity I felt was mutual, but from the very start of the evening, when the guests began to assemble, the flamboyant and personable young man, despite his proprietorial right to preside there, was quite simply eclipsed by the effulgence of two of the others present.

  The first of these, James Stewart, the fifth hereditary Steward of Scotland, was the personification of most people’s idea of a great lord. Tall, broad-shouldered, richly dressed, freshly bathed and barbered, and subtly, delicately scented, he radiated both authority and amiability—seldom an easy mixture to achieve in any company. He also enjoyed an ability to put awkward, tongue-tied strangers at ease in his august presence, and I watched in admiration as he set out, effortlessly and with convincing sincerity, to make even the least of his table companions feel more comfortable, encouraging them, without ever appearing to do so, to overcome their natural awe and reluctance at sitting down to dine with him.