by Jack Whyte
I clearly remember the stillness once the sounds of the four horses had died away ahead of us. We were walking through a grove of majestic beech trees, on a thick carpet of dead leaves from previous years, and the smooth, grey skin of the trees’ massive trunks reminded me of the soaring, vaulted heights of the cathedral nave in Glasgow. Somewhere off to the east a thrush was singing, and ahead of us, a pair of linnets were competing with each other in a struggle for melodic supremacy. It was a profoundly peaceful moment, and even as I became aware of it, it was shattered.
Out of nowhere, I saw four men—or rather a blurred impression of four large, armed men—running towards us, and I saw a long, bare, pointing blade. At the same moment I was aware of Lord Bruce dropping into a crouch as his hand swept down for the sword at his waist. But of course no sword was there. We were on a hunting expedition within the earl’s own lands, and it had not occurred to any of us that we might need to defend ourselves. I saw Bruce flinch, then start away, his hand now at his other side clawing for the dirk that hung there. But the first attacker was already between us, thrusting at me stiff-armed to knock me aside as he swung up his sword, left handed, against Bruce. He had clearly judged the earl more dangerous than I because he was bigger, broader, and more brightly clad.
The attacker’s stiffly outstretched arm came close to hitting me, but I knocked it aside with my elbow, deflecting his charge easily as I grasped my staff two-handed and drove its heavier end into his exposed armpit as hard as I could, knocking him heavily sideways and off balance. As he fell sprawling, his sword spun from his grip, and Bruce pivoted, bending as he went, to snatch up the fallen sword, gripping it awkwardly by the cross-guard as he drew the dirk at his waist with his other hand. Someone crashed into me then from my side and sent me flying.
Armed but yet helpless, the earl spun away from the new attacker in a full circle, changing his weapons from hand to hand as he went. His legs flexed and he straightened, dirk in his left hand and the long English sword in his right, and parried the wild swing launched at him by the fellow who had knocked me down. The sword flashed, metal clanged, the attacker’s arm flew up, and the dirk in the earl’s hand flickered forward and stabbed deep into another exposed armpit. I heard a choking grunt of pain, but already Bruce was spinning away to confront yet another charging assailant. The long blade in his hand swung up and around and down, hissing with speed and power until its arc ended suddenly in a jarring, meaty sound.
Behind me, I heard fleeing footsteps and knew, without having to look, that a last assailant was running for his life.
Bruce and I stood staring wild eyed at each other, both of us panting for breath, although his exertions had been far greater than my own.
“You saved my life,” he said eventually. “That whoreson would have killed me if you hadn’t hit him.”
I looked down at the man who lay at the earl’s feet. He was English—they all were, no doubt of that—a foot soldier by the light leather armour he wore. He was easily as tall as Bruce himself, with long, greasy hair and surprise-filled eyes that stared down disbelievingly at the swaying hilt of the sword that Bruce had just released. The dying man’s eyes travelled down the length of the blade for as far as they could, towards the spot he could not see, where the edged steel, driven by all Bruce’s strength and anger, had sunk deep into the join of his neck and shoulder.
I turned away from the bloodied forms on the ground at my feet to look at the first man who had fallen; the one I had hit. Relief hit me like a splash of cold water as I saw he was alive and whole, with no trace of blood on him anywhere. But he was writhing on the ground and grimacing, one hand clamped tightly beneath his armpit where I had struck him. Bruce crossed the distance to him in one step and hauled the Englishman to his feet, gripping him by the armholes in his leather armour. The fellow took heed of the fact that his dead weight was being lifted as though it was nothing, and blinked up at the man holding him.
“Who are you?” he slurred, in Scots.
“Carrick.” Bruce’s response was a feral snarl. He hitched the sagging man higher, so they were face to face. “This is my land. Who are you? And who sent you?”
The Englishman was blinking rapidly, beginning to regain his senses, and he suddenly thrust himself upright and made to shrug off the earl’s grip. Bruce let go one hand and smashed him hard across the face with a clenched fist, knocking his head sideways and drawing a gush of blood from his nose. He then spun him with both hands, grasped him anew by the nape of the neck, and swept his feet away with a swift kick, dropping him heavily to his knees next to the sprawled corpse of his erstwhile companion before thrusting him forward to look directly down at the ruined body.
“Look at him, fool. You can be as dead as he is before you draw another breath, if you so wish. It’s your decision to make, so make it now if you ever hope to stand on your feet again. Live or die, here and now, where no one might ever find you until your bones are picked clean by the crows.”
At that moment, the other downed man, the one Bruce had dirked in the armpit, began to cough, and we could tell, from the gurgling, painfully laboured sounds of it, that he was close to death.
Bruce wrenched the kneeling man’s head around to face the sound. “Your friend there’s dying, too,” he said. “Deservedly. Four of you, and two of us, and us unarmed while you held the surprise. And now two of you are down, dead and dying, you’re next to go, and your fourth man is running for his life into the bogs to the south. He’ll die, too, in there.” He tightened his fingers on the prisoner’s neck. “Now tell us. Who sent you?”
The kneeling man straightened his back and began to speak in a breathless, high-pitched voice. Alas, I could not understand a word of what he said, for he spoke now in a language—or a dialect—that I had never heard before. Fortunately, it was one Bruce was evidently familiar with, for the two jabbered at each other for several minutes before Bruce grunted in disgust. Still holding his captive by the neck, he dragged him bodily to where he could bend down and retrieve the sword he had used earlier. I felt a surge of horror, believing he was bent on killing the prisoner, but before I could even begin to protest he straightened up again and smashed the Englishman behind the ear with the sword’s pommel, knocking him senseless and releasing him to fall face down.
“Percy’s people,” he said to me. “They’re closer than we thought—less than ten miles from here but more than five. These four are part of a larger group sent out to scout the countryside. They’ve been coming north since last night, and the main party— two hundred of them, this fellow said—is about six miles behind them.”
“Headed to Turnberry?” I tried to keep the thrill of fear out of my voice.
“No. They’re going from west to north, towards Lanark. They’ll miss Turnberry.”
“Not if the one who escaped finds them again. He’ll bring them back this way.”
He looked me in the eye. “Why do you say that?”
“Because it’s logical. They found us here and the only place we could have come from is Turnberry, or failing that, Irvine or Ayr. There’s no other habitable spot to the east of here for miles … Too many miles for us to be here by accident.”
“Damn. You’re right. Though they’d never dare tackle Turnberry with only two hundred men. But that would be a wise man’s decision, and we’re dealing with Percy, so we’d best be ready for folly. Come on, we’ll have to move quickly and get ready.”
The dying man had fallen silent and the third was unconscious, and there was nothing more that I could do for either of them apart from reciting the Prayer for the Dying over the wounded man, breathing a final Act of Contrition into his ear while Bruce waited, tapping his foot but making no attempt to hurry me. I made the sign of the cross one last time over the man, who no longer appeared to be breathing, then stood up, nodding to indicate that I was finished and we could go. We had nothing to take with us, apart from my walking staff and the English sword, which Bruce thrust beneath his belt, a
nd so we struck off immediately for our hunting camp.
As soon as we were safely out of the glade and were once again moving through familiar countryside between vast, dense stands of hawthorn bushes, I asked, “What language was that fellow speaking?”
Only after I had asked the question did I become aware that my companion might have taken exception to my tone, or to the lack of any honorific, but he merely shrugged and answered the question as asked.
“It was English,” he said. “English as the English themselves speak it, that is. They all speak different languages, just like us up here with our Gaelic, and the Norman-French version of English spoken by much of the nobility, and what we call Scots, though that’s a bastard thing, born of people’s need to trade with one another. We have our dialects, but it’s nothing like as bad as in England. The common folk down there can’t even understand the languages being spoken in another part of the country, or sometimes even the next town. These fellows here are from Sussex, on the south seacoast. My family has lands near there, so I learned to speak their local language as a boy. We were lucky in our choice of prisoner, simply because of that. I could talk to him, but he wouldn’t be able to talk to someone from Devon, say, or York.”
“But he spoke Scots at first, when he asked you who you were.”
“He did. That’s true. But that might have been all the Scots he knew. He said he came from Sussex.”
“So Percy’s men are from Sussex?”
“No, not all of them. But they are raised in groups, in local levies, with their own officers, and they generally keep to themselves. They have people whose job it is to stand as interpreters, translating English speech into English speech for different Englishmen, which sounds really strange to us. But they manage to keep themselves informed, nonetheless.”
“Hmm. Part of a group. D’you think their friends might have found our camp?”
He shook his head. “I doubt it. We’re not that far away and there’s at least a score and a half of our people there. Had anything happened, I think we would have heard the noise.”
I doubted that, but since I had no more reason for my doubt than he had for his certainty, I said nothing to gainsay him. We lapsed into silence, and relieved of the need to be ready to fight or flee, I muttered a few grateful prayers as we walked, Bruce now a few paces ahead of me.
Suddenly he stopped, and I almost walked right into him. He turned, unsteadily, his face deathly white, and he gazed at me blankly for a moment before looking back in the direction from which we had come. And then he dropped to his knees like a felled bullock, and lurching forward onto his hands, vomited violently.
Stunned, I moved to aid him, though I could do little besides lay my hand on the back of his neck and mutter sounds of encouragement. The paroxysm passed quickly, and after one more long, agonized spell of dry retching, he crawled to a patch of longer grass where he rolled onto his back and lay with his bent elbow covering his eyes. I sat down beside him, wanting to ask him, as people always do at such times, if he was feeling better, but I could see for myself that he was nowhere close to being himself, and so I held my peace and sat there quietly, waiting for him to recover.
A short time later he exhaled deeply and sat up, hitching himself backwards on straightened arms until he could cross his legs beneath him. Then he placed his hands on his knees, hunched forward, and stared at the ground between his legs.
“All my life I’ve trained for that,” he said eventually in a quiet voice. He raised his eyes to look directly at me. “But no one ever told me how personal it is … It went as I always thought it would,” he continued, frowning gently, “almost exactly as I expected, but faster. I saw it develop, though, fast as it was, and I suppose my training took over. It must have, for otherwise I can’t explain what happened. I don’t think there was anything deliberate in what I did—at least, I wasn’t aware of doing anything deliberately.” He fell silent for a few moments, then continued in the same, slightly bemused voice. “It seemed for a moment as if I were standing aside watching myself and what was happening.”
His gaze sharpened suddenly and his voice grew stronger, more like the Bruce I had spoken with earlier. “I’d have gone down in the first clash if it hadn’t been for you, and believe me when I say I’m grateful. But after that I was in control at all times. And then out of nowhere, right here on the path, I saw what I had done to that first man with my dirk, and then to the other … that hacking sword cut. The sound of it. The blood.” He closed his eyes tight and shuddered.
“I didn’t know it would be so real, so personal … Didn’t know I’d see their eyes as I killed them.”
I sat thunderstruck, awed by the realization that the men he had just killed were his first, and that probably he had never drawn blood in anger, either. Who would have suspected that, being who and what he was, he had managed to live for as long as he had, during a time of war, without ever having killed a man. I stretched out my hand and helped him to his feet.
“Will you hear my confession, Father?”
“Of course I will. You wish to do it now, here?”
He looked around the spot where we were standing, and it was as quiet as any church. Even the birds had stopped singing. He nodded. “Here and now, yes. I think I need to.”
As soon as we arrived back at the campsite, Bruce announced the English presence in the woods, and instantly the mood of the entire assembly changed from celebration to urgency. Everything was packed up and on wagons in no time, the horses readied, the fires put out. Bruce and I wrapped some dripping slices of fresh-roasted meat between new-cut slabs of bread and ate on horseback as we retraced our route to Turnberry, the earl riding on a fresh horse while his injured mount was led by one of the camp attendants.
Within half an hour of our arrival the entire place was seething with urgent, last-minute preparations as the army assembled by the Steward and his friends and allies was made ready to march. The plan was to march northwest, towards Irvine, where Lord Stewart had identified a high-ground site strong enough to discourage any head-on attack by Percy’s force, which was generally assumed to be stronger and more battle-ready than our own.
I had gone looking for my employer as soon as we returned, but he had been in conference and had merely nodded to indicate that he would send for me when he was free, and so I was standing in the castle yard, off to one side, watching all the activity when one of his young acolytes came to summon me. I was to go to the chapel, he said, where his lordship would join me presently.
The bishop, who had a horror of wasting time—his own as well as other people’s—did not keep me waiting. I had been in the chapel no more than a minute when the door opened and he swept in, glancing around the small space to make sure we were alone. He went straight to the front of the altar and seated himself on the right side of the narrow aisle without genuflecting, waving me to a seat opposite him where we could talk without raising our voices.
“We may be interrupted at any time,” he said in Latin, “but there’s no other place that’s safer from being overheard. How was the hunt? I hear you and Lord Bruce shared an adventure.”
“Aye, my lord, you could say that.”
“English scouts?”
“Apparently. Ranging a few miles ahead of their main force.”
“And one of them escaped?”
“Aye, ran away, rather than escaped, but reported back to his masters either way.”
“Unfortunate.”
“Very, my lord, but there was nothing we do to prevent it. There were four of them to two of us and they caught us by surprise. We were a hunting party, and no one thought to send out scouts. No one had dreamed the Englishmen might be there.”
“Clearly, in hindsight, someone should have dreamed they might be there. We’ve known for some time now that Percy is drawing close.”
“Close, my lord, but not yet here. A matter of days removed, it was said last night.”
“Aye, and wrongly said, as things tr
anspired. That encounter could have been disastrous.”
“It could, sir, but thanks be to God and the Earl of Carrick, it was not. Lord Bruce did well to best them as he did. He was unarmed, except for a dirk, but he managed to wrest a sword from one of them and saved us both.”
The bishop eyed me askance, then grunted. “And did you have a chance to speak with him before this happened? For long enough, I mean, to have arrived at a considered, solid opinion before the onset of the earl’s heroics?”
“Yes, my lord, I did.”
“And? You judge him trustworthy?”
“I judge him innocent of the traitorous perfidy of which some men accuse him. Whether that makes him trustworthy in other matters would depend greatly upon your expectations of him. But I saw no malice in the man, no reason to mistrust him or his motives. He struck me as being honest and straightforward in his dealings with everyone around him, and I like him for himself, which is more than I can say for many another you have asked me to evaluate. And all of those conclusions I had formed before our encounter with the English scouts. What happened during that encounter merely reinforced my view. I would trust the Earl of Carrick, my lord bishop.”
“And his ambitions, would you trust those?”
“I would. Why not? He is a Bruce, and makes no secret of it, and offers no apology. What else would you expect of him? As heir to his grandfather’s and his father’s legacy, he sees the realm as being his by right, and I would wager that when he judges the time is fit, he will step forth and claim it, given the support and backing of men like yourself and the High Steward. That is ambition, by anyone’s definition, but it is forthright. There is nothing about it that is underhanded or deceitful. And should it come about that he does claim the Crown someday, I think by then he will be old enough to hold it fast and wear it well. As I said, my lord, I like the man. I believe he will distinguish himself with great honour someday.”