The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  “How strong is Percy’s group, in terms of horse and foot?”

  “That’s uncertain. The likeliest estimate I heard was two hundred horse—knights and mounted men-at-arms—and three thousand foot.”

  “Hmm … You said rumours, as in more than one. What else is there?”

  “Another almost certain to have substance. John de Warrenne, the Earl of Surrey, still holds command in Scotland although he detests the place and its climate and has not set foot here since last year. According to our friendly clerical sources close to Westminster, he will be coming back to do his duty, under threat of Edward’s great displeasure. And he will not come unattended.”

  “Invasion strength, think you?”

  “Invasion strength, for a certainty, the bishop believes.”

  Will nodded. “Fine, so be it. I’ll go to Fife when I leave Lothian. But this route you named for Murray, straight south to Perth, why don’t you go up that way, instead of adding twice as much again by going along the coast?”

  “Too hazardous to try alone, I’m told. There’ll be folk along the coastal route if I get into trouble.”

  “Aye, and those folk along the coastal route could be trouble. Never trust anyone but yourself when you’re on the road, Jamie. You should know that as well as anyone by now. Besides, it’s summertime. The snow’s all out of the high passes by now, and that’s most of what makes that route hazardous for a man on his own. I think you’d be better off striking straight north and following the passes. Save yourself a hundred miles that you don’t need to ride.” He smoothed his shaven chin with thumb and forefinger—a beard wearer’s mannerism. “You can cover ten miles a day easily, with a sound horse under you and a good pack horse. Either way, what if you run into trouble?”

  “From whom?” I replied, smiling to disguise my own misgivings. “Only two kinds of people might cause a travelling priest trouble: Scots and Englishmen. If any Scots attempt to interfere with me, I’ll tell them you’re my cousin and threaten them with your vengeance, as well as with excommunication. And if any Englishman contests my passing, I’ll show him my letter of safe conduct from the King of England himself.” I had shown him the captured document earlier. “But nothing will happen to me while I’m on God’s business, Cousin,” I continued. “And this is most assuredly God’s business, so put your mind at ease. I’ll leave first thing in the morning, as soon as I’ve said Mass. If I can do ten miles a day north from Perth, it’ll take me but a fortnight to reach Inverness and start looking for Murray.”

  He grunted. “And if you can’t, you’ll never be able to make up whatever time you’ve lost. Your plan leaves you no breathing space, Jamie. I think you should go by sea.”

  “By sea?” The mere suggestion left me open-mouthed. The idea was so far removed from the reality of my life that it made no sense to me. I had seen the sea, of course—living in Scotland it was almost impossible not to, at some point—but I had never been to sea, afloat upon it in a boat.

  “Aye, by sea. How much baggage are you carrying?”

  I blinked at him. “Baggage? Not much. Not even enough to merit a pack horse.”

  “What specifically?”

  “Some clothing and a few personal belongings. My sacramental things. Oats and nosebags for the animals, and basic food and utensils to feed myself. Why?”

  “What about vestments? Are you taking priestly robes with you?”

  “No sacerdotals, no. I’ll celebrate my daily Mass alone in the dark before I take the road, and only God and I will know what I’m wearing.”

  “What else would you absolutely need to take with you, if you were to travel by ship?”

  “What ship, Will? We’re far inland. What are you—?”

  “Just tell me, Jamie, what else?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Nothing, I suppose. Some underclothes, my cloak and staff. That’s all.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Were I mad enough to contemplate such a journey, then yes, that’s all I would need. But I really have no idea why we’re even talking about such a thing.”

  He gestured towards the sword in the corner. “D’you remember who made that?”

  “Aye,” I said, glad to have the topic changed. “Shoomy’s brother, Malachy the smith. He finished it, anyway.”

  “That’s right. And until Shoomy came back from the north that time, bringing the sword with him, I hadn’t even known he had a brother. Or certainly not that the brother had a grown son called Callum.”

  I blinked at him, wondering where this was headed.

  “Young Callum is here right now. He arrived from Aberdeen yesterday morning. His father, Malachy, is dead and Callum was brought south to his uncle Shoomy for his own protection.”

  “Wait, wait!” I raised my hand to silence him. “Why would this lad come here? And how would he know where to find you?”

  Will dipped his head in a slow nod. “Excellent questions. He came in the first place because he has been proscribed—he is an outlaw with a price upon his head. It seems that his father fell afoul of one of the English garrison commanders in Aberdeen—some dispute over smithing Malachy was never paid for. He was angry about it and, being Malachy, he made no secret of it. So the Englishman, Mowbray I think his name was, sent some of his garrison lads to have a word with him. Four of them went into his smithy and started throwing things around, and when Malachy picked one of them up and tossed him onto the fire in his forge, they didn’t like that at all. The noise brought young Callum running at the head of a crowd, just in time to see his father being murdered in his own smithy. The boy snatched up a pitchfork and killed one of the soldiers. The angry neighbours took care of two more, but the last of the four escaped and ran back to the castle. And there, of course, he reported things to suit himself, and a manhunt was launched to find the murderous young Callum.”

  “So how was he able to get away?”

  “Because he was fortunate. A man called Sven Persson—some call him Big Sven, I call him Finn—was in Aberdeen that day. Finn is, or was, brother to Callum’s mother, who died a few years ago, and he’s a seagoing merchantman out of one of the Norse ports across the sea, well connected among the burghers of Aberdeen and other coastal towns. In late spring every year, Finn takes his ship to Aberdeen, where he seems to be related either by blood or marriage to half the folk in the region, and picks up a relative, a cloth manufacturer and merchant, and takes him down to the Firth of Tay, where the merchant drops off finished woollen goods all along the Fife coast, ending up in Perth. He then picks up a fresh cargo of raw winter wool from the warehouses in Perth and takes it back to Aberdeen for processing.

  “Big Sven is no fool—I’ve met him a few times—and when he found out what had happened, he smuggled the boy aboard his ship as soon as it was dark and kept him out of sight until his crew could load their cargo and put out to sea again. He took the boy with him to Perth, then sent him here with an escort of four of the fighting men he employs to guard his ship. Those four will be returning to Perth come morning, and by the time they get there, Sven should be ready to head back to Aberdeen. I think you should sail with him. That’s why I asked you about baggage. There’s not much room for extra baggage aboard a seagoing ship.”

  “But I can’t go by sea!”

  “Why not? If there’s a ship available and willing to take you, of course you can. It’ll be a lot faster than going by land.”

  “But what good would it do?” I asked. “I’d be in Aberdeen with another sixty miles and more ahead of me and no horse to get me there.”

  “At worst, you could buy another horse, but you won’t need to, because you’ll continue north by sea, still with Finn, all the way to Inverness. With favourable winds, you’ll be there in days, not weeks.”

  “But … how can you know that? This Finn fellow, or Big Sven or whatever his name is, might be sailing back to wherever he lives as soon as he returns to Aberdeen.”

  “No, he wo
n’t. His next port of call is in fact Inverness. It always is. He has merchants up there, too, who rely on him from year to year—him and others, I mean—to ship their goods to market. As for why he should agree to take you, he’ll be glad of the passage money you’ll pay him. I’ll write to him and tell him you’re my cousin and under my protection.”

  “But how do you come to know this man, Will? How do you meet a sea captain from across the eastern sea when you live as an outlaw in the depths of a great forest?”

  He shrugged his huge shoulders. “I meet a lot of people nowadays, Jamie,” he said modestly. “And sometimes they arrange for me to meet other people. I know a lot of folk.”

  “Evidently so,” I said, impressed in spite of myself. “And do you really think you can arrange this?”

  He grinned. “I’ll go and see to it now. You can come with me, if you like.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE BURGESS OF INVERNESS

  God smiled upon me in the weeks that followed, blessing my northern journey with the best of weather, so that I sailed up the eastern coast of Scotland aboard Sven Persson’s ship, The Golden Gannet, in a blaze of dazzling, sun-gilt beauty, seeing the land on my left in its true but savage glory, and reiterating my sincere gratitude in prayer, time after time, that I was safe aboard the vessel that bore me, with no need to attempt that journey on land.

  The Gannet was a fine ship, sixty feet in length and broad in the beam, with sufficient cargo space below decks to generate revenue for her owner and crewmen year-round. She carried a crew of sixteen, eight of whom were armed guards—mercenaries whose primary task was to protect the vessel against attack by pirates. In the absence of pirates, though, the guards worked beside the remaining crewmen, manning the twin banks of oars that powered the ship when there was no wind. Never having been on board a ship before, I was endlessly impressed by the compact efficiency of the vessel. Not a single inch of space was wasted or lacking purpose, and I understood why Will had insisted on knowing exactly what baggage I was carrying.

  How different, I realized, this sea journey was from the land route I might have followed, where every turn, every hillside, involved the possibility of change of direction or purpose. Aboard ship, there were no such possibilities, and the more I thought about the differences between where I found myself and where I might have been, the more grateful I became that I was aboard the Gannet. It was one thing to admit that, lacking roads, the Scottish terrain could be difficult to cross. To see that same terrain from shipboard at a distance, however, knowing that there simply were no roads traversing it, provided a daunting lesson in the realities of overland travel and the impossibility of progressing with any hope of sustainable speed from day to day. It took me less than a single day after leaving Perth, having journeyed out into open sea, to be able to see for myself how dense and impenetrable were the forests that covered the land, and how its high, rolling hills crested occasionally in majestic, craggy tops that thrust up like breaching whales from the uniform blanket of trees that covered their lower slopes.

  Later that first day, before nightfall, the captain and I were eating together with the sole other passenger, huddled in his tiny cabin, when the lookout screamed a warning from above us and sent us running out onto the deck.

  I spoke just now of hill crests breaking the surface of the forest like breaching whales, but until that day, I confess, I had never seen a whale. My awareness of the creatures was based solely upon the scriptural tale of Jonah and the Leviathan. That evening, though, I witnessed a gathering of the creatures when we found ourselves sailing northward in the very midst of a large group of them— immense, terrifying monsters from beneath the seas, some of them even larger than the Gannet. I froze when I saw the first of them, my eyes directed to the sight by the frantic screams and pointing finger of the lookout on the cross-tree of the single mast. I turned and saw the most frightening sight of my life—a black behemoth leaping clear out of the water less than a hundred paces away and appearing to hover endlessly before it crashed back to the surface and dived. The sight of its mighty, high-held tail remained seared into my memory after it vanished.

  I saw how tiny was the ship that I had thought so large, dwarfed and threatened as it was by giant, moving bodies all around us as they rose into view and vanished again beneath the black waters that swirled around our keel. I felt sudden, scalding heat as my bladder gave way with fear. By then, though, everyone aboard was soaked with seawater and so no one noticed what had happened to me. I thought that everyone else aboard the ship must be as terrified as I was, but I soon realized that what I had taken to be their fright was no more than surprise at finding themselves so suddenly among the whales, in imminent danger of being capsized. I was, I later discovered, the sole person there on the deck who had never seen such things before and thought them supernatural.

  Afterwards, when the whales had vanished back into the depths and order was restored, the ship making steady headway northward, I asked Big Sven what he would have done had one of the creatures collided with the ship. He shook his head abruptly. “They wouldn’t have,” he said. “They make no accidents like that. They saw us more clearly than we saw them. They made sport with us, I think, but not war.”

  I was astonished. “You mean they knew what they were doing?”

  “I think so. They are not stupid, these creatures. And the deep water is their home. They make no accidental bumps … they do not get drunk and fall around like people. So if one collides with us, it would be because he attacked us.” He dipped his head and shrugged. “And in a fight like that, I think we would lose. He would drown us all.”

  The captain’s fatalistic observation, and the way he made it, reminded me of a long-forgotten conversation I had had with Andrew Murray the last time I saw him, and remembering it, I felt a sudden rush of gooseflesh and a tightening in my chest at the prospect of meeting the man again and seeing for myself how serious he had been in what he said on that occasion. He had stopped in Glasgow to visit Bishop Wishart on his way north to his home in Moray after escaping from Chester Castle in Wales a month or so earlier. I had asked him a provocative question, one that should never have been asked, since there was no precedent for the possibility I was proposing, but it had simply popped into my mind and I blurted it out as it came to me. What would he do, I asked, if King Edward, for reasons of his own, were to decide that he wanted to make an example of young Andrew Murray of Petty and had him arrested again and executed out of hand, as a lesson to his father and others?

  Andrew had looked at me in much the same speculative way that Big Sven had, and then he, too, had dipped his head and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I would fight him to my last breath— and I intend to do that anyway, no matter what he does. My family’s lands, in Moray and elsewhere, are vast. And if Edward of England wants to seize them, or me, he will have to come and do so in person, and I will not be standing idly by, watching him from some far mountaintop. I’ve had a bellyful of sneering English pigheadedness and I’m going home to raise the men of Moray and stir up Hell itself against these arrogant overlords, as they like to call themselves. Overlords! Faugh! One of them’s living now in Auch Castle, in the house where I was born. But he’ll be leaving once I reach home, and all his people with him, one way or another, and I care not whether they be dead or alive when they go. I am sick to my soul of strutting, overweening English arrogance. Scotland is ours by the grace of God—it always has been, and the English have no place in it. And I swear to you that if God spares me, I intend to teach them that, though I have to write it in their blood.”

  His eyes were flashing, but strangely his voice had grown quieter as he grew angrier, falling to a near hiss as he continued, almost spitting the words. “It’s high time someone taught them what they are, these strutting, ridiculous bantam cocks. Who gave this benighted, self-deluding King of theirs the belief that he has a right to come up here and impose his will upon free folk who have no need of his int
erference, no desire to suffer his attentions, and no intention of lying down and allowing him and his thieving, ignorant bullies to trample them and their rights? My father, Sir Andrew Murray of Petty, is ten times the man England’s King could ever be, and he is an old, old man. But he has lived a life any man could be proud of, a life more honourable and upright than anything to which the Plantagenet can lay claim. But now, at the petulant whim of this self-righteous King of England, this posturing, impious popinjay, my father is locked up in London’s Tower and like to die there. I swear to you, Jamie, by the living God, that if no other man in Scotland will stand up against this aging, braggart crusader from a bygone day, I, Andrew Murray, will defy him alone and die, if I must, with my bloody spittle soaking his grizzled beard.”

  Remembering that rant, and the grim-faced, implacable determination of the young man who had uttered it, I grew impatient again with the slowness of my journey, despite my certain knowledge that I was making far better time than I had ever imagined possible. And so, while Sven and his crew worked all around me, I fell to pacing the deck anxiously, though there was scarce room enough to walk four paces before having to turn back and retrace them.

  It took us three days to make the voyage to Aberdeen from the mouth of the Tay, and we spent three more in the town, unloading and reloading. The other passenger had vanished with his cargo of raw wool as soon as it was unloaded. I knew no one in Aberdeen, and so I stayed aboard the ship, roaming the harbour during the days and watching, fascinated, the thousand and one activities that go on in such places all day, every day.

  A merchant came aboard on the third day, his cargo of heavy, square-sawn lumber already loaded and secured, and our captain— who had invited me that day to call him Finn—introduced us to each other. I disliked the newcomer immediately, and despite knowing I should not judge a man without coming to know him at least slightly, I felt justified in my dislike. The fellow glowered constantly, radiating distrust and hostility, so that among the first words that occurred to me in assessing him were suspicious, taciturn, shiftyeyed, and surly. I quickly decided that, having lived for as long as I had without being aware of his existence, I could easily live as long again without a need to be reminded of it. I had no desire to speak with him, or even to remember his name.