by Jack Whyte
I wondered about his cargo, though, since raw, heavy lumber seemed to me to be a strange material to be shipping within a country that was largely covered in forest, but my curiosity did not survive the first two days of sailing farther up the coast. The forest appeared to continue unchanged north of Aberdeen, but on the few occasions when we approached close enough to land to be able to discern such things, I could see that the size of the trees was diminishing rapidly as we progressed northward, and by the time we rounded the Cape of Buchan and turned west to sail into the Moray Firth, the landscape south of us, in the great lordships of Buchan and Badenoch, was mainly treeless—immense, rocky expanses of low hills, covered in scrub and heather, with only stunted bushes and shrubs laying claim to the name of forestation.
Making that turn and sailing west, it seemed to me that we had sailed the length of Scotland and nothing lay northward of us there. That impression, though, lasted less than a day, quickly belied by the reappearance of land to the northwest, which Finn told me was the territories of Ross, Sutherland, and Caithness. He drew me a crude picture with the point of his knife, scoring two shallow lines in the dampened wood of the deck at our feet to show how, like two sides of a triangle, the southern coast on our left and the one coming down from the northeast formed the great funnel-shaped bay that was the Moray Firth, sweeping inland and narrowing dramatically to the town of Inverness, hard by Loch Ness, at the entrance to the great glen that divided Scotland’s Highlands north and south.
As we continued westward, past the small towns of Banff, Elgin, and Nairn on the southern shore, the countryside grew ever more bleak and barren. There were mountains ahead of us in the west and to the south, hulking shapes shrouded in the mist of great distances, but there were no large trees to be seen, and it rapidly became clear to me that the value of the lumber aboard the Gannet had increased greatly since it was loaded in Aberdeen.
There were castles, too, visible from the water on both sides of the firth; enormous castles, several of them built of stone and still being fortified, to judge from the scaffolding surrounding them.
“Where is the Black Isle?” I asked Finn on my last day aboard the Gannet.
We were proceeding under the power of oars alone by that point, the firth having narrowed between Nairn on the south bank and Cromarty on the north, and Finn was leaning indolently against the railing at the rear of the ship, by the tiller, idly watching the efforts of the rowers. He waved ahead, towards the northern coastline that was now less than two miles from us and growing closer.
“You’re looking at it.”
I peered more closely at the land he had indicated. “That’s an island?”
“It’s the Black Isle.”
“Well, I would never have known. It looks like part of the mainland.”
“Aye, but it’s an island nonetheless. There’s a wee channel runs all the way across it, isolating it from the land behind. You could jump over it in places, but it’s there.”
I could see two castles over there, one of them close, on a great stone motte overlooking the southeastern shore of the island, the other farther off, only its shape visible as a large and obviously man-made block against the skyline to the north and east, beyond the hump of the island’s shoulder.
“Which of those is Auch?”
“That one,” he said, pointing at the closer of the two. “And now that I see it, I should tell you this is the closest we will come to it, on this or any other voyage, so if it’s Auch you want to reach, we can put you ashore over there right now, within easy walking distance of the castle. That would save you from travel all the way to Inverness and back here again by land. Would save you two days, at least. It’s your decision, my friend, but if you want to go ashore here you had better decide quickly.”
I gazed at the distant fortress, debating with myself, then asked him if Murray had retaken it or was it still in English hands.
“You tell me,” he said with a grand shrug. “But I can tell you, Andrew de Moray has been in revolt for two full months and more. Everyone knows that. And he started here, evicting the garrison from his father’s castle. I would be surprised if the English have returned since then.”
“I would be too,” I said, remembering Murray’s grim determination. “Can you put the Gannet in that close to shore?”
“Not close enough without a long swim.” He grinned at me. “But we can row you ashore in a small boat. How long will you take to make ready?”
I stood at the top of the shelving, pebbled beach where Sven’s men had dropped me dry-footed, staring up at the castle the de Moray family had built on the summit of a barren, sheer-sided rock. This was Auch Castle, the seat of the de Moravia family, and the very look of it gave warning that its owners were not to be trifled with. It was a classic motte-and-bailey castle: a central, defensive keep built of local stone atop a high motte and surrounded by a bailey, a walled courtyard, that housed other buildings and provided shelter for the people of the surrounding countryside in time of danger. As was the case with many of Scotland’s greatest fortresses, though, the motte upon which Auch was built was natural—a large crag thrusting vertically to a height of more than a hundred feet, and the steepness of its sides—sheer cliffs, for the most part—made it easily defensible. Its sole potential weak point, the approach road winding in a series of steep switchbacks up bald rock hillside to the summit, was vulnerable at every stage of its ascent, overlooked and threatened from above. All in all, Auch’s was an impressive and intimidating site, and even though I knew the trick by which Andrew de Moray had been able to penetrate the castle and win it back from the English, I could not help but be awed that he had been able to capture the place.
As I stared up towards the distant summit I saw movement on the heights as a file of men emerged and lined the edge of the road above, looking down at me. I was unsurprised. The Golden Gannet would have been closely watched since it first became visible to the guards on the walls, long before Finn Persson altered course to set me ashore. Sure enough, I saw movement on the road down from the motte, and I picked up my pack, swung it into place at my back, and went to meet my new hosts.
They treated me with adequate civility from the outset, correctly judging that I posed no threat to anyone. The man in charge of the group sent to meet me, a corpulent, sallow-faced fellow wearing half armour, asked me to give my name and state my business on de Moray land. I told him who I was and that I had been sent north by my bishop to find Sir Andrew the Younger and to speak with him on a matter of some urgency.
“He’s no’ here,” the big man said. “But ye’d better come up to the keep. Bring him!”
The six men who had accompanied him now arranged themselves about me, not in the disciplined way that formal military guards would, but nonetheless effectively, leaving me with no shred of doubt that I was under guard, and we followed their captain as he led us back up the hill. I asked whom I would be speaking to when we reached the keep, but no one gave any sign of having heard me and so I decided to say no more and wait until my question answered itself.
As we approached the top of the road, I could get a better view of the outer wall surrounding the bailey, and I realized it was far stronger and more substantial than I had thought it to be when I was gazing up at it from the beach. I had known it would be massively thick at the base, for it was built on the solid stone summit of the motte, which meant it could have no entrenched foundations, but I had underestimated the scale of the thing.
All curtain wall fortifications are double structured, built with an empty space between two parallel stone walls. The outer wall confronts the enemy and, for obvious reasons, is built of heavier and larger stones than the inner one, and the space between the two is filled with packed earth and rubble. Some curtain walls I had seen were dizzyingly high, towering above the ground to provide the defenders with the advantage of height and inaccessibility. It was not so with the walls of Auch, though, for the monolith that was the motte already gave
its defenders both of those advantages, and the curtain walls that topped it, which were no higher than thirty feet, had been built right to the edge of the cliff, offering no foothold or rallying space to any attacker.
The outer wall could be described as roughly circular, following the outer edge of the crag, and its ends overlapped to form a killing ground, a passageway four good paces wide and more than fifty long that led to the main gate and was wide open to attack from overhead at every step. The gate itself, I saw to my amazement, was an enormous and cumbersome thing, built of ancient, square-dressed logs, iron-bound and hinged at the top to form a gigantic, hanging curtain. This gate could be raised and lowered by chains and pulleys, though the lower end could be released to crash down devastatingly in time of need, and once it was down it could be locked in place, secured by a brace of iron bolts each as thick as a man’s thigh. That gate, I decided, eyeing the device as I passed through, exactly captured the meaning of the word impregnable.
As I slowed below and peered up at the hinged apparatus that topped it, one of my guards, walking too close behind, bumped into me, whereupon he threw himself violently sideways with a curse and drew his dirk as though I had tried to attack him. Seeing the leaping fury on his face, I thought I might die right there in that narrow space between the walls.
“A God’s name, Maitland,” one of his companions snarled. “Are ye daft? Put up yer dirk.”
“He tried to—”
“He tried nothin’. He looked up at the gate is what he did, and had you been awake instead o’ stumblin’ ahint him like a blearyeyed tosspot, ye’d hae seen him do it and no’ tripped ower him.” His voice was heavy with disgust that I knew had little to do with me. “The man’s a priest, for Christ’s sake! And there’s six o’ us here guardin’ him, so what would he try to do? Ye think he’s like to turn on you?”
“What’s going on here?”
It was the half-armoured captain, and my defender looked at him almost defiantly, it seemed to me. “Nothing much,” he said, looking back at the red-faced dirk-wielder, who was putting his weapon away and looking sheepish. “Maitland here tripped ower the pr—the priest. That’s all.”
He had been on the point of saying “the prisoner,” I knew. The captain looked from him to me, ignoring the man called Maitland, and then sniffed. “Aye, well, we’re here now. The rest of you can go back to work. You,” he said, pointing at my defender. “Take this one up to the keep and put him under guard until he’s needed.” He scanned me from feet to head with a scowling glance. “Tell whoever ye leave him wi’ that he needna be shackled, but he’s to be locked up and kept out o’ mischief until he’s sent for.” With that he turned his back on us and walked away, followed by five of the six guards.
I raised an eyebrow at my guard, and he shrugged one shoulder. “You heard the man,” he said.
“Aye, I did.” I looked straight up and pointed to the device overhead. “I’ve never seen a gate like that. Are they common in these parts?”
“What?”
He clearly had not understood the question. “The hanging gate. I’ve never seen the like. Are there others like it in other castles?”
He, too, looked up at the unusual gate, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. That’s the only one, as far as I know. And before you ask me anything else, I ken nothing more about it.”
“Sir Andrew might know.”
“Aye,” he said, “Sir Andrew might. You should ask him about it.”
“I will.” Only when I saw his eyebrow quirk did I realize that he had meant his remark sarcastically, never dreaming that I would, in fact, ask such a trivial question of Sir Andrew de Moray.
He jerked his head in a signal for me to start walking again, and I turned obediently into the yard that opened up at the end of the curtain wall passageway. We walked together across a courtyard that had been chipped and chiselled from the raw rock; the ground was uneven and dangerous to walk on without watching where you placed your feet. In the short distance we covered I saw a well-equipped smithy with several forges, a cooperage with new barrels stacked outside, several storage houses of varying sizes including a strong barn, and a small, squat building with several chimneys from which wafted the mouth-watering aroma of new bread.
The keep dominated everything else, and in the defensive tradition of such buildings, it had but a single entrance, high up on the sheer stone wall and fronted by a long drawbridge. A steep, opensided flight of steps rose up from the courtyard to the end of the lowered drawbridge, and as we approached it I could see that the bottom of the drawbridge was protected with sheets of iron, so that when raised, it would protect the door in the wall from fiery arrows and other missiles.
We climbed the steps and crossed the narrow bridge—I kept rigidly to the centre, since there were no railings on either side and it was a sheer drop to the uneven rock twenty feet below. The guards at the far end allowed us to pass through into the keep with no more than a curious glance at me. I had to keep my eyes on my feet as we climbed several flights of wall-hugging steps leading to the floors above the main entrance of Auch Castle.
The family quarters of the castle’s owners occupied the third floor and were separated from the common stairway by floor-toceiling wooden walls, affording a degree of privacy. The floors directly below and above the family’s rooms were used by garrison and administrative staff, and it was to the quarters of one of the latter, on the fourth floor, that my escort delivered me. By the time we arrived there, I was growing sure we were headed for the open roof of the keep, for my legs had pushed me up at least a hundred steps and I knew there could not be many more left to climb. Before we reached the roof, though, my escort stopped at an open door and cleared his throat loudly.
The room beyond was surprisingly small—barely larger than a horse stall—and crowded, with a low ceiling that barely allowed its single inhabitant, a man several inches taller than me, to stand upright without stooping. The fellow was leaning against the rear wall, peering through a tiny window that was no more than an arrow slit. He straightened up and turned, and as he took in every aspect of me from shoes to tonsure, I took note of his own appearance, from thinning, reddish hair and blazing blue eyes, to a lean, fit-looking frame. I was wearing my travelling clothes, dark woollen tunic and leggings beneath a heavy cloak, and he was similarly dressed, save that his clothes appeared to be made of finer, less durable stuff than mine and were coloured in varying shades of brown, from walnut dark to palest tan.
He sniffed—disdainfully, I thought. “Right,” he said, as though I wasn’t there. “Who is he?”
“Priest,” my guard said before I could get a word out. “Frae the south. Wants to talk to Sir Andrew.” He pronounced it Surrandra.
“Who sent you?” the other man asked me.
“My bishop, Wishart of Glasgow,” I replied.
“Hmm.” His eyes flicked back to my escort. “Right, then. You wait outside, at the head of the stairs. I might hae further need o’ you.” The fellow waved me inside, and I stepped through the doorway, stooping to avoid the lintel.
Neither of us spoke for a moment, but then he stepped forward quickly—I stepped back instinctively—and removed a high-sided box of documents and tightly wound scrolls from a stool at the side of the room’s work table and placed it on the floor at his back. “Here,” he said in a voice that now contained no hint of suspicion or distrust, “sit ye down, for then I can sit down, too. I’ve been on my feet all day and my legs are weary.”
Surprised by the signal change in the tone of his voice, I remained where I was. He had an unusual voice, light and high pitched but not unpleasant, and a distinctive manner of pronouncing certain words and phrases that I presumed to be the dialect of Inverness.
He cocked his head and looked askance at me. “Will you not sit?”
As I obeyed, he turned the small room’s only other chair around to face me and sank into it with a sigh, stretching his legs out in front of him and scrubbing at h
is thinning scalp with the palms of both hands. Immured as he was in a small, cramped room filled with books and written records, I assumed him to be a scribe, if not a cleric.
“Do you speak Latin?” I asked him.
He smiled for the first time and shook his head. “I have but one tongue, and this is it. Now then,” he said. “I’m Alexander Pilche. But folk call me Sandy. Who are you?”
Pilche! Some scribe! I knew the name well, from having heard Father David de Moray speak of him, but hearing this man lay claim to it surprised me. The reports I had heard of Sandy Pilche had led me to imagine a fierce, warlike man, grim and humourless and bent upon driving the last surviving, wounded Englishman back over the border to die in England. I had pictured him to be physically large and intimidating, with a loud, commanding voice, but here was a soft-spoken man, and not much older than I was myself.
I now took in the “scribe’s” wide, muscular shoulders and big, strong-looking hands. There was a litheness about him, too, that bespoke both speed and grace; a subtle, inherent threat I had acknowledged when he moved to pick up the box from the chair. And then I saw the armour tree behind him, in a dim corner of the room. It was sturdy and functional but bare, save for the long, sheathed sword that hung from one of its pegs on a heavy, supple belt. A dangerous man, then, although the overall impression he gave me remained one of clerical benevolence.
“Master Pilche, of Inverness,” I said. “A face, at last, to go with the name. Well met, Master Pilche. Your name is known where I come from. I’ve heard it mentioned several times in recent weeks, and always admiringly, as one of Andrew’s most valued associates. I am James Wallace, and despite my appearance I am a priest, just as the other fellow said. Bishop Wishart is my employer, has been for years.”