The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  “And does that have anything to do with your presence here?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Hmm … All right, what does bring you all this way?”

  “Your need for weaponry. I’m told you are short of weapons.”

  He snorted something that might have been the start of a bitter laugh. “Short! Aye, you might say that. My sergeants-at-arms are training my recruits with wooden swords—quarterstaves, to be sure, and ages old in honour and tradition, but there comes a stage in training when the practice weapons have to be replaced with the real thing, and we have none other than those we take from dead or captured Englishmen. So yes, you could say we are short of weapons.”

  “Well, that is about to change. I am instructed to tell you that the agents of Mother Church, under the aegis of the See of Glasgow, have arranged for a cargo of ingot iron and finished weapons and chain mail to be delivered to you at Aberdeen harbour within the month. I have the papers you will need to claim the cargo—no names attached to them, for reasons of maintaining secrecy, but I have all those in my head. How you will take delivery, of course, is for you to determine, since I understand there will be an English garrison to contend with.”

  Andrew had stiffened as I told him this. “The garrison will not present a problem,” he said. “But there are other difficulties. Within the month, you say?”

  “Aye, aboard the vessel Poseidon, out of Lübeck.”

  He drew in a great breath and stared at me for several seconds longer, then grunted and stood up, twisting around to look back towards the other fire. “D’you recall my saying you were not the first man off a boat from Aberdeen this week?”

  “I do. Who were the others?”

  “One other.” He raised an arm and pointed. “The dark-haired fellow over there, wearing the blue cap with the silver badge and the bright yellow feather. Do you know him?”

  I stood up and looked where he was pointing. The man he described was some distance away and the light was untrustworthy, but he was yet close enough for me to recognize had I known him. “I don’t,” I said. “Should I?”

  “Probably not. His name is Garnat MacDonald, but he’s most often spoken of as Gartnait of Mar, heir to the earldom of Mar, by Aberdeen.”

  “I recognize the name. His sister Isabella was Bruce’s wife.”

  “Was?”

  “Aye, sadly. She died last year, birthing a daughter. They had been wed for less than two years. Bruce was—still is—distraught.”

  “God! I knew naught of that … I’m newly wed myself, did you know that?”

  “Yes, Sandy told me. Your wife is well, I trust?”

  “Aye, and lovely as a spring morning. We are expecting our first child by year’s end, thanks be to God, though the last thing a woman needs is to be big with child while her man is fighting a war, risking death with almost every day that comes.” He inhaled sharply. “That must have ripped the guts out of Bruce, for I cannot imagine how I would feel to lose my Eleanor … And he is here in Scotland now, you say, and out with Stewart and Wishart in defiance of the Plantagenet? That’s a turnaround. I wonder if it had aught to do with Edward?” His eyes narrowed. “He’s not here as Edward’s man, you’re sure of that?”

  “I’m sure of it,” I told him. “He claims, in fact, to be here as Scotland’s man. Not Balliol’s, not King John’s, but Scotland’s.”

  “By God, I confess that surprises me.”

  “I can see that. But why should it surprise you, really, Andrew? The man’s as Scots as you are. Both your ancestors, de Moray and de Brus, came to this realm around the same time, two hundred years ago, sent here by the same Norman king, William Rufus.”

  “That’s true, but …” He hesitated, then gave a dismissive shake of his head. “No matter. But I thought he was in England.”

  “Until you pointed him out, I thought Gartnait of Mar was in England, too, as Edward’s captive.”

  “And so he was. His father remains there as a prisoner, hostage to the son’s attendance in support of Edward’s war in France. It’s a long story, but Gartnait arrived at Inverness a few days ago, sent up from Aberdeen by his associates, to warn me off and convince me to stand down and disband my army.”

  I had felt a deep pang of anxiety as he spoke the words. “Which you have no intention of doing, I hope?”

  “What think you?” He sat down again, waving me down, too, then raised his mug and sipped at his ale, the first time he had done so since toasting my arrival. “I could be offended that you even ask such a question.”

  “Don’t be. It was an observation, if you like.” I drank from my own mug and set it down again. “Who are these associates of Gartnait’s you spoke of, that they could dictate to him within his own earldom and send him all the way up here to make demands of you?”

  He drew air through his teeth. “An astute question, Father. And appropriate, too. They are friends and relatives of mine, as is Gartnait himself, but senior in rank and title to both of us. Edward convinced a number of Scots magnates to exchange imprisonment in England for service in France and Gascony. Hardly a difficult choice for any of them, I suspect, after spending the best part of a year in captivity and facing more to come.”

  “That makes perfect sense,” I said. “Perfect sense for Edward, too, for he would have them under his thumb thereafter, their sworn paroles the guarantee of their fidelity. But no word of this arrangement has reached us in the south.”

  “It affects me ill, though, in this matter of collecting the bishop’s cargo from Aberdeen, because according to Gartnait there’s an army coming north from Aberdeen right now, to stamp me down.”

  He set down his cup carefully, then gripped his knees and swayed effortlessly to his feet with barely a grunt before stepping over to a supply of logs that lay ready for the fire and selecting a couple that were to his liking. He thrust them into the coals in the fire pit, pressed them home with the thick sole of his armoured boot, and returned to sit again as they began to burn.

  “When the magnates with Mar were released from London, they agreed to return home and make ready to embark for France come August. It seems, though, that on the very day they set out northward, a man called Andrew de Rait, a Scottish knight loyal to Edward, arrived in Westminster from the north—from here in Inverness, in fact—with word for Edward about the nuisance we’ve been causing here in Moray. He carried letters from Reginald de Cheyne, the commander of Inverness Castle—the first official notification Edward had received of our rebellion. That, incidentally, is Edward’s word, not ours. It’s an English word with an English meaning. Ours is an uprising, not a rebellion. We have risen up in protest against his tyranny, but the English use the term rebellion because a rebellion gives an appearance of support to Edward’s false claims of ruler status.”

  “How did you learn,” I asked him, “about Andrew de Rait and the letters from de Cheyne?”

  “Gartnait told me. In return for de Rait’s loyalty, Edward endowed him that same day with all the lands that had been forfeited after Dunbar by his brother. He then turned de Rait around on his heels and sent him chasing after the party that had left for Scotland that morning, with new instructions.”

  “And who were these travellers?”

  “John Comyn, the Earl of Buchan, for one, although there’s no surprise in that. He was the leader, accompanied by the other John Comyn, his cousin, the Lord of Badenoch—the Black and the Red branches of Comyn together. Also among their number was Edward’s lickspittle toady, Henry de Cheyne, the Bishop of Aberdeen—as God is my witness, I detest that loathsome, unctuous man. Sir Edward de Balliol, the king’s brother, was with them, too, as was Malise, Earl of Strathearn, and Gartnait himself. There were others, but those are the principals.”

  “And de Rait obviously overtook them.”

  “He did. Instead of preparing to leave for France, they are now ordered to remain here in Scotland and use all the resources at their disposal to stamp out the so-called rebellion
in Moray and Rossshire—that’s me and my folk. Bishop de Cheyne and Gartnait are ordered to proceed immediately to the relief of the Constable Fitzwarren in Urquhart Castle, and that’s a waste of time, since Urquhart has been unthreatened these past eight weeks. The Comyns, for their part, are to remain in the north, and in the field, until the rebellion be completely quelled.”

  “Well, there’s nothing there that’s hard to understand, is there?” I said. “Stop Andrew de Moray by any and all means. So why would they send Gartnait to talk to you?”

  One side of Murray’s mouth twitched in a half smile. “Because it would have been the most straightforward means of achieving their objective, were it successful. It was the most logical way to begin, and certainly worth the effort.”

  “But why try at all? They must have known you were unlikely to simply give up and go home. And now you know they’re coming to find you, so they’ve sacrificed whatever surprise they might have achieved by marching here directly.”

  “No surprise was possible, Jamie. I’ve known since I set foot again in Moray that someone, someday, would be sent to remove me. The biggest bother in my mind now is that ship. I won’t be able to meet it until I’ve dealt with Buchan and his army.”

  “The ship is unimportant at this point,” I said. “That’s weeks away, and will resolve itself when the time is right. In the meantime, you will have time to outface the Buchan crew.”

  “I hope you’re right. They’ll come soon, though, and they’ll come northwest, through Mar and Badenoch to the Spey river. That’s the eastern border of Moray. They’ll have to come by the Ingie and the Bog of Gight, and that’s where I’ll be waiting for them.”

  “The bog I can guess at, but what’s the Ingie?”

  That won me a smile. “It’s a place, or rather a region. It’s the biggest of the royal forests in the north, and it lies on the far side of the Spey. It’s dense and trackless—which means completely impenetrable to a marching army. Inside its western boundary, bordering the Spey itself, there’s a huge, mud-choked tract of impassable mire called the Bog of Gight. Not good country for heavy horsemen, believe me. But any army coming north and west has to follow the outer edges of both the forest and the bog. It’s the only route there is, and I was brought up near there, so I know every inch of it. I’ll stop them there.”

  “And what about Gartnait? You can’t let him go back to Aberdeen. Will you hold him here?”

  “No,” he said. “He’ll be leaving in the morning. There’s a ship waiting for him in Inverness.”

  I was stupefied. “You’re letting him go?”

  “What else am I to do, Jamie?” he asked with a broad smile. “He is my friend, and he is in a nasty predicament, but he came here openly to explain his situation to me.”

  “And all credit to him for that. But he’s an avowed enemy, Andrew. He’s Edward’s man, bound by parole. He’ll destroy you if he can and hand what’s left of you and yours over to England.”

  Andrew Murray smiled again. “Mayhap,” he said. “You might be right, but not unless, as you say, he destroys me. And I have some views of my own on that matter. Besides, his enmity’s a passing thing—a politician’s enmity, enforced by England’s aging King.”

  “Enmity is enmity, Andrew, no matter how it’s painted. No one ever confuses it with friendship.”

  “Then we must be very different in this part of the world.” He stood up again—rather angrily, I thought—and moved to stare into the fire, his brows compressed in a frown. “Listen to me now, Jamie,” he said, and his voice was soft and serious. “And mark what I’m telling you. The greatest sadness of this war—a war we neither sought nor thought to have to wage—is that the men we actually have to fight, chin to chin and eye to eye, are, in the main, our own countrymen. That is the most damnable part of the pervasive rot that festers in our realm these days: the English use us against ourselves, for their own ends. And here in the Highlands it appears to be more true than anywhere else. Most of the commanders who hold our royal castles against us are Scots, at least by birth. The garrison troops are all English, but the men commanding them are Scots. Edward controls their purse strings, with the threat of denying them their English lands and the income from those lands, and that means he controls their behaviour and obedience. That is the truth of life here in Highland Scotia. But it is not the entire truth, for Comyn, who has no real need of English lands or money, is marching north to lay waste to Moray. Tell me now, why do you think that is the case?”

  I was gaping at him, unable to respond.

  “I’ll tell you why it is. It’s because we’ve done it to ourselves— we, the magnates of Scotland, myself included. We have deceived ourselves and deluded our own people and now we are being made to pay the price. Edward Plantagenet, the all-high King of England, has proved himself to be the great manipulator of the ages, setting us all at one another’s throats for gifts of English land and titles, baubles that bind us to his will and to his whims while he steals our realm from us. He holds each man of us hostage against ourselves, in one way or another.

  “Look at Sir Reginald de Cheyne, the Scots castellan of Inverness. He is one of the most eminent Scots in the land, nephew to John Comyn of Badenoch and baron of both Inverugie and Strabrock, with their huge estates. The man was King Alexander’s Chamberlain of Scotland in his youth! But now he fights for the Plantagenet because Edward holds his first-born and dearest son, young Reginald, prisoner in England. The Countess of Ross, who brought her people out against me when I sought to besiege the Englishman Fitzwarren in Castle Urquhart, did so because her goodman the earl is close held and under threat of death in one of Edward’s jails. It happens everywhere nowadays, and all the time.

  “And now the Comyns, Red of Badenoch and Black of Buchan, are in similar straits, under Edward’s orders to destroy me. They have no wish to fight against their own. They are Highlanders and they know themselves how great the hatred of the English is among their folk. But they can see no way out from the bog into which they have floundered. They hate and fear Edward, but they won’t stand against him now because they don’t believe they can beat him. He proved that—to their eyes at least—last year when he crushed Scotland’s finest army at Dunbar and imprisoned more than half of all the Scots nobility.”

  “Do you really believe the Comyns will march against you?”

  “I believe they have no wish to, but I believe equally that they believe they have no choice. They’re my close kin, my family, blood of my blood, and though they might be cursing me today for putting them in the case in which they find themselves, I’m reasonably sure they have no wish to kill me or slaughter my followers. That’s why they sent Gartnait to talk to me. They believe this will be settled the usual way, by discussion and compromise and quid pro quo. That’s the way these risings and disturbances have always been settled. From time to time tempers grow frayed, some blood is spilt, there is much rushing around and rattling of spears and bows, and then an agreement is reached, oaths are renewed, titles and rewards and concessions are dispensed, and everyone goes home again.”

  “But not this time,” I said.

  “No, not this time, and never again. The world has changed, Father James. Edward of England changed it with his dishonesty and perfidy, his betrayal of our trust and goodwill, and now the folk of Moray are changing it again, and as long as I remain alive it will not change back in England’s favour. My Comyn cousins have yet to learn all that, but it is not their fault that they were away in England’s jails while new realities took hold up here in Scotland’s north, in the aftermath of the Dunbar disgrace. For me, and for the folk who follow me, the time for compromise and submission, aye and for deep-staining shame, is over. My father is a prisoner in London, too, but I’ll no longer be bullied into letting an English madman trample me and my folk into the dirt through fear for my father’s life. My father would die of shame if he thought I would do so.

  “So now I am committed and will not be deflected fro
m my path. I’ll fight until England is beaten or I am dead. Gartnait will tell Buchan and Badenoch that when he returns to Aberdeen, and in the meantime I’ll be working to make sure that nothing they might do on Edward’s behalf thereafter can surprise me or my army. And when I’ve dealt with them, I’ll go to Aberdeen and take possession of my cargo there.”

  He picked up a short length of charred-end wood and peered at it closely. “That is as far as my planning goes,” he continued. “I talked with Gartnait for hours last night, and I made my decision near dawn. This morning I sent out the word for the rest of my folk to follow me eastward to the Spey and to join me at my father’s castle in Boharm. Once my army is there—and we’ll leave all Moray stripped of manpower—we’ll wait and see what the Comyns do, for there’s no point in planning anything until we see what their intentions are.” He threw the stick back in the fire. “Would you like to talk to Gartnait?”

  “Not if he’s siding with the English,” I said. “I care not what his reasons are for that, but I can’t ignore the fact that the friends with whom he rides are Comyns, for they are no friends of me or mine. They have made no secret, these past years, of their disdain for us Scots who live south of Forth and follow the House of Bruce. Besides, did you not say he will leave in the morning for Inverness?” He nodded. “Well, then, there’s little point, I think, in spending time with him that would be better spent with you.”

  He shook his head, half smiling. “I always liked that about you. Direct and to the point. It really is grand to see you, Jamie. I’ve often wondered what you have been doing, knowing the good bishop and how he drives his people. I could scarce believe my ears when I heard you were here. But I confess, the fact that you are here has me concerned. Wishart sent you. I know that because he is the only one who could have, and he is also the only one who would have sent you, in particular. Not even Will could send you all the way up here to me unless Wishart gave his permission. Let us talk then, you and I, of Bishop Wishart’s urgencies. What else does he want of me?”