by Jack Whyte
He cocked his head, waiting for a response, but when it came, it was not what he had expected.
“I know who Angus Mohr is, and you make him sound like an ogre,” the boy said. “But he can’t be that bad, because my mam likes him.”
“He is an ogre, boy, and don’t you ever think otherwise. No man comes to be as powerful as Angus Mohr is by being kind and gentle. Besides, your mother can find a good word for anyone. That is why she’s my favourite kinswoman.”
“Not everyone, not by a mile. My father has friends she won’t let in the house, so she’s not that tolerant.”
“Friends? Or do you mean people who work for him? I’ve seen some of them myself and I wouldn’t let them into my house, either.”
“Aye, but she has always liked Angus Mohr, ever since she was a babby. So he can’t be as black as you would stain him.”
Nicol turned his head away to hide a smile and spoke towards the distant western hills. “Perhaps she may be right. We’ll see. But one way or the other, once we have the great man safely in hand, along with whoever might find honour in being with him, we will make our way up to Turnberry, where you will be a Bruce again—for a while at least, until they pass you back to me. It’s just a few miles north of where we are headed, and your mother will be waiting for you. Tomorrow is your tenth birthday after all, as you said, and ten years is a whole decade—worthy of celebration—so we’re taking you home to be with your family. You will remember the day you turned ten, though. You will recall it forever after as the day you met the King.”
“The King? King Alexander?”
“Aye. Is there another that you know of? Alexander the Third, of the House of Canmore, King of Scots. You will not have met him before, I suspect, eh?”
“No.” The boy was wide-eyed with wonder. “And he’s coming to Turnberry?”
“Aye, he is. And he’ll be there for your birthday.” His grin grew wider and then he shrugged. “Mind you, he’s coming to meet with Angus Mohr as well. The two of them have matters to discuss. But he will know your face, from tomorrow on.”
Rob was stunned, for he had never met anyone his own age who had met the King. Alexander had been King of Scots for more than twenty years, he knew, but few of his common subjects were ever fortunate enough to meet him, especially here in the wild southwest. And now King Alexander himself would be in Turnberry, there for his birthday …
Rob had known he would be returning home for his birthday, because he did so every year. This year, though, he had not been altogether sure he wanted to go back, and he had been feeling guilty about that, uncomfortable with what he suspected were stirrings of disloyalty. Now, though, he felt a great wave of relief sweep over him, banishing his earlier feelings and filling him instead with eager anticipation. Notwithstanding the King’s visit and the excitement it would engender, he found himself thrilling to the thought of seeing his mother again, and even his father, Earl Robert, though the man seldom recognized Rob’s existence other than to growl a warning at him from time to time when his patience grew thin. And it would be good to see his brothers and sisters again, though most of them were too young to be of any real interest. His elder sister, Christina, he knew, would be happy to see him, and so would his closest younger sibling, Isabel. Even Nigel, the sturdy, smiling, sunny-natured child whose name was really Niall, after their maternal grandsire, would make him welcome. Isabel was eight now, and Nigel must be six and a half, but below them in line, spaced roughly a year apart, came three more boys, Edward, Thomas, and the recently born Alexander. All three of those, in young Robert’s eyes, were little more than sources of never-ending noise, ranging from screams of rage to whines and bleats of complaint, separated by unintelligible outbursts of squabbling.
No wonder, he thought for the first time, that his father was so impatient and short-tempered all the time. Robert Bruce of Carrick was a conscientious, studious man who took his duties as the earl seriously and was consequently seldom at home. Whenever he did come home, though, the constant noise of brawling, squabbling children must have driven him mad. Realizing that he shared that much in common at least with his father, Rob decided, then and there, that meet the King or no, he would far rather spend more time with his uncle Nicol, in his home at Dalmellington, than among his own clamouring brood in Turnberry Castle, and he was surprised, for a moment, by how happy the decision made him feel. He turned his eyes slightly to glance at his uncle and was relieved to find that Nicol was deep in his own thoughts, his narrowed eyes gazing off towards the west as though they could pierce the hills and show him the distant sea.
Rob Bruce could not remember when he had decided that his uncle Nicol was his favourite person in the world, but for as far back as he could recall, no one else had come close to claiming his esteem in the way Nicol MacDuncan had. He had done it effortlessly, too, simply by being the only adult male in the boy’s life who treated him as a person, rather than as a simpering, unformed, half-witted child. Nicol had never spoken down to his nephew and never belittled him. He had always treated him as a real person—not as an equal, certainly, for Rob knew he was no such thing, too young even to lay claim to such consideration. Yet none the less Nicol had always treated him as a thinking being, someone whom he expected to have an opinion on any subject, no matter how ill informed that opinion might be. And not only did he assume that Rob had opinions, he insisted upon hearing them and discussing them. He never scoffed at what he heard, never sneered, never belittled anything his young charge said. Instead, he would fill in the gaps in the boy’s knowledge, enlarge upon the pros and contras of each element of Rob’s opinion and frequently end up leaving several more options in his nephew’s mind for further consideration. Looking at him now, Rob felt a flush of warmth and affection for the man.
Nicol was really his mother’s uncle, her father’s youngest brother by almost twenty years, which meant, in truth, that he could never have really known his eldest brother, Niall, the former Earl of Carrick, at all, and he had never known the father, Nicol MacDuncan, whose name he bore. That Nicol had been the son of Duncan, the first Earl of Carrick, and had not lived long enough to see the boy child of his old age birthed. In fact, Nicol was no more than a year or two older than his favourite niece, Marjorie, Earl Niall’s formidable daughter, and he had taken an active, avuncular interest in the welfare of her eldest son since the first day he saw the boy, when young Robert was only four weeks old and Nicol decided the child looked like the son he had always wanted. Nicol had married young, to a woman who died childless a few years later, and then he had wed a widow with three daughters, but he and she had never had any children of their own, and since the widow had clearly demonstrated her own fertility beforehand, it soon became clear that Nicol, and not his wife, must be at fault. No one thought any the less of him for that; it was simply accepted and ignored.
Nicol’s initial interest in his niece’s firstborn son had never abated, and for the past three years it had resulted in the boy’s being given over into his young great-uncle’s care for several months, from early spring until midsummer, before being returned to the family fold in time for his birthday on the eleventh of July. Those months, from the beginning of March all the way through until mid-July, had become Robert’s favourite and most jealously guarded time of the year, when he would learn more about everything around him than the rest of his brothers and sisters combined would absorb in an entire twelvemonth. He grunted quietly, deep down in his chest, then kneed his horse forward gently until he sat beside Nicol, staring out with him over the wild landscape below.
To say that the lands of the earldom of Carrick were hilly would be a deceptive description; rocky and bleak and inhospitable were far more accurate words. The name Carrick sprang from carraig, the Gaelic word for a rock or a rocky place. The Carrick lands were almost completely lacking in arable areas that might offer sustenance for farmers, but they offered fine grazing for the hardy local sheep, and because of that the people of the Carrick region wer
e mainly wool producers—just like everyone else the length and breadth of Scotland. Young Rob, the seventh consecutive Robert Bruce of his line, had been born here, in his mother’s ancestral home of Turnberry Castle, overlooking the Firth of Clyde and the Isle of Arran and the distant Mull of Kintyre. To the north lay the town of Ayr, and to the east, the earldom’s main town of Maybole. Rob loved Carrick, and he was always excited to be reminded from time to time that it would one day be his. These were his own lands, his inheritance, and the knowledge of that never failed to thrill him. For the time being, though, the lands were his mother’s. Rob’s father, though he held the title Earl of Carrick, held it solely by virtue of his marriage to the countess.
“Are you ready, then?”
Rob glanced at his uncle and nodded, then kicked his mount forward to follow Nicol down from the summit and into the trackless reaches of the moors. There were no roads across the moorlands. In truth there were few real roads in all of Scotland. The boy thought about that as he allowed his horse to make its own way at the heels of Nicol’s mount, for the matter of roads—or rather the lack of them—had been brought to his attention only a few weeks earlier—by his uncle, of course. Roads were something he had never had cause to think about. His people went everywhere on foot, and could travel five miles in a single hour over trackless land. When greater distances had to be travelled, those who had horses used them, but even so they were all inured to dismounting and leading their animals slowly through the treacherous, boggy, and wildly uneven terrain of the moors, where a single misplaced hoof could result in a broken leg and a lost mount.
That conversation, which had lasted throughout an entire afternoon, had resulted, as such talks with his uncle Nicol nearly always did, in a far broader understanding of things in the boy’s mind, prodding him to think about matters he had never considered before. The Romans in ancient times had built wide, straight roads throughout England, as they had throughout the entire world, for the sole purpose of moving their armies quickly and efficiently, and those roads had made it possible for men to build towns everywhere along their lengths. Scotland had few such roads, because the Romans had never made a determined attempt to conquer the remote and inhospitable territory they called Caledonia. As a result, Nicol had pointed out, Scotland had far fewer towns than England and only a few port cities. The revelation had fascinated the boy.
In and around the villages and hamlets of the Carrick region there were beaten paths, created by the coming and going of the local folk. But there were no large settlements worthy of being called towns in Carrick, other than, perhaps, Maybole, the administrative centre, and there were no roads. England lay mere miles to the south of where Rob and his uncle rode now, but on the entire western seaboard there was only one real route between the two countries, and that was little more than a winding track, unusable at the border crossing much of the time because it was under water. Travellers coming north from England did so along the single narrow road that ran north from Carlisle to the border, but then they had to wait for low tide before crossing the wide, sandy estuary of the Solway Firth that separated the two countries.
It was a tedious and inconvenient route for travelling merchants, but at least they could use it. Armies, on the other hand, could not, so the Solway crossing was never considered seriously as an invasion route. The firth was as safe as a wall in shutting out large armies, because the shifting tides and treacherous sands made crossings impossible for large numbers of soldiers and supplies, and the lie of the land on the north side of the firth made it possible for small numbers of defenders to destroy any advance guard that might have crossed from the south before the next low tide allowed the invaders to be reinforced. Rob knew that was true because his uncle Nicol had taken him all the way down there the day after their talk, and they had spent the night on a low hill overlooking the wide, wet sands of the firth so that Rob could see for himself how straitened and dangerous the crossing was, even at low tide. He had asked his uncle when an army had last tried to cross there from England.
“Eighty-five years, I’ve heard. That seems a long time even to me. But it’s not that long at all. There has been peace between Scotland and England for all that time, and life has been good in these parts. But in truth that could all change tomorrow, for any one of a hundred reasons. All it would take is for some idiot on either side—and not even a king, just some powerful baron or earl—to offend, or threaten, or cross some other fool on the opposite side, and we could have English armies trotting towards us across those sands within a month. So look well at what I’m showing you and remember it. This route will lead any enemy who crosses here directly into Carrick, into your lands and towards your folk. Take heed, then, and don’t ever lose sight of the dangers of having an open door at your back.”
Rob, for all his youth, felt certain he would never have to worry about such a thing.
Lost in his thoughts and the places they led him, the boy fell into a daydream, content to allow his horse to follow Nicol’s, his body adjusting mechanically to the lurching of the beast’s back as it picked its way across the tortuous landscape and began the long climb up the last sloping hillside between them and the sea. He came back to attention, though, as they crested the hilltop and he heard his uncle speak.
“They’re here already. But we haven’t kept them waiting.”
A hundred feet below them, on a shallow, sandy beach, a long, sleek, wide-bellied galley was drawn up onto the strand, its sail already furled and secured to the enormous spar that braced it, and a number of men were busy around it in the shallows, some of them up to their waist in water as they laboured at transferring horses from the vessel to the shore. Two beasts had already been unloaded and were being tended on the pebbled shore above the wrack by a boy whom Rob gauged to be about his own age. A third horse was about to be swung over as he looked, hoisted in a wide cloth cradle slung beneath its belly, and a fourth stamped nervously on the small cargo deck that seemed barely large enough to have held four animals. Nicol kicked his horse forward, leading the way down the grassy hillside as Rob shortened his reins and followed.
The boy on the beach with the horses was the first to notice them, and he shouted something to the others, so that within moments everyone was looking up the hill to where Nicol and his young companion were wending their way down. Rob saw row upon row of upturned faces staring at them from the rowing benches on both sides of the galley’s central aisle, but though he was close enough to see the colour of their hair and beards he was still too far away to see any faces clearly. Above the oarsmen, on a platform in the prow, a dozen more men were working around the hoist being used to transfer the animals from the ship to the shore, and six more, besides the boy and his horses, were on the beach, four of them unloading the beasts from the galley, standing up to mid-thigh in the water but soaked to the waist as they waited for the suspended horse to be lowered to them. Their interest in the two newcomers had been brief, little more than a quick glance in response to the boy’s shout, and quickly abandoned in the need to maintain a secure footing among the waves that broke over the submerged stones of the shelving shoreline.
The remaining two men on the shore stood on the pebbled beach above the waterline and were clearly, even at the distance from which Rob first saw them, of a different rank to the others. As he and his uncle drew closer to the water’s edge, and details began to grow clearer, Rob saw what it was that set these two apart from their companions. Their clothing seemed little different from that worn by the rest of their party, but it was brighter, the colours bolder, more vivid, and the decorations adorning their garments—feathered crests and jewelled brooches—were larger, richer, and more elaborate, so that the pair stood out from their fellows like two of Earl Robert’s beloved cock pheasants among a brood of dowdy hens.
“Which one’s Angus Mohr?” Rob whispered to his uncle.
“Which do you think? The older one. The other’s his good-son, a MacRory lordling, married to his daught
er Morag. I only met him once and I can’t recall his name but it will come to me…” Nicol spoke from the side of his mouth without turning his head away from the bustle below. He was smiling, though, and Rob knew the smile was for the people watching them.
“Why would they land here, when Turnberry’s only four miles up the coast?”
“I can make a guess. Angus Mohr trusts no one—and believe me, he has learnt that to his cost. He has known your mother all her life and would probably trust her, but he does not know your father, other than as an English-born incomer, and therefore I would guess he is loath to sail blithely into Turnberry harbour without a guarantee of being able to sail back out again. Now say no more about it.”
The hillside beneath them began to level out, and as they neared the shore Rob kept his eyes on the fierce-looking older man of the pair awaiting them. The man called Angus Mohr was imposing, so much so, in fact, that the man beside him, his son-in-law, faded into insignificance, appearing slight and nondescript. The Lord of Islay was every inch what his title proclaimed him, tall and broad in the shoulders, but where both height and width should have demanded depth and weight, the man was slim and agile-looking. He was stern-looking, too, Rob thought, the space between his brows showing a single crease that, while not quite a frown, looked as though it might easily become one. His hair was thick and black, with a single blaze of white above his left eye, and it hung in ringlets to his shoulders. There was no trace of a curl in his short, neatly trimmed beard, though, and his sun-darkened skin emphasized deep-set eyes that were startlingly, brilliantly, blue. His thin-ridged nose was more like a beak than any Rob had ever seen. A brimless black cap with a silver ring brooch that secured a hackle badge of distinctive black-cock tail feathers hung from his left hand.