Robert the Bruce--A Tale of the Guardians

by Jack Whyte

  He drew himself up to his full height, unsmiling, and for the first time Comyn’s face flushed. The young Gael’s bristling stiffness left him, and his shoulders slumped.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said quietly.

  “Granted. But what of Master Bruce? He is the one you have offended more than me.”

  Comyn turned his eyes to meet Rob’s and dipped his head briefly. His mouth opened but nothing came out. Rob did not mind. His own anger was gone, and it was plain to see that Comyn’s had, too. He nodded in return. “So be it,” he murmured.

  “Good. Then shall we begin again?” De Blais’s voice was gentle now, yet it was to Robert Clifford that he looked for concurrence. The young Englishman nodded and smiled faintly. “Excellent,” the Gascon said. “So, let me think.”

  He turned his back on all of them and looked about the courtyard, his right hand cradling his left wrist behind him. “Here is what happens next. Master Bruce will take you two to your quarters in the Squires’ Tower. There are others there already, most of them of an age with you, so you will not lack for company. Take note of who they are, Master Comyn, for they represent the cream of this realm, the next generation of the ducal and baronial families of England. All of you will reach manhood within a year or two of one another, which is why you are all here. Edward Plantagenet is a prudent King who has no time for, or patience with, surprises within his realm. To that end he studies all of you, being a believer in the philosophical tenet that the ways of manhood are set deep in childhood. Get to know the others, then, while you are here. But be back here, in amity, to meet with me in one hour from now, and we will start again from there. Am I understood? So be it. I will see you all in one hour.”

  Rob led the other two towards the squires’ quarters in silence that none of them sought to break. He was remembering the tone of the King’s voice when he had made his double-meaning comment about their friendship beneath his roof. There had been a new, hard quality in Edward’s voice that Rob had never heard the King direct towards him. He had heard Edward’s wrath expressed before, many times, for the monarch had a notoriously short temper, but the King had never used such a tone with him in all the time Rob had known him, and it bothered him deeply, the more so since Edward, on this occasion, had not been even slightly angry. And now he remembered the word de Blais had used, nuance. The Edward who had spoken to him that afternoon was a different man than the King Rob had grown to love and admire these past few years. And though he could hear the difference in his mind now, he found himself unable to understand what it was that troubled him about it. It had been but one sentence, but Rob had not doubted for one moment that it held a veiled threat. It made him realize that there were hidden, dangerous depths to the English King that he had never suspected, and it made him wonder about how dark and unpredictable those depths might be.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE LAIRDS OF LOCHMABEN

  At the age of sixteen Rob Bruce was long familiar with the awe-striking sensation that gripped him every time he caught sight of his grandfather’s fortress of Lochmaben after a long absence—a sense of wonder mixed with the fear-tinged, reverential awe he felt for his formidable grandfather, the master of the place.

  Robert Bruce of Annandale, at something more than seventy years of age, was one of the last great feudal lords of Scotland and England, with the royal blood of both countries in his veins. Rob knew him as a daunting, brooding, black-garbed presence with a sharp-boned face that might have been chiselled from stone. Grey-bearded and grim, the Bruce patriarch had always been an intimidating apparition to his grandson, a stern presence with bristling, bushy eyebrows above glaring eyes deep-set on either side of a hard-edged beak of a nose. But the most sinister aspect of the forbidding old man, in the boy’s eyes, was the pair of large, gristly ears that thrust, parchment thin, from his wild grey hair like translucent bat wings. In Rob’s earliest memories, the Lord of Annandale had always been aloof, achingly unknowable to the child who had watched him since infancy with fearful eyes, waiting for the frown of disapproval that would announce the old man’s awareness of his presence. The frightening old patriarch and the ominous, ancient fortress were as one in Rob’s mind, and together they affected him as nothing else could.

  Now, riding ahead of everyone else at mid-morning on the seventh day of October in the year of our Lord 1290, Rob watched the earth-and-log fortifications loom into view again as his horse breasted the last low hill, and he felt the familiar, eerie shiver of recognition at the sheer scale of the place.

  Lochmaben was nothing like a castle in the English sense. Nor was it comparable to any castle Rob had ever seen. He had heard his father talk of how new castles were springing up everywhere in Scotland and England nowadays, insisting that they were all military installations. They were the emerging fashion, the Earl said: display pieces used for intimidation and serving as assembly points and launching areas for sorties rather than for defensive purposes. Most of them were built of palisaded logs and carefully sited ditches, but an increasing number, among them the crowned heights of Stirling and Edinburgh, were being gradually fortified with stone walls. Edward of England was a great believer in stone castles and was building a number of them in his newly conquered lands in Wales, and his enthusiasm for the strength they offered had convinced his good-brother Alexander of Scotland to follow his example in his own realm, so that someday soon, according to Earl Robert, the entire country would be dominated by massive, modern stone fortifications.

  Lochmaben, on the other hand, was a true fortress, ages old, like those in Edinburgh, Stirling, and the other great defensive bastions of Scotland. Like them, it was a natural structure, hewn from the timeless crags of the upflung land and fortified by countless generations of local folk who had dug its maze of defensive ditches deeper and thrown up ever-higher palisaded breastworks around the motte, the rocky summit of the hill at its centre. That summit was now crowned by an immensely strong tower, its walls built of great oak logs and surrounded by groups of thatched huts and sturdy buildings of framed mud and wattle. The site was virtually impregnable, and anyone intending to attack it would have to think long and hard on the costs entailed, for the place was too massive to be besieged without a great deal of planning and limitless resources.

  Rob halted his horse on the summit and sat there for a while, watching the activity of the folk around the fortress. In the cleared acres below the first line of defences, teams of people with scythes were working together in lines in the bright sunshine, reaping the harvest of ripened grain, while others gathered up the scythed stalks and bound them into stooked sheaves that stretched in neat rows to dry. He saw no signs of any soldiery in the rustic scene, or any weapons, and was not surprised. Scotland had been at peace for almost thirty years under King Alexander’s rule, and since his death the council of Guardians, a group appointed by the community of the realm and comprising six of the country’s most powerful men, two of them earls, two more barons, and the last two bishops, had quietly maintained the peace of the realm until such time as another monarch could be crowned.

  He glanced towards his father, who was now riding past him, knee to knee with Nicol MacDuncan and talking to him in a voice too quiet for Rob to hear. The others in their party, including the twenty mounted troopers at the earl’s back, rode in silence, the muffled thudding of their horses’ hooves stirring up clouds of dust from the sun-dried ground. They were alert, all of them, their eyes on the mass of earthworks and wooden buildings that was Lochmaben.

  Bruce men, all of them. Rob wondered what kind of escort Comyn of Badenoch might be travelling with today, for the Highland Gaels had few horses and went almost everywhere on foot.

  In the weeks that followed their meeting in Westminster, the two young men had learned to live in apparent friendship, despite their intense awareness that they would never like each other. That was understood by both of them from the outset. They had nothing in common, other than their mutual dislike and hostility. But
they had been under royal command to behave as friends while they were in Westminster, and neither of them doubted the folly of doing otherwise. Knowing they were under scrutiny at all times, they went to great lengths to be courteous and even amiable to each other. Edward made no secret of his propensity for fostering and rewarding favourites while dispossessing and punishing others whose behaviour he deemed unacceptable. And, despot that he was, the range of things he considered unacceptable was expansive and capricious.

  Rob and Comyn had been together for four weeks, until Bishop Bek’s affairs took him north to Scotland again, with Comyn in tow, within days of the enactment of the Treaty of Birgham, on August 28th at Northampton. Almost two years in the making, the treaty assured both the continuity of the Scots Crown in the person of the seven-year-old Queen Margaret, and the future joining of the Crowns of England and Scotland under the heirs of the royal marriage that would follow, between the young Queen and five-year-old Edward of Caernarfon, the heir to the English throne. The celebrations after the signing were brief but heartfelt, with everyone concerned believing it a job well done.

  Rob’s father’s official affairs in England had concluded with the signing of the Birgham Treaty, but he had family business to attend to after that, and so he and Rob had travelled south and east again, beyond London into Sussex and then Essex, to inspect his own father’s properties there. Rob had enjoyed the journey, seeing his father’s birthplace and his own future inheritance of Writtle, in Essex, for the first time and meeting an entire clan of English-born relatives whose existence he had barely suspected. There had been no urgency to their journey, and they had been made welcome at Writtle, spending two pleasant weeks in the southern English countryside in magnificent September weather, Rob hunting and fishing with his newfound cousins while his father conducted his audit of the family’s English affairs. When they eventually left to return home, they made their way back unhurriedly up the eastern length of England to the border at Berwick, where they crossed into their own country and headed west to visit the earl’s father.

  Rob kneed his horse into motion and guided it to join his father and Nicol, who turned in their saddles as he approached. The earl nodded, cordial but reserved as always.

  “Well,” he said, “here we are again. How long has it been since you last saw your grandfather?”

  “Almost two years, sir.”

  “He’ll be glad to see you. You’ve grown much since then.”

  Rob noticed how his father had used “you” instead of “us.” No one had ever said anything on the topic, but Rob had been aware for years that there was something missing in the relationship between the two senior Roberts. His grandfather had never been the kind of man to show emotional attachment, even to his elderly wife, but even so there was something more than a simple lack of warmth between Earl Robert and his stern-faced sire. Rob had heard tenuous, infuriatingly tantalizing hints at earlier strife between father and son when the elder Bruce had married for the second time, at the age of fifty. That wife was still alive and thriving, two decades later, but Rob did not know her well at all, though he spoke with her every time he came to Lochmaben. She was a withdrawn woman who said little to anyone and notably less to Rob’s father.

  Rob knew from his own investigations that his father, for some unknown reason, objected to the union. That objection had earned the earl his father’s displeasure and, Rob had come to believe, his dislike, perhaps even his mistrust. Yet his father, Earl Robert, was a good man, Rob thought; a gentle if somewhat reserved parent, a fond and faithful husband, and an able administrator of his own affairs. He had been a friend and confidant of the late King Alexander, and was well regarded by his own tenants and liegemen in Carrick. It was true that he lacked the volatility, the fire and unbridled passion, of his noble father, but there seemed nothing unnatural to Rob in that, and he could see no reason why the earl’s own father should consider him untrustworthy because of it.

  “Is Grandfather expecting us?”

  “He should be,” his father replied. “I sent word on ahead from Berwick.”

  “Good, because I’m hungry. Let’s hope he has told his cook to throw an extra hare into the pot.”

  The earl barked out one of his rare but welcome laughs. “Oh, he’ll have more than that. Even his enemies concede that Annandale’s larder is generous. Look, there’s someone coming out to meet us. A party of five, with standards. That is encouraging, for it means we are awaited, and I could eat a haunch of venison myself. What say you, Nicol?”

  “Swine,” MacDuncan answered in the sibilant English he used only when speaking to Earl Robert. “A juicy haunch of pig, with crackling rubbed in flour and salt, and roasted apples.” He was looking away as he spoke, his eyes narrowing as he watched the approaching riders. “These folk look agitated, Robert. Does your father always send an escort to meet you?”

  Rob turned with his father to look more closely at the approaching men and felt a swift rash of gooseflesh on his nape as he saw that Nicol was right. The riders had an undeniably martial look about them, and the banners they bore were the chivalric pennons of the House of Bruce, pennons normally unseen in times of peace. The man at their head was Sir James Jardine, one of the old lord’s staunchest followers, and he wasted no time in pleasantries beyond a stern nod of recognition.

  “You are expected, Earl Robert, but your faither has grave need of you. You are to come with me at once.”

  “What’s wrong, Sir James?”

  “It’s no’ my place to say, Earl Robert. The Bruce will tell ye that himsel’. Best no’ keep him waitin’. Come awa.” He rowelled his horse brutally and wrenched it around to face the fortress in the distance, and the beast took off with a whinny of outrage, leaving the rest of them with no choice but to follow at the gallop.

  * * *

  The level of activity in and around the fortress increased alarmingly as they approached, with parties of mounted riders suddenly erupting from the main gates like angry bees and swarming down the sloping roadway to the plain, where they dispersed rapidly, one grim-faced group of ten passing the Bruces with hardly a glance as they rode on up the hill and along the road towards Berwick.

  They followed Sir James through open gates into the main courtyard to find it seething like a nest of ants, people scurrying in all directions and an air of tension and excitement everywhere. Earl Robert paid no attention to any of it, but swung down from his horse, dropped the reins to the ground, and strode towards the tower doors that hung open on their huge hinges. Rob followed close on his heels, aware that Nicol MacDuncan had not dismounted and was staying behind with the others of their party.

  The vast hall beyond the doors was only slightly less crowded than the yard outside, but in the sparse light that penetrated the gloom from the open doors and the few tiny windows above them, Rob saw that the half score of heavy black oak tables that normally filled the room had been dragged aside to clear the central space, evidently to accommodate the mass of men he suspected had been in here only a short time earlier. One man, his grandfather’s factor, Alan Bellow, stood alone by the far wall, glowering down at a scroll he held open in his hands. He raised his head to them and nodded curtly. Earl Robert nodded back, but he did not stop moving forward.

  “Where is my father?”

  “I’m in here!” Lord Robert’s voice came from the room he referred to as his den, as though it were the lair of some wild beast. Rob had always thought the name appropriate. It was a dark, deep, and surprisingly spacious cubicle under the broad stairs that soared up to the floors above. Permanently lit with racks of thick, stubby candles mounted in sloping iron holders, its rear wall, a sweep of solid stone, was hung with the cured pelts of animals, mainly bears, wolves, and wildcats. One great hanging rack of tanned and worked deer hides served to divide the den into two parts, the nethermost of which held a chimneyed brazier. This room, Rob knew, was where his grandfather spent most of his time, tending to the affairs of his lands and their swarmin
g folk at all hours of the day and night.

  The old man had not raised his head as he shouted, but stood looking down at his worktable, his body bent forward as he tapped the point of his dagger on a parchment that lay there, its corners weighted by four fist-sized smoothly polished stones. Rob recognized the pose and the dagger, for the latter was never far from Lord Robert’s hand and he invariably used it as a pointer whenever he was deep in thought.

  The earl stopped in the doorway, as though reluctant to disturb his father. The old man glanced up at him and beckoned him inside, and he stepped through the open doorway. Rob hesitated, unsure whether he should follow or wait, and his grandfather’s eyebrows rose as he caught sight of him.

  “Robert? Is that you? You’ve grown.”

  “Good day to you, my lord.”

  His father half turned and waved him away.

  “No,” Lord Robert growled. “Let him stay. He’s a Bruce, and if he’s not grown now he will be after this. Close that door and listen, both of you. Sit down, Robert.”

  Rob moved quickly to close the heavy door at his back as his father seated himself.

  “What’s amiss, Father?” the earl said. “Where is everyone going? We must have passed thirty riders on the way up.”

  “More than that. They went out by both gates, front and back, to raise my host, and I’ll need you up and away to Turnberry, too, as soon as may be, to turn out your own men.”

  “To turn out—? In God’s name, Father, what has happened?”

  “God’s work, though some might gauge it otherwise. The Queen is dead … The lass from Norway. I had the word but hours ago, direct from Dunfermline, two horses killed in the bringing of it.”