Robert the Bruce--A Tale of the Guardians

by Jack Whyte

  He listened avidly as his grandfather and his vassal knights made their plans for taking the road north towards Stirling and Scone the following day, and he was fascinated with the meticulous attention to detail that Lord Robert brought to everything. He marvelled, too, at the magnate’s tireless repetition of what he deemed to be most important: the painstaking recitation to each successive newcomer of the importance of the logistical details needed for equipping, feeding, and maintaining a party large enough to be an army, for many days and nights over long distances. He listened admiringly as his grandfather catechized his leaders individually on the arrangements each had made, seldom raising his voice but harping insistently on the need to be aware of the most minute but necessary and well nigh unforeseeable details.

  “Details, details, details,” he told his men, time after time. “You have to feed your people every day. And feed them well, every man of them, and even the folk that feed them, and any women that might be with the cooks. You know from your own experience that you can leave nothing to chance. You have to equip yourself as completely as you can against sudden needs you might never foresee—extra weapons, saddles, supplies, and the equipment to repair broken equipment. You wouldna think of going on a campaign without an armourer in your company, would you? Well, we are going on a campaign, to claim a kingdom! But where’s the good of having an armourer if he leaves half his tools behind him because he can’t carry them? Your armourer will need a cart, equipped wi’ everything he might need at any time. Might need, mind you, and hear me well on that, for God alone can foresee what might happen out there on the road.”

  Most important to Rob, though, was that his grandfather introduced him to each man of the group of knights known as the lairds of Annandale in the course of that long day, and though several of the grim-faced veterans eyed him askance, all of them acknowledged him and, grudgingly or otherwise, accepted his presence among them. For his part, Rob worked hard to memorize their names and traits from the moment of first meeting them, analyzing them by appearance and demeanour and fixing their names, faces, and voices firmly in his memory.

  When the business of the seemingly interminable day was over and all the lairds had departed to their homes to organize the next day’s expedition, Rob met again with his great-uncle Nicol MacDuncan to share his table at supper, the pair of them drawing odd looks from their seated neighbours as they spoke quietly together in rippling, lilting Gaelic. Nicol had all their own arrangements well in hand, he told Rob, and the remaining score of Carrick retainers were prepared to leave in the morning with the Lochmaben contingent—but he was itching with curiosity about what had happened that day between Rob and his grandfather. Nicol listened without interrupting as Rob told him everything in detail, watching his nephew enjoying his own recollections of what he had evidently decided had been the single most exciting and exhilarating day of his life.

  “So,” he said when Rob had finished, “it’s clear your grandsire is a different man to you today than he was yesterday, and you—you’re bubbling over with excitement like a pot on the boil. What changed your mind about him?”

  “I don’t know,” Rob said quietly. “A new feeling of rightness, of belonging?” He shrugged. “That sounds silly, but I think it’s true … I felt, today, like a real Bruce, one of the family, as though I belonged where I was, sitting by Lord Robert’s side while he planned for our future. I didn’t do anything other than sit there, but I felt welcome and I learned more about … about being a Bruce, I suppose, than I had ever thought to learn. And it felt natural. As though I was taking my rightful place.”

  His uncle said nothing, and after a moment Rob added, “My father has always treated me with kindness and my grandfather never has, in the past. And yet since last night all of that has changed, for now I see that my father has never involved me in anything—nothing of importance anyway—seeing me, I suppose, as yet a child. Lord Robert, on the other hand, has brought me into his life after a lifetime of silence and taught me more than I have ever known of who I am and where I belong. And all within a single day.” He smiled, shaking his head again. “I find it hard now to believe I could ever have been afraid of him, Nicol, and I want to spend all my time with him from this point on. Impossible, I know, but that’s what is now in my mind and in my heart. But am I being disloyal to my father, or to you?”

  “No, to both. But your life and the disposal of it is still your father’s to command, for years to come. And knowing how his life and his father’s seldom cross paths, I can see he might not wish to see you spend too much of your time with the sire he himself knows none too well. He might resent that, might simply be reluctant to see you enjoy a knowledge and a privilege that he himself was never asked to share.” Nicol shrugged. “I can’t say anything on that matter, for God alone knows how this will all work out. But I’m glad, none the less, to see you over your fear of the old man. Enjoy it while you can, and to the full.”

  Rob grinned. “I intend to. Tomorrow will bring great adventures, I pray.”

  “Don’t pray too hard, Nephew.” Nicol’s tone was matter-of-fact. “Adventures sometimes bring surprises, and too many of those can be of the unpleasant kind. I would suggest you remain content as you are, and simply accept what comes along. We’ll be marching north in force, sometimes through lands whose folk care nothing for Bruce interests. Did you have any indication that your grandfather foresees armed hostilities?”

  “He hopes not, but he’s prepared to fight, if fight he must. It will depend, I suppose, on what he finds at Scone.”

  “Aye, that’s what I’m afraid of.” Nicol looked around and was unsurprised to discover that they were almost alone, most of the others having gone inside, leaving the clearing up to the kitchen helpers. He cleared his throat and pushed away the wooden platter that held the scraps of his meal. “Come on, let’s leave these people to their work. It’s dark outside already and I’m cold. Bed beckons, lad, and the dawn will come too soon. We’ll need all the sleep we can get this night.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A RIDE TO PERTH

  No one paid Rob the slightest attention as he emerged from the kitchens in the pre-dawn gloom of the following morning, hitching his travelling pack up higher on his shoulder and reaching down to adjust the sole weapon he carried, a dagger sheathed at his waist. The Lochmaben men were assembled in the main yard outside the tower as planned, and the noise was deafening: the snorting and whinnying of horses; the stamping and clatter of shod hooves on stony ground; the creaking and clinking of saddlery and harness competing with the sounds of steel armour and rattling weaponry, all mixed with the clamour of voices as men shouted loudly, trying to make themselves heard above the cacophony. The entire walled gate yard was brightly lit by the flames leaping from two massive iron cressets that dominated the yard, each containing its own bonfire.

  Ahead of him, beyond the fires, the horsemen, some fifty of them, were drawn up in two distinct groups, facing the outer gates, their shadows dancing wildly in the firelight. Beside them stood the foot soldiers, far more of them than Rob had expected. Given what his grandfather had told Earl Robert, he had anticipated that there would be perhaps fifty to three score of infantry, rounding out the hundred-strong force from the fortress itself, but at first glance he saw that this muster was far bigger. The men were ranged in separated groups of twenty or so. Rob’s first swift scan of them registered at least seven groups, amounting to no fewer than a hundred and fifty bodies, all of them heavily armed. And finally Rob saw his own small contingent of Turnberry retainers, with Nicol MacDuncan mounted at their head.

  A gust of wind whirled over the walls, filling the yard with bluster and making the fires bellow even more loudly, and his eyes followed the explosions of sparks that flew upward against the grey, paling sky where the flush of the approaching day was a faint stain of pink on the horizon. And then the scene in front of him was transformed as every man there raised his arms and shouted in salute, calling the name of Bruce
over and over.

  Rob turned to look behind him, and his jaw dropped. The main doors of the tower had swung open at his back and two lines of identically uniformed guards were now marching shoulder to shoulder down the wide steps to the courtyard, carrying burning flambeaux mounted on long poles. The front pair stopped at the bottom step, and the entire column behind them split to line both sides of the steps, the swirling smoke from their torches creating the effect of a downward-sweeping ground fog. They were followed by two standard-bearers, each carrying a banner depicting the arms of the House of Bruce. The first, a blue lion rampant on a white field, was the ancient emblem of the Bruce family, brought north to Scotland a hundred years before in the service of David, Earl of Huntingdon, who became King David I. The other, magnificent in its richness, was the personal standard of Robert Bruce of Annandale: a blood-red saltire on a field of gold, with the blue Bruce lion embedded in the right corner of the red bar across the top. This pair stopped at the head of the stairs and then moved to each side, leaving sufficient space for the man at their back to pass between them and stand looking out over the cheering crowd that filled the great yard.

  Rob had expected to see his grandfather as he had always seen him—gaunt, stooped, and grim-visaged, unkempt and soberly dressed in his muffling, workaday clothes of black and grey. What he saw instead left him awed. Lord Robert was fully armoured in magnificent black steel helm and corselet worn over a knee-length mail hauberk of the same colour. Heavy black boots covered his legs to the knee, and a black mantled cloak was turned back over his shoulders to expose the blood-red silk lining. In his steel-gauntleted right hand he held the sword he had shown Rob the night before, the sword of the Marshal of England. He raised it high, then brandished it in a salute to his men, and the volume of their cheering rose to new heights. The old man looked, Rob thought, like a warrior in his prime, no vestige of his seventy years visible in the spectacle he presented. The armoured figure brandishing his blade between the standards was not the aging Robert Bruce V, his grandsire. He was the Bruce, patriarch of his house and of all his folk and vassals. He had summoned them here to do his bidding and give him their support, and it was only proper that he should present himself thus to them, in recognition of the trust they placed in him and he in them.

  Watching the man, and hearing the storm of enthusiasm at his back, Rob felt himself in the grip of a strange and novel sensation as his skin flushed and the short hairs all over his body stirred. A great lump swelled in his throat, and only as he fought it down did he recognize that what he was feeling was pride—pride in his stern old grandfather and in his own name, and in what that name signified within the realm of Scotland.

  The cheering continued as Lord Robert sheathed his sword and moved swiftly down the steps to the mounting block, where a sturdy black horse awaited him, caparisoned in black and gold and held in check by two grooms. As he came he caught sight of his grandson and stopped, beckoning Rob to come forward.

  “Get rid of that pack and mount up,” he said. “Then come and ride by me.”

  There was no prouder young man in all Scotland than Rob Bruce when he passed through Lochmaben’s gates a short time later, riding on the right of his noble kinsman in the new dawn’s light.

  * * *

  The sun rose in a clear, blue October sky, glinting off the gear and weapons of the party that surrounded Rob and Lord Robert’s command group as they left Lochmaben. They turned north at the bottom of the hill, following the wide, well-beaten track leading towards the fringes of the great forest that cloaked the southwestern body of Scotland north of Annandale. From that point on, as they passed through the hamlets and villages of their own lands, their numbers swelled constantly as other groups came from all directions to join them, and Rob came to think of their route through Annandale as a river with endless tributaries pouring new strength into its channel with every twist of the path.

  Armies, in Rob’s limited experience, were composed of disciplined military units. He thought of them in terms of blocks and phalanxes of armed men, usually dressed in uniform and marching in defined ranks—but he could see no semblance of organization in the swelling group around and behind him. This growing army moved freely, at its own pace and unconstrained by officers or sergeants of any kind. Each new party of newcomers tended to keep together, and the mounted men kept clear of the marchers for obvious reasons, and yet they made good time, moving quickly and efficiently as though by common consent, with only an occasional voice raised in command or reprimand.

  His grandfather identified each group tersely for Rob’s benefit as it arrived, a roll call of the vassal lairds of Annandale whom Rob had met the day before: Dinwiddies first, then Kirkpatricks, Johnstones, and Jardines, followed later by three separate groups of Herrieses and two of Armstrongs, late arrivals from the Jedburgh region, and finally a large contingent of Crosbies from the area surrounding Dumfries. Although his grandfather had estimated fifty men might come from each source, there were no fewer than seventy in the second group of Herrieses to arrive—and that was the smallest of all in number. The Crosbies of Dumfries alone had turned out a group of close to two and a half hundred.

  They made camp that first night in a rocky meadow among the Lead Hills, on the bank of the wide, strong stream that would become the River Clyde within the next thirty miles, and Rob, duty free from the moment they dismounted, wandered through the encampment. He guessed that more than twelve and perhaps as many as fifteen hundred men had answered his grandfather’s call to muster, and they seemed a mismatched crew at first glance. On closer inspection, though, he recognized how his grandfather’s motley muster was comparable to the formal, English-defined norm of cavalry and infantry, rigidly segregated and organized in disciplined formations and cadres.

  The Bruce force may have appeared to lack discipline. Yet both were readily discernible, evident in the extreme care the Annandale marchers all took to keep themselves spread far apart and cross through their own home lands without causing any depredations that could be avoided. They advanced on an extended front, close to a mile wide where the terrain would permit, because, as his grand-father explained to Rob, fifteen hundred men with horses and wagons moving in a compact body would destroy every field and every copse it crossed. These were the men of Annandale and this was their home, so they took great pains to leave few lasting signs of their passing.

  By the time they were beyond Annandale and struck northwest towards Bothwell, their muster was complete, and any newcomers they saw kept well away from them, gathering on vantage points from which they could watch, and count, the passing Bruce forces.

  From Bothwell, they left the widening valley of the Clyde and struck northeast again, towards Stirling and the River Forth that split the realm of Scotland into its two ancient divisions, northern Highlands and southern Lowlands. On that part of their journey they were contacted by couriers from the Earls of Lennox and Mar and Fife and from Sir James Stewart himself, the hereditary High Steward of the realm, all of whom promised Lord Robert armed support and offered encouragement and godspeed.

  Rob’s father caught up to them the day before they reached Stirling, adding a full seven score of newcomers from Carrick to their ranks. Rob was alone with Nicol when the earl arrived, and they were the first to welcome him back, and while his father made no reference to the changes in Rob’s bearing and demeanour since their last parting, Rob felt sure that he was quietly pleased with his son’s progress and he felt no need to prove anything further. His two immediate ancestors were serving their realm well, he believed, and he was determined to do no less when his turn arrived.

  * * *

  They arrived at Perth, less than ten miles from their final destination at Scone, and Lord Robert and some twenty of his most prominent followers rode into the town, leaving the main body of their following drawn up in the fields outside the town’s walls, not wishing to alarm the inhabitants any more than they must. They were met in the marketplace by Robert Wishart
, the Bishop of Glasgow, a dyed-in-the-wool Bruce supporter and a close friend and confidant of the Stewart, within whose holdings Glasgow lay. He was also a member of the council of Guardians, wherein his Bruce sympathies were well known. Even before Lord Robert and the Earl of Carrick had time to dismount, the bishop came striding to meet them, dressed in the full episcopal regalia of his guardianship. He nodded grimly to Lord Robert and the earl and curtly summoned them to confer with him. Without waiting for a reply, he stalked away towards the pavilion that had been erected for him in the middle of the marketplace.

  Earl Robert swung a leg over the cantle of his saddle and slid to the ground, watching the bishop’s retreating back. Beside him, his father dismounted with less agility, his face impassive as he handed his reins to one of his men. As Lord Robert stamped his feet, loosening his leg muscles, the earl turned to him, one eyebrow raised in a silent question. The patriarch shrugged slightly but said nothing as he turned to follow the bishop. The earl instructed Nicol to warn the others to stay in the square and form a cordon around the bishop’s pavilion, far enough from the tent to keep prying ears at bay. As he turned back to make his own way towards the tent, the earl saw that his father was walking with one hand on young Robert’s shoulder.

  The earl entered the pavilion just in time to hear the bishop question the boy’s presence.

  “He’s a Bruce,” Lord Robert said. “He has to learn and earn his place and I intend to see to that myself. Thus he is here and will remain.”