by Glen Craney
“Who goes there?” shouted the shrouded voice.
The fog prevented James from seeing what was happening. He leapt to his feet, determined to go to the monk’s aid, until Robert restrained him.
SWEENIE WAS COUNTING THE STEPS he had walked into the blinding soup when the discarnate voice called out again.
“How many fingers on Fillan’s hand?”
The shouting man, Sweenie suspected, was asking for a password, and it was probably a trick question. The saint’s shriveled arm was kept pickled in brine at Whithorn Priory, but he had never cared enough to go see the relic. Had souvenir seekers hacked off some of the fingers? Maybe Fillan had been born with a malformed arm. Not likely, considering the Roman monks would have banished him as a child of Satan. He stalled for more time. “Left or right?”
“Are you clan Donald or Dougall?”
Sweenie risked a step nearer. “My mother never told me.”
“Enough of your cunning tongue! Show your face!”
Sweenie drew up his courage and pushed deeper into the fog, determined to latch onto the MacDougall knave and gnaw him to death with his gums, if necessary. Ten steps into the soup, he bumped his forehead against a knee. He looked up. Above him loomed the tallest man he had ever encountered. He nearly swallowed his tongue.
But instead of attacking, the bearded giant backed away. Eyes bugging, he pulled a coin from his pocket and bounced it off Sweenie’s chest. “An offering. Forgive the intrusion. No mischief, please.”
Sweenie concealed a smirking grin at his good fortune. This hairy behemoth wrapped in folds of tartan wool was apparently under the delusion that he had just stumbled upon a gnome, one of the Little People who haunted these moors. Unarmed as he was, the monk decided to use the only weapon at his disposal, his cleverness. He puckered his nose into an elfish scowl and seized on the foolish man’s superstition. “A six-pence? That pittance for the trouble you’ve caused me? Your name, mortal!”
“Angus Og MacDonald.”
“Your business in my glade?”
“I’m searching for the king of Scotland.”
Sweenie scoffed. “You expect me to fall for such nonsense? What monarch in his right mind would be lurking about here in such foul weather?”
“Robert Bruce is his name. I was told he seeks refuge in these parts.”
Sweenie made a waddling circuit around the giant’s ankles. “I thought Comyn the Red was the leader of you miserable wretches? Who is this Bruce you speak of?”
“Are you as daft as you are wee?” The giant Scot immediately regretted his outburst. “The Red is now under sod. Bruce is our monarch now, but he’s hard pressed by his enemies.”
Sweenie climbed atop a mossy boulder and sat cross-legged, pressing his tiny fist against his chin in a pose of deep thought. “I might be able to conjure up this king of yours with a little magic. But a six-pence won’t even pay for the first incantation.”
The distant howling of the hounds from across the loch sped the giant Scotsman to the transaction. He reached into his waist-pouch and relinquished ten more coins.
Dropping the offering into his pouch, Sweenie broke off a twig and tested its flex by circling it above his head as a wand. “Fire and wind, earth and water—eh, I almost forgot. I need a description to inspire the vision. What does this Bruce fellow look like?”
“A man of good height.”
“And countenance? Fair or repugnant?”
“Average for a Lowlander. Nothing remarkable.”
“How is he with the ladies? Well met?”
The looming scout squinted quizzically. “Is that necessary?”
“Would I have asked it if not?”
MacDonald raised his hands in contrition, fearing he had angered the sprite. “Bruce gains his share of attention, but I suspect it is due more to his wealth than comeliness.”
A rustling near the loch was followed by a loud thump.
“Just some of my friends,” Sweenie assured the man. “Pay them no heed, or they’ll find us and demand more compensation.” He began dancing a jig atop the boulder. “Bring me Bruce! Bring me Bruce!”
A hail of rocks rained down on them both.
The frightened MacDonald man looked to the heavens in confusion.
Sweenie attacked his own head with his fists. “I remember now! The one asking the miracle has to perform the dance.”
The MacDonald man was about to protest that condition when Sweenie aimed his wand at him in a warning. The Islesman reluctantly began shuffling in an awkward imitation of the monk’s gyrations while looking around to make certain no one was observing his embarrassing display.
“You call that a jig?” Sweenie cried. “I’ve seen slugs move with more abandon. The elements won’t congeal unless you stir the wind faster.”
Doubling his effort, MacDonald churned a jigging frenzy—until two men appeared through the mists. He glanced at Sweenie in amazement at the efficacy of the spell. Approaching the conjured men cautiously to test their reality, he yanked on the taller newcomer’s scruffy beard. He gritted his teeth and cursed in a voice lowered to avoid alerting any scouts around. “Damn you, elf! This isn’t the Bruce. You’ve summoned some half-wit beggar.”
“Average countenance?” Robert growled at MacDonald. “The ladies seek me only because of my wealth?”
The giant clansman’s eyes bulged. “By the Rood.”
Despite the danger of the moment, James couldn’t help but rollick with laughter. He slapped the stunned Islesman’s broad back in a hearty greeting and whispered, “Well summed, MacDonald. Though I felt you gave him too much benefit of the doubt regarding the lasses.”
The MacDonald clansman embraced Robert with a bear hug. “We feared the dogs had gotten you.” He brought Sweenie to his side. “I beg you, my lord, grant a benefice to this leprechaun. I’d have never have found you without his wondrous powers.”
“Aye, we mustn’t forget the spirits.” Robert nodded James to the task. “Vassal, give our wee ally here from the nethers his just reward.”
James grasped Sweenie by his cord at his waist, flipped him upside down, and scraped his knuckles across the bald oval on the monk’s scalp.
MacDonald was horrified by the abuse. “Douglas, are you mad? He’ll curse us to our last days!”
Released, Sweenie spun head over heels and landed on his feet like a cat.
“Sweenie, meet the Chieftain of the Isles,” James whispered. “No galley sails from here to the Orkneys without the mandate of this oversized bag of hazelnuts. But pray he’s never attacked by a navy of faeries.”
Red-faced, MacDonald didn’t know whether to thank the scheming monk or heave him into the loch. He pointed a threatening finger at all three men and warned, “If a word of this gets out, you’ll all swim to—”
The louder barking of the hounds drove them behind the boulder.
MacDonald pushed Robert toward the wooded ridge. “The Earl of Lennox escaped Methven and made his way to my castle in Dunaverty. We found your brother this morning. We’d best not tarry.”
Holding back, James turned to assess Sweenie’s condition. “You got one more jaunt left in you, Wee-kneed?”
Sweenie flexed his puny biceps. “Aye, my lord.”
Robert saw to his regret that James was determined to backtrack and find Belle. “I owe you my life. … Go on, then.”
Clasping Robert’s hand in farewell, James instructed MacDonald, “Angus, take good care of our king. I’d not serve a day under his boiled-brain brother.” He thumped Robert on the chest. “I’ll find you in the Isles.”
“Clifford will be patrolling the south,” McDonald warned him. “Go by way of Strathyre.”
Halfway down the slope, James turned back and called out, “Bruce!”
Robert spun in his tracks, looking hopeful. “You’ve changed your mind. I knew you couldn’t stay long from me.”
James motioned with a cupped hand. “Let’s have it.”
With a guilty shrug
, Robert reached under his shirt and tossed over the copy of the Chanson of Fierabras that he had purloined while James was slumbering on the far banks. Before James could burn his ears with a flurry of curses, Robert ran off for the ridge to catch up with MacDonald.
Reunited with his precious gift from Belle, James hurried back to the loch and found Sweenie catching a wink in the currach. He shook the monk awake and pushed the boat off into the waters.
Halfway across the water, James broke their weary silence to correct one of the dwarf’s more irritating habits. “How many times must I tell you? I am not a lord. Leave off such fancy titles for those like your new king who traipsed about the London courts with curled toes.”
“But your lady insisted that I address you as such.”
“Did she now?”
Sweenie grunted and puffed as he rowed. “Aye, she told me that life had given you so little in compensation of features or wit that we should allow you this one false conceit, at least.”
Ears reddening, James stole the oars from the lippy monk and sped their pace to find his Floripas.
XIX
THE FIRST RAYS OF THE March sun broke over the Don River as Tabhann Comyn led his mounted mosstroopers into the golden moors of Buchan. During the six months since Belle had escaped from Dalswinton, he and his cousin Cam had scoured the North, searching for her and planning their vengeance against James Douglas and the Bruces. At last, they had turned up a promising piece of surveillance: MacDougall’s spies had reported seeing several stragglers, including women, running for Kildrummy castle. If his wife was among them, he was determined to see that she received a proper welcome home.
Reaching the crest of the Grampian Mountains, he gained his first glimpse of Kildrummy, the northern keep that had been held by their clan before the Bruces stole it. Black clouds roiled above its quadrant towers. The castle was under siege, and had been for at least a week, by the look of the trebuchet damage to the walls. Scanning the heralds flapping over a white canvass pavilion, he pointed to the Plantagenet dragon, too shocked to utter the possibility.
“Longshanks is too ill to ride this far north,” Cam assured him. “It must be the prince.”
Tabhann was relieved that Longshanks was not up here in Mar rutting around, but Edward Caernervon’s unexpected arrival presented him with a different, and troubling, dilemma. For all his cruelty, Longshanks could be counted on to act rationally, in accord with England’s interests. The Comyns and the MacDuffs were still in the English king’s peace, and so long as Robert Bruce was at large, he felt confident that Longshanks would find it advantageous to embrace him as a victim of the usurper. The Plantagenet’s misspent arrow of a son, however, was flighty, prone to wild swings of emotion, and at times reclusive. He might prove to be an unreliable ally.
As Tabhann led Cam and their men into the English camp, which had been set a mere two hundred yards from Kildrummy’s curtain walls, he suffered the glares of the conscripted Yorkshiremen and Northumbrians, who made little distinction between traitorous and loyal Scots. Spying Nigel Bruce at the crenellations directing the tower’s defense, he lashed his horse through the English pike men and nearly trampled several of them in his haste to confront his old clan enemy. “Damn you, Bruce!” he snarled up at the walls. “I’ll have my wife! And your head on a pike!”
“She found your bed too small!” Nigel shouted down at him. “At least, I think that’s what she said she found too small!”
That retort drew raucous howls from the English archers, who lowered their bows in admiration for young Bruce’s witty bravado.
Enraged, Tabhann lashed his horse along the perimeter of the moat in search of some means to attack. Denied a target for his wrath, he retreated through the jeering conscripts and rushed up to Caernervon’s pavilion.
From their position in the vale below the castle, Robert Clifford and Aymer de Valence, the newly appointed commander of the English army in the North, had been observing Tabhann’s raging performance with amusement. “A magnificent sortie,” Clifford remarked dryly. “Those walls suffered dearly.”
Tabhann leapt off his saddle and came strutting up huffing indignation. “That is my castle you are destroying!”
Clifford pushed the complaining Scot aside. “You expect us to stand back after the fighting while you sweep in to collect the spoils?”
“The Bruces stole it from my uncle!”
Valence half-listened to Tabhann’s rant while he signaled for the trebuchet to be reloaded. “I don’t give a damn, Scotsman, if your mum suckled you in that tower while the angels sang lullabies. Engage those ramparts again without my permission, and you’ll walk to Lanercost in chains.”
A helmeted knight arrayed in flashy French silks galloped into the camp. He dismounted and strode into the prince’s pavilion without even being questioned about his purpose.
Tabhann looked to Valence for an explanation of that privilege, but the earl merely shrugged. Furious that a foreigner was permitted a prior audience, Tabhann marched toward the pavilion.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Clifford warned.
Ignoring the advice, Tabhann forced his way inside. He found Caernervon under the sheets, naked and in the arms of Piers Gaveston. Sputtering for words, he was hard-pressed to know which was more shocking: that the prince was intertwined in a perverse embrace, or that his Gascon dandy had so brazenly violated Longshanks’s order of exile.
Caernervon grinned and stroked Gaveston’s oiled locks for Tabhann’s benefit. “It seems, Piers, that the beasts have broken out of the stables again.”
Tabhann retreated a step. “I would speak with you, my lord, concerning my wife.”
Gaveston kissed the prince and then watched for a reaction from Tabhann. “Has the Scottie lost his bride?”
Caernervon nuzzled and conversed intimately with his favourite, as if Tabhann were not present. “It seems she prefers the company of that Douglas cad. You remember him, Piers. He was the thick-tongued bumpkin who danced like a bear.”
“The one with the firm derrière?”
Caernervon, stung with jealousy, wriggled away from Gaveston’s arms.
The Gascon knight reassured the insecure prince with a pointed glance aimed at his buttocks. “Not as fine as yours, Poppy.”
Mollified, Caernervon rested his head on Gaveston’s chest. “I too have suffered the pangs of lost love. We must do all we can to see the Scottie reunited with his lady.”
Gaveston leapt from the bed and donned the prince’s breastplate, leaving exposed his lower extremities where a codpiece would be attached. He scampered around mimicking a joust with his lance. “Your wish is my command, my lord! Where is the poor damsel held? In London Tower? On some brigand ship?”
Caernervon rollicked across the sheets, toasting the performance.
“My wife!” Tabhann shouted, incensed by the mockery at his expense.
Wiping tears of mirth, Caernervon finally regained breath enough to report, “She is indeed inside those walls.”
Tabhann took an impatient step toward the bed. “Then it is true—” He stopped when Caernervon laid back the covers, as if to make room for three.
Primping his curls, Caernervon studied his own reflection in the goblet’s jeweled neck. “There is even more good news. This Douglas traitor who cuckolded you now seems to have turned his affections toward Robert Bruce.” The prince shot a wicked glance at Gaveston, as if savoring the possibility of a physical bond between the two Scot rebels. “Bruce and Douglas have abandoned those conniving cunts they dragged west with them. Now they share a bed sack on the moors! How scandalous!” He winked with devilish intent at Gaveston, who was prancing around in glee at the irony. “It would be such a shame if such depravity became widely known. That might destroy their reputations.”
“Who defends the tower with Nigel Bruce?” Tabhann asked.
Tired of toying with the humorless Scot, Caernervon suspended Gaveston’s taunting with an upturned hand. Adopting th
e practiced façade of the serious monarch that he would soon become, the prince reported, “He is being suckled by that fat sow, Atholl. I intend to roast their loins for ham hocks. They have a small garrison, but Bruce’s brother is putting up a stiff resistance. I fear it will be a month, perhaps more, before you are back in your lady’s arms.” He winked at Piers, betraying that neither was in a rush to end their secret tryst in this wilderness. “These primitive siege guns commissioned by my father are not worth the kindling.”
“A month? That is time enough for Bruce to restock his rebel army in the Isles and send a relief force!”
Caernervon waved off the warning. “Do you know what they are calling Robert Bruce in London? King Hob. He hobbles over here and he hobbles over there. That smelly MacDougall oaf reports that the turncoat now resembles a recluse with a beard falling to his belt and his ribs poking out of rags ripped to shreds by hounds. Even by your primitive standards of hygiene, Comyn, that must be something frightful to behold. You needn’t worry about King Hob. He can’t even scare up a rabbit to roast.”
“Even if Bruce remains in hiding, Douglas will come for her.”
Caernervon drained his wine goblet. “What can one man do to us?”
Tabhann paced and stewed, desperate to get his hands on Belle before Douglas discovered where she was hiding. He scoured his memory of Kildrummy’s layout. One oddity of its architecture, he remembered, had always drawn complaints from the vassal assigned by his uncle Red to hold it years ago. A small chamber situated between the kitchen and the dining hall had been converted into a corn bin. The room had once been used as a waiting station to pass heated victuals, but the aperture had been boarded up rather than refilled with stone and mortar. He asked the English prince, “Is the castle provisioned?”
With affected dejection, Caernervon sank into his pillow and bemoaned his plight. “Alas, it seems so. My spies confirm the granary is full.”