by Robert Low
‘We will hold, my lord,’ he said, reassuringly cheerful, ‘until Midsummer’s Day.’
He had back a look as mournful as a bull seal on a wet rock.
‘So I thought myself, once,’ Thweng replied. With a jolt, he realized that he had been ransomed after Stirling fell in return for one of this Mowbray’s kin. Comyn connections, he recalled, which accounts for their change of cote.
Seventeen years since; the thought made his bones ache and he wondered, yet again, at the wisdom of dragging his threescore plus years all the way from the peace of Kilton to another round of Scottish wars.
At least this duty was simple if onerous: escort the commander of Stirling’s fortress under safe writ through the Scots siege lines and back to his castle where he would await, as per his agreement with Edward Bruce, the outcome of events.
‘Take careful note as you go,’ de Valence, Earl of Pembroke had said to him. ‘Ascertain if Bruce will stand and fight.’
Stand and fight, Sir Marmaduke thought. Pembroke and Beaumont think it is all a matter of bringing the army north and forcing the Scotch rebels to battle. The King himself, a copy of his father in everything but wit and wisdom, scarcely cares what happens after, only that a victory here will settle matters with Lancaster, Warwick and all the other disaffected. The King’s worst fear is that the Scots will run back to the hills.
He and Mowbray had come up Dere Strete, as much on a scout as ambassadors charged with the official chivalry of the upcoming affair round Stirling. They had taken the straight road to the castle, as the army would when it arrived, with the great loom of Coxet Hill on their left, heading to meet Bruce and the other lords at St Ninian’s little chapel.
Mowbray, his face sharp and ferret-eager with watchfulness, pointed out the pots dug at the crossings of the Bannock stream, each hole’s flimsy covering hiding the sharp stake within; beyond, to the north, a line of men sweated and dug.
‘Dangerous for horse,’ he pointed out, as if Thweng was some squire in need of instruction. ‘Trenches and pots, my lord: it means the Scotch will stand and fight as the King wishes.’
After what he had seen, the drilling men and the numbers of them, the grim hatred and the entire families they had brought – which you did not do if you thought of defeat – Sir Marmaduke felt a small needle of doubt lancing into the surety of an English success.
And yet … he knew Bruce of old, from the stripling days when he had been a tourney fighter of note and the pair of them had clattered round the circuit in a welter of expensive saddlery, horses and gear. They had shared bruises, victory, drink and jests – he was Sir M, Bruce was Sir R, which sounded like ‘sirrah’ and was the laugh in the piece.
The tourney-fighting Bruce he knew had not liked a straight pitched battle then, the French Method of fighting where you trained horse and rider to bowl a man over. His was the German Method, mounted on a lighter horse and avoiding the mad rushes to circle round and strike from behind.
His tactic was to grab knights round the waist and drag them bodily from the saddle, so that the Kipper – the man on foot with a great persuading club – could invite the lord to surrender himself to ransom. He and Bruce had played Kipper for each other, time and about for one profitable, glorious season, and Thweng recalled it with a dreamy mist of remembrance.
He has waged war the same way, Thweng thought as they rode up through the litter of men and shelters, avoiding anything that looked like a full commitment of all his force. He did it in ’10 and long before that. He’d had Wallace as teacher for it – why would he contemplate changing it now?
They passed Bannock vill, a rude huddle of cruck houses and drunken fences, where men leaned on spears and watched them; one spat pointedly. Nearby, hung from the shaft of a tipped-up and weighted two-wheeled cart, a festering corpse turned and swung, smoked with flies.
A black reminder about pillage, Thweng thought; the wee households in this hamlet had not fled, though they risked kitchen gardens and chooks, because armed men and Bruce’s bright writ ensured no looting.
That was order and organization and Thweng felt a slim sliver of cold slide around his backbone; when you see your enemies in discord, fill your cup and take your ease. When they are grim and resolved and of one mind, gather your harness and set your shield …
They dismounted outside the small stone chapel, garlanded with a splendid panoply of bright tents and banners. They had been brought the last little way by Sir James Douglas, though Sir Marmaduke found it hard to equate the lisping cheerfulness of dark youth with the man he had heard was a scowling scar on the lip of the world and whose very name, the Black, set men and women and bairns howling.
The small mesnie of English men-at-arms remained by their horses, nervous as levrets in a snakepit, while Mowbray and Sir Marmaduke clacked along the stones to the door of St Ninian’s and ducked under the Douglas smile into the musty dim of the chapel.
‘You will wait to be called, gentilhommes,’ said a voice from a shadow. ‘Then you will step forward and bow. You will not parley unless asked a question. Understood?’
‘Understood, my lord Randolph,’ Thweng answered, recognizing the voice and forcing the man into better light, where his unsmiling face could be clearly seen. ‘My lord earl, I should say. You have risen in the world since you betrayed one king for another, it appears.’
Randolph flushed.
‘I am loyal to the King,’ he blustered, but Thweng had made his point and waved, at once apologetic, insouciant and dismissive, which deepened Randolph’s flush – but their names were called and the Earl had no chance to reply.
Bruce was standing behind a table littered with papers, half-rolled, unfolded and pinned – the corner of one by a dagger. Beside him was his brother Edward, a coarse copy hewn of rougher stone, and behind was a coterie of shadows, waiting and watching.
‘My lords,’ Edward declared. ‘Present your writ.’
Mowbray passed across the rolled vellum, had it taken, examined and placed to one side.
‘You may proceed to the castle. Take no detours. Once inside, you will be considered quit-claimed from this writ. Is that understood?’
Edward was matter-of-fact and harsh, much changed from the smiling, eager man who had negotiated the midsummer surrender of Stirling, Mowbray thought and almost smiled at what must have passed between the brothers at the news of it. Instead, he merely inclined his head and hovered uncertainly until he realized he had been dismissed; he shot Sir Marmaduke a stiff look and vanished. There was a silence, thick as gruel.
‘You have seen enough to satisfy the Plantagenet?’
The voice was rough and rheumed and the face, when it was presented to the filtered light inside the still, close tent, was a stone to the temple; Sir Marmaduke jerked a little and blinked before he recovered his wit.
‘A deal of men,’ he answered, staring at the lesioned skin and the wounds. A scar down the left eye – Methven for that, he recalled – and the ruin of his right cheek. A tourney wound, he remembered, though that had been long since and if it had never healed there was something festering wrong; there had been rumours of sickness and reports that the usurper King of Scots was taken to his bed, feverish and practically dead, but Sir Marmaduke had always dismissed them as wishes. Now he was not so sure and he fought for more sense to his words.
‘A deal of men,’ he repeated, ‘in rough wool and drilling with sticks.’
‘For all that,’ Bruce said, stiff as old rock, ‘Plantagenet will find us here when he finds the courage to seek us out. And we will have sharp on the sticks.’
‘So I understand, sirrah,’ Thweng answered and heard the court of shadows suck in their breath at this breach of protocol. But the King smiled a little at the old joke only the pair of them knew, stretching the cheek – bigod, Sir Marmaduke thought, there is discolour on it all the way back to the ear …
‘I have a gift,’ Bruce declared suddenly. He turned to take an armful of folded cloth from one of the shado
ws behind him and then shook it out.
‘Return this to my lord Berkeley – he lost it recently in my domains.’
The bloodied, torn Berkeley banner taken by Jamie Douglas seemed to glow balefully as Thweng reached out and gathered the rough brocade, folding it into a loop over his arm, and all the time could not take his eyes from the face of the man he had known from youth.
God blind me, he thought, the changes in him. The fierce ambition had always been there, though Thweng had not realized what the young, chivalrous knight that had been Robert Bruce had had to sacrifice for it. It was as if the stains on his soul had manifested themselves, for all to see, on his face.
Thweng shook the idea from him as a bayed stag does a hound; he had his own stained liege and enough personal sins not to want to burden himself with others. And he had his own tasks. He steeled himself, couched his lance and dug in his spurs.
‘A gift for a gift,’ he replied, ‘and a counterweight to the knowledge I have garnered: Strathbogie has fallen from your chaplet.’
It was a strike, sure as point on shield. There was a long silence, followed by a moth-wing murmur from the unseen shadows as the news went round. David of Strathbogie, Earl of Atholl, had been a recent convert to the Bruce cause, despite being married to the daughter of the murdered John Comyn of Badenoch. His defection back to the English would send a shiver through the other titled lords who supported Bruce; they were few enough and he depended on them for the best of his army.
‘It seems’, Sir Marmaduke went on, driving home the spike of it, ‘he did not care much for your brother’s shift of dalliances to the daughter of the Earl of Ross. I am told wee Izzie Strathbogie is blinded with snot and red-eyed with weeping.’
Edward growled a little and leaned forward, flexing his knuckled hands on the table, for it was his seductions that had brought this about; Bruce cleared his throat and Edward, black scowling, straightened a little.
‘Fair exchange,’ Bruce said flatly. ‘And your observations on the reasons for it are cogent – you would know, of course, of the problems women can cause. How is Lady Lucy?’
Sir Marmaduke fought down his own hackles, admiring Bruce’s smooth parry even as he did so; Lucy Thweng’s wayward, single-minded progress through lovers, husbands and even abductions was a scandal to the Thwengs in general and himself, her uncle, in particular. Yet he fought the flicker of a wry smile on to his walrus-moustached face.
‘A splendid animal,’ he answered, which was how his own king had described her, grinning knowingly and nudging Despenser as he did so, for the rumours that old Sir Marmaduke had also plucked his niece’s fruit was rife. It had clearly reached here, too, for someone tittered in the dark behind Bruce and muffled it swiftly.
There was silence after that and Sir Marmaduke realized he had probably been dismissed, was turning to clack his way across the stones when the Bruce voice harshed out again.
‘You have seen our sticks, sir. Tell Plantagenet we will defend this realm with the longest one we have.’
And Thweng, nodding a lower bow, heard the last whispered phrase as he found his way back to sunlight.
‘Farewell, Sir M.’
Bruce watched him go with a dull ache of another lost friend settling stonelike in his belly. An old friend – he had been surprised at the sunk cheek, the white wisp of hair, yet now wondered why he had been so shocked; Sir M had to have sixty years lying on his shoulders – at least. He had seemed old when he and Bruce had tourneyed together – bigod, he must have been the age I am now.
A long time of friendship, now smoked away as if it had never been. Small wonder folk spoke of being raised to the throne – it was a place as high and lonely as any eyrie.
‘Did he see, d’ye think?’
Edward’s voice was harsh with eagerness, his great broad face shining, but his brother’s eye was jaundiced when it turned on him, blood-filled with Edward’s misdemeanours.
‘Sir M misses nothing,’ he answered shortly and Edward, sensing the mood, wisely tightened his lips, aware that the Strathbogie business was too raw; he could feel the accusing eyes of all the other nobiles searing his back.
‘He saw the work, Your Grace,’ Jamie confirmed, and then frowned. ‘Though I cannot see why you had men digging pretend holes as well as true.’
‘I want the Plantagenet blocked from coming up Dere Strete,’ Bruce answered patiently. ‘When he moves round to the north, as he then must if he wishes to officially relieve the siege on Stirling, I want him to believe I have trenched to our front there, too. That way he will think I wish to stand and fight.’
‘But you must,’ blurted Jamie and Edward’s sharp bark of laughter drowned the disapproving murmurs at this breach of etiquette.
‘If I fight at all,’ Bruce answered, slow and cold as a glacier and as much to them all as the flustered Jamie, ‘I will not be standing, my lords. This will not be Falkirk.’
The air was heavy with the sudden tense interest of all the others, who hung on whether the King would stand and fight. And Jamie understood it, sudden as a flaring light: if the area between the armies was trenched it would be as much a barrier to the spear blocks they had been drilling in and they needed to stay tight and together as they moved. That was why the holes were pretend: Bruce would not wait for the English; he would attack them, as Wallace did at the brig.
He almost exclaimed it out loud, but then recovered himself and bowed like a bobbing hen.
‘If Your Grace stands to fight,’ he added.
Bruce favoured him with a twist of smile.
‘Just so. If that is the case, you will attend in my own Battle on the day, with your mesnie. Until then, I want your men mounted and riding.’
‘We are not horse, Your Grace,’ Jamie argued lightly in French. ‘You have Sir Robert Keith’s men for that.’
‘The Earl Marischal’s horse are few and needed,’ Bruce answered. ‘Your men are good riders and I want them broken in two – yon Dog Boy will command the other half – and riding about the Lothians making a deal of noise and fire and smoke.’
‘Aleysandir? He is not stationed enough for command.’
‘Stationed or not, he is vital,’ Bruce replied. ‘I will tell you why, good Sir James, since I am your liege lord and king and can do so where others tremble – he is your double. The twig does not fall far from the tree and whether your difference in stations admits that you are sired by the same loins, the truth is palpable each time you stand side by side.’
He saw Jamie Douglas stiffen and frowned.
‘Loose your hackles, lad – I need the country in turmoil. I need every handful of horsemen as heralds of the terrible Sir James. If the Black can be in two places at once, all the better.’
Jamie Douglas saw it and his flattered anger subsided slowly. He glared round the other lords, daring them to comment on this shame on his father’s name – though the truth was that all of them could name some wee common woman tupped by a noble relative.
‘I need herschip, but of a particular sort,’ Bruce went on. ‘Fetch back all the iron you can carry from Northumberland’s smiths and forges. Strip it from the Church if needs be – we will need as much as we can, to beat ploughshares into swords.’
Nor will there be enough, he thought to himself, if the weapons fail to arrive from Spain.
‘Above all,’ Bruce added, ‘you watch. Put eyes on the road from Berwick and do not remove them until you can ride and tell me proud Edward is coming over the Tweed with his host, by which route and how many.’
He watched Jamie Douglas stride off and heard Randolph clear his throat.
‘The Earl of Atholl is a sore loss.’
Indeed. As if I had not realized that – Bruce almost spat it back, but swallowed it and offered an insouciant shrug instead.
‘If the great and good cannot be persuaded to fight for their king, then the sma’ folk can be persuaded to fight for their kingdom instead, my lord,’ he replied in English, and then turned to the s
hadows, picking one out from the others; Sir Henry Sientcler of Roslin bowed.
It was unkind and Bruce knew it as he spoke, but fear made him careless of the Roslin lord’s feelings.
‘And if your Herdmanston kinsman and namesake falters, my lord,’ he declared to the stricken lord of Roslin, ‘we will, in truth, be defending this realm with nothing better than long sticks.’
Crunia, Kingdom of Castile
That night …
They made a plan, of sorts; Sim levered himself up and flung himself into the turmoil of the streets like a man plunging into surf, while Hal stayed with a flask of watered wine in the maelstrom of cockfighters, waiting to see if Piculph returned.
The day slid to a groaning end, the sun a raw, bloodied egg trembling on the horizon. The cockfights filtered to an exhausted finish and the victors fed and watered their weary, wounded champions, before cosseting them carefully in the dark comfort of linen bags, which they hung high on posts to thwart the vermin. The losers made more pragmatic arrangements and chicken stew was cheap on the tavern bill of fare.
Sim ate his with considerable gusto, but Hal neither liked the taste nor the idea that the white and red might be mixed in with the green and gold – though the truth was that the dying light brought out hordes of fluttering insects, mad for the sconces and, in the dim, Hal could not tell what had started out in his stew and what had landed since, drunk with light.
Sim, presented with this, paused, shrugged and spooned on, observing only that the folk of Compostella could take perfectly good food and make it ‘as heated as the Earl of Hell’s hearth’. Yet he ate Hal’s bowl as well and, at the end, slid it away from him, belched and sighed.
‘They ken how to bliss saints, mark me well,’ he observed, swallowing watered wine and grimacing at the water. ‘The seven holy men have been duly worshipped, I can tell you. The wee saints they name Segundo and Tesifonte had a good stushie at the entrance to a street, though I think it had more to do wi’ the fact that tanners carried one and cobblers the other. And Cecilio cowped off his bier and crushed a wee nun, so she and God are not on speaking terms.’