Kingdom (67 page)

James Douglas rode up with Walter Stewart, both men, along with a host of knights, having pursued King Edward along the ridge.

‘My lord,’ greeted James, breathless. ‘The king has fled south.’

‘He didn’t make it to the castle?’ asked Robert, surprised.

‘He did,’ answered Walter Stewart. A faint grin flickered at the corner of the youth’s mouth. ‘But Sir Philip Moubray refused him entry. He was forced to turn back.’

‘The king was seen riding with Aymer de Valence, through the Bannock Burn,’ finished James. ‘Our men reckon he had around five hundred knights with him.’

‘I want you to follow, as far as you can,’ Robert told the two young men. ‘Take as many of them as possible, but take them alive. I want prisoners – not more dead to bury.’

As James inclined his head and turned his horse, Robert saw his brother approaching. Edward had removed his helm. His face was streaked with sweat that had tracked lines through the blood. Behind him came a company of Carrick knights, hauling more bodies to add to the rows already being set out on a cleared stretch of grass. These dead men were nobles, whose bodies would be respected as befitted their rank. For the common soldiers, a mass grave would be their resting place.

Edward’s knights had to step carefully on the ground, slippery with blood and covered in the debris of broken lances, discarded swords, dead horses and men. One of the corpses already laid out there was Gilbert de Clare, the Earl of Gloucester, his face a mess of livid cuts and bruises, eyes wide and bloodshot. Beside him, the men placed the first of the bodies they were carrying. Robert recognised the arms. The dead man was Giles d’Argentan.

Edward halted beside his brother, his eyes on the English knight, whose armour had been rent in numerous places. ‘Sir Neil says he saw him taking King Edward to safety. He must have ridden back into the battle once he got the king out.’ He shook his head, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm. ‘It took three of my knights to bring him down.’

Robert caught the admiration in his brother’s tone. He nodded. ‘He will be returned to his family with the others. Make sure no one plunders their—’ He fell silent, catching sight of another of the corpses being brought down. This one was even more familiar. It was Robert Clifford, royal knight, veteran of the war, and once his brother in the Knights of the Dragon. Clifford’s body was utterly broken, his head lolling back as they hauled him to the row. ‘Careful,’ Robert called sharply.

His eyes lingered on this growing line of bodies of knights, earls and lords. Truly, the flower of English chivalry had been plucked.

‘My lord.’

Turning, Robert saw Thomas Randolph escorting two prisoners. One, held up by two squires, face pale, teeth clenched in pain, was Ralph de Monthermer. The other, walking unaided, his hands tied behind his back, was Humphrey de Bohun.

As they came closer, Robert locked gazes with Humphrey. He saw the devastation reflected in the earl’s eyes – the horror, the humiliation, the bitterness of this defeat. Such a thing, he knew, could undo a man. Robert felt no joy, no triumph in the knowledge. Instead, he felt pity. Old threads of friendship pulled inside him. But for the countries in which they had both been born, but for their destinies that had diverged on two different roads, they would have still been friends.

Nes appeared at his side. ‘My lord, there is someone asking for you. I think you should come.’

‘Have my physician tend to him,’ Robert told Thomas, motioning to Ralph. His eyes flicked back to Humphrey, briefly, then he turned away and followed Nes down the field to the edge of the slope, where the dead were thickly clustered. ‘Who is it?’

‘Alexander Seton.’ Nes glanced at him. ‘He is badly injured, my lord.’

Robert had to climb over the bodies to reach Alexander. He was lying on his back, one of his legs trapped under a dead horse, his arms splayed out to either side of him. His face was marble white. Sweat soaked his hair. Robert’s eyes moved to the wide red slash across his chest, which had torn through his gambeson and the flesh beneath, clearly made by the mighty stroke of a sword. He could see the splintered bones of ribs, beneath the raw mess of muscle.

Alexander’s eyes went to Robert as he crouched beside him. He licked his lips. ‘Aymer de Valence.’

Robert’s jaw tightened.

‘But I gave him a mark of my own.’ Alexander tried to laugh, but his lips just twitched. ‘Something to remember me by.’

‘You and me both then,’ said Robert, with a grim smile.

Alexander stared at him. ‘I didn’t just betray you to the English, Robert. Katherine, your first wife’s maid – I made it so she lay with that man in Ayr, made it so you found them. I wanted her gone so you would have nothing to distract you from the throne. But in helping you fulfil your own ambition I merely wanted to satisfy my own.’ He closed his eyes with a grimace, then opened them again. ‘I have no right to ask it, but, still, I beg your forgiveness. For all of it.’

Robert took a moment to answer. ‘You have it.’ He grasped Alexander’s shoulder, felt the man shuddering beneath his hand. ‘Christian had a son in Sixhills. I have heard he looks like his father.’

Alexander reached up and gripped Robert’s wrist. ‘Get her out, my lord,’ he murmured. ‘Get them all out.’

Robert glanced back up the hill to where the noble dead were being laid out and the prisoners corralled; all of them worth their weight in ransoms. ‘I will,’ he murmured. Feeling the hand around his wrist release, he looked back.

Alexander Seton died with his eyes open, staring at the midsummer sky.

Rising, Robert moved off. He stood for a moment, surveying the carnage of the battlefield. Both the cost and the value of this victory were visible on every inch of ground. The implications of what he had achieved here today were starting to form, nebulous, in his mind. To the north, the walls of Stirling Castle blazed gold in the morning sunlight. He lifted his face to heaven, closed his eyes.

Lochmaben, Scotland, 1314 AD

In the autumn, when the trees that encircled Castle Loch had changed their colours, their reflections gilding the waters like the gold borders of a mirror, Robert returned to Lochmaben. He came with a large company of men, including some of his captains, Thomas Randolph, James Douglas, Walter Stewart and Edward. Their sister, Mary, accompanied them, as did William Lamberton.

Others of his men, Angus MacDonald, Gilbert de la Hay, Neil Campbell and Malcolm of Lennox among them, had returned for the time being to their estates, some of which had been recently gifted to them. Christiana MacRuarie had gone too, sailing back to Barra. In the final days of summer, they had spent their last night together on the wild Carrick coast. The next day, Robert had stood on the sands of Turnberry, watching her war galley pull out into the waves. Christiana had stood at the stern, the sail filling with wind behind her, the divide of the sea growing between them.

Standing with Robert and his men, at the crossroads where the road led west to Dumfries and south to Carlisle, was a prisoner. Humphrey de Bohun was clean-shaven, dressed in a black doublet and hose, a cloak around his shoulders. His own clothes, ruined, had been burned after the battle. The wounds on his face were mostly healed, although the scars stood out starkly in the afternoon sunlight. It was three months since the battle on the plain by the Bannock Burn.

King Edward and his knights, pursued relentlessly by James Douglas’s company, had made it as far as Dunbar, where the king boarded a ship and set sail for Berwick. Sir Philip Moubray, the Scottish commander who had held Stirling for the English, had surrendered the castle to Robert and had since come into his peace. Many of the dead, too numerous to count, were thrown into a grave by the banks of the River Forth. The bodies of the nobles were returned to their families for burial. Of those who survived and had been taken prisoner, some had already been exchanged for ransoms. Others, Robert had released without penalty, among them Ralph de Monthermer, his old friend in the Knights of the Dragon, who had saved him from Longshanks’s wrath with a pair of spurs. Now, only Humphrey remained in his custody. The earl, Constable of England, had been his greatest prize.

Fionn’s barking alerted the men to the approach of someone. Robert heard the hooves before he saw the company, coming along the road from Carlisle. A group of knights rode at the head in front of two covered wagons. They wore the livery of King Edward. Some of Robert’s men shifted their stances, hands near weapons. Their victory over the enemy, although overwhelming, hadn’t yet ended the war. Robert, however, was confident that it would be a long time before the English king would be able to send another force north to engage him. Edward’s reputation, tarnished before the battle, had been severely damaged by the catastrophic defeat. The riders halted a short distance away. Some of them dismounted, staring down the road at the waiting Scots. Others moved to the back of the wagons, from which they escorted a number of figures.

Robert stepped forward, shielding his eyes from the sunlight. He felt a strange mixture of hope and dread at the sight of them. Did they blame him for these lost years? Would they even know one another now? As the figures began walking towards him, watched over by the English knights, he fixed on one at the front: a tall, slender young woman, in a plain black gown, a white coif on her head. For a moment, he didn’t recognise her, then he realised, with a stab of emotion, that she was his daughter.

He had last seen her, eight years ago, when he had thrust her, weeping and begging him to stay, into Elizabeth’s arms during their desperate parting in the woods beyond St Fillan’s shrine. Marjorie wasn’t a girl any more. The years they had lost were all too visible in her face and body: those of a woman’s. With Marjorie walked his sister, Christian, hand in hand with a young boy, who looked so much like Christopher Seton Robert felt the sort of joy he imagined he would feel if he saw the man himself again. Behind came his youngest sister, Matilda, and his half-sister, Margaret, grey-haired and stooped.

Unable to contain herself, Mary ran to greet her sisters, crying out with grief and joy as they embraced one another. At his side, Robert saw Edward’s blue eyes were shining. Thomas Randolph was the next to break from the company, hastening to his mother. At the last, came Elizabeth, Robert’s wife and queen, arm in arm with a shuffling, bent old man. It was Robert Wishart, the Bishop of Glasgow. William Lamberton murmured a prayer at the sight of his friend.

All of them were the price of an earl’s ransom.

Robert turned to Humphrey, watching the company approach in silence. The earl’s eyes held a sorrow he couldn’t fathom.

Humphrey met his gaze. ‘Am I free?’

‘Yes.’

Humphrey hesitated, seeming about to say something further, but he merely inclined his head.

Robert understood. There was nothing more either of them could say.

He watched Humphrey walk away, along the road towards the waiting English knights. The earl paused as he passed Elizabeth. Leaving Wishart – once the leader of the insurrection, now an old blind man – to be guided by Bishop Lamberton, she turned to him. Robert couldn’t hear what they said, but he saw her look at the ground and shake her head and saw Humphrey’s hand move, as if to reach towards her, then stop.

Whatever question was forming in his mind was vanquished as Marjorie ran towards him. Robert went to meet his daughter, drawing her into his arms. He pulled back after a long moment, smiling as he brushed away her tears with his thumb. ‘My God, you look like your grandmother.’

Marjorie returned his smile with a laugh. ‘That is what Christian says.’ Her eyes searched him as she spoke, as if familiarising herself with this new face of his – all its unfamiliar scars and lines; stories she did not know.

Robert looked over at Christian, who was hugging Matilda and Mary, her young son standing close by. He realised there was someone absent from this company. He knew about Isabel Comyn, having been informed during negotiations for the exchange of prisoners that the countess, delivered into the custody of Henry Beaumont, had died, much to his grief and his guilt for not being able to release her sooner. But he was expecting his nephew, Donald of Mar, Christian’s son by her first marriage. ‘Where is Donald?’

‘He chose to stay in England, in the king’s household,’ Marjorie told him quietly, her eyes on Christian. ‘He said he felt at home there.’

‘My lord king.’

Robert looked round to see Elizabeth approaching. Marjorie moved aside, allowing them to greet one another. Robert inclined his head to her. ‘My lady.’ As they lapsed into silence, unsure of one another, unsure of what to say, Robert held out his hand. Elizabeth took it, glancing up at him as his fingers closed over hers.

After more greetings were exchanged, Robert led his family over to where their horses and the rest of his men were waiting. The English had already gone, dust settling on the road in their wake. After calling for the squires to bring horses for his wife and daughter, Robert paused, looking up at the broken keep of his grandfather’s castle. Ivy had trailed up the sides, covering over the ruin. Below, an oak tree that he remembered climbing as a youth had grown tall, its branches reaching almost to the crown of the motte.

He thought of the tree in Turnberry that had held the web Affraig had made for him in the fire-bruised dark of her hovel, a lifetime ago. When he took the throne and the web didn’t fall he had doubted its power. Now, he felt he understood. Affraig’s belief in him had carried his prayer all the way to Barra and there, burned up in the funeral boat with the old woman, his destiny had been fulfilled not by a fall but by a rise; of smoke and sparks on the night air and of his people’s faith in him, their king. It was in that moment, surrounded by men and women of his realm, that his hope had been rekindled and his war had risen from the ashes.