The Honor Due a King (20 page)

I said nothing to that. O’Brien may have been Irish and yesterday he may have known what another of them was thinking or had said, but today was altogether different.

O’Brien was retrieved from his clansmen and brought forward. He stood in front of us wearing a smirk and with his fists planted firmly on his sword belt. A young man, but bold and desperate to lead, he had won the loyalty, if only for now, of those of his kinsman adamantly opposed to the English and any of their adherents.

“Munster,” he announced in a jaunty tone, as if eager to lay low old archrivals. “I have word they’ll rise in your favor when you go there. It will be the beginning of the whole army of Ireland flocking to your cause.”

At that, Randolph and I exchanged dubious glances. The army of Ireland had not been one for centuries. If ever the Scots had trouble agreeing amongst themselves, the Irish were tenfold worse.

At Edward’s insistence, we marched at once toward Limerick and found ourselves faced across the Shannon by Brian O’Brien’s own kinsman, Murrough. They were not going to allow us to pass without a gory fight. Once again, we turned back – this time toward Ulster.

The journey was arduous. Sleet pelted us daily. When it was not raining ice, the north wind peeled the skin from our faces. Spring came late and even then barely. The land had been stripped clean as a bone and run roughshod many times over. The locals we chanced upon bore the ghostly look of starvation. Fights erupted daily, not only between Scots and Irish, but also among my own men.

Along the way, many of the Irish crept away in the night. My greatest fear was that they would join with the opposition and fall upon the very men they had fought beside: us. But such fears never came to pass. More than likely, they just went on home.

We lost dozens to sickness. Miles that might have taken us only days to travel instead took weeks. Our horses went lame, even the best of them, and we were forced to relieve many of their misery.

One late March morning, a pale sun broke above the river of mist that hung over the boglands of Tipperary. On either side of the road, the bog spread far and flat. Only here, where one could see to the horizon, could we escape trouble. We had been harried recently by a contingent of local peasants and although we had managed to fend them off without loss of life, some of our remaining supplies had been stolen. We barely had the resources to go on and yet we could not stay. Edward rode the length of the road, roaring threats to prod the bedraggled column along.

As we gathered our scarce belongings to begin on the road north, a cry rent the air. I bolted in the direction of its source. Amongst a small group of women, Sorcha lay curled sideways on the ground, holding her knees up toward her chest. She stifled another scream, splayed her legs apart and forced her energies into her belly, bearing down hard.

An older woman with sharp cheekbones and gray hair gazed at Sorcha, then at me. “The bairn comes. The king’s bairn.”

A crowd gathered around Sorcha. Edward bellowed for the throng to part before him, as if he were Moses himself expecting the Red Sea to divide at his very presence. Still on the back of his bony mount, Edward rolled his eyes and flipped the embroidered hem of his cloak over his shoulders.

He spat at the ground, barely missing the old woman. “Leave her behind with some of the women. The brat will come when it’s ready. We’ve miles to cover and no friend in this territory.”

“Which is why we shouldn’t leave her like this.” I knelt and took Sorcha’s hand, clammy with sweat. Between her gripping pains she looked up at me, smiled faintly and drew a deep breath as she waited for the next wave to push the baby downward through her pelvis.

A cloud passed over Edward’s countenance. “Women bear children all the time, brother. It could take all bloody day. And we haven’t got all day.”

“Women do not bear
your
children every day, Edward – although it seems nearly so.” I looked at him pointedly, but he gave no admittance to the fact that this woman, who had worshipped him enough to follow him to battle through the dead of winter, starving and footsore, loved him and was about to give birth to his own flesh and blood. “You owe her your protection. You owe the child a chance to live.”

He snorted. “
That
is in God’s hands.”

Two of Sorcha’s companions flanked her, clamping her elbows as they helped her into a squatting position. Her loins were but inches from the soggy ground, which reeked of decay and stagnant water. It was no place for the son of a king to enter the world.

“Fetch my furs and blankets,” I said to some of the other women, “so that she might have her child in warmth and on a dry place. Not like this.”

The old hag shuffled off. Gritting my teeth, I strode toward Edward. “I am tired of fighting with you, Edward. For weeks now I have yielded to you, kept my mouth closed, so that we could march as one. But it is here I draw the line. Here that I stand. Move on if you will. You’ll not make it more than two leagues down the road before those who loathe you will fall upon you and scour the flesh from your bones. And with only half an army, you’ll expose your backside just as you did when we first left Carrickfergus. Sorcha will have her child under the safeguarding of my men and once that child comes I will grant her escort sufficient for her to return home when she is able. Only then will I move my feet from this very earth.”

His expression did not change. To go on with a depleted force was absolute suicide. His lips twisted in a scowl.

Sorcha screamed loud enough to topple the nearest mountain. One of her companions gripped her arm, urged her to focus her strength on her belly and squeeze. Sorcha gulped, stifled another scream and bore down. Another woman shoved forward and yanked Sorcha’s skirts up past her belly.

Enthralled by the vulgar miracle taking place before me there on the boggy plains, I did not notice Edward leaving. Sorcha pushed and cried and pushed some more until finally, a small, purple bundle slid from between her milky thighs. The old woman took the child and wiped him clean with my bedding, then held him up so all could see his sex.

Blood spilled bright and red in a puddle at Sorcha’s small feet as the women pulled the afterbirth free. Then she collapsed backward into the pile of furs that had been brought for her. The boy was placed on her bloated belly. With tears bright in her eyes, Sorcha traced a finger over his tiny nose and chin. He looked, I mused, more like a wrinkled old man than a newborn. When he paused in his crying and began to turn his groping, naked gums toward her, she unlaced and pulled down her gown, showing without humility a brown jutting nipple. She clenched her hand around her breast, sliding the teat into the infant’s greedy mouth. Carefully then, to shield her new bairn from the wind, she arranged a borrowed, woolen cloak over him as the child suckled. Sorcha, although spent, wore a look of pure ecstasy, just as she must have when the child was created.

Edward was nowhere to be seen. He had called off the march evidently though, as the soldiers had sunk back down to their quivering haunches and were grumbling miserably over the void in their bellies and how much better it would all be when they got back to Carrickfergus. Better yet when they returned to Scotland.

Too sore in the loins to ride, Sorcha was given space on one of our last remaining carts. She would not stay behind, insisting on going on the very next day with us. Prideful, she kept her bairn in plain view of all. The wee lad paid no heed to the cold, seldom crying, for he was too busy guzzling his mother’s milk in between naps. Edward, she called him. How unfortunate for the lad to be so cursed. I had not known a worthwhile Edward in all my days, least of all my brother. Not once did he acknowledge Sorcha or the child.

By the time we crawled, famished and raw-footed, into Carrickfergus, Sorcha was down with a fever. She did not live out her son’s first month. Too ashamed of her, Sorcha’s family did not claim her body for a proper burial, nor the child.

April rains were falling gently when she was laid into the ground in a common grave on a hillside outside the fortress. The first wildflowers of spring sprouted blue and pink over her grave. I found a mother in the nearest village, one of the O’Neil clan, who had recently lost a child to the rampant sickness abounding over the island. She gladly took Edward’s son to her breast as if he were her own child. I made certain that she and her husband knew whose child it was that they were fostering and told her that when he was weaned I would send for him and have him brought up in Scotland. Even as I said that I knew they would not part with the little dark-eyed babe so readily. He would be loved by these strangers more than his own father ever would.

In May, Randolph and I took ship back home. With every mile that fell behind us over the horizon, separating me from my last remaining brother, I felt a burden lifting.

I would no longer come to Edward’s aid. I would no more ask for his. In truth, if I never saw him again I would not suffer for the loss. So very little had been gained by this venture onto Irish soil. So many men lost along the way. Our losses had been as numerous as our victories. We had neither fallen to the forces of the English in Ireland, nor wiped them from there.

***

Carrick, 1317

T
he hills of Carrick were in their flush when I returned to the land of my boyhood. I sent my soldiers home and dispatched Randolph to Edinburgh with word that I would be delayed while looking over my holdings in the southwest. Ever mindful of my safety, my nephew balked at leaving me with so small a retinue, but I ordered him on, mostly because I could not bear the accusations behind his every look. He knew where I would go.

Aithne greeted me at Loch Doon Castle with arms wide, a smile warm and inviting on her mouth, and a willing ear.

Her husband, Gilbert, had once relinquished the castle to the English and fled south, but before he could find refuge he died. I had never known much of him, except that he had beaten Aithne for her inability to bear him a child, telling her that God had cursed her for her sins. Marriages are often made out of convenience, but some are so devoid of kindness as to be cruel. In this instance, fate had served the hand of justice and released Aithne of her domestic imprisonment. Sometime after Bannockburn, I returned Loch Doon to her, so that she would have a home and the means to raise her son.

With unmistakable pride, Aithne showed me about her shrewdly managed estate. The dense pines and grassy hills surrounding the loch stirred melancholy sighs in me that did not go unobserved by my gracious hostess and first love. For two days, we walked through her budding orchards at forest’s edge and rode past fields thick with cattle while I talked of all that had befallen me in the decade since we last met. And talk we did – from the breaking of fast to the verge of midnight. I spoke frankly about Elizabeth, her guarded secret, her rejection of me. Aithne listened astutely, held my hand when all was said, lent me words of comfort.

Then I asked to see Niall. She beckoned him from the loch where he was straining to pull up a net onto shore with one of the local fishermen. They had picked out their scanty catch and were unraveling the knots in the webbing of the net. As the lad came walking up the road toward the house, pulling a sweat-soaked linen shirt on over brown shoulders, I said to her, “You make him do that? Go out in a boat and bring back his supper?”

“Make him? No, not at all. He fancies the fisher’s daughter. I’ve no doubt they’ve had a tumble or two when he sneaks off before dawn. You were the same at that age, as I recall.”

“At sixteen is there anything else?”

The lad who bowed before me was no more a boy. As he raised his eyes, I imparted a few words of well wishes and venerable wisdom, all of which brought only a blinking stare interrupted by swift glances over his shoulder. The object of his affections was lingering next to an old, crumbling wall draped with rambling ivy. Obviously, she was curious as to why the King of Scots would come calling upon a country woman and her orphaned son, but the lass was also anxious with separation, twirling her black braided hair about her fingers. So I bid Niall to return to his work, at which he dashed breathlessly away, grabbing up his lass’s hand and yanking her along the road toward the wood.

“I must ask,” I said to Aithne, as we began walking, “does he know he’s my son?”

Her chin sank. “No, I could not tell him. Not without your consent. Do you want me to?”

“He should know, but perhaps ... I don’t know. There is Elizabeth to think of. I have no wish to hurt her.”

“What happened between us, Robert, it was long ago. Before Elizabeth.” She hooked her arm through mine. “What does your heart say when you look at him?”

“That he is happy as he is.”

“Then listen,” she said enigmatically. “Your heart always speaks the truth, doesn’t it?”

The late morning sun glinted silver off the dark waters of the loch. There was an indescribable void within me. I needed more. Children of my own that I could call as such. But sometimes, what we wish cannot be had. Not for all the hope or all the prayers of a lifetime.

“Aithne, I want you to bring Niall to Edinburgh. I’ll set you both up in the court. Give him a fine education. And you, everything you want or need.”

She stopped where it was safe from prying ears, rose on her tiptoes and pecked me on the cheek in endearment. “As the mother of your bastard? Thank you, truly, Robert, but I decline. It’s not my fashion to be dependent. All we want or need is here. And you may come back whenever you wish. My door is always open to you – any time, for any reason.”

An invitation that was sweetly tempting, had I not the future of a kingdom on my shoulders. Indeed, though, this would be a fine retreat when burdens and woes were too much to bear. And Aithne, I would have liked to believe all my life that she had loved me alone, but I knew it not to be true. If she could make me feel that way for a time, though ...

I took her hand, kissed it cordially. “I think I will. But breathe not a word of it to Edward, aye?”