The Renegade: A Tale of Robert the Bruce (11 page)

“Most people address me as sire.”

Rob nodded slowly. “Aye, but they’re English and I am Scots. I would call King Alexander Your Grace if I met him, but not sire. We don’t call anyone sire in Scotland.”

The English King cocked his head. “Does that mean you never have met the King?”

Rob shook his head. “No, not yet. I was supposed to, on my birthday, when he arrived. But he was too busy.”

“Call me my lord, then, and I will see to it that you do meet him. Have you ever been to England?”

“No, my lord.”

“Your father has great lands there. Does he never visit them?”

“No, my lord. Not much, anyway. They are my gransser’s lands—Lord Robert’s.”

“Ah, Lord Robert’s. Of course. Well, one of these days your father the earl will come again to England—he attended my coronation, you know, with your lady mother—and I will tell him that when he does, he must bring you to visit me in Westminster. Would you like to see London?”

Rob nodded solemnly. “Aye, my lord, I would.”

“Then so you shall. But now I must go and join your parents. Where are you two going?”

“To the kitchens, my lord.” Rob hesitated then, frowning again. “Can I ask you something else?”

For a moment he thought the English King was going to smile, but he maintained a straight face and merely nodded. “You may.”

“Why are you called King Edward the First? There were three other kings of England before you.”

The King’s eyebrow shot up. “There were. That is true. I am wondering how you knew that.”

“My tutor, Father Ninian, told me.”

“I see. And did he tell you their names, these three former kings?”

“Aye, sir, he did. Edwards three—the Elder, the Martyr, and the Confessor.”

“All of them named, but none of them numbered. Did you ask why?”

“I did, my lord, but Father Ninian didn’t know.”

“It is very simple, young Bruce. The custom of numbering kings is a French one—a Norman one, in fact. I am the first king called Edward to rule in England since the days of my great ancestor the Conqueror William. Therefore I am Edward the First. The others you named were Anglo-Saxon Kings, the elden Kings of England, and hence they had no numbers to their names. Do you understand now?”

Rob nodded, and the King of England waved a hand. “Excellent,” he said. “Go then, and sup well. We will speak again. Farewell.” He nodded kindly, including both boys in the gesture, and made his way inside the heavy doors, leaving them staring after him.

“That was Edward Longshanks, the King of England,” Rob said quietly in Gaelic, his voice tinged with awe. “Did you see the height of him?”

“Aye,” Angus Og said equally quietly. “What was he saying to you?”

“He invited me to come and visit him in England, at his palace of Westminster in London.”

Angus Og blinked in surprise. “Will you go?”

“Of course I’ll go—if my da will take me. D’ye think me daft enough to say no? My da says London is bigger than Dunfermline and Perth together.”

“He might keep you there,” Angus said, his expression dubious. “My da says there are too many Scots folk who go down there and never come back.”

“That’s not true,” Rob said. “Who would want to stay down there anyway, among Englishmen? I’d surely come back if I went. But I want to see Westminster. Mam says there’s a church there that’s bigger than any other church in England or Scotland. Westminster Abbey, they call it.”

“I’m starved.”

“Me too. Race you to the kitchens.”

Supper was long past, and by the rules of the Bruce household, Rob should have been safely abed hours earlier, but on those magnificent late July days in the year 1284, thanks to the gathering of so many distinguished guests and their retinues, there was nothing of the normal in effect within Turnberry Castle, and Rob and Angus Og had taken advantage of the general confusion to slip out of doors again almost as soon as they were sent to bed. No one saw them leave and none paid them any attention as they walked through the encampments for the lesser visitors. They wandered among the long rows of tents, listening to all there was to hear, and Rob was amazed by the range and variety of dialects and languages being spoken. Some of the conversations were incomprehensible to him, but all of them, save for the Gaelic of the Islesmen, were gibberish to Angus Og. Awash in the sea of foreign-sounding tongues, the two drifted without purpose, driven by their curiosity and gazing avidly at the heavy, gleaming armour and polished weapons of the soldiers and men-at-arms around their fires, none of whom were even aware of the gawking boys.

In one spot between two separate encampments for horse and foot soldiers, men were gaming, pitting their skills against one another in contests ranging from wrestling to throwing horseshoes at iron spikes set in the ground, and the open spaces between the major contests were busy with smaller games involving dice, tossed coins, and bone tokens. The air was filled with raucous voices shouting and laughing, exchanging gibes and friendly insults and imprecations, and all too often, as bets changed hands, with jeers and bitter cursing that awed Rob with their range and fluency.

It finally grew too dark for the horseshoe games to continue, and as the boys left the ordered lines of tents with their roaring fires, it was approaching the tenth hour of the night. In the west, silhouetted against the lingering light in the summer sky, the distant mountains of Arran were sculpted in black. Encouraged by the invisibility the coming darkness would afford, the boys were making their way towards the seashore, attracted by the distant, melancholy sound of bagpipes. They were off the common path, skirting a cluster of stunted, wind-bent hawthorn trees on a grassy knoll, when Rob, leading the way, found himself suddenly close to a fair-sized knot of men—all Gaels, wearing shawls and plumed bonnets—who appeared to be quarrelling among themselves, their raised voices muffled by the distant breaking of the waves on the beach at their backs. He reached out a hand to stay Angus Og, but before he could alert the other boy he felt a heavy hand clamp onto his shoulder.

Rob twisted in the grip to look back. “Uncle Nicol!” he gasped in Gaelic, his knees threatening to give way. “I thought you were my da.”

“Aye, I can see that. You’re as whey-faced as a caught thief. What are you up to?” Nicol MacDuncan had turned his nephew to face him and now stood with his arms folded over his chest. “You two should be abed long since. If anyone notices you’re missing, the earl will plant his boot firmly in your arse, my lad, as ought I.”

Rob opened his mouth to reply, but before he could say anything he heard an angry curse and the sound of a heavy blow behind him, followed immediately by the rasping slither of a blade being drawn.
He spun around, and what he saw was branded into his mind: two snarling men faced each other, one of them brandishing a long, bared dirk while the other tugged to clear a sword from the scabbard behind his shoulder.

The dirk-wielder leapt forward, the thrust of his entire body behind the stabbing lunge, then seemed to stop in mid-leap as his blade hit the solid bulk of the swordsman’s breast. The stricken man gasped at the suddenness of it and his upper body hunched violently, his shoulders seeming to curve down and around the weapon that had pierced him. He stayed there, motionless, for several heartbeats, poised as if held up on the dirk’s hard blade. Then, his teeth bared savagely, eyes glaring in rage that swiftly changed to disbelief, he turned slowly, stiffly, sideways to face Rob, as though to show him the thing that was lodged in his chest. He teetered grotesquely and his face changed, going slack and empty as the high, extended fingers of his yet upraised hand released his unused sword. Unable to look away, Rob watched the weapon fall, its heavy hilt and guard sending it tumbling, spinning within its own length to strike the ground point first between the two men and lodge there, swaying.

The murderer seemed appalled by what he had done, for he made no effort to pull his dirk free, merely releasing his grip on it as his victim turned away from him with the lethal blade protruding from his chest. The wounded man’s arm came down slowly, feebly, fumbling at the dirk’s hilt as though to grasp it and pull it free, but he had no strength in him by then. He made a gurgling sound in his throat and toppled forward, rigid as a tree, to hit the ground face down, driving the long blade home hard enough to punch clean through him.

Rob heard the meaty rip as the knife tore through the body, its exposed point strangely bloodless and bright between the dead man’s shoulders in the fading light; heard, too, the utter silence that followed, brief and quickly banished as a voice rang out in grief and fury and a third man sprang at the killer, whirling a short, broadbladed axe above his head. The killer, empty handed, did what Rob would never have expected. Instead of trying to leap away, he sprang
at his attacker, almost on his toes, to place himself inside the axe’s sweeping arc. And as he went, quicker than thought, he snatched up the dead man’s swaying sword and thrust it straight-armed at his assailant, driving its point beneath the fellow’s chin. The blow was deadly, amplified by the momentum of both their bodies. The axewielder’s head snapped back as the blade pierced his neck, but his own hard swing and his determination were unstoppable. He was dead before his strike landed, but the lethal edge of his hard-swung axe took his opponent high on the shoulder, cleaving through cloth and flesh and bone and smashing him to the ground.

Another silence followed. Rob heard it clearly, as if in a waking dream. Sharp-edged yet less profound than the one before, it was disturbed by the shuffling of rapidly moving feet. All the men were moving quickly now, splitting into two groups and baring weapons, readying themselves to die if need be, crouching and sidling, searching for weaknesses among the others facing them. He heard his uncle shout in protest and felt himself pushed strongly back as Nicol stepped past him.

But the voice that stopped all movement was not Nicol MacDuncan’s. It was a roar of outrage, voiced by Angus Mohr MacDonald himself as the newly named Lord of the Isles strode into the gap between the opposing groups. He was closely followed by another Gaelic chief—defined as such by his dress and bearing— whom Rob had never seen.

Weaponless, MacDonald held his arms high, the look of fury on his face defying any to ignore him or challenge him, and the unexpected sight of him, appearing at that spot and in that moment, froze every man there. He was dressed splendidly, as he had been earlier that day when meeting with the King of Scots, in a bright, belted tunic of buff-coloured leather over a high-necked bright green shirt, with leather boots and leggings dyed to match. He looked every bit the Lord of the Isles, and no man there would meet his eye as he stood, arms raised, glaring around at the carnage.

“What started this?” His voice emerged now as a deep, angry growl, and no one answered it. He looked directly at one of the men in the forefront. “You, Donuil Dhu. What happened here?”

The man addressed, Black Donald in the English tongue, shifted from foot to foot, gripping his bared dirk, his eyes cast down before his leader. He muttered something to the ground.

Angus Mohr’s next words cracked like a thunderclap. “Look at me, man, and use the voice God gave you!”

Donuil Dhu drew himself erect and looked at his chief. “They had words,” he said. “Fergus and the Macdougall … Ill words.”

“Ill words …
Ill words
, you say?” The MacDonald scanned the crowd, and even from where he stood watching, Rob saw the fury in him, marked the bitter scorn that changed his voice. “Four dead men, over
ill words
?”

What he said brought frowns of perplexity to every face in the crowd, for all of them could see that the dead men numbered only three.

The thoughts of young Rob Bruce, though, had abruptly snatched his attention elsewhere.
They had words … Fergus and the Macdougall
. Suddenly Rob understood the bloodied corpses on the ground to be a mere consequence of who and what these people were. The MacDonalds of Islay and the Macdougalls of Argyll and Lorn were ancient enemies, goaded by mutual hatred bred and fed through generations of fear and well-deserved distrust. He had always known that; he had heard it spoken of throughout his life. The Macdougall lands lay to the north, largely on the western mainland bordering the MacDonald holdings in the Isles, and their people were a folk who, for a hundred years and more, had defended their long sea lochs against incursion and usurpation by MacDonald Islesmen. He knew that this spilling of blood was far from being the first such, but he nevertheless saw it as oddly inappropriate—the notion of irony lay years in the future for the boy—that this eruption should occur here in the neutrality of his mother’s Turnberry, and on such an occasion.

He sensed movement by his side and saw that Angus Og had moved closer, standing right beside him.

“Are you going to be sick?” Angus asked in a whisper, sounding both concerned for Rob and awestruck by what they had seen.

“No,” Rob answered, somewhat surprised that this was true. “Are you?” he whispered.

“No.”

“Who’s the chief with your da?”

“I’m not sure, but I think he’s the Macdougall.”

Of course he is
, Rob thought. Alexander Macdougall was the King’s sheriff of Argyll and Lorn. And a strong Macdougall contingent had arrived with King Alexander’s party, that he knew. Since then, Macdougall’s followers and those of Angus Mohr had avoided each other. But it was clear to Rob now that the two rival chiefs must have been conversing close by when this fight broke out, and in apparent amity, since neither one was armed. And that explained how the rival parties had ended up together—each group was nearby as escort to its chief.

Angus Mohr’s voice suddenly rose again. “Hear me, all of you!” They were all watching him, not a man stirring, and he waved towards the bodies at his feet. “This is the worst kind of madness.”

Someone at the rear of the crowd dared to speak, muttering what sounded to Rob like an imprecation.

Angus Mohr stiffened, and his eyes sought among the crowd for the speaker. “Say that again.” His tone was reasonable enough, but Rob sensed pent-up anger lying beneath it. “Come, then. Speak up.”