Worth Dying For (The Bruce Trilogy) (11 page)

I pushed my tongue around a bone-dry mouth. My belly grumbled and flopped. “Meat.”

Torquil dragged a forearm across his mouth and nodded. Boyd whipped out his knife. As he moved to the cow’s throat, Gil shot to his feet so fast the bowl of milk overturned and splattered over Boyd’s shins. Gil drew his fist back. I stepped between them and caught his forearm.

Boyd’s mouth twisted within the dark red mat of his beard. He plowed his bulging chest against me. “What now? Soft over a cow, Douglas? Is that your pleasure, seeing as how I’ve never seen you with a lass beneath you? Let him go. We’ll have this out and then we’ll all eat well tonight.”

“No.” I nudged Gil aside and peered at the horizon. “Someone’s coming.”

Boyd drew his chest up and looked about. “There’s no one.”

“There,” I said.

Riding double with Cuthbert, who had been on picket, was a lady I had never seen. Twenty mounted men accompanied her, some wearing mail and others only padded jackets. Both Robert and Edward were there to greet her, almost trying to crowd each other out. Robert yielded as Edward lifted her from the saddle.

“Aithne!” Edward cried, swinging her around in his arms. Her cloak sailed out behind her, circling them both. “Ah, my eyes are glad indeed.”

When Edward finally put her down, he kissed her on the lips. She received him stiffly, then pulled back from his embrace. Edward let go of her, one hand lingering on the swell of her hips. Her hair was the color of a summer sunset after a storm, her eyes the azure of a cloudless sky.

“Sire. My lords.” She beckoned a young boy to her side.

“Aithne of Carrick, welcome,” Robert said kindly. “Who’s this?”

 “Niall. My son.” She looked from Edward to Robert, and back again. Her cheeks creased with dimples as she smiled nervously. “He is seven now.”

“A fine soldier he’ll make someday.” Edward tousled the boy’s hair. “I’ll show you about later, Niall. I have a fine horse. A stallion taken from an English knight at Turnberry. I’ll let you sit on him. Would you like that?”

There was a glitter in Niall’s eyes, though faint, like the first stars at night. His head bobbed.

“Likens to his father, does he?” Robert asked courteously. The boy had shining dark hair and eyes as rich as the tilled earth of a deep valley – both very unlike hers.

Her arms went around her son. “Some might say so.”

“And how is Sir Gilbert? Any word of your husband since he gave up Loch Doon? I heard he fled to England.”

Her eyes met Robert’s once more. “He did... tried. He was killed before he ever got there.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to –”

“You assumed he was a coward or a traitor, did you – or both?” she said bluntly. “I reckon everyone did, and they always will. The truth of it is that when he heard of your loss at Methven and the English came, he was... unprepared. We abandoned the castle before they could lay siege to it. I went to Arran while he headed south, where he had kin. He meant to send for Niall and me when he knew that it was safe. He never made it. Anyway, it is done, in the past.” She held her hand out to him, a sad smile barely lifting the corners of her mouth. “I have grave news.”

A moment passed before Robert took her hand.

“My lord,” she began huskily, “Kildrummy was taken and Nigel captured.”

“We know that much,” Robert said. “The manner of his death, as well.”

Softly, Aithne brushed the back of her fingers across Robert’s cheek as she gathered breath. “Then you know that before the English arrived to besiege Kildrummy, Nigel sent the Earl of Atholl north with your wife and daughter?”

“Aye... but no more than that.”

“Then I shall tell you, though I wish to heaven I did not have to be the bearer of this news. They were seized near Tain at St. Duthac’s shrine while seeking sanctuary and were immediately sent to the king in London. At Westminster, the Earl of Atholl was hung from a high gallows. His head rests on a pike on London Bridge. Your wife, Eliz –”

Robert held up his hand, shaking his head emphatically. His voice cracked. “No, no more news. Say nothing, Aithne, nothing. I cannot bear more.”

“But they live, my lord. They live.” She clasped his face in her hands. “In a sad, awful and lonely way, but they live.”

“How so?” Edward interjected.

“King Edward ordered your sister Mary to be placed in a cage. It hangs from Roxburgh Castle.”

In the murmuring press of the crowd, Neil Campbell groaned and hung his head. “The bastard,” he muttered, and shoved his way free. “Bloody bastard!”

Neil’s voice echoed across the valley and when it finally died away, everyone turned again to hear Aithne’s news – for we all knew there was more.

“Marjorie was sentenced to the same fate – dangling from the Tower of London. Some say the king took pity on her because of her tender years, for she has since been removed. By rumor, she is at Walton, I hear. Christina... some other nunnery, but I do not know where. And Elizabeth, her father being an earl, was spared the humiliation. She was for a time in London, but is now under heavy guard at Burstwick-on-Holderness.”

Like some ancient stone that would weather yet another storm, Robert stood unwavering. But only so for a moment. His brow furrowed, his chin drifted downward and his hands began to tremble slightly.

“There’s more. Better you hear it all at once, so you know.” Aithne lifted up his fingers in her own and squeezed them gently. She drew a deep breath, hesitating long before she began again, her voice quaking. “Thomas, Alexander and Sir Reginald Crawford were attacked as they landed in Galloway. Crawford was murdered on the shore. Thomas and Alexander met their fate, the same as Nigel’s, in Carlisle.”

Robert tore from her and shoved his way past the onlookers. In moments, he disappeared through the trees. Aithne collapsed, spent with the burden she had just unloaded. Edward knelt and put his arms around her. The two of them huddled there within the hovering circle of men – Aithne with her face hidden in her hands and Edward holding her against him. After a while, Edward lifted Aithne up and took little Niall by the hand and led them away.

The rest of us drifted apart and went back to our blankets, spread upon the ground beneath the trees or in the cave. Cooking fires were struck up as night came on. Robert was not to be seen. I left the fire I was sharing with Gil and Torquil and wandered through a nearby stand of woods toward a little stream cutting between two hills.

I found Robert sitting on the damp hillside, gazing up at the stars. His knees were pulled up to his chest, his arms locked tight around them. He glanced, red-eyed, at me, then laid his forehead on his knees.

“Her son is seven, she said.”

I sank down a few feet away. “Her husband must have been proud.”

He looked at me over the ridge of his forearm. “She never loved him.”

“Ah.” I wasn’t sure that I wanted to know more, but he was going to tell me anyway.

“Aithne and I... we knew each other then. We have known each other for a long time. She was the first woman I was ever with. I wanted to marry her. My father always thought her beneath me. Her own father loathed my family. Called us ‘pretenders’, false princes... me, a worthless rebel. When I met Elizabeth I never thought about Aithne again. Not until I saw her four years later – in Edward’s bed. It was not their first time. That much I could tell. Nor was it to be their last. How very like him to take what he wants without thought or care.”

My admiration of Edward Bruce did not extend beyond the battlefield. He thought himself the center of the world and the sole reason for God creating it. To him, women were merely another conquest. “The boy, do you know who... who...”

“Who his father is? I don’t know if I should ask. I don’t know if I want to know. Except that Elizabeth and I... we have not been able to have any children so far. If Niall... No, I don’t want to know. It’s better this way. It was better when I didn’t know of him at all. He is indeed fine to look upon. Let Edward believe as he will. The boy is likely his, anyway.” He raked his fingers through the sides of his hair. “In the morning, I’ll send Aithne back to her home. Send her money, when I can. She doesn’t need to be within Edward’s reach.”

An early summer wind caressed the tall grass of the Carrick hills. The hour was well past midnight, the whole world in slumber, but Robert was far from sleep. The matter of the boy’s patronage was merely a diversion – something to be resolved some other day, if at all. All of heaven must have pressed down on him that night, the weight of it delivered in Aithne’s sad words.

“What now?” I asked.

He sighed and raised his face to the endless night sky. “This morning, I thought I knew. Now?” His shoulders plunged lower yet and he thrashed his head around, digging fingernails deep into his scalp. “I’m a selfish bastard... and thrice the fool for what I have long dreamed of.”

I let the wind answer him. The pines whispered and their branches rustled against one another. What could I have said or done to put such things right? We sat there, not speaking, for a very long time. I had come to know him not as a king, but as a man and a friend, and between friends the familiarity of silence is at times a comfort.

“It is not for men to know God’s reason,” I finally offered.

He scoffed lightly. “So they always tell us when things go terribly wrong.”

“That is what my mother, my real mother, not the Lady Eleanor, used to say.”

“Your mother – what do you remember of her?”

I thought for a moment and in my mind an image appeared: “The lilt of her voice as she sang me to sleep, the warmth of her touch, the color of her hair – dark like the night. Just like it is now.” As I looked up at the stars and the darkness surrounding them, an old sadness overcame me. I was a small boy again, witnessing an event the portent of which I could not then comprehend. “On the day that Hugh was born, I crept into her chamber. For nearly two days she had labored. Then, all fell quiet. Knowing something was amiss, I had gone to see. There stood the midwife and a handmaiden, one on each side of the bed. The midwife took a knife and cut open my mother’s belly. She was lying there, her guts open, the blood everywhere – on her, on the sheets, spilling onto the floor. A huge, dark puddle of blood. I screamed at them to stop. I thought they were killing her. I didn’t know that women died sometimes, giving birth.”

There I paused, recalling that Robert had lost his first wife, Isabella, in childbirth. I could see in the glow of starlight every painful memory clearly on his face. But I went on, even though I had never spoken of it before, because he understood. “The midwife shook me hard until I stopped screaming and told me I had a brother... told me to fetch my father. But I could only stare. The bairn... Hugh, he barely cried. He could not breathe well at first. He was blue. Deep, purple-blue. Ah, Hugh was never right. He is slow to understand, shy as a deer. My father... I think he blamed Hugh for her dying.”

“Hardly Hugh’s fault,” Robert said.

“And it is hardly yours for what happened to your brothers. Or Lady Elizabeth or Marjorie. Longshanks is to blame.
Longshanks
, do y’hear? Do not, for a moment, blame yourself.”

“Easily said,” Robert muttered.

“Aye, but hard to remember sometimes.”

“Leave me, James. I have had enough of words today.”

“We all have pain, Robert. Any man without it hasn’t really lived, has he?”

He gave me a damning look that cut deep into my soul. “Do you think that revelation lessens what I feel right now, James? In one day, I have lost three brothers and in the worst of ways.
Three.
In one day. Fair, errant Thomas, who could not find his way, even though the path was well laid out before him. Nigel, who could have shamed the saints. And Alexander... oh, beloved, luminous Alexander. I would have given my own life in return for his. And of the women I love, all are held captive by my greatest enemy.
Nothing
you say could make any difference at all right now. Now, I told you to leave. So go.”

Having said all I could, I headed back toward the cave, the wind nudging me down the hill.

“Is this what it is to live?!” Robert shouted after me.

I turned and looked up at him, now standing with his arms spread outward. Ten thousand stars glittered behind him in a silver-black dome.

“Is this...” he raised his hands to the firmament, “
this
what it is to live?”

He slid down the hill and halted before me, the whites of his eyes shining bright with anger. “Cold and hunger. Fighting and death. When is the last time you fell asleep without your hands on the hilt of a weapon? Can you even remember what it is like to sleep deeply and not bolt at every little sound? I’ll tell you what it is to live, James. To live is to hold your child, your own flesh, your very blood, in your arms. To see her smile and wrap five tiny fingers around just one of yours. To live is to hold your wife close to you as you lie in bed and listen to her breathe – to fall asleep, one against the other, fitted as if you were made for each other, and then awaken in the dawn when she turns to you and whispers your name. To live is to walk your land, knowing every tree and footpath and foxhole, and come home to the smell of a pot of stew, boiling over the fire. Home, wife, children.
That
is what it is to live.”

He gripped my arms fiercely. “Have you ever ached for a woman? Loved her so much, that you thought that every time you lay with her, that if ever she was gone from you, you would die not to have her again? I have, more than once, and...” Suddenly, he let go. His hands slid over his face.

“Ah, James... how can I go on when I cannot live like this?”

I touched his forearm, but it did not seem like enough. So I put my arms around him. His head fell against my shoulder.

“You‘ll wake up tomorrow,” I told him, “like the rest of us, and go on. Someday, the answer will come to you. But I cannot say when, Robert. Only... have faith in God’s plan.”

“Faith?” He took a deep breath, wiping away tears as he pulled back. “Aye, faith. I swear to you James, on my life, I’ll bring them home.”