Worth Dying For (The Bruce Trilogy) (31 page)

“You would wish me different, would you?
You
have always been this way, Robert. You smack of the very arrogance you accuse me of. If you loathe it in me, first change yourself. I am but a mirror of my older brother.”

“In more lawless times I would have throttled you by now for your impertinence.”

“When were you ever one to heed the convention of laws?” He smirked. “You murdered John Comyn in God’s house and then crawled on your raw belly to Bishop Wishart and groveled for forgiveness. Tell me, who between us is arrogant, given that?”

“I defended my own life.”

“Call it what you will. You drew your sword. You put a hole in his gut. He would have drowned in his own puddle of blood if Christopher had not acted on mercy and set him free. The man died, Robert.”

“You should not speak of that day. You were not there to witness it. Say no more on it and leave my sight, Edward. If you don’t, then I’ll –”

“You’ll what? Will you kill me, too, brother?”

I tightened my fists into bloodless stumps. Aye, there were moments I had considered it. God alone knew that I had often wished myself free of the curse of having Edward as a brother.

I held my breath before I answered. “For now I have to deal with your mess. You’ve brought upon us what I’ve long tried to avoid and succeeded without having to do – meeting the English in full battle. But it’s a year I’ve got as well to prepare. And a year from now you
will
be there at my side.”

“Sweet Jesus, Robert. You were ever the fatalist. They won’t come. You’ll see.”

“Oh, they will. They’ll come like a market parade stretching from London to Carlisle. You will be there with the rest of us – a stand of reeds against a tempest. And you will watch your kin and faithful fall. Do you wish me to be among the heaps of the dead, so that this hollow crown will then be yours? What will it be worth when the war is lost? Edward, I would rather have toiled another ten years, gaining a foot at a time, than risk all in one day. Why have you forced us to the edge? Why?”

Edward whipped away. He clenched and unclenched his fists. “I have stood behind you from the first, brother. Ask yourself: would you be where you are without me?”

The men who had gathered about us exchanged glances. None of them loved Edward. I questioned if I even did. I had heard enough of the derogatory remarks under the breath of each one of them pertaining to his selfishness.

Gentle waves lapped against the shore. The late June sun had begun to dry my clothes out. But there was a chill that went deep beyond my flesh and down into my very soul. I let my chin sink. “No, Edward. I would not.”

Slowly, with tilted head, he turned to face me. His eyes were drawn tight, his jaw clenched, his voice barely controlled. A sliver of the devil danced upon his tongue as he spoke. “Then you’ll live with things as they are. Maybe this isn’t the curse you’ve made it to be, but the way things ought to be. If you think King Edward will be here come next year, then you’ve that long to think on how to beat him.”

Because of you, Edward, I have no choice
.

Ch. 30

James Douglas – Roxburgh, 1314

As a lad, I seldom slept peacefully, rising often before first light from the lumpy bed I shared with snoring Hugh and creeping up the tower stairs on bare, silent feet. With my knees tucked up to my chest, I would sit on the parapets and peer out over Douglas Water, which often lay hidden beneath a cloak of shifting fog. There, I envisioned kelpies dancing mischievously at water’s edge and waiting for some wayward beggar to tumble into the water and drown so they might claim his soul. I feared the trickery of kelpies more than I feared damnation by God, the possibility of which the priests were forever warning us.

This night was ideal for ambush, but instead of kelpies, there were my men and I, tasked to take Roxburgh Castle and release it from English hands – for good. As well, I did not sleep that night either. A winter mist had lingered all the day before and by the time darkness came on in full, a thick, tangible fog had rolled down from the Lammermuir Hills and sprawled across the valley where the Rivers Teviot and Tweed met. The whiteness swallowed Roxburgh Castle whole and threatened never to spit it out again.

At the brink of the apple orchard near where my men and I huddled, a small herd of penned cattle lowed. On one of our forays previously from the Forest of Selkirk, we had stripped the bark from the apple trees, leaving their leaves to yellow and float to earth and their branches go barren. Their fruit would never again fill English bellies. Now they stood like harpies with their hair blown wild by the wind and gnarled, outstretched hands, waiting to snatch wandering bairns. Limbs felled by winter storms littered the weedy ground beneath them. Between the castle and us lay an open stretch of field, soaked by winter rains. I pulled at the corner of the black cowhide spread over my shoulders and wiped the snot from my nose.

The years had been both good and hard. The forest from the top of Clydesdale all the way to Jedburgh was mine. I had lost men – good men, honest, hard fighters – but the English had lost more. All that was left in English hands was a thin strip of land running from Berwick to Stirling, but even those possessions grew more and more precarious with each passing day. In September, Linlithgow had fallen to the rustic wiles of good William Bunnock, delivering a cart of hay in which was concealed eight Scotsmen. Robert rewarded William heartily for that prize. Randolph had been tasked to take Edinburgh, but I could hardly see how that was possible.

I peered through the fog as it parted momentarily to reveal the faint outline of Roxburgh. One more day from now and there would be one less jewel in King Edward’s rusting crown. A sentry passed over the battlements and the fog billowed upward to once more envelope the slumbering fortress.

No more the lank lad, I had strung my bow a hundred times a hundred since the day I had joined up with Robert nearly eight years past. My chest had broadened and my hands grown strong and coarse, but I was far from the giant in strength that Robert was. It was an advantage, I discovered, to be underestimated. When an enemy came at me and saw a lean man, few in years, he would either laugh at his good fortune or half try to kill me, sure that I would falter or flee. I did neither. I would fight until my very end, just like my father had.

I knew the places where mail gapped. How to deflect every angle of my foe’s every blow and how to vary the strength in my parry to upset their leverage. How to shoot an arrow every third heartbeat with unfailing accuracy. How to wait through torrents of rain, crouched among the nettles, nursing an empty belly until the sentries fell asleep on the towers, or the archers dropped their breeches to piss from the crenels of the battlements, or the guards arrived at the barbican swaggering with too much drink. I knew the crumbling, low places in the walls that had gone unmended from English assaults. The depth of moats and the places where the latrines drained into them. And the doors in the walls through which crucial supplies came and furtive letters went.

When it came to my foes, I knew what tempted them, what bored them, what frightened them, what rankled them and what aroused their suspicion. I knew all that and I used their soft, unguarded spots to defeat them, preying first upon their fears, nibbling at their sanity, just as a kelpie would.

I knew, as well, the pain that their evil left in its wake. The English had ravaged the women in these surrounding villages, then tossed them inside their cottages, barred the doors and set the thatch afire. Too many wretched times we came upon those scenes when all that was left was the rotten stench of charred corpses and swirls of smoke rising from the ashes. More than once I found a child, now an orphan, crying inconsolably beside the blackened bones of his parents, the burnt down house and the carcasses of dead animals – cows, pigs and old plow horses with their bellies split open and their blood roiling in the muddy, trampled grass. Most of the wee ones had witnessed the whole sordid thing. The lucky ones were those too young to be able to remember, too young to understand. When we found weeping bairns, we tried to feed them and clean them up, then carried them to the nearest abbey to be cared for. The monks were never happy to see us, whether they were Scotsmen or no, but they had come to an understanding that when we arrived with children we would take nothing from them. I would thank them in Latin, which would always set them back in astonishment, and we would go on our way.

Rain began to fall again. I burrowed deeper inside the fresh cattle hide, still stinking of blood. Drops pattered against the hide, fine and soft at first, but soon they were bigger and harder. Silver fog drifted down toward the river, revealing again the stark outline of Roxburgh. My men hunkered still as stones – two dozen donned in cattle capes, as many more spread about in the broken orchard around us, and ten deeper back in the woods holding the reins of their horses. None complained – they knew I would not allow the smallest grumbling. Any complaint was followed by a sound thump to the head. Bairns cried, I told them, not grown men. My boots were soaked, my feet frozen to the leather. It had not seemed cold when we first took up our position on a slope at the wood’s edge about half a mile from the castle, but a few hours in a miserable rain, unable to move, and eventually it was damnable cold. I wiggled my fingers and blew warm air into my cupped palms. I had to piss, but didn’t dare.

It was hard to tell when the first light of day actually came. In time we could see the castle more clearly. We waited. The rain softened. When we could make out the sentries on the walls, the ruse began. I gave the wren’s whistle and the herd of underfed, black cattle were unpenned and prodded toward the open meadow. In the dawn gray we crept forward upon hands and knees, mingling with the cattle. My fingers squelched in the cold mud and steaming cow dung. I wiped my hands on the grass, moved forward as a startled heifer danced over one of my legs with her enormous weight and found myself sunken again in more shit. I clenched my teeth to keep from crying out. Sim was behind me and gave her a shove in the flanks with his round shield, barely dodging a flash of angry hooves as she braced on her front legs and swung her rear to the side. Fearing a stampede, I struggled to regain my feet. Sim yanked me to my knees, then disappeared with a grunt into the herd. Tomorrow there would be a bruise the entire length of my right calf. The big, wet hide weighed me down like a sack of rocks. The muck sucked strongly at my hands and knees. My lower right leg throbbed. I checked my belt for my arrows, to be certain they were still there. My sword was slung over my back beneath the hide, so as not to drag on the ground, and just beneath it closest to my flesh, was a small round shield. Their constant weight was a comfort.

Shouts went down from the walls to the yard within. Chains rattled and the edges of the portcullis groaned against its stone grooves as it was raised up. Most of the garrison streamed out through the gate to come claim its feast. They charged across the open land, whooping with excitement, the few horsemen reaching us first. But before the first spear was hurled from English hands, Scottish arrows flew from the trees and pierced their breasts. The men on foot did not know yet what was happening when the first horseman slammed onto the ground, crying in mortal agony. They kept coming and did not falter until we threw off our hides, raised our weapons and rushed at the horsed soldiers. By then my own horsemen had already set off from the woods to cut off the footsoldiers. Every step on my right leg was a bolt of pain, but it was pain quickly forgotten in the rush of battle.

While we rained our blows and poured out our strength – cutting, thrusting, jabbing, slashing – Sim parted from the fray and scaled the ladders put up over the walls. A dozen followed him. There were not enough men left inside the walls to sufficiently defend the castle. By the time I made it through the gates of Roxburgh and led my men into the bailey, a pale sun was overcoming the fog and a dry, even colder wind blew down from the hills.

What remained of the garrison had withdrawn to the central keep. I tried to keep up with my men and they maneuvered across the bailey, but every step I took shot me with pain from ankle to hip. An arrow smacked on the cobbles beside me. I snatched it up and ducked behind a cart loaded with broken barrels. A scrape and scuffling beside me drew my attention. Sim wheeled before me, his huge hairy forearm flailing through the pale dawn light. An English archer, barely weaned from his mother’s breast and now in his horror of horrors reduced to fighting on foot, wielded a clumsy sword. The Englishman’s sword jerked swiftly toward Sim’s head. Sim ducked to avoid the blow. His axe blade glinted high as he whipped it back and upward, then arced it down. It cleaved the archer’s face from hairline to nose.

I closed my eyes as blood sprayed over me. Instinctively, I wiped away the wetness from my lips and cheeks. The English archer lay on the slick cobbles, his eyes wide and lifeless. Sim wiped his axe blade on the Englishman’s jacket and went to find more prey. Carefully, I took the bow that was slung over the archer’s back before its string could soak up any blood. He had three arrows stuck in his belt. Two had been broken in his fall. So I took the one left and gathered more, scurrying in between bursts of fighting, before I returned to the cover of the cart and its jumbled barrels. In my own belt, I had but one arrow – the last one fletched with swan’s feathers. The rest I must have lost in the first wave of fighting.

An occasional arrow still pelted us from the keep and it was there I set my sights. A figure appeared in one of the crenel gaps. He was an older man, his forehead fringed with silver. His red and blue surcoat marked him as someone of importance. The visor of his helmet was flipped open, so that he could better see the state of fighting below. Daring fool, he was, to stand there so long and vulnerable. I fitted an arrow to my newly found bow, marked him for his boldness and let fly. The white swan feathers sailed upward and struck him in the face. He toppled backward, out of sight, and someone else upon the battlements there dashed from behind the merlon to his aid. I waited for more men to appear, but by now they were wise to me. I chanced a few more gray-feathered arrows wherever I noted movement, but whether more found a mark I did not know. Likely by now they were barricading the doors, bent on holding out for the long term.