The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  “Oh, don’t worry about me. I’m a grown man and I’ve spent days on my own before.”

  He smiled again. “Good! That’s excellent. Walk with me, then, to the horse lines. I wasn’t hungry before, but I could eat something now. With any kind of fortune we’ll scrounge some trail food from the cooks.”

  “No complaints from me,” I said, and fell into step beside him. “Who was that man Alistair? He seemed very … different.”

  “Different?” He chuckled. “Oh, Alistair is that and more.” But then, instead of explaining, he asked, “How many men would you guess were there altogether?”

  I shrugged. “At a guess, five to six hundred.”

  “Six hundred and thirty-four,” he said quietly in his sibilant Gaelic. “Sandy Pilche counted them before we left Duffus. And among all of them, including my own Wee Mungo, Alistair Murray is the one you least want to have angry at you.”

  I had suspected as much, purely from the fellow’s appearance.

  “He’ll guard you while I’m away.” Andrew saw my reaction. “No, I’ll hear no objections. You need a good man at your back, Jamie, so humour me and don’t argue. You are a stranger here and don’t know who you can trust or who you can’t. Neither do I, in truth, apart from my close friends and captains. Alliances change overnight in times like this, and friends are being suborned every day by Edward’s spies and toadies. And you are not only a stranger but also a messenger from the south, from Wishart and the Steward. Take my word, Jamie, your life will be in danger all the time you’re here, so whether you like it or not, Alistair will be your guardian angel henceforth. Trust him as you trust me, for he is my cousin and one of my oldest friends—we were raised beneath the same roof and shared a bed for years as boys. He will look after you as well as I could, mayhap even better.” He looked about us, and his face broke into a grin. “Here he comes now, so let me make you known to each other.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A SHOW OF PRUDENCE

  It was to be four days before I laid eyes on Andrew Murray again, for he vanished into the Bog of Gight shortly after introducing me to his cousin Alistair, at the head of a scouting group of half a hundred men. The rest of the army, including me and my new shadow, Alistair Murray, followed them hours later at a far slower pace and eventually reached an encampment that had been partially prepared for us.

  I was surprised to see it at first, but I quickly learned that it was typical of Sandy Pilche’s thoroughness. And it made me realize once more that Andrew Murray had planned far ahead. Six spit-roasted deer ensured that everyone ate well that night once the work of setting up camp and posting guards had been completed, and afterwards, as the dusk was deepening to night, the sergeants and captains moved from fire to fire, sending their various charges to their beds.

  I was astir and celebrating Mass in the open air, at an altar made from a folding table, long before dawn the following day. The night had been warm and calm and the pre-morning air was motionless, and I was gratified to see how many men joined me there in the peaceful darkness by the flickering light of a few torches. As the Mass progressed, I was aware of increasing activity all around us, and by the time the brief Sacrament was over, the morning sky was pale and birds were singing in the surrounding trees. I blessed my congregation and dismissed them, and soon after that the daily drills began.

  I spent the next few hours watching the men, for what I was witnessing was far from the kind of disciplined drilling I had seen the English soldiery practise on the few occasions when I had been close enough to study them. There, squads and groups of men had marched in solid blocks to the commands of petty officers, all uniformly moving according to long-established procedure.

  The Moray men I watched that morning were made of different stuff. Highlanders all, they scorned the rigid formations that formed the building blocks of English military prowess. They took pride in being warriors, and the tactics used by the English invaders were alien to them, to the extent that whereas the common English soldier went to fight protected by effective armour, whether of boiled, hammered leather or linked mail or both, the Highland Gael was frequently known to plunge into battle completely unclothed, discarding the toga-like garment in which he habitually wound himself, because it was too restrictive for armed combat.

  I remember I laughed when first I heard that, thinking it a lie concocted to gull fools, but Sandy Pilche convinced me it was true, telling me, in all seriousness, that the Scots Highlander preferred to fight naked, armoured only in his own righteousness and protected by a round shield called a targe and the keenness of his own steel. The Gaels were not soldiers, he insisted; they were not militarily disciplined; they were warriors, each one unique, a law and a force unto himself, and their training methods reflected that. The disciplines they pursued in readying themselves for battle were mostly concerned with stamina and bodily strength. I quickly became accustomed to the sights and sounds of them competing with one another in great feats of strength, hurling massive stones one-handed and hoisting and throwing entire tree trunks, besides running for hours at breakneck speed across terrain that would daunt even my cousin Will’s forest outlaws.

  Even so, I spent the greater part of the days that followed sitting alone in my tent, compiling a report on my progress to Bishop Wishart. I knew I would probably deliver it into his hands in person, since no one else was likely to reach him before I did in mid-August, yet I was glad to get to work and enjoyed the challenge of capturing the details of my journey before I could forget them.

  The solitude was mental rather than physical, because, like the poor in the Scriptures, Alistair Murray was always with me. When I went outside he hovered around me like a hunting hawk, his eyes scanning our surroundings high and low for signs that anyone was watching me too closely or thinking about harming me. He was constantly fingering the hilts of his weapons, too, gripping them and twisting them, easing them in their sheaths as if he were afraid of finding them too tightly seated should he need to draw them quickly. I was impressed by his dedication, but I found his fierce-eyed presence disconcerting and wished he were less intense.

  I tried speaking to him, when first we found ourselves alone together after Andrew left, but my attempt at cordiality rattled off the armour of his indifference like hailstones off a slate roof, and for a while I was determined not to speak to him again. I found it difficult to remain angry at him, though, for it was plain that he was focused on protecting me, and so I spoke to him whenever he was nearby, hoping to break through his indifference. And slowly but surely he began to thaw, though it was alien to his nature to be garrulous or demonstrative. By the end of the third day he would answer me, sometimes even civilly, but it was always I who initiated the conversations, such as they were.

  On the morning of the fourth day, I had broken my fast with a handful of salty roasted oats and chopped hazelnuts and was washing them down with fresh spring water from the hillside above our camp when I saw him across the communal space fronting the fire pit outside my tent. He had been gone for mere minutes, probably to relieve himself, and as he moved fluidly back towards me, idly twirling the heavy quarterstaff he carried, I snatched up my own walking staff, a stout and useful one as heavy as his, and stepped forward to meet him. He halted immediately, eyeing me speculatively: no doubt the warrior in him recognized the threat I posed in stepping forward boldly as I had, while the good Catholic in him balked at the prospect of challenging, perhaps even having to fight, a priest in holy orders.

  I hefted my staff across my chest and stretched it towards him, holding it with my hands about a foot apart. “A challenge,” I said, and spun the weapon quickly with my right hand. “To pass a little time. I’m trained to it, so you needn’t be afraid of hurting me. And even if you do,” I said with a grin, “I promise I’ll absolve you of the sin of it. Guard yourself.”

  I dropped into a fighting stance and advanced towards him and he reacted instinctively, raising his own weapon and sidling away from me. His fa
ce, though, still betrayed his confusion, and I leapt at him, swinging my staff hard towards his head. He countered with a solid block and a counterstroke, his reflexes taking him instantly where his piety would not permit, but before the blow was fully released I was already on one knee, my staff scything towards his ankles. He leapt back nimbly, avoiding my sweep and launching himself back at me in a driving blur of whirling wood that ended with a sudden sharp, one-ended thrust that might have cracked my sternum had it landed.

  We went hard at it for a full quarter-hour, neither conceding anything to the other, and eventually he threw down his staff and raised both hands.

  “Enough,” he gasped. “Enough. I keep waiting for you to remember you’re a priest, but you need no reminding, do you?”

  I dropped my own weapon beside his. “No,” I said, “I don’t. But from time to time, especially when I take a hard rap, I have difficulty remembering not to blaspheme.” I drew a deep, shaky breath, then let it out. “I enjoyed that … and in truth I think I even needed it. It has been some time since last I fought.”

  “Is that a fact?” he said, in a voice both wry and dry. “Well, ye’ll be glad to know it was barely noticeable. You fight well for a man who has no business fighting.”

  “Oh, I might argue that,” I said. “Remember, even our Lord Jesus took a whip to clean the money lenders from the Temple. Priests are men above all else, Alistair, and any man will fight, given sufficient provocation.”

  From that time on, he and I were comfortable with each other.

  It was later that same day that I was working outside in the sunshine, at a table in front of my tent, and had completed the fair copy of my report to Bishop Wishart moments earlier. I was, in fact, waving the final written page from side to side to dry the last few lines of ink, when I glanced up to see a lad of ten or eleven scurrying towards Alistair, who sat in the shade of a nearby hawthorn tree. I guessed as soon as I set eyes on the boy that he came bearing tidings, and I knew I was correct when he half turned and knelt on one knee, carefully presenting his back to my gaze, and bent forward to whisper in my guardian’s ear. Alistair, who had seen the boy approaching and obviously knew him, had risen to his feet and moved forward into the light to meet him, and now he knelt beside him, one elbow resting on a raised knee and his head cocked as he listened, his eyes finding mine over the lad’s shoulder.

  I remained at my table, watching them. Unlike most of his fellow Highlanders, who wrapped themselves in the single voluminous garment called a plaid, Alistair Murray chose to wear the southern style of clothing, a knee-length tunic over trousers or leggings and heavy, thick-soled leather boots that laced up almost to his knees. He also wore a loosely belted sleeveless jerkin of tanned leather that did nothing to disguise his heavily muscled shoulders. A gleaming torc—the intricately carved collar of heavy gold that marked its wearer as a Gaelic chieftain—encircled his neck, today left bare by the single tight-braided queue that pulled the hair back off his face to hang behind his head.

  He stood up, keeping his eyes fixed on me as he patted the young lad roughly on the back and dismissed him with a word of thanks. I watched as came towards me, hitching the sword belt at his waist until it hung comfortably again.

  “Andrew wants us” was all he said, passing by me on his way towards the horse lines.

  I scooped up my report and my writing materials and carried them quickly into my tent, where I tucked them beneath the thin mattress on my cot for safety before hurrying out to catch up with him.

  “What does he want?” I asked when I caught up with him. “Did the boy say?”

  We had reached the horse lines by then and I saw the boy himself watching us from the back of the horse he must have ridden on his way to find us. Beside him, on one of the few truly black horses I had ever seen, sat Fillan de Moray, the young chieftain whom Andrew had left in command during his absence. Alistair nodded to the chieftain, then glanced at me briefly before taking his horse’s bridle from the wooden frame that held it.

  “It’s not the boy’s affair,” he answered. “He was sent to fetch us, that’s all. We’ll find out the rest when we reach Andrew.” He set about bridling and saddling his horse then, and since I was similarly occupied, we spoke no more.

  We rode in silence until we reached our journey’s end, some six miles farther south, for the so-called road we were following was no more than a winding, beaten track that wound haphazardly around and between, and sometimes up and down, the contours of the land. On a particularly narrow stretch through a press of springy saplings, the boy turned sharply right into an unseen junction and went ahead of us along a narrower and even more serpentine path that climbed steadily upwards. Again we rode in silence, our attention on the narrow, treacherous, stone-littered track beneath our horses’ hooves, until our flagging beasts struggled up a final steep incline to a cairn of stones, where our guide drew rein and pointed to a bush-covered crest higher than any we had encountered until then.

  “Up there,” he said. “I’ll mind your horses.”

  We dismounted and climbed the last forty or fifty paces on foot, making heavy going of it until we arrived at a small plateau where two guards waited. They stopped us, and one of them vanished into a cleft in the hillside, to reappear a short time later followed by Andrew Murray himself.

  “Welcome,” he said. “I had you stopped here because there is a need for caution farther along the path.” He beckoned with his fingers. “Come and see.”

  We followed him for a short distance, along a track no wider than a goat path, until the land ahead of us disappeared without warning, swooping away beneath our feet, and we found ourselves standing on a rock-strewn crest among head-high clumps of the wild broom that was known up here as whins, gazing down a precipitous hillside towards the continuation of the road we had been following earlier.

  “What do you make of that?” Andrew asked.

  No one answered him, for we were all three trying to make sense of what we were looking at. The winding road far below us was obscured by a solidly packed mass of men and horses that was obviously the English army we had been expecting. But it was far from being what we might have thought to see. An army on the march—any army on the march—formed a long, disjointed train, strung out along its route, and most particularly so when that route was tightly restricted, as was the one below us. What we were seeing, though, appeared to be massed formations of foot soldiers, flanked on the side nearest us by ranks of heavily armoured cavalry, all apparently proceeding slowly in line of battle, as though defying an enemy. But our own force, some six miles behind us, was the only other army in the region. Who, then, were the English facing? I looked at Alistair and saw at once from his frown that he was as much at a loss as I was. It was left to Fillan, Andrew’s lieutenant, to ask the necessary question.

  “I can make nothing of it, Cousin, for it makes no sense. They’re expecting to be attacked, clearly, but who by? There’s no one there.”

  Andrew grunted. “I’ve been watching them since they came into view this morning, and I kept asking myself the same question because I didn’t believe the obvious answer. Straight away I sent for you three, wanting you to see the truth of it.”

  “The truth of what, Cousin?” Fillan was frowning, too. “What is Buchan’s army doing down there? Making ready to fight off an attack from us? If that’s so, he’s plainly mad. Unless—unless it isn’t Buchan’s army.”

  “Oh, it’s Buchan’s,” Andrew drawled. “There’s no mistaking that. If you squint into the sun you can see his standard at the head of the first rank of cavalry—three golden stooks of corn on a blue field. As for what you are looking at, well, I think we’re witnessing something altogether new.”

  We all looked at him.

  “What that spectacle down there means, my friends, is that John Comyn, the Earl of Buchan, is prepared to spend a long time on the road to Elgin. A very long time. He is marching in full battle order, making very little progress—his men are practi
cally standing still— but keeping his formations absolutely safe from attack, by us or by anyone else who might come along.”

  “Name of God!” Fillan spluttered. “Why would he do that? It’s sheer folly.”

  “Prudence,” Alistair said, more to himself than anyone else, and Andrew grinned at him.

  “Aye, prudence, Cuz. A bit of fear, a bit of wisdom, much of common sense, but prudence in the main. You can see he has the forest on his right, at his back. And we know how dense it is there. It’s impenetrable, in fact, so he’s safe from attack in that direction and free to front all his strength towards the left. He must have been marching like that since they entered the Ingie.”

  “So they’re expecting a fight,” Fillan growled. “Then I say we give them one.”

  Andrew looked at his cousin and smiled. “And how should we attack them, Fillan? What would you propose?”

  “We’ll—” He stopped abruptly and stood frowning before he muttered, “We can’t, can we?”

  “No, we can’t. Not down there, and not while they’re drawn up and waiting for us. We would be slaughtered. So you’re right. We can’t attack them. And what does that tell us?”

  Fillan looked back at his commander and, for the first time since we had arrived on the crest, showed some good judgment, for he said, “It tells me nothing, but I’m not as clever as you, so why don’t you tell us what you think?”

  “Right,” Andrew said, looking at each one of us in turn. “I will.” He half turned away from us and stood looking down at the army of Comyns as he spoke on. “It tells me that my cousin down there, John Comyn, might have learned a lesson from his past defeats, even before his downfall at Dunbar.”

  “What past defeats?” Fillan asked him. “Dunbar was his sole defeat.”