The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  I allowed myself to smile. “In fact, Master Murray, I have the greatest admiration for your strategies. It’s merely in my nature to ask questions. But what about Auch Castle? Will you leave it sitting empty?”

  “Never. We’ll leave a holding force to man it, though I think we may leave Balconie empty, as a gift for the Countess of Ross. An unmerited gift that might remind her where her loyalties should lie.”

  “I see,” I said, and I did. “You have thought everything through.”

  “From start to finish, with Sandy.” A smile twitched at one corner of his mouth. “Have I earned your approval?”

  “You have,” I said. “And my blessing.”

  A fortnight later, on the Friday of the first week in August, we arrived in Aberdeen to a welcome none of us would have imagined. The Earl of Buchan had indeed stripped the garrison of nine-tenths of its manpower when he set out northwards, and he had apparently done so in complete ignorance of the extent to which the native Aberdonians detested all things English. Whether or not that decision reflected irresponsibility on the earl’s part was debatable, and a capable lawyer could have made a strong case on Buchan’s behalf, claiming that the earl’s ignorance of local conditions was natural and wholly logical, since he was newly returned from having spent an entire year in prison in England—a year, moreover, the advocate might point out, throughout which the earl had been informed, time and time again by his captors, of how completely vanquished and subdued Scotland had been since the battle in which he had been captured at Falkirk. What reason might such a man have, then, the advocate would ask, to suspect that there was any peril in leaving a formidable, English-held fortress such as the one at Aberdeen in the care of an adequately armed and provisioned holding crew in the temporary absence of its garrison?

  That same advocate, of course, would have been praying fervently throughout the proceedings that no one on the opposite side of the court would bring into evidence the fact that the Earl of Buchan, having grown to manhood in his family territories north of, and abutting, the Aberdeen region, must have a lifelong familiarity with the peculiar and illogical but nonetheless spectacular hatred that the folk of that region felt for the English, whom they regarded as gibbering foreign devils and unconscionable thieves.

  Be that as it may, and whatever the folk of Aberdeen might have thought of John Comyn of Buchan, there could be no doubt of how they perceived the young man who rode at the head of the twohundred-strong attack force we brought to their town. As soon as the word began to spread that Andrew Murray of Petty had come south, the people of Aberdeen rose up. The report I heard, once everything was over, was that the castle gates had been standing open at mid-morning, the marketplace outside them thronged with people, when the word of Murray’s approaching army first was heard. A group of citizens and merchants had exploded into action and attacked the gate guards, throwing their lifeless bodies off the causeway leading to the gates. Others surged through the castle gates, taking the remaining occupants unaware and killing all of them. Thus Aberdeen had been ripped out of England’s hands before Andrew Murray even entered the town.

  There was quite a grand celebration that night, to mark what folk were calling the liberation, but the festivities were largely confined to eating and drinking, with the local provost and members of the various town guilds making speeches in honour of their liberator, Andrew Murray. There was not even any music or dancing, and though it seemed strange to me, everyone was abed early that night. We were in Aberdeen, when all was said and done, and grateful though they might have been for our “deliverance,” the folk of the town were as insular and circumspect as ever in their distrust of outsiders, particularly when those outsiders were warriors, lacking women of their own.

  The next morning, fresh from celebrating my daily Mass in private—Aberdeen was the seat of a bishop and therefore had no lack of priests or churches—I stepped outside to find a brilliant, beautiful summer’s morning, the marketplace already bubbling with activity. I was alone, for Alistair de Moray had been relieved of his duty to watch over me weeks earlier, once Andrew had returned to camp after a brief absence, and I had grown re-accustomed to being shadowless. I broke my fast with a mouth-wateringly fine meat pie from one of the market vendors and made my way down to the harbour, where I amused myself counting the boats at anchor and trying to identify the vessel from Lübeck.

  I identified six possible vessels, then disqualified four simply because they looked too small, and I could read their names and understand the language spoken by the men working aboard and around them. Of the two remaining, I had no idea which was the one we sought, so I walked back up the hill to view them again from a greater distance. One of them was moored to a side wharf, its prow pointed directly towards me so that all I could see was the front of the ship. I stood gazing down at it, vaguely troubled by something.

  “Which one is ours?”

  Startled, I turned to see Andrew, at first surprised that he should have come to look for me, but realizing at once that he had not. A few paces behind him stood his entourage, a gaggle of Highland leaders, peacocks all, resplendent in their Gaelic savagery. I nodded to Alistair and Fillan.

  “I don’t know,” I answered Andrew. “Maybe it isn’t even here yet. How far is Lübeck from here?”

  He turned towards his group. “Does any man know how far it is to Lübeck?”

  They looked at one another, shrugging, and a man standing nearby, wearing the clothing of a seaman, said, “Eight, nine days’ sail. Straight out from here, north of east for six hundred miles to Gothenburg, then due south along the coast of Denmark for four hundred more. Lübeck lies on Germany’s north coast.”

  “Which is it, then?” Andrew asked. “Eight days or nine?”

  “To a seaman?” said the fellow’s friend. “Who can tell? Might be half a score, mayhap longer. It’s a’ up wi’ the winds.”

  Andrew blinked at him. “What?”

  “The winds, loon,” he growled, explaining as he might to a child. “Gin they blaw fair, ye’ll fa’ shin. Gin they’re no’, ye’ll no’.”

  Andrew turned to me. “Did you understand that?”

  I was about to shake my head when a third voice spoke up, one of Andrew’s group. “He said that everything depends on the winds. If the winds are fair, you’ll make good time and have a swift voyage and a fair landfall. If they are not, you will not.”

  Andrew surveyed the boats in the harbour. “I don’t think our ship has come in yet, Father. When did you say it was due?”

  “It must be here,” I said. “Bishop Wishart said it would be here by July’s end, the first week of August at the very latest. So no one is late—not us, not them. The first week of August yet has two days to run.”

  “Well, we’ll soon know.” He raised a hand and signalled to Alistair, then instructed him to take his fellow officers down to the wharf and find out which of the vessels there had sailed from Lübeck.

  “No point in my going down there until we know something,” Andrew murmured to me as the others left. “Why run the risk of looking ignorant, impotent, or indecisive when there’s no need?”

  “I agree, now that you mention it,” I said.

  Soon Fillan de Moray was gesturing widely to us, waving and pointing towards the vessel moored at his back, the one I had been looking at prow-on. It was the largest ship at the wharf, which is not to say it was very large at all, and I felt apprehensive, eyeing it. It looked old, with a general air about it of having been battered and beaten beyond endurance.

  “That’s it?” Andrew sniffed. “It doesn’t look like much, does it?”

  “Not at first glance, no.” I hesitated. “Something is not right with it, though I don’t know what it is …”

  He tilted his head, frowning. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know. But it looks wrong, somehow. We’re too far away to really see it, though, and the angle is bad.”

  “So let’s go down and look at it fr
om the viewpoint of the owners of its cargo.”

  As we moved down the hill towards the wharves, I recognized what had struck me as being “wrong” about the boat, and when we reached its moorings alongside the wharf, we could see a splintered stub projecting upwards from the deck well that had held the rear mast.

  One of the crewmen standing close to us on the wharf was a Scot, I decided from his dress, and while Andrew went to talk with the captain, I asked him what had happened. He told us that the ship had made harbour mere hours before, struggling in on the morning tide after encountering an unseasonable series of storms and squalls far out on the North Sea. They had lost part of the mast, with all its sails and rigging, in the most savage squall, and had come close to capsizing, he said, dragged down by the wreckage with the seas breaking over the stern and threatening to swamp the ship.

  “Stay well clear, lads, and let the crew have their way!” Andrew had finished his colloquy with the captain and rejoined us, and the crewmen were already clambering aboard the ship, some of them preparing to open the hold while others worked to prepare the gin hoist that would lift the cargo from the hold. Someone on deck shouted, but not urgently, and then came the sound of the hatch covers being removed. The captain beckoned to Andrew to come on deck.

  Andrew glanced at me. “You brought the word and all the documentation, so you had better be the one to check the cargo’s appearance.”

  I followed him up the short, sloping ramp that led to the deck until we both stood looking down into the cargo hold. It was filled almost to the level of the deck itself with carefully stacked crates of varying sizes.

  “I see nothing out of place,” I said quietly to Andrew. “But since I have no notion of what we should be expecting, I can say no more than that.”

  “What we are expecting,” he answered in a matching tone, “is weaponry. And it looks to me as though that could be what we have here. Spears in the long cases, I’d say. Swords and axes in the shorter ones, and who knows what in the others.” He stepped back and raised two fingers to the captain, indicating that he was satisfied and the unloading could proceed.

  “Alistair’s folk should have horses and wagons here by now to carry the crates up to the castle. We’ll unpack them there, distribute weapons as needed, and then we’ll send an escort with the things we don’t need right away—the ingot and sheet iron—back up to Auch. Our smiths there are waiting for them, hungry for work. The remaining weapons and armour we’ll take with us to Dundee, for Sandy’s people.”

  He crossed in front of me, between me and the ship’s hold, then bent his knees slightly and peered down. “There,” he said, pointing towards a corner below the deck. “Can you see back there? Shields, stacked up like coins, and lots of them. We need as many of those as we can get, God knows.” He straightened up again and made his way back to the wharf, with me following close on his heels.

  “Axes,” I said as we stepped back onto the dock. “You said there would be axes in some of the crates. Did you ask for those?”

  He grunted. “Ask for them? I didn’t even know these things were coming until you turned up and told me. How could I have asked for axes? I told the bishop we needed weapons, but I had no hope that he might actually provide them. If anything, I would have asked for swords, though. Not axes.”

  “Well,” I said, “we’ll find out what we have when we open the crates.”

  He turned away from the busyness on the wharf. “Let’s get back up to the castle. There’s much to do and I want to be on the road south the day after tomorrow.”

  “Do you think that’s feasible?”

  He looked askance at me. “Why would it not be?”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  TROLLS AND TRIALS

  It had been a long day’s march and I was more than glad to reach the end of it, for I had spent much of it slouched in my saddle, paying little attention to anything while I mulled over my report to my employer and the analysis it would contain of our march down along the coast road from Aberdeen towards Fife. When we reached that day’s campsite, as soon as I had taken care of my horse’s needs—always the first priority for a rider at the end of a journey, the necessary half-hour ensuring an uneventful day to follow—I delivered him to the horse lines and went looking for a comfortable seat beyond the smells of horses and stables. I was fortunate, finding a pleasant spot far enough removed from the odour of dung and the hubbub of setting up the camp. I sat on a mossy, comfortable mound at the base of a sturdy young elm that would support my back, and dug into my satchel, retrieving my ink flask and pens, some of my precious paper, and the plain thin wooden sheet, two handspans long and nearly the same wide, that I carried as a makeshift writing surface, supporting it on my knees at times like these when I had no table.

  I knew by then exactly what I wanted my report to say, but I began by making a nota bene list of memoranda, some precise and others less so, on thoughts and events that had come to mind earlier in the course of my journey. I soon lost all awareness of my surroundings, and as I scribbled there, locked up in my own little world of recollections, the new encampment took shape around me and the noise and bustle gradually died away as the army began to settle down after the exhausting ten-hour daily grind.

  I was brought back to the present by Alistair de Moray. Startled by his voice, unexpectedly loud and close by, I looked up to see him lounging against the bole of a large beech tree a few paces from where I was sitting.

  “I asked you if you know what a troll is.”

  “Of course I do,” I answered, mystified. I set my writing materials carefully aside, using the ink pot’s base to secure the papers against an errant gust of wind. “It’s a mythical monster from Norse legends. A giant, misshapen, manlike creature of immense strength, but lacking a human soul.”

  He nodded. “And are they bald?”

  “I believe they are. Hairless. Why?”

  He grinned. “Because there’s one of them outside the camp, surrounded by half a score of guards, and it’s asking for you.”

  It took several moments for my mind to make the connections, but as soon as it did I sprang to my feet with a most unclerical whoop of delight. “Ewan Scrymgeour! Where is he?”

  “You know him, then,” Alistair said, no trace of surprise in his voice.

  “I do indeed. One of my oldest and dearest friends, with a face that frightens children and grown men and a nature that delights God Himself.” I was already looking down at my feet, eyeing my writing materials. “I have to clean up here first, before I go anywhere,” I said. “If I leave these things here, they’ll be gone when I come back.”

  “I’ll help you.” Alistair sank onto one knee in front of me, reaching for my ink pot and the stained wooden box that held my pens. “Here, hand me your bag. I’ll hold it open, and you put these inside, since you know how. Careful …” He held my sheaf of written papers in one hand as he plied the other, and we quickly had everything loaded into the large shoulder bag that accompanied me everywhere. I stood up and looped the carrying strap over my shoulder to let it hang across my chest, and Alistair led me quickly to where Ewan waited for me on the camp outskirts.

  I saw the big archer before he caught sight of me, and I felt a surge of affection. Clad in his perpetual Welsh archer’s green, he towered head and shoulders over the men around him, none of whom would have been small in any company. The sheer width and bulk of Ewan’s shoulders astounded me again, though, no less than it had on the day I first saw him, when I was a ten-year-old boy. But I saw no sign of his bow, and that made me frown, for even in the safest of company, among friends when he had no need of a weapon, Ewan carried his precious unstrung bow shaft with him at all times.

  “Ewan!” I shouted. “Over here!”

  He spun towards the sound of my voice and threw out his arms, and his ruined face sank into what only those who knew him well would recognize as a great grin of happiness. What I had said to Alistair earlier about Ewan’s face frightening children wa
s no exaggeration, and if children were around, the big archer often wore a mask to hide his disfigurements. Any sane person knows that a battlefield is no fit place for any twelve-year-old boy, but there are always boys in the middle of battles, hauling supplies and running with messages, bringing water to the fighting men, and, if they are trainees and apprentices, assisting their masters in the field. Ewan had been twelve at the time of the battle of Lewes, newly apprenticed to an archer with the army of King Henry III. He had been struck by a heavy war club, and the blow had crushed his right cheek and jawbone and completely destroyed his right eye. The appalling extent of the damages had grown more noticeable as he aged.

  Ewan reached me and snatched me up in a huge embrace, swinging me high into the air with utter disregard for my priestly dignity, just as I had known he would. Three times he swept me around in a circle, then carefully set me back on my feet and pushed me away to arm’s length, scanning me with a single, keen eye that I knew to be eagle sharp. He was the only one-eyed archer I had ever known, and I had never known more than two normally sighted men who could match him, shaft for shaft. I smiled and endured his scrutiny, wondering how anyone could ever think him frightening, and soon he grunted and stepped back slightly, his ruined face settling into itself again.

  “Ye look well,” he said in that gentle, careful voice that I had quickly grown to love as a boy.

  “You, too, Ewan,” I said, blessing him with the sign of the cross and aware of the eyes of the surrounding guards. “But you look naked. Where’s your bow?”

  His eye gleamed and his face shifted again into what was, for him, a grin. “Times change,” he said softly. “Your cousin carries a sword nowadays instead of a bow. So I’m considering doing the same.”

  “Go and tell that to someone who will be more likely to believe you. I doubt if you would even know which end of a sword to snatch up. Now, where’s your bow?”