Robert the Bruce--A Tale of the Guardians

by Jack Whyte

  As he crossed the main courtyard of the castle towards the massive square central tower, Rob wondered whether that final decision might have to do with his being brought before the King. He dismissed the thought immediately. Whatever Edward required of him, it would have nothing to do with the case before the court of auditors, which was still in session, he judged, given the deserted courtyard. And that thought prompted another: the King himself should have been in the auditors’ chamber. That he was not, that he had apparently left the court and sent for Rob, was ominous.

  Rob slowed his pace in the last few steps towards the main doors of the tower, but the messenger ahead of him looked back and waved to him to hurry. Rob caught up to him by the time they reached the doors, which a pair of guards held open for them. The messenger led Rob quickly across the empty entrance hall and ushered him into a tiny cubicle, where an elderly man in long, dark robes had clearly been waiting for him.

  The man stood up immediately, dismissing the messenger with a wave of his hand. “His Majesty awaits you,” he said. “Come with me.”

  The man led him up a long, sweeping flight of stairs and along a short passageway lined with several identical doors. These were not, Rob knew, the official audience rooms. The man knocked on one of the doors and waited until a voice from inside bade him enter. He opened the door and leaned inside, announcing Rob’s name before he stepped aside and allowed Rob to enter. The man pulled the door closed behind him.

  The room was small and dimly lit by two windows that flanked a large stone fireplace directly across from him, but Rob saw that it was walled on three sides with oiled and polished oak that had been cunningly carved to resemble draped linen panels, and it contained few furnishings. The fireplace, empty and cold, was fronted by a wide, heavy table at which the King of England sat alone, staring at a parchment laid out in front of him and anchored at the corners by small stones. He looked up as Rob entered, then eyed him grimly as the young man bowed formally.

  “Training,” he said tonelessly. “It’s a hot day to be wearing armour.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Aye. For all that, I’d rather be out there myself, working up a sweat, than be stuck in the smelly courtrooms I live in nowadays.” There was still no inflection to his voice, and Rob was shocked by the tired, deep-graven lines that now etched the face he knew so well. “You look well, young Bruce. Sir Marmaduke has not been neglecting you, has he?” The question was rhetorical, for Edward continued without waiting for an answer. “This was your last day of training, no?”

  Rob nodded. “Yes, my lord. Your messenger arrived just as we were finishing.”

  “I gauged as much, though the timing was accidental. I sent for you as soon as I received word.” The monarch waved towards one of the two chairs that faced him across the table. “Sit down. Pull that chair closer.”

  Rob’s confusion grew stronger. With the sole exception of his very first encounter with the English King, eight years earlier in his father’s earldom of Carrick, he had never seen Edward Plantagenet unaccompanied. There was always someone with him, even if it was only a cleric or two, no matter how informal the occasion. Alarmed, he lowered himself into the chair and waited.

  Edward was nibbling at his upper lip, glowering, but then he placed both hands palm down on the parchment in front of him. “I will not be knighting you with the others.”

  It flashed into Rob’s mind that the monarch had been called away, perhaps back to London. But then the full meaning of what he had said crushed Rob like a falling tree. He sat gaping, searching frantically within himself for anything, any fault or sin of dereliction or omission that could have brought about such a disastrous condemnation.

  Edward, seeing the alarm in the young man’s face, realized belatedly what he must be thinking and snapped up an open hand. “No! I did not mean I have decided not to knight you. Do not think such a thing. You have done nothing wrong and you are not being punished.” He leaned back into his chair. “It is simply that it cannot be. You will not be here for the ceremony. That is all I meant to say and I could have said it better. Forgive me for alarming you thoughtlessly.”

  “But … But I am here, my lord King.”

  “Aye, but you will not be tomorrow. You must leave today.” He braced his straight arms on the edge of the table, then laid his hands again upon the parchment there. “I received this today, Robert, and would give much not to have done so. It is from your father.” He looked Rob square in the eye. “He informs me that your lady mother is gravely ill, her very life in peril. Some sudden affliction like the one that took my Queen. And of course he sought your release from duties immediately, so that you may go to be with her.”

  A hollowness grew inside Rob’s head—gravely ill, her very life in peril—and the King’s voice seemed to echo strangely within it, the words he now spoke empty of meaning. He saw his mother’s face clear in his mind and heard her throaty, swelling laughter as she played exuberantly with his youngest sisters, radiating health and vitality to all the world. Marjorie of Carrick could not be sick! The very thought of it was ludicrous. She was his mother, her entire life dedicated to and thriving upon the welfare of her turbulent brood. He began to hear a roaring in his head and realized that he had stopped breathing, and as he released his pent-up breath he heard the King still speaking to him.

  “… arranged. You’ll find them waiting for you at the stables when you are ready to leave. I sent people to your quarters to pack up your belongings, so all you need do is take care of any last-moment matters that occur to you. A dozen men are set aside to ride with you, with food and spare horses for all. If you leave immediately, riding hard and bypassing Berwick, you should reach Dumfries by nightfall or soon after. From there, depending on how hard you drive your men and horses, you should be home sometime tomorrow night. Now go with God, Robert, and deliver my condolences to your father. I will pray you arrive in time to take your leave of your mother.”

  Barely aware of what he was doing, Rob stood up and went through the motions of thanking the King for his concern and kindness, then bowed, turned, and walked away, vaguely aware that he was walking stiff-legged and jarringly and that his most immediate concern was to remain upright and keep moving without falling down. The noises in his head were strange and alien, metallic reverberations and echoing fragments of words, and his senses threatened to desert him, but he closed the door behind him and leaned against it for a few moments, fighting to control his breathing.

  * * *

  In the times that lay ahead Rob would find it alarming, when he thought of it, that he had no recollection of the journey from Norham to Turnberry. He knew it had been a hard, unrelenting ride with little pause for sleep or even rest. He had no detailed memory of any part of the passage across the rugged, trackless Lowland hills and no remembrance at all of passing the border town of Berwick, where they had crossed the Tweed River that first day, before swinging west.

  He remembered nothing, in fact, of what had passed between the moment when he heard the terrifying tidings from King Edward and the other, agonizing moment in the middle of the next night when the door of his parents’ darkened bedchamber swung open to reveal his mother lying pale in her massive bed, the startling planes and hollows of her ravaged face and sunken cheeks rendering her unrecognizable at first look. The bed was flanked by racks of flickering candles that revealed the presence of his father and his grandfather, both of whom stood gazing down in silence at the woman who lay between them.

  It was Lord Robert who turned towards the sound of the opening door and saw his grandson standing there, his eyes wide with terror. He swung away from the sickbed and strode to meet his grandson, reaching out to turn Rob around. He ushered him back out into the dimly lit hallway and pulled the door shut behind them.

  “We didn’t know when to expect you.”

  Rob turned to face the closed door at his back. “Is she—?”

  “Aye, she is alive, praise God. And sleeping soundly
. When did you leave Norham?”

  Rob shook his head impatiently. “Yesterday, around noon. What’s wrong with her?”

  The old man harrumphed. “You made good time, then. Have you slept at all?”

  Another headshake. “A little. There was no time. What happened to my mother?”

  “Childbed sickness,” he growled. “Nothing anyone could do. The child was born dead, six days ago, and the midwives could not stop the bleeding. And then your mother caught a fever. She is gravely weakened. Close to death, I fear, though none will come right out and say so. But the cleric physician, Ethelric, believes she may survive. It is in God’s hands, but she has received the best of care and she appears to be regaining a little of her strength. She supped a bowl of broth this evening, for the first time since she fell sick, and now she is sleeping more easily than she has in days. And sleep, Ethelric says, is God’s own balm and cure.”

  Rob tried to remember a time when his mother had not been with child. She had been surrounded constantly by a sprawling, growing, clamorous brood, her belly distended constantly either with the aftermath of one pregnancy or the burgeoning of her next, and none of that had hampered her for a single moment in her running of the massive household that was her ancestral home. He remembered the last time he had seen her, eight months earlier, before he had left to join King Edward at Norham. Then her face had been lovely still, full-cheeked and glowing with health, with no trace of the wrinkles any of the other women showed. He had smiled back into her loving eyes, enjoying her wide, generous smile as she kissed him by the gates and tied a leather purse of sweetmeats of honeyed almond paste—his favourite delight—to the belt at his waist. Her hair, too, had been lustrous and rich then, deep auburn and burnished with streaks of reddish gold, a far cry from the dank and colourless tangle of ropes that now lay twisted on her pillow.

  “What was the child?” he asked, plainly not caring.

  “It was a boy. They would have called it Angus.”

  “It killed my mother.”

  “Now, now, boy. That’s not so. Your mother is not dead, and besides, the childbed sickness has nothing to do with the child being birthed. The sickness comes on afterwards, the result of evil humours.”

  “I want to speak with her, Grandfather.”

  “Aye, I know you do, but now is not the time, hard as that may seem for you. This is the first restful sleep she’s had these past seven days. It would be shameful to wake her from it merely because you lack the patience to wait until tomorrow, and you’ll see that if you but think on it. She knows you’re coming and has been waiting for you, as eager to set eyes on you as you are to see her, but if she sleeps though the night she’ll waken tomorrow refreshed and stronger … I can tell from just looking at you that you’re almost as tired as she is, so go you now and sleep and you’ll see her when you awaken.”

  “What’s wrong with my father? He did not even look at me when I came in.”

  The old man sighed, his face creased with concern. “Your father is mourning for his love. Not for the loss of her life, mind you … rather for the loss of her youth and his own. He feels that he has betrayed her somehow and he is impotent to change anything. He would gladly leap to bear her sickness and her woes if he could. But he did not ignore you wilfully. Not in the way you thought. You have your life ahead of you and he knows that. All his attention, all his care tonight, is for his wife and for her life, which he is in terror of seeing disappear …

  “Go now, and get some sleep. That is a command, Robert. I promise you, if anything goes amiss in the night—the which may God forbid—I’ll send for you immediately. Go now, and pray to God for the strength to face your mother cheerfully come morning, for she’ll need to see you smiling for her.”

  * * *

  “Robbie, you’re here.”

  Her whisper was barely audible, and he felt his throat constrict at the dry weakness of it as he stooped to take her hand and kiss her forehead, struggling to hold a smile that felt more like a rictus. His grandfather had told him, just before they entered the sickroom, that she had slept well and was stronger than she had been for days, and Allie had washed her face and combed out her hair before binding it with a silken ribbon that brought out the blue highlights of her startling blue-green eyes. But the brightness of the ribbon also emphasized the pallor of her skin and the high, hectic flush on her cheekbones above the hollows of her face.

  Her grip on his fingers was strong, though, and there was no mistaking the joy the sight of him gave her. He blinked rapidly, willing himself to show no sign of grief or anguish, and knelt as close to her as he could come, bending forward to inhale the remembered scent of her and feeling it soothe him as it always had.

  “I’m sorry I took so long, Mam. I came as soon as I heard.”

  “I know you did … All the way from England, at the gallop. You’ve grown up, Robbie … When you went away you were a boy, a fine lad and my pride and joy, but just a boy, and here you’ve come back in just months, a man grown. Stand up and let me look at you.”

  He rose and stepped back, watching her closely as her eyes swept over him. He had changed greatly in the previous eight months, he knew, but his gains in weight and bulk during that time were merely the end result of the process that had started two years earlier, when first he started living in England at the King’s court, committed to the unrelenting discipline of training daily, brutally and diligently, for his eventual knighthood. Since then he had come home to Turnberry only three times, seeing the changes in his growing brothers each time but unaware of the changes in himself. And at that thought, he realized for the first time since leaving Norham that his friends in England had become men in fact since he left, formally dubbed and raised by King Edward to the exalted state of manhood as warriors within the order of knighthood.

  “You’re so big,” she whispered. “Look at you, the size of you! You’re bigger than your da.”

  He found it easy to smile at her now. “But not as big as my gransser,” he said quietly, using the name he had given the old man before he learned to pronounce grandsire properly. Her eyes flicked immediately to where Lord Robert stood listening, his craggy old face for once lit by a smile of pure fondness for his good-daughter.

  The countess smiled again. “No,” she whispered. “Not yet, that’s true. But you will be, someday soon. You’ve the same shoulders and you’re still growing. You’ll be a Robert Bruce to make him proud. You wait and see.”

  “He makes me proud already, my dear,” the old man said. “But I believe you’re right.”

  The countess nodded. “I’m glad you two are close now” was all she said, and then looked back at her son. “Have you seen your brothers? Allie told me you came home late last night. Were they here?”

  Rob’s smile widened into a grin. “Aye, Mam, but they were all abed by then.”

  “And you woke them up when you went upstairs, I expect.”

  He ducked his head to one side. “I did, but they werena sleeping very soundly. We talked for a while and then I ordered them back to bed.”

  “And what did you talk about?” She wiggled her fingers. “Come back to me.”

  He moved quickly to kneel beside her again and reached for her outstretched hand, feeling her grasp his fingers again far more strongly than he would have expected earlier. “About living in England and training for knighthood,” he answered. “Are you surprised?” She had no need to know that he had talked with his brothers for hours about her condition and their fears for her—and for themselves, should she not recover.

  His mother was watching him closely and he made himself smile again. “Edward can’t wait for his turn to be a squire to someone, and he prays every night that he will find a master who loves horses as he does. And Thomas and Alec are in despair because they still have to wait years before they can even start.”

  His mother’s chin dipped as she nodded gently, squeezing his fingers more tightly. “Aye,” she said in that voice that sounded li
ke a zephyr stirring dried leaves. “But the years fly by faster and faster as we grow older … And what seemed like a lifetime ago is no more than a flitting moment, seen from afar. Their time will come soon enough. Sooner than they would wish were they older and wiser. But for now they are just wee boys, aching to be men. So leave them to fret, Robbie. Remember yourself, how young you were when you were their age, and let them be. Let them learn at God’s own pace. Now, when will you be knighted?”

  His face must have fallen, for he saw the alarm in her eyes, and he quickly shrugged, discovering, to his own great surprise, that he really did not care about the temporary loss of his knighthood compared to the gift of being able to see her again.

  “I missed it, Mam,” he said. “This time at least. I was on my way here when the ceremony happened. It was today, this morning.” He hurried on as he saw her eyes widen in horror. “Mam, don’t fret. It doesna worry me, and that’s God’s truth. The King himself told me I have earned my knighthood and that he will gladly confer it upon me at the first opportunity that comes. For now I am a knight in all but name.”

  “I know you are, my son … You always have been, in my eyes, but it’s a shame you had to miss the ceremony with all your friends.”

  He stooped and kissed her again on the forehead. “No, it’s not, Mam. I’ll see them all again soon enough and I’d rather be here with you right now.”

  She smiled. “I don’t think you even expect me to believe that, Rob Bruce, but I thank you for that lovely thought. I’ll—” She jerked violently, and suddenly her fingers were digging sharply into his hand and her eyes were wide with fright.