Robert the Bruce--A Tale of the Guardians

by Jack Whyte

  Best of all, though, in Bruce’s opinion, was the discovery that this headquarters unit, as he thought of it, was under the command of the same royal guard sergeant and corporals who had brought him here, and that they had two score of their own men with them, in full royal livery, to bolster Bruce’s credibility—should ever that be needed—as a personal representative of King Edward.

  * * *

  Immediately upon his return to Writtle, he split his royal guard detachment into three ten-man squads, each with an officer and an attendant cleric, and dispatched them to deliver the orders for his knightly neighbours to assemble, each with his fifty men, and place themselves under his command within a week of receiving their instructions.

  He knew only five of the eleven knights, and those five but slightly, having met them briefly in company with his grandfather during his intermittent filial visits from the north in the previous two years. He anticipated no trouble from any of them, though, for his mandate from the King was absolute. They might dislike him individually, might even resent him for his youth or see him as an interloper, but Bruce was genuinely surprised to recognize his own indifference to that. It was their obedience and cooperation he required, not their approval, and he was content to know they would obey him without question as the King’s agent. Of far more concern to him was the force he would command.

  He needed this to be a single force, united and dependable, looking to him for leadership rather than to their individual liege knights, and that, he knew, would be the greatest difficulty facing him from the moment they started to assemble at Writtle. The little military training most of these men might have would have been dunned into them by the knights to whom they were bound in service. Some would be well trained, but others would be less so, and some, inevitably, would be pathetic and inept. But the fact was that he would have no time to train them to work together. His orders were precise: to begin his sweep of the heartlands before Yuletide.

  Not unusually, Bruce realized afterwards, it was Thomas Beg who proposed the only workable solution, offering it offhandedly when nothing was expected of him. They had been idly watching the remaining ten men of the King’s Guard as they sat around their two tents, keeping themselves busy by cleaning their armour and weapons and mending whatever needed mending.

  “Which o’ them d’ye think will get here first?” Thomas Beg asked. The summons had gone out three days before.

  Bruce shrugged. “Montmorency, I would guess. He’s closest, less than six miles from here.”

  “An’ what think ye o’ him?”

  “Barely know the man. But he’s young enough to look respectable. Well put together and with an appearance of competence, I thought.”

  “Ye liked him, then?”

  “I didn’t dislike him. Why do you ask?”

  “Because he’s one o’ eleven, and among them they could cause you grief.”

  “How so?”

  “Their men and how they treat them. Together wi’ ours, they’ll be an army o’ six hundred, but in truth they’ll be a wheen o’ different gangs—fifty in each. It’ll take a fell, dour hand to keep them a’ in order.”

  Bruce had been thinking the same thing for days. “Aye, and it won’t be mine, for I can’t take the time to do it. I’ll confess, though, I don’t know who it might be, and I do know it needs to be someone capable. The damnable part is that I don’t even know most of these knights by sight. One of them might be capable of doing what we need, but until I’ve met them all I won’t know, yea or nay.”

  “Beltane.”

  “Beltane? The old pagan festival—the one that’s Easter now? What about it?”

  “It’s a man’s name. The King’s sergeant. He’s your man.”

  “He’s a sergeant, Tam.”

  “Aye, he is. And one o’ the best in this land. I spoke wi’ him the other day, when we were in Westminster. He’s a good man. He’s been guardin’ Edward’s back for years, since he was a boy. Saved his life twice in Wales and then refused a knighthood. Content to stay as he is, he said. A dour man, but ye winna find better anywhere.”

  Bruce eyed him curiously. “I don’t doubt it, but I need somebody for this task that the other knights will heed. And they won’t heed a common sergeant, no matter how good he is at what needs to be done.”

  “They will, gin you tell them to frae the outset. An’ make him a captain. They might no’ like it, but they’ll hae no choice.” He paused, reading the doubt in Bruce’s face. “Think about what ye said, man. They’re knights, wi’ grand ideas o’ themsel’s, no doubt. But you’re an earl an’ you’re Edward’s own choice to lead this thing, and any fool knows this King winna thole anything that thwarts his will. If you say Beltane is to be your choice to train this rabble that they’ve brought to be your troops—to drill some sense into them—then hell mend the lot o’ them if they dinna like it. What can they do, complain to Edward that they’ll no’ go because ye’ve insulted them?”

  “By the sweet Christ, Thomas, you might be right.” Bruce held up a hand to silence whatever might come next from the big Scot. “That’s how the Romans did it, when they ruled the world. One man, the senior centurion, commanded an entire legion in matters of discipline, training, and procedures. Six to ten thousand men he commanded. They called him the primus pilus, the First Spear, and he answered only to the commander of his legion. By Christ, that might work! Why not?” He stopped short, his face falling. “But would Beltane accept such a position? You said yourself, he refused advancement from the King, so what’s the likelihood of his accepting this? No point in us even thinking of it if he won’t stand for it.”

  Thomas Beg grinned. “Have you ever looked at the man? Then do it next time ye see him. I don’t know what your fancy Romans looked like, but scarce a single one o’ them could outface Beltane in matters o’ pride and appearance. I think he’d jump at this, were you to offer it—the chance to make an army out o’ a rabble. It’s his life, as well as his callin’. And wi’ you to back him up an’ keep the other knights frae interferin’, I think he might work magic for ye. The other two, the corporals, I think he might like to promote them, make them sergeants, too, gin ye agree, and then they could make up some new corporals to replace them. It’s a wee enough army, but it could be a fine one by the time we’re finished.”

  “Tam, you’re an inspiration. Send him to me as soon as he gets back and we’ll get started on it. He’s been gone what, three days? He should be back directly. By the time the first contingents get here, we can have the plan in place.” He grinned wryly. “Thomas Beg, if this works out I will be greatly in your debt.”

  “Aye. Again,” said Tam, turning away.

  * * *

  The matter of Sergeant Beltane’s duties was quickly settled. It transpired that the stone-faced veteran was a great admirer of the Roman legions and their discipline and tactics. Beltane took to Bruce’s notion instantly, and by the time they both stood up, more than three hours had fled and the newly promoted captain was counting off reminders on his fingers. Indeed, he appeared to relish the challenge of welding the incoming levies, within a few short weeks, into a functioning military unit. It would be a thankless task at first, they both knew, but not impossible.

  Their little army never did become a proficient fighting force, but it quickly learned a basic discipline and became at least outwardly cohesive, able to march in good order and to present the crisp appearance Bruce demanded. The knights were sceptical at the outset, some of them openly resentful at having to defer to an unfamiliar subordinate in the handling of their own men, but within days they saw the advantage to themselves in having someone else perform the daily tasks of drill, training, and discipline, and they had sufficient brains among them to recognize the simple truth that no harm would come to them from having the behaviour and performance of their people thus enhanced. The royal guards were the only group who looked uniform, thanks to the King’s livery they wore, but the other groups, motley as they were, formed na
tural divisions, each fifty strong and marching under a knight’s banner. They marched in double groupings, a hundred men to each unit, the paired elements marching abreast where space permitted and alternating front and rear where it did not. Bruce was not unhappy with the result.

  He was less than happy with the expedition itself, though, for its day-to-day sameness in the first two months of the new year of 1296 was debilitating to everyone, and by the end of January they had not yet reached the northernmost point of their route. They made fair progress, for the roads in that region were uniformly good; long, straight, and well drained, they had far outlived the Roman engineers who had built them a millennium earlier. But the men constantly had to strike away from those roads and into the countryside, in search of the places they had come to find, and winter had settled about their ears since they’d left home. The trees were bare, the incessant wind had that sullen chill that penetrated even the warmest of garments, and the grass underfoot was long and rank and wet from the constant rain and foggy drizzle. A sudden cold snap in Northampton had brought snow to add to their discomfort, and the rank and file of their soldiery grew bored and fractious as their armour chilled and chafed at them.

  Most of the Balliol houses they visited were simply what the name implied, wealthy, strongly built places surrounded by several acres of land, but some were castles, and three of those were surrounded by vast estates. They had encountered no difficulty anywhere, the King’s writ and Bruce’s authority accepted without demur, but those larger estates had required detailed surveys and reports to be compiled by the recording clerics, and so three times Bruce had been forced to spend a week or more in one place while the infuriating records were drawn up. And throughout everything it seemed as though they rode and marched in utter isolation.

  He found the dearth of news from beyond their route to be the most frustrating element of their sortie, the truth of it soon borne home to him by the very dullness of their progress. He had expected at first that, sooner or later, the news of his little army’s advent would precede them as word sped from one to another of the Balliol holdings along their route, but it never happened, and he was forced to conclude that the urgency of his mission existed in his mind alone. The houses and estates he repossessed in the name of King Edward were simply that—individual and self-centred. None of their occupants had any thoughts of other, similar holdings beyond their own; each small group lived in its own little world, self-contained and self-sufficient. Each household showed initial surprise at being summarily repossessed, but they all adjusted quickly. Most of the occupants had never even seen, let alone met, their titular owner, the foreign King of Scotland, and since the repossession seldom entailed anything other than the changing of the royal standards above the roofs and parapets and the removal of anything that visually asserted Balliol’s presence, the household staff invariably shrugged philosophically and carried on with their routines, so that Bruce had not even needed to leave any of his own men in place. These houses were all English, after all; their people were English for the most part and they had no slightest difficulty in transferring their allegiance back to the English Crown.

  More than any other thing that tugged at him, though, he missed Isabella savagely, often tossing and turning late into the night as he pined for her and wondered how she was faring without him. He had no real misgivings over her safety, though he often thanked God that he had decided to leave Thomas Beg behind to care for her, but he fretted constantly about their enforced separation and he was haunted by his memories of her despair over her failure to become pregnant. He began to fear that at his present rate of progress he might never win back to her.

  It was not until they reached Oxford, homeward bound on the last day of February, that Bruce heard anything of what had been going on in other parts during his wanderings. They found an elderly Scots knight in residence at the last great house they stopped at. His name was Crawford, Sir Hector Crawford of Bootle, and Bruce guessed his age at seventy and perhaps even older. He was delighted to welcome Bruce, apparently attaching no significance to the purpose of his visit, and made a point of telling him that he had once served with old Lord Robert for ten years, when they were both young and hale.

  Speaking alone with Sir Hector mere hours after his arrival, Bruce was perplexed at first by the old knight’s enthusiasm and garrulity, for living in a Balliol house as he was, the old fellow must have known that this visit from a Bruce, representing England’s King and claiming possession of the estate, could bode nothing but ill for his master. The old man’s pleasure was unfeigned, however, and listening to his prattling and the way it went without logic from one topic to another, it gradually became clear to Bruce that the old man’s mind had been somehow impaired, perhaps by his age. Whatever the reason, Sir Hector spoke out freely on whatever came to mind and showed no reticence about discussing things that would have been held close by a younger, fitter man. At one point, he confided that his eldest son had come to visit him from Scotland, privily, mere days before and had brought news of great, exciting portent. Scotland and France had made a treaty of alliance against England, he said, negotiated in France by several earls and bishops.

  Bruce sat up straight as his mind snapped back to Edward’s question months earlier on the whereabouts of Bishop Fraser of St. Andrews. He recalled how Sir James Jardine had very carefully not looked at anyone. The old man was still babbling away, and Bruce leaned closer, afraid now to miss a word. The two realms had aided each other in such matters before, the old knight was saying; for more than a hundred years now they had been close, but this new alliance would see England’s power set at naught. A wapinschaw—a council of war—had been held earlier, and the summons had been sent out to the entire Scottish host, from north and south of Forth, to assemble at Caddonlee, near Selkirk, by the eleventh day of March.

  War! Caddonlee was the traditional rallying ground for armies preparing to invade England. Bruce could barely contain himself, for this was information of incalculable worth, and he had to sit still, forcing himself to smile and nod in pretended innocence as he thought frantically of how quickly he could pass this news on to Edward in Westminster. He reviewed the mental list of the knights under his command and chose two of them to send directly. Ralph de Montmorency would be one, he decided, and Sir Ranulf Mortimer, whom he had come to know and like, would be the other. Two men, each making his own way alone and accompanied by a ten-man escort. That should be sufficient.

  It was another hour before he could find two of the Cistercian clerics and dictate his tidings to King Edward. He signed both copies, noting that neither monk had betrayed the slightest interest in what was being written, then sent for Mortimer and Montmorency. He gave them their orders and told them to be on the road by dawn, knowing that each of them would do his utmost to reach Westminster ahead of the other and deliver the letter personally to the King.

  He would not discover, until he reached Westminster again in mid-March to find the King long since departed, that word of what Edward called the foul Scotch perfidy had already reached the monarch ahead of Bruce’s letters and had incensed him to a towering fury the likes of which no one could recall. He had immediately cancelled his plans to leave for France and reassigned his armies, the strongest in Christendom after years of war in France and victory in Wales. He would lead them to Scotland himself and, faced with the threat of this new alliance, his barons would support him to a man. The Scottish host would have gathered at Caddonlee by the eleventh of March, but Edward’s armies had been at Newcastle, poised to attack, on March the first.

  * * *

  When they left Westminster, Bruce led his little army to Montmorency’s castle, which lay between London and Writtle, and disbanded it there on a sunny, blustery day in the last week of March. Before he dismissed the men he thanked them for their support and commiserated with them that they had missed seeing the King at Westminster, for he had led them there to do precisely that, hoping that Edward would deign to reco
gnize their service over the past three months. Captain Beltane and his guardsmen had remained behind at the palace, already preparing to march north to join the King, whose armies must have marched past them unseen on their way to Scotland, and it was left to Bruce to thank the eleven knights in whose company he had spent so much time. They were all as eager to return to their homes as he was, so the farewells were brief. Then, left alone with his own men, he gave the signal and spurred his horse towards Writtle and Isabella.

  He spent the final two miles in a fever of expectation and fighting against the urge to whip his horse into a gallop and simply leave his men to follow at their own pace. But that, he decided, would be both disloyal and demeaning; he was not the only one impatient for the sight of a loving face after so long a journey, and he owed it to them, at the very least, to share their last hour of anticipation and anxiety.

  He sensed the moment when they were first seen from the house, and soon he heard the warning horn blaring from the walls, announcing their arrival. And then at last they were approaching the gates and he was looking for Isabella among the bustling throng ahead of him. It was only when he saw she was not there and the pain began to well up in him that he thought to look up at the roof of the tower, and there she was, waving to him.

  Thomas Beg stepped forward, smiling up at him. “Welcome home, my lord. Her ladyship’s waitin’ for ye. I’ll see the men dismissed. Away ye go.”

  Bruce swung his leg over the front of his saddle and dropped easily to the ground. He handed Tam the reins and punched him on the shoulder. “Good to see you, Thomas,” he growled, then made his way directly to the house, noticing that Isabella had already left the roof.

  The words were churning around in his head as he ran up the stairs, but he forgot them all as soon as he saw her smiling at him from the landing by their rooms. She was even more beautiful than he had remembered, and she was laughing and reaching for him and … By God, she was pregnant! He stopped dead, gaping at her, at the difference three months had wrought in her, her belly rounded and prominent and her face radiantly happy.