Worth Dying For (The Bruce Trilogy)

by Sasson, N. Gemini

  He should not be here. He should still be at Stirling.

  Angus hopped over the rowing thwarts to stand before me. “Happy to see your brother, as always, m’lord?” He propped his fists on his hips.

  “Do not nettle me, Angus.” I buried my face in my hands for a moment, then looked up at him between splayed fingers. “I should give you my weapons. Remove temptation.”

  Angus put out a hand to help me up. He pounded me on the upper arm. “Och, I knew enough of your brother’s company at Dunaverty. I would not pick a quarrel with him. He’ll finish whatever is started.”

  I hopped over the gunwale and immersed myself up to my ribs. The smell of saltwater mingled with that of muddied river water. Side by side, Angus and I waded toward land.

  “I differ there, Angus. He’ll not leave a fight unfinished, but as for a simple task, suffice it to say that persistence is not among his virtues. If only he had finished what he started at Stirling...”

  “Ho! Robert!” Edward sprang from his horse and waved his arms in the air. “Come, let me tell you the news.”

  As we sloshed through the water, waves lapping at the backs of our knees, Angus gave me a sideways glance. “He’s not wearing mail. I can throw a knife at this distance, if you’d like to make short of it.”

  “You’re a poor influence, Angus. I can see why your people have such a sordid reputation.”

  “And proud of it, sire.” He chuckled into his beard.

  Angus and I emerged in our dripping clothes and water logged boots. Edward jogged toward us. He had shed his armor in favor of velvet and fine hose, looking more the king than me in my ragged battle garb, my face and hair beaten by the force of the sea and sun. With a wan smile above his trimmed beard, Edward bowed slightly. He threw his arms open to embrace me.

  “Robert, well met. Did it go well on Man?” he asked.

  “Not so well met, brother. In fact, our situation is horrid. I don’t think it’s ever been worse. I should think you’d be aware of that. What is this I hear about you getting the Earl of Atholl’s sister Isabel with child and denying it? My sources tell me you are now wooing the sister of the Earl of Ross, worshipping her like the Virgin Mary, and making Atholl’s sister out as a Jezebel. It’s dangerous play to pit Atholl against Ross. I gave too many years trying to bring them together to have you rent them apart because of your inability to keep your breeches on.”

  “Atholl would leak that lie to you because he wants his fallen sister wed to a Bruce. It’s a common ploy among women, an age-old conspiracy, to immediately bed with the most desirable nobleman they can find after they’ve already gotten themselves plowed and sown.”

  “And you consider yourself desirable?”

  “As do you. But you hush your women properly. If I could shower their brats with slabs of rock and empty titles, I’d do the same. You bed women for passing pleasure, Robert, as you know – not to test their fertility for marriage. Isabel of Atholl is a harpy and a leech and she can keep whatever bastards she bears well fed with those ample breasts of hers... and her brother David has more than the means to look after her brood. The worst thing I could do to encourage her is admit that her bulging belly has anything to do with me. Atholl concocted this whole, fabulous, overgrown lie. Believe him, or believe me.”

  I covered my eyes with my hands for a moment, trying to wring the thoughts from my brain and shape them in a way that would go over as well as possible. But this situation with Atholl and Stirling – it was impossible. I was angry with him, for a hundred reasons. I would not let him ply at my infidelity in order for him to shirk off his own guilt like a mantle he had tired of wearing.

  “My God, my God.” When I uncovered my eyes, I found that I could not look at him and accuse him at the same time. “David of Atholl’s father died trying to help Elizabeth, Marjorie and your own sisters escape. He has been back in Scotland himself not a year, trying in vain to prove his loyalty and forget whatever divided us all in the past – and this is what you do, call him a liar and opportunist? You fathered a child on an earl’s sister, Edward, not a peasant girl who can be brushed away. If I could give away lands or titles to fix everything that you have broken, I would. But this is beyond that. And there is one thing you have done that I won’t be able to fix. My kingdom is in a shambles... because of you. Everything I have gained thus far stands to be lost.”

  His mouth sank in confusion. “But with Og’s galleys and men, surely you –”

  “Not that. Rushen fell. Quick work. But I hear... understand that you and Mowbray, Stirling’s commander, came to an agreement. Is that so, Edward?”

  Behind him, Gil, who had been left on assignment with him, shrunk at the mention of Stirling. I could see that he, at least, had some inkling that this reunion would not go smoothly.

  Edward forced an unconvincing smile. The gravity of my disappointment in his deeds was starting to seep in. He took a step back. “Aye. I thought you would be glad to hear of it. I agreed to lift the siege. He agreed to hand us Stirling if the English did not relieve it by midsummer next. The castle will be ours without so much as bending a finger.”

  The tenor of my voice deepened. “What in Christ’s sacred name were you thinking?”

  His dark eyebrows lifted. “Thinking?”

  “Not at all, I reckon. What will happen if they come?” The men trailing behind him kept their distance as my patronizing queries rose to a bellow of inquisition.

  He shook his head. “But they won’t. I assure you. Edward of Caernarvon is too troubled in his own court to care. He hasn’t stepped north of Berwick since –”

  “Damn it! And damn you to bloody hell and back!” I stomped at him and jabbed a finger at his chest. “Fool, idiot and imbecile! You’ve given them reason and invitation now to come with a full invasion force. You could have gotten away with such stupidity elsewhere, but they’ll not hand you Stirling. I can barely believe you would act with such blind carelessness. Had you no time to think this through? You had them, my God, had them right there in your palm – supplies to last you weeks yet and if those had run short we’d have sent you more. More men, if you needed, too.”

  His pride challenged, Edward moved closer to me until our chests nearly touched. “More men to sit idly about and count the clouds in the sky? No, Robert, I caution you not to hurl such rubbish at me. And listen well first. It was Mowbray who made the offer. I indeed gave it thought. Stirling sits on a rock so high it parts the clouds. It was untouchable. I freed our men to fight elsewhere for you. How many times have you bemoaned the fact that the English outnumber us? I have saved you a world of trouble. Stirling will fall like a ripe apple into our open hands. For that you should thank me, not berate me like a spoiled infant.”

  I raised a fist to hammer him in the breastbone, but drew it back, beating at my own chest instead. I raised my chin and shouted in vexation. “Agh!” Yanking at the roots of my hair I turned back to him and shook my head. “You gave King Edward an entire year to gather an army. A whole year. Did you stop to consider that if Mowbray were willing to throw out such a lure, that maybe his victuals were beginning to run low? Or that sickness had set in? That if you had only waited another week, another month, that Stirling might now be yours? He held out before at Stirling against Longshanks himself as long as he could. Have you no memory of these things? Heaven tests my patience in your very form. I told you when I left you were not to break the siege for any cause or reason. Yet you neglected my wishes and thought better of your own. What arrogance you possess.”

  “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.