I studied the soldier’s feet. His leggings hung in shreds about his knees. The sole of one shoe was entirely gone from one and half from the other, so that the bottoms of his feet oozed with blood and pus. Where his toes were not likewise raw, they were completely bruised green and purple.
“His duty is to serve his king,” I said, “and his king commands him to march to Stirling.” I straightened in my saddle and signaled my horse onward. “Carry on, captain.”
As we proceeded to the port, the sharp crack of the whip rang out again and again. Usually, other soldiers mocked and shouted derisions at offenders. This time, they did not. Perhaps they had all wanted to voice the same complaint, but the rest had been wise enough to hold their tongues. The footsoldiers would have to tolerate their blistered feet and wearied legs. Surely they knew there was no element of comfort in their calling? In their ignorance, they probably expected riches from this expedition.
We came to the rocky strip of shoreline which began the eastern border of the harbor. I looked behind me and squinted against a blaze of June sun. Edinburgh Castle rose up ominously at our backs – a great, black rock dominating the horizon and shadowing a long reach of land at its base wherein huddled a town no longer protected by its power. Months ago Thomas Randolph had taken the castle. I both marveled and fumed at the feat. “Without sorcery I would say it was impossible. How did they manage?”
“The Scots are like goats, sire.” Hugh Despenser swished the flies from his horse’s ears with the ends of his reins. “Done at night. Randolph and his men climbed the rock face. The devil must have had some hand in it.”
“You can see to the other side of the Forth from there,” Clifford observed.
“They are not watching us from there now, Sir Robert,” Pembroke said. “A skeleton garrison. Victualed to the highest stone. With orders, no doubt, to starve themselves, rather than surrender.”
I wadded the cloth of my surcoat at the shoulder and wiped the sweat from my brow. “So Bruce would rather rule over a country of byres and burnt fields. What of Linlithgow? Roxburgh?” Lightheaded, I gripped the edge of my saddle. I had not stopped thirsting since the day we rode out from Berwick. The constant weight of my armor had wearied me. The fiery knot between my shoulder blades burned like the first singe of a branding iron.
Pembroke freed his hands of his leather gauntlets and wiped the sweat from his tanned brow. “Linlithgow fell by deceit. A farmer named William Bunnock brought a cart full of hay to the gate as he had done for months before that. But on one particular day the hay had hidden within it a handful of Scotsmen. They forced open the gate and more poured in. Roxburgh, on the other hand, indeed had the devil playing for it. The Black Douglas employed an old ruse – dressed his men up as wandering cows. When the garrison came out to raid, they were set upon and slaughtered.”
Deceitful bastards. Have they no chivalry?
The ships, two days overdue, were finally being emptied and provisions and arms loaded onto their bursting carts. I coughed dryly as another cart, this one heaped with sheaves of arrows, rumbled by in a cloud of dust to take its place in line. It had not rained a drop since we stepped foot in Scotland. The low hills around Edinburgh were as brown as cow dung. The ground had begun to crack. Soon the cracks would grow into a chasm wide enough to swallow a column of footsoldiers.
“If we push out tomorrow, Lord Pembroke, can we make it there in time?”
“If nothing stood in our way, sire, yes. The men are weary, but if we drive hard tomorrow, it will be less far to go the next day to Stirling. My estimation, however, is that Bruce will have blocked the most direct path.”
Clifford’s eyes narrowed in thought. But he kept what was on his mind to himself for the moment. There was a constant tacit struggle between the two men. I should have liked to fling Pembroke and Clifford into a pit and watch them fight to the death like dogs with spiked collars and be done with it. Their quarrels were the cause for many a headache of mine.
“Good then,” I said, casting a terse warning glance at Clifford to hold his tongue. Not quite noon and already a sharp pain was splitting my skull into two halves. “It will finally come to outright battle. That is why we came – to get this over with. Dear God, I am sick unto death of this place. A stinking, burnt out, God-forsaken hellhole. If I never come back again it will not be soon enough.” I plucked up my reins and turned my mount toward the southwest where my quarters were. As I rode out between the writhing, grunting lines of soldiers, rolled in dust, unloading the supplies, I said to Hugh beside me, “How many times have I said that before? This country is my curse, I think.”
“Perhaps, sire,” Hugh said, “it is your opportunity at greatness.”
Clever fellow. I enjoyed his flattery.
Come, come, Bruce. The final day of reckoning is well past due. I have an army that Alexander the Great would have envied. And you? What have you? A herd of brutish hill men waving their pitchforks and fishing knives as they charge suicidal at the greatest army in Christendom. Come. Fight. I will finish the work my sire began. What an even greater revenge that will be for all the times he mocked me for being weak.
Make room in your grave, great sire. Robert the Bruce is soon to join you.
As Pembroke drifted off to inspect and direct supplies, Clifford rode toward Hugh and me.
Clifford glanced furtively about us, not wanting to be overheard, and said lowly, “If Bruce guards the entry to Stirling along the Roman road, as we all know he shall, our army cannot pass through without first fighting them. We have lost precious time. Let me bypass them and relieve the castle. Is that not our first objective?”
Hugh and I exchanged glances. His eyebrows lifted and drew down as if in a nod of agreement.
“Indeed, it is,” I acknowledged to Clifford. “You know the land. Go by the shortest route. Just get it done. Smashing Bruce into historical oblivion is secondary. But I should like that pleasure to myself.”
Clifford’s whiskered cheeks bunched into a smile. “Gladly, sire.”
Ch. 32
James Douglas – Leith, 1314
A sea of polished silver glimmered in the first hazy beams of morning sun. Spearheads glinted like the fins of fishes breaking the surface. Surely, my eyes deceived me. Yet time and again, I counted and calculated the mass of English cavalry and footmen. The number was staggering. Their encampment clogged the area along the Forth between the castle and port, where two dozen ships bobbed empty-bellied at anchor. A train of wagons stretched out to the east, each one heaped with boxes, barrels, or bundles. Some of those bundles, I knew, contained arrows by the thousands: broad-heads with their flared barbs for shredding flesh and sharply pointed piles for driving through mail. I remembered the pale-haired boy at Berwick during Longshanks’ assault when I was ten, caught in the shower of arrows, his brain torn open by a single shaft.
Out of habit, I ran my fingers over the string of my own bow, slung over my back. Its length was much shorter than that of the English bows, but the strength required to pull it was much less and because of that I could turn out more archers quicker. For our closer work, lurking in the woods then springing to attack, it suited our purpose. But the army before us would not be an object of unsuspecting ambush. They would line up before us in the open and from a distance would send those arrows and blacken the very sky with them. The bow that had so faithfully served me on Arran, at Perth and Roxburgh seemed an insignificant tool in light of what lay before me.
“How many, would you say?” Sir Robert Keith, whom the king had appointed as Marischal of Scotland, crouched beside me. His question brought my heart to a halt. Keith was more than twice my age. He had known my father and known him well. The years had not soured him as happens to some older men, who become cynical, languid or stubborn. On the contrary, he was open-minded, pensive at times and, although less fleet, as strong as many of my archers not past their twenties. Being of noble lineage, he was to command the cavalry. As a horseman, he was the most excellent I
had ever known. His horses were not only his servants, but also his guarded treasures. He looked to the nails in their shoes himself, kept his farrier always at his side and his horse groom just a step more behind. Our horses were tethered fifty feet away on the southern side of a long, wooded ridgeline where we had huddled the night, waiting for the sun to chase away the half-darkness of midsummer so that we could take inventory of our opposition and their strength in numbers.
On my other side, Gil de la Haye sniffed. “Two thousand mounted knights. Maybe more. Ten times that in archers and footsoldiers.”
I nodded in affirmation. Keith scooted along the ground and sank down behind a tree. He drew a hand over his face and pulled down on his beard so that his mouth hung open.
“What a slaughter of man and beast we will see,” he prophesied. Finally, his hand slipped down to his throat and he looked up at the canopy of leaves overhead, undisturbed by wind. “Heaven help us all.”
“I would not leave it to heaven,” I said, “but to King Robert. And he would say that we shall have to help ourselves.” I continued to watch the English army as they stirred from their places to gather into lumpy columns. Their commanders shouted tersely, angrily. It took a long time for them to seek out their marching positions and assemble into columns, something which, by now, should have come as naturally to them as a blind man moving about his own home.
Edward of England believed in the power of numbers. But when it came to fighting, numbers were also a burden. The giant Goliath had been no match for David with his little stones. The English army was so cumbersome that they had lost the ability to move with speed. They were late getting here. Weary to the bone. Short on time. Their bellies were empty, their throats were dry and they hated the land they walked upon. I wagered they would not have dallied there at the port if they had not been in dire need of those supplies. They could not go on without them. Edward of Caernarvon had bitten off more than he could swallow in bringing such a vast horde so impossibly far. His ambition had exacted its toll. We had suffered for wanting our land back and Edward of Caernarvon should suffer for trying to wrangle it once again from us.
We could only hope that our disadvantage in numbers had spawned enough ingenuity in us to make the difference. Robert had more than a few stones in his pocket and a good aim to tip the scales.
“Can you tell by their standards who is with them?” Keith asked, rejoining us. “Lancaster? Pembroke? It’s all a blur of color to me from this distance. They say the eyes are the first to go from age.”
“Truly? I heard that was the second,” Gil jested.
“Oh, a lie,” Keith said, “I assure you. But who do you see?”
“Aside from the king’s standard on the oxcart to the front, I can’t tell from here either. Not worth the risk of finding out. This time let curiosity yield to caution.”
“I should rather like to know,” Keith mused, grinning, “whose head I have the chance to cut off, that’s all. Some English I hate more than others.”
“Time to go back now, then?” Gil prodded, already sliding down the short hillside toward the horses.
“Don’t like being here?” I teased.
He stopped and pounded the dust from his surcoat. “The three best Scottish soldiers against thirty thousand English?” His thin lips twisted into and out of a smile. “Wouldn’t be fair to them, I say. So let’s go back to Stirling and at least play by the rules, aye?”
“Aye. Back to Stirling. ‘Though I don’t know how fair a fight it will be.”
Bannockburn – June 22nd of June, 1314
It was a hard day’s ride under a hot sun that threw our mounts into a thick lather, but there was no threat of the English army being on our tails by the time we arrived. As we neared the vacant hamlet of Bannock, lying on the south side of the meandering stream which began up in the hills and wound its way sluggishly downward and across the peat bogs and marshes before spitting out into the Forth, the men of the Scottish pickets hailed us. At the burn, we turned our horses upstream and made way toward the place where the Roman road dipped into and crossed the murky water. There I found King Robert, leading the reins of his low-slung pony, as he walked through a milling of soldiers, who were hefting piles of sod and long sticks in their arms.
He raised his hand as he saw me, Gil and Keith and beckoned us to him. We dismounted and bowed our heads once as we moved toward him. Robert took no heed of our gesture, instead dropping the reins of his pony and darting toward a trio of soldiers.
“Iver, Gram... not so heavy they cave in. You understand?” Robert had spent the months since spring not only scheming and plotting, but learning the names of the soldiers as they slogged in from various parts of Scotland. He drank with them and shared stories with them as they sat around their cookfires at night. The familiarity not only allowed him to win their allegiance, but it also gave him license to criticize when the moment called for it. He strode up to one of the soldiers, who was barely able to peek over the thin mats of layered sod cradled in his bare, grubby arms. Then he plucked a stout branch from one of the other men’s loads. “This one – it’s too big. And this, John, it is too green and will bend before it breaks. The green will work if it is small enough, but any larger pieces must be well dried out, brittle, understand? I want the English to fall like boulders. See their horses’ legs snap like kindling. I want to watch those bleeding armored knights flounder like pregnant cows tipped over, while the lines behind them rush forward and fall on top of them.”
“My lord?” John’s face, deeply scarred from a pox, became ten shades of red all at once. He blinked repeatedly as rivulets of perspiration streamed down his temples and into his eyes. “We’re working as fast as we can. And we hadn’t enough of these things for all the pots.”
John held out an object, cast from iron and with four pointed spikes of equal length.
“That ‘thing’ is a caltrop, lad. Its sole purpose is to maim horses, which will then be of no use and worse than dead. The screaming wounded animals will serve as barriers to those behind them. Hardly a means of fighting fairly, but the purpose of war is to win, isn’t it? Now do you want the whole English cavalry to come bounding over your traps without missing a stride? If you’ve not enough caltrops, then litter them with jagged stones or line them with pointed sticks. Whatever does the trick. You will wish you hadn’t compromised when the first lance pricks a hole in your brain or arrows pierce your chest so that you leak blood like seawater through a fishing net. Don’t bumble now. Figure it out. And if you have any doubts test the cover yourselves. I’d sooner sacrifice one of you to a broken leg than to lose an entire schiltron to a wall of English cavalry.”
The three soldiers exchanged blank glances, none of them willing to vault up and down on a flimsy pile of grass and twigs laid over a hole in the ground to see if it would hold them up. Then in shrugging acceptance they shuffled on toward the pots, now completely dug and being covered over artfully to conceal their exact whereabouts. From a distance, it was near to impossible to tell the ground had been disturbed at all on either side of the Roman road nearer to Stirling.
“Sire?” I swallowed, not wanting to share the news.
Absorbed in overseeing his vast project, it took a moment for Robert to shake his thoughts and give me his full attention.
“The barricades?” Robert inquired, panicked.
“Done days ago,” I assured him.
Before he asked for my report, he thumped a fist on my shoulder. “James, someone came asking to join you, but damn if I can remember who or from where. It will come. Give a moment.”
He screwed his eyes shut in thought. I glanced at Gil and Keith, who both nodded for me to go on.
“It will wait, m’lord. Our report first. You’ll want to hear it.”
His eyes flew open. “Ah! Aye, do. You all look a wee bit grim, though. Should I hear?”
Although Robert could bound lighthearted into even the darkest of moments, I could not for once reflect his outlo
ok. “I wish I did not have to tell. They are over thirty thousand. A tenth of that is cavalry, heavy cavalry. More banners than I have ever seen in all my life. Some, I would guess, from faraway places. They have plucked up half of Wales to wield their bows. The wagon train stretched out beyond the horizon. Miles.”
“Many,” he said to himself. A grin of amusement played over his lips. “I should have sent my brother Edward along with you to see for himself. Ah, but what use now to rub his nose in his own shit pile? He’ll smell the English soon enough.”
For a good while he said nothing, just turned to watch the soldiers as they bent over their holes in the earth, laying the long branches across them that had been taken from deep in Torwood many weeks ago for this very purpose. The work, although tedious at times, had kept the soldiers from falling idle and turning against each other, as might have happened in the face of bringing together so many traditional enemies in one place under one premise. When they had not been felling trees, gathering branches, shoveling up sod or clawing at the earth, they had been drilled rigorously in arms and archery, often by me. The movements of each schiltron had been practiced to unthinking exactness, planned out like a party dance. Robert had kept their faith by encouraging them all on while I, Gil, Edward, Randolph and Keith demanded effort and precision of them, shouting till our throats were raw and our chests aching. He shook his head helplessly as one of the soldiers who had been carrying the wood collapsed. Someone hurried to him with a bucket of water and doused the man while he lay on the ground, twitching.
“The heat,” he said. “Getting to them. Long days. Hard work. But it must be done. Should have been done by now. A blessing, I suppose, that the English have been in no hurry. But whether they get here by the set date or not... it will not matter.” Suddenly he turned to me, his face clear of worry and the dark circles that had haunted beneath his eyes all the last year gone for a change. “This is fate, good James. God cursed me with that bastard Edward for a brother so it would all come to this. Battle. Scot against Sassenach – face to face. If He had wanted it to be easy for us, He’d have kept King Edward at Windsor. We’re as ready as we are ever damn well going to be. I say let them come. Let them test the faith of Scotland and the love of her people for their land and their freedom. I have no fear of whatever may befall us. I am ready, James. Are you?”
Worth Dying For (The Bruce Trilogy) Page 27
