by Glen Craney
“And by spring, there will be nothing left to recover. Longshanks will hold every castle from Stirling to Inverness.” After a pensive breath, James revealed his intent. “I leave on the morrow, with or without you.”
“We have haven’t eighty men within the day’s call.”
“I’ll make do with ten.”
Robert caught his arm. “The dampness here has sogged your head.”
James waited for him to remove the hand. “There’s another way to fight the English. Clifford may own the day, but I will own the night.”
He climbed to the bluffs and unexpectedly came face to face with Christiana, who had walked down from the castle after observing their fight. Looking distraught, she held a folded parchment in the fold of her sleeve.
Robert, still on the beach below, waited for her to reveal what was on her mind. “Well, out with it, woman!”
Clutching the letter with its seal broken, Christiana could not look at him. “Your brother Edward says he has a hundred men with arms on Arran. Thomas and Alexander wait in Ulster with two hundred more.”
Robert reacted as if convinced that she had misread a coded message his brothers had sent. “That cannot be all they’ve managed to muster.”
Christiana glanced sharply at James; then, she flung the letter at Robert. “Edward says you must come now, or never.”
Robert shook his head in disbelief as he read the few hastily scribbled lines on the message. “How does he expect me to transport them across the sea?”
Christiana turned aside to hide her tears. Driven to the task by James’s forceful glare, she finally admitted to Robert what she had promised James privately several days ago. “I’ve ordered ten of my galleys up from Doirlinn.”
Her willingness to risk her navy for his cause stunned Robert. He climbed to the bluff and reached for her hands, whispering softly, “Chris, how can I ever repay you?”
She repulsed his attempted embrace. “The ships come with one condition.”
“Name it.”
“Never return to me.”
Before Robert could argue against her decision to deny him her bed, she hurried away. Several steps up the path, she turned back to confront James. “And I have read Homer.”
James realized that she had overheard their shouted argument while she had been walking down from the tower through the mists.
“It was not a woman who set those Greeks upon that journey,” she reminded him. “It was a man’s lust for war and revenge for a wife stolen by another man.” She whipped her cloak across her shoulders and did not look back as she walked away.
A WEEK LATER, AS THEIR SMALL invasion fleet sat at the ready in Whiting Bay, James paced the swaying deck of the lead galley. Below him, the white-capped waves sheltered by the grey cliffs of Holy Isle lapped at the hull with deceptive calm. Fearing the sea would turn violent with the approach of night, he looked up again in exasperation at the crag where Robert had stood fixed for two hours, peering across the Firth of Clyde toward his birthplace at Turnberry. To the south, off the Irish coast on Rathlin Isle, a second small force led by Thomas and Alexander Bruce had been sent orders to sail at dusk, which was now only minutes away.
From his lofty vantage overlooking the bay, Robert called down to him on the ship again. “You are certain the watchmen saw the signal?”
Green from the churn, James braced against the riggings to avoid retching. Behind him, their three hundred volunteers huddled on the row benches for warmth and muttered complaints that they had wasted enough time waiting to launch for the mainland. Most were fast losing faith in this new king. Yet with the other claimants to the throne now dead or firmly under the Plantagenet thumb, their only alternative to Robert’s irresolute rule was English oppression. Lust for revenge, not loyalty to Bruce leadership, had driven most of these refugees to this desperate hour.
Robert peered across the sea again. “I can't see beyond that far bow!”
“Three fires!” James shouted at him. “With the middle extinguished if all is clear! Cuthbert can be trusted! We’ll find the English bedded down when we land!” When that assurance did not move Robert from his rooted stance, James leapt across the gunwale and clambered up the rocks to speed him to the task. “If we don’t go now, your brothers will be left stranded.”
While Robert studied the ten bobbing coffins that Christiana had supplied him, a seal lounging on the rocks began barking at him, as if to mock his indecision. The king shook his head in dismay, rudely reminded that even the lowliest of his subjects afforded him no respect.
Although he would not admit it, James conceded that Robert had good reason to doubt the likelihood of their success. The condition of Christiana’s ships did little to inspire confidence. Unlike the English galleys with their fortified forecastles and keels of bolted timbers, these steep-pitched Highland barks had been clapped together with rusted clinch nails and moss caulking, and their rectangular sails of dun-colored wool were so thread-worn that they appeared on the brink of ripping from their frayed hemp cordage. In truth, the hulls were no better than those of the dugouts that had carried their Norman ancestors to these isles centuries ago. Despite these misgivings, he put up a false bravado and assured Robert, “The Danes reached Ireland in hollowed logs with less ballast than these offer. We’ll easily manage the fifteen miles to Ayrshire.”
With a heavy sigh of resignation, Robert climbed down from his perch and walked to the shore. Relieved that a decision had finally been made, the men raised their oars before he could change his mind. Assisted to the lead galley, Robert glared at the bowsprit crowned with the head of a red dragon. Touching it for good fortune, he ordered Sweenie, “Bless this sailing, monk.”
Sweenie climbed atop James’s shoulders. Lowering his head, he prayed loud enough for all the men to hear: “Lord, you parted the waters for Moses. But we’re not asking for a miracle like that on this night. We’re Scotsmen here. We’ll make our own fate. Just ease the gales a bit and we’ll take it from there.”
Appalled by the blasphemous benediction, Robert stood glaring at the shrugging monk, until James chided him, “You’re damned for eternity anyway. So stop your bellyaching about not getting a High Mass.”
Robert shook his head as he coldly regarded his scruffy band of ill-clad men and questioned how he had been brought so low. But, at long last, he gave a half-hearted signal for the helmsmen to push off, and one by one, the galleys, each limited to a solitary covered lantern to avoid detection, formed a line and bit the water with supple quickness.
Soon the sun fell to the horizon, requiring the armada to keep the moon’s shimmering beam in its sights, remaining just north of its light to avoid detection. The oars slapped the water in a rhythmic beat.
Robert caught James staring mesmerized at the roiling storm clouds passing to the west. He remarked dryly, “I trust the heavenly signs are well met?”
James pointed to Columba’s pulsing star, which had just appeared in the clearing sky. “I was thinking how fortunate I am. The exiled saint never saw his homeland again. Whatever happens, at least I’ll see mine this night.”
AN HOUR INTO THE CROSSING, the Scot pilots could no longer tack by the fires on Arran Isle behind them. The outbound currents had strengthened, insuring that there would be no turning back before the tide reversed in the morning, and the men had abandoned their nervous prattle and now rowed in tense silence. Robert stood uneasily at the bow, shrouded with the stricken look of a condemned man going to his execution.
To raise their spirits, James signaled Sweenie to a task that they had previously conspired. The monk climbed the mast and shouted against the wind:
“Scots, who have with Wallace bled!
Scots, who now with Bruce are led!
Welcome to your gory bed!
Or to victory!”
James slapped Robert’s back. “Now you’ll get your blessing.”
As he sang, Sweenie clung fast to the rigging with his blunt legs flapping like pennons. Th
e men in the rear galleys, taking heart from the little monk’s fearlessness, unleashed a roar of admiration above the crash of waves.
Try as he might, Robert could not suppress a grudging smile at the feat.
James climbed the mast behind Sweenie and chimed in with another verse:
“Now’s the day, and now’s the hour;
See the front of battle lower;
See approach proud Edward’s power
Chains and slavery!”
The Scots rowed faster to the cadence of the ballad that had been sung by the Wallace’s soldiers at Stirling Bridge. Even Edward Bruce, who despised all such acts of frivolity, joined in the chorus:
“What, for Scotland’s king and law,
Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,
Freeman stand, or freeman fall,
Let him on with me!”
When they had finished their song, James slid back down the mast. Finding not a dry eye on the decks, he gripped Robert’s arm to firm his resolve. “Do you know how many are with us this night?”
Robert gave him a dubious glance, as if suspecting he had fallen into one of his infamous dreaming spells. “Three hundred, unless you count the fish. And I wouldn’t put that past you.”
James looked across the galleys to burn each face into his memory. “I’ll wager you ten thousand old men will one day tell their grandsons how they sailed with Bruce and Douglas on this wee sneak back into Scotland.”
TWO HOURS BEFORE DAWN, THE galleys floated in creaking silence toward the mist-shrouded Ayrshire coast. The English had destroyed the old Turnberry lighthouse, forcing the Scots to rely on the instincts of Christiana’s pilots to navigate the dangerous reefs. Despite the roughening of the sea, they maintained good formation, and when they came in danger of grounding, James signaled for the rowing to stop.
He dived into the chilly waters and swam ashore. Finding the dunes unguarded, he whistled the others down the hulls to join him. The shivering men waded in and mustered under the overhanging bluffs. They had gone over the plan a hundred times. Their scout on the mainland, Cuthbert, was not to light the signal fire until Clifford had depleted the garrison for one of his many forays into the countryside. Then, they would follow Cuthbert into the city by the cow gate and attack the sentries in their sleep.
Minutes passed, and then an hour, but Cuthbert did not arrive.
James prepared to reconnoiter Turnberry’s walls when the bluffs suddenly came alive with torches and voices. He held the others in their crouches while he slithered up alone to the headlands for a better look. He was about to tear into Cuthbert for his tardiness when the English cavalry came galloping over the brunt, followed by foot soldiers thrashing at the gorse brush with pikes.
He crawled closer to the castle and saw English scullions tending a large bonfire. He slammed a fist into the sand. Their watchmen on Arran had mistaken a burning refuse pit for the signal. The garrison would still be at full force, and Clifford now had his troopers patrolling the coast for landing parties.
He waited until the last of the horsemen had passed overhead. Then, he slid back down the dunes and reported to Robert: “A fire …”
“And?”
“Not ours.”
Robert stared at him in disbelief. Shuddering with a look of panic, he ordered his brother Edward to recall the galleys. The exhausted men moaned and cursed as they began crawling back toward the water.
James held back. “I won’t go.”
“Percy and Clifford must know we are here,” Robert reminded him. “We’ll be butchered if we stay.”
“And if we go back to Arran, we’ll never keep enough men with us for another invasion. I say we split up and regroup in Galloway.”
Robert studied his men behind him, reminded that they had risked everything to reach this shore. Seeing the desperation in their eyes, he finally agreed to stay. “We’ll scatter in threes and meet up in Glen Trool within the fortnight.”
“I’ll go with you,” Edward said.
Robert shook his head at Edward’s smothering insistence to always be at his side. “We can’t be captured together. Jamie goes with me. And the monk.”
Denied again, Edward sneered at James as he dispersed the other men across the dunes to make the run inland.
Sweenie sent them off with a whispered verse from the ballad that he had sung on the galley. “Welcome to your gory bed, lads. Or to victory.”
ON THEIR THIRD NIGHT OF running from Clifford’s patrols, James, Robert, and Sweenie finally reached the forest around Glen Trool. To avoid leaving tracks, they followed the puddled banks of Loch Moart and eventually came upon a thatched hut that churned smoke from a stone chimney nested with hundreds of jackdaws and puffins. Overgrown with sphagnum and wadded with twigs, the cabin resembled a giant sett formed by badgers. It would have passed for any hunter’s winter outpost except for one remarkable oddity: a maturing hawthorn tree split the roof, evidence that whoever called this place home had long ago given up the pretense of maintaining the border between nature and civilization.
When darkness fell, James ordered Robert to remain behind with Sweenie while he stalked the cabin, hoping to find something to eat. He ran in stealth toward its window and, arriving, looked through the vined aperture. A pot of stew sat boiling over a fire, giving off an aroma nearly buckled his knees. He drew his dagger and cautiously opened the door to the hut.
Tending the hearth was a shrunken crone with thinned white hair drawn severely over the tops of her ulcerated ears and a cob-nosed face that was all creases and moles and hanging skin. Seeing him, the woman did not frighten, but merely arose from her stool and, as if having performed this sacrifice many times, poured a ladle of root soup into a wooden bowl and set it on the table.
James stared at the first food he had seen since the invasion. He couldn’t remember ever having smelled anything with such a heavenly tang, but he declined the offering. “Two men are with me. I can’t eat without them. I see by your circumstances that you haven’t enough for three.”
The old woman ladled two more helpings and set them on the table.
Moved by her generosity, James stuck his head out the door and signaled Robert and Sweenie up from their hiding. They entered warily and stared wide-eyed at the gruel. When the crone nodded them toward the table, Robert and the monk bowed to her and attacked the helpings like wild animals. James paused long enough from his ravenous eating to thank the crone. Yet she persisted in not speaking, and when they were finished eating, she merely removed the licked bowls from the table for washing. After lapping his bowl clean, he tried again to draw her out. “Your name, my lady, so that we might one day repay this kindness?”
At last, she proved that her tongue worked. “There’s nothing ye could do for me, unless ye can raise the dead. I give sustenance to all who come to my door in the hope that some charity might be visited upon our king. None’s heard from him for months. I pray he’s still alive.”
Her earnest prayer heartened James. If the common folk like this woman still supported Robert, he held out hope that they might yet redeem themselves in the eyes of the oppressed and save the kingdom from English domination. “Your prayers have reached God this night,” he told her. “You have just served your liege.”
The crone rushed at him and thumped his head with her ladle. “This is how ye repay me? Festooning me with jests? Get out of me abode!”
Robert stood from the table and tried to calm her. “Good woman—”
The crone turned on him, aiming her kitchen weapon in threat. “When King Robert returns, and I swear by Fillan’s hand he will, he’ll bring a host so great that Edward feckin’ Longshanks, God damn his malformed soul, will run south like a Irish hare in heat!”
Robert gently grasped her shaking hands. “My man here speaks true, good mistress. You have indeed just fed that host … I am the Bruce.”
The old woman squinted to take in his features, spitting a wad of saliva to deny the claim. “I saw young Bruce on
ce in a Glasgow tavern. Served him and his grandfather with tankards, I did. You wouldn’t suffice for his bootlick.” But when Robert reached into his cloak and pulled out the gold brooch with his clan herald, she stared at the talisman and slowly raised her gaze again to his scruffy face again. Eyes bulging, she staggered to her knees. “Forgive me, m’lord.”
Robert raised the woman back to her feet. “I am the one who requires forgiveness. I have left too many of my subjects in such straits. My wife could use a good matron like you.”
The crone blanched. “Ye’ve not heard? … No, how would ye?”
“Heard what?”
The crone’s eyes darted as tried to evade the answer. Finally, she swallowed hard and revealed, “Your queen has been captured. Those traitorous Comyns handed her over to the English six months ago.”
“God help me! My daughter and sisters?”
The crone nodded, her hands shaking from witnessing the king’s outrage. “Scattered off to English prisons.”
James leapt up from his stool. “Another lass was with them.”
The woman ran her fingers through his thick hair, trying to place his face. “Are you the son of the Hardi? The one they call the right hand of the king?”
“Aye.”
She hesitated, until his fearsome glare demanded that she say what more she knew. “Some of the English soldiers were puffering in the village. The Countess of Buchan is being paraded about in a cage to be abused by all who pass.”
James overturned the table in a rage. “Where?”
The woman backed away, frightened by his outburst. “I daren’t know.”
Robert was certain that the woman had just heard a wild, unfounded tale. “Longshanks would never deal with a lady in such base manner.”
James glared darkly at him. “Aye, you’d know well enough!”
Robert’s face drained at the insult. “I’ll not suffer that from—”
