The Crown in the Heather (The Bruce Trilogy)

by Sasson, N. Gemini

  “Gave up your lass? The pretty redhead?”

  I sighed. “Ah, Aithne...” When I returned from Perth with him five years ago, she was the first person I sought out. I couldn’t do without her. I even thought to marry her, if only to keep her to myself. But my father would not hear of it – ‘not worthy of a man who would one day be the Earl of Carrick’, he said – and I was often gone with Grandfather then. I’d found her attentions hard to keep. My brother Edward, two years younger, lunged at the opportunity during one of my absences. He flattered her. Gave her gifts. And in the end, he took her to bed, tired of her, then moved on to another conquest. I begrudged Aithne nothing, for our romance had long since faded and Edward was quickly becoming notorious for his fleeting trysts. He already had three bastards to his tally – and not yet nineteen years old. I leaned deeper into the window. The first rays of sun in several days pried through the clouds to brighten the land below. After a winter of long, cold nights, the hills were flushed with a splendid green where not three days before they had been the color dun. I almost remarked on the sight to Grandfather, but I doubt he could have seen. “Married a man named Gilbert. Lives on Loch Doon. They have a son, I hear.”

  “You?”

  “None yet.”

  “Yet.” He nodded faintly and closed his eyes. “B-b-balliol?”

  “A pathetic king, just as we all knew he would be. But he’s in trouble with Longshanks already. Chafed too much at being yanked about. Finally spoke his mind and was promptly chastised for it, to put it lightly. Then the French – God bless King Phillip – declared war on England when Longshanks refused to pay homage for his lands there. He was set to sail for France when the Welsh were gnawing at his backside and he rushed there instead. They’ll keep him busy awhile. As for Balliol... I’d cheer him on if I didn’t realize all he did was invite Longshanks to march here and trample on us again. Bloody fool. If he thinks...”

  He slept peacefully. His breath was faint. The tremors gone. His skin the color of cold ashes.

  I gazed out the window, smelled the rain and earth mingling on the cool breeze. For a long time, I sat there with him, holding his hand, wishing for one more hour, one more day to be with him, to talk, to tell him of Isabella and so many more of the things that filled my life.

  When I looked again, he was no longer breathing.

  Grandfather, pray I may one day have but a speck of your courage in the presence of my enemies, a sliver of your grace toward my fellow men. You carried me as far as you could and because of that I shall never stand alone.

  Ch. 2

  Robert the Bruce – Turnberry, 1296

  The wind gusted, howled as it blasted into the mouth of the sea cave above which Turnberry Castle perched, and then quickly fell away to a plaintive moan.

  I traced a numb finger along the feather and felt the prick of its stiff edge. Lifting the arrow, I stared down its shaft: dead straight and crafted from the finest ash. The leather wrist brace, stiff from the winter cold, crinkled as I curled my palm inward and nocked the arrow. Wind roared in my ears. My hands stung. I raised the bow and pulled back hard on the string until it cut down the length of my cheek. Squinting one eye, I aimed slightly to the left of my mark. The pale gold light of a winter sunset reflected off the sea in broken flashes. I blinked away momentary blindness and focused again on the target: a sack of grain propped against an overturned rowing boat. Corn had spilled from a rip in the sack when my first arrow – the only one to come close – snagged its cloth. A scattering of yellow grain flecked the dark gray shingle of the ragged shoreline around it.

  I let out a sigh. Half a clutch of arrows already dispatched and not one had yet found its mark.

  Beyond the abandoned boat and the torn sack, the black mouth of the sea cave gaped. Clamorous kittiwakes dipped beneath its high opening and claimed refuge from the weather in scattered nooks within. The hulking fortress of Turnberry sat on a long arm of land that reached out into the sea. When it was built a hundred years ago, a tunnel had been hewn through the rocky earth beneath it down to the cave, so if the castle was ever laid siege to supplies could be brought in by sea. In all that time, it had not fallen from my family’s possession, to either rivals or foreigners. Likely, it never would.

  How many times as a lad had I scrambled up and down these cliffs, hunted among the tidal pools for shells curved like rams’ horns, or plied these relentless waters in a sailing boat with Grandfather barking at my shoulder? Although remote, Turnberry was a fine place: a safe haven where I and my many brothers and sisters had grown up. Soon, my first child would be born here in the very same bed in which my mother, Marjorie of Carrick, had given birth to me. God willing, Isabella and I would have many more. But childbirth... there was danger in it for the unborn child as well as the woman.

  A rusty brown crab skittered from beneath a flattened branch of seaweed and I pulled a foot back to allow it past. Hours ago, noon perhaps, I had descended a trail further south along the shore and come to this small, secluded cove to wait out the arrival of our child. For two days now, Isabella had suffered through this labor. In between tides of pain, the air punctuated by her screams, she succumbed to bouts of exhaustion. As if I could somehow protect or help her, I had stood guard outside her door. Then, a faint groan leaked from the room.

  I had bolted upright and gripped the door latch. The inhuman sound rose sharply to a keening. I burst in, fearing the worst. But Isabella, merely frustrated at the fruitlessness of her efforts, turned her tearful face from me. The midwife flailed her arms and ordered me gone, saying that my fretting was of no help. For another hour I leaned with my back against the door, but every wail or mumble from within only distressed me more.

  So finally, I had come here, away from servants’ eyes filled with nervous pity, with a borrowed bow and a handful of arrows to distract myself. With a weapon in my hands I felt some control. Or perhaps it was purpose? But the comfort such objects usually provided were useless to me now. However strong or skilled I thought myself, I was utterly powerless to ease the torment of my beloved Isabella.

  I took aim again and eased the bowstring back further. Its tension against my bloodless fingers sang out for release. I pulled frigid air into my lungs and held it. My heart pounded against my ribs. This time...

  “Lord Robert! Lord Robert!”

  Startled, I exhaled sharply. My fingers loosed their grip on the string. The arrow hissed across the stave, curving right, and smacked into a rock at the cliff’s base, not ten paces from me. The splintered shaft plunged into a shallow tidal pool with a tiny ‘plop’. Still clutching my bow, I looked skyward, toward the screeching voice, where terns cut through a sullen sky, their tails streaming behind like double-pointed pennons.

  A face, eyes wide with panic, and then a small, beckoning hand appeared at the top of the sea cliff. More calmly, the girl said, “You must come at once, my lord.”

  I could barely hear her above the wind whistling through the crevices of rock and the waves slapping against the shore. “The child?” I shouted.

  Isabella’s chambermaid – a reed of a lass of twelve or thirteen whose name I could never recall – went down on her knees and, clinging to a clump of yellowed grass, dangled over the edge to peer at me beseechingly. A thick, black rope of hair swung from over her shoulder. “A girl.”

  “Is she hale?”

  She nodded, a feeble smile flitting over her mouth. “Aye. Loud and hungry, as well.”

  I nodded, feeling the buoyancy of relief. God be blessed. A healthy daughter. That was good. Very good. “And my wife?”

  The girl frowned. “The Lady Isabella... she...” Her voice thinned to the strained pitch of one fraught with concern. “You must hasten, my lord.”

  For a moment I stared at her, my mind suddenly gone empty. A strange heaviness filled my heart and trickled into the pit of my stomach, anchoring me where I stood.

  “My lord,” the girl begged again, “please, hasten.”

  I did not
ask why the urgency. Some things need not be asked. Some things are better left unknown. Some... should never happen at all.

  A stiff breeze tore at my woolen cloak. From where I stood, there was no way to the cave except by boat. To go back to the trail which had brought me here would take too long. I would have to go up, through the staggered footholds of the cliffs. I pushed my stave away, letting it fall to the ground with a clatter, and leapt onto a boulder, from which I began the precarious climb upward.

  The door of Isabella’s chamber swung open to darkness. A murmur of instruction came from somewhere inside. Isabella’s chambermaid nodded and flew back down the stairs. I reached for the doorframe, but a splinter pricked my fingertip and I drew my hand back. Gradually, shapes took form. Thin slats of light shone duskily through closed shutters. My eyes fell first on a milk-skinned young Orkney woman: Ljot, the wet nurse. Married to a local fisherman, she had already birthed six, each little more than a year apart and all girls – the last of which had died in the cradle a fortnight ago.

  The wide neck of Ljot’s tunic gaped, exposing a plump, ivory breast. At her teat an infant fed greedily, a downy tuft of yellow hair crowning her tiny head. My daughter. Ljot smiled at me, seductively almost, then shifted the babe to her other breast, taking time before she reached to cover herself.

  My eyes swept toward the great four-postered bed across the room. On the far side, the old midwife, Alice, wiped delicately at Isabella’s white brow with a cloth. And nearer to me, at the foot of her bed, Father Malachi... performing last rites.

  “Dear God in heaven,” I uttered. “No, please, no.”

  The priest daubed the soles of Isabella’s feet with holy oil as he blessed her soul to heaven’s keeping. I drifted past him, the iron tang of blood filling my nose and mouth. A great blotch of red-brown stained the sheets on which she lay. Over her bloated belly and bare legs someone had draped a blanket in modesty. Her shift, wet with the slickness of birth, clung to her full breasts in dark, sodden wrinkles.

  Stunned, I knelt beside her and took her hand, still warm, in mine. Sweat glistened like a fine sheen of hoarfrost upon her cheeks. The only color in her face was a mask of red encircling closed eyes. Her waist-length hair, once fair and shining, lay across her pillow in twisted, lackluster strands. I stroked her fingers, even as I sensed them stiffening, and bent my head to my forearm.

  My Isabella, she cannot be... No, no, it isn’t possible. This is not right. Did her eyelids not flutter just now? Her chest rise in the slightest of breaths? Was that twitch beneath my fingertips not the faint pulse of blood streaming through her veins?

  A wail of lament ripped from my gut, but I clenched my jaw fiercely, trapping the knife of pain in my throat. My hands began to tremble, then my arms and shoulders, until soon my whole body shook uncontrollably.

  “Marjorie,” came a hoarse whisper.

  A long moment later, I swallowed back the hard knot in my throat and looked up through bleary eyes. “What?”

  “Marjorie, my lord,” Alice murmured, a sorrowful smile on her thin lips. “Lady Isabella’s last wish was that you should name the child Marjorie – after your mother.”

  With quivering fingers, I pushed away tears. But like a fresh cut doused with vinegar, their sting remained.

  “If...” My voice cracked with grief. “If that was her wish.” I glanced at the tiny babe swaddled tightly in the curve of Ljot’s arms.

  Father Malachi touched my shoulder. “The godparents should be summoned, my lord. If I remember, you chose your oldest brother, Edward. And your sister... Mary, was it? I will send to Lochmaben for them. We can perform the christening as soon as they arrive.”

  Christening? How could I take joy in the baptism of a child in the same week I was to bury my wife? More often, it was the mother who lived and the child who died, as Ljot’s did. If only this babe had –

  God forgive me. How can I even think such wickedness?

  Then I heard the slurp and grunt of my daughter’s vigorous suckling and soon her bittersweet cries rent the air.

  “Marjorie,” I repeated.

  Ch. 3

  James Douglas – Berwick, 1296

  “Afraid James?” my father asked.

  I gazed up at him through the veil of mist that clung to my eyelashes. He was not tall, but I had to crane my neck to look up at him, for I was small for my ten years. A stiff March wind scoured my cheeks and tangled my hair into a hopeless knot. I shook my head and looked back at the long horde snaking its way along the Tweed toward frantic Berwick. Above, leaden clouds scudded on winter’s final winds.

  “Perhaps you should be.” Father kneaded stiffly at my bone-thin shoulder and braced his other hand, the knuckles crisscrossed with jagged white scars, against the rough stone of the battlements. As he turned to survey the chaos erupting below the castle walls, the metal chape of his scabbard scraped the stones.

  Father’s dark eyes reflected a brooding sky. The two crevices that cut across his forehead furrowed themselves even deeper. Usually, he said whatever was on his mind, frankly, sometimes brutally, but this time he held his tongue.

  With a tattered sleeve, I wiped at the endless trickle that ran from my nose. “Are you?” I softly pried.

  His lips twisted into a wry half-smile. He leaned against me, the links of his mail chafing me through my linen shirt, and put his mouth close to my ear, breathing cold words into the cold air.

  “A little fear is a good thing. Without it, a man will meet the devil all too soon.”

  He lifted a finger, the tip of it missing from some long ago skirmish. “King Edward’s standard. See it yon? He crushed the Welsh under his heel and means to do the same with us. What say you, James? Shall we throw open our gates and fall to our knees before him? Behold the mighty Longshanks!” He swept his hand across the horizon, his voice growing louder. “Master of man and all living creatures. What a fool the sun is not to shine on his glory. Ah, there! A breach in the clouds.”

  I could see nothing but gray sky above and below it, sprawling out over the gaping valley, the world to come.

  Father had said the English king would come. England alone was not enough for a man like Longshanks – he would have France and Scotland, too. But what a man of his riches would want of us Scots, wretched lot that we were, was beyond mystery.

  Along the sluggish Tweed, the black column crawled... closer, ever closer. Longshanks rode at their front – thirty-five thousand men in all, I later heard. There were so many. So very many. By midmorning they had surrounded Berwick, where my father, Sir William Douglas, was governor. Berwick, a port town on the Scottish border, became that day a sinking island amidst a sea of glimmering blades and polished armor.

  To my left on the battlements an archer counted his clutch, then counted it again and pressed a quivering arrow to the waxed string of his bow. Sweat poured from his hairline in spite of the chill air. He held his breath and declared, “Mother of God... we’re dead. All of us.”

  The look he gave me was one I shall never forget, for all my days. A look of hope destroyed. Of memories given up to ashes. You learn to know that look – the soulless pupils cast heavenward, the clenched jaw, the tendons on the neck stretched taut. It touched a raw place inside of me, as if my heart had been carved from my chest and laid bare to the biting wind of winter. I looked away. I was not strong enough, not yet, to turn my fear into anger and my anger into purpose.

  The wide eyes of the archer bored into my soul and peeled away my false courage. I realized then, as I know full well now, what the English had come for. What they would take from us was not measured in gold coin, but in hopes and dreams... and lives.

  How suddenly everything can change. In a day or a moment, all innocence can be swept away like dust motes banished into oblivion by a straw broom.

  “To your room, James. Hasten,” my father urged as he beckoned one of his lieutenants close. He pulled from his belt the small hunting knife he always kept there. “May heaven preserve at le
ast one of us to remember this day.”

  He ruffled my hair. I looked down at the worn leather binding of the handle and closed my fingers around it as archers brushed past and scurried to their positions along the wall. When I looked up again, Father was gone, his voice tangled in the terrible din with a thousand others.

  I did not go as I was bid to. Fright and curiosity kept me on the battlements. Around me, grown men made the sign of the cross, clamped their eyelids shut and muttered their prayers. On the road just outside town, the countryfolk shrieked and cried out for God’s mercy. They poured through the gates, seeking sanctuary from the approaching swarm. Our soldiers poked at them with spear tips and struggled to clear the way to close the only entrance to town. Then the gates groaned shut, leaving unfortunate dozens hammering at them with bare hands until their fingers were bloody with splinters.

  The citizens of Berwick dangled from the timber palisades, taunting the English. Inside the walls, womenfolk hooked their wailing bairns by the sleeve and dragged them inside their homes. The boom of bolted doors echoed like thunder across an open valley. Baskets, bundles and pots were dropped in the streets as the people fled for safety. A mother called to her fair-haired son from a doorway. He ran toward her. The sky began to rain with arrows, whistling in warning before they pierced their mortal marks with a twang. A shaft struck the boy in the skull with such force that his feet flew out from under him.

  I crouched behind one of the crenels, shaking like a birch limb in a strong wind. Some time passed before I could call upon my courage to peer over the wall again.

  Orange flames with tails of smoke arced through the sky. If not for the mist that had dampened roofs earlier that day, the whole town would have erupted like tinder. It went on for hours like that – the screams and moans, the smell of smoke and blood, my father pacing the wall walk then flying down the stairs into the castle and emerging above again to bark orders.