The Crown in the Heather (The Bruce Trilogy)

by Sasson, N. Gemini

  Argumentative as ever... and never pleased with second helpings. “Are you saying you want none of this?”

  Edward hesitated. His hands swept wide. “I’m trying to make things clear, Robert. Not muddy. Scotland does not need another throne left vacant. It only invites contention and opportunists. And I have no intention of taking part in your brawl and getting nothing but scraps.”

  “Scraps are what we have had thus far, brother. This will be a fight in the name of all Bruces – the rightful heirs. You, me, Alexander, Nigel, Thomas. I would not treat you thus, Edward.”

  “Good, because I don’t take kindly to being maltreated.”

  He meant it even more than his words conveyed. Edward resented being born second. The problem with Edward was not in garnering his support for the quest. It was in gratifying him afterwards.

  Rain began to fall, not in a fine mist, but heavy and hard as it does in April, as if the clouds had suddenly wearied of their burden and surrendered to it. Nigel and Thomas scrambled for their horses, but Edward and I just stood there face to face, the rain slashing at our faces like cold steel. He looked away for a long moment as our younger brothers sped off, back toward the castle.

  Finally, he nodded. “Better the brother of a king,” he mused, “than a mere earl. I only pray I do not die in the attempt. It would be a pity to waste such talents as mine.”

  “I daresay you will never be mistaken for being humble.”

  He smiled broadly, raindrops running in little rivulets between the bristles of his unshaven face. “Humble is merely knowing how to hide the truth. Lying to oneself, in effect. I am what I am and in that I am honest... as I trust you are being. Now, tell me – if you have no sons yourself, who will come after you?”

  “You drive a hard bargain, Edward.”

  “Make up your mind. I’d like to get out of this rain.”

  “You will.” I braced my hands firmly upon both of his shoulders. “I swear to it. Not because I want to appease you. Because I know you would never let anyone wrest anything from you. You would surrender the clothes on your back and your last crumb of bannock before you’d allow the slightest scratch in your armor of pride. In that, I trust Scotland is secure.”

  No sooner had he clasped my hand than he was upon his horse and flying over ground back to a roof and fire. I watched the hooves of his horse slapping showers of water behind them as they drove through the gray rain.

  It was not until I rode through the gates of grim Lochmaben that I felt the chill invade my flesh. Unhurried, I returned my horse to the stables and entered into the hall where my brothers and little sister Mary waited. Edward wore a sardonic smile, but the rest were entirely somber.

  Mary came to me and took my hands. Her fingers were cold. Her eyes, red.

  “He’s dying,” she whispered.

  “All hail,” Edward said with a bow, “our soon-to-be new Lord of Annandale: Fair Robert.”

  When I entered my father’s chamber for the second time upon my return, the odor of rotting flesh stung inside my nose. His stone-still form beneath his coverings looked like a corpse upon its funeral bier. If not for the occasional flickering of his eyelashes, he might well have been mistaken for dead.

  As I reached his bedside and made the sign of the cross, he turned his face to me.

  “A priest?” he croaked.

  “Nigel has already sent for one.”

  He labored to breathe. His malady had devoured his insides. Like many who had journeyed to the Holy Land, he had harbored the leprosy until its later manifestation. While on Crusade with Longshanks, then prince, my father’s friend Adam de Kilconquahar died, leaving behind a wife heavy with child. Her name was Marjorie of Carrick and she first met my father when he returned home and brought her the sorrowful news of her husband’s death. Within the year they had wed and she bore him ten children in all before a fever took her swiftly away one harsh winter. Death was not coming so mercifully to my father. It had haunted him for years like an unseen shadow and finally he gazed at its hideous face in the full light of day.

  That was how he looked as he stared wordlessly at me, mortality meeting death and realizing the strength of its power – his mouth parted to show his loose teeth and pale gums, the flesh on his face lumpy and splotched, one eye long since swollen shut. God spare me that I should ever suffer such infirmity for such a length as he, or such gruesomeness that I must hide from the world.

  With fingers like gnarled twigs attached to his swollen stump of a hand, he reached for a cup on the table next to his bed. His numb fingertips grazed it as it skidded out of reach and tottered on the table’s edge.

  “The drink, son. Give me the drink. It will ease the pain.”

  I raised my arm to reach for it and then stopped. I took a step backward and watched him writhe as the agony gripped him. His mottled hand, dangling over the edge of the bed, trembled violently.

  “Give it to me,” he commanded in a raspy, failing voice.

  I shook my head. “Give me your blessing first.”

  “I told you – the marriage is well done. Now, give it to me... or curse you.”

  “I want your blessing to claim what is rightfully mine.”

  “Fool to think you can so easily take or keep it.”

  I went to the door and silently slid the bar across to persuade him. “Your blessing. You can die in peace... or in agony.”

  Even on the precipice of death, he nurtured no remorse, sought no penitence, desired no salvation. Naught but his own comfort mattered to him.

  He shook from head to toe, his breath catching with each spasm. Finally, he curled two of his fingers at me and said over his drooping lip, “Then come be blessed.”

  I knelt at his side. He laid the club of his hand on top of my head. “For all you endeavor to gain – I bless you, son. Let it be not in vain... as my life has been.”

  His hand slipped away. Quickly, I lifted his head and let him drink. Most of the liquid spilled from the side of his mouth. He coughed and swallowed, then mumbled something, which I took to be a request for more. Slowly, the tremors subsided.

  When the cup was empty, I stood and clenched it in my hands. I fought the tear that sprang to my eye.

  “I would have given it to you anyway,” I uttered, staring into the cup. “Good God, I would have run through a rain of arrows to save your fading bones... and all for only your blessing.”

  I heard him breathe once more – deeply, peacefully.

  It was seven days before we laid my father, Robert Bruce, fifth of that name before me, to rest, without his last rites. The local priest that Nigel had gone to fetch had refused to come to Father’s bedside or preside over the funeral of a leper, but another was finally found who, although even less ardent about performing such a task, was more easily reminded of who filled his collection box.

  The body of Robert, Lord of Annandale, lay wrapped in a plain white shroud in a coffin of lead. Upon the coffin was draped a pall of black and centered there in tight threads of gold embroidery was the lion of Bruce: claws outstretched, its mouth wide open in a roar of dominion.

  Ch. 17

  Robert the Bruce – Selkirk Forest, 1304

  I awoke to the scent of pines and hay. Next to where I had slept, sweet woodruff bloomed in abundance. Beads of morning dew clung to its whorls of leaves beneath airy white petals. I reached out and tipped a leaf so the dew dripped onto the ground. The generous rains of April had lately been followed by warmth and sunshine more like July than spring. I could have lain there all day, staring up at the blue-green boughs above me where a golden-eyed, horned owl roosted... except for Gerald stooping over me, his stale morning breath suffocating my daydreams. He inclined his head toward the edge of camp, where my brother Edward was washing his hands in a stream.

  I pulled on my boots while Sir John Segrave, Longshanks’ man, watched me. I sauntered toward a tree nearby, undid the cord on my hose and relieved myself. My brother, Edward, approached me. His mare, sipping f
rom the cool brook, trailed her reins along the stony shore.

  “Did you find him?” I knelt at water’s edge to rinse yesterday’s dirt from my face.

  “Wallace? Ah, well, no...” he revealed with a sly grin. “But he did find me. Drove a spear into the trunk of an oak tree not half a foot from my head. Sweet Jesus, but I thought my next heartbeat would be my last.”

  “And you told him?”

  “Aye – follow the Ettrick Water. Keep to the hills. Then west to the Nith and on to Ayr, where a ship will carry him to France.” Edward rubbed at his beard pensively. “If Segrave suspects anything, Robert... you know?”

  “Aye, treason.My head on the block. Yours as well.” I stood up and with the corner of my cloak wiped the water from my chin. “But how else am I to play the part of the faithful dog than to ‘follow’ orders? I will just be the hound that never quite catches the hare. As for Segrave – in with Neville since the start. A tangle of snakes. Cover your tracks well, when he is about. Better yet, leave none.”

  Edward unslung the short bow from his back and removed the bowstring, then coiled it around his fingers. “I thought it was particularly clever of you to omit the windlass when that devil, Longshanks, ordered you to forward the siege engine to Stirling.”

  “Omit? Misplaced by careless sailors at the port, that is all. None of it my doing.” I winked at him, then plucked a twig from the ground, frayed the end of it and picked at my teeth.

  We stood there in the dampness of the lifting mist, going about our morning business as if it were any other uneventful day. I itched to ask my brother about his morning – what words he might have said to Wallace and Wallace to him – but I knew it would have to wait. Before the day was over there would be more than enough cause for Segrave to watch us more closely in the future. Silently, we watched as a scout rode into camp, dismounted and immediately made way, not to me, but to Segrave.

  The scout poured out a river of information as Segrave received the news stoically. Segrave glanced at us, then uttered a few words to his men. They kicked dirt on their cooking fires as they shoveled down handfuls of cold porridge and scooped up their weapons in haste.

  Edward gathered up his mare’s reins and scratched at her pink nose. “The executioner comes.”

  Segrave strolled toward us, hands clasped behind his back. Always, he wore the expression of a fox – the small, scrutinizing eyes, the long, pinched nose.

  “Wallace was seen fleeing to the southwest less than an hour past,” he said.

  I feigned surprise. “Are you certain it was Wallace?”

  “Completely,” Segrave acknowledged. “He is unmistakable: they say he is a giant among men who goes about bare-legged and bare-armed and wears his hair loose and wild like a lion’s mane. Who else fits that description?”

  “Many a Scot would,” I mused, then added, “but, if you say without a doubt it is him –”

  “How far is he now from us?” Edward’s forehead wrinkled with the appearance of genuine interest. My brother was a fine actor – no doubt he used the skill to flatter his women and woo his way into their beds. So many times as a lad he had turned the blame on Nigel or Thomas when he played mischief and our mother had never been the wiser to him.

  “Miles. Sir Edward... the sentry says you were off long before dawn this morning. Where did you go?”

  “I was near to starving, Sir John,” Edward answered. “What do you think I was doing? Plotting your murder with rebels?”

  A moment hung suspended as Segrave’s smooth, hollowed cheeks sucked in further. Then Edward reached for the back of his mare’s saddle and untied the game he had collected. He swung two hares and a plump, wild goose by their feet.

  “All I had time for, really. These parts have been picked over.”

  Segrave suppressed a sneer. “Save them for later. We’ve a rebel to hunt now.”

  Edward smiled and tipped his head of chestnut waves in something of a nod.

  “Gerald, at once!” I called. “Saddle my horse. We’re riding out.”

  As Segrave went to gather up his arms and don his mail, Edward draped an arm about me.

  “Thank Wallace for filling your belly when you sit down to eat tonight,” he said, pleased with his own resourcefulness. “I never let go a single arrow.”

  We rode all that day and most of the next before Segrave relented. The trees in Selkirk Forest were as thick as hairs on a dog’s back. Segrave was either too obsessed or too stricken with the fear of going back to Longshanks as a failure to realize he may as well have been searching for a single pearl in the whole of the ocean. We picked up Wallace’s trail from where the scout had led us to, but it grew quickly cold. Wallace knew the hills and the forests, knew how to live off the land and become a part of it. If he was ever taken, it would be either by trickery or sheer luck. I prayed that would never come to pass.

  Wallace’s flight should have resurrected hope. But the year was a failing one for Scotland. A year in which self-reliance gave way to self-preservation. When Soulis departed for France to plea for Philip’s allegiance along with a contingent of others, among them Stewart and Umfraville, the guardianship was then turned over to Comyn. A fatal move, because Comyn connived however he could. If bowing to Longshanks would buy him time and keep his lands from being plagued, then that is precisely what he would, and did, do. He bartered for fines over punishment, so that the Scottish nobles could keep their possessions, never mind their pride. But who am I to condemn for such?

  Again, in legions they capitulated. Would nothing ever change? Only Sir William Oliphant at Stirling stood firm. Before Soulis left, he had commanded Oliphant to defend Stirling at all costs and that is exactly what Oliphant tried to do.

  Longshanks had other plans. If Stirling would not surrender of its own free-will, he would raze it to rubble. Preservation, as I had learned, meant setting aside dignity, if only for a while.

  Ch. 18

  James Douglas – Paris, 1304

  The summer father left for Irvine, Hugh and I would sit high on a hill, day after day, watching the kestrels glide and swoop. One morning, our patience was rewarded with the sighting of a vixen. Ears twitching, she loped cat-like through the rustling grass. The short tail of a plump vole dangled from between her teeth. Vigilant, she made her way back to her lair beneath the roots of the yew tree where her kits awaited. Another time, we saw a pine marten stealthily hunt down a red squirrel among the treetops. It stared and crept, closer, closer. Then with a burst of speed, it pounced, clamping its jaws on the squirrel’s neck. With every squeal and squirm of its victim, its teeth pinched deeper and deeper, until finally the furred russet body hung limp from its jaws.

  The road over which we kept vigil stretched across the land, disappearing around a hill to the south where a spur of black rock forced a twist in its path. Every time a traveler appeared in the distance, we raced down the hillside, slapping our hands against the pine trunks to keep from sliding, and waited anxiously to see who it was. We saw many strangers: merchants and soldiers, nobles and beggars, farmers and robbers.

  But we never saw our father again.

  I cannot remember the last words that I shared with him. I do remember him standing on the wall walk of Berwick, his eyes fixed on the horizon, his voice strained yet sharp with commands. I remember him patiently teaching me how to pull a bowstring when I had not half the strength needed. I remember him that final winter stooped over on his bench before a dying hearthfire, head in hands, as Eleanor kneaded his bunched shoulders. Images as strong as if only a moment past.

  Before autumn arrived, I was sent off to the College of Cardinal Lemoine in Paris. No one told me how long I was to stay there or even why I was sent in the first place. For awhile, Lady Eleanor wrote to me. Although her letters were glossed with words of hope, after a time even that trickle gradually ran dry.

  Then, before I had turned thirteen, I received one more letter from my stepmother, delivered by an associate of Bishop Lamberton’s. It s
tated, simply, that my father was dead in the Tower of London. I have no doubt his tongue had cost him his life, for he had no love of England or its wicked king whatsoever. I heard no more from Eleanor after that.

  I had no father now. My stepmother was lost to me. And my brothers and I had been flailed apart and cast like wheat chaff to the wind.

  Of Scotland, I cherished both the sprawling days of summer, when dusk and dawn were one, and the witching darkness of winter, when I would warm my hands by the hearth while song and company wrapped themselves around me like a cloak against the cold. I loved the height and breadth of the mountains and the mysterious depth of the lochs. I marveled at the matrimony of blue-green pines embracing a meadow of yellow-faced daisies; glittering ribbons of shoreline and forests thick with deer; snowy hills and starry skies.

  Among all those things that filled my heart and gave me breath, Paris had none. Seven years had lapsed since I left home. Seven years of wretched solitude, during which I had invented my own means of survival.

  The stars winked faintly from the tiny window at the end of the room I shared with some twenty other students at the College of Cardinal Lemoine. Beneath my threadbare blanket, I curled my fingers around the purse and squeezed. The hard edge of three silver deniers indented my palm through the softened leather. I dug within and pulled one out to run my fingertips over the cross imprinted on it, then tucked it back inside, clutching the pouch to my chest.

  As I rolled over, pain seared through the stripes of broken skin on my back. Ten lashes – the usual punishment. Between each bite of the willow switch, Master Marten had quoted scripture to me: ‘Because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience’.

  I had been late to Master Datini’s Latin lecture. A quarter of an hour, no more. For a reason. Earlier that afternoon, I had been at the fair in the streets leading to Notre Dame Cathedral. A Genoese cloth merchant sidled up to a market stall to inspect a pot of weld, a yellow dye. I edged up to him, my knuckles brushing the leather purse that swung at his hip. Then, he began to haggle, loudly, with the dyer. I drew my hand back into my sleeve, the blade of my short knife cold against my wrist. Only when the crowd erupted in near hysteria did I have my chance again. People jostled forward from alleys to see the annual Procession of the Relic, led by the Bishop of Paris. Sweating bodies pressed in around the stall. A zealous pilgrim dressed in rags bumped the merchant’s elbow. As he bellowed curses at the pilgrim, I looped the strings of his purse in one hand, then slipped my knife across them. Shoving my way through the throng, I had put twenty paces between myself and the Genoese before I heard him accuse the dyer of stealing his money.