The Battle for Duncragglin (26 page)

The gatekeeper set his lantern down and held a large ring of skeleton keys to the light. “Let me see now….” He swung one key after another around the ring. “Ah, here we are … no, wait … it's this one.”

“Cm on, man, let me in!” Rorie rattled the gate.

“It's hard, Sire, especially with my eyes.” The gatekeeper
fitted key after key into the flat lock before it finally clicked open. He gave the gate a tug.

Rorie shoved it open, the heavy gate screeching on its hinges. He shouldered his way past the gatekeeper, barking orders. “Have the guards fetch the other foreign spies from their cells – that local girl also. Have them brought to the rack room. Keep an eye open for Lord Hesselrigge – he'll be along any minute and will no take kindly to being kept waiting. And get rid of this kitchen master for me.”

As everyone filed past, the gatekeeper raised his hand to catch the kitchen master's attention. “The captives ye want are that way.” He pointed to a side passage. “And this time, go easy with that cleaver of yours. The moaning and groaning I have to listen to when your workers come back is something terrible.”

The kitchen master grunted. Duncan's hidden dagger gently propelled him in the direction the gatekeeper indicated.

The others followed Rorie down a central passage with a heavy stench that made Alex think of open sewers. Low barred openings lined both sides. Shocked, Alex saw pale shrunken faces, eyes pleading, float up behind the bars. Behind each barred opening was a damp, dark little cell too low to stand in and no wider than outstretched arms. Inside, curled-up human forms lay under dirty rags, asleep, or too weak to raise their heads.

They came to a large, ornately carved door. On either side, lanterns flicked. They entered the dark room, and one of Rorie's guards lit the wall torches.

Chains hung from rings mounted in the wall, each ending in a manacle. In the center of the room were three wooden chairs: each straight-backed, solid, and hard-edged; each dangling leather straps. Next was an ominous, long narrow table with large straps in the middle, smaller ones at the ends. It was split in the middle and had a wheel with spokes on one side. There was only one thing it could be: a rack.

Alex thought of Annie, Katie, and Willie, and panic surged in his chest.

“Excellent!” Rorie rubbed his hands together. “Let's get things ready for Lord Hesselrigge.” He adjusted the rack to a smaller setting.

It was not long before the door burst open, crashing against the wall. Two soldiers marched in and stepped to either side, each holding their swords straight up in readiness. A dark-haired man wearing a fur-trimmed blue cloak strode into the room. At his heels was the soldier Rorie had sent to get Hesselrigge, followed by a figure awkwardly springing along in a loose gray cloak.

“M'Lord Hesselrigge.” Rorie made a slight bow. Rorie's soldier-henchmen stiffened to attention, as did the stable master and Don-Dun. “Ye instructed us, m'Lord, to call for ye the moment another foreign spy was apprehended.”

“Indeed I did – good work.” Hesselrigge spoke to Rorie, but his eyes were on Alex. “Are the others being brought?”

“Aye, m'Lord. A guard is retrieving them, except, of course, the one you sent on up ahead.”

Hesselrigge paced, lost in thought. Stopping abruptly, he stared sharply at Alex. “Do ye no recognize me, Alex?”

Surprised he knew his name, Alex shook his head. As much as he had heard of Hesselrigge, he felt sure he had never met him.

“Think hard, think back – or should I say think forward to a time on a beach not far from here, when you met an antique dealer and his son,” Hesselrigge continued.

Alex was puzzled.
Think forward?

The man in the gray cloak spoke up, jiggling his weight from one foot to another. “Think forward – that is good, Sire. That would be when one thought follows the other in a forward lineal progression. Thinking sideways – that would be good too; that would be when one thought does not pick up where another left off, but leaps to one side and picks up somewhere else instead. But how would one think backward? People often speak of others as backward thinkers, but what could it mean?”

Hesselrigge turned to the gray-cloaked man. “It means that, like ye, they are fools.”

A fool!
Alex looked more closely at the gray-cloaked man, who was making a great show of scratching his head, then rubbing his chin with his eyes rolled to the ceiling. Finally, he folded his hands over his head and stared at the floor.

Alex tried hard to remember the features of the professor he'd met on the airplane. It could be him, but the man on the airplane was a serious professor –
this
was a fool.

“I have it,” the fool proclaimed. “Thinking backward is when one thought begins at the same place as another, but instead of progressing forward, works its way back to where the thought came from. That would be much harder than either thinking forward or sideways. Think backward long
enough and ye will find where all thought springs from, which is far better than to find the conclusion of all thought, don't ye think?”

Hesselrigge laughed. “I think ye are a fool – a fool who knows naught of what he says. When I said think forward, I was referring to forward in time from whence he came.”

“What is time, what is place, m'Lord, but a point of view? Perhaps we speak of the same thing, only differently.”

“Ye have no idea of what I speak,” Hesselrigge snapped. “I mean that this lad has traveled back in time.”

“Same place, different time – same time, different place it's all the same to me,” the fool babbled. “I suppose ye, too, have come from a time that has yet to happen, m'Lord?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

“Who's the fool now, m'Lord – the one who thinks one can travel to the origin of all thought, or the one who thinks one can travel to the origin of all time?”

“Be careful who you call a fool, Fool!”

“No offense intended, m'Lord,” the fool hastened to add. “I, too, have come from a time that has yet to happen.”

“Don't ye mock me.” Hesselrigge pointed at him. “And hold that tongue of yours if ye wish to see the morrow.”

A loud rap sounded on the door, and a man burst into the room, clad in an elegant tunic.

“My good knight, Sir James Barr!” Hesselrigge exclaimed. “What brings ye here?”

“My apologies for troubling Your Lordship, but word is in from our spies in the countryside,” Sir James announced breathlessly. “William Wallace is planning an assault on the men being sent here by King Edward to help us put down
the uprising. The men are but a few hours' ride from here and are headed straight into a trap.”

“So, the ones who are to help us need our help?” Hesselrigge sneered. “What help is that?”

“King Edward would be most displeased if his men did not so much as make it here, m'Lord,” Sir James replied. “There is also the matter of the weaponry they bring: good quantities of bows, arrows, spears, shields, armor…. It would no be good for it all to fall into Wallace's hands, m'Lord.”

“Bah,
what idiots!” Hesselrigge roared. “Wallace will gain those weapons at a price. I'm sure King Edward's men will fight back long and hard.”

“The ambush they ride into will leave them defenseless, m'Lord. It is the Falloch Pass in the Strathlomorand Ridge.”

“Can we not ambush the ambushers?” Rorie asked suddenly.

Hesselrigge rubbed his chin. “To ambush King Edward's men at the Falloch Pass, Wallace's men would need to climb Grenochy, would they no? What if a company of our men was already there, lying in wait for them?”

Rorie smiled. “Excellent idea, m'Lord. They would be caught by surprise and would be at the disadvantage of being downhill from our men. Those who survive would be driven right into the waiting arms of King Edward's men, who would slaughter each and every one.”

“William Wallace may be among the fallen!” Hesselrigge pounded his fist into his palm. “Nae, he must be among the fallen. James! Take two companies of men under Captains Killenden and Aimsworth and execute this plan.”

“Two companies?” Sir James recoiled. “Should we leave the castle so poorly manned, m'Lord?”

“To withstand an attack, this castle needs no more than a handful of men,” Hesselrigge replied. “Tell our spies to be on alert for an assault. Should they learn one is imminent, have your two companies surprise the attackers from the rear. Either way, we get them! Ride out quickly now, while there's still time. A promotion and a bag of silver awaits the man who brings me William Wallace's head.”

Knight James Barr was not a man to waste time. He bowed quickly and strode from the room. Rorie instructed two of his three henchmen to put extra patrols on the battlements.

“Now, where were we?” Hesselrigge asked as the door closed behind the departing men. His eyes traveled slowly around the room before fixing upon Alex. “Ah, yes,” he said softly. “We were about to get started.”

“B
ut, you were not with the antique dealer….” Alex tried to make sense of it all. His head hurt. The flame of a lantern blew low, as if caught in a breeze – or starved for oxygen. Shadows flickered across the heavy oak rack.

“Think again,” Hesselrigge snapped. “Who was with the antique dealer?”

“Only his son, the boy who tried to take away a board I'd found. Grant, I think his name was.”

“Ah, yes, the board … now we're getting somewhere the board with the carving of the bird, the instructions on how to enter the time chamber; the board ye left on the rocks pointing the way into the caves….”

“How … how do you know all this?”

“Why would ye presume that everyone who enters the time chamber comes out at the same earlier time? What would happen if someone went slightly farther back?”

A sudden far-fetched thought reached Alex. He looked at Hesselrigge, straining to see a likeness. “Grant?” he asked uncertainly.

“The same.” Hesselrigge nodded grimly. “I went through hell after ye laid that trap. My father died a slow death because of those caves. He didn't die of hunger or thirst, although we had nothing to eat or drink for days. Worst of all, he died of madness, being lost in such suffocating darkness. Let me give ye an indication of what it was like.” Hesselrigge bent toward Alex, narrowing his eyes. “Our torches died after only a few hours, leaving us with just matches to see where we were going. My father had trouble breathing and started hearing people laughing – jeering and mocking him. He clutched at me and held me as a shield, but even that didn't help. He stumbled blindly into one cave after another and tried to claw his way through a wall. He even wrote pleas for help in his own blood….”

Hesselrigge's eyes burned with a deep hatred. “We finally found a way out – alive, but barely so. But escaping the caves didn't help him. He kept shouting gibberish and ranting about demons and ghosts coming to get him. He died a few days later, clutching his covers and staring into nothing.

“Thirty years!” Hesselrigge shouted, his fists clenched. “Thirty years I have lived here, rising to positions of ever greater power, all the while keeping a lookout for the one responsible for destroying my past life, the one responsible for my father's death. I knew ye might head into the caves. I knew ye might find that time chamber … and now here ye are – barely days older than when I saw ye last. A whole life yet to live – or
not!”

Hesselrigge leaned in close enough for Alex to feel the spray of his spit. “For what is to come,” he hissed, “ye can thank yourself.”

Alex shrank back. “You can't seriously be blaming me for what happened … I didn't leave the board as a trap! It was so we could find our way back.”

“Bah,
do ye really expect me to believe that?” Hesselrigge spat bitterly. “My father was convinced we were onto something, that the caves would contain some treasures or antiques we could sell. Ye must've known that board and those directions would lure us in … well, congratulate yourself: it worked! Here I am. However, I've made a new life for myself after all these years. But ye will no likely be able to say the same.”

“Why didn't you go back – forward, I mean – in time? You could have gone back to find your father, to help him before it was too late –”

Hesselrigge cut Alex off. “Haven't ye figured it out yet? The time chamber goes only one way.”

“There's no way forward? There's no way back to the time we came from?”

“Oh, there's a way forward alright, doing what we're doing right now, moving forward through time one second at a time. Your bones will make it back – that is, if I don't feed them to the castle dogs.” Hesselrigge threw back his head and laughed. “But not making it back is the least of your worries. Ye'll be lucky to see another day. The only reason you're not dead now is because I want to savor the moment.”

“What do you want from me?” Alex rasped, his throat so dry, he could barely speak.

“Want? What do ye want from
me
?” Hesselrigge mocked. “For ye not to have laid that nasty trap is what I want – but enough of that. Let's stay with the present and the matters at
hand, shall we? I want ye to tell me about that scoundrel William Wallace and his band of brigands. Let's start with their numbers and arms. I may know something of his plans already, but that Wallace is a crafty villain who's won too many a battle to be underestimated. So start talking – what is Wallace up to?”

Alex sealed his lips.

“It is as I thought, and even, as I prefer. We shall do this the hard way.” Hesselrigge nudged Rorie. “Who shall we strap in the rack first – him or one of his friends? Which will make him talk the fastest – his own pain or that of a friend?”

“I would say his own, m'Lord.” A gleeful smile appeared on Rorie's face.

“Of course ye would,” Hesselrigge said disdainfully. “That is how it would work with your own self, is it no? Not a word would pass your lips while your friends were being pulled apart on this thing, but as soon as ye were strapped down –”

“M'Lord! Ye do me an injustice!”

“Do I?” Hesselrigge stroked his chin.
“Hmm,
very well then.” He pointed to Alex. “Strap him to the rack.”