Worth Dying For (The Bruce Trilogy) (3 page)

Far above, the first buzzard floated, held aloft by a gentle, but steady wind. Great wings etched a dark crescent against a gray sky. The grass around me stirred into a rising rustle. The buzzard dipped a wing and glided eastward, where clouds were gathering to blot out the sun.

Soon, I found myself in a thicket of brambles, canopied by a mosaic of ash and oak. Thorns caught on my sleeve and pricked my arm. I dropped to my knees amidst the tall grass and sank down. Wadding my cloak, I laid my head on it and pushed my fingers up over my face to trace the long scar that bordered my hairline: a reminder of Methven.

Before Methven, we had numbered in the thousands. Before Lorne’s ambush as Dalry yesterday, over five hundred.  And yet, was it only yesterday that I held my wife in my arms and spoke to her of what I dreaded most?

“Elizabeth, whatever you think, I’ll not risk losing you. I swear it to both you and Our Lord. But I’m not ready to fight again. Not after Methven. Not yet. It’s too soon. We’ve lost too many men and have neither the weapons nor the strength to defend ourselves.”

“But you will fight,” she said. “You’ll have to. You... we... we can’t keep running forever.”

She drew back, gazed at me softly as her lips parted, then quickly buried her head against my chest again.

“What, my love? Something else?” I said.

“’Tis a small thing,” she murmured. “It can wait.”

“You’ll tell me tonight then?”

“Aye, tonight,” she whispered. “When we have more time.
”

That time had not come. Maybe, it never would.

Ch. 2

James Douglas – Balquhidder, 1306

A slat of yellow light pried between my eyelids. Hunched forms surrounded me. Voices wove together in a muffled buzz.

I tried to look around, but a dull throbbing mass of pain in my right shoulder seized me. A murky fog filled my head. Closing my eyes again, I succumbed to the unfeeling comfort, the nothingness. My body became heavier... slipping away, sucked down into some endless chasm of blackness.

Calloused fingertips clamped against either side of my jaw, snatching me back to awareness.

“Hold now. Tight,” a voice said.

My eyes flew open.

Robert Boyd gripped my bare shoulders, while Edward Bruce held my head. Someone had removed my shirt and chain mail. My chest and arms were bare. I shivered at the cold. A tattered blanket lay across my lap. As I reached for it, pain jolted through my arm – the lower half bent at an odd angle. Dead might have been better than this.

Gil de la Haye positioned himself to set the bone.

“Pain me on your life!” I growled.

“James,” Gil murmured with a patronizing smile, “I was mending bones long before your father and mother made you.”

Boyd jammed the hilt of his knife between my teeth. “Quiet now, lad, and let Gil do his work. If you don’t, y’may be able to thrash your sword with the other arm, but you’ll have a damnable time stringing a bow.”

 Face fixed in concentration, Gil yanked and twisted. Bone ground against bone. White, hot pain shot up my arm, into my chest and opposite shoulder. I gnashed at the hilt. Edward clamped tighter. Not daring to watch, I pitched backward against Boyd. Finally, Gil stood back and scratched at his frosted head.

Peering over my shoulder, Boyd grunted. “No, doesn’t look right. You need to turn it a bit more.”

I prayed to be struck unconscious at that moment.

Gil nodded in agreement. With one slender hand, he clamped onto my right arm just below the elbow and with the other he pinched my wrist. I closed my eyes, expecting another excruciating flood of pain. I heard a little pop and he let go.

“Impressive, Gil,” Boyd exclaimed with genuine wonder.

Edward slipped his hands from my head and pounded Gil on the shoulder. “Well done. Now if there are any of us not reeling too hard from all the blows, I need to find someone to relieve the sentries. Lorne may have left more of ours dead than his, but he won’t swallow the humiliation of not having taken Robert alive.”

The king’s brother strode off and Gil, oddly skilled in plucking haft splinters and arrow shafts out of flesh, went to work elsewhere. Boyd took the knife from between my teeth and stood grinning above me.

“It will plump up like a piglet by sundown. A pleasure seeing you down for once,” he gloated. “I was starting to think you were one of those fairy folk that live forever, like the Irish have.”

“Maybe I am.” I attempted a grin, but from his stiff reaction it must have looked more like a sneer. I think I had bruised my lip in the fall, as well. “That pleases you... that I was knocked from my horse?” The numbness in my arm was beginning to wear off. My whole right side throbbed with every pulse.

“Every scar tells a tale, young Douglas. Some day you’ll be an old man like me. No one will ever ask you what it was like to fight alongside Robert the Bruce, King of Scots. They won’t believe you ever did with that pretty face of yours.”

I didn’t bother to mention the scars his wife had given him or the fact that he wasn’t as old as he said. One day he was twenty-five, the next he was fifty. It was a habit of Boyd’s to bend the truth. He gimped toward the mouth of the cave.

I called out, “Boyd?”

“Aye?”

“Thank you.”

He shrugged. “For calling you ‘pretty’? Tell anyone I said that – and I’ll gut you like a fish.” Sunlight curling around his bearish form, he turned and went outside.

For once, Boyd had not exaggerated. From just above my elbow down to each fingertip, my arm swelled so much that I had to tear the lower part of my sleeve lengthwise for relief. While we loitered in the damp cave beyond Balquhidder, the first frost gripped the land. Gil, with his nimble fingers and keen eyes, mended the injured in a crude and sometimes unconventional manner. He made me drink a potion of juniper berries. Bitter, but it numbed my pains. Piece by piece, we ripped at the hems of our cloaks and shirts for bandages. I suffered the least. Beside me lay a man younger than me named Torquil. During that first week after Dalry, he bled so heavily that he was as wan as his silver-fair Viking hair. He had a wound in his chest, just below his right shoulder. One of Lorne’s men had plunged a spear between his ribs. With his bare hands, he had pulled it out and killed the man. He came from an island he called Ba-Rah or something, to the west of Skye. So peculiar was his speech, I could only understand some of what he said. His lady, he told me through one of the other wounded who understood him better, was the widow of Duncan of Mar, the brother of Robert’s first wife Isabella. Her name was Christiana of the Isles.

There had been no sign of Lorne’s Argyll men since Dalry, but even now we were wary, afraid to go out into the open for fear of discovery. I have no recollection of how many days we passed there in the glen, only that I was aware of the chill that crept over the land at nightfall and the frost that sparkled on the clumps of heather every morning when I rose and sat at the cave’s edge, battling not warriors of Argyll or the Earl of Pembroke’s knights, but my own persistent, nagging pain. When the swelling started to go down enough, Gil freed my arm of the crude splint he had fitted on it. He put it in a sling made from the lining of my colorful cloak – the one Robert’s wife Elizabeth had given to me. I had never deemed myself worthy of it, but still I was grateful for it.

One morning, feeling stronger and itching with restlessness, I sat upon a rock as the sun rose pink in the east. Most of the men were still asleep, but a few had begun moving about quietly. Brisk air wrapped around me and I pulled my cloak close, hugging my knees to my chest. Robert walked along a meandering trail up to the cave. He held out a handful of berries.

“Take these,” he offered.

I extended my left hand and he poured them, red and bright as precious gems, into my cupped palm.

“I’ve no penchant for them. I’d as soon live on beef and bread, as have my mouth puckered by something so tart.” Wrinkling his nose, he wiped his hands on a tattered shirt and added, “You look like some skeleton the crows have picked clean. Eat.”

I threw them in my mouth, let them swim there for a few seconds while their juice flooded my entire being like a surge of fresh blood, then swallowed them all in one gulp.

“Mmm, I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything so good,” I said, my hand on my throat as if I could capture the sensation again. “Thank you, my lord king, with all my heart.”

“Thank me all you want,” – he settled down on the rock beside me and glanced at his red-stained hands – “but call me Robert.”

“Robert?”

“Aye. ‘Tis my name.” Shoulders hunched up toward his ears, he tucked his hands into his armpits. “Aside from Edward – and there’s a voice I deign not to hear every day for the rest of my life – no one calls me that anymore. Not since Nigel and Elizabeth left. It’s a lonely feeling, not hearing your own name. As a lad, sometimes there were three of us by the same name in the castle – myself, my father and grandfather. They had no trouble with it, but you can imagine the confusion it caused for a bold-spirited, sociable bairn like me. My grandfather... he is the one who taught me how to sit upon my horse so I would not fall, how to sail in strong winds and what words to whisper to make the maidens blush. He called me Robbie.” He paused, smiling to himself.

They had called his grandfather Robert the Competitor, because he had contested the Balliol claim to Scotland’s empty throne. Many agreed that it belonged to the Bruces. Even England’s king, Longshanks, had promised it to Robert after his grandfather and father died. But when it became clear that Longshanks wanted Scotland for his own, Robert began to weary of empty promises. In time, John ‘the Red’ Comyn betrayed him to Longshanks, thinking it would earn him lands and titles. Greed has always been Scotland’s downfall, whether Comyn or someone else.

When Robert called Comyn to meet him at Greyfriar’s Kirk to confront him, Comyn attacked him. Though Robert only wounded Comyn, his companion Roger Kirkpatrick finished the scoundrel for him. I would have done the same.

Robert sighed, stood and cupped me lightly on my good arm. “Mend fast. We will head out in a couple of days.”

“My lord... Robert? Marjorie... and the queen – where is Nigel taking them?” I had a fondness for both Robert’s wife and his daughter. Elizabeth had given me a fine horse and a cloak when Bishop Lamberton sent me off to join Robert. And Marjorie, so spirited and curious… I don’t know what I felt for her. The protectiveness of an older brother, perhaps?

The question forced his chin down. “To Kildrummy, if it’s safe. If not, north to Orkney, then aboard ship to Ulster.” The heel of his hand resting on the axe tucked into his belt, he shook his head in doubt. “Ah, James, how utterly selfish I am. Foolish, too. They would have been better off if I had sent them to Ireland in the first place.”

“They’ll be there, waiting for you,” I assured him. “You’ll see.”

“
If
they’ll have us in Ireland, otherwise we’ll spend the winter adrift. Like rats on a piece of driftwood.” An unconvincing smile flitted across his mouth. “Well then – eat. Get some rest.”

“Thank you... for what you did.” I meant to say his name again, but even the first time it had stumbled across my tongue.

“Pluck berries? Bit of a hike to gather them, but your gratitude is too much.”

“Gil told me it was you who went back for me when I fell from my horse. I owe you my life for that.”

“Ah, well, it would have been inconsiderate of me to leave you behind.” He began to go, then stopped and added, “That was brave work at Dalry. Ten more like you, good James, and I should have the kingdom won back before next Michaelmas.”

More like a thousand of me, maybe. But him... it would take only one of him.

Ch. 3

James Douglas – Loch Lomond, 1306

We laid our dead out in rows in the cave, their arms crossed solemnly over their breasts, and piled the heaviest stones we could manage across the entrance. Nigh on starving, we left the secret cave of the glen near Balquhidder and crawled southward. We had only a few horses remaining that were not lame, and so our wounded rode those; the others we abandoned. Soon, Robert told me, we would have to cross a loch or a wide river and if we ever made it to the coast, we could not take them to Ireland anyway. While we trudged through dense forests and over burnished heather, I learned from Gil how to recognize wild thyme and mint to chew on, which flowers to pluck the petals from in the summer to eat, how to tell a nut tree from a distance and which plants to dig for their roots. I taught the rest where to look for the holes of mountain hares and how to snare a stoat or marten for its fur. Useless with my bow, I watched admiringly as Edward sent an arrow in a sure arc two hundred paces and brought down a young red stag in full stride. We ate only a small hunk of meat each. There was not nearly enough to go around.

It must have been late September when we saw Ben Lomond, its summit shoved up against a glowering sky that threatened to sink down on us as the rain began. There in its shadow, we found another cave that overlooked the loch, this one bigger and drier than the last we had inhabited. In the center, Boyd fed the fire with kindling that we had gathered along the way. Outside, the rumbling sky was dark as coal dust. A cold wind blustered in and the flames wavered before they burst defiantly back to life again.

Robert crouched on his muscular haunches before the sputtering fire. “If we stay here, we risk John of Lorne finding us. Or the English.”

Should the Argyll warriors catch up with us again, they would kill us in a craze of bloodlust. The English, if they found us, would make prisoners of our leaders, as they had my father. There were many ways I wished to be like him, but living out my last days in the Tower of London was not one of them.

The broad, long loch below, called Loch Lomond after the mountain that guarded over it, was a daunting stretch of water and I, not being one with a love of water, would have preferred the longer journey around it. Once, when I was nine, my brother Hugh and I had stolen a little rowing boat. We only wished to row about on an adventure, but had sorely underestimated the strength of the waves created by a rough wind chopping at the surface. The little boat overturned before we were but a stone’s throw from shore. Even though the water was only chest high, I was trapped beneath the weight of the boat. Hugh’s frantic thrashing had only pushed the water higher inside my little dark, diminishing cavern of air. When he finally heaved the boat upright, it gave me a thump in the head hard enough to knock me out. Later, I found myself on the shore looking up at a blurry sky, coughing up water, with an awful ache in my skull and a lump that remained on my forehead for a week. Hugh, simple though he was, had saved me. Ever since then, the rocking of a boat upon the waves hurled me into a state of silent panic.