Worth Dying For (The Bruce Trilogy) (35 page)

We could only hope that our disadvantage in numbers had spawned enough ingenuity in us to make the difference. Robert had more than a few stones in his pocket and a good aim to tip the scales.

“Can you tell by their standards who is with them?” Keith asked, rejoining us. “Lancaster? Pembroke? It’s all a blur of color to me from this distance. They say the eyes are the first to go from age.”

“Truly? I heard that was the second,” Gil jested.

“Oh, a lie,” Keith said, “I assure you. But who do you see?”

“Aside from the king’s standard on the oxcart to the front, I can’t tell from here either. Not worth the risk of finding out. This time let curiosity yield to caution.”

“I should rather like to know,” Keith mused, grinning, “whose head I have the chance to cut off, that’s all. Some English I hate more than others.”

“Time to go back now, then?” Gil prodded, already sliding down the short hillside toward the horses.

“Don’t like being here?” I teased.

He stopped and pounded the dust from his surcoat. “The three best Scottish soldiers against thirty thousand English?” His thin lips twisted into and out of a smile. “Wouldn’t be fair to them, I say. So let’s go back to Stirling and at least play by the rules, aye?”

“Aye. Back to Stirling. ‘Though I don’t know how fair a fight it will be.”

Bannockburn – June 22
^nd
of June, 1314

It was a hard day’s ride under a hot sun that threw our mounts into a thick lather, but there was no threat of the English army being on our tails by the time we arrived. As we neared the vacant hamlet of Bannock, lying on the south side of the meandering stream which began up in the hills and wound its way sluggishly downward and across the peat bogs and marshes before spitting out into the Forth, the men of the Scottish pickets hailed us. At the burn, we turned our horses upstream and made way toward the place where the Roman road dipped into and crossed the murky water. There I found King Robert, leading the reins of his low-slung pony, as he walked through a milling of soldiers, who were hefting piles of sod and long sticks in their arms.

He raised his hand as he saw me, Gil and Keith and beckoned us to him. We dismounted and bowed our heads once as we moved toward him. Robert took no heed of our gesture, instead dropping the reins of his pony and darting toward a trio of soldiers.

“Iver, Gram... not so heavy they cave in. You understand?” Robert had spent the months since spring not only scheming and plotting, but learning the names of the soldiers as they slogged in from various parts of Scotland. He drank with them and shared stories with them as they sat around their cookfires at night. The familiarity not only allowed him to win their allegiance, but it also gave him license to criticize when the moment called for it. He strode up to one of the soldiers, who was barely able to peek over the thin mats of layered sod cradled in his bare, grubby arms. Then he plucked a stout branch from one of the other men’s loads. “This one – it’s too big. And this, John, it is too green and will bend before it breaks. The green will work if it is small enough, but any larger pieces must be well dried out, brittle, understand? I want the English to fall like boulders. See their horses’ legs snap like kindling. I want to watch those bleeding armored knights flounder like pregnant cows tipped over, while the lines behind them rush forward and fall on top of them.”

“My lord?” John’s face, deeply scarred from a pox, became ten shades of red all at once. He blinked repeatedly as rivulets of perspiration streamed down his temples and into his eyes. “We’re working as fast as we can. And we hadn’t enough of these things for all the pots.”

John held out an object, cast from iron and with four pointed spikes of equal length.

“That ‘thing’ is a caltrop, lad. Its sole purpose is to maim horses, which will then be of no use and worse than dead. The screaming wounded animals will serve as barriers to those behind them. Hardly a means of fighting fairly, but the purpose of war is to win, isn’t it? Now do you want the whole English cavalry to come bounding over your traps without missing a stride? If you’ve not enough caltrops, then litter them with jagged stones or line them with pointed sticks. Whatever does the trick. You will wish you hadn’t compromised when the first lance pricks a hole in your brain or arrows pierce your chest so that you leak blood like seawater through a fishing net. Don’t bumble now. Figure it out. And if you have any doubts test the cover yourselves. I’d sooner sacrifice one of you to a broken leg than to lose an entire schiltron to a wall of English cavalry.”

The three soldiers exchanged blank glances, none of them willing to vault up and down on a flimsy pile of grass and twigs laid over a hole in the ground to see if it would hold them up. Then in shrugging acceptance they shuffled on toward the pots, now completely dug and being covered over artfully to conceal their exact whereabouts. From a distance, it was near to impossible to tell the ground had been disturbed at all on either side of the Roman road nearer to Stirling.

“Sire?” I swallowed, not wanting to share the news.

Absorbed in overseeing his vast project, it took a moment for Robert to shake his thoughts and give me his full attention.

“The barricades?” Robert inquired, panicked.

“Done days ago,” I assured him.

Before he asked for my report, he thumped a fist on my shoulder. “James, someone came asking to join you, but damn if I can remember who or from where. It will come. Give a moment.”

He screwed his eyes shut in thought. I glanced at Gil and Keith, who both nodded for me to go on.

“It will wait, m’lord. Our report first. You’ll want to hear it.”

His eyes flew open. “Ah! Aye, do. You all look a wee bit grim, though. Should I hear?”

Although Robert could bound lighthearted into even the darkest of moments, I could not for once reflect his outlook. “I wish I did not have to tell. They are over thirty thousand. A tenth of that is cavalry, heavy cavalry. More banners than I have ever seen in all my life. Some, I would guess, from faraway places. They have plucked up half of Wales to wield their bows. The wagon train stretched out beyond the horizon. Miles.”

“Many,” he said to himself. A grin of amusement played over his lips. “I should have sent my brother Edward along with you to see for himself. Ah, but what use now to rub his nose in his own shit pile? He’ll smell the English soon enough.”

For a good while he said nothing, just turned to watch the soldiers as they bent over their holes in the earth, laying the long branches across them that had been taken from deep in Torwood many weeks ago for this very purpose. The work, although tedious at times, had kept the soldiers from falling idle and turning against each other, as might have happened in the face of bringing together so many traditional enemies in one place under one premise. When they had not been felling trees, gathering branches, shoveling up sod or clawing at the earth, they had been drilled rigorously in arms and archery, often by me. The movements of each schiltron had been practiced to unthinking exactness, planned out like a party dance. Robert had kept their faith by encouraging them all on while I, Gil, Edward, Randolph and Keith demanded effort and precision of them, shouting till our throats were raw and our chests aching. He shook his head helplessly as one of the soldiers who had been carrying the wood collapsed. Someone hurried to him with a bucket of water and doused the man while he lay on the ground, twitching.

“The heat,” he said. “Getting to them. Long days. Hard work. But it must be done. Should have been done by now. A blessing, I suppose, that the English have been in no hurry. But whether they get here by the set date or not... it will not matter.” Suddenly he turned to me, his face clear of worry and the dark circles that had haunted beneath his eyes all the last year gone for a change. “This is fate, good James. God cursed me with that bastard Edward for a brother so it would all come to this. Battle. Scot against Sassenach – face to face. If He had wanted it to be easy for us, He’d have kept King Edward at Windsor. We’re as ready as we are ever damn well going to be. I say let them come. Let them test the faith of Scotland and the love of her people for their land and their freedom. I have no fear of whatever may befall us. I am ready, James. Are you?”

He said the words as easily as any saint preparing for the Second Coming. Said it as one who understands God’s wishes and never doubts the impossibility of his task. But in that certainty, he seemed somehow removed from the present, like he was already looking back on what had not yet happened. It unsettled me, not because I thought him deranged, but because I could not muster the faith in myself, given what I had witnessed. “We have had... time to prepare. I agree. But what do I tell men like John, Iver and Gram there when they ask how many bloody English are going to be marching toward them along this road we’re now standing on as we have this very profound conversation about God and fate?”

He winked at me. “Tell them there are a lot of them. Most of them can’t count past ten, so showering them with vast numbers won’t mean a thing, except there are more of them than us, and I reckon they all expect that. Tell them that the English argue, straggle, and suffer from the heat and terrain. That sickness plagues them and they’ve run low on food. Don’t mention any cavalry and if they ask, plead ignorance.” Robert drew me in close, his hands pinching either side of my face. “They are ready for this, James. Ready. Don’t do or say anything to dissuade them from believing that victory is possible. Because, dear God in heaven, it is.
It is
.”

His eyes were mere inches from mine. Even through the hot air, I could feel his breath on my face, feel the sweat thick upon his calloused palms, feel his blood pounding through the veins in his fingers... and I believed him.

I touched him on both shoulders to draw strength from him, then pulled away to go back to my men and ready for the day to come.

As Keith handed me the reins of my horse, Robert, who was heading back toward the pots, called out.

“Ah, I do remember now. Too many things crowding my head these days. Some young man and his brother from Ross... no, Rothesay.” He clucked at his pony. It lifted its shaggy head to follow him at a leisurely pace, stopping on occasion to pull at a clump of grass. “They went on over to Walter Stewart’s tent to wait for you. I wouldn’t mark either as archers, though. The mute one had broad shoulders and was already fondling a spear. Put him in one of the schiltrons. The other is barely weaned, but Walter will find a place for him. He seemed to know them already.”

“Rothesay?” Keith said to me as Robert wandered away. “Stewart’s men?”

“My brothers,” I told him. “Hugh and Archibald.”

“Brothers?” He slipped his foot into his stirrup and swung himself up. “Didn’t know you had any.”

“I wasn’t sure if I still did, until now.”

“Is Walter Stewart within?” I asked the soldier loitering at the entry to Stewart’s tent. His face was unfamiliar to me, but he looked the part in his leather-trussed hose and over-sized hauberk. After leaving Robert down by the pots along the Roman road, I had gone with Keith back to the encampment at the edge of the Torwood. There we had given our horses over to squires for tending, then parted ways to manage the hundred details apiece that had to be looked over in too little a time before the inevitable finally came to pass.

The soldier blinked at me and narrowed his eyes. “Who calls?”

For months now we had made our camp in the Torwood, two miles south and uphill of the tiny village of Bannock, the inhabitants of which had departed soon after our arrival dragging their life’s belongings in rickety carts or in empty grain sacks tossed over hunched backs. In that time we had hewn tall spears from the saplings and practiced with them in the clearings. We had fashioned thick barricades across every path that led through the Torwood for miles, to destroy any plans the English might have of avoiding us by that route and relieving Stirling. I had wielded my axe alongside my men, not burrowed inside my tent and emerged merely to spew orders. I had suffered from the raw pain of oozing blisters and my fingers were lumpy with calluses. I had bedded down each night weary to the bone and arisen stiff and barely able to walk or raise my arms above my head.

By now, any man who had been at camp for more than a few days would have known me. This one had no idea of my identity and I wondered if he might truly be my brother or was just another upstart, lately come. I studied the young man. In years, he was probably not yet twenty and because of his sinewy limbs and clear skin could have passed for less. The sword hanging from his belt appeared so awkwardly heavy in comparison to his frame that it threatened to topple him over. He had let the downy fuzz on his chin and upper lip go unshaven, but it did little to age him. The eyes, surrounded by thick, dark lashes, were honest and innocent and their constant shifting to take in every face and going-on revealed he had not seen much of the world before coming here. His hair was golden-brown, but loosely curled like mine.

“I am the Stewart’s cousin – James Douglas,” I said.

He took his time answering, scrutinizing me every inch as if he were yet doubtful of my identity. “They said you had the king’s confidence – that you were important.” Tentatively, he put out his hand. His palms were smooth and pink. The only callous he had was on the inside of his middle finger, where a quill had rested. Crescents of ink stain showed beneath the ends of his nails. “Archibald.”

“Archibald!” I crushed him in my arms and as I thrust him back to look at him again he stiffened, uncomfortable with such an endearing gesture. “I would never have known you. A bairn when I left. Ah, but look at you now. Look. You have Eleanor’s eyes and chin, true. Father’s mess of hair, though. Where is Hugh?”

He pointed down the length of the corridor between the two rows of commanders’ pavilions. There crouched Hugh, dipping his dented bascinet into a bucket of water intended for horses and pouring it over his head to cool off. When I called out his name, he turned his wet head and seeing Archibald curve an arm in beckon he dutifully rose and loped toward us with his bascinet tucked under his arm. He paused only long enough to scoop up a long spear, dragging its end along the ground, stirring up a trail of dust on the way.