Worth Dying For (The Bruce Trilogy) (4 page)

“If we can make it across the loch,” Robert said, looking from face to sinking face, “we can go west, to the coast. I’ve sent Neil Campbell ahead. He’ll be waiting for us with galleys. To take us to Ireland.”

Edward had just come in from outside. Rivulets of rain trickled from his shoulders to pool at his feet. He sauntered closer and pushed his fingers back through slick hair. “Across?” he said with more than a trace of skepticism. “If you mean for us to swim, half of us will be drowned before we reach the other bank.”

The sudden roar of rain filled the air. We all stared into the amber light of the fire, mulling over his words, wondering just how it could be done.

“A boat,” Torquil proposed sleepily. He was sitting on the floor of the cave with his back against the wall, eyes half closed. Gil had given him some sort of infusion made from the crushed petals of a white flower and willow bark. Torquil let out a huge yawn. “Boats... I know. I sail.”

Edward snorted. “Well, we don’t have any, do we? And boat or no, it’s a long way yet to Kintyre at this pace.”

“We’ve made it this far,” Robert reminded him tersely. “We’ll make it even further.”

The next day, after the rain had stopped, Torquil and I slid down the hillside, over the next rise and along a muddy, winding trail among the trees. Torquil veered from the path and, with his small axe, he cut free two straight and lean saplings, hacked off their branches and tossed them over his shoulder. We wandered along the banks until we found a promising spot. With his knife, Torquil stripped the bark from the first one, then tossed it to me, pointing to the tapering end of the pole. I shaved the end to a sharp point, left-handed no less, until he ceased to grimace at my imperfect work. While he lay belly down on a rock and dangled there, I stripped and sharpened the next spear. Soon, he had skewered the first fish and tossed it onto shore. More followed. Torquil was patient enough to make his throws worthwhile, but swift enough to hit his mark with deadly accuracy. My mouth watered every time a tailfin swished at the surface. I was so famished I could have eaten them raw: heads, bones and all. I gathered the catch into my cloak. My hands smelled of fish. My cloak – the half of it that was left – was going to reek of it for a long time.

Wind rippled the water, pulsing waves over the lip of the bank. Water splashed at my leggings and my feet were soon soaked. My chest tightening with unease, I moved up away from the loch’s edge to dry them as I waited to see Torquil take another jab into the water. He cursed in his own language at a pike too cunning for his methods.

My sights wandered in and out the length of the loch. Four days on horse to ride all the way around it, Gil had said. As battered as we were, it would take us eight. In a little cove to the south on the far bank, poked the roofs of a small fishing village. Four houses, maybe five. Hard to tell from this distance. On our side, directly opposite it, was a sandy beach broken by stands of reeds. A sandpiper wandered through the reeds, standing at times on one slender, blue-gray leg. Every so often, it dipped its long, pointed bill in the water, rooting about, then moved on, bobbing up and down. I lost sight of the bird as it moved behind something large and solid. After a time it appeared on the other side. Slowly, I realized that the ‘something’ was a fishing boat. Later, I thought, we could maybe take the boat out away from the shore and if I could somehow trail a hook there would be even more fish to eat. For now though, Torquil was doing well enough.

Far away to the north, the rock dropped abruptly into the water in places. There, the loch narrowed where it began as a river sprung from the mountains. Gil had told me that to the south the loch spread apart wide, pushing the earth miles and miles apart. A small army of islands floated there, he said, like a herd of whales skimming the surface. Behind us, the trees still wore their green summer cloaks, but some were now tinged with traces of gold or scarlet. Their leaves fluttered gently at the teasing of a steady breeze.

I wiggled my fingers and freed my arm of its sling. I turned it ever so slightly outward and tested my strength by plucking up small stones and squeezing them feebly in my palm. It would be some time before I could grip the hilt of my sword with ease. Longer yet, before I could pull a bowstring. Sinking back against a lush cushion of grass, the handle of my knife poked at my hip and I pulled it free. The sky was as blue as any summer day. In the branches above, a lark trilled incessantly.

Eyes drifting shut, I shifted the longknife to my weakened right hand and rubbed my thumb against the familiar worn cording of the handle. Water lapped rhythmically against the shore, lulling me to sleep.

I dreamt of home. Of riding along the Douglas Water and running over the hills with my simple-minded brother Hugh trailing behind. Of foxes loping through the meadows and a hare with its black-tipped ears peeking above a tussock of grass. I dreamt of my stepmother Eleanor rocking my wee brother Archibald in the ivory cradle of her arms as she sang to him and my father sitting on a bench before the hearth with a cup of ale in his hands, his thoughts consumed within the dancing flames. Of the Englishman, Neville, shoving Eleanor onto a table and yanking her skirts up, as she wept tears of shame. My knife, arcing through the air to cut him. Longshanks’ boot slamming against my jaw to dislodge a tooth.

Then I dreamt long of two great armies staring at each other across an open plain, of a voyage in a leaky ship filled with rats the size of dogs and a journey into a strange land over a muddy field. Of Paris, cramped and reeking, and Master Andrae telling me to grab my ankles and bend forward as he tested his willow switch on the floorboards before laying it over my back. My father lying dead in a Tower dungeon. I dreamt of Bishop Lamberton reciting Mass from behind glittering relics and William Wallace walking away on a long, dusty road, never turning around, never showing his face, only the great sword strapped against his broad back.

And then, in the drifting mist of my dreams, Robert, tall astride his horse, twisted at the waist and beckoned to me. His embroidered cloak swung regally from his shoulders. Upon one of his fingers was a ring bearing a seal. Upon his brow sat a circlet of gold.

“James? Come along, James,” he called, a soft, half-smile playing over his mouth.

As he began to go, I tried to follow, but something held me back. I willed my feet to move, but they could not. Further and further he went, saying my name, but never stopping to wait for me or looking back.

“Look ‘ere,” a gruff voice said. “A Scottish dog, good as dead.”

The dull fog of sleep lifted suddenly like a blanket thrown off. It was not Wallace’s voice, nor Robert’s. Neither was it Torquil’s.

Through barely parted lashes, I glimpsed a man with a bulging paunch standing over me. He grinned and flicked his tongue over lips pocked with sores. Drooping jowls rough with black stubble melted into a thick neck. The man had not suffered for lack of food, or from the guilt of gluttony. He reached beneath his oversized leather jerkin and scratched at his crotch. Then he lifted a nicked and rusty sword. Its point pricked the soft of my belly.

My heart thumped in a wild cadence. I curled my fingers around empty air. My blade lay tangled in the grass, only a few feet away. If I reached for it, I was dead. If I didn’t – I was dead then, too.

His mouth spread into a macabre smile of jagged yellow teeth and irregular gaps. A guttural laugh shook his flabby gut and gurgled out of his throat, making him sound like a braying donkey. “Scared, are you? Don’t worry, I’ll keep you alive long enough to get some sport out of you.”

I opened my eyes fully, gauging his quickness against mine. No contest. I would have skewered him in a heartbeat in an honest fight. Gutted him like the fat pig he was. That was when he pressed the point deeper into my belly, reminding me who had the advantage.

“Will, over ‘ere!” he bellowed. “Look what I found me!”

With every shallow breath I drew, the sword point bit harder, almost burning. I held my breath. Fear, or fate, whatever it was, held me entranced to observe the slow approach of my own death.

God’s teeth, I had always thought I would die in a furious blaze of glory, not like this. Not in such a pathetic, helpless way.

Behind him, twigs cracked. Footsteps plodded, then stopped.

He chuckled, this time scratching at his buttocks. “What do you say we should do with him, Will? Strap him belly flat to a tree and fuck his Scottish arse till he screams with pleasure? Chop off his fingers, one knuckle bone at a time? Gouge out his eyeballs, maybe? I like that one, I do. Won’t be pretty no more, then, will ‘e?” He guffawed, amused by his own cleverness.

“Let him go.”

The pig-bellied Englishman stopped laughing. He cocked his head sideways, not daring to take his eyes off me. “What did you – ?”

A thwack cut off his words. He stumbled forward, as if someone had shoved him from behind. But there was no one there. A line – wet, burning – trickled warm across my abdomen to pool in my navel. The sword had pricked my flesh. It slipped from his grasp and thudded to the ground.

His tongue popped from his mouth, red foam bubbling around it. He lowered his eyes to gawp at his chest, where the tip of a wooden spear point protruded. Bright blood clotted in the Englishman’s stubbly beard, spurted from the hole in his breast. Empty-eyed, he stared at me, making little croaking sounds – and fell.

I rolled away. My arm, not yet healed, flared with a bolt of pain. The spear point ripped my sleeve at the shoulder as he crashed against me, knocking the breath from me. Gulping in air, I shoved him aside with a strained heave. The man was dead, for certain, but smelling of his own shit.

“You could’ve killed me,” I grumbled at Torquil as he stalked toward me.

With a yank, he pulled the spear out, stifling a curse when the haft split in two. He knelt down and whispered into my ear, “They come.”

I started to sit up to look around, but he pushed me back down and pointed up the hillside to where a narrow bridle path led through the stand of trees from which he had been cutting spears. Rising on my good elbow, I peered at the rim of the small rise above us.

“English.” I sank back down. “Ten, maybe twelve. They’ll be looking for this one soon.”

Torquil’s fingers fluttered on his spear. I retrieved my knife from where it lay. It would be a quick fight if they found us – and not in our favor. I pointed to a thicket of bushes that crowded the nearby bank. Backs hunched to stay low, we dragged the dead man between us and rolled him under a young pine. We crawled deep inside the thicket, thorns lashing at our faces and snagging our shirts. Although their voices drifted clearly down to us, I could understand only snatches of their thick speech. They went by very slowly, pausing once directly above us a hundred feet up the mud-slickened slope.

As they at last passed to the south, Torquil turned to me. The wind tossed long strands of straw-pale hair from his ruddy face. “They find our horses. Follow us here.”

While the sun slipped lazily into the west, they scoured the hillside, twice coming within a spear’s throw. My fingers twitched on my knife, but Torquil kept his weapons idle beside him as they wandered off. Although I took joy in killing Englishmen – for I had never forgotten the terror of Berwick – neither of us was fool enough to deny the odds on this occasion.

When they had been gone for some time and daylight began to yield to dusk, Torquil and I crept down to the water. The boat that Torquil and I had found was big enough for only a few men. There was a leak somewhere in the stern, but Torquil deemed it slow enough that the boat could easily be bailed out before it took on too much water. Darkness falling, we returned to the cave and told Robert of the scouting party.

That night, under a moonless sky, we rowed across to the opposite side of the loch in batches. The worst of the wounded – which was only a few by now, the rest having died – were set ashore first. After that went Robert, Gil and I, with Boyd returning the boat to the other side. I was eminently thankful there was no breeze that night and so, but for the sweep and surge of the oars, the boat glided across the surface, parting the mist that mantled the glassy loch. All the same, getting in and then out was motion enough to churn my stomach into a sour brew. While we waited for the others, Robert told the tale of Tristan and Isolde in French, the words drifting away into a twisting murmur as I slipped in and out of a fitful slumber. Every time I opened my eyes to look for the boat and who had made it, Robert was standing vigilant on the shore, his hands braced on his sword belt and his shortened cloak flared out over his elbows. A few at a time, our men were set safely upon the western shore of the loch.

Boyd had just left on the last trip, this one to fetch Edward and Torquil. Minds benumbed from sleeplessness and bodies drained by hunger, we peered into the mist as it broke, then rolled again over the silvery loch. In the east, above the blanket of fog, dawn crowned the mountaintops in a watery orange haze.

A scream shattered the silence. Metal clanged on metal, thudded on hide-covered shields to echo in the long, narrow basin of the loch against embracing mountains. Shouts. Another scream. The clink of blades striking metal bosses. A dying groan. The crash... of something hitting water. Then, quiet. Heavy, heart-stopping quiet.

I looked at those around me. Their faces were drawn. Some stood, swaying with closed eyes, their lips twitching in prayer. Others knelt, too weary, too hopeless. At last, the far-off murmur of rippling water filled our ears. Several men drew their weapons, but others edged forward to stand at the water’s lip. Through the steamy fog, the little boat skimmed, its belly pushed deep by too much weight, with Boyd smiling devilishly at the prow and Torquil scooping out water with his hands. Grunting, Edward dipped hard into the oars, his cadence doubled. Some distance out yet, Torquil leapt into the water and waded ashore. He collapsed to his knees and touched his forehead to the sand.

“Thank the Almighty Above,” Boyd said as he and Edward dragged the boat to ground, “he was carrying that bloody fishing spear and has a good aim. Killed one of the bastards before he could alert the others. We barely slipped out onto the water and they came tramping down the hill. Now, let’s get the bloody hell out of here, shall we?”