Kingdom Page 5

  Robert heard John of Atholl shouting behind him, but he dared not turn, acutely aware of the blades carving all around him, horribly exposed without his helm. A man on foot came at him from the side, face contorted, soaked in blood. Robert blocked his blow. Their swords crossed in mid-air with a clash that shuddered through his arm. He battered away a second strike, before hacking at the man’s neck. The man hoisted his shield to block. As Robert’s sword smacked into the wood he saw the symbol painted upon it: a white lion on a blue background. Stunned, he left his defences open.

  The man’s eyes widened in anticipation and he lunged again. Suddenly, there was a volley of ferocious barking and a blur of motion. The man’s sword went wide, missing Robert by inches, as Fionn leapt at him. He went down screaming, the hound on top of him, ripping bloody chunks from his face. Looking around him, Robert now saw white lions everywhere, on shields and surcoats, dotted among the arms of Pembroke and the myriad colours of his own men. The reason for Galloway’s brooding emptiness was suddenly clear. The Disinherited had joined the English.

  Robert’s gaze locked on James Stewart, some distance away, surrounded by English knights. Malcolm of Lennox was converging on his position, along with Simon Fraser, both men fighting savagely, but even as Robert watched, James’s horse rose up, a spear embedded in its neck. He yelled, seeing the animal go down, the steward disappearing beneath the seething tide of men. James Douglas was battling to reach his uncle, but he had been unhorsed and was no match for the knights amassing all around him. Robert glimpsed Gilbert de la Hay grabbing hold of the young man’s cloak, pulling him back while fending off blows with great strokes of his broadsword. Malcolm of Lennox had been cornered. Simon Fraser had disappeared.

  Another Scot marked with the white lion of Galloway rushed in at Robert. The man checked his blow at the last second, his face registering shock. He lunged instead for Hunter’s reins. ‘I have the king!’

  Hunter tossed his head, but the man held on, pulling the bit painfully through the warhorse’s mouth. Robert stabbed out with his blade, but couldn’t reach him. Then, Christopher Seton was sweeping in from the side. With a vicious arc of his sword, the knight cleaved the man’s head from his shoulders. The man’s hands continued to clutch Hunter’s reins until the horse bucked away and the headless corpse collapsed, spewing blood. But the Scot’s shout had done its damage. More men were turning on Robert, eyes alight at the promise of such valuable prey.

  Away across the jostling crowd, through the clouds of smoke, Robert caught sight of a powerfully built man astride an armoured destrier, its trapper striped white and blue. The man’s helm was crested with a spray of feathers. He had snapped up his visor and his gaze was on Robert.

  Aymer de Valence’s lips peeled back. ‘Bruce!’ he bellowed, thrusting his sword in Robert’s direction.

  John of Atholl was at Robert’s side, as were Edward Bruce and Neil Campbell, hacking desperately at the Galloway men pressing in on all sides. Hands reached out to grasp the man who had overthrown John Balliol, their former lord, and had murdered his nephew, John Comyn. There were too many of them.

  ‘We must pull back!’ Atholl cried hoarsely.

  Smoke and sweat sour in his mouth, Robert wrenched Hunter towards the trees, into the shadows of which many Scots were fleeing. Yelling the retreat, he and his men spurred into the gloom, quickly overtaking foot soldiers and the wounded. The ridge echoed with fighting, many English having ridden deeper into the camp, aided by the men of Galloway. Men scattered through the trees in all directions like panicked ants pouring from the ruptured cone of a nest.

  Robert passed a group running pell-mell through the undergrowth. He caught a glimpse of a youthful face and felt a shock of recognition, certain the young man was his nephew, Thomas Randolph. Then he was thundering on, no chance to slow or turn, the stampede carrying him out of the trees and down the steep hillside towards the river.

  Chapter 4

  County Durham, England, 1306 AD

  As the physician rubbed his hands in the basin, the odour of turpentine sharpened the air inside the tent. King Edward closed his eyes at the bitter smell, which had become a harbinger of pain these past weeks. Breathing through his mouth, he sat on the edge of the bed wincing at the spasm deep inside his bowels. The feather mattress provided scant comfort. Everything – the bed and cushioned stools, the smooth saddle of his horse, even the silks and linens he wore – felt rough and unyielding. It was as if his skin were thinning, exposing him little by little to every hard edge and coarse surface.

  ‘My lord?’

  Edward looked up to see the physician standing in front of him. His eyes narrowed as he saw the lancet and glass bowl in the man’s hands. ‘No leeches, Nicholas?’

  ‘I’m afraid not, my lord. While the moon is in its current phase I must do all I can. Leeches are too slow for this work.’ The physician’s thin lips pursed. ‘I say again, my lord, I would rather not do it at all, given your current weakness.’

  Edward’s face tightened at that last word. His grey eyes, one of which drooped at the lid lending him a permanent hooded scowl, fixed on the physician.

  Nicholas Tingewick was a cool, self-possessed man, who had spent six years at Oxford studying medicine and canon law, but even he could not help but squirm under that gaze. Clearing his throat, he motioned to the stool he had set out. ‘If you will, my lord.’

  As he rose, Edward was gratified to see Nicholas take a step back. Even with the stoop that curved his shoulders, the king stood at over six feet tall. Edward Longshanks, his subjects called him. His weakness may have stripped the muscle from his bones and hollowed out his cheeks until they were lanterns for the light to shine through, but it hadn’t diminished the dread he still saw in the eyes of men when they were levelled with his displeasure. The elderly Dean of St Paul’s had been so affected by it he had wilted and died right in front of him during a disagreement over Church taxes.

  Crossing to the stool, Edward sat, hands on his knees, his body erect. A gust of wind rippled through the curtains that separated the bedchamber from the rest of the royal pavilion. Its cool breath whispered across Edward’s sallow skin, which puckered in the bowl of his sunken stomach, his hip bones protruding over the waist of his braies. Coarse white hairs bristled on his chest, gleaming like spider threads in the candlelight. Scars riddled his arms and torso telling a long story of violence: faded tracks from his youth on the tournament grounds of Gascony, knotted ridges from his conquest of Wales, a depression in one shoulder where an arrow had pierced him at the siege of Stirling Castle and a whorl of scar tissue, close to his heart, from an Assassin’s dagger in the Holy Land. But none of these scars was as livid as the wounds in his side – a series of neat red lesions, only just starting to scab.

  Nicholas crouched beside the king, his eyes on the wounds. His face was intent as he set down the glass bowl with its slender stem of a neck. Placing two fingers to either side of one of the blood-crusted cuts, he opened up the skin with a decisive slash of the lancet. Edward grunted and gripped his knees, feeling the pressure as the physician pushed the cold lip of the bowl into his side, just below the cut. Nicholas muttered something, watching the line of blood trickling into the bowl.

  ‘What is it?’ Edward demanded, glancing down.

  ‘The blood is dark and thick today, my lord. I will have to drain it well, until it comes red and thin.’

  As the blood flowed, helped by Nicholas’s fingers, which kept the wound prised apart, Edward focused on the folded book of parchment that hung from the physician’s belt on a cord. The pages were covered in words, numbers, tables of astrological signs and phases of the moon. There were intricate diagrams of his body with its network of veins and descriptions of the look, taste and smell of his urine. The book charted the course of his disease, mapped out across its pages. On each of those stained sheets, Nicholas had painstakingly compiled detailed information on every facet of the enemy. But it was becoming clear that the sickness was hi
dden deep in the recesses of Edward’s body and all the physician’s strategies to draw it out and destroy it had so far yielded nothing but blood and pain.

  Edward closed his eyes, feeling light-headed. Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. After a time, Nicholas made a satisfied noise and the pressure of the bowl disappeared from Edward’s side. It was replaced with a wad of linen soaked in laurel oil, which the king pressed to the wound, knowing the procedure well by now. The physician was conveying the glass bowl, half full of blood, to his table when the curtains opened.

  Edward frowned as his son-in-law entered. Humphrey de Bohun’s face, browned by the summer sun on the march north, was unusually animated. A new energy had sharpened the earl’s green eyes, making him look younger than his thirty-one years. In him, Edward saw a fleeting memory of himself, so different to the shrunken ghost of a man he glimpsed now in mirrors and water. ‘I said no interruptions, Humphrey.’

  ‘I thought you would want to hear this, my lord. Word has come from Scotland – Sir Aymer’s men.’

  Edward felt the fog of pain dissolve. ‘My robe.’

  At the command, the physician brought the garment. The cut in Edward’s side hadn’t yet closed, but Nicholas knew better than to protest and stepped aside as the king pulled on the robe.

  Edward strode through the pavilion, ignoring the expectant looks from his officials and servants. Humphrey de Bohun walked at his side, keeping pace with the king’s long stride. The sunlight dazzled Edward as they headed out. Raising his hand to shield his eyes, he saw four men garbed in the blue and white striped surcoats of Pembroke. Horses, their flanks foamy with sweat, cropped the grass close by.

  Seeing the king emerge, one of the men hastened over. Dropping to his knee, he bowed. ‘My lord king.’

  ‘What word from my cousin?’

  The knight rose quickly at the king’s impatience. ‘Sir Aymer de Valence engaged Robert Bruce five nights ago, outside Perth. Men from Galloway under Captain Dungal MacDouall aided us. Their pledge of loyalty was proven, my lord. Together, our forces destroyed his army.’

  ‘And Bruce?’ demanded Edward, his heart thudding hard against the cage of his ribs.

  ‘He evaded capture. But we came close, my lord.’ Turning to his comrades, the knight gestured.

  One of the others approached, carrying a bag. With a bow to the king, he reached inside and drew out a folded silk cloak. As Edward took it the material slipped open in his hands to reveal a red lion, rampant on gold.

  ‘Many hundreds were killed in the assault,’ continued the knight. ‘Others we took prisoner, including a member of Bruce’s own family. The rest were routed.’

  Edward didn’t answer, his gaze on the lion’s narrowed eye. The red beast had been hoisted defiantly with the first declaration of war by John Balliol, the man he had chosen to be his puppet king, but who proved to be in thrall to the powerful Comyn family and by their will had stood against his attempts to dominate the kingdom. When he defeated Balliol and first conquered Scotland, Edward had thought the reign of the lion ended when his men ripped the royal arms from Balliol’s tabard, stripping him of his kingship and sentencing him to a life in exile. But soon it had risen again, rearing over the heads of the rebels under William Wallace, who fought in the name of their banished king. He remembered the lion, huge and lurid on a wall in the ruins of Ayr, painted by the followers of Robert Bruce, who had turned on him.

  There followed campaign after campaign, draining Edward’s treasury and testing the loyalty of his barons. Two years ago, when the royal banner had been torn from the battlements of Stirling, the last castle to fall to his might, he believed it brought down for good. The magnates of Scotland had surrendered at St Andrews, the kingdom was relegated to a land and Wallace had been executed, his quartered body packed in barrels and sent to Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth to be strung up on their walls; bloody tokens of Edward’s imperial might. But then Robert Bruce had risen up once more and with him that lion, proud as Satan.

  He had taken the man into his household. Not once, but twice. He had fed him, trained him, sanctioned his marriage, given him land and authority. All the while, the serpent had been waiting to strike.

  Humphrey’s eyes, too, lingered on the cloak. ‘It is a poor substitute for the man himself.’

  Edward stirred. ‘Did you find anything else? Any other possessions?’

  ‘Only supplies and gear, my lord. We took a good number of horses, along with weapons and armour.’

  ‘We will find him, my lord,’ said Humphrey, turning to the king. ‘And that which he took.’

  Edward met his gaze, knowing his son-in-law had read his mind.

  How many nights had he lain awake, pain gnawing at his bowels, his thoughts fixed on the box Bruce had stolen? His feverish mind had drifted often to the fate of the Gascon commander, Adam, missing since he was ordered to Ireland with a crossbow bolt meant for Bruce. Was Adam truly dead, as Bruce had told Humphrey, or had he been kept alive – proof of Edward’s sin? And if Bruce knew enough to take the box from Westminster Abbey when he fled, did he also know the truth about King Alexander’s death on the road to Kinghorn?

  ‘Where is Bruce now?’ Humphrey asked the Pembroke knight.

  ‘He fled north into the mountains. We believe he will make for Aberdeen. Some of those we captured told us he sent his queen and the womenfolk there while he campaigned in Galloway.’

  ‘Return to Sir Aymer,’ Edward told the man. ‘Tell him, if he cannot capture Bruce, he is to trap him in Aberdeen until I arrive. Tell him to use MacDouall and his followers to hunt down the rest of Bruce’s supporters – any who weren’t with him on the field. I want them picked off, like ticks.’ He felt a sudden twist of pain in his gut. Edward doubled over, dropping the gold cloak. Humphrey was at his side in an instant, but the king pushed him away. Sweat trickled down his cheeks. ‘Go!’ he hissed at the knight, who bowed and hurried to his horse.

  As the spasm subsided, Edward straightened, his face clenched. ‘Summon my son, Humphrey. It is time for the new bloods to win their spurs. I will send them west to Bruce’s lands.’ He scanned the plain that stretched from the grassy slope on which his pavilion had been raised. The fields were covered with a sprawling mass of tents, wagons, men, horses and mules, all shrouded by a pall of smoke from countless campfires. His own body might be failing him, but this army arrayed before him was his iron fist and by its strength he would hammer Robert Bruce into the ground. ‘We will leave no allies, no strongholds – no rock for the renegade to hide behind.’

  At Edward’s feet, the fallen cloak rippled in the breeze, the red lion distorted, its one eye staring up at the ashen-faced king.

  Chapter 5

  Aberdeen, Scotland, 1306 AD

  It was a ragged company that appeared before the gates of Aberdeen late that evening. The towering clouds that had shadowed them all afternoon had finally opened on their approach to the north-eastern port and rain poured from the heavens, drenching the column of men to the bone. It trickled down faces drawn with exhaustion, caused rust to bloom on broken rings of mail, soaked through bloodstained clothes and pooled in the depressions of empty saddles. Several of the animals were injured, some wounded in battle, others crippled during the desperate flight through the mountains. They limped along the road, barely able to carry their burdens these last unforgiving miles.

  The guards who manned the town’s south gate at first refused entry to the company, shouting down from the gatehouse that it was past curfew. It was only when they were commanded to open up in the name of their sheriff and the king himself that they obliged, allowing the line of men to trudge across the earthen bank that bridged the wide ditch.

  Once inside, the procession wound slowly through the streets. Rain ran in rivers along the gutters, carrying the stink of night soil down to the Dee. As they made for the castle, which squatted on a hill above the town, faces appeared in doorways and windows, the people of Aberdeen summoned by the clatter of ho
oves and tramping feet. The gazes of the townsfolk lingered on the litters being carried in the midst of the company, bearing those too badly injured to walk or ride. Some nudged their neighbours and pointed out the king, riding beside the sheriff on a grey palfrey. Whispers became rumours, darting from house to house as the people of Aberdeen questioned what had happened and why the king had returned with less than half the army he had set out with in spring.

  By the time the company reached the castle, word of their coming had spread before them and the guards were already hauling open the gates.

  As the portcullis clanked up, Robert rode through the arched darkness of the gatehouse into the bailey beyond, where torches sputtered in the rain. His men funnelled in behind him. He caught a few voices lifted in relief as the weary and wounded saw the end of their journey, but to him these encircling walls that promised rest and shelter were cold comfort indeed. He slid down from the saddle, the sodden woollen cloak Nes had found to replace his royal mantle lost at Methven dragging at his shoulders.

  The castle’s steward hurried from the hall. ‘Sir John!’ He made his way over to the Earl of Atholl, who had dismounted beside Robert. ‘My lord king.’ His gaze darted across the crowd of men filing into the courtyard, some of whom were sinking to the steps of the great hall, helms and shields clattering down beside them.

  In the steward’s shocked and silent stare, Robert saw his defeat. It was burned into the remnants of his army like a brand, his failure laid bare in their depleted numbers and haggard faces. The wheel turns. Always it turns. The words, his grandfather’s, echoed from some distant time. In his mind’s eye, Robert saw himself bound to a great grinding wheel on its downward spiral towards earth. It turns for all of us.