Worth Dying For (The Bruce Trilogy) (16 page)

Edward was right. I could not sit my horse. He held my limp, burning body to his chest as he sought to preserve me and gave me his cloak. I cannot say that I slept in such a precarious state, propped up in the saddle semi-conscious with naught but Edward’s cramping arms to save me the fall, but I remembered very little of our flight. When we forded a river and the frozen waters cut across my lower legs I was shocked into temporary mental acuity. But just as fast, my mind, echoing the failing strength in my body, dimmed to darkness. Water brought to my lips invoked endless retching. Food had not passed my lips for a week. I recognized the haunting whisper of Death’s specter as it breathed at my neck. I had seen the spirit’s impending visit on my grandfather’s ashen face in his fleeting days and I knew by others’ reactions that that was how I must have looked.

By Christmas Day, I could not rise. My heart told me to listen to my dreams and live. My head told me to listen to my body and just let go.

As the snow tumbled down and deep upon the earth, my men straggled uphill, numb and weary. Boyd carried me in his arms and laid me on a thick piling of furs beneath an outcrop of rock, so that the snow would not bury me. I turned my stiff, aching neck to look. There, far beyond a boggy stretch of turf lay a village, wasted and emptied – though whether our work or Buchan’s or perhaps even Pembroke’s I could not tell. Edward began to array our men on the hillside, archers to the fore. And there in the distance... the men of Buchan marching forward, straining to churn their legs through the impeding drifts, their horses snorting clouds of ice.

Gil, who knew Latin better than any among us, sank to his knees at my side and began to utter, “...
terra sicut in coelo...
dimittenobis...
nosinducas in tentationem...
”

He made the sign of the cross above me, glanced quickly over his shoulder, laid his hand on my chest and started again. “
Pater noster qui
–”

I laid my trembling blue fingers over his. “When did you take vows, Gil? Do I look so near to death?”

He feigned a smile, but it slipped away under the shadow of his beak-like nose. My brother-in-law Neil Campbell, his longsword dangling from one hairy-knuckled hand, hovered grimly over Gil’s shoulder.

“Tomorrow will find you hale, my king,” Neil insisted. “For now – Buchan, he is across the way. Rumors were amuck that you were already dead. That is why they’ve waited so long to come after us. They dared not while they believed you among us. But now, we’ve nowhere left to run. Our legs refuse to carry us any further.”

“Time to use your arms, Neil,” I told him hoarsely. “Time to fight.”

“Aye.” Neil tightened one of the carrying straps of his studded round shield and stood.

“Neil?”

“Aye?”

“For Mary.”

The name touched on some strength deep and latent within him. He drew breath, raising his shoulders, and nodded. “And Elizabeth.”

Before his sentimental side got the better of him, Neil took off scrambling sideways along the hill. I gestured to Gil to bend nearer to me.

Our archers ran their calloused fingers over their strings for one last test, then jabbed their missiles into the packed snow at their feet. They were well practiced and my faith in them was unfailing. But Buchan had archers, too, and no matter how stray or true the aim on either side, Scots would die this day.

“Edward – bring Edward,” I whispered into Gil’s scarlet-rimmed ear. I tried to raise my head, but the downward pull was too great, my power too little. “Tell him... I have a wish.”

Gil left me. It was only a moment and yet more than an eternity when Edward’s hulking shadow appeared above me. He studied me in his callous, cursory manner, half love, half hate, then knelt slowly beside me. There was not a thread of fear abiding in his conscience – only the cool glimmer of ambition at seeing his older sibling, that which stood between him and glory, heartbeats from death.

He bowed his head and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Your wish?” he prompted.

Of all of us this past year, he had fought the hardest and most dangerously, and yet he appeared unscathed, stronger, damn invincible.

I looked him straight in the eye and raised two fingers. Then I lowered one and said, “First, if you must go on without me, that you will finish what I started.”

“That goes without saying, Robert. And?”

My hand began to shake and I let it fall to my chest. “Put me on my horse. Let me lead them one more time.”

He scoffed at me. “And let you fall to an arrow? No.”

“Edward, I am going to die here anyway. You know...”

He abandoned me with a surly glance. Ever defiant. Tenfold more so toward me than the rest of humanity. And yet...

I watched as Buchan’s archers scurried forth. The call went up:

“Take aim!”

For a moment, there was nothing but silence. Far, far silence resounding of mortality and snow all around, blinding to the sight.

“Pull!”

The twang and hiss. Bodies reeling backward. Buchan’s lines faltered, then staggered on. Another command. Another cloud from our side, like diving swifts, cutting through the sky. More fell. Buchan’s men began to weave and wade their way through the bog. My own men stood waiting with slack shoulders and pale, sepulchral faces.

I pushed away the furs covering me, turning over so that I could pull myself along the frozen ground, and searched for my sword and shield, for I had only my axe in my belt, nothing more. I trembled from the effort so much that I had to lay my head down to rest. Even though the surface of my flesh was drenched in fire, I felt the cold deep inside every muscle and my body yielding to it.

My dearest wish was to sleep until winter passed, then perhaps, in spring, awaken and move my resting place to some grassy knoll swept by a warm breeze. Come summer I might wander to the banks of a swift stream, there to dangle my hand in the cool water and watch the salmon flash like the last rays of sunset beneath the foaming swirls. But this existence... this marching on through winter’s grip, swimming against the undercurrent of insurrection among my own countrymen, trailing them down, dangling retribution over them and at the last moment casting exoneration on them...

Heaven pity me, but that last was more draining than all my other efforts through the whole of my life. I only prayed that my generosity would not later prove me to be a naïve fool. Ah, but for certain it would. Let me rather pray that it would buy me more and stronger allies than enemies. I would need them. I had so few in the beginning and now – James, Boyd, Gil, Angus – blood brothers, all. But to die here today, while so much faith and loyalty yet lived...

Then... before me – the movement of hooves. My horse.

As Neil and Gil scurried to position me on my mount, Edward looked on, his sword lying ready across his lap as he sat astride his own horse. Neil and Gil held me fast while Boyd drew up on his bay next to me. Boyd brought our horses as close together as possible so that his knee touched mine. Carefully, he placed my sword in my limp hand.

“Hold onto this with all you have,” he said. “I will hold the other end with my right hand to support you and hold you up with my left. We’ll ride down the hill. When they see you, I’ll let go. Raise it up. Let them know it is you.”

I curled my fingers about the hilt. “I can’t feel the damn thing. Not at all.”

“Doesn’t matter. We’re taking wagers on the might of your reputation.”

With Boyd beside me and Edward riding abreast, we went slowly down the hill. Edward had told our men to hold their position, a directive they accepted willingly, for none were in a state for an intense or drawn out fight. We picked a path through the fallen bodies. Arrows fell wildly about us and twice Edward blocked one with a swift move of his shield. Where the slope leveled out, we halted. Buchan’s soldiers were now a hundred feet away.

Boyd let go of my blade. Even though it felt to me heavier than any boulder I had ever rested on, I raised my sword toward heaven.

Let God’s will be done. Take me now or let me finish what I have begun.

Their lines began to falter.

“The Bruce!” someone shrieked.

The few still rushing forward drew up, then turned back. Buchan’s lines broke. They ran.

I slumped against Boyd’s burly arm and closed my eyes.

Ch. 16

Edward II – Boulogne, 1308

Isabella. Isabella.
Queen
Isabella…

Daughter of a king, soon to be the wife of one and someday, should God decree, the mother of yet another. Born in a royal bed and taken to one. She need do nothing but receive me when I will have her, bear me a son, steward my servants and otherwise keep from me. A pampered life. One I would have relished, had I been so inclined to compliancy. Both misfortune and ease in being born woman.

I saw her for the first time in the cathedral at Boulogne. Between Bruce and his fractious rogues in Scotland and my English barons who nagged me to conclude my arranged union, this for now was the lesser of two evils. The documents had all been detailed, perused, re-penned, signed and sealed. Her dowry was already aboard ship. I was satisfied with her lineage as worthy of my own, pleased with the trinkets and property that came with her, but in the girl herself I was disappointed. Thirteen and by that age she should have had some budding to her bosom and broadening to her hips. She was a reed. Legs of a crane underneath that billowy skirt, doubtless. Layers of radiant silk and velvet did not distract enough from the thinness of her cheeks. And how was such a weanling to get herself bred? I might have suspected that in Louis’ court they ate nothing but bean bread and turnips, judging by the sight of her, except that I have seen that the king himself is as corpulent as an overstuffed boar. We shall have to flush her after the tupping. She will have a fat baby, a healthy one, and after that I will be done with her.

Her eyes, though, they were... pretty. But shy. Big and round, like a doe’s. Her pupils swam in a pool of tears. Tears of joy at the promise of womanly fulfillment... or tears of fear and repulsion? Probably some worldly, spiteful handmaiden had informed her of the horrid details of wedding nights and sent her into a dithering state of fright.

As she floated ghost-like up the steps to the altar, I experienced some relief at her displeasure. She gave a broken sigh, almost a whimper, her knees wobbling as she forced the last step toward me and placed her clammy hand in mine. I turned to the bishop and did not look upon her again until all was done.

Suffering the tedium of the ceremony, I yielded to distraction and glanced around at the spindly columns holding the ceiling aloft and up at the vaulted arches as they intersected in endless webs. A confusion of angels radiated from the narrow windows behind the altar and it was there, for a long while, that I fixed my eyes as the bishop canted on and on in mystic verse.

Only the peeling of bells roused me from my open-eyed slumber.

Although we walked side by side down the length of the nave and out into the shocking light of a winter noonday, we were yet separate entities, just as we had been hours before. Horses caparisoned in silks and bells awaited us. With a noisy string of mummers trailing behind the wedding party, we made way to the castle where a feast followed. Everything was, as is the usual French manner, in excess. I might have been reviled by it, but on this occasion it was a welcome array of distractions. My new wife waned. She slumped. She looked as though she might dissolve into a lake of tears from pure exhaustion at any moment.

“You should retire, my lady,” I said.

She recoiled at my words. It was the first I had spoken to her, nay, even looked at her directly since leaving the cathedral. I leaned closer, intrigued by my effect on her. Her ivory hands lay tightly clasped in her lap.

“Wait for me,” I teased wickedly.

Her eyes enlarged to the size of full moons. “Your forgiveness, but... I am exhausted,” she said meekly.

“Ah.” I gestured for more wine. When the servant finished filling my cup, I numbed myself with its contents. “I shall inform our guests that I, too, have wearied and need to retire.”

She shuddered visibly and cast her eyes down. To her right, broad-bellied King Philip, resembling a lobster in his rose-colored clothes, was picking clean an entire stuffed capon. To my left, my stepmother Marguerite batted her eyelashes at the kings of Navarre and Sicily and thrust out her pouting, rouged lips. Was it the nobility of Europe I sat amongst, or the harlotry of a brothel?

I tugged at the ends of my sleeves, admiring the cut and hang of my peliçon. With a raging hearth at my back, the fur was stifling, but the fashion worth the price. “You wear your dread too plainly. Worry not, then. You are... how should I say this – not yet ready. I can see. There will be time, later, for the marriage bed.”

To my immeasurable relief, she slid back her chair and rose, dipping at the knee to me for the benefit of our onlookers, but avoiding my gaze entirely.

“Isabella, my little butterfly?” King Philip slurred as he wiped the spittle from the corner of his drooping mouth. “Will you not dance with your new husband first? What shall I have them play for you?”

He jerked his other hand up in the air, sending droplets of grease from his roasted chicken leg splattering onto my new garments. I snatched his forearm and yanked it back down before the musicians were alerted to his wishes.

“She is weary, my lord,” I begged, as I watched her turn and scurry off. “We will have years ahead of us to dance. Years ahead in which to get to know each other.” But what was there to know of her? She was meek, uninteresting. A dainty violet whose petals would wilt with the first frost. What match was she for me? Certainly, Piers outshone her in every way. And it was Piers who had my love, not her.

Head down, Isabella tried to rush through the doorway at the far end of the great hall, but a young man with hair the same flaxen shade as hers caught her in his arms and held her protectively to his breast, smoothing a hand over her back in comfort. I recognized him as her brother, Charles, older than her by only a year.