The Guardian (16 page)

The staff was a plain, unadorned thing of dried and hardened ash wood, virtually identical in weight and thickness to the one that had been mine a decade earlier, when I still sparred with Will. In recent times I had seen more elaborate staves, some crowned with metal to make them even more lethal than nature had intended. I had even seen some that were longer and heavier than this. One of those, I recalled, had been more than six feet in length, and I had wondered
at the time why its owner should have felt he needed anything that long, because the added length, to my eyes, made the weapon cumbersome and unwieldy. But swords and metal weapons had been hard to come by in Scotland since Edward had confiscated all the weapons lost at Dunbar, and many men had reverted to the comforting heft of a solid, well-cured quarterstaff, metal-shod or not. I hefted this one myself, gripping it with the ease of long familiarity, and swung it tentatively, left and right, before gliding into the traditional, rhythmical pattern of disciplined exercises basic to the use of the weapon. I ended by twirling it vertically in what had once been one of my favourite moves, with my arm outstretched to bring the weapon’s butt end up to slap gently and comfortably into my waiting right armpit.

“Now that is impressive. Where would a priest learn to do that?”

The voice snapped me back to awareness of where I was, and I swung about to find the fallen warrior sitting up and looking at me, his spread elbows resting on his upraised knees and his face invisible behind the cheek guards of his helmet.

“I wasn’t always a priest,” I said, extending my hand to pull him to his feet.

He swung himself up smoothly and released my hand. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice muffled by the helmet.

I lay his quarterstaff against one of the nearby seats. “Father James Wallace, of Glasgow Cathedral.”

“Wallace? Are you any kind of kin to the outlaw?”

“He’s my cousin,” I said. “But I’m a priest, as you can see, not an outlaw. I’m here with Bishop Wishart, to meet with Lord Bruce.”

The metal-covered head tilted towards me. “Lord Bruce of Annandale?”

“No, the Earl of Carrick.”

“Ah! They’re father and son, you know.”

“I did know that,” I said.

“Good, then. Help me off with this damned helm, will you?” He had been tugging uselessly at the thing for several moments but it was showing no sign of movement, and now he bent towards me,
pushing against its lower rim. I grasped the crown and heaved twice before I finally pulled the helmet off his head.

“Ah! Thanks be to Christ,” he said, blithely uncaring of taking the name of the Lord in vain. “There’s so much padding in that thing, I come close to suffocating every time I put it on. And there are times it feels so tight I doubt I’m going to get it on at all.” He spun the helm in the air and held it towards me for my inspection, showing me that its interior was, indeed, very tightly padded. He was young and pleasant looking, one of those men at whom it was easy to smile.

“You should probably be grateful for that,” I said, “because the stuff looks thick enough to serve its purpose. Had that big fellow hit you on the head, you probably wouldn’t have come back together as quickly as you did, even with all that padding. That’s a big man. Who is he?”

“Our Rob?” He swivelled around and looked across to where his former opponent stood watching us among the other men, and raised a hand in salute. “Rob is the biggest instigator of fights and the greediest manipulator of wagers in Turnberry. He’s Sir Robert Mowbray, and he’s our master-at-arms.”

“Ah,” I said. “I heard someone call him Rob, and so I thought he might be Bruce, but then it came to me that here in Bruce country there might be no name more common than Robert.”

“And right you are. We have no shortage of Robs and Roberts and even Rabs around here. I’m one myself.”

“And what about the others? They must be knights, too, judging by the ease with which they speak to him.”

“They are, and two of them are Roberts, too. All knights of the Bruce household, as am I.” He grinned at me then. “So, what think you of Turnberry?”

I turned to look up at the lofty tower on the far side of the courtyard. “It is … impressive,” I said. “That’s the word that keeps occurring to me. I had some time to fill before I meet again with Bishop Robert—”

“There, you see? Another Robert. They swarm like rats around here.”

“Aye, well, as I said, I had some time on my hands and so I decided just to take a look around the castle. I was not expecting anything so grand.”

One eyebrow rose slightly. “Grand? How, grand?”

“How not? For one thing, I doubt I have ever seen anything quite as well made as that portcullis at the entry.”

“Hah! If you think
that
portcullis is grand, you really must go down and see the other one. Now
there
is a portcullis on the epic scale.”

“You mean there are two?”

“I do. One at the front and one at the back, over there, facing seaward.” He pointed towards the south wall. “Just follow the main track through that arch over there and you won’t go far wrong. And now I’ll leave you to yourself again, because I need to get out of this damnable armour before I melt like a candle in the sun.” He raised a hand in salute and walked away to join the others, who had clearly been waiting for him, since they all trooped off together, laughing and bantering.

If I had been impressed before, the remainder of what I saw that afternoon left me with a feeling of awe approaching reverence, for I had never seen anything to compare, even remotely, with Turnberry. The high, square tower I had guessed at earlier as the probable Bruce family quarters rose behind me to my left, but another rectangular tower filled one entire corner of the fortification, and it was far bigger than the one at my back. I followed the main roadway, which sloped gradually downwards deep into the dim bowels of the huge building.

There were noises in the air all around me now, and the heights of the ceiling over my head were lost in darkness, but I was nevertheless stunned when I realized that I had entered a huge cavern, that I was listening to the unmistakable sounds of water, and that the strange shape I could see moving ahead of me was the mast of a large, oared galley. I went forward slowly, my eyes growing larger with every moment that passed, and came to a point where I could look down and see the entire vista below me. The galley was huge,
its sides lined with oarlocks, thirty to a side. It was unmanned and unguarded, safe behind a huge portcullis, and it floated peacefully alongside a man-made stone jetty that must have stretched for thirty, perhaps even forty paces on either side. Above and beyond me soared the sea gate, with its lowered portcullis vanishing beneath the waters.

I had admired the portcullis we had entered under, but this leviathan construction must have been three times the width and four times the height, with pairs of immensely strong-looking ropes attached to its top at either end, each rope the thickness of a grown man’s calf. I could do nothing but gape at it in wonder.

I heard a sudden sound close behind me, and I swung around to find my injured companion from earlier watching me. “Forgive me,” I said. “You startled me.”

He grinned. “So, are you impressed?”

“I am. And I am amazed, too. I’ve never seen anything like it. And where did the galley come from, do you know?”

“It came from Bute, yesterday. That’s the island just up the firth from here. It is an astounding place, I agree. How old it is, I have no idea. It’s been in the Bruce family for years. It’s a mormaer stronghold.” He hesitated. “D’you know what that means?”

“Aye,” I said. “The old Gaelic nobility.”

“That’s right. The ancient Earls of Carrick were all Islanders. Seafarers. And it was they who built all of this, a long time ago.”

He was greatly changed from the young knight I had encountered earlier. All of his fustian and felt padding had disappeared, along with the dust and mustiness that went with it, and a very striking man had emerged, tall and well made, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist. His shoulder-length dark hair had been brushed, and I noticed his eyes for the first time, dark blue and sparkling above wide, high cheekbones. He was close to my own age, nobly born, beyond dispute, and clearly very wealthy. He wore a floor-length coat of rich, dark blue brocade with a filigreed yoke of silver wire woven across the shoulders, and a trailing length of bright yellow silk hung down his back on one side, pinned at his left
shoulder with a broad, circular clasp of worked silver. A black belt of supple leather circled his waist, with a long-bladed, sheathed dagger hanging on one side and a black leather scrip on the other, and his feet were encased in finely worked boots of what looked like black kid skin.

“I know your name is Robert,” I said to him, “and that you are a knight, but that’s all I know. So who are you, exactly?”

He bowed from the waist, quickly and self-disparagingly, though that interpretation did not occur to me until long afterwards. “I’m Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, but don’t let that confound you. I would have told you when you spoke of being here to meet Lord Bruce, but I saw you had no notion who I was and I had no wish to embarrass you.” He held up a warning hand. “No, don’t say it. You’re here, and you’re a guest in my house, and I enjoyed meeting you. You’ll be having dinner with us, so you can call me Lord Carrick when we meet again. In the meantime, when there’s but the two of us, please call me Rob. Now come and walk with me and I’ll show you the quickest way of finding your bishop.”

I spent the remaining few hours of that late afternoon and much of the evening looking forward to spending more time with the young Earl of Carrick at dinner, and so I was greatly surprised to find I had little time for him that night. I had liked him from the moment of first speaking with him, and had sensed that the amity I felt was mutual, but from the very start of the evening, when the guests began to assemble, the flamboyant and personable young man, despite his proprietorial right to preside there, was quite simply eclipsed by the effulgence of two of the others present.

The first of these, James Stewart, the fifth hereditary Steward of Scotland, was the personification of most people’s idea of a great lord. Tall, broad-shouldered, richly dressed, freshly bathed and barbered, and subtly, delicately scented, he radiated both authority and amiability—seldom an easy mixture to achieve in any company. He also enjoyed an ability to put awkward, tongue-tied strangers at ease in his august presence, and I watched in admiration as he set
out, effortlessly and with convincing sincerity, to make even the least of his table companions feel more comfortable, encouraging them, without ever appearing to do so, to overcome their natural awe and reluctance at sitting down to dine with him.

He must have been about forty years old, and there was something exotic about him—a hint of foreignness despite the fact that his family had never left Scotland since arriving there from France some two hundred years earlier. And then it came to me that he resembled someone I had once met, a bishop from the Basque kingdom of Navarre, who had visited us in Glasgow a few years earlier. He had been sent to Scotland on a diplomatic mission, to entreat King John’s assistance in the war against the Moors who threatened to overrun the Iberian peninsula, and he was the only Spaniard I had ever seen—though when I said so to him he grew offended, insisting that he was a Basque, possessed of a proud, pre-Roman heritage that precluded any possibility of his being Spanish.

I could see the Navarrese bishop clearly in my mind, and he had had the same physical attributes as the striking Scots magnate across from me. James Stewart was as dark skinned and
different
looking as the Basque bishop had been, with a long, narrow face framed by straight, perfectly coiffed dark hair and neatly trimmed beard and moustaches. Large, dark, expressive eyes gazed straightforwardly at the world, and the teeth that gleamed frequently in his smiling mouth suggested strength of character and quiet determination. He was soft-spoken in that way of strong men who know they have no need to raise their voice, and his entire bearing exuded self-assurance and the great confidence of being high-born and wealthy beyond the ken of ordinary men.

This was not the first time I had seen Sir James, of course. He was the Stewart, the chief of all his namesakes, liege lord to all us Wallaces as had been his father before him, and even the Noble Robert, the Earl of Carrick’s grandsire and former Lord of Annandale, had bowed the knee in fealty and service to him and to his father before him. This was, however, the first occasion on which I had sat at table with the great man, and it was also the first
time I had had the pleasure of being able to watch him at my leisure without appearing to be ill-mannered or impertinent.

There were fourteen people present, and although I did not realize it for some time, being newly arrived and abysmally ignorant of recent developments while I had lain convalescing, the occasion was a meeting of some of the principal figures directing the general uprising that was on the point of erupting throughout Scotland that summer of 1297. The gathering was held in the great hall of Castle Turnberry, which had been partitioned to fashion a room a quarter of its size, and the attendees, myself among them, were arranged casually along the outer rim of a grouping of tables that formed three sides of a rectangle, the open side permitting access for the serving staff.

The Earl of Carrick presided at the meal as nominal host, since Turnberry was his even though he had been away from it for years, and he was flanked by the Steward on his right and Bishop Wishart, the mastermind behind what I was coming to think of as the general insurrection, on his left. The fourth place at the head table, on Wishart’s left, was occupied by Sir William Douglas, the Hardy as he was known, a dark-faced, glowering man who spoke little and frowned constantly.

The remaining diners sat at the two flanking tables and consisted of five clerics and five knights. The man on my right, closest to the head table, was Alpin of Strathearn, the recently consecrated Bishop of Dunblane. I knew him well by repute, though I had never set eyes on him until that day, and I knew that Bishop Wishart held him in high regard. I also knew that he had only recently returned to Scotland to take up his episcopal duties and was therefore one of the few Scottish bishops who had been able to avoid swearing fealty to Edward the previous year. He had been in Rome, being consecrated as bishop, when John Balliol was robbed of his kingship and the land first felt the weight of Edward’s iron-shod heel. I spoke with him several times in the course of that dinner—he was hugely intelligent and immensely likeable—but I never saw him again after that day.