The Guardian (25 page)

He grinned. “I’ll go and see to it now. You can come with me, if you like.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE BURGESS OF INVERNESS

G
od smiled upon me in the weeks that followed, blessing my northern journey with the best of weather, so that I sailed up the eastern coast of Scotland aboard Sven Persson’s ship,
The Golden Gannet
, in a blaze of dazzling, sun-gilt beauty, seeing the land on my left in its true but savage glory, and reiterating my sincere gratitude in prayer, time after time, that I was safe aboard the vessel that bore me, with no need to attempt that journey on land.

The
Gannet
was a fine ship, sixty feet in length and broad in the beam, with sufficient cargo space below decks to generate revenue for her owner and crewmen year-round. She carried a crew of sixteen, eight of whom were armed guards—mercenaries whose primary task was to protect the vessel against attack by pirates. In the absence of pirates, though, the guards worked beside the remaining crewmen, manning the twin banks of oars that powered the ship when there was no wind. Never having been on board a ship before, I was endlessly impressed by the compact efficiency of the vessel. Not a single inch of space was wasted or lacking purpose, and I understood why Will had insisted on knowing exactly what baggage I was carrying.

How different, I realized, this sea journey was from the land route I might have followed, where every turn, every hillside, involved the possibility of change of direction or purpose. Aboard ship, there were no such possibilities, and the more I thought about the differences between where I found myself and where I might have been, the more grateful I became that I was aboard the
Gannet
.
It was one thing to admit that, lacking roads, the Scottish terrain could be difficult to cross. To see that same terrain from shipboard at a distance, however, knowing that there simply
were
no roads traversing it, provided a daunting lesson in the realities of overland travel and the impossibility of progressing with any hope of sustainable speed from day to day. It took me less than a single day after leaving Perth, having journeyed out into open sea, to be able to see for myself how dense and impenetrable were the forests that covered the land, and how its high, rolling hills crested occasionally in majestic, craggy tops that thrust up like breaching whales from the uniform blanket of trees that covered their lower slopes.

Later that first day, before nightfall, the captain and I were eating together with the sole other passenger, huddled in his tiny cabin, when the lookout screamed a warning from above us and sent us running out onto the deck.

I spoke just now of hill crests breaking the surface of the forest like breaching whales, but until that day, I confess, I had never seen a whale. My awareness of the creatures was based solely upon the scriptural tale of Jonah and the Leviathan. That evening, though, I witnessed a gathering of the creatures when we found ourselves sailing northward in the very midst of a large group of them— immense, terrifying monsters from beneath the seas, some of them even larger than the
Gannet
. I froze when I saw the first of them, my eyes directed to the sight by the frantic screams and pointing finger of the lookout on the cross-tree of the single mast. I turned and saw the most frightening sight of my life—a black behemoth leaping clear out of the water less than a hundred paces away and appearing to hover endlessly before it crashed back to the surface and dived. The sight of its mighty, high-held tail remained seared into my memory after it vanished.

I saw how tiny was the ship that I had thought so large, dwarfed and threatened as it was by giant, moving bodies all around us as they rose into view and vanished again beneath the black waters that swirled around our keel. I felt sudden, scalding heat as my bladder gave way with fear. By then, though, everyone aboard was soaked
with seawater and so no one noticed what had happened to me. I thought that everyone else aboard the ship must be as terrified as I was, but I soon realized that what I had taken to be their fright was no more than surprise at finding themselves so suddenly among the whales, in imminent danger of being capsized. I was, I later discovered, the sole person there on the deck who had never seen such things before and thought them supernatural.

Afterwards, when the whales had vanished back into the depths and order was restored, the ship making steady headway northward, I asked Big Sven what he would have done had one of the creatures collided with the ship. He shook his head abruptly. “They wouldn’t have,” he said. “They make no accidents like that. They saw us more clearly than we saw them. They made sport with us, I think, but not war.”

I was astonished. “You mean they knew what they were doing?”

“I think so. They are not stupid, these creatures. And the deep water is their home. They make no accidental bumps … they do not get drunk and fall around like people. So if one collides with us, it would be because he attacked us.” He dipped his head and shrugged. “And in a fight like that, I think we would lose. He would drown us all.”

The captain’s fatalistic observation, and the way he made it, reminded me of a long-forgotten conversation I had had with Andrew Murray the last time I saw him, and remembering it, I felt a sudden rush of gooseflesh and a tightening in my chest at the prospect of meeting the man again and seeing for myself how serious he had been in what he said on that occasion. He had stopped in Glasgow to visit Bishop Wishart on his way north to his home in Moray after escaping from Chester Castle in Wales a month or so earlier. I had asked him a provocative question, one that should never have been asked, since there was no precedent for the possibility I was proposing, but it had simply popped into my mind and I blurted it out as it came to me. What would he do, I asked, if King Edward, for reasons of his own, were to decide that he wanted to make an example of young Andrew Murray of Petty and had him
arrested again and executed out of hand, as a lesson to his father and others?

Andrew had looked at me in much the same speculative way that Big Sven had, and then he, too, had dipped his head and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I would fight him to my last breath— and I intend to do that anyway, no matter what he does. My family’s lands, in Moray and elsewhere, are vast. And if Edward of England wants to seize them, or me, he will have to come and do so in person, and I will not be standing idly by, watching him from some far mountaintop. I’ve had a bellyful of sneering English pigheadedness and I’m going home to raise the men of Moray and stir up Hell itself against these arrogant overlords, as they like to call themselves. Overlords! Faugh! One of them’s living now in Auch Castle, in the house where I was born. But he’ll be leaving once I reach home, and all his people with him, one way or another, and I care not whether they be dead or alive when they go. I am sick to my soul of strutting, overweening English arrogance. Scotland is
ours
by the grace of God—it always has been, and the English have no place in it. And I swear to you that if God spares me, I intend to teach them that, though I have to write it in their blood.”

His eyes were flashing, but strangely his voice had grown quieter as he grew angrier, falling to a near hiss as he continued, almost spitting the words. “It’s high time someone taught them what they are, these strutting, ridiculous bantam cocks. Who gave this benighted, self-deluding King of theirs the belief that he has a right to come up here and impose his will upon free folk who have no need of his interference, no desire to suffer his attentions, and no intention of lying down and allowing him and his thieving, ignorant bullies to trample them and their rights? My father, Sir Andrew Murray of Petty, is ten times the man England’s King could ever be, and he is an old, old man. But he has lived a life any man could be proud of, a life more honourable and upright than anything to which the Plantagenet can lay claim. But now, at the petulant whim of this self-righteous King of England, this posturing, impious popinjay, my father is locked up in London’s Tower and like to die there. I
swear to you, Jamie, by the living God, that if no other man in Scotland will stand up against this aging, braggart crusader from a bygone day, I, Andrew Murray, will defy him alone and die, if I must, with my bloody spittle soaking his grizzled beard.”

Remembering that rant, and the grim-faced, implacable determination of the young man who had uttered it, I grew impatient again with the slowness of my journey, despite my certain knowledge that I was making far better time than I had ever imagined possible. And so, while Sven and his crew worked all around me, I fell to pacing the deck anxiously, though there was scarce room enough to walk four paces before having to turn back and retrace them.

It took us three days to make the voyage to Aberdeen from the mouth of the Tay, and we spent three more in the town, unloading and reloading. The other passenger had vanished with his cargo of raw wool as soon as it was unloaded. I knew no one in Aberdeen, and so I stayed aboard the ship, roaming the harbour during the days and watching, fascinated, the thousand and one activities that go on in such places all day, every day.

A merchant came aboard on the third day, his cargo of heavy, square-sawn lumber already loaded and secured, and our captain— who had invited me that day to call him Finn—introduced us to each other. I disliked the newcomer immediately, and despite knowing I should not judge a man without coming to know him at least slightly, I felt justified in my dislike. The fellow glowered constantly, radiating distrust and hostility, so that among the first words that occurred to me in assessing him were
suspicious
,
taciturn
,
shiftyeyed
, and
surly
. I quickly decided that, having lived for as long as I had without being aware of his existence, I could easily live as long again without a need to be reminded of it. I had no desire to speak with him, or even to remember his name.

I wondered about his cargo, though, since raw, heavy lumber seemed to me to be a strange material to be shipping within a country that was largely covered in forest, but my curiosity did not survive the first two days of sailing farther up the coast. The forest appeared to continue unchanged north of Aberdeen, but on the few
occasions when we approached close enough to land to be able to discern such things, I could see that the size of the trees was diminishing rapidly as we progressed northward, and by the time we rounded the Cape of Buchan and turned west to sail into the Moray Firth, the landscape south of us, in the great lordships of Buchan and Badenoch, was mainly treeless—immense, rocky expanses of low hills, covered in scrub and heather, with only stunted bushes and shrubs laying claim to the name of forestation.

Making that turn and sailing west, it seemed to me that we had sailed the length of Scotland and nothing lay northward of us there. That impression, though, lasted less than a day, quickly belied by the reappearance of land to the northwest, which Finn told me was the territories of Ross, Sutherland, and Caithness. He drew me a crude picture with the point of his knife, scoring two shallow lines in the dampened wood of the deck at our feet to show how, like two sides of a triangle, the southern coast on our left and the one coming down from the northeast formed the great funnel-shaped bay that was the Moray Firth, sweeping inland and narrowing dramatically to the town of Inverness, hard by Loch Ness, at the entrance to the great glen that divided Scotland’s Highlands north and south.

As we continued westward, past the small towns of Banff, Elgin, and Nairn on the southern shore, the countryside grew ever more bleak and barren. There were mountains ahead of us in the west and to the south, hulking shapes shrouded in the mist of great distances, but there were no large trees to be seen, and it rapidly became clear to me that the value of the lumber aboard the
Gannet
had increased greatly since it was loaded in Aberdeen.

There were castles, too, visible from the water on both sides of the firth; enormous castles, several of them built of stone and still being fortified, to judge from the scaffolding surrounding them.

“Where is the Black Isle?” I asked Finn on my last day aboard the
Gannet
.

We were proceeding under the power of oars alone by that point, the firth having narrowed between Nairn on the south bank and Cromarty on the north, and Finn was leaning indolently against the
railing at the rear of the ship, by the tiller, idly watching the efforts of the rowers. He waved ahead, towards the northern coastline that was now less than two miles from us and growing closer.

“You’re looking at it.”

I peered more closely at the land he had indicated. “That’s an island?”

“It’s the Black Isle.”

“Well, I would never have known. It looks like part of the mainland.”

“Aye, but it’s an island nonetheless. There’s a wee channel runs all the way across it, isolating it from the land behind. You could jump over it in places, but it’s there.”

I could see two castles over there, one of them close, on a great stone motte overlooking the southeastern shore of the island, the other farther off, only its shape visible as a large and obviously man-made block against the skyline to the north and east, beyond the hump of the island’s shoulder.

“Which of those is Auch?”

“That one,” he said, pointing at the closer of the two. “And now that I see it, I should tell you this is the closest we will come to it, on this or any other voyage, so if it’s Auch you want to reach, we can put you ashore over there right now, within easy walking distance of the castle. That would save you from travel all the way to Inverness and back here again by land. Would save you two days, at least. It’s your decision, my friend, but if you want to go ashore here you had better decide quickly.”

I gazed at the distant fortress, debating with myself, then asked him if Murray had retaken it or was it still in English hands.

“You tell me,” he said with a grand shrug. “But I can tell you, Andrew de Moray has been in revolt for two full months and more. Everyone knows that. And he started here, evicting the garrison from his father’s castle. I would be surprised if the English have returned since then.”