The Mer- Lion (3 page)

That these two princes could not share their isle harmoniously surprised no one. Once the shrewd influence of Henry VII was gone, problems multiplied, beginning at the border. No longer did the English wardens suppress the wanton raids of English Borderers into Scotland, and James's wardens retaliated by ignoring the incursions by Scots into England.

Henry VDI compounded the problems by dabbling in European politics. In 1512, he joined with the Pope and the Emperor Maximilian in an alliance against France, Scotland's traditional ally. Against her will, Scotland was being pulled into a maelstrom not of her own choosing. Yet, it was a flaw in James IV's own character that brought Scotland to commit the folly of invading England.

James, though forward-looking, was in one respect an atavism: he was an honorable man. Honorable in the medieval, chivalric sense of the word. In the early summer of 1513, faced with an invasion by an English army, Louis XII invoked the Auld Alliance between France and Scotland; and his queen, Anne of Bretagne, named James her champion and sent him a token, a turquoise ring, to carry while he protected her honor. James IV did the only thing a true knight could do—he went to war to defend his lady's honor.

He issued his challenge and summoned his lords, the clans, and the Borderers. And the men came, for they loved their king. Thousands and thousands of them: barons, knights, free-holding lairds, farmers, laborers—common folk and nobles alike, plus all four Scots dukes, fourteen earls, and even three bishops. Seaforth was among those who answered the call. With him went Seamus MacDonal, now a big, blond giant of a horsegroom, who towered at least half a head higher than any of the other Seaforth retainers.

Men from all over Scotland assembled outside Edinburgh, beneath the protective walls of the castle. After hearing Mass in the Abbey of the Holy Cross, alongside Holyrood House, the king and his lords rode out and down St. Mary's Wynd. With him for a distance rode Margaret Tudor, the princess of England whom he had the day before named regent of Scotland as mother of the two-year-old James V. In her very pregnant belly reposed the assurance James needed that his dynasty would continue. As the king and his entourage clattered by with banners snapping in the wind, pipes and drums setting the measure, those living in the noble houses lining St. Mary's Wynd rode out and joined the procession.

Seamus, turning in his saddle, could see the Lady Islean standing on the steps leading down to the courtyard. She was joined there by Seaforth, who gravely took her scarf, tucked it into his sleeve as a token, and bade her good-bye. He did not wear full armor; he was going to war, not a tourney. And the horse his squire led was a cob, not one of his mighty destriers. Thus, mounting required no block and tackle, but simply a leg up. He leaned down from his horse to say something to the beautiful child who stood close to his mother's skirts. Whatever it was, it provoked a laugh followed by a kiss and then a salute. Then Seaforth was off, his men following after, under the six-foot-long Seaforth sable banner bearing a maned Mer-Lion, its forelegs ending in webbed paws, and, from the waist down, its body and tail that of a sea serpent.

Soon the procession reached Cowgate, or the southgate, either a misnomer, for there was no gate joining the city walls there. The phalanx of nobles and their minor entourages filled the street back as far as one could see. Now, the pipes and the drums were nearly drowned out by the cries and huzzahs of the people cheering their king and his glorious army off to victory. Outside the wall, the army joined up. And so sounded the first sour note of the show. So disorganized, so eager to join in, and so independent were they, that some of the troops came to blows as to which would have precedence. The spearmen, in their eagerness to go to war, pushed forward. Like a row of dominoes, each forced the one in front to tread on the heels of the man before him until the Scots army was literally forcing its king to rush to stay ahead of it. Seamus feared for a while that he might get caught in the crush. Later he heard reports that men had fallen and been trampled in the melee. That night, when James met with his assembled lords, he hailed the event as a sign to hurry forward in this goodly cause.

The cheers of the people stirred the blood of the warriors; making them eager to meet their ancient foe. And about them nature added her purple benediction: meadows of heather, spread like spilt wine—or, as some more cynical would have it, Scottish blood— across the hills and moorlands, with the feathery-leaved bracken in its russet glory enriching the scene. Seamus drank it all in. The hills, the sylvan settings, the clear streams, the heather—indeed, it was a glorious time to be alive. Cheerfully, willfully, agreeably, even eagerly, he and his fellows rode into war. Coming to meet them, perhaps less eagerly, but surely unwaveringly, was the English army under the command of Lord Howard, Earl of Surrey.

The two armies met on September 9, 1513, in England, near Flodden Held, at the base of Branxton Hill.

The cannons played overture to this battle, a deep thumping tympany serving as counterpoint to the high-pitched sounds of men preparing for war: the clash of metal on metal, horns blaring and wailing and just as shrilly replying, the cries of men seeking to cheer, rally, and bolster the confidence of their fellow men while striking a note of fear in their opponents.

Seamus never did understand what, if any, were the battle plans. He was too wrought up by the sudden realization that this was actually war, that he was in it; that he couldn't change his mind now and go back; and that, more than anything else in the world, he needed to piss just one more time. Just then the Borderers under the Earl of Home and the Gordons under their clan chief, the Earl of Huntley, advanced. The Mackenzies led by Seaforth went with them and Seamus forgot everything else but staying close to his lord. Down the hill they charged, fell upon a group of men, broke through them and surged on toward the English camp, stopping only to take prisoners. Then, though their leaders urged them on, many began to plunder the dead and the helpless, fallen living.

Seaforth's squire was among the fallen; and on the battlefield Seamus was given an impromptu promotion, confirmed while the army was stopped. As he watched, of a mind to ask Seaforth's permission to join in plundering, horsemen appeared on their flank. The English had struck back. Now there was fighting in earnest and men falling left and right. After the first furious moments, each side drew back to regroup; it was obvious they were well-matched, neither side having an advantage in men or position, and thus neither eager to renew the attack. So they stood facing each other like two angry dogs, their hair on end, their lips drawn back in a snarl, their motions stiff-legged as if to attack.

However, as the noises of the battle raging elsewhere grew even louder, there seemed to be an unspoken but mutual understanding between these two factions. Each side withdrew just a bit
...
and then some more, never relaxing their guard, of course. Finally to Seamus's surprise, the Scots were back at Branxton Hill. From there they could see, in dusty but vivid panorama, the course of the battle. It was a preview of Hell.

The sounds were deafeningly loud, and dominating all else were high-pitched screams that repeated and resounded and never ceased. The acrid smell of gunpowder clung to his nostrils, as well as the sickeningly sweet odor of blood. Dust rose from the battle, pierced now and again by brief slashes of lightning, the spark of metal on metal. No one in his fight mind, thought Seamus, would voluntarily go down into that inferno. That, he saw with horror, was exactly what the Earls of Huntley and Seaforth planned to do. Like lemmings in sight of the sea, they threw themselves suicidally into battle. Down they went into the face of a rain of arrows. Horses fell, pulling down their riders, leaving large gaps in the line of spearmen. Once into the thick of things, dead Scots tripped their fellows up and made the way treacherous. Courage the Scots had in abundance
..
.plus the strength of men whose leader fought alongside and among them, unlike the British whose king this day was in France, fighting a war more to his vainglorious liking.

But the Scottish spear on which James and the rest so relied had met its match in a better weapon: the bill, a six-foot-long shaft of wood topped with a combination ax blade and curving hook. Deftly the English billman lopped off the head of the spear before him, and then did the same to its owner. One and two, and one and two, and do it again. Slowly but methodically and invincibly, the wielders of these weapons advanced, using the steady, back-and-forth sweep of a scyther. Their harvest was death, and it recognized no rank. James IV himself, fighting on although shot full of arrows and with one hand almost severed at the wrist, fell victim to one swift stroke of a bill that separated head from neck.

Seaforth went down, too, victim to a blow that Seamus didn't see. Seamus panicked. He would have run if he'd known where to go. But in the chaos, there was no sense of left or right, north or south. There were only waves of fighting that one rode out as well as one could. Not knowing what else to do, he straddled the body of his lord. So large, vigorous and strong was he that he managed to foil four bills and kill the men who wielded them, until a blow from behind flattened him. When he fell, his massive body cloaked the smaller one of his lord's, shielding it from the British carrion who came at dusk to strip the corpses of the nobles. Seamus regained consciousness before all of the plunderers had passed but cannily played dead; however, his bladder could be denied no longer. Seamus pissed in his breeches, unwittingly wetting the lord of Seaforth beneath him.

When the British withdrew, chased by darkness back to their camp to celebrate victory, Seamus carried the body off the field and up Branxton Hill, intending to give it decent burial. He was surprised to find mat some Scots were still stubbornly encamped there. The Home Clan, who had fought the vanguard of the British alongside the Gordons and Mackenzies, had refused to join in that last self-destructive charge into battle. When Seamus starnmeringly inquired as to why the Borderers were there, Archibald, the third Earl of Home, gave the same answer he had given Huntley and Seaforth a few hours before: "He does well that does for himself. We have fought our vanguard already; let others do as well as we."

(Weeks later, tales circulated among the Scots that it was not a bill, but a spear wielded from behind by a man of the Home Clan that caused the death of the king. When Seamus was asked for confirmation because he had talked to Home's men before and after the final battle, he refused to comment. He spoke only of a debt owed the Border chieftain for the loan of a horse to carry home the corpse of Seaforth.)

From their position on high ground, the few Scots who remained spent a sleepless night—kept awake by the moans and cries of their fellows down on Flodden Field. Seamus would have gOne down to attempt to succor them, but he was not sure that Home's Borderers would have let him return.

Down there, the vast majority of James's brave army perished. Twelve earls, three dukes, all of the bishops who had ridden into battle joined the king in death. Long live the new king
...
the two-year-old nephew of the man whose army had massacred the Scots, decimated the ranks of her nobility, arid destroyed with one stroke most of her country's leadership.

At dawn when the first of the scavengers came out onto the battlefield, the hills around them were clean of surviving Scots. During the night, the Borderers had begun their way home. Seamus too, with the body of his lord tied on a horse.

The jostling of the horse roused the earl from his deep coma, and he moaned, frightening Seamus momentarily. Then, filled with joy, he would have cut his master loose to ride upright, but the semiconscious earl was aware enough to decide that riding tied was faster and surer.

Not until the battle was left far behind, did Seamus stop to make camp, and to unloose Seaforth from his packhorse. Then it was time to examine the wounded arm. What he saw made him all the more determined to get the earl home as fast as possible. There had been great loss of blood. Seaforth's lips were blue, his face white, his hands palsied. The ropes cutting off circulation had stemmed the bleeding, and a clot of sorts had formed, but the clot was blackish, the edges of the wound purple and angry. Flies had been at it, too, and hung in clumps from it. Shooing the flies away was easy, but it was difficult to bathe the wound without starting the bleeding again. Seamus felt that a man needed all the blood he carried with him. "If the good Lord wanted us rid .of our excess blood, he'd arrange regular fluxes for us like he does with our womenfolk." Once the wound was cleansed and bandaged, and the earl rested a bit, they were off again in haste to Scotland and the nearest of the earl's homes, that in Edinburgh.

As Seamus led the horse up St. Mary's Wynd, he was reminded mat less than a fortnight before, they had left the Countess of Seaforth there in attendance on the pregnant Queen Margaret. Ten lances, or one hundred men, had gone with .the earl, plus thirty mounted men, to join the largest army ever gathered together by a king of Scotland before or since. Now Seamus, the earl, and one borrowed horse were all that returned of the Mackenzie contingent.

Seamus surrendered his charge gladly to the anxious countess. Before he left, however, he blurted out the bad news of her king father and bishop half brother.

"The one loved me much, I'll sorrow for turn on the morrow. As for the other..." The countess shrugged her shoulders expressively, "Time now for the living; my lord husband and my very faithful Seamus. Now, hie you to your bed. If you collapse here, 'twould take too many of us to carry you."