The Guardian (34 page)

From that time on, he and I were comfortable with each other.

It was later that same day that I was working outside in the sunshine, at a table in front of my tent, and had completed the fair copy of my report to Bishop Wishart moments earlier. I was, in fact, waving the final written page from side to side to dry the last few lines of ink, when I glanced up to see a lad of ten or eleven scurrying towards Alistair, who sat in the shade of a nearby hawthorn tree. I guessed as soon as I set eyes on the boy that he came bearing tidings, and I knew I was correct when he half turned and knelt on one knee, carefully presenting his back to my gaze, and bent forward to whisper in my guardian’s ear. Alistair, who had seen the boy approaching and obviously knew him, had risen to his feet and moved forward into the light to meet him, and now he knelt beside him, one elbow resting on a raised knee and his head cocked as he listened, his eyes finding mine over the lad’s shoulder.

I remained at my table, watching them. Unlike most of his fellow Highlanders, who wrapped themselves in the single voluminous garment called a plaid, Alistair Murray chose to wear the southern style of clothing, a knee-length tunic over trousers or leggings and heavy, thick-soled leather boots that laced up almost to his knees. He also wore a loosely belted sleeveless jerkin of tanned leather that did nothing to disguise his heavily muscled shoulders. A gleaming torc—the intricately carved collar of heavy gold that marked its wearer as a Gaelic chieftain—encircled his neck, today left bare by the single tight-braided queue that pulled the hair back off his face to hang behind his head.

He stood up, keeping his eyes fixed on me as he patted the young lad roughly on the back and dismissed him with a word of thanks. I watched as came towards me, hitching the sword belt at his waist until it hung comfortably again.

“Andrew wants us” was all he said, passing by me on his way towards the horse lines.

I scooped up my report and my writing materials and carried them quickly into my tent, where I tucked them beneath the thin mattress on my cot for safety before hurrying out to catch up with him.

“What does he want?” I asked when I caught up with him. “Did the boy say?”

We had reached the horse lines by then and I saw the boy himself watching us from the back of the horse he must have ridden on his way to find us. Beside him, on one of the few truly black horses I had ever seen, sat Fillan de Moray, the young chieftain whom Andrew had left in command during his absence. Alistair nodded to the chieftain, then glanced at me briefly before taking his horse’s bridle from the wooden frame that held it.

“It’s not the boy’s affair,” he answered. “He was sent to fetch us, that’s all. We’ll find out the rest when we reach Andrew.” He set about bridling and saddling his horse then, and since I was similarly occupied, we spoke no more.

We rode in silence until we reached our journey’s end, some six miles farther south, for the so-called road we were following was no more than a winding, beaten track that wound haphazardly around and between, and sometimes up and down, the contours of the land. On a particularly narrow stretch through a press of springy saplings, the boy turned sharply right into an unseen junction and went ahead of us along a narrower and even more serpentine path that climbed steadily upwards. Again we rode in silence, our attention on the narrow, treacherous, stone-littered track beneath our horses’ hooves, until our flagging beasts struggled up a final steep incline to a cairn of stones, where our guide drew rein and pointed to a bush-covered crest higher than any we had encountered until then.

“Up there,” he said. “I’ll mind your horses.”

We dismounted and climbed the last forty or fifty paces on foot, making heavy going of it until we arrived at a small plateau where two guards waited. They stopped us, and one of them vanished into a cleft in the hillside, to reappear a short time later followed by Andrew Murray himself.

“Welcome,” he said. “I had you stopped here because there is a need for caution farther along the path.” He beckoned with his fingers. “Come and see.”

We followed him for a short distance, along a track no wider than a goat path, until the land ahead of us disappeared without warning, swooping away beneath our feet, and we found ourselves standing on a rock-strewn crest among head-high clumps of the wild broom that was known up here as whins, gazing down a precipitous hillside towards the continuation of the road we had been following earlier.

“What do you make of that?” Andrew asked.

No one answered him, for we were all three trying to make sense of what we were looking at. The winding road far below us was obscured by a solidly packed mass of men and horses that was obviously the English army we had been expecting. But it was far from being what we might have thought to see. An army on the march—
any
army on the march—formed a long, disjointed train, strung out along its route, and most particularly so when that route was tightly restricted, as was the one below us. What we were seeing, though, appeared to be massed formations of foot soldiers, flanked on the side nearest us by ranks of heavily armoured cavalry, all apparently proceeding slowly in line of battle, as though defying an enemy. But our own force, some six miles behind us, was the only other army in the region. Who, then, were the English facing? I looked at Alistair and saw at once from his frown that he was as much at a loss as I was. It was left to Fillan, Andrew’s lieutenant, to ask the necessary question.

“I can make nothing of it, Cousin, for it makes no sense. They’re expecting to be attacked, clearly, but who by? There’s no one there.”

Andrew grunted. “I’ve been watching them since they came into view this morning, and I kept asking myself the same question because I didn’t believe the obvious answer. Straight away I sent for you three, wanting you to see the truth of it.”

“The truth of what, Cousin?” Fillan was frowning, too. “What is Buchan’s army
doing
down there? Making ready to fight off an attack from us? If that’s so, he’s plainly mad. Unless—unless it
isn’t
Buchan’s army.”

“Oh, it’s Buchan’s,” Andrew drawled. “There’s no mistaking that. If you squint into the sun you can see his standard at the head of the first rank of cavalry—three golden stooks of corn on a blue field. As for what you are looking at, well, I think we’re witnessing something altogether new.”

We all looked at him.

“What that spectacle down there means, my friends, is that John Comyn, the Earl of Buchan, is prepared to spend a long time on the road to Elgin. A
very
long time. He is marching in full battle order, making very little progress—his men are practically standing still— but keeping his formations absolutely safe from attack, by us or by anyone else who might come along.”

“Name of God!” Fillan spluttered. “Why would he do that? It’s sheer folly.”

“Prudence,” Alistair said, more to himself than anyone else, and Andrew grinned at him.

“Aye, prudence, Cuz. A bit of fear, a bit of wisdom, much of common sense, but prudence in the main. You can see he has the forest on his right, at his back. And we know how dense it is there. It’s impenetrable, in fact, so he’s safe from attack in that direction and free to front all his strength towards the left. He must have been marching like that since they entered the Ingie.”

“So they’re expecting a fight,” Fillan growled. “Then I say we give them one.”

Andrew looked at his cousin and smiled. “And how should we attack them, Fillan? What would you propose?”

“We’ll—” He stopped abruptly and stood frowning before he muttered, “We can’t, can we?”

“No, we can’t. Not down there, and not while they’re drawn up and waiting for us. We would be slaughtered. So you’re right. We can’t attack them. And what does that tell us?”

Fillan looked back at his commander and, for the first time since we had arrived on the crest, showed some good judgment, for he said, “It tells me nothing, but I’m not as clever as you, so why don’t you tell us what you think?”

“Right,” Andrew said, looking at each one of us in turn. “I will.” He half turned away from us and stood looking down at the army of Comyns as he spoke on. “It tells me that my cousin down there, John Comyn, might have learned a lesson from his past defeats, even before his downfall at Dunbar.”

“What past defeats?” Fillan asked him. “Dunbar was his
sole
defeat.”

Murray nodded gently. “That is true, I suppose … But would you not agree, Cousin, that a long series of inconclusive fights and a complete lack of victories, even small ones, amounts to overall defeat?”

Fillan made a face. “Mayhap … I might … I would, in fact. So what are you saying, Andrew?”

“I have already said it, Fillan. Buchan has learned from experience, and I now suspect that he really might not want to fight us— and I don’t simply mean here on this road. I think he might not want to fight us at all.”

“But he’s here, is he not?” Fillan said. “And with an army big enough to kill us all. How can you say he doesn’t want to fight?”

Andrew looked at him and wrinkled his nose, sniffing loudly. “Say I can smell it in the air, Fillan. Look,” he said, “there are two ways to consider this situation. The first is to see it as it appears to be, plain and simple and seemingly straightforward. The other, though, is to look beyond what appears to be, and see what is really happening here. The truth is that Buchan is here with an army because he is under oath to Edward, but I think that is open to challenge. His oath was taken under duress, as a quid pro quo, paroled freedom in return for a commitment to fight in Gascony.

“To fight in
Gascony
, Cousin. Understand that clearly. In Gascony, but not here, not in Scotland. I would stake my life—and in fact that is precisely what I intend to do—that there was no mention at the oath-taking of fighting here in Scotland. The world is aware that an oath sworn under duress has no validity, but that’s of little import here. The fact is that we have had no indication to this point that Buchan wants to fight us.”

He paused, surveying the road below. “He is also down there with an army because his orders were changed, brought to him on the road by Edward’s messenger. Those changes required him to march north from Aberdeen to Inverness and relieve Castle Urquhart. That was not necessarily an order to
fight
, for in Edward’s mind, a sufficient show of strength might have been adequate to win the day. But the fact remains that the road my lord of Buchan is on right now is the sole route that would permit him to discharge that obligation. The fact that we are here on the same road, waiting for him, is incidental. He’s a Comyn, born and bred up here in the north, and he has known from the outset that we would be waiting for him somewhere along the way.

“Then again, that he is moving with such obvious caution tells me something more, for he is using far more of it than I would ever have expected him to. It tells me he has been listening to scouts, informants, perhaps spies, and taking note of what they report. He’ll have a good idea of our strength as being close to his own or perhaps even greater, and so he’s taking no chances.” He quirked one eyebrow and looked at each of us in turn. “Be sure of this, though: that has nothing to do with fear—either of us or of his situation. It simply means that he’s a veteran campaigner. He knows this country as well as anyone, including me, so he’s aware of the dangers of the Ingie for an army like his. And believe you me, he will take no chances in the Bog of Gight. The Earl of Buchan is more likely to sprout wings and fly away than he will be to let us lure him off the road and into the bog where we can destroy him.”

Alistair blew out a breath of air. “D’ye mean we’re no’ goin’ to fight him at all?”

Andrew answered without looking at his cousin, his eyes fixed on the spectacle below. “I would have scorned you had you asked me that last night, Alistair,” he said. “But what I’ve seen this morning makes me wonder what we have to gain from forcing a fight here. We can’t fight them there on the road, where they can dictate the terms of fighting. We’d be slaughtered. We know that and Buchan knows it, too, and it’s going to stay like that because His
Grace cares nothing for the time he wastes in avoiding being attacked. The same goes for the bog—I had hoped to lure him into there, but it’s clear now we have no chance of that. For now I’ll watch him and wait. And I’ll let him see us watching him at every step along the road from here on. He won’t come against us from the roadway, for he can’t. He has no room for his army to deploy. All he can do is keep them huddled close for safety, and what’s safe for him and his, in this particular place, is safe for us, as well.”

But Fillan had other thoughts. “What happens once we cross the Spey? The country opens out up there. He can spread his forces into ranks anywhere up there.”

“Aye, and so he might. But he’s not likely to, if what I suspect is true. I believe he’ll rest content to march in defensive order all the way to Elgin. And if he does that, then in all probability he will turn west and continue all the way to Inverness.”

“Without a fight? Once we’re across the Spey, we could force him to fight anywhere we choose.”

“We could, Fillan. Of course we could. But if we do, his men will kill a host of ours and we will kill a large number of his and all we’ll end up with will be hundreds of dead Scots. And the more I think of that, the less I like it. Hundreds of dead Scots. All killed for England’s cause. That makes no sense at all. Especially when they’ll soon be fighting by our side anyway.”

Fillan blinked in bewilderment. Perhaps we all did. “What d’you mean, fighting by our side?”

“Buchan and all the other magnates will join us, Fillan, sooner or later. That’s why he doesn’t want to fight us at this stage. He’s waiting to see how matters develop. And when he’s grown convinced we will prevail, he’ll cast off his false oath to Edward and declare for us and for the realm.”

“He will?” Even Alistair seemed stricken by Fillan’s obtuseness, for he turned his eyes away to study a giant clump of gorse far below.

“Of course he will,” Andrew said. “They all will—all the Comyns and their ilk, forbye all the MacDougalls and MacDowells,
the MacDonalds and the Stewarts, the Campbells and the Grants— all of them will come together for Scotland. You wait and see.”