Kingdom (47 page)

Ahead, a man was kneeling in the expanse of white, his back to him. He wore a red surcoat, which pooled around him like the blood. There was a shield in the snow beside him with three sheaves of wheat emblazoned on it. The man was John Comyn. The trail of blood now made a horrible sense. As Robert approached, foreboding rising in him, the man staggered to his feet and turned. There was a dagger protruding from his ribs. His hands rose to grasp at it. Then, as Robert’s eyes moved up to the man’s face, he realised it wasn’t John Comyn standing there. It was his grandfather. The old lord thrust a finger towards him, his dark eyes filling with accusation.

Edward Bruce looked round as his brother cried out. Robert lay on a litter piled with blankets and furs, his head twisting from side to side. His face gleamed in the lantern’s yellow glow, oily with sweat which tracked lines through the dirt and crusts of blood that had sealed over recent wounds. Nes crouched beside him.

Edward glanced to the opening of the makeshift tent, formed from sheets of waxed canvas strung up on the branches of the trees. ‘Christ, if the men hear him like this . . . ?’ He pushed a hand through his hair, which had been stuck to his scalp from the tight encasement of his coif and helm, rarely removed these past days. ‘We cannot give any more of them cause to desert.’ Edward’s voice was thick with bitterness. Their campaign had begun in force and victory had opened her arms to them, eager and willing. Drunk on blood they had ravaged the lands of their enemies; a reckoning long sought. But then the sickness had come, stripping them of their strength and draining their resolve. The Black Comyn had seized upon their weakness, coming at them fierce and hard.

‘We should withdraw,’ suggested Gilbert. His face was drawn and dark circles shadowed his eyes. There was a cut along his left cheek, crudely stitched, where an arrow had grazed him during the attack on Inverness Castle weeks earlier. ‘I say again, let us head south and find shelter until the king is well. Then we can return in strength.’

‘There isn’t time,’ Neil Campbell told him flatly. ‘Comyn will be on us before we can rouse the men. Many are still ailing. We cannot show the earl our backs. Not now.’

Edward nodded. ‘We hold a strong position here. Comyn’s cavalry couldn’t breach our lines on the Christ Mass, when the sickness in our ranks was at its worst.’

‘His infantry may have better luck,’ warned Malcolm of Lennox, looking between Gilbert and Edward. ‘And without our king to lead us?’

They all looked at Robert, sprawled on the litter, drifting in and out of consciousness. The strident blare of a horn rent the air outside.

Edward pushed his way out through the canvas sheets, followed by the others. The woods were crowded with men, splashes of colour from tunics and cloaks daubing the monochrome landscape of bare trees and snow. Many had risen at the horn’s blast, donning helms and snatching up shields. Others, incapacitated from the fever that had swept through the army, while blizzards besieged them and lack of food debilitated them, lay prone by campfires, glancing anxiously around them as their comrades moved into action. The horn blared again, grooms soothing the horses tethered together in a clearing. The animals were part of the plunder they had taken from Inverness, before the castle was razed.

Edward saw Cormac, hastening towards him. His foster-brother’s red hair was the only thing of colour about him, his face blanched by the cold. Thomas Randolph was at his side, his pale blue eyes wide with fear.

‘They’re coming!’

Edward set off through the trees. Gilbert and the others went with him. ‘How many?’

‘I’d say the scouts were right,’ replied Cormac. ‘Two thousand.’

Edward cursed. When the Black Comyn had challenged them a week ago he’d had less than half that number. With his cavalry unable to penetrate their position, well defended on a wooded knoll surrounded by boggy fields, the Earl of Buchan’s archers had resorted to exchanging volleys with their own bowmen over the course of the Christ Mass. Each side had picked off only a few dozen of their opponents before the Black Comyn retreated from the field, leading his men back to Banff. There had been deep relief among Robert’s forces at the enemy’s withdrawal, the respite offering them and their king a chance to recover, but while many of the men had since shrugged off the sickness, Robert had only worsened. There were no healing herbs or roots to be found in the frozen wasteland and no amount of prayers had helped him. The mood among the men sank further when the scouts had ridden in two hours ago with word that their enemy was returning in strength.

The commanders came to the edge of the trees, boots splashing through the slush, breath misting the air. A few of the archers that formed a ring around the knoll nodded tautly in greeting. Most kept their eyes on the distance, bows ready in their hands. Edward followed their gazes.

Before him, the mound dipped down into a large, snow-covered plain, spiked with coarse grasses that thrust up from the underlying marsh. The mud was still churned in places where the enemy’s cavalry had tilted futilely at their ranks, but in the plummeting temperatures of the last few days it had become crusted with a hard layer of ice. Here and there, the rigid limbs of horses and men stuck up out of the snow. Beyond the plain, about a mile to the north, a large column of men had appeared. At this distance they were just a dark mass against the white, but Edward had seen enough armies to know the scouts’ estimates weren’t wrong. Above him, the branches of the trees rattled like bones in the wind. It was picking up. The sullen sky augured another fall.

‘Mostly infantry,’ murmured Malcolm, his eyes narrowing on the approaching force. ‘They’ll not be so hindered by the marshes. They could break through our lines. Overrun us.’

‘We have two score light horses at our disposal,’ countered Neil, looking at Edward. ‘The ground is frozen. We could charge them.’

Edward nodded slowly. ‘We might be able to scatter them, keep them disorganised, before our own foot soldiers attack in strength.’

‘I fear you overestimate the valour of our infantry, Sir Edward,’ Gilbert cautioned. ‘Our men have been without food or shelter for weeks. More importantly, they have been without their king. Just as Robert has weakened so has their courage. You’ve seen it as well as I have. I believe his absence, more than mere discomfort, is what caused so many of the cowards to slip away these past days.’

Edward looked back through the trees to where the men were gathering, hoisting weapons in frost-bitten fingers, shrugging shields over shoulders slumped with exhaustion. It was still a large force, but not as mighty as the one they had led out from Castle Tioram in the autumn, sickness, injury and, now, desertion stripping their ranks. It had been a source of great frustration for Edward to see how much of their will was bound up in Robert’s own – that all their fates should be determined by him alone.

‘King Robert is their champion,’ finished Gilbert, unknowingly putting voice to Edward’s thoughts. ‘It was his valour at Loudoun Hill that inspired them – that caused so many of them to flock to his banner. We need him to lead them in the field again. To put fire in their hearts.’

‘In that case, Sir Gilbert,’ murmured Thomas Randolph, ‘we need a miracle.’

Edward looked sharply at his nephew. Then, he was off and moving, hastening back through the trees.

‘Edward!’ Malcolm called after him.

But Edward didn’t turn, sprinting towards the king’s tent.

Earl John of Buchan, head of the Black Comyns and former Constable of Scotland, reined in his muscular roan courser and lifted his hand for his men to halt. His knights, dressed in black as he was, spread out around him, all eyes on the knoll that rose from the plain, knotted with trees. The enemy were clearly visible, their tunics bright against the white of the snow.

Comyn fixed on the distant figures hurriedly forming up between the trees at the sight of his army. His dark eyes glittered. Back in Banff, where he’d retreated to gather a force of foot soldiers, he had been tense, worried that in the pause Bruce and his men would move on, only to reappear outside another of his strongholds. But his apprehension had vanished earlier that morning when the scouts who remained in the area reported that not only had Bruce’s army been here since the Christ Mass, but that the king himself was rumoured to be deathly ill, incapable even of rising. Several deserters caught slipping from Bruce’s encampment confessed to the scouts that the king hadn’t been seen in days. Some believed he was already dead. With this news, sweet music to his ears, Comyn had roused his troops, leading them with renewed resolve on the road to Slioch. Bruce’s position, which had proven too indomitable for his cavalry, was now a prison in which Comyn would trap him. The scars that webbed the earl’s hard face puckered with his smile. How long he had waited for this.

Bruce’s ambitious toad of a father and his proud, stubborn grandfather had been thorns in the side of the Comyn family for years, but nothing had prepared the earl for the wounds inflicted by Robert himself: the brutal murder of his kinsman in Dumfries, the attack on his house and abduction of his weak-willed wife by Atholl; the crippling humiliation of Isabel’s betrayal in crowning his hated enemy. Bruce’s seizing of the throne had toppled the Comyns from the seat of power they had held for decades. The Black Comyn had thought, after the routing of Bruce’s forces at Methven and the ambush in Lorn by John MacDougall of Argyll, that they were finally gaining the upper hand. They’d had Bruce on the run, a wounded animal, beaten and surrounded. No one should have been able to come back from that. But, somehow, the bastard had.

In the autumn, his army swelled from the triumphs at Glen Trool and Loudoun Hill, freed from the threat of English assault by the recent exodus of the new king and his men, Bruce had swept north through the Great Glen like a storm surge, sudden, unexpected – devastating. Inverlochy, the great stronghold of the Red Comyns, had fallen first, assailed from land and water, the galleys of Lachlan MacRuarie and Angus MacDonald attacking from Loch Linnhe. When the castle fell the ships remained, forming a barrier that would prevent any attempt by John MacDougall to come to Buchan’s aid. The path clear to the very heartland of the Comyns, Bruce had moved on. Next it was the turn of mighty Castle Urquhart, guardian of Loch Ness. Then Inverness. Then Nairn. The Earl of Ross, one of the Black Comyn’s allies and the man responsible for the capture of Bruce’s womenfolk, had been so overwhelmed the coward had offered the enemy a truce, before slinking away. This had left Comyn alone, standing between the rebel king and his total domination of the north-east of Scotland. Repelling Bruce’s assaults on Elgin and Banff, he had set out to meet him.

Now, here on this plain under this bruised sky, with only an expanse of snow between him and his enemy, Comyn scented victory. Bruce’s men, holed up in this frozen wilderness at the mercy of cold and hunger, were losing heart – that much was clear from the desertions. If the man himself could no longer lead them they would surely quail in the face of a determined assault. One push and this could all be over. The time was ripe. England no longer had a formidable king, or one who seemed bent on controlling Scottish affairs. John Balliol remained in exile in France, but if Bruce was crushed there was a chance Balliol could be returned to the throne. Then, the Comyn family would regain their place of power behind it.

The clink of weapons and the crunch of boots in snow filled the air as the infantry fanned out around the company of knights, readying themselves. The horses snorted, their breath pluming before them. The afternoon sky was darkening. A raw wind flurried the drifts on the plain and snatched at the men’s clothes. A few flakes began to fall. The earl rolled his shoulders, stiff under his hauberk and coat-of-plates, as he waited for the last men to move into position. He was now sixty and his muscles were less capable of bearing the weight of his armour, his formidable bulk having softened somewhat these past few years. But, inside, he felt as strong as he had in youth. His desire for vengeance was a potent force, pumping new life through him.

As the infantry formed up, the Black Comyn spurred his courser down their line, his harsh voice echoing across them as he told his men that their enemy lay dying in those trees, his men leaderless, faltering. Now was the time to destroy him and vanquish the rabble that had overrun their towns and plundered their lands. Now was the time to end Bruce, once and for all. Their earl’s fierce words ringing in their ears, the men of Buchan set out across the frozen fields, grim of face and confident in step, hammers, maces and spears gripped in their fists. The Black Comyn urged his horse back to his knights, watching as the foot soldiers filled the plain before him, advancing on the wooded knoll. His infantry would breach the enemy’s position, scatter Bruce’s forces, then he and his sixty cavalry would ride them down.

The snow was falling faster, a storm of swirling white whipped by the wind. Arrows darted from the trees as the first lines of Comyn’s soldiers came into range. Men ducked, those with shields raising them to protect themselves. A few screams sounded as barbs punched into flesh, but the mass of infantry moved on, quickening their pace over the ice-crusted marshes.

The cry of an eagle sounded somewhere above. Comyn glanced up, blinking into the blizzard. Just then, a roar resounded across the plain. One of his knights shouted in alarm. The earl looked sharply back as out of the trees came a host of riders. Forty, maybe fifty strong, they charged down from the knoll and on to the plain, heading for his infantry, snow gusting around them. Comyn’s eyes widened as he saw, at their head, a yellow banner lifted, the red lion of Scotland rippling across it. Beneath it rode the king, his surcoat – emblazoned with the royal arms – unmistakable.