The Honor Due a King (15 page)

But it was he who moved first. Barely in control of his balance, Neville blustered at me. I remained firm. As his sword parted the air, I met his ill-timed blow and heaved back. The jolt sent him reeling sideways.

I followed him and rained blow after blow. Hard, heavy. Throwing the brunt of my vengefulness into every move. Beating him backward with each quick strike as he could but defend himself and had not enough time to take the offensive. His flurry of energy expended, he melted step by step back toward his own ranks.

I paused to take breath. Looked around. The fighting between Scots and English had stopped but for a few struggling pairs on the fringes of the woods. Most had stepped aside to see how it would go between Neville and me. I saw clearly, not the flashing white of his smile, but the whites of his eyes and the masked fear behind them. In that instant, he felt and knew the inevitability of his own mortality. Sensing the moment, I plowed in and knocked his blade from his trembling hands as easily as plucking a twig from a child.

“I was a lad when first we met. Do you remember it? It was a long time ago. Let me help your memory, for it may be feeble now. Berwick, twenty years past. Longshanks stormed the walls. The town fell. The castle held a few days more. You and your men broke down the door of the room where my brothers and I, mere lads then, were with my stepmother, Lady Eleanor Douglas. You tried to rape her. Tried. I leapt at you and cut you. Your lord and king chastised you publicly. Perhaps that part you remember? You’ve grown old, Neville. I, in my prime now. You, past yours. Isn’t this the moment when you beg for mercy?”

He scoffed and lifted the axe shakily from his belt. “You know full well I have no such mercy for you, bastard that you are. There’ll be no prisoners this day. This fight’s a long cry from being over with. I stand, and I’ll still be standing when the ravens are bathing in the vile blood around your shredded body.”

“Then if you won’t go down on your knees and beg forgiveness for your acts, cast your eyes to Heaven and make your peace. There is but one end to this meeting. You raped her – and you will die for it today.”

A thin laugh trickled from his crooked mouth. He lifted his helmet and mail hood and tossed them to the ground. In the moonlight, then, I saw the crescent scar on his face.

“Your mother begged me into her bed and made sport of the fight simply for show.”

He was a sick man, beyond help or pity or understanding. I let my arms drift wide in invitation. “Is that how you remember it, Sir Neville?”

His axe wheeled through the air at the end of an unnaturally long arm. The bright colors of his surcoat flashed behind it in a collision of scarlet, azure and green. I thrust my sword arm to block the blow, as I had done a thousand times before, and moved to unarm my foe with a quick upward jerk.

But somehow I misjudged. Somehow ... by a moment, a breath, a hair ...

The bottom point of his taper axe snagged my forearm. I felt neither piercing nor cutting, only the pressure of metal against the resistance of my muscle as I tried to jerk my arm away.

I was on my knees then without knowing how I had been put there. The axe blade was buried in my arm, hooked on my bone it might have been ... and yet I could not feel it. Nor could I feel my fingers or the sword hilt that slipped from them and fell to the earth.

Never before or since in the course of all my turbid, contemptuous years had I been without plan or action. But just then, a few brutal moments blurred past when an unfamiliar truth bared itself to me – that I might die, then and there, suddenly maybe, or cruelly slow. My head was as frozen cold as my right arm – unresponsive, numb, apart from the rest of me. I observed a weapon, tempered and lifeless, embedded in human flesh, life weeping in streams and splatters of carmine blood around. It was my flesh, my body ... his blade buried there ... and yet it could not be.
Could not
.

I fought, not with my head or my skill, but with a desperate strength that blinded me to my wounds. With my left arm, I plowed my round shield into his belly. The jolt sent him tottering backward, pulling me with him by the connection of his weapon buried in my arm. I wrenched away and in the same motion let loose my shield and then scooped up my sword with my left hand, its weight awkward there. A stranger in my grasp. But its purpose would speak more clearly. I found my feet beneath me, the earth like a platform holding me up.

I saw then the tear in my flesh – the skin flapping on my forearm like a rent piece of clothing and feeling no more a part of me than such. In that moment of realization, there was no time for needed breath or reckless prayer. Only time to strike out and defend, as I had so very long ago at Berwick in defense of Eleanor against this same man, as I had against Frederick the spoiled nobleman’s son at the College of Cardinal Lemoine in Paris, as I had at Bannockburn against the vast might of England. Aye, those moments defined me, set me apart from other men, made me a creature of the devil’s bowels – feared by honest men and forsaken by the gentler sex. If God indeed had a purpose for me, then he possessed a wicked streak and that was a trait I shared with him, cherished or not. I would avenge Eleanor, who had suffered by this man’s evil touch.

My blade divided the air and drove into his neck, a scant finger’s width below his ear. Blood rained as I pulled my sword back and struck three times more while he staggered, gurgling, his eyes fluttering heavenward. As I poised for one more blow of retribution, his head rolled onto his left shoulder like a shaken rag doll and he crumpled to the forest floor. His body jerked rigidly as he took his last gasp, then went limp.

I blinked away the blood stinging at my eyes. Neville’s men kept their weapons at hand, regarding me warily. I snatched up the red, shimmering axe in my right hand, barely enough strength in my fingers to grasp the haft, and raised it to the height of my drooping shoulder. I shuddered with the rage of combat.

“Next!” I shouted at their blank English faces, all blanched like witnesses to some apparition of the infernal world. “Come now! My master won’t be pleased with this trifling rot!”

They ran. Ran as though the devil himself were on their heels, fain for souls to devour whole, then spit out the bones to pick his teeth with. I would have pursued them each and all and dealt out the same unpleasant fate their vain and feckless lord had suffered. One fallen peacock. One slim, garish feather in my cap. I could stuff a featherbed with the lot of them. But my legs were leaden, my head as light as air.

An angel’s voice beckoned, called out my name softly on the gentlest breeze. “James, follow me. Fast now. Come. They won’t find us.”

My lips shaped her name. “Marjorie.”

Ah, Marjorie . . . let me hold you once more
.

***

Melrose Abbey, 1316

I
slept in a world adrift with alternating memories: some sweetly pleasant, some stark and frightening. A world of pleasures in sunlight and uplifting gladness. A world of clouds and darkness, of slow, seeping terror and sudden panic. I fought to stay ... and to go.

I wandered in that world of half-dark, half-light, hearing Marjorie’s voice – sometimes as a child spilling over with laughter, sometimes as a woman flushed with desire, calling to me – and yet, I could not find her there. Not in the meadows or woods, nor in the twisting alleys or winding corridors. Nowhere. Only her voice, at first loud above the chanting, and gradually, the longer I searched and searched, fading away to nothing.

At last, I came to a room ... the chapel of Melrose. But there was no door through which I could leave. No window to look out upon the world. Only walls of stone, rough and damp to the touch, an altar draped with a cloth of red, and a crucifix hanging askance on the wall behind it. I had the vaguest recollection I had been here before ...

A presence filled me, seized my heart and gave it strength. Yet, I felt no fatigue in my body, no weight to my limbs. I knelt, brought my palms together, touched my fingertips to my lips and closed my eyes. What else was I to do? I was put here to wait, I was certain, for some meeting, some judgment that would allow me either to ascend to heaven or hurtle me down to hell.

As a lad, I prayed when I was prodded, attended Mass when I was made to and doled out respect to the priests by way of blind obedience. When I returned from school in France, I honored Bishop Lamberton as my master without question. But I can never say that truly in my heart did I
believe
.

When I knelt at Mass, Latin utterances ringing above bowed heads, I tried, tried,
tried
to understand, to open my soul, to imagine the light cast by God’s face or his hand instructing the affairs of men. But it never came to me. Never made any sense but to give the poor, hopeless peasantry some semblance of order to their aimless lives and that I thought was reason enough for churches and monks and bishops.

So how was it, after the life I had led, that God should allow me salvation?

“You fought well, James,” came God’s voice, thin and distant.

Odd. I could hear the chanting of monks in my dreams. I tried to open my eyes, to look upon Him. A shape, white and floating, appeared before me, but I could not make out the face.

Fool. Man is not meant to look upon God.

“You’re fortunate to be alive,” said the voice, this time closer, more clearly.

I blinked. I was lying down now ... but how? “Alive? Alive?” I kept repeating it in confusion. I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be with Marjorie.

A starpoint of white hovered above me. The face came near. Smiled quaintly. I blinked again. The point of light became a candle flame, but the face ...

Another figure stooped over me. This voice was deeper, gruffer. Familiar.

“Aye. Those English must’ve thought you possessed by the devil. Ran like flaming hell to get away from you. Lost a lot of blood, you did. Nasty wound there. Turned fifteen shades of purple and green before Gil cleaned it up. Should I tell you how? Or would you rather not know? Let’s just say it had to do with wee, slimy beasts. Och, look there. You won’t be out of bed for a while, much less heave a sword.”

Outlines sharpened. The light around the room brightened. Candles wavered – on a small table by the bed, in sconces by the door. With my returning sight, sensation began to return.

“Boyd?” I whispered. “Where are we?”

“Melrose.” He chuckled, then handed Gil a piece of cloth. “But we’ll have you back at Lintalee in no time.”

“You must have thought to bury me, if you brought me here.” I feigned a smile, but do not think I managed, so weak I was. I couldn’t stay here. There were too many memories of her here.

Gil dipped the rag in water, then began to dab at the wound on my forearm. The water burned. White pain fanned upward, from my arm, to my shoulder, through my chest. I felt weak, as though I was slipping away again.

“Aye. We fetched the mason to cut you a headstone.” Boyd guffawed. “Fools, all those folk who say you’ve a pact with the devil. Too damn stubborn to die, that’s what you are. Any ordinary man would not have lasted a day in your condition.”

Boyd, Gil ... you should have let me die. I could have been with her again
.

***

W
hen I was well enough to ride again, Gil and Boyd escorted Archibald and me back to Lintalee. Many times before I had been wounded, but never so grievously. The wound itself was not life-threatening, but the loss of blood had been great. If I could have chosen, I would not have returned to the world, but there was always something within my soul that would not succumb. My work, whatever it was anymore, was not done. No matter that I no longer cared to discover that calling. I only wanted back what I could not have: a chance to live over those few short months with Marjorie in which I had tread so errantly astray.

One dismal November day as my brother and I sat about the hall in Lintalee with our two favorite hounds sprawled under the tables, I was, as usual, deeply sunk in melancholy, pondering the same thoughts senselessly over and over. I had a sheaf of arrows arrayed on the table. One by one, I picked them up, inspecting the goose feathers for gaps or imperfections, eyeing the shafts for straightness, testing for weight and balance, lying them back down again, reaching for another.

When again would I be able to pull my bowstring? My arm was yet partly numb below the elbow and I had far from regained good use of it. Eating left-handed was something of an embarrassment, and so my waist had dwindled to spare my pride. I barely noticed when the bitch at my feet lifted her head, stood on her gangly, bristly legs and looked to the outer door.

“Have you heard anything I’ve said, James?” Archibald tapped his knife on the table. “King Robert asks, if you’re well enough, if you’ll be in Edinburgh for Christmas?”

The bitch hound twitched her ears and tilted her gray-streaked head. As I reached to stroke her neck, she trotted away toward the door, turned and looked expectantly at me.

“No hunt today, girl. Not for some time,” I told her.

“You didn’t answer me,” Archibald whined.

“The Lindsays will be in Edinburgh, certainly. Have you answered them about their sister?”

His cheeks flushed crimson. He fidgeted in his chair. “Come with me, James. Tell me if you think Beatrice is fit to marry.”

“Me? ’Tis you who’ll have to share her bed, not me. I’m far from qualified in meting out advice in the department of marriage.”

“Ah, but you used to prod me constantly on it. Told me I ought to marry. Even offered Douglas Castle to me. I’ll say if I dare, but it frightens me to think of ... of spending all my life with one woman. What if she’s a shrew? Near thirty, she is, older than me, and never once married.”

“There were offers. All fell through for sound reasons. I understand one of her betrotheds died in battle less than a month before they were to be wed.”

He slid from his seat, paced uneasily. “Come, won’t you?”

“You know the way as well as I.”

He stopped abruptly, his back to me. Crossing his arms, he turned to gaze at me with the look of a child from whom the truth can no longer be hidden. “You said her name when you were down with the fever, did you know?”