The Renegade: A Tale of Robert the Bruce Read online

  Rob listened, rapt, knowing beyond a doubt that he was hearing more of great matter in this darkened place than he had ever heard before. He was aware that the man he was listening to was a warrior chief whose reputation lent itself to pillage, piracy, and arrogance rather than to diplomacy and subtle politics, but his words were holding everyone spellbound—and with that thought the boy real-

  ized that he had missed something the man was saying.

  “ … damn yourselves, that is your own affair,” he heard. “But damned you will be. Make no mistake on that. And there is no need. The Scots King offers us no ill. He seeks our goodwill—our friendship and support here in the west. His own, true realm lies in the east, and there, from Dunfermline town, he has his work cut out for him in governing to the north and south, the towns and burghs and the fertile lands that feed and support the people there—far, far more people than our isles and mountains could support.”

  A new thought tugged at young Rob Bruce as he heard those words, but even as it came to him it vanished. Annoyed, he tried harder to grasp it, but by then it was too late.

  “East, south, and north,” the Islay chief was saying, gesturing dramatically in each direction with both hands as he named it. “The Scots King’s realm lies there—with us, our high mountains, lochs, and glens, at his back in the west. He sees no risk from us, and he is right. All of us Gaels combined would not suffice to raise an army big enough to conquer his. But he needs us to guard his back. To keep these mountains safe from threats to him. And to gain that help from us, he offers us the right to govern ourselves as we see fit, without threat of interference from him. So be it we conduct ourselves as worthy allies, the man will leave us alone and in peace. The King’s peace, he calls it. And I, for one, have no quibble with that, so long as the King who claims that peace leaves us in peace.”

  Slowly, someone in the assembly began to applaud and moments later he was joined by a second man and then another, until all of them were clapping their hands together in approval. Angus Mohr MacDonald bowed his head, then raised his arm high and brandished his fist. And then he turned to Alexander of Argyll and placed an arm about his shoulders.

  Rob Bruce lay awake in the darkest hours of the night. He could not remember ever being awake at that time. The previous day, though, had been unlike any other, and it had been close to the middle of the night before he and Angus Og had arrived back in the castle to find the housekeeper waiting for them in Rob’s small room. She was in her nightclothes, pacing the floor angrily when they walked in. But Rob, who had known Allie since he was a baby in her arms, knew how to read her moods and sensed that she had not been too worried. She was wise enough to know that the presence of so many grand and unusual guests and armed encampments would have been irresistible to curious boys forced to retire early when so much was going on around them.

  Despite his exhaustion, though, sleep had eluded Rob, and he’d lain on his back for hours, staring wide-eyed up into the darkness long after his candle had guttered out. He saw again and again the sudden, brutal violence and the blood spilt from appalling wounds. He heard the explosive, hate-filled sounds and watched again and again as the raised sword fell from the dying man’s fingers. And he saw Angus Mohr again and again: those long, tense fingers flexing behind his back as he poured scorn on his guards; heard again the milder voice he had used when he spoke to his men in the light of the new-lit torches. And suddenly a door swung open in his mind, showing him what it was that had been tugging at him as he had watched and listened beneath the hawthorn tree: it was a word, once obscure but now more clearly understood, that had been thrust upon him several months earlier by his tutor.

  It had been the first warm day of spring. Rob, who would be leaving home within days to spend the springtime with his uncle, was chafing at having to sit inside and study when he might have been outside in the sunshine. In desperation he had asked the old priest—it would be decades yet before he realized how young Father Ninian actually was, though the man had tutored Rob’s own father— why they could not conduct their lessons outside, on the grass. Ninian had straightened up and peered at him before muttering, more to himself than to Rob, “I have enough trouble keeping your mind upon your work in here. Why would I add to it by taking you outside into the distractions of the world? And why would you even ask me to? Do you believe me so easily manipulable?”

  Seeing the blankness on the boy’s face he added, in his customary didactic way, “Manipulable. From the Latin manus, a hand. Surely you know it?”

  Rob had shaken his head. “No, Father.”

  “That is ridiculous, Robert, and unacceptable. This is a word you should surely know, coming from a family adept in its applications.” He paused, blinked, and continued. “Manipulation means moving something, or controlling it, by hand. That stylus you are clutching— when you write with it you are manipulating it. And since you can manipulate it, it is therefore manipulable—able to be manipulated. Do you understand?”

  Robert nodded, his yearning to be outside ousted by a strange word. Ninian had taught him to love words, so that he was constantly learning new ones and searching for others newer yet. But then he frowned. “If you please, Father? You said my family is … ” he hesitated over the word, knowing it but unaccustomed to pronouncing it, “adept at it. Why should that be?”

  His tutor sucked in a great sigh and released it with a grunt. “Because your grandfather is Bruce of Annandale.”

  “Are you saying, sir, that other people’s families can’t manipulate things?”

  The priest’s face broke into a fleeting smile. “No, Robert,” he said more quietly. “That is not what I meant at all. Everyone who has hands can manipulate. But the word is a rich one, complex with layers of meaning. Every family has its manipulators, of differing abilities, but your family has Lord Robert, who has more aptitude in such things than any other I could name.” He stopped again, seeing the utter bafflement on his student’s face, and then he sighed a second time and closed the massive Bible from which he had been reading to the boy.

  “Very well then,” he said, the half smile flickering again. “I will accept that you are not attempting to manipulate me at this moment, so let us leave the Blessed Paul—a great manipulator in his own right—and proceed elsewhere.” He raised a hand towards Rob, spread his fingers wide and then clenched them, repeating the gesture several times with variations, moving the hand around. “Manipulation. In its most basic sense it means moving and controlling things with your hands, often moulding them as a potter moulds his clay. Have you watched our potter, Fergus, at his wheel?” Rob nodded. “Then you understand what I am saying, no?” Again Rob nodded. “Excellent. So, the most basic level understood, we move forward. Come here now and sit at the table with me.”

  Rob hurried to obey, oblivious now to the seductive sunshine outside. This was always his favourite part of his lessons, when Ninian warmed to an incidental topic and his enthusiasm spilled over to engulf his student.

  “At its most exalted level, manipulation entails a far more mysterious talent than simply using one’s hands. It involves the ability to use your will to shape, control, and mould people—to influence their behaviour and even their beliefs, bending them to your requirements and to your way of thinking. And that, Robert, means you are controlling their minds—their moods, their beliefs, their emotions. It is an ability few men possess. On a small scale we all attempt it every day, we try to manipulate the others in our lives, to make them do what we want them to do—let us leave this classroom and sit outside in the sunlight, for example—to make the lives of everyone about us useful to our own designs. I believe the need to do so is born in us.”

  He spread the fingers of his right hand. “You failed, of course, in your manipulation. After all, I have authority over you and no need to be responsive to your wishes. Few people ever attain the needed skills to influence others in any significant way, and most of those who do succeed have spent their entire lives learning h
ow to do so. The very best of those, the adepts as I have come to think of them, are all leaders, men of power and influence.” He tilted his head and looked at Rob with eyes that twinkled with a kind of mischief. “But what I ask myself frequently is this: are they powerful and influential leaders because they are adept at manipulating people, or have they learned to manipulate people as a result of being leaders? That is a question you should ask yourself in the times ahead, Robert. Whatever the answer might be, you should know that your grandsire is such a man. Lord Robert Bruce of Annandale ranks first among his peers in this respect. I have often watched him play with people’s minds the way a cat plays with a mouse, manipulating them by using the strength of his own personality and the passion of his beliefs to persuade them to do what he wishes them to do. Your father is quite similar, although to a lesser degree, as he lacks the primal fire, the urgency that motivates your grandsire.”

  Rob could find no words to express his astonishment, but Father Ninian was already busy with his tools, wrapping his pens with care and closing the tightly hinged lid on his inkhorn.

  “And now you may go outside,” he said without looking at Rob. “We will return to Paul’s letters to the people of Corinth tomorrow. But in future, bear in mind what I have told you and try to look beyond the faces that your eye encounters, to discern what really lies behind those bland expressions. The day will come, not too long from now or I miss my guess, when you will need to know such things, if only to safeguard yourself against manipulation by others. Now go, and leave me to my work.”

  Rob had had no time to dwell on that lesson in the days that followed at his uncle Nicol’s home in Dalmellington. Nicol MacDuncan was completely without guile, as open and honest as a man could be, and his household was run for him by his two stepdaughters, neither of whom appeared to have the slightest wish to wed a man of her own. They both loved Rob and demonstrated it by bullying him as delightfully and mercilessly as they did their amiable stepfather. Any efforts those two made to manipulate Nicol or his nephew were loud, assertive, and entirely lacking in subtlety, so the boy had no opportunity to practise the kind of assessments urged upon him by his tutor, and he soon forgot about them altogether.

  Only now, in the dark hours of this sleepless night, did revelation wash over him like sunlight from a gap in heavy clouds. He had watched Angus Mohr MacDonald manipulate his small crowd of listeners effortlessly. Now he saw the Islesman chief again, using his hands expressively—those same hands he had worked so hard to keep concealed earlier—as he talked to his men in a voice that suddenly rang and echoed with changing, soaring notes and falling cadences. He had manipulated them, easily and deliberately, and now Rob was bemused by his failure to see it sooner. He understood now that Angus Mohr had kept his hands out of sight at first not simply to hide his anger but to maintain control, not of himself but of his listeners. Showing too much anger would have weakened the lesson he wished to deliver—it would have made him too much like the men he was admonishing, railing at them for their lack of discipline when he himself could not control his own emotions.

  He knew, too, that Angus Mohr had used the band of guards to practise on, saying to them what he would also have to say, soon and with more conviction, to his chieftains and his supporters and subordinates. He recalled the exact words the man had used: Now, some may say—will say—that the Scots King has no presence here in the west, and thus no right to claim allegiance of any of us … Those people are wrong now and will be more so in time to come. That argument was one that Angus Mohr would need to win if he was to maintain control of his own.

  Rob Bruce stared into the darkness and smiled at his own cleverness, and resolved that someday he, too, would manipulate men with ease.

  Book TWO

  The Noble Robert

  1290

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A LAYING ON OF HANDS

  “Jesus! Move!”

  The warning came too late, for the hurtling speed of the bulky figure descending the narrow, winding stone staircase made nonsense of any effort the man coming up might have made to avoid him. With no time to do anything else, the runner threw himself to the inside of the staircase, where the vanishing wedges of the tightly winding steps made footing impossible, and as his shoulder hit the wall he rebounded across and down the narrow space of the well, striking the other man as he went and throwing out his hands to cushion the impact with the outer wall. The man ascending, a castle servant, was thrown back against the same wall, the breath driven from his lungs, but before he could topple he was hit again as the other man rebounded once more from the wall. The servant’s legs gave way beneath him and he fell, clutching at the stone steps above him as he gasped for air. The wooden bucket he had been carrying flipped end over end, hurling water against the curving wall before plummeting down the spiralling stairs, splintering into pieces and narrowly missing the other man, who was already several steps below. He had managed to right himself, bracing himself awkwardly against the wall and listening to the distant clatter of the heavy bucket. There was no sound from above, and as soon as he had regained his balance he launched himself back up the sodden stairs, scrambling on all fours until he saw the feet of the other man. He hesitated, afraid he had killed him, then quickly moved up higher, placing his feet carefully to get around the fallen man as he peered down at him.

  The whimper he heard next would return to him later as being perhaps the most beautiful sound he had ever heard, and he almost moaned aloud himself as he knelt closer to the sprawled figure.

  “Are you hurt? Can you move?”

  The servant raised himself up slightly and looked at his questioner wide-eyed. “What happened? Who are you?”

  “Robert Bruce. My father’s the Earl of Carrick. I knocked you down. I was late, running, didn’t expect to meet anyone on the stairs. I’m even later now, so I have to go. Will you be all right?”

  The man pushed himself around on one elbow and sat up slowly, shaking his head, and Bruce dug into the scrip at his waist and pulled out a coin. It was a silver mark, more money than the other man would see in a year. He pressed it into the fellow’s palm and closed the unresisting fingers over it. “Look, sit here and get your breath back. Someone else can bring the water up again, but I have to go. I’m in trouble enough as it is. If anyone is angry at you, tell him to come and find me, Rob Bruce of Turnberry, guest of the King. I’ll make it right for you. Farewell.”

  He set off again quickly, this time keeping well to the right, where the steps were widest, and he felt the rough material of his shoulder covering scraping against the wall as he went. He was wearing thickly padded practice armour of sized sackcloth, reinforced with leather at shoulders, elbows, and knees and strengthened underneath with layered thicknesses of compressed straw and heavy fustian. Sufficiently strong to protect against hard-swung quarterstaves and blunted swords, the covering was none the less light enough to offer little restriction to his movement—far different from the chain mail and plate steel that would replace it when the time came to fight in earnest. Yet even as he went, his mind reeling with all that had occurred to him in the short but memorable period before his encounter on the stairs, he was aware of a loose flapping at his right shoulder and at his lower legs where he had not had time to buckle the straps of various parts of his coverings.

  As he leapt down the last few steps into the narrow, open doorway, blinking against the sudden brightness from outside and hopping on one foot, he fumbled for the loose straps below his right knee. Gripping one end of a strap in each hand, he shuffled past the door and looked for a place to rest his foot while he threaded the buckle and secured the legging. Beyond the doorstep to the Squires’ Tower the rocky outer yard fell away steeply, and he lowered himself to sit on an outcrop while he quickly fastened the buckles at knee and ankle on one leg and then the other, cursing Humphrey de Bohun under his breath and yet smiling as he did so. Had de Bohun not tripped him, toppling him into a muddy, water-filled ditch, Rob would not h
ave been forced back to his tower room to change his sodden clothes, and he would not have had the adventure that had delayed him so wondrously and then required his mad dash down the stairs.

  He was fumbling awkwardly at the loose straps of his upper right armguard, making heavy weather of the left-handed task, when he was distracted by the brassy noise of several concerted trumpets in the distance. He quickly made his way crabwise under the curved sweep of the wall of the tower in which he was housed, heading towards the grassed courtyard that fronted the main buildings of the palace. Trumpet calls were far from unusual here, for this was the King of England’s home, but such announcements were usually single blasts, heralding the arrival of some visitor or supplicant to the King’s favour. A multiple, disciplined fanfare such as this, on the other hand, indicated the advent of someone of importance, and Rob was curious to see who it might be, forgetting, for the moment, that his own long-overdue arrival at his destination was likely to overshadow the incoming visitor’s, at least in the disapproving eyes of his tutor, Sir Marmaduke Tweng.

  Rob Bruce liked Sir Marmaduke Tweng, finding him to be the embodiment of knighthood and chivalry: well bred, well dressed, and always well disposed towards those with whom he had dealings, even servants and menials. The knight was renowned for being civil tongued and even tempered, yet few men—and absolutely none of his youthful charges—would ever dare to arouse his wrath. Unmastered in the lists or in single combat, Tweng was lethally proficient with every weapon he picked up, and when called upon to fight he was implacable and, many said, invincible. Reputed to be one of the most gifted soldiers and commanders in Edward’s entire realm, he had proved himself in battle and on campaign many times, both in the Welsh Wars and on the King’s external campaigns in France as Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony.