And yet … he knew Bruce of old, from the stripling days when he had been a tourney fighter of note and the pair of them had clattered round the circuit in a welter of expensive saddlery, horses and gear. They had shared bruises, victory, drink and jests — he was Sir M, Bruce was Sir R, which sounded like ‘sirrah’ and was the laugh in the piece.
The tourney-fighting Bruce he knew had not liked a straight pitched battle then, the French Method of fighting where you trained horse and rider to bowl a man over. His was the German Method, mounted on a lighter horse and avoiding the mad rushes to circle round and strike from behind.
His tactic was to grab knights round the waist and drag them bodily from the saddle, so that the Kipper — the man on foot with a great persuading club — could invite the lord to surrender himself to ransom. He and Bruce had played Kipper for each other, time and about for one profitable, glorious season, and Thweng recalled it with a dreamy mist of remembrance.
He has waged war the same way, Thweng thought as they rode up through the litter of men and shelters, avoiding anything that looked like a full commitment of all his force. He did it in ’10 and long before that. He’d had Wallace as teacher for it — why would he contemplate changing it now?
They passed Bannock vill, a rude huddle of cruck houses and drunken fences, where men leaned on spears and watched them; one spat pointedly. Nearby, hung from the shaft of a tipped-up and weighted two-wheeled cart, a festering corpse turned and swung, smoked with flies.
A black reminder about pillage, Thweng thought; the wee households in this hamlet had not fled, though they risked kitchen gardens and chooks, because armed men and Bruce’s bright writ ensured no looting.
That was order and organization and Thweng felt a slim sliver of cold slide around his backbone; when you see your enemies in discord, fill your cup and take your ease. When they are grim and resolved and of one mind, gather your harness and set your shield …
They dismounted outside the small stone chapel, garlanded with a splendid panoply of bright tents and banners. They had been brought the last little way by Sir James Douglas, though Sir Marmaduke found it hard to equate the lisping cheerfulness of dark youth with the man he had heard was a scowling scar on the lip of the world and whose very name, the Black, set men and women and bairns howling.
The small mesnie of English men-at-arms remained by their horses, nervous as levrets in a snakepit, while Mowbray and Sir Marmaduke clacked along the stones to the door of St Ninian’s and ducked under the Douglas smile into the musty dim of the chapel.
‘You will wait to be called, gentilhommes,’ said a voice from a shadow. ‘Then you will step forward and bow. You will not parley unless asked a question. Understood?’
‘Understood, my lord Randolph,’ Thweng answered, recognizing the voice and forcing the man into better light, where his unsmiling face could be clearly seen. ‘My lord earl, I should say. You have risen in the world since you betrayed one king for another, it appears.’
Randolph flushed.
‘I am loyal to the King,’ he blustered, but Thweng had made his point and waved, at once apologetic, insouciant and dismissive, which deepened Randolph’s flush — but their names were called and the Earl had no chance to reply.
Bruce was standing behind a table littered with papers, half-rolled, unfolded and pinned — the corner of one by a dagger. Beside him was his brother Edward, a coarse copy hewn of rougher stone, and behind was a coterie of shadows, waiting and watching.
‘My lords,’ Edward declared. ‘Present your writ.’
Mowbray passed across the rolled vellum, had it taken, examined and placed to one side.
‘You may proceed to the castle. Take no detours. Once inside, you will be considered quit-claimed from this writ. Is that understood?’
Edward was matter-of-fact and harsh, much changed from the smiling, eager man who had negotiated the midsummer surrender of Stirling, Mowbray thought and almost smiled at what must have passed between the brothers at the news of it. Instead, he merely inclined his head and hovered uncertainly until he realized he had been dismissed; he shot Sir Marmaduke a stiff look and vanished. There was a silence, thick as gruel.
‘You have seen enough to satisfy the Plantagenet?’
The voice was rough and rheumed and the face, when it was presented to the filtered light inside the still, close tent, was a stone to the temple; Sir Marmaduke jerked a little and blinked before he recovered his wit.
‘A deal of men,’ he answered, staring at the lesioned skin and the wounds. A scar down the left eye — Methven for that, he recalled — and the ruin of his right cheek. A tourney wound, he remembered, though that had been long since and if it had never healed there was something festering wrong; there had been rumours of sickness and reports that the usurper King of Scots was taken to his bed, feverish and practically dead, but Sir Marmaduke had always dismissed them as wishes. Now he was not so sure and he fought for more sense to his words.
‘A deal of men,’ he repeated, ‘in rough wool and drilling with sticks.’
‘For all that,’ Bruce said, stiff as old rock, ‘Plantagenet will find us here when he finds the courage to seek us out. And we will have sharp on the sticks.’
‘So I understand, sirrah,’ Thweng answered and heard the court of shadows suck in their breath at this breach of protocol. But the King smiled a little at the old joke only the pair of them knew, stretching the cheek — bigod, Sir Marmaduke thought, there is discolour on it all the way back to the ear …
‘I have a gift,’ Bruce declared suddenly. He turned to take an armful of folded cloth from one of the shadows behind him and then shook it out.
‘Return this to my lord Berkeley — he lost it recently in my domains.’
The bloodied, torn Berkeley banner taken by Jamie Douglas seemed to glow balefully as Thweng reached out and gathered the rough brocade, folding it into a loop over his arm, and all the time could not take his eyes from the face of the man he had known from youth.
God blind me, he thought, the changes in him. The fierce ambition had always been there, though Thweng had not realized what the young, chivalrous knight that had been Robert Bruce had had to sacrifice for it. It was as if the stains on his soul had manifested themselves, for all to see, on his face.
Thweng shook the idea from him as a bayed stag does a hound; he had his own stained liege and enough personal sins not to want to burden himself with others. And he had his own tasks. He steeled himself, couched his lance and dug in his spurs.
‘A gift for a gift,’ he replied, ‘and a counterweight to the knowledge I have garnered: Strathbogie has fallen from your chaplet.’
It was a strike, sure as point on shield. There was a long silence, followed by a moth-wing murmur from the unseen shadows as the news went round. David of Strathbogie, Earl of Atholl, had been a recent convert to the Bruce cause, despite being married to the daughter of the murdered John Comyn of Badenoch. His defection back to the English would send a shiver through the other titled lords who supported Bruce; they were few enough and he depended on them for the best of his army.
‘It seems’, Sir Marmaduke went on, driving home the spike of it, ‘he did not care much for your brother’s shift of dalliances to the daughter of the Earl of Ross. I am told wee Izzie Strathbogie is blinded with snot and red-eyed with weeping.’
Edward growled a little and leaned forward, flexing his knuckled hands on the table, for it was his seductions that had brought this about; Bruce cleared his throat and Edward, black scowling, straightened a little.
‘Fair exchange,’ Bruce said flatly. ‘And your observations on the reasons for it are cogent — you would know, of course, of the problems women can cause. How is Lady Lucy?’