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?’
Sir Marmaduke fought down his own hackles, admiring Bruce’s smooth parry even as he did so; Lucy Thweng’s wayward, single-minded progress through lovers, husbands and even abductions was a scandal to the Thwengs in general and himself, her uncle, in particular. Yet he fought the flicker of a wry smile on to his walrus-moustached face.
‘A splendid animal,’ he answered, which was how his own king had described her, grinning knowingly and nudging Despenser as he did so, for the rumours that old Sir Marmaduke had also plucked his niece’s fruit was rife. It had clearly reached here, too, for someone tittered in the dark behind Bruce and muffled it swiftly.
There was silence after that and Sir Marmaduke realized he had probably been dismissed, was turning to clack his way across the stones when the Bruce voice harshed out again.
‘You have seen our sticks, sir. Tell Plantagenet we will defend this realm with the longest one we have.’
And Thweng, nodding a lower bow, heard the last whispered phrase as he found his way back to sunlight.
‘Farewell, Sir M.’
Bruce watched him go with a dull ache of another lost friend settling stonelike in his belly. An old friend – he had been surprised at the sunk cheek, the white wisp of hair, yet now wondered why he had been so shocked; Sir M had to have sixty years lying on his shoulders – at least. He had seemed old when he and Bruce had tourneyed together – bigod, he must have been the age I am now.
A long time of friendship, now smoked away as if it had never been. Small wonder folk spoke of being raised to the throne – it was a place as high and lonely as any eyrie.
‘Did he see, d’ye think?’
Edward’s voice was harsh with eagerness, his great broad face shining, but his brother’s eye was jaundiced when it turned on him, blood-filled with Edward’s misdemeanours.
‘Sir M misses nothing,’ he answered shortly and Edward, sensing the mood, wisely tightened his lips, aware that the Strathbogie business was too raw; he could feel the accusing eyes of all the other nobiles searing his back.
‘He saw the work, Your Grace,’ Jamie confirmed, and then frowned. ‘Though I cannot see why you had men digging pretend holes as well as true.’
‘I want the Plantagenet blocked from coming up Dere Strete,’ Bruce answered patiently. ‘When he moves round to the north, as he then must if he wishes to officially relieve the siege on Stirling, I want him to believe I have trenched to our front there, too. That way he will think I wish to stand and fight.’
‘But you must,’ blurted Jamie and Edward’s sharp bark of laughter drowned the disapproving murmurs at this breach of etiquette.
‘If I fight at all,’ Bruce answered, slow and cold as a glacier and as much to them all as the flustered Jamie, ‘I will not be standing, my lords. This will not be Falkirk.’
The air was heavy with the sudden tense interest of all the others, who hung on whether the King would stand and fight. And Jamie understood it, sudden as a flaring light: if the area between the armies was trenched it would be as much a barrier to the spear blocks they had been drilling in and they needed to stay tight and together as they moved. That was why the holes were pretend: Bruce would not wait for the English; he would attack them, as Wallace did at the brig.
He almost exclaimed it out loud, but then recovered himself and bowed like a bobbing hen.