Robert Low - The Lion Wakes

He managed to keep the smile on his face, all the same, while he watched Sir Henry and his wife exchange loving glances. Well, Kirkpatrick thought as he witnessed this, you arranged for this loving reunion and I daresay you thought to get effusive thanks and pledges for it – at the very least a decent meal. More fool you, my lord earl

… there are too many folk who still regard you with suspicion.

‘Where is Wallace?’

Hal’s voice was a knife through the soft chatter.

‘Gone,’ Bruce replied shortly.

Hal lifted his head.

‘Gone where?’

‘France, I hear,’ Kirkpatrick said and Bruce nodded, chewing.

‘Fled,’ he managed between forced swallows of clotted bannock, and Hal frowned. Fled did not sound like Wallace and he said as much, though he was surprised by the thoughtful nod he had back from Bruce. He had been expecting the sullen lip and the scowl.

‘Indeed. The Red Comyn is ranting about him not asking permission of the Guardians – namely himself, of course – to quit the realm after he resigned the Guardianship. I suspect this is because he has designs on Wallace holdings.’

‘Resigned,’ Sir Henry said with a twist to his voice which was not missed. When he caught Bruce’s eye, he flushed a little.

‘Hardly freely done, my lord earl,’ he added.

‘They forced him out,’ Hal said, blunt with the black-dog misery of what he had heard of it. ‘The bold nobiles in conclave at Scone. Not content with runnin’ like hares at Falkirk, they then turn on Wallace, as if it was all his doing. Betrayed because he was not the true cut of them. Now ye tell me they squabble over his wee rickle of lands.’

‘I trust,’ Kirkpatrick said sharply, ‘ye are not casting anything at my lord earl. Your liege lord.’

‘Now, here, enough,’ Sir Henry bleated and his wife stepped into the breach of it, bright and light as sunshine.

‘Frumenty?’ she asked and, without waiting, clapped her hands to send a servant scurrying. Bruce grinned, half-ashamed, across at Hal.

‘Scotland betrayed itself,’ Bruce answered flatly. ‘Ye all ran at Falkirk, even Wallace in the end. That’s the fact and the shame – and the saving grace of it, for if you had stayed and fought, you would be dead. In my own defence, I had business enough in Ayrshire to keep me occupied – but I would have galloped from that field, same as everyone else.’

Hal felt the sick rise of it in his gorge, knowing he was right and having to admit it with a curt nod. They had all run and, because of it, proud Edward had his slaughter, but no real victory. The Kingdom had its back to the wall more than ever before, but though the struggle was more grim, the realm was no more subjugated than before.

Now the resistance was what it had always been – strike from the forest and hills, then run like foxes for cover. Bruce had occupied the English in Ayrshire with the tactic and showed a surprising aptitude for the business. He had learned well from Wallace, it seemed to Hal, and, by the time had finished, a desert seemed like a basket of cooked chicken compared with the desolation he made.

This was a new ruthlessness, which allowed Bruce even to destroy his own holdings if it hindered the enemy – he had burned Turnberry Castle to ruin and Hal well knew he had loved the place, since he had been born there and it had been his mother’s favourite. There was new resolve and a growing skill in the man, Hal saw, and his next words confirmed it.

‘Wallace fled to France,’ Bruce added, frowning at the bowl in front of him, ‘because he could not be sure that he would not be betrayed by his own. There will be no peace for Wallace. Edward will have his head on a gate-spike.’

Hal regarded the Earl of Carrick with a new interest, seeing the sullen face of two years ago resolved into something more stern and considered. There was steel here – though whether it would bend and not break alongside the Red Comyn was another matter.

Bruce stirred and looked up at Sir Henry, then pointedly at Hal, who nodded and levered himself wearily up from the table.

‘It is time.’

Sir Henry stood up and a flutter of servants brought torches. They left Elizabeth and the servants behind, moving into the shifting shadows and the cold dark of the undercroft, descending until the stairwind spilled them out into the great vaulted barrel that was Roslin’s cellars. Their breath smoked; barrels and flitches gleamed icily.

‘This has been finished a little, since I was last home,’ Henry Sientcler mused, holding up the smoking torch.

‘As well your Keep is now stone,’ Hal said. ‘I would do the rest, and swift, my lord of Roslin, now that your ransom money is freed up – if Edward comes back, Roslin’s wooden walls will not stand and that Templar protection we Sientclers once enjoyed is no longer as sure as before.’

Henry nodded mournfully while Bruce, his shadow looming long and eldritch, waved a hand as if dismissing an irrelevant fly.

‘Castles in stone are all very fine – but only one stone matters now,’ he said, then turned to Hal. ‘Well, Sir – ye claim to have the saving of us. Do you ken where Jacob’s Pillow lies?’

Hal fished out the medallion and handed it to the frowning earl, who turned it over and over in his gloved hand.

‘A medal of protection,’ he sniffed. ‘Sold by pardoners everywhere. Like the one we took from yon Lamprecht fellow.’

Hal watched while Kirkpatrick and Sim, suitably primed, moved down the length of the vaulted hall, shifting bundles and barrels, peering at the floor and tallying on sticks. Bruce and Sir Henry watched, bemused.

‘It is the very one,’ Hal said, watching the two torches bobbing across the flagged floor. ‘It was the pardoner explained the significance of the marks.’

Bruce turned it over and over, then passed it to Sir Henry, who peered myopically at it.

‘A fish?’ he hazarded and Hal fumbled out the ring corded round his neck.

‘The same one is on this,’ he declared, ‘which the Auld Templar bequeathed me on his deathbed. An auld sin he called it.’

Bruce looked steadily at Hal and he was struck, again, by the absence of the sullen pout, replaced by a firm, tight-lipped resolve and an admitting nod. Sim appeared and shook his head; Hal felt his stomach turn.

‘Reverse it,’ he said and Sim nodded. The torches started to bob again, the tallying began anew.

‘A mason’s ring,’ Hal went on. ‘Belonging to Gozelo, who worked here before he became involved in your… scheming, my lord. And died for it.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Bruce muttered as he frowned, muttering half to himself. ‘If he had not run… a sad necesssity for the safety of the Kingdom. The ring went to the Auld Templar and then to you. It is the Christian fish symbol from ancient times -what has this to do with locating the Stone?’

Henry, who had only recently been told of all this, blinked a bit and shook his head with the sheer, bewildering stun of it all. Plots were nothing new in this Kingdom, nor the killing that invariably went with them, but, even so, the careless way the Earl of Carrick dismissed a murder was disturbing.

The torches bobbed to a sudden stop and Sim and Kirkpatrick both cried out.

Hal moved swiftly, the others following, drawing into a breathless ring round a single broad flagstone, the faint chiselled mark gleaming in the torchlight.

‘A fish,’ Hal said pointedly and Bruce agreed, then pointed to his left.

‘There is another. And one over there. Every flagstone is marked – there are scores of them.’

‘Just so,’ Hal said. ‘Gozelo’s mark, which all masons leave behind – if it seems he was excessive fond of making it here, he had reason, my lords.’