Jack Whyte - Order in Chaos

“Make sure they build your stables first. Your horses will need shelter from the winter storms. Will you hold my treasure here for me?”

Will looked over in surprise. “Of course. You will be gone when it arrives.”

“I will, but even were I not, I would be loath to take it with me aboard MacDonald’s galleys. Too visible, too much temptation. Forbye, I’m sailing first, but then I’ll be afoot, marching through hostile country towards war … an ill time and place to be carrying heavy treasure.”

“I’ll see it kept safe for you, Sir King.”

“Good man. I’ll have Jamie collect it at some future date, when I can tend to it as it deserves.” He yawned and stretched, then looked at the dying fire. “I need to sleep, my friend, and so do you. There’s a room next door ready for you, though you’ll have to share wi’ Jamie Douglas.” He smiled again. “But it has two cots. And now I’ll bid ye a good night, for I do have vexing matters to discuss wi’ his Lordship Davie here. We will deal wi’ his needful things tomorrow, the three of us. Sleep well, Sir William Sinclair.”

FOUR

Will rolled from his cot long before dawn to find a candle burning in a sconce, and no sign of Douglas, who had shared the room with him. He doused his face with ice-cold water from the pitcher on the table, then realized that there was no toweling with which to dry himself. Containing his annoyance, he dried his hands and face on his bedding, thinking it strange that he had not heard Douglas rise or leave, but when he thrust a hand into the bedding on the young knight’s cot he found no trace of warmth. Surprised, he dressed himself fully and made his way downstairs, expecting to find Douglas there, but there was no sign of him. Aside from a busy work crew, the place was empty, its erstwhile inhabitants already scattered to meet the working day.

The great hall, lit by flickering torches and a replenished fire, had already been cleared of any sign that it had ever been a dormitory. The main doors were propped open to let in the cold, pre-dawn air, and the tables and benches had been hauled aside and stacked in their storage spaces. A crew of cleaners was clearing out the old, dried rushes from the floor, sending up clouds of dust, and at their backs another group was spreading a fresh mat of green rushes underfoot. The far side room to the left of the main doors had tables in it and had already been much used as a breakfast room, and Will was grateful to see that there was still food available and helped himself to a bowl of thick, hot oatmeal porridge that he cooled liberally with fresh goat’s milk.

Afterwards, seeing no one that he recognized, and feeling unaccountably lost and lonely as the only Templar among so many strangers, he went outside at daybreak and walked down to the parapet overlooking the bay, where he saw one of the men he had met the previous night, one of the Gaelic chieftains of the Campbell party who had spoken to him in Scots rather than the unintelligible Gaelic. The fellow was peering intently out to sea and muttering to himself as Will approached, and when he looked to see what the man had noticed in the strengthening light, he was alarmed to see a pair of boats half a mile away, dancing dangerously in turbulent waves and far too close to the rocks at the base of the cliffside that dropped steeply into the sea.

“In God’s name,” he asked, “what are they doing over there?”

The fellow looked at him askance. “Ah,” he said in Scots. “It’s yourself. They’re fishing.”

“In that sea? They’ll be killed.”

“Nah, they’re finished now, coming back in. They found a shoal. We’ll eat well tonight.”

“What kind of shoal?”

“Fish!” The man looked at him as if he were soft in the head, then turned away to shout—uselessly, Will thought—at the men in the distant boats, who, it transpired, were his own.

Will watched with him for a long time as the boats fought their way back to the beach below, wallowing heavily in the choppy swell, and then he went down through the wall gate with the Gael and gazed in stupefaction at the sight of thousands of foot-long silver fish being unloaded from among the feet of the rowers, scooped and shoveled from the bottom of the two craft and thrown onto the graveled beach, their shed scales leaving the wooden interiors of both craft shimmering and crusted with a metallic coating. It was a miraculous catch. He could tell that from the excitement of the men working around him as they scrambled knee deep in breaking waves to keep the fish from escaping back into the water. They were throwing and scooping the squirming, leaping creatures high, tossing them up onto drier land away from the water’s edge, where others, whooping wildly, caught them and threw them into sturdy baskets hurriedly brought down from the kitchens. Will found himself responding to the excitement and had to restrain himself from leaping into their midst like a small boy and joining in the frenzy of collection.

When the last basket of fish was carried away he was left standing alone on the beach’s silvered edge, lost in a swirling torrent of thoughts that tumbled over one another and swept his mind along without rhyme or reason. The boyhood memories that the fisher folk had evoked gave way to memories of joining the Order of Sion at boyhood’s end, at the age of eighteen, of being sent to join the Temple, and of how he had begun to struggle with the lore and the advanced mysteries of the Order of Sion, all the time advancing through the Temple hierarchy. For a while he found himself plunged back into the struggles they had had in trying, vainly, to stop the spread of Islam from northern Africa across the narrow seas into Iberia.

The waves swirled around his soles, shifting the pebbles on which he stood, and he turned away to climb the sloping foreshore towards the palisaded fort. He was through the gate and just starting up the flight of stone steps that led up to the forecourt of the hall when he heard yet another commotion erupt ahead of him, beyond the stairs. The sounds cut through the drifting eddies in his mind and snapped him back to the present. He lengthened his step and bounded up the stairs, fearing what he would find up there, and sure enough, a mile beyond where the fishing boats had been, the line between sea and sky was obscured by an irregular mass of angular shapes: masts and billowing sails upon which he could clearly see the emblem Bruce had described the night before, the galley symbol of Angus Og MacDonald, stark in its blackness against the whitened sails that bore it.

More and more men were crowding around him, obscuring his vision as they bobbed and weaved for a sight of the distant fleet, and he saw Tam Sinclair among them. He waited to catch his kinsman’s eye, then waved him over.

“Good day to you,” he growled when Tam reached his side. “You look … fresh. What were you up to last night?”

Tam grinned down at the thronging clansmen. “Among this crew? What would you think? I supped well, played a few games of dice and lost, then had the best night’s sleep I’ve had since leaving La Rochelle. On a tabletop on a floor that didna budge or sway once in the whole night. Whose ships are those?”

“Islanders. They are expected. Where’s Mungo?”

Tam shrugged. “He’s here somewhere. I saw him just a while ago. What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you everything later. For now, I need to see what’s happening out there.”

The crowd had ringed them in while they stood talking, and now Will began to weave among them, trying to find a vantage point of his own, but a hand pulled at his sleeve and he heard his name being spoken. It was David de Moray at his side, with the taller figure of Bruce looming just behind him.