WORTH DYING FOR

THE BRUCE TRILOGY: BOOK II

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Prologue

Edward II – Bannockburn, 1314

The crash of weapons roars like constant thunder.  My army – dropping to the earth like swatted flies.  I have deafened to the screams.  Gone blind to the sheen of blood.  Dulled to the stench of death.  

     Centuries from now, will they uncover the massed bones of my soldiers buried in this foreign earth?  Or perhaps a shattered skull revealed among the stones and sand of one of these shifting stream banks after a cataclysmic storm?

     So many dead.  God's soul, so many.  Gilbert among them.  But how can that be?  What unspeakable acts have those heartless heathens committed on him?  Yesterday, he rode away on my command.  Out of brash loyalty.  And did not come back. 

     Hereford, who saw it, said that Robert the Bruce, that base traitor who dares call himself ‘King of Scotland’, butchered him in a single blow.  Hereford lies.  He saw wrongly.  Gilbert fought valiantly – to the last tooth and nail.  My nephew and dear companion, Gilbert de Clare was my playfellow as an infant.  Closer to me than my own brothers.  Never my judge.  Always at my side when I called.  Often there when I did not.  Gilbert with his wry quips and his lust for drink and merriment. 

     Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, grabs at my mount’s reins.  “We must leave.  Now.  To Stirling.  Sire?  Sire?  Do you hear?”

     I blink at him.  Hot tears scorch my eyes.  My sire, who some called Longshanks because of his long legs, always told me I failed at everything.  That is why he fought so hard to keep from dying.  So I could not have what was his and make ruin of it.  I must prove him wrong!

     “No, " I say, "we stay.  See this to the end.” 

     “It’s already the end,” Pembroke says in harsh, cutting honesty.  His dark brows hood his deeply set eyes in foreboding shadow and I realize it is the end now.  “We haven’t time for futile acts of self-pity, my lord.  And to sacrifice your person would be to give your enemies more than they deserve.  The day is lost, but Stirling still belongs to the English.  You have a kingdom yet.  Stay here a moment too long and it will be your death they'll be celebrating this day.”

     Death?  I should embrace it, for I have nothing left to live for.  Piers is long gone.  Gilbert, too. And now this . . .

     I look back toward where the Bannock Burn carves at the earth.  Last night while the planks and beams from the village were being scavenged and dragged over the boggy ground to be laid across the burn as bridgework, we found that its banks were steep, its waters swifter and deeper than one might have guessed merely by its width.  Now those banks are slickened by an oozing of mud and blood and crowded with a squirming mass of bodies, grappling over one another, begging for mercy, desperate yet to live even in their abysmal agony.

     A chill washes over my face.  I feel the sweat beading on my upper lip, stiffen to the fever in my heart, see the white, blazing orb in the sky and yet I am wet-cold to the bone.

     Again, Pembroke yanks on my mount’s reins as he begins to lead me through the bedlam toward the Pelstream.  My private guard surrounds us in a thick wall of armored knights and horses.  But our own infantry presses in on them, blocking our route in a panicked jumble.  My guards to the front order them away and follow their threats with a slash of blades.  Those that will not yield are cut down or trampled underfoot.  From the corner of my eye, I see another and another swarm of Scots rushing down from the high ground.  Their mouths open in a yip of battle cries, but the din is all a buzz in my empty, ringing head.  The new mash of fighters melts into a blur as crazed and complete as a swarm of locusts devouring a field of grain.

     My standard bearer.  Where is my standard bearer?  My soldiers will not know to where I have gone. 

     I clamp my knees to my horse’s ribs and pull back on the reins as Pembroke fights to drag us forward.  Some of the guard is already slipping down the banks of the Pelstream, their horses deftly avoiding the gored and leaking bodies that litter the slopes.

     Young Hugh Despenser comes up on my left and the champion D’Argentan shoves his way through the tangle of death to be at my other side. 

     “I will see you to safety, my lord,” D’Argentan declares.

     “There will be no safety for us at Stirling!” I cry, as I loose my sword from its scabbard. 

     “I assure you there is less here,” Pembroke answers and pulls me onward as we slide down the bank and splash across the reddened stream. 

     I am jostled when the arm of a headless corpse entangles itself between my horse’s legs.  My wrist is snapped backward by the jarring and my sword slips from my fingers, landing hilt first in the stream.  A nebulous cloud of scarlet seeps into the murky water from the dead man’s neck and floats over my weapon, lost to me.  Pembroke guides my animal forward reassuringly.  An arrow flicks out of nowhere and smacks against my breastplate.  The jolt awakens me to reality.  A wild Scottish arrow.  Come from somewhere this side of the Roman road, by the little white church with the thatched roof.  More shafts hiss through the air.  A knight ten paces before me flies backward from his saddle with a fledged arrow sticking from between his eyes.

     My hand goes to my throat as I feel my heart there, choking out my air.  “No, no!  You’re taking us too close!  They’ll kill us all.”

     “It’s the only way,” Pembroke insists.  “Would you rather fight a handful of Scots or drown in the river?”

     The land between where the Pelstream and Bannock Burn conjoin and the broad Firth of Forth lies is riddled with pockets of marsh and peat bogs, impassable in many places for our heavy warhorses.  There is no way to Stirling but by the Roman road.  Bruce knew that and used it to this end.  And I, in my haste and spite, have been lured straight into the snare.  Now it tightens and strangles my army.  The rope closes around me, burning, cutting off my air.

     Stirling looms ahead.  Gray and imposing, like an eagle guarding its crag.  We ride over the rough, choppy ground, strands of my broken columns of soldiers, racing in the same direction.  One of my faint-hearted archers, who had been scattered in the first charge of Scottish cavalry, runs alone on the narrowing stretch of ground between the river and the road, his bow long lost in his frantic flight.  He stumbles, spills the useless clutch of arrows from the bag on his back, and scampers to his feet.  Two strides later a Scottish longsword hews into his spine.  I jerk my torso in the direction of the Scottish horseman – hobelars they call them, lightly armed fighters on swift mounts who can move through the mountains like wildcats.  He is not alone.  Twenty or more hobelars are swiftly riding down our heavier horses.  My guard is yet in the hundreds.  But the hobelars seem to know who they are heading for.  They lash at their mounts with the flat of their swords and bypass my knights to the rear.  Several times some of my knights veer off, trying to block them, taking down a hobelar, but the rest come on and all I can do is ride like the fires of hell on toward Stirling Castle.  It could not have been more than a mile away by then, but it may as well have been a hundred.

     Absolute fear claws at my soul, shrieking for me to give up, to let fate grasp its own conclusion, written as plain as a mason’s mark hammered in stone.  For the moment, life exists only in flight.  My head tells me to hurl myself down and yield, yet some primitive instinct pushes me impossibly on.