The Renegade(34)

Rob Bruce stared into the darkness and smiled at his own cleverness, and resolved that someday he, too, would manipulate men with ease.





Book TWO

The Noble Robert

1290





CHAPTER FIVE

A LAYING ON OF HANDS

“Jesus! Move!”

The warning came too late, for the hurtling speed of the bulky figure descending the narrow, winding stone staircase made nonsense of any effort the man coming up might have made to avoid him. With no time to do anything else, the runner threw himself to the inside of the staircase, where the vanishing wedges of the tightly winding steps made footing impossible, and as his shoulder hit the wall he rebounded across and down the narrow space of the well, striking the other man as he went and throwing out his hands to cushion the impact with the outer wall. The man ascending, a castle servant, was thrown back against the same wall, the breath driven from his lungs, but before he could topple he was hit again as the other man rebounded once more from the wall. The servant’s legs gave way beneath him and he fell, clutching at the stone steps above him as he gasped for air. The wooden bucket he had been carrying flipped end over end, hurling water against the curving wall before plummeting down the spiralling stairs, splintering into pieces and narrowly missing the other man, who was already several steps below. He had managed to right himself, bracing himself awkwardly against the wall and listening to the distant clatter of the heavy bucket. There was no sound from above, and as soon as he had regained his balance he launched himself back up the sodden stairs, scrambling on all fours until he saw the feet of the other man. He hesitated, afraid he had killed him, then quickly moved up higher, placing his feet carefully to get around the fallen man as he peered down at him.

The whimper he heard next would return to him later as being perhaps the most beautiful sound he had ever heard, and he almost moaned aloud himself as he knelt closer to the sprawled figure.

“Are you hurt? Can you move?”

The servant raised himself up slightly and looked at his questioner wide-eyed. “What happened? Who are you?”

“Robert Bruce. My father’s the Earl of Carrick. I knocked you down. I was late, running, didn’t expect to meet anyone on the stairs. I’m even later now, so I have to go. Will you be all right?”

The man pushed himself around on one elbow and sat up slowly, shaking his head, and Bruce dug into the scrip at his waist and pulled out a coin. It was a silver mark, more money than the other man would see in a year. He pressed it into the fellow’s palm and closed the unresisting fingers over it. “Look, sit here and get your breath back. Someone else can bring the water up again, but I have to go. I’m in trouble enough as it is. If anyone is angry at you, tell him to come and find me, Rob Bruce of Turnberry, guest of the King. I’ll make it right for you. Farewell.”

He set off again quickly, this time keeping well to the right, where the steps were widest, and he felt the rough material of his shoulder covering scraping against the wall as he went. He was wearing thickly padded practice armour of sized sackcloth, reinforced with leather at shoulders, elbows, and knees and strengthened underneath with layered thicknesses of compressed straw and heavy fustian. Sufficiently strong to protect against hard-swung quarterstaves and blunted swords, the covering was none the less light enough to offer little restriction to his movement—far different from the chain mail and plate steel that would replace it when the time came to fight in earnest. Yet even as he went, his mind reeling with all that had occurred to him in the short but memorable period before his encounter on the stairs, he was aware of a loose flapping at his right shoulder and at his lower legs where he had not had time to buckle the straps of various parts of his coverings.

As he leapt down the last few steps into the narrow, open doorway, blinking against the sudden brightness from outside and hopping on one foot, he fumbled for the loose straps below his right knee. Gripping one end of a strap in each hand, he shuffled past the door and looked for a place to rest his foot while he threaded the buckle and secured the legging. Beyond the doorstep to the Squires’ Tower the rocky outer yard fell away steeply, and he lowered himself to sit on an outcrop while he quickly fastened the buckles at knee and ankle on one leg and then the other, cursing Humphrey de Bohun under his breath and yet smiling as he did so. Had de Bohun not tripped him, toppling him into a muddy, water-filled ditch, Rob would not have been forced back to his tower room to change his sodden clothes, and he would not have had the adventure that had delayed him so wondrously and then required his mad dash down the stairs.