Now, riding ahead of everyone else at mid-morning on the seventh day of October in the year of our Lord 1290, Rob watched the earth-and-log fortifications loom into view again as his horse breasted the last low hill, and he felt the familiar, eerie shiver of recognition at the sheer scale of the place.
Lochmaben was nothing like a castle in the English sense. Nor was it comparable to any castle Rob had ever seen. He had heard his father talk of how new castles were springing up everywhere in Scotland and England nowadays, insisting that they were all military installations. They were the emerging fashion, the Earl said: display pieces used for intimidation and serving as assembly points and launching areas for sorties rather than for defensive purposes. Most of them were built of palisaded logs and carefully sited ditches, but an increasing number, among them the crowned heights of Stirling and Edinburgh, were being gradually fortified with stone walls. Edward of England was a great believer in stone castles and was building a number of them in his newly conquered lands in Wales, and his enthusiasm for the strength they offered had convinced his good-brother Alexander of Scotland to follow his example in his own realm, so that someday soon, according to Earl Robert, the entire country would be dominated by massive, modern stone fortifications.
Lochmaben, on the other hand, was a true fortress, ages old, like those in Edinburgh, Stirling, and the other great defensive bastions of Scotland. Like them, it was a natural structure, hewn from the timeless crags of the upflung land and fortified by countless generations of local folk who had dug its maze of defensive ditches deeper and thrown up ever-higher palisaded breastworks around the motte, the rocky summit of the hill at its centre. That summit was now crowned by an immensely strong tower, its walls built of great oak logs and surrounded by groups of thatched huts and sturdy buildings of framed mud and wattle. The site was virtually impregnable, and anyone intending to attack it would have to think long and hard on the costs entailed, for the place was too massive to be besieged without a great deal of planning and limitless resources.
Rob halted his horse on the summit and sat there for a while, watching the activity of the folk around the fortress. In the cleared acres below the first line of defences, teams of people with scythes were working together in lines in the bright sunshine, reaping the harvest of ripened grain, while others gathered up the scythed stalks and bound them into stooked sheaves that stretched in neat rows to dry. He saw no signs of any soldiery in the rustic scene, or any weapons, and was not surprised. Scotland had been at peace for almost thirty years under King Alexander’s rule, and since his death the council of Guardians, a group appointed by the community of the realm and comprising six of the country’s most powerful men, two of them earls, two more barons, and the last two bishops, had quietly maintained the peace of the realm until such time as another monarch could be crowned.
He glanced towards his father, who was now riding past him, knee to knee with Nicol MacDuncan and talking to him in a voice too quiet for Rob to hear. The others in their party, including the twenty mounted troopers at the earl’s back, rode in silence, the muffled thudding of their horses’ hooves stirring up clouds of dust from the sun-dried ground. They were alert, all of them, their eyes on the mass of earthworks and wooden buildings that was Lochmaben.
Bruce men, all of them. Rob wondered what kind of escort Comyn of Badenoch might be travelling with today, for the Highland Gaels had few horses and went almost everywhere on foot.
In the weeks that followed their meeting in Westminster, the two young men had learned to live in apparent friendship, despite their intense awareness that they would never like each other. That was understood by both of them from the outset. They had nothing in common, other than their mutual dislike and hostility. But they had been under royal command to behave as friends while they were in Westminster, and neither of them doubted the folly of doing otherwise. Knowing they were under scrutiny at all times, they went to great lengths to be courteous and even amiable to each other. Edward made no secret of his propensity for fostering and rewarding favourites while dispossessing and punishing others whose behaviour he deemed unacceptable. And, despot that he was, the range of things he considered unacceptable was expansive and capricious.
Rob and Comyn had been together for four weeks, until Bishop Bek’s affairs took him north to Scotland again, with Comyn in tow, within days of the enactment of the Treaty of Birgham, on August 28th at Northampton. Almost two years in the making, the treaty assured both the continuity of the Scots Crown in the person of the seven-year-old Queen Margaret, and the future joining of the Crowns of England and Scotland under the heirs of the royal marriage that would follow, between the young Queen and five-year-old Edward of Caernarfon, the heir to the English throne. The celebrations after the signing were brief but heartfelt, with everyone concerned believing it a job well done.