The Renegade(64)
Rob had expected to see his grandfather as he had always seen him—gaunt, stooped, and grim-visaged, unkempt and soberly dressed in his muffling, workaday clothes of black and grey. What he saw instead left him awed. Lord Robert was fully armoured in magnificent black steel helm and corselet worn over a knee-length mail hauberk of the same colour. Heavy black boots covered his legs to the knee, and a black mantled cloak was turned back over his shoulders to expose the blood-red silk lining. In his steel-gauntleted right hand he held the sword he had shown Rob the night before, the sword of the Marshal of England. He raised it high, then brandished it in a salute to his men, and the volume of their cheering rose to new heights. The old man looked, Rob thought, like a warrior in his prime, no vestige of his seventy years visible in the spectacle he presented. The armoured figure brandishing his blade between the standards was not the aging Robert Bruce V, his grandsire. He was the Bruce, patriarch of his house and of all his folk and vassals. He had summoned them here to do his bidding and give him their support, and it was only proper that he should present himself thus to them, in recognition of the trust they placed in him and he in them.
Watching the man, and hearing the storm of enthusiasm at his back, Rob felt himself in the grip of a strange and novel sensation as his skin flushed and the short hairs all over his body stirred. A great lump swelled in his throat, and only as he fought it down did he recognize that what he was feeling was pride—pride in his stern old grandfather and in his own name, and in what that name signified within the realm of Scotland.
The cheering continued as Lord Robert sheathed his sword and moved swiftly down the steps to the mounting block, where a sturdy black horse awaited him, caparisoned in black and gold and held in check by two grooms. As he came he caught sight of his grandson and stopped, beckoning Rob to come forward.
“Get rid of that pack and mount up,” he said. “Then come and ride by me.”
There was no prouder young man in all Scotland than Rob Bruce when he passed through Lochmaben’s gates a short time later, riding on the right of his noble kinsman in the new dawn’s light.
The sun rose in a clear, blue October sky, glinting off the gear and weapons of the party that surrounded Rob and Lord Robert’s command group as they left Lochmaben. They turned north at the bottom of the hill, following the wide, well-beaten track leading towards the fringes of the great forest that cloaked the southwestern body of Scotland north of Annandale. From that point on, as they passed through the hamlets and villages of their own lands, their numbers swelled constantly as other groups came from all directions to join them, and Rob came to think of their route through Annandale as a river with endless tributaries pouring new strength into its channel with every twist of the path.
Armies, in Rob’s limited experience, were composed of disciplined military units. He thought of them in terms of blocks and phalanxes of armed men, usually dressed in uniform and marching in defined ranks—but he could see no semblance of organization in the swelling group around and behind him. This growing army moved freely, at its own pace and unconstrained by officers or sergeants of any kind. Each new party of newcomers tended to keep together, and the mounted men kept clear of the marchers for obvious reasons, and yet they made good time, moving quickly and efficiently as though by common consent, with only an occasional voice raised in command or reprimand.
His grandfather identified each group tersely for Rob’s benefit as it arrived, a roll call of the vassal lairds of Annandale whom Rob had met the day before: Dinwiddies first, then Kirkpatricks, Johnstones, and Jardines, followed later by three separate groups of Herrieses and two of Armstrongs, late arrivals from the Jedburgh region, and finally a large contingent of Crosbies from the area surrounding Dumfries. Although his grandfather had estimated fifty men might come from each source, there were no fewer than seventy in the second group of Herrieses to arrive—and that was the smallest of all in number. The Crosbies of Dumfries alone had turned out a group of close to two and a half hundred.
They made camp that first night in a rocky meadow among the Lead Hills, on the bank of the wide, strong stream that would become the River Clyde within the next thirty miles, and Rob, duty free from the moment they dismounted, wandered through the encampment. He guessed that more than twelve and perhaps as many as fifteen hundred men had answered his grandfather’s call to muster, and they seemed a mismatched crew at first glance. On closer inspection, though, he recognized how his grandfather’s motley muster was comparable to the formal, English-defined norm of cavalry and infantry, rigidly segregated and organized in disciplined formations and cadres.