Worth Dying For (The Bruce Trilogy) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Ch. 1

  Ch. 2

  Ch. 3

  Ch. 4

  Ch. 5

  Ch. 6

  Ch. 7

  Ch. 8

  Ch. 9

  Ch. 10

  Ch. 11

  Ch. 12

  Ch. 13

  Ch. 14

  Ch. 15

  Ch. 16

  Ch. 17

  Ch. 18

  Ch. 19

  Ch. 20

  Ch. 21

  Ch. 22

  Ch. 23

  Ch. 24

  Ch. 25

  Ch. 26

  Ch. 27

  Ch. 28

  Ch. 29

  Ch. 30

  Ch. 31

  Ch. 32

  Ch. 33

  Ch. 34

  Ch. 35

  Ch. 36

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Books by N. Gemini Sasson:

  EXCERPT FROM THE HONOR DUE A KING (The Bruce Trilogy: Book III)

  Ch. 1:

  WORTH DYING FOR

  The Bruce Trilogy:

  Book II

  N. GEMINI SASSON

  CaderIdris Press

  Robert the Bruce has known nothing but hardship since seizing Scotland’s crown in 1306. Parted from his wife and daughter and forced to flee through the Highland wilderness, he struggles to unite a kingdom divided by centuries old blood feuds. The price, however, must be paid in lives and honor.

  Falling to temptation, Robert’s only means of redemption―and to one day win his wife Elizabeth back―is to forgive those who have wronged him. One by one, Robert must win back Scotland’s clans and castles. The one man who can help him purge the land of English tyranny is the cunning young nobleman, James ‘the Black’ Douglas, who seeks vengeance on those who took both his inheritance and his father’s life.

  With the death of Longshanks, Edward II ascends to the throne of England. His first act as king is to recall the banished Piers Gaveston. Too soon, Edward learns that he cannot protect the one he loves most and still preserve his own life and crown. To those who demand the ultimate sacrifice, he must relinquish all power. To have his revenge, he must do what his father never believed him capable of―defeat Robert the Bruce on the field of battle.

  WORTH DYING FOR

  (Kindle Edition)

  Copyright © 2010 N. Gemini Sasson

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the Author. For information:

  www.ngeminisasson.com

  For Eric –

  Forever...

  and ever...

  and a couple of days after that.

  Prologue

  Edward II – Bannockburn, 1314

  The crash of weapons roars like constant thunder. Before me, 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.

  So many fallen. God’s soul, so many. My nephew, Gilbert de Clare, 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 said that Robert the Bruce, that base traitor who dares call himself ‘King of Scots’, butchered him in a single blow. Hereford lies. He saw wrongly. Gilbert fought valiantly – to the last tooth and nail. He 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? Are you listening?”

  I blink at him. Hot tears scorch my eyes. My sire 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.”

  His dark brows hood his eyes in foreboding shadow and I realize it is already the end.

  “The day is lost,” Pembroke says in harsh, cutting honesty, “but Stirling still belongs to the English. We must go there, now. Stay here a moment too long, fall into their hands and it well may be your death they’ll be celebrating today.”

  Death? I should embrace it, for what have I left to live for? Piers is long gone. Gilbert, too. And now this…

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

  One hand pressed to my chest, I feel for the lump beneath my coat of mail. It is there still: the lion pendant Piers always wore with such devotion.

  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 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 where I have gone to.

  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 web 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 pulls me onward as we slide down the bank and splash across the reddened stream.

  A headless corpse entangles itself between my horse’s legs, jostling me. 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 white 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.

  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.

  Ch. 1

  Robert the Bruce – Balquhidder, 1306

  I stumbled to the mouth of the cave, my bones grinding with weariness. The sun’s rays, growing stronger, fell upon my face. I closed my eyes, inhaled the damp morning air, and thought of Elizabeth.

  The last I had looked into her eyes, bright and green as summer grass slicked with dew, no words had passed between us. What would I have said, had I time to say anything at all? That we would be together again soon? I did not know. That she would be safe? That neither.

  That I loved her? Achingly so.

  For her, I had sacrificed everything. Turned my back on my fellow Scotsmen to scrape the ground at Longshanks’ feet. With no more pride than some starving cur, groveling for fetid scraps. I thought I could have her and Scotland’s crown – all without so much as a drop of blood shed. And so I took her as my wife and did Longshanks’ bidding. What reason did he have then to give me more?

  How I had hated every day of it. Hated him for his cruelty and deceit. Hated myself for my weakness, for yielding to him. But I had believed some good would come of it. What good? Not this, certainly. My army crushed at Methven by Pembroke’s forces like grist beneath the millstone. My womenfolk wandering through the wilderness. So many more dead at Dalry.

  Bloody and broken, we had made it as far as a glen pocked with rocky overhangs and small caves, somewhere near Balquhidder. We laid the worst of our wounded in the largest cave, stinking of mold and sheep droppings and crawling with insects, high up on the hillside. In a few days, God permitting, we would be on our way again. Yet every step would be clouded with the dread that John of Lorne’s Highlanders might attack again. Ah, how can we drive out the English when we cannot stop fighting our own?

  Stubborn! Stupid! Fool!

  “The sun out today, my lord?”

  I turned at the sound of the voice, so feeble I might not have heard it, had I not been so close to its source. Behind me, near the cave’s opening, a man sat propped crookedly against the wall. He was perhaps in his mid twenties, but the toll of battle had added a decade or more. A faint webbing of veins traced purple across his milk-pale skin. Curly, dark red hair lay in matted clumps on the top and right side of his head. But on the left... the hair was gone. An oozing mass of dried blood and mangled flesh marked the place where, only a day ago, his ear had been. The right eye was swollen shut, too, the lid a lumpy, mottled patch of blue and green.

  “Aye,” I said. “Bright and bold.”

  “Good.” He half-smiled. “My Muriel will like that. She’s an ill-tempered beast when it’s gloomy.” A shiver gripped him hard, made his teeth clack. When it had passed, he patted his lap and the ground. Finding nothing, he drew his hand to his chest to cradle the other arm against the chill. His right arm was nothing but a stump – a bloody, grotesque stump – the hand hewn clean off by a Highlander’s axe. Someone had wrapped it in rags, but already they were soaked red.

  I unclasped my cloak, flecked brown with battle-blood, and draped it across his legs. “Is Muriel your wife?”

  “Daughter. My wife, she died last year.” A tear squeezed from his good eye, blue as the winter sky, and streaked its way down his dirty cheek, leaving a jagged white trail. “My son, too. He was only three months old.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. Children should never die so young. Nor wives.” A wave of grief crashed inside my chest. My first wife, Isabella of Mar, had died in childbirth at not yet eighteen. Too young, too beautiful, and too much a part of me. Lately, every time I had looked at my daughter, who now tottered on the precipice of womanhood, it had sent a knife of sorrow through my heart because I saw so much of her mother in her: the sweeping, dark lashes that contrasted sharply with her corn-gold hair, the peculiar way she thrust her chin forward when determined to have her way, the dimples that creased her cheeks when she smiled. The pain of memories does not so much as fade, as it hides and waits in unexpected places. Even in the innocent face of a child. But Marjorie was not a child anymore.

  A yellow dung-fly circled my head sluggishly, its annoyance yanking me back into the present. I swatted it away. “Tell me your name.”

  He laughed – a dry, raspy cackle, which quickly deteriorated into a hacking cough. Another violent shiver rattled his body, so that his words came out in broken bits. “N-never had a... k-king ask my name before. It’s Col–Colin. ”

  “What happened to them, Colin?” I squatted down to hear him better. He had little strength left, even for words, but he told me his story, perhaps because he thought it was the last thing he would ever do.

  “I was in the hills with Muriel. May. The hawthorn was in bloom – clouds and clouds of it. How my lass loved to watch the lambs play king of the cairn. She laughed until her belly ached.” The vaguest of smiles curved his mouth, but soon the corners trembled and slipped downward. “And then, I saw the smoke above the hills. I knew, knew it was my home burning. I snatched her up and ran like the devil. But he was... they were already there. I was...” Colin paused, his disfigured face contorting even more with the agony of the memory. Several breaths passed before he whispered, “Too late.”

  No need to ask who ‘they’ was. It had been happening as long as anyone could remember – the English marching imperiously north every year when the days lengthened, plundering and murdering, striking terror wherever they went like the Hounds of Hell unleashed. Ever since Longshanks had cozened our nobles into signing the Ragman’s Roll at Norham.

  “Must have been twenty of the damned Englishmen,” Colin said, little whe
ezes now leaking out in between strained breaths. “Maybe more, I don’t know. There was so much smoke. Merciful Father, it was everywhere. The thatch was burning. Flames bursting from the door. When the roof fell in… I thought they were dead.” His trembling stopped as he winced at a pain and drew his maimed arm tighter to his chest. Gulping, he struggled to pull in another ragged breath, before continuing. “Then… I heard my son cry. He was alive! But they’d heard him, too, and they went to the haystack where the sound had come from. One of them plunged his sword into it. Then another threw a torch on it. My wife jumped up and ran, holding the boy, but it was for naught. They were all around her. Everywhere, everywhere. They... they ripped my son from her arms and flung him to the ground. He stopped crying. Stopped moving.” A long silence followed as he steeled himself to go on. “I knew if I went down there, I would die, too, and so would Muriel. So I hid. Like a coward, I hid in the hawthorns, my hand over Muriel’s mouth so they wouldn’t hear her whimpering. One after another, they raped my wife. Raped her, until she was bloody from her hips to her heels. I thought they would let her go, but... oh, sweet Jesus, they –” He tilted his head back, his mouth hanging open as he let out a sob. When he spoke again, his words were hollow with loss. “They c-cut her throat. Left her there to bleed like a butchered pig.”

  I laid a hand on his shoulder in comfort. Even through the cloth of his shirt, crusted with the dried blood from his missing ear, his flesh was ice cold. “Where’s your daughter now?”

  “In Aberdeen, with my sister. Her husband died at Methven. She has six children to raise on her own. Seven now.” He swallowed hard, my cloak wadded in a shaking hand against his stomach. “Whoring bastards. I’ll slice their bollocks off and shove them down their gullets, then strangle them with their own entrails.” Bruised lips twisting in a sneer, he gazed down at his useless stump.