Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
T he English banner snapped in the midday breeze over warriors encamped for three days after the long march from the borderlands. Beside it, the black dragon on a blood red field, the beast seeming to take flight with the movement of the wind.
A call from one of the look-outs went out across the encampment as a dozen horsemen emerged over the crest of the hillside and rode toward the encampment.
They wore no armor nor carried any banners that might give away their true purpose. Instead, they were dressed as huntsmen, their tunics mud-stained with grime from the past weeks in the Scottish countryside.
The black knight, with the dragon emblazoned across the front of his tunic, strode from the center of the encampment his gaze fixed on those who approached.
The riders pulled up their horses and William of Pembroke, Marshal to King Henry III of England, dismounted and strode toward the black knight. As the others dismounted, he pushed back the hood of his tunic. He strode to the banks of the nearby stream, knelt, scooped water and drank thirstily.
Blackwood followed, impatient at the delay, the waiting, now waiting again as Marshal quenched his thirst. Be damned!
"What word?" he demanded.
Marshal eventually stood, brushing water from his beard as his men dismounted their weary horses. They'd ridden non-stop to reach the meeting place.
"My men need food and rest." He'd pushed both men and horses to bring Blackwood the information he wanted.
"By God, Marshal... ! What have you learned? Or must I send out my own men to bring me the information I need?"
He was young, Blackwood thought, not the man his father had been, serving five English kings as counselor and advisor. Not experienced in, but by God, he would be when Blackwood finished with him.
Marshal's gaze narrowed. Blackwood had a habit of inserting himself too much. Family alliances made King Henry indulgent and perhaps careless in letting loose the hound of destruction, the name Blackwood had earned on the battlefield and at court.
Henry was not a warrior. He was far more content to focus on the arts, his favorite past-time, or the indulgences of the queen.
Before his death, his own father had counseled him on the role he would inherit both as Earl of Pembroke and as Marshal to the king. And he had warned him of Henry's weaknesses.
"There are those who will attempt to use the king for their own purposes," he had spoken from his death bed.
"You must guard against this. For even though the king may have no taste for conflict, the conflicts remain. There are some that must be confronted directly--France and the ever increasing threat from Spain. There are other conflicts that must be handled indirectly through diplomacy and negotiation--those that are closer to home. And there are those who will be incautious in their actions to serve themselves."
Blackwood. A name mentioned several times in those last weeks as his father worked against time and death to tell him the things he must know--things he already knew, but were of grave importance to the King and the kingdom.
"Blackwood would act with brute force," his father had repeated. "He has but one objective and it serves himself before any others. It has been like a festering wound these past years. You know it well. And you must be the counter-balance to his haste."
Then even in the final hours as his life slipped away, from a man who had served five kings, "Never forget that you serve England no matter which king sits on the throne or the men that would use it for themselves."
Words that came back to him several times over the past weeks as he and his men moved through the countryside of this stark land to the north. Marshal had his own reasons, and it had nothing to do with wealth as men usually thought of it--gold, titles, vast farmlands that yielded crops, and everything to do with a particular land holding.
Diplomacy and counsel. A hard task with a man who often refused to listen.
"The young king is at Stirling," he began, weighing words carefully.
That took the edge off Blackwood's anger. "You're certain of this?"
"We had word of it on the road four days ago. He is with his entire household and the Scottish court."
"What fortifications?" Blackwood demanded. It was almost too much to hope that Marshal would have that information.
Marshal scrubbed back his hair with a weary hand. "Tis said that the Campbell is also in residence with three score of his kinsmen."
"Three score?" Blackwood slowly smiled. "And all in one place." His voice hardened with contempt.
"The young king makes my task easy."
Marshal caught the inflection at the word ' my ', as if this was Blackwood's personal campaign and not the diplomatic mission as Henry intended.
"Yes, Yes, I understand ," the king had told him, momentarily distracted from a game of balls at the London courtyard.
"You should go . Caution is best, and keep a tight rein on Blackwood ."
"Diplomacy is best ," the king had agreed. Then with a frown, what his Lord High Treasurer had warned.
"We cannot afford another costly conflict. This war with France is draining the royal coffers. Put an end to this and bring the young king to heel."
These past weeks, as Blackwood moved steadily north, Marshal and his men had slipped through the countryside unnoticed for the most part, with a two-fold purpose--to learn the temperament of Alexander the young Scottish king, as well as his location for a meeting, and to learn the temperament of the Scottish people, to determine if the clans supported the Scottish king, or were splintered in their loyalties.
For almost two hundred years, since William of Normandy had claimed the English throne and then granted lands to his loyal knights, including lands in Scotland, the conflict had grown and festered like a wound that kept reopening.
As King William had set up his center of power in London long ago and then returned to France, overlords in the north had been left to their own protection and rule.
As a result some clans had risen to power, while lesser clans had banned together. For decades they answered to no king, only their clan chieftains, protecting their lands and holdings, and growing more distant from the English crown. Past kings-- John, and Henry before him, had attempted to bind the northern chieftains to England with holdings in both England and Scotland.
A man might be persuaded in his loyalty with the loss of wealth and title. But there were those who had remained steadfast in their loyalty only to Scotland. It was a strange and often deadly circumstance, but one each English king in succession had been forced to accept for the sheer economics of attempting to rule over this northern land.
Henry's father, of a different temperament than his mild mannered son, had attempted such subjugation of the northern clans in the outposts he had built in a physical chain that resembled a noose that, if necessary, could be slowly closed around the neck of Scotland.
But those outposts had been a mixture of successes and failures, as English soldiers became indifferent to their duties so far from home, defected into the countryside, or were hunted down and made to pay for their abandonment of their post, or simply never heard from again. He feared it was an expensive campaign that was doomed to failure--a lesson his father had taught him. The new outposts that had pushed farther into Scotia had accomplished little in bringing the Scots to heel. So far.
"If one doesn't learn from the past, he is doomed to repeat it."
Marshal feared that Blackwood's intransigence would doom them to failure. He had given much thought how to temper the man's single-mindedness, or he might well get them all killed.
"We could take them in a single day," Blackwood commented. "They are no match for a well-armed English army."
"I would remind you that is not our purpose," Marshal cautioned. "We are here to meet with the Scottish king about unification, a unification that could well serve his people as well as King Henry."
Blackwood made a derisive sound. "And if he refuses, I will convince him that it is pointless to resist."
"The king has asked for diplomacy," Marshal reminded him again.
"Diplomacy does not serve our interests," Blackwood replied.
"You mean, your interests," Marshal spoke boldly. He knew well that Blackwood had no respect for the king nor any of his counsel, but oddly held a grudging if dangerous respect for those who stood up to him.
"This is not a campaign to start a war. You must set aside this obsession with Fraser. He is powerful and very possibly the key to the other clans. And there are rumors that an alliance of clans has gathered."
"Let them," Blackwood spat out with loathing. "They are nothing more than pig farmers and shepherds. They will easily fall, including Fraser."
It was time to finish what he had set out four years before. All of Scotland would then fall without the protection of Fraser, the powerful clan, and their much vaunted stable of horses that would make any king envious.
For too long Henry and his father before him had ignored the threat from the north, but once Clan Fraser was destroyed the rest would crumble, along with the young man who sat on the Scottish throne, and he would be in a position to claim Fraser lands as it had been promised before, as it should be.
"As they fell four years past?" Marshal reminded him of that failed campaign in the borderlands.
Blackwood glared at him. "Clan Fraser was weakened in that campaign. Their war chief is an old man, near his time. They will not prevail."
Marshal frowned. Not according to information he had learned weeks before.
"Tis said he has made another his war chief."
"What other?"
With reluctant satisfaction, Marshal realized this was something Blackwood had not known, and it only emphasized the man's rashness and tendency toward haste for his own objectives.
"A younger brother, returned from France."
Blackwood's gaze narrowed. Was it possible? He had word that Ruari Fraser had died of his wounds--wounds that Blackwood had been all too pleased to inflict at Calais. He shook his head.
"I had Ruari Fraser under my sword. If he survived... " he emphasized his doubt of it, "he would be no more than a helpless cripple." He laughed at the thought.
"Come now, Marshal. You may offer your negotiations for unification. And if young Alexander refuses, I will persuade him. We will see the matter done, and King Henry will be most generous."
He already knew what his first move would be once he received that praise and the much deserved reward that he intended to have. He would have everyone, loyal to Fraser--man, woman, and child-- put to the sword.