Pretender's Fate

“How many men did you say?”

“More than twenty-thousand, the Bruce told us. Edward himself at the lead. They crossed into Scotland two weeks ago. They are camped not more than five miles from the ford now.”

“And how many Scots?” James Young asked. He could not settle down. He was pacing about the tent of his liege lord, John Douglas, at the Scot’s encampment half way between Stirling Castle and the ford over the Bannockburn. Edward II had made quite clear that his intent was to break the Scottish siege of Stirling Castle, currently held by the English but invested by the forces of Robert the Bruce. No castle was more important to the Scots than Stirling, which commanded the main passage from England into the Scottish Highlands and that had long been the unofficial seat of the Scottish kings.

“Perhaps seven thousand here, now in the field. More are coming, we were told. But the English will try to cross the burn tomorrow. Robert’s spies are sure of that.” John Douglas, effectively Robert the Bruce’s second in command, was sitting in his camp chair, near his field cot, watching his powerfully built lieutenant pace. As always, Young was dressed only in a kilt and his boots and high socks, playing his role—thanks to his magnificent physique—of the last Scot an English soldier wanted to see standing before him, to the hilt.

Only one other figure was in the tent: Douglas’s manservant, who was obediently—and to the two Scottish warriors, invisibly—kneeling in the shadows at the edge of the tent, polishing the scabbard of Douglas’s sword—or at least pretending to. If only these two realized, the servant thought, how much they revealed in the face of their servants’ invisibility to them, they would be sore afraid of the power their servants held. Fortunately for Douglas, the servant admired him. It was more a case of fear and past bitterness toward the other one, though.

“Seven thousand Scots against twenty thousand bastard Englishmen. It seems fairly even, perhaps a little heavy on the Scots’ side.”

Douglas sighed. There was a time when he had thought that Young would drop the bloodthirsty bravado when they were alone, but he had come to accept that Young believed his own boasting—and that, in fact, it had been what had carried the no-longer-young warrior through decades of fighting.

It had not been an easy sixteen years for James Young. Before the burning of the castle at Ayr, he had been the man closest to Robert the Bruce. In that one act, going against deBruce’s orders even though Young did exactly as the troops expected and desired, Young was sent away from deBruce’s presence. Robert couldn’t exile him completely from military operations—he was too much of a legend and a charismatic symbol of the Scottish determination for him to be sent from the battlefields. But Young no longer would be included in the counsels of the man who was crowned king of the Scots in 1306, after having duped and murdered his leading rival for the crown, John III Comyn. Young had been assigned to serve under Douglas to be close to Robert and yet still far away.

“I wish you had been there, in the council, to voice that hope and determination, James,” Douglas murmured, with another sigh. “Too many of the lairds are pessimistic about tomorrow.” And that was exactly how Douglas felt about it. Young very likely would have been just the voice they had all needed to give them assurances about tomorrow’s battle.

“It is none of my decision that I’m not in the council,” Young answered, his bitterness evident. “Most of the twenty thousand are on horse, are they not?” he continued, obviously more interested in the coming battle than past bickering.

“Yes. Edward prides himself on his English cavalry.”

“Yes, I’ve heard how well he likes to ride—and I’m not talking of horses, but rather his young squires,” Young said, with a slight leer in his eyes. “But for all that, he is a capable military leader; not one to disregard. Ours are infantry? And sturdy lads all?”

“Yes, most.”

“Then we shall be fine. Tell me, has Robert told you where he wants us to go from there? I have heard that he will keep with the Stirling siege but that he wants you elsewhere.”

Such optimism, Douglas thought. We face a tough fight tomorrow, and James already is thinking toward the next conquest. I wish I had his confidence. Most of all, however, I wish I had his physique. Douglas looked over at Young. Older than he was by a few years and yet magnificent of body. Enhanced by always strutting around bare chested like that. Intimidating to most. Desired by a few others.

“Roxburgh next,” he answered. “But just you, taking our forces. Robert wants me to linger at Stirling for the moment. The lairds are restless, and Robert thinks that I calm and assure them.”

“Roxburgh? Why there? It is not on the direct route from the south.”

“No, but it has something there Robert wants. It is commanded by Thomas Howard.”

“Ah, Thomas Howard.” Both of the men thought back sixteen years to the siege and burning of Castle Ayr. That had been commanded by Sir Thomas Howard as well even though it turned out that Howard wasn’t there. “And that is important to Robert because . . . ?”

“DeBruce wants Howard dead. But here is the delicate part for your mission. Robert wants Howard’s son alive.”

“Howard’s son? He has a . . . ? Oh, yes, I remember. I once saw the son, I believe.”

The manservant in the corner dropped the scabbard he was polishing and, looking mortified that he’d made a sound, snatched it back up off the hard ground and turned away from the two men in the room. As a servant, he just wasn’t there. And as a servant, he should have not been making a sound while he “wasn’t there.”

“I wonder why?” Young continued.

“Why he does not want the son harmed? Why he wants the son brought to him?” Douglas said. “I cannot say, but I’m told if you saw what the young man looked like—who he looked like—now, you would not have to ask that question.”

“Ah, yes I see,” Young said. And see he did. It explained so much more as well. It explained why the Bruce took Castle Ayr so softly, which was completely out of his character—and why he escorted the lady of the castle and her brat to a nunnery himself. And also, to some extent, why he had been so angry that Young had raised the castle despite deBruce’s promise to that woman. The Scottish king was known for guarding the welfare of all of his by-blows. But was Robert wise in this? Did he really need bastards running around the countryside? Were not the secession issues and contenders abundant enough and enough of a puzzle already?

“So, yes, I understand, even though, with the complications, I think him not wise to be so maudlin.”

“I don’t believe that such talk is wise, James. Even when we are alone.”

Young shrugged, waved a hand as if to just brush the suggestion he was speaking dangerously out of the tent, and continued. “But the taking of the castle . . . it will not be an easy or bloodless task. If I cannot single out a single man for saving . . .”

“Then that would be God’s will, I suppose,” Douglas answered. “And I am sure that Robert would understand. But enough. I grow weary. And tomorrow we do battle. Come here. Come over here.”

Young stopped his pacing and turned toward Douglas, sitting in his camp chair. “How weary?”

“Not completely weary. I understand the ritual you must have before going into battle.”

Young walked over to stand very close to Douglas in the chair. He leaned down and took Douglas’s lips with his. His hand snaked in the low-cut neck opening of Douglas’s tunic and his fingers found a hard nipple. Douglas’s hand went under the hem of Young’s kilt and found the hardening cock, standing out free under the single material layer of the kilt. He milked the engorging phallus with his hand as Douglas growled deep in his throat.

Pushing the front of Young’s kilt up his belly with one hand, the other still wrapped around the base of the gigantic, hard cock, Douglas took the phallus in his mouth and moved his lips down the side of the shaft as far as he could go. He gagged a bit and then pulled back and sucked on the bulbous head.

“Treat it right, lad,” Young murmured. “Make it want you and it will make your hole sing. We have a hard night to get through—or at least you do. You know what I want the night before a fight.”

Douglas’s mouth descended on the cock again. This time when it had reached its limit and the gag reflex was visiting once more and Douglas tried to pull back, Young grabbed his head and held it in place, though. When the urge to gag had passed, Young began a pumping motion. Douglas’s hand went to the waistband of his own breeches, which he unlaced and then pulled out his own hardening cock.

Douglas lay on his belly on the camp cot, his arms hanging over the side with his knuckles dragging on the ground and his head hanging down over the top margin of the cot. Young was straddling his liege lord’s hips with his knees, his heavily muscled calves holding Douglas’s thighs close together, restricting his entrance, as Young liked, while the older warrior brutalized the constricted channel with his thick cock.

The manservant took fleeting glimpses of his lord being roughly fucked by his former lord. It had been the servant who Young had fucked like this in years past the night before going into battle—until the servant had grown too old for Young’s tastes. Then Young had given him to Douglas to serve him. Douglas didn’t fuck him; with Douglas he only was a manservant, and he was a fine lord to serve. The manservant was totally loyal to Douglas, and, in turn, Douglas assigned him great trust. However, he remembered the poundings he had received—and initially wanted to resist but eventually became addicted to—from the brash Scot, Young. He could only watch now, in envy, Douglas getting the total cocking that he had once gotten.

So vigorous was the assault on Douglas’s ass that the cot collapsed under them. But Young just rode his commander to the ground. This was a ritual that Young required in order to be his bravest in battle. And the Scottish foot soldiers depended on Young’s optimism, confidence, and bravado.

The manservant turned back to face the tent wall and picked up Douglas’s shield. It would be the most highly polished one in the field the next morning, bearing all of the frustration of a mere servant.

Still, although Douglas was getting the cocking now that the servant had once gotten and grown to beg for, he could not help feeling sorry for his liege lord. As he well knew, Douglas lived for this cocking as long as it was confined to the privacy of his tent. And as he also knew, Young lost interest in a man when he had reached a certain age. Douglas was close to that now. Who would he have brave enough to cock him and as good at doing it as Young was when that bloodthirsty warrior moved on to a younger man?

Young was most loyal to Young. His attachment to Douglas—for that matter even to Robert the Bruce—only went so far.

* * * *

James Young’s assessment of the battlefield opportunities was not so much bravado as it was having the keen mind of a strategist. All of the time that John Douglas had been in council with Robert the Bruce and the other Scottish lairds, Young had spent out on the southern side of the Bannoukburn ford, in a marshy field spanning the approach to the ford, supervising the laying of pointed wooden stakes in the ground just to the northern side of a grassy berm. He hadn’t been assigned this task. As was his wont, he had seen what needed to be done and was doing it, frustrated by having been frozen out of the war council and antsy to be doing something to prepare for the battle.

His query on the composition of Edward II’s forces—primarily mounted cavalry knights in full armor—had not been a light one, although he had known the answer before he had asked. It had been a leading question, but Douglas had not understood its intent.

Douglas was a fine commander and a good lay, Young believed, but he also believed that he himself was the one who should be standing at Robert the Bruce’s side in battle councils. He enjoyed such as he was doing today—taking some preparations in his own hands and savoring Robert’s frustration when he realized that those preparations were crucial to his victories.

Both armies devoted the daylight hours of 23 June to testing each other, but early on the second day of the engagement, the English forces attacked in full tilt, knowing that they outnumbered the Scottish forces significantly and determined to relieve the siege of Stirling Castle after having been turned back too many times. Edward knew his forces would sustain losses in a full-frontal attack into the range of the Scottish spearmen arrayed across the berm on the southern side of the ford—the only fording place for many miles in either direction. But once past the spearmen, Edward assumed, he would only be facing a mopping up operation.

The English cavalry galloped full tilt at the berm, with a knight here and there falling by the wayside, either his horse or he himself having been struck by a well-thrown spear. Before they reached the berm, though, the spearmen suddenly evaporated, melting behind the berm and then running to either side. The English horses flew over the berm—and onto the buried stakes on the other side. Those that survived this impalement landed in a marshy field that they hadn’t known was there between them and the ford—and that Young had had buckets of water carried to throughout the preceding two days and nights. Despite the reach of the English knights’ swords, they were no match in their heavy armor, standing on marsh ground without a horse under them, for the spears and pikes of the screaming, ragtag Scottish foot soldiers.

At this point, the battle plan that Robert the Bruce and his council had actually put into place was brought to bear. From the eastern and western flanks of the marsh, legions of Scottish infantrymen, with their long spears, converged on the marsh from the cover they had taken in Tor Wood.

Very few Englishmen survived that day in the resulting breaking of the English ranks and every-man-for-himself flight from the field in any direction they could find. Edward II himself barely escaped capture in his retreat. The English troops were pursued and harried the full ninety-miles back to the English border. In the entire engagement only two Scottish knights were reported to have been killed, but Edward’s knights had been decimated.

The Scottish siege of Stirling Castle continued.

In surveying the battlefield the next day with the Scottish troops lined up in ranks on the marshy field they had defended so proudly and well, Robert the Bruce and his immediate lieutenants rode down the ranks in a victory parade. When he reached the soldiers of John Douglas, with James Young in front of them, astride his sturdy horse and, as usual, dressed only in his Young clan kilt, Robert paused. He turned in the saddle and gazed out at the rows of stakes this side of the berm—stakes that he had not commanded be emplaced. Then he turned in the saddle again and gave Young a hard look and then a slight nod of his head, about as much of a “well-done” acknowledgment he was known to give in public. Another hard look, and then he rode on down the line, a concerned-looking John Douglas riding in his wake.

If this was a warning—and one, in particular, related to the mission that had next been set out for Young—Young did not care. James Young was James Young. If Roxburgh was to be taken and Thomas Howard to die, this would be done. As for anything to do with the soft side of Robert the Bruce in the saving of his bastard son, Young would do what he could, as he saw best, and what, ultimately, he thought would serve the greater good. He did have loyalty to Robert the Bruce, despite the tensions between them, but he had a greater loyalty to the Scottish cause. And, yes, he had an even greater loyalty to himself.