The Renegade: A Tale of Robert the Bruce by Jack Whyte Read Free Book Online Page B

lurching of the beast’s back as it picked its way across the tortuous landscape and began the long climb up the last sloping hillside between them and the sea. He came back to attention, though, as they crested the hilltop and he heard his uncle speak.
    “They’re here already. But we haven’t kept them waiting.”
    A hundred feet below them, on a shallow, sandy beach, a long, sleek, wide-bellied galley was drawn up onto the strand, its sail already furled and secured to the enormous spar that braced it, and a number of men were busy around it in the shallows, some of them up to their waist in water as they laboured at transferring horses from the vessel to the shore. Two beasts had already been unloaded and were being tended on the pebbled shore above the wrack by a boy whom Rob gauged to be about his own age. A third horse wasabout to be swung over as he looked, hoisted in a wide cloth cradle slung beneath its belly, and a fourth stamped nervously on the small cargo deck that seemed barely large enough to have held four animals. Nicol kicked his horse forward, leading the way down the grassy hillside as Rob shortened his reins and followed.
    The boy on the beach with the horses was the first to notice them, and he shouted something to the others, so that within moments everyone was looking up the hill to where Nicol and his young companion were wending their way down. Rob saw row upon row of upturned faces staring at them from the rowing benches on both sides of the galley’s central aisle, but though he was close enough to see the colour of their hair and beards he was still too far away to see any faces clearly. Above the oarsmen, on a platform in the prow, a dozen more men were working around the hoist being used to transfer the animals from the ship to the shore, and six more, besides the boy and his horses, were on the beach, four of them unloading the beasts from the galley, standing up to mid-thigh in the water but soaked to the waist as they waited for the suspended horse to be lowered to them. Their interest in the two newcomers had been brief, little more than a quick glance in response to the boy’s shout, and quickly abandoned in the need to maintain a secure footing among the waves that broke over the submerged stones of the shelving shoreline.
    The remaining two men on the shore stood on the pebbled beach above the waterline and were clearly, even at the distance from which Rob first saw them, of a different rank to the others. As he and his uncle drew closer to the water’s edge, and details began to grow clearer, Rob saw what it was that set these two apart from their companions. Their clothing seemed little different from that worn by the rest of their party, but it was brighter, the colours bolder, more vivid, and the decorations adorning their garments—feathered crests and jewelled brooches—were larger, richer, and more elaborate, so that the pair stood out from their fellows like two of Earl Robert’s beloved cock pheasants among a brood of dowdy hens.
    “Which one’s Angus Mohr?” Rob whispered to his uncle.
    “Which do you think? The older one. The other’s his good-son, a MacRory lordling, married to his daughter Morag. I only met him once and I can’t recall his name but it will come to me … ” Nicol spoke from the side of his mouth without turning his head away from the bustle below. He was smiling, though, and Rob knew the smile was for the people watching them.
    “Why would they land here, when Turnberry’s only four miles up the coast?”
    “I can make a guess. Angus Mohr trusts no one—and believe me, he has learnt that to his cost. He has known your mother all her life and would probably trust her, but he does not know your father, other than as an English-born incomer, and therefore I would guess he is loath to sail blithely into Turnberry harbour without a guarantee of being able to sail back out again. Now say no more about it.”
    The hillside beneath them began to