Castaways in Time by Adams Robert

The retreat was in no way a rout. The trains, the guns and all the noble wounded were in column with the battered troops … for a while. That they did not remain so was in no way the doing of the victorious English. Rather was it the English weather.

The bright, warm sunlight under which the withdrawal had begun did not last long. By noon, the sky had become a uniform, dull gray, and the first big drops of cold rain splattered down shortly thereafter. With scant pauses, the rain fell for nearly a week, and a truly deadly rain it was for full many a Scot.

The very lightest of the siege guns weighed, with its massive carriage, in excess of four tons, and the huge, bulky, clumsy weapons were difficult to transport under optimum conditions. By the evening of the third day of rainfall, Alexander had been forced to abandon every big bombard he had taken south and several field guns, as well. There was no way to reckon how many tons of supplies and powder had been surreptitiously cast by the way by wagoners trying to lighten their loads, or how many draft horses and mules had been killed or crippled in heaving to drag mired wagons and gun carriages out of the slimy, sucking mud. While fording some nameless stream, a wagon had lost a wheel, tilted and been overturned by the force of the current, hurling its load of screaming wounded into the racing, icy waters. Alexander had refused to countenance any rescue attempt, for by then English dragoons and lancers were nibbling at the rear’ and flanks of what was left of the Scottish Army. For all any knew, the entire English army was massing just over the closest southerly hill, and the area surrounding the ford was no place on which to try to make a stand.

Alexander had the place at which he and the army would—regardless of the maunderings of Legate, Lovat, Moray, Ayr or any of the rest of that craven pack—make a stand. He had managed to convince himself that Whyffler Hall must certainly foave fallen to Scottish arms by now, conveniently forgetting the poor quality of the troops he had left behind to invest it. It was within those masterfully wrought works that he would mass his remaining force, thundering defiance at the excommunicated and disenfranchised wretch of an Arthur from the mouths of the Sassenachs’ own guns.

But when at last he came within view of his objective, cold reality—in the form of the English royal banner, King Arthur’s personal banner, and a third bearing the arms of the House of Whyffler, as well as a fourth which was not familiar to him, still snapping proudly upon the apex of the ancient tower—brought his self-delusions crashing about his head. Disregarding the “advices” of his advisers, he ordered the army to take up the positions they had occupied when first he had essayed the fort and, the next dawn, ordered and personally led a full-scale assault against the heavily defended works.

The assault was repulsed, sanguineously repulsed. The Scottish King himself had no less than three horses killed under him, and one of every six Scots and mercenaries was killed or wounded. But immediately after he had reluctantly ordered the recalls sounded, the valiant but impossibly stubborn sovereign was discussing the dispositions of the next morning’s assault.

In the night, numerous Continental Crusaders cast off their white surcoats and, after tying rags of them to their lanceshafts, rode silently out of camp . . . headed south. Bearing their wounded and such supplies as they could quickly and easily steal, the surviving mercenaries were not long in following.

At dawn, the bloodied Scots formed for another suicidal effort, awaiting only the King to lead them. Then, just before the hour of tierce, the great lairds—Moray, Lovat, Ayr, Midlothian, Aberdeen, Ross, Angus, Banff, Argyll and Berwick—appeared in company with the Lord Marshal, James Stewart, to announce that King Alexander had died of his wounds in the night, as, too, had Cardinal de Mandojana. The late monarch had not thus far produced a legal heir, and as bastards could not inherit a crown, they had decided upon James to henceforth rein as Fifth of that name.