The Way Between the Worlds by Alys Clare Page B

must keep his mind occupied, for if he did not, he might give in to the despair and the loneliness. Death was lurking; if he did not fight it, he could easily succumb. Slip into its kindly embrace. Wasn’t he already lying in his grave? This was what could so very easily happen, if a man proved himself too useful to his king  . . .
    Enough, he told himself firmly.
    He tore his mind away from the present and went back to the day when it had all begun  . . .
    One of the many problems besetting King William II was that which his mighty father had always said to avoid if at all possible: fighting enemies simultaneously on two fronts. Early in the fourth year of his reign he sailed for Normandy, where the ongoing problem of his younger brother, Duke Robert, had broken out once again, with Robert nibbling away at William’s possessions in the region and going so far as to besiege the castle of one of William’s loyal barons. On arrival William immediately outbid his brother for the support of the barons and the services of the mercenaries, who abandoned Robert and flocked to William. Robert had no option but to come to terms with William, resulting in a treaty to which both brothers signed their names.
    William, however, was not given long to savour the victory. Word reached him while he was still in Normandy that King Malcolm of Scotland had invaded northern England, advancing across a wide front and pushing on determinedly until the local inhabitants organized themselves sufficiently to drive the Scots back. William raced back to England, where he hastily gathered a large army and sent them north, some by sea and some travelling overland.
    It was by then September, and one of the worst early autumns men had ever known. It was cold, it was wet, and the wind blew with a steady, brutal, unvarying force that drove people half-mad. William’s army, making what haste they could to shore up the northern border, suffered appallingly. Those in the land-army were beset by severe cold and by hunger that had many soldiers weak from near starvation. The ship-army fared even worse, for the equinox brought gales of such strength that their ships foundered and sank and almost all the men perished.
    What remained of William’s army found King Malcolm calmly waiting, in an area of Lothian south of the Forth that was English to its very bones. Malcolm was the aggressor, but William, far from his power bases in the south and with half his army dead, was in no position to use force. The two kings negotiated a settlement: Malcolm agreed to become William’s vassal, giving him his allegiance as he had done to William’s father. Such support was not lightly given, and William well knew it. In exchange, he offered to return to Malcolm the twelve English townships that the Scottish king had held under the Conqueror, as well as an additional gift of twelve gold marks, to be paid annually.
    As he oversaw his army’s preparations for setting out on the long road southwards, William was already planning what to do next. Among his plans, handing either the gold or the towns over to King Malcolm did not feature at all.
    He was far from satisfied with the outcome of the recent foray. It was true that, with the loss of the ship-army, his forces had been severely weakened and he had been in no position to fight. Nevertheless, to have been forced to make such concessions to the Scottish king – even ones he had no intention of honouring – had amounted to a grave loss of face.
    What was needed, the king decided, was a major fortification of the borderlands between England and Scotland. An area of land that was securely under English control, with strong castles and inhabited by Englishmen who would live and work there, would keep the Scots at bay back on their own side of the border. In addition, the men who settled up there would provide a fighting force if Malcolm tried to invade again.
    William turned the scheme over in his mind. After some more