Braveheart (30 page)

The priests glared at him, and one of them turned again to the door, most likely to fetch the guards, but he pope raised his hand and stopped him.

“
I wrote you,” Wallace said. “When I was Scotland’s guardian, I wrote. I begged for help. I am no longer the guardian, but I beg again.” Everyone was staring at him, including the pontiff, and Wallace plunged on. “You could endorse our rights, you could forbid our enemies to attack us, you could – you could –“ He tied to think of all that the pope could do. “You control the knights Templar. They are warriors who are sworn to fight for justice and the protection of the innocents, and I swear to you that the children of Scotland need such champions. If you –If…

The pope was gazing at him in bewilderment. He turned as if he had not heard and walked out.

“
So you were forgiven for Bouchard’s death,” said the captain of the French guards who had brought Wallace to Rome. On the trip they had become friends, for they treated Wallace not as a prisoner but as an ally. Now he was waiting for Wallace, and as he emerged from the inner chambers of the Vatican, the captain clapped the Scot on the back. “You’re free.”

Wallace lifted his head and stared at the Frenchman. He could not yet have been told what happened inside; he must have known all along that the letters contained the request that Wallace be pardoned. But hat was the only request made and the only petition the pope was willing to consider. “You knew,” Wallace said. “All this time on the trail, when I hoped and planned and dreamed of finding help here, you know I would find none.”

“
My mission,” the captain said, “was like the letter, conducted with the secrecy of the confessional. “And now I am to take you home.”

“
Home?”

“
To France. We will release you before we reach Paris, and you will be free to go wherever you wish. I am also to provide you with money, as I did on the journey here, so that you will not be without comfort wherever you wish to go.”

“
Is that another gift of your king?”

“
Don’t be bitter toward our king, my friend. He arranged for you to be free.”

“
But he knew all along the pope would not help me.”

“
Perhaps. The pope is elected by cardinals. The cardinals are controlled by kings, who war against each other, and –“

“
Stop. I don’t want to hear any more explanations.”

The French captain nodded. “I have no antidote for your disappointment,” he said. He led Wallace out to where the other guards held their horses, already packed for the trip back to France. But as they stepped into their saddles, he said quietly, so that only Wallace could hear, “Well, perhaps just one. The instructions for your care on this journey came not from a king….. but from a princess.”

And saying nothing more, the captain turned his horse and led his company back the way they had come.

54

WITHIN HIS NEW CASTLE OVERLOOKING THE RICH LANDS HE NOW CONTROLLED, AT THE EDGE OF A BEAUTIFUL LOCK TEEMING WITH FISH, surrounded by towering mountains dusted with snow, Mornay lay in what for him now masqueraded as sleep. It had been years since he had passed a night in peaceful slumber. He was now lord of everything as far as he could see; he had directed that an opulent bedchamber be constructed in his new castle, and he had fashioned it for comfort. But even the great fireplace had been unable to drive the chill from his bones, and the tapestries and floor coverings, instead of providing the feeling of soft embrace he so desired, seemed to heighten his sense of being cramped and smothered.

He blamed these unpleasant sensations on many things. His builders had erected a drafty structure—let them deny to their graves, but they were at fault. His cooks were preparing the food in such a way that it sapped his strength – though they had grown fat, eating what he found untasteful. He suspected his friends, his physician, even his priest, of plotting against him.

He had always been a suspicious man, but he had slept well—until that day at Falkirk, when he had led his cavalry off the battlefield leaving Wallace and his Highlanders to their fate. But Mornay refused to account for his sleeplessness in this way. “No!” he insisted, sometimes saying the word out loud when he was all alone or moaning it as he rolled about his bed as he did right now—he was not troubled by what he had one. Nor did it worry him that Wallace had never been caught. He had not been caught because he was dead, his body lost forever in some god-forsaken forest where he had dropped in starvation never to rise again or down some isolated gorge where he had fallen, breaking his stubborn skull, or out upon some moor where the birds had stripped the flesh from his bones. The phantom brands of marauders who raided the borderlands in the years since Falkirk were but lawless Highlanders, doing what the Highlanders always had done; they were not led by William Wallace, as the village wags all liked to say. “No!” Mornay was not afraid to Wallace. He was gone, never to return.

Except in Mornay’s dreams, where every night Wallace did return. Then Mornay saw his face on the field at Falkirk, though on the day of the actual battle he had been too far away to see Wallace’s features when Mornay led his men away. Yet now Mornay could see that face staring at him. The eyes unblinking, burning through him right into his soul. He was alive in those dreams! He would never go away!

Tonight Mornay had a new dream. Wallace was riding toward him. Tonight it was Mornay on foot, surrounded by his enemies, with Wallace riding—and not away, but toward him…..closer…closer!

Mornay awoke, sweating though still cold. He rubbed his face, looked about him to assure himself he as still within his castle and its safety, and rolled over to burrow back beneath the furs of his bead. But then he heard a noise and sat up. He heard hoofbeats. And not outside his castle but within!. It was not possible. He pressed his hands to his face, squeezed his head, felt the bristle of his beard against his palms to drive out what had to be the lingering echo of his dream.

Still he heard the sound. Hoofbeats! They were growing louder, the clatter of hoof on stone, rising up the spiraling stairway of his bedchamber tower. He heard shouts, too, screams from below. The human noised did not alarm him; they seemed real, human, comforting. But what were these hoofbeats that could not exist?

Then silence; it seemed to hand outside his doorway. Mornay stared at that door. Had it all been a nightmare after all?

Then the door exploded inward, propelled by the hooves of a rearing horse.

Into the bedroom rode William Wallace.

The shouts of Mornay’s guards, pursuing him up the stairway, flew in with Wallace like leaves blown through the open door. The guards were close behind, but Wallace seemed not to heed them. He looked at Mornay sitting straight up with the covers pulled up against his chest.

Wallace drew the broadsword from the scabbard at his back. Mornay never moved or spoke. His eyelids did not twitch, his eyes seemed not to see. Wallace’s sword cut through his neck in one stroke.

For a moment the guards at the door froze as Mornay had. But here was no retreat for them, as other guards, the castle’s entire garrison, was flowing up the stairs behind them in pursuit of the intruder. They gathered in the corridor just outside the bedroom door. They had William Wallace trapped! That he had ridden over the sentries in the courtyard, up he stairs—it was shocking, it had taken them all by surprise. But now he could go nowhere, could not maneuver within this room they had him! A single coordinate rush and they could finish him. The king’s reward would be theirs!

Wallace snatched a pelt from the bed, threw it over the horse’s eyes, and kicked the animal’s flanks. The horse jumped forward, blind and crashed through the shutters and out the window.

Horse and rider plunged down, down. Past the sheer walls of the castle, past its natural stone foundation, and into the loch.

High above its surface, Mornay’s guards and the castle servants clustered at the windows and looked in awe. They could scarcely believe the feat; as they watched the water returning to its rest, they found themselves praying in silence that he would live through the fall; surely he could not! And yet he had made the jump so quickly, as if he’d planned it all along. He must have planned to die, for the water remained quiet.

But there he was! Wallace and the horse surfaced. They swam to the shore of he loch.

The guards and servants of Mornay’s castle were cheering from the battlements as Wallace reached the shore, drew his horse to his feet, jumped upon his back, and rode away.

55

MORNAY DEAD BY THE HAND OR WALLACE!
THE NEWS OF it burned through the Scottish countryside. So fast did word travel that by the time Craig heard it, traveled to Mornay’s castle and then on to Bruce’s, in every village he passed, he heard drunken chanting: “Wallace! Wal—lace! Wal—lace!”

Craig found the young Bruce walking the battlements of his own castle. Hearing the same chant, coming up to him from the tavern of the village at the base of the castle hill. The Bruce snapped around the moment he saw Craig and said before Craig could greet him, “Is it true about Mornay?”

Craig nodded, his face drawn and tight. “I had to go see for myself. The tales about Wallace, they’re so fantastical-he’s here, he’s there, he materializes out of darkness, he rides horses up castle towers—no one could believe such stories! But ….this one is no rumor. It must have Wallace himself. He rode up the stairway—and not up the outside of the tower wall as some of the wags suggest! But Mornay is dead, cut down with one stroke.”

Craig handed him the blood-stained nightshirt Mornay had worn. The Bruce took it with eager hands, and Craig was surprised to observe that he seemed to admire rather than to fear Wallace’s apparent return.

“
And he rode through the wind? My God!” Bruce said. Looking up and noticing the disturbance on Craig’s face, Bruce turned away and stepped to the wall overlooking the village, from which the cries of
Wal-lace
!
Wal-lace!
Still rang up to them. “Don’t you see?” Robert said. “Those people down there, chanting his name, they take him as a hero. And a hero he is. But he’s not magic. He’s real. Don’t you see? He’s real!”

Craig most emphatically did not see. What could be young Bruce’s point? What could he possibly see in Wallace that filled him with excitement rather than dread? It was almost as if, in Wallace, young Bruce had found something – and in discovering it in Wallace had discovered it also in himself! But what was it? Craig was baffled, even angry at Bruce, who seemed drunk, frivolous, insane!

Tying to explain, as if he knew Craig’s thoughts, Bruce said, “He planned what he did! Think about it! He didn’t ride into Mornay’s castle like a madman, with no-well, yes, I mean he did ride in like a madman, like a man possessed of demons, which he is but--he has his angels, too!” Bruce’s words were tumbling, trying to keep up with his thoughts, but both were coming too fast. “What I mean – what I mean is – he has his passion and his pain, he lives with it all, he uses it all, he is willing to give up his life, and that is why he would think of an action that the rest of us could never imagine. We think first of our own preservation. He plans for his preservation, but that is not his goal.”

“
I don’t – I have no idea what you are trying to say.”

“
He rode out the window. Forced the horse through. Must have blinded it some way, yes?”

Craig nodded, surprised at Bruce’s perception.

“
Yes. The guards said he threw a pelf from the bed over the horse’s eyes to trick the animal in doing something so insane.”

“
But it was not insane! It was the sanest thing he could do! By calling him insane, you deny his courage – a madman is without fear and thus without bravery. But Wallace! He rode into Mornay’s castle, right through the spears of his guard’s, into Mornay’s bedchamber, and took his life and rode out the window as he had planned to do before he ever rode into the castle!” Bruce had turned to Craig and now grabbed his shoulder. “He is a man – like you and me. If we say he is not, that is he is more or less, than we – then we are saying we can never be like him. But we can be. We must be.”

Robert the Bruce turned back to the battlement. Craig stared at him for a long time, as the wind blew chilly against their faces and carried the sound of Wallace’s name up from the village. He had grown bored with young Bruce’s raptures. There were facts to be dealt with, and old Craig wanted those made clear. “So the sum of it all, “Craig said, “is that you believe Mornay’s killer was definitely Wallace, and –

Robert laughed. “Of
course
it was William Wallace! Who else could it have been?”

“—
and that this was not an act of wild irrationality but a carefully planned and executed act or reprisal.”

“
Yes, yes, yes ….,” Bruce said as if the whole conversation had become tedious to him.

“
Then …,” Craig persisted, “if he came for Mornay that way ---“

“
You understand me at last,” Bruce said in a tired, dry voice. “He’s coming to fro everybody. You. Me. All of us. He’ll kill us all. Exactly as he should.”