The Forest Laird (2 page)

PROLOGUE

I
t pains me to hear people say nowadays that William Wallace died defiant, a heroic patriot, with a shout of “Freedom!” on his lips, because it is a lie. William Wallace died slowly and brutally in silence, to my sure knowledge, for I was there in London’s Smithfield Square that morning of August 24th in 1305, and all I heard of defiance was the final, demented scream of a broken, tortured man driven beyond endurance long before he died.

I was the last of our race to see him alive and to speak with him, the sole Scot among the crowd that watched his end and the only one there to mark and mourn his passing. I did not really see him die, though, because my eyes were screwed shut against the tears that blinded me. When I was able to breathe again and wiped my eyes to look, they were already quartering his corpse, the chief executioner proclaiming his death and holding aloft the severed head of the Scotch Ogre who had terrified all England.

Sir William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland, my friend, my blood cousin, and my lifelong nemesis, would never terrify another soul.

But, by the living God, he had terrified enough within his lifetime for his name to live on, in Scotland at least, long after his death, a grim reminder of the punishment for disloyalty, treachery, and disobedience.

As I watched the executioners dismember his remains, I accepted the reality of his death as I had accepted its inevitability two weeks earlier, when word reached me that he had been taken by Sir John Menteith and handed over to the justice of the English King. I had known that was coming—not that Menteith would arrest him, but that someone would, and soon, for William Wallace’s time had passed and he had fallen from grace in the eyes of the people he had led and inspired just a few years earlier. He had become an embarrassment; a source of discomfort to all of them; a thorny, disapproving, uncompromising reminder of all that they had fought for and then abandoned. For they had come to terms, nobles, clerics, and commoners, with England’s Edward Plantagenet, and the English King was being regally lenient, exercising forbearance towards all Scots rebels who would join his Peace, save only the outlawed traitor, Wallace. The price of that forbearance was the surrender of the brigand Wallace to Edward’s justice. Every noble, sheriff, and justiciar in the realm of Scotland was charged with the duty of apprehending the former Guardian on sight and dispatching him to London as a common criminal.

I was in England when I heard the news, bearing documents from my superior, Walter the Abbot of Paisley, to the Bishop of York and the Bishop of London. I had stopped to rest at the Priory of Reading, and there found the sole topic of conversation among the brethren to be the recent capture of Wallace. Everyone knew he would be tried summarily and executed out of hand, but the manner of his death was a matter for debate and conjecture among the jaded monks, who seldom had open cause to speculate upon such worldly things. I listened to their prattling, and thought about how different was the man I knew from the monster they were all decrying.

I resolved then and there to see him, somehow, while I was in London. I had powerful friends there among the clergy, and I promised myself that I would use them to find him wherever he was being held and, if it were possible, to visit him and offer whatever small comfort I could in his final, friendless hours among an alien people who loathed and feared him.

In the event, I had no trouble finding where he was imprisoned, for the whole city of London was agog with the news, and with the help of a trusted friend, Father Antony Latreque, Sub-abbot of Westminster, I was admitted to the prisoner’s cell on his last night, to hear his last confession.

The tears I would later shed in Smithfield Square, blinding me to his final moments, would have nothing to do with the barbarity that I was witnessing that bright, late-August morning. They would surge instead from a sudden memory of Wallace’s own tears earlier, long before dawn and before they came to lead him out to death. The sight of those tears had shaken me, for I had never seen Will Wallace weep since the day our childhood ended, and the anguish in his eyes there in his darkened cell had been as keen and unbearable as the pain he and I had endured together on that long-ago, far-off day.

He did not recognize me when I entered, for it had been four full years since he and I had last seen each other. He saw only a cowled priest accompanying a portly, mitred Abbot. The jailer had seen the same thing, ignoring the priest while he whined to the Abbot about his orders to permit the prisoner no visitors.

“We are not
visitors
,” Abbot Antony replied disdainfully. “We are of Holy Mother Church and our presence marks a last attempt to make this felon repent the error of his ways and confess himself before God. Now provide us with some light and open up this door.”

The fellow slouched away to bring each of us a freshly lit torch, then unlocked the heavy door, set his shoulder to it, and pushed it open. My first glance showed me a broad, flagstoned floor, dimly lit by one flickering flambeau in an iron sconce on the left wall. I saw no sign of the prisoner, but he spoke before we had crossed the threshold, his words accompanied by a single brief clash of chains.

“I need none of your English mouthings, Priest, so get you gone and take your acolyte with you.” He spoke in Latin, and the Abbot turned to me, brows raised in surprise. I merely gestured with a cupped hand, bidding him continue as we had rehearsed. The Latin was no surprise to me, although I had not thought to speak of it to my companion earlier. Wallace and I had learned the tongue together as students at the same Paisley Abbey that was now my home.

Abbot Antony spoke to the prisoner as we had agreed, but now in Latin.

“I have heard of your hatred for all things English, William Wallace, but although I deplore both that and your wilful intransigence, I find myself constrained, through simple Christian charity, to offer you the benefit of God’s sacraments in the hope that, in the end, His clemency will absolve you of your many sins.”

“Seek your own people, then, Priest, beginning with your King, and absolve them, for their sins are greater than mine have ever been.” The voice was flinty with scorn. “Shrive you the slaughterers who slew my family and friends. Pray with the drunken animals who raped me and savaged my people. Mumble a Mass with your grasping earls and barons, who despoiled my home and sought to rip it asunder to sate their own lusts for land and power. But leave me to my God. He knows my sins and what drove me to commit them. I need no English translator to poison my words before they reach God’s ears.”

They were not the exact words I had expected, but I had estimated precisely the tone and content. Abbot Antony was mortified, and it showed clearly on his face. To hear such venom in a single voice, directed not merely at him but at his entire Church and his people, left the poor man speechless, but not addled. I had warned him that he might hear appalling things when he confronted this prisoner, and so he pulled himself together quickly and returned to the script we had prepared against the risk that others might hear us.

“I had heard,” Antony said, “that you were obdurate in your hatred of my kind, but it is my Christian obligation as a man of God to do all in my power to help you towards salvation. And so …” He hesitated. “And so I have taken pains to bring you an intermediary, twixt you and God, to whom you may speak in your own tongue. Father James is of your folk. I will leave him to commune with you and hear your confession.”

Now the prisoner turned his eyes towards me for the first time, and though he was merely a shape stirring among blackness, I could tell that he was squinting to see me better.

“What is a Scots priest doing here?”

“His duty,” Antony answered, “comforting the afflicted. Will you speak with him? If so, I will leave the two of you alone.”

Wallace shrugged, the movement easily visible now that my eyes were adjusting to the darkness. “I’ll talk with him, if only to hear my own tongue. Who are you, Priest? Where are you from?”

“Thank you, Father Abbott,” I said quietly, and Antony turned away towards the still-open door. I heard him speak to the jailer outside, and then the man hauled at the massive door until it scraped shut, leaving me alone with the prisoner. “Where am I from? I am from Paisley, from the Abbey. Do you not know me, Will?”

The shadowy figure straightened up as though he had been struck. “
Jamie?
Jamie Wallace? What in God’s name are you doing here? Your very name could hoist you to the gallows alongside me.”

I pushed my cowl back off my head and let him see my smile. “Plain Father James? I doubt that, Will. The Wallace part of me is unknown here in England.”

“Then pray you to God it stays that way. This is madness, Jamie. But, man, it’s good to see your face.”

“And to see yours, Cousin, though God Himself knows I had never thought to see you in such straits.” I stepped forward to embrace him, but as the light from my torch fell upon him I stopped short. “What kind of barbarism is this?”

He grinned at me and drew himself up to his full, imposing height. “D’ye no’ ken,” he said in our own tongue, “I’m a dangerous chiel? They ca’ me the Scotch Ogre and they a’ believe I eat bairns whene’er I get the chance.”

His hair and beard were matted and unshorn, and he wore only a ragged shirt, one arm of which had been torn from his shoulder, exposing the massive knots of corded muscle there, but I paid little attention to those things. I was staring at the harness that bound him.

“Can you sit?”

His grin widened, but there was no humour in his eyes. “Sit? Sit on what? It takes me a’ my time to stand wi’out cowpin’ sideways. I ha’e to stand spread-legged and lean my back against the wa’, else I’ll fa’, and these chains winna even let me dae that.”

The chains that bound him, wrists and ankles, were thick and heavy, the manacles tautly fastened to a thick leather belt that circled his waist. The girdle was fastened right and left to short lengths of chain that were secured to a heavy iron ring mounted on the wall at his back. He could not fall, nor could he turn. All he could do was stand upright or allow his weight to sag into the harness around his waist, but there would be no comfort there, either, for now I saw that the chains from the belt were of different lengths, ensuring that he could only hang tilted to one side.

“How long have you been held like that?”

“Three days.” He spoke still in Scots. “Ye’ll pardon the stink, I hope, for they havena let me loose since they strapped me in here.” He was unbelievably filthy, and at his mention of it the appalling stench of him hit me like a blow. I lowered my torch, looking down at his befouled legs beneath the tattered shirt he wore. They were crusted with feces, and the ground at his feet was a stinking puddle.

“Sweet Jesus,” I said, my senses reeling. “Who is responsible for this? This is …” I stopped, unable to find words.

“This is Edward’s vengeance, or the start o’ it, for a’ the grief I’ve caused him these past years. Tomorrow—no, today, he’ll make an end o’ it. But ere he’s done, I think I’ll be yearnin’ for the comfort o’ just standin’ here, danglin’ frae my chains. D’ye ken, he wouldna even come to look at me, Jamie? Ye’d think he’d want to look at least, would ye no’? To gloat a wee bit, wag a finger at me. But no. He left it a’ to his judges …”

I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out.

“It’ll be a fine day, the jailers tell me. A grand summer’s day to die on. But this London’s a dirty, smelly place, Jamie, a sad and dirty place to die. I’d gi’e anything to hear the birds singin’ to welcome the dawn in the Tor Wood one last time.” He snorted. “But I
hae
nothin’ now to gi’e, and we’re a long way frae Ettrick Forest.”

And at that moment, a miracle occurred.

Somewhere beyond the high, barred window above our heads, a bird began to sing, and the clarity and volume of the sound stunned both of us into silence. The song was liquid, brilliant in its welling beauty, the notes rising and falling with limpid perfection so that it seemed the creature producing them was here in the cell with us instead of outside in the pitch-blackness of the night. I watched Wallace’s eyes widen and fill with a kind of superstitious fear.

“Mother of God,” he whispered. “What kind o’ sorcery is this? It lacks three full hours till dawn. What kind of creature makes such a sound in the blackness of the night?”

“It’s only a bird, Will, nothing more. They call it a nightingale, because it sings at night. I think there are none in all Scotland, though I may be wrong. I’ve certainly never heard one there, and it’s not the sort of thing you could easily forget. Is it not wonderful?”

He listened, and I could see the tension drain from him. Eventually he allowed his weight to settle slightly into his restraints. “Aye,” he murmured. “It is that, a thing o’ wonder.”

I have no idea how long we stood there listening to it before the silence of the night returned.

“He’s gone. Will he come back, think ye?”

“Your guess would be as good as mine. But he answered your wish. That was like a miracle.”

“Aye …” He stood gazing into nothingness. “D’ye remember that day in Dalfinnon Woods, Jamie, before they caught us? Remember we hid from them, amang the brambles on our hands and knees? It was so quiet and we listened so hard for the sounds o’ them comin’ and then the only thing we could hear was a lintie singin’ in a tree above our heids? God, yon bird could sing. Like a lintie, they say—he could sing like a lintie. But unless you kent what a lintie sounded like, you’d never be able to tell if that was true or no’. It was wee Jenny who tell’t me that day that the bird was a lintie, for I didna ken. How was I to know? Poor wee Jenny …” He squeezed his eyes shut and flicked his head.

“Seven, she was, and yon big English whoreson killed her wi’ a flick o’ his wrist. Didna even look at what he’d done, didna even turn his heid to see. Just cut her wee, thin neck the way ye would a stoat. Jesus, Jamie, I saw that in my dreams for years, her head rollin’ and bouncin’ like a bairn’s ba’ kicked into the bushes, its mouth open and its eyes wide, as if she was wonderin’ what had happened. What they did to you and me afterwards was cause enough to hate them a’ and want to see them deid, but poor wee Jenny …”