The Forest Laird (34 page)

“Was that you?” I asked him, a little breathlessly.

“Was what me?”

“The knight … Did you shoot him?”

“Aye. Can I ask ye somethin’?”

I was staring at the fallen knight, and I assumed that the fellow wanted to ask me something about him. “Of course,” I said, asking myself already what I could possibly know about the slain man. “Ask.”

He fixed me with an intense, furtive look. “I’ve been hearin’ folk talk, about what we’re to do. Sounds to me as though we’ll be killin’ priests afore this day’s oot, and I don’t know if I like that.”

I felt my jaw fall in shock. “Killing
priests
? In God’s holy name, Geordie, how can you even think such a thing? Of course we won’t be killing priests. The very thought is an abomination.”

The archer jinked—there really was no other word to describe it—his chin twitching down towards his right shoulder, which jerked forward to meet it as though in sympathy. “Aye, maybe so, right or no’,” he added. “But that’s what folk are sayin’. We’re goin’ to be killin’ priests this very day. I ken they’re there, too, the priests. I saw them mysel’, last night, frae up on the cliffs, aboon their camp. There was half a hunnerd o’ them.” He nodded emphatically. “Aye, easy,” he added. “Frae a’ the noise they were makin’, a’ the singin’ an’ chantin’, easy half a hunnerd.”

I forced myself to smile at him with a serenity I suddenly did not feel, and highly aware that others, including Mirren and her two women, were listening to our exchange.

“No, Geordie,” I told him, waving a hand dismissively and trying hard to keep my voice sounding relaxed and confident. “There’s nowhere near as many. There might be half a hundred men in that whole train, give or take a handful, but few of them are priests. We counted them last night, from the top of the same cliff. There are twenty-eight clerics in all. Two of them are bishops, six are priests, and the remaining score are Cistercian monks. And on top of that, there are these ten scouts, five on each side of the road, and this knight who was in charge of them, and perhaps half or threequarters of a score of servants.”

He cocked his head like a bird, one eye glittering as it caught the light and adding subtly to the birdlike resemblance. “Cistercian monks, ye say?” His voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “Are they no’ French, tha’e Cistercians? Aye, they are …What are French monks doin’ ower here?”

This Geordie was a curious soul, and simple, and I glanced down at Mirren, who was looking back up at me. She rolled her eyes as though to let me know I would receive no help from her.

“Geordie, I can’t tell you that. You know more about them than I do, so shush you now and let me go. I have to see to the knight there.”

I was less than ten paces distant from the fallen rider, and no one moved to join me as I walked over and stood looking down at him. I suppose there must have been some thought in my head of baring his face and identifying the man, for I was still convinced I had seen him somewhere before, but long before I reached him I knew I would do no such thing. He was unmistakably dead, reeking with the stench of voided bowels, and his face would remain unseen. The arrow that had killed him, travelling with incomprehensible speed and force, had hammered diagonally up through the front of his war helm and lodged inside, twisting the visor violently out of true and jamming it shut, and blood and grey matter from the shattered skull within had filled the helm and now oozed, thick and obscene, through the openings in the metal.

My stomach lurched and I snatched my gaze away, trying to empty my mind and resisting the urge to vomit, and as I did so my eyes fell on the man the knight had killed. The difference was startling, and somehow pitiful. The knight appeared largely unbloodied. The man he had killed, though, had been unarmoured, and the knight’s broad-bladed sword had split him wide open, carving him like a slaughtered deer and sending his lifeblood flying in all directions to stain the grass and the bushes for yards around the spot where he had fallen. I crossed to where he lay, holding the skirts of my robe high to avoid staining them with his blood, then bent forward slightly so I could see his face. He was a stranger to me, heavily bearded and poorly dressed in a tunic-like garment of rough homespun wool, and I could see no weapon anywhere near him. I wondered what had possessed him to attack a heavily armed and armoured mounted knight, alone as he was, on foot and unarmed, for I remembered seeing him springing high towards the falling sword.

I found myself suddenly seething with outrage. Will had sent me away from the coming day’s activities, with the women, in order to protect my feelings, because he knew I was uncomfortable with anything that smacked of defiance of Holy Mother Church. Now, though, with this single instance of mindless violence and unnecessary slaughter, a new understanding of what was happening everywhere in my country crashed down upon me. I saw that what I had been objecting to—what Will had tried to protect me from—was nothing less than an atrocity, an atrocity carried out against my fellow countrymen by a cynical foreign king using the Church’s name and privilege to abet a damnable war of aggression.

Bishops and senior clerics, indeed all clerics, by general consent, had no need to fear travelling alone, for no one in his right mind would ever dream of robbing a priest. But the two English Bishops whose presence here today had demanded our attention were engaged in activities that set them apart from their peers, and priestly innocence played no role in what they were about. They had a screen of killers thrown out ahead of them, purely to ensure that no profane eyes would gaze upon whatever it was that they were transporting. And I had been puling and fretting like a callow, unformed boy because I was afraid that Will was doing something that might draw down the displeasure of the Church upon my head. I stood there for some time, feeling my flesh crawl with the sickness of self-loathing and thinking about what that voluntary and wilful blindness said about me, and then I swung around and strode back to where Mirren, alone, stood watching me.

“What happened to you?” she asked as I reached her. “Did you know that man?”

“No. Scales from my eyes,” I answered, not caring whether she understood me or not.

“Aye? So where are you goin’ now? It’s plain to see you’re goin’ somewhere.”

I looked at her, and then beyond her to where one of our party held the reins of her horse and my own. “I’m going back to Will. You’ll be fine without me … Better off, in fact, for we both know how feckless I’d be in a fight.”

Her eyes had narrowed and she looked at me now with a completely different expression than the slightly scornful one that she habitually reserved for me. “And what will you do when you find Will? He’ll have no need of a priest under his feet, Jamie. D’ye not know that’s why he sent you away in the first place?”

“Aye, I do. And I’ll stay out of his way. But first I’ll give him the absolution I’ve been withholding.”

Her frown was quick. “Absolution for what?”

“For what he’s about to do. It needs to be done and he’s the one to do it, but it’s taken me until now to see that. Now I need to give him my support and my blessing.”

“D’ye think he needs those?”

“I don’t care, Mirren, and I didn’t say
he
needs anything.
I
need to give them to him, freely. I’ve been wrong. Stubborn and stupid and short-sighted.” I pointed with my thumb to the blood-drenched corpse on the grass behind me. “I see it now, my eyes washed clean by the blood of the sacrificial lamb there.”

“That sounds blasphemous,” she said more quietly.

“What’s happening in this land is blasphemous, and my Church has been perverted to make it possible. I’ve only now come to see that. So now I’m going to try to help change things.”

She nodded, a single dip of her head. “Aye, well, ye’d better hurry, or it’ll all be done when you get there. Away wi’ ye, and tell my man he’s in my mind and heart. Run now.”

2

L
ess than half an hour later, I walked out of the woods into full daylight again, leading my horse, and allowed my gaze to slide across the scene in front of me, marvelling at the rich brightness of it. The uneven surface of the rocky escarpment beneath my feet was sparsely carpeted with short, springy, startlingly green grass and striped in places by slanted, inch-high ridges of silvery-white, flaky stone. The sky was blindingly blue and cloudless. The sun had been climbing it now for nigh on two hours, yet in the valley below, the fog was still thick and solid. Directly ahead of me, seemingly just a short leap down from where I stood, a thick, flat blanket of greyish white stretched away from me. It had appeared solid mere moments earlier, but as I looked at it now I could see the topmost, budding twigs of the trees beneath it showing through, the mist that had concealed them eddying gently and dissipating in the tiny breeze. Across from me, half a mile to the south, a twin bluff loomed straight up from the fog-shrouded trees at its feet. Beyond that, stretching away like a string of green and silver beads, other hilltops sparkled in the strengthening sunlight.

“Fog doesn’t often stay this long,” a voice said beside me, and I turned and nodded to Will, who had been standing with three of his people, gazing down into the carpet of mist when I arrived. “But the wind’s coming up now, so it’ll all be gone soon.” He turned his head slightly to look me in the eye. “What brings you back here, and where’s Mirren?”

“She’s with Shoomy and the others. She’s fine. They’ve cleared away the scouts along the road, so you don’t need to worry about being taken from behind.”

“That’s good, but you didn’t answer my other question. What brings you back here?”

“Conviction, but not in the way you’re probably thinking. I’m here to tell you I’m sorry for the way I’ve been … stubborn and stiffnecked and arrogant.”

“Arrogant?” The expression on my cousin’s face was almost but not quite a smile, for there was uncertainty in his gaze, too. “Am I hearing aright? A priest, admitting to arrogance?”

I ignored the jibe and merely nodded. “An epiphany is what you’re seeing. I’ve had a change of heart in the past hour. I watched a man die and I saw the pity and the sickness of it all. And with that, I came to see that I have been wrong. Ever since he first told me about this, about what was in his mind and what he intended to ask you to do, I’ve been angry and afraid of my own Bishop’s motives and I’ve been questioning what I saw as his mutiny against the Church. But now I can see he’s right—has been right all along. This trickery that’s afoot is sinful, betraying the Church’s trust for the benefit of a mere man, no matter that he be a king.”

Will looked at me wryly. “So? What are you telling me?”

“That I am here to stand with you, as a representative of God’s Holy Church, on behalf of men of goodwill everywhere.”

Will stared at me for some time, his face unreadable, and then he turned away to look down into the valley at our feet. “And these men of goodwill, think you there are such creatures in England, Jamie, when the talk turns to Scotland?”

“Aye, Will. I do.”

“Right,” he said then, nodding. “Look, it’s clearing quickly down there. Look at it blow!”

Sure enough, the remaining fog was vanishing even as we looked, whipped to tatters and blown into nothingness by a strong breeze we could not feel, and as it cleared we saw the activity below us where the group we were waiting for had made camp late the previous afternoon. This party of churchmen was making a leisurely progress of the journey northward, its members secure in their safety as clerics in the service of God. They had crossed the border at Berwick three days earlier, and we had received word of their arrival within hours. Since then, they had travelled less than twenty miles, beginning each day’s journey after celebrating Mass and eating a substantial breakfast. Thereafter, at a pace set by the cows they had brought with them for their breakfast milk and matched by the horses pulling the upholstered wagon in which the Bishops rode, they had made their way steadily along the broad, beaten path that served as the high road into Scotland from England, eating their midday meal while on the move, and stopping at roadside campsites, selected by their scouts, long before the afternoon shadows began to stretch towards nightfall. Then, while the priests prepared for evening services, their servitors set up an elaborate camp with spacious leather tents and ample cooking fires, and the episcopal household staff busied themselves preparing the evening meal. The soldiers of the scouting party maintained a separate camp, a short way from the main one.

Now, in the open glades between copses, we could see the horse handlers leading two large, heavy wagons into place below us, in what would be the middle of their line of march. The two Bishops in their upholstered carriage would ride in front, and behind would come the two heavily laden supply wagons. Behind those, in turn, would come the priests and acolytes, walking with the Cistercian monks.

“They’re fine,” Will muttered. “Their Graces should be on their holy way any moment now. Did you recognize them?” I shook my head, and he looked back towards the group in the distance. “Aye, there they go. And now it’s our turn. Let’s get down there.” He swung himself up onto his horse and kicked it into motion as I mounted my own and fell into place behind him, following him down a narrow, twisting goat path until we reached the road. The three men who had been talking with Will when I arrived struck out on foot, making their way down separately by a far steeper route.

It took us no more than a few minutes to reach the spot Will had chosen for what he intended to do that morning, but the path we had taken down from the escarpment was vastly different from the winding route the Bishops’ train would follow through the valley bottom. It would be half an hour before they reached us, and in the meantime, Will had some final dispositions to see to.

The place we came to, the narrow end of the funnel-shaped valley we had been overlooking, had been burned out years earlier in a summer fire and was now a long, narrow clearing extending twenty to thirty paces along each side of the road for more than a hundred yards. It contained a rolling sea of waist-high grasses and a scattering of saplings, plus, on this particular morning, an army of at least a hundred men, all of them wearing hoods or masks and carrying bows of one kind or another. A large, recently felled tree, one of only a few to have escaped the fire of years before, lay by the roadside at the northern end of the exposed road, and broken branches and debris from its collapse littered the road. Beside it, drawn up close to a makeshift saw pit, a high-sided dray blocked the narrow roadway completely. It had been there since the previous day and was half-filled with sawn logs. The two draft horses that had brought it there were cropping idly at the rank grass by the roadside, some distance from the work area.