The Forest Laird (54 page)

He grinned. “Aye, but to Edward, there’s no difference. What will I do? I’ll fight him to my last breath. My lands in Moray and elsewhere are vast, and largely empty, with ample space for fighting. If Edward of England wants to seize them, he will have to come and do so in person, and I will not be standing idly by, watching him from some far mountaintop. So I am heading home, as quickly as I can, and once I’m there I intend to raise the men of Moray and stir up Hell itself against these arrogant English overlords, as they like to call themselves. I intend to teach them that Scotland is ours, that they have no place in it, and that they never have had legitimate claim to any part of it. Who do they think they are, these strutting bantam cocks? And who does this benighted king of theirs believe gave him the right to come up here and impose his will upon free folk who have no need of his interference, no desire to suffer his attentions, and no intention of lying down and allowing him and his thieving, ignorant bullies to trample them and their rights? I swear to you, Jamie, by the living God, that if no other man in Scotland will stand up against this aging, braggart crusader from a bygone day, I, Andrew Murray, will defy him alone and die, if I must, with my spittle soaking his grizzled beard—” He broke off and laughed. “Do I sound overeager? You did ask me! First, though, before I tackle any of that, I have to talk to Will Wallace. The Bishop tells me you can take me to him.”

“Aye, I can. But why do you need to talk to him?”

“Can you not guess, Father James? I need to conscript him to my cause, to help me drive these English oafs out of my country.”

“But he cannot.” It came out as a blurt, and it earned me a disconcerting look from his level blue eyes.

“He cannot?”

I flapped my hands, feeling foolish. “He cannot. He has sworn an oath not to become involved in the fighting—”

“Until Scotland produces a leader he can trust and follow. Yes, yes, Bishop Wishart did tell me.” He grinned, and the sight of his flashing white teeth almost made me feel better about what I instinctively knew he was going to say next. “Well, that has been taken care of, because Scotland now has a leader whom I will swear William Wallace can trust, a leader born on the battlefield at Dunbar, this year, and raised to maturity these past few months in England’s prisons. Andrew Murray of Petty, Lord of Avoch and Moray and commander of at least five thousand fighting men, every one of them dedicated to watching the arse of the last Englishman in Scotland vanish back over the border into England. Let us drink to that, Father James.” He raised his cup and emptied it at a gulp, then set it down and smiled at me again. “Now, when can we leave for Selkirk?”

3

I
was sitting back in comfort in Will and Mirren’s hut, marvelling at the astonishing relationship that existed between the two men I admired most in the world. It had always been thus, ever since the three of us had met as boys in Paisley.

That evening, though, listening to the easy banter the two of them traded, I was unusually aware of Mirren, knowing without ever looking at her that she was watching me closely, with that secretive, inscrutable half smile that I imagined on her lips every time I thought of her when she was not around. Now, as Will and Andrew waxed enthusiastic about something, some element of training or of fighting that was less than interesting to me, she rose quietly and made her way to the small stone sink Will had installed next to a built-in cooking stove close to the window. Moved by some prompting that I did not even pause to think about, I followed her, and she cocked her head to look at me as I approached.

“What?” she asked. “You look as though you have a question to ask me.”

She was correct, but suddenly I felt awkward, almost abashed by her perceptiveness, and instead of saying what I had intended to say, I shrugged. “You like him, don’t you?” I asked, adding, needlessly, “Andrew.”

She smiled and began to stack the platters from which we had eaten earlier. “Of course I like him. Why should I not?”

I shrugged again. “You didn’t like me when first we met. What is so different about him?”

She looked at me and laughed quietly, and my breast filled up with the familiar, comfortable warmth of the respect and esteem that I had always had for her. “Jamie Wallace,” she said teasingly, and I heard the fondness in her voice. “If I didna ken ye were a priest, I’d think ye were jealous o’ the man. But why should I no’ like him? My goodman loves him like a brother … and you do, too, forbye. With two such as you on his side, how could I be foolish enough to dislike him?” She tilted her head to one side, looking at me with sudden seriousness through narrowed eyes. “What’s wrong, Jamie? Ye have a strange look about you.”

I shook my head again, but she was not about to be dismissed that easily. She stepped closer to me and lowered her voice. “Tell me.”

I squirmed, and she reached out and plucked at my bearded chin, jerking it up so that I had to meet her eye. “Tell me,” she said again.

“I think he’s here to take Will to war,” I said.

“No. He’s here to
try
to tak’ Will to war. I have nae doubt o’ that, but he’ll ha’e nae joy there. Will winna go. He tell’t me that again last night, just afore you two arrived. He’ll play the general, he says, but he’ll no’ fight himsel’. He swore.”

I found myself unable to look her in the eye, for Andrew Murray had been right: Will had said he would follow a worthwhile leader if Scotland could produce one. I turned and moved away to join the other two again, leaving her to her household tasks.

From then on I sat and listened closely as Will Wallace and Andrew Murray drew up their dreams and schemes for Scotland’s future. Will’s championship of nameless, faceless folk did not surprise me at all, for he had lived his life among them and was deeply solicitous of their welfare. That he came of a knightly family was true, but he himself had had no training in the ways of chivalry and he had never considered any possibility of being raised to knighthood someday. I found it amazing, though, that Andrew Murray should be voicing such ideas, let alone championing them so enthusiastically, for his makeup contained nothing that anyone could describe as common stock. Nevertheless, he appeared to accept, willingly, that aligning himself at the head of his fellow Scots, in defence of their common interests, must entail the forfeiture of his vast English holdings and the revenues that flowed from them, and he dismissed the loss as insignificant.

He stayed with us for three days, and I spent every moment I could find listening to their conversations. I was fascinated by the way their minds worked in concert. Every idea advanced by one or the other of them—and they appeared to feed off each other voraciously—generated a cascade of others, the way a smith’s hammer scatters sparks from a glowing iron bar. I listened admiringly as they discussed strategy and tactics in grand, sweeping terms, comparing possibilities of attack and manoeuvre in order to wring every advantage possible from the land itself in fighting and beating the English forces whose own disciplined formations might be—and would be, had these two anything to do with it—hampered and disadvantaged on mountainous or boggy Scots terrain.

I listened open mouthed as my cousin expounded on current political and philosophical theories that I had not even known he knew about and with which I would never have guessed he might be familiar; yet there he was, stating strongly held and obviously long considered opinions on free will and the morality of restitution and atonement, citing Edward of England’s lack of contrition for his deliberate intent to usurp the throne of Scotland after undermining and destroying its rightful occupant. I sat awestruck as he demonstrated, using flawless logic, that the King of England’s behaviour was unconscionable and indefensible and that he was therefore morally unfit to function as a truly Christian king. I knew whence those ideas had come, for I had often heard them voiced by William Lamberton, who had absorbed them in his turn from John Duns during his visits with the scholar in Paris, but I had never suspected that Lamberton and Will had been spending the amount of time together that Will’s grasp of his subject indicated.

Then, late one night, I listened to the two of them debate the propriety of the hit-and-run battle techniques advocated by Murray as opposed to the “honourable” and time-honoured system of chivalric warfare championed by Will. That confrontation, mild though it was, provided me with further cause to shake my head over the incongruities and contradictions of their alliance. Andrew, born to the nobility and to the strictures and traditions of chivalry and the feudal ways, and trained for years in the customs and the lore of the chivalric code, should have been the champion of the status quo in warfare, calling for things to be done as they had always been done and looking for ways to bring the Scots forces as close as might be feasible to parity with the English. Instead, he declared that to be impossible and committed himself to the idea of training his fighting men to use every possible advantage they could find in the terrain and the topography of the countryside to outwit, outmanoeuvre, and ultimately outfight and destroy the armies brought against them. He refused even to pay lip service to the old, “honourable” style of warfare, calling it suicidal and immoral. A man forced to fight, he said, should fight as though his life depended upon winning, because it did. Winning, he said—victory and survival—was the only measure of success in war. Everything else was failure since, even if it did not result in death, it involved defeat and the loss of liberty, which he maintained was worse than death.

My cousin, on the other hand, argued strongly in favour of formal battle between ranked armies as the most legitimate and generally accepted means of resolving conflict. He ignored Murray’s immediate heaping of scorn on that notion, holding his peace as the other denounced the rampant folly of sending hundreds or even thousands of poorly trained and equipped men to die needlessly against superior formations when far more success could be achieved, at far less cost, by using much more versatile methods of isolating, stranding, and then defeating depleted enemy battalions. When his opponent fell silent, Will merely nodded and acknowledged that the other might be right, in fact, but from the viewpoint of political reality, he believed that was ultimately unimportant. His primary concern lay, he maintained, with legitimacy and the appearance of propriety. I blinked when I heard that, and for the first time in many hours of discussion I interjected.

“Are you serious, Will?
The appearance of propriety?
What bearing does that have on throwing the English out of Scotland? Forgive me, but that strikes me as being the most mindless thing I have heard.”

I thought he was going to give me the rough edge of his tongue, but then he twitched his shoulders in the beginnings of a shrug. “Mindless,” he said. “You think speaking of propriety is mindless? No, Jamie. Let me tell you what mindlessness is about. Mindlessness is the ability to accept things without thought simply because they are familiar. Mindlessness is the condition of going through life without ever questioning the right or wrong of general custom. It is seeing things that frequently are wrong in the moral sense and ignoring the wrongness purely because it has become so familiar that we are no longer aware of it—or because, were we to notice it and pay attention, we would be forced to do something to change it. That is mindlessness, Cousin.” He sucked at something caught in his teeth.

“And then there is another kind of mindlessness,” he continued, “comparable perhaps, but different. The mindlessness of seeing something happen and being able to deny that it is happening—and not only that, but going ahead then and basing a set of expectations on that denial of what you actually saw.” He nodded in the direction of Andrew. “If our friend here will forgive me, I will point out to you that the group to which he belongs subscribes to that. A knight is not required to be literate or educated, except in the ways of war. The knightly code requires only adherence to the laws of chivalry. It makes no demands otherwise. It ignores logic, by and large, and it expects no moral judgments. And yet judgments are made all the time, based on the expectations it engenders, irrespective of logic. Do you have any idea what I am talking about?”

I shook my head, and he shook his in return, his mouth twisting downwards. “Aye. Well … What I am saying is that every ignorant, thick-skulled, witless bully capable of carrying a sword or swinging a club, be he knight, pikeman, or man-at-arms, will condemn us as brigands and barbarians for not fighting in accordance with their rules of combat.” He saw my lips quirk. “Don’t laugh! There is nothing even mildly amusing in what I am saying.” He paused, looking from Andrew to me and back to Andrew. “No matter how hard we fight in this struggle, no matter how many men we mobilize against them, no matter how long we fight against them or how many of them we kill, these people will afford us no legitimacy until we meet them face to face on the field of battle and defeat them according to the rules of chivalry.”

“Thereby committing suicide,” Andrew added. “That is obscene, Will. We’ve been over this before. No army that Scotland can field would be equipped to defeat the English host in battle. We might as well lay down our weapons and surrender ourselves to them right now.”

And so the argument began again.

There is no defining military word for what Will was, or for what his methods were. In those days when he and Andrew Murray first took up the sword against the English, there was only one accepted way of waging war, and that was the way of chivalry, the way wars had been fought between Christian armies for hundreds of years. There were conventions to be observed therein and rules to be followed, and a battle—any battle—was as likely to be decided by negotiation and bargaining between leaders as it was by physical combat. All of which appeared highly civilized and carefully structured to avoid unnecessary killing, until the observer took note that the only people who ever benefited from these negotiations were the leaders from each side. The remainder of the people involved, probably ninety-nine out of every hundred people in the field, were unimportant and insignificant. There at the behest of their leaders and under pain of forfeiture and punishment should they refuse, they were expected to die happily should their leaders not be able to arrive at a satisfactory settlement of their troubles.