The Guardian (23 page)

“Is there doubt that you might?”

“Enormous doubt, Jamie.”

“Enormous is more than merely large, Will,” I had said, with more than a small measure of cynicism. “What causes such great doubt, may I ask?”

“Aye, you may ask. It’s caused by the fact that I’m about to be a father. I’m to have a son, Jamie, or perhaps a daughter. I don’t care which it is, but whatever the result, it’ll be a thing I’ve never known before. It frightens me when I think about it: a wee, small person, wide-eyed and alive and hungry for knowledge, and completely dependent upon me for his or her existence.” He crossed his arms over his chest and peered at me. “For that reason alone I’ll be steering well clear of leadership in future. God willing, I intend to stay here safely in the greenwood with my
wife and child from now on, providing for them and getting more of them.”

God, though, for reasons known solely to Himself, had not been willing.

I had not set eyes upon my cousin since the deaths of his family, but I had heard much about the aftermath, and I felt my soul quail inside me. By killing Will’s loved ones, the English had removed the single impediment to William Wallace’s rising up against them, the sole consideration restraining my cousin from seeking bloody, brutal, and merciless vengeance against them and theirs. They treated him as an ordinary man, tragically unaware that no man alive at that time could have been more extraordinary, and then they treated him as a Scot, beneath their lordly notice until it came time to swat him like a fly.

My imagination shied away from thoughts of what Will’s vengeance might entail in the times ahead. I loved him deeply and admired him greatly, but I had known Will since we were children together and I had shared with him the unspeakable shame and terror of being sexually violated by the drunken English soldiers who had murdered his parents and decapitated his baby sister while he watched. Perhaps because of my vocation, I had eventually forgiven the benighted souls who had abused us, but my cousin never had. The wounds inflicted on William Wallace’s soul that day had been deep and grievous, and he had never forgotten a single detail of what had happened. Nor had he ever considered, even for a moment, forgiving either the crime or its perpetrators, whom he had classified thereafter as “the English.” And now, two decades later, he had been deprived again, by other, equally rapacious Englishmen, of his nearest and dearest loves, the wife and children who had, within his own mind, been his sole reason for living.

I had no doubt of my cousin’s unquenchable capacity for vengeance, and none at all about the single-minded, implacable ferocity with which he would set about inflicting revenge upon those he believed had wronged him.

Now, I turned away from the concealed door and stepped to
where I could reach out and touch the weapon. Though superb, it was simply too large and too heavy for an ordinary man to use. It had stood here unused, in the corner by Will’s fireplace, from the time Shoomy had claimed it for Will until Will learned of the murder of his wife and children. From that day on, the sword had gone wherever William Wallace went, and its fame was spreading as rapidly as was his own.

“Jamie, welcome!” I leapt with fright at the sound of Will’s voice, for I had not heard the door opening at my back, and I spun to face him. He was holding something in his hands, something draped in a cloth. “Arnulf told me you were here. It’s good to see you, Cousin,” he said in his deep, rolling voice.

I was watching his eyes, trying to gauge his mood and fighting to conceal my apprehension. It had not really been a long time since he and I had last seen each other, a mere few months, and the last words he had said to me when we parted had been instructions on protecting and safeguarding his family. Within hours of that conversation, though, both our worlds had changed forever.

Mirren’s mother had been identified and taken into custody by Sir Lionel Redvers, a knight from Yorkshire who had been charged by the sheriff of Lanark, William Hazelrig, to find and detain the wife and family of the notorious outlaw William Wallace. We— Will’s family and I—had encountered the arresting party by purest accident. Mirren had recognized her mother and gone to her assistance. In the melee that followed, I had been left for dead by the side of the road, my responsibilities grossly unfulfilled and my precious charges ripped from my care. Will’s two-year-old son, William, had died soon after that, fatally injured in the skirmish—whether by accident or not we will never know—and callously thrown aside to die among the bushes lining a forest track, and Mirren, with her unborn child, had died even more brutally the following night, kicked to death by a drunken, oafish lout of a jailer who had fed her stillborn baby to his pigs.

Within a week of hearing those tidings, Will had killed both Redvers and Hazelrig, before attacking the garrison at Lanark and
marching south to Sanquhar Castle to savage and destroy another English force. William Wallace had unleashed his fury and given notice to Englishmen throughout southern Scotland that they could no longer ride roughshod over the people here without suffering dire consequences.

I saw the changes in him at first glance and felt the shock of seeing them, even as I wondered whether he was being similarly taken aback by the ravages in my own face.

He was as big, as broad, and as strong as ever, and perhaps even larger—wider in the shoulders and deeper in the chest than he had been before. But there were deeply chiselled lines in his face that were new and cruel looking. His eyes looked feverish, brighter than was natural, I thought, and they seemed to flicker and pulsate with nervous energy. The most striking change, though, was in his hair, now shot through with silver. It was not old-man grey—he was not yet twenty-five, after all—but it was greying nonetheless, individual strands of silver standing out clearly in the haloed light from behind him.

“Wait,” he said, “let me put this down.” He went to the sideboard by the hidden door, where he carefully set down what he had been carrying, a large jug of some kind. “Fresh buttermilk,” he said, smiling as he turned to look at me again. “New from the churn.”

He came back to me then and reached out a hand to cup my chin, digging thumb and forefinger into my cheeks and tilting my head towards the light as he peered closely at my face. “They made a mess of you, Cuz,” he murmured, “but at least there’s no scars. And you were too pretty anyway. I always thought a face like yours was wasted on a priest … You haven’t said a word. Can you talk?”

I managed to find a smile at last. “Yeth,” I said, exaggerating wildly. “I can thpeak and thay nathty thingth to people that they don’t underthtand, and thometimeth I even thing with the monkth at Thunday thervitheth.”

He laughed, and I cannot recall ever hearing a more welcome sound. “Dear God,” he said, “it’s good to see you again. I’ve missed you this past while. Come, sit down, for we’ve much to talk about,
even if Wishart hasn’t sent you here to put me to work of one kind or another.” He stepped back to the sideboard and removed the cloth covering from the jug, then held the jug up to me. “Will you join me? It’s cold and it’s fresh.”

“Pour two, then,” I said, hooking a chair from the table with my foot and preparing to sit down. “And I do have instructions for you from his lordship, but they can wait until later.”

“Fine, but don’t sit down yet. There’s a well-built fire in the grate and a live coal in a firebox on the mantel there. I just brought it from the main fire outside, so it should flare up easily. And there’s tapers in that long tube beside it, so you light us a fire while I pour us our drinks. And keep talking while you do it. Do you know how long it’s been since I last spoke Latin?” He paused. “How long has it been since we two last spoke? Because I’ll swear I haven’t said a Latin word since then. No one around here speaks anything but Scots.”

For the next half-hour, while the fire grew stronger and the buttermilk lasted, we sat together and enjoyed each other as amicably as we had when we were boys, and not until we had been conversing for at least half that time did I become aware of strangenesses in his way of speaking.

I had brought up the matter of his loss and my own feelings of guilt over what had happened, talking about how I had been unable to help Mirren and the children in all the awful consequences of our encounter with the English knight Redvers. It was not a subject I would have willingly confronted, but I was aware of its being there between us, like an open wound, and I knew I would never be able to look Will directly in the eye until I had admitted my fault in the whole thing and laid bare the guilt that had been haunting me ever since. And so, despite the fear that clutched me like an icy fist, I acknowledged my dereliction and asked my cousin if he could ever forgive me.

He sat up straighter suddenly and bent towards me, his eyes filled with concern. “Jamie,” he said, “in God’s holy name, how can you believe that what happened that day had anything to do with you? You are a priest—you’ve always been a priest, even before you
were ordained. You were never a warrior, and no one ever expected you to be one, so what nonsense is this you’re babbling? What could you have done against such odds, even had you owned a sword or a bow? No, Cousin, put your mind at rest on this matter. It was no fault of yours that the woman and the wee boy died that day. That was the Devil’s work, done by the Devil’s minions, Redvers and Hazelrig, and they have died for it.”

In the brief silence that followed, two things became startlingly clear to me: he was being completely truthful, and he had not once spoken either Mirren’s name or young Will’s, referring to them only as “the woman” and “the wee boy.” Was he aware of what he was doing, working so carefully to avoid naming them? Had he lost his mind in his grief? Mayhap he had simply decided it was better and less painful for him not to call them by their names, thereby avoiding the pain and distress of contemplating them too freshly.

He rose up then and crossed in front of the fire to place his mug on the tabletop by the empty jug. “So, Wishart has instructions for me. I’m surprised it has taken him so long to send them, for I’ve been expecting them since I left him in Glasgow last month. How is the old warlock?”

“He’s well, Cuz, but he’s not as young and spry as he was when we first met him.”

“God’s blood, is anyone? He was old even then, and that was a half score years ago at least.”

“Closer to three-quarters. I was ten, I think—perhaps eleven.”

“But he’s hale, eh?”

“He is, thank God, and as curious as ever. He wants to know how many men you have with you now. I do, too.”

“Altogether? I couldn’t tell you. I’ve made no attempt to count them recently. They’re here aplenty, but there’s been no need for an actual tally, though I suppose that’s a stupid thing to say. There’s always a need for such things. But I came back from Perth with close to two hundred new men. God knows I never sought them out or asked them to come with me—they just followed me back. They wanted to fight for King John and the realm, and they were willing
enough. But they would have been worse than useless in a real fight—farmers and labourers, shepherds and swineherds, many of them with no weapons other than a wee knife or a heavy stick, and some with not even that much. Made Ewan and Shoomy near sob with sorrow when they saw them.

“We’ve been training them since we got back—them and others like them—though we’re sorely lacking in weapons, even for training. But at least they all know the difference now between the dangerous end of a club and the end they have to hang on to. And a very few of them can even use a bow. So they’re getting better all the time, but not fast enough to suit Long John and the others. What we need to do now is to take them raiding somewhere. That’s when they’ll really start to learn in earnest, when they’re pitted against folk who are fighting back, for their lives.”

“So how many actual fighting men do you have, can you guess?”

He inhaled deeply. “Let’s see … perhaps five hundred, ready to fight. There are three other camps here in the forest, with two or three hundred in each.”

“That’s nigh on twelve hundred men.”

“Aye, give or take a hundred or so. Do you have a use for them?”

He laughed again. “And am I being the fool even to ask? Of course you have a use for them. Or Wishart does. Come on then, Cousin, for I think the time has come. What does the old hawk want?”

“He wants the English out of Scotland, above and beyond all else. I know you spoke with him at length before you came back here, but how much do you know of what he plans to do?”

Will eased himself back in his chair and narrowed his eyes, gazing at me with an expression I found hard to read. “He was talking of holding his army in check at Irvine … to dance a pavane with Percy and Clifford’s force but not to fight with them. I think that’s worse than foolish and I told him so to his face, but he wouldn’t listen. Nor would Stewart.”

I nodded. “Do you know what he hopes to achieve by doing that?”

“Let me guess. A lingering death from old age?” His voice was heavy with sarcasm. “No, I don’t know what his hopes are. But I
know what Henry Percy is likely to do, once he has figured out a way to—”

I spoke right over him. “He’s playing the doddering old fool and poltroon, as is the Steward, fussing and fretting and refusing to commit their army—though he’s keeping it safe against attack— because he is attempting to buy sufficient time for you and Andrew Murray and several others in the realm to unite the folk in a general uprising and act decisively.”

He grunted. “So now we come to it,” he said. “Go ahead, then. Tell me what he wants me to do.”

I drew a deep breath and told him, speaking words that I had never imagined I could ever say: “He wants you to behave like the Plantagenet at Berwick: to raise the dragon banner against the English garrisons in Lothian with fire and sword and no quarter.”

“Does he, by Jesus?” He pursed his lips as he sank back into his chair. “Fire and sword in Lothian, eh?” He pondered that for a moment longer, then nodded slowly. “Aye, it makes sense. My first thought was to refuse, because we’d be waging war against our own. But
are
they our own, these Lothian folk? Or are they Edward’s? They’ve made no effort to rise up against anyone, and God Himself knows that Lothian is a hell-nest of Englishry, right enough.”