The Guardian (59 page)

I stared at him. “The
English
pulled it down? You mean the battle’s over? I can still hear fighting.”

“No, you’re hearing our men celebrating. The English are gone, fled with their tails between their legs.”

“Praise be to God,” I said, meaning every word, and then I saw in the distance the high black-and-white standard I had been searching for. “There it is, over there! You see yon black banner? That’s where the knights are stationed.” I looked about me, my tiredness forgotten and my mind functioning clearly again. “Look you. There’s no point in both of us going all the way over there simply to walk back again. I was working near here before I started giving the last rites to dying men. I had a stretcher, for carrying the wounded. It must be close by here somewhere. If we find it, you can use it to bring Andrew to the hospital over there. I’ll go ahead of you and tell them Andrew’s coming. Now help me find that stretcher. You’ll know it when you see it—a plain wooden bier, two long side pieces with crosswise slats.”

It was half hidden beneath a pile of bodies, and Alistair Murray carried it away with him, holding it in front of him like a shield while I knelt above the body of my former colleague, whose name was unknown to me. He was entirely encrusted in filth, unrecognizable save by his ankle-length habit and his tonsure. His knapsack was unopened, its contents yet intact. I opened it and placed the stole of his priesthood around his neck, then anointed him with his own chrism, administering the last rites posthumously in the
complete belief that he had no need of them. And then I left him there, his hands crossed on his breast, and set out to rejoin Brother Reynald and his Hospitallers.

I found a scene of appalling horror awaiting me when I reached the hospital, but I could see I was the only person there who was aware of it, for no one else had time to look at it. I had thought myself amid the atrocities of Hell out there on the battlefield, surrounded by the dead and wounded, but the hospital was worse, for there in one small place were collected casualties from all areas of the field. Englishmen and Scots lay side by side, all race and ranks ignored in the reality of fighting now for breath and life itself. Peasants lay among noblemen, and common foot soldiers lay bleeding beside others whose bedraggled finery proclaimed them to be high-born knights and lords. And all of them were
in extremis
, for no man well enough to walk away from there would have thought of remaining in such a place. There was surprisingly little noise, though, there where I would have expected the screaming from so many throats to have outdone the worst I had heard earlier. I soon realized that most of the men there were too gravely injured to make much noise. Of course there were exceptions, and no shortage of them, but I tried to close my ears, as those around me must have done already.

I found Brother Reynald by the largest of the wagons, surrounded by several of his brethren. He was standing by a bloodstained table, holding his hands up in front of him as he watched one of his fellows sew an open wound shut with a large needle. Blood dripped heavily from his upraised hands, and I thought he had cut himself, but as I watched, someone handed him a ragged towel and he wiped his hands on it, taking care to clean the clotted stuff from between his fingers. Two other men moved forward, stooping over as though about to kneel for his blessing, but they went to work instead, one of them holding open a large sack while the other filled it with severed arms and legs that he drew out of a mountain of limbs that had been concealed from my sight by the tabletop. It was a sight that came close to overwhelming me, even
after my earlier ordeal, but as I stood there reeling, Brother Reynald looked up.

“Father James! Come over here.”

I walked slowly over to where he stood. His companions paid me no heed at all, so busy were they at their work, but as I approached him I could see he was looking at my clothes much as I was looking at his. We were very similar in appearance then, save that his robes were drenched in pure blood, whereas there was more mud in the mixture that coated mine. His eyes narrowed and he nodded at me. “They tell me it is over,” he said quietly.

I nodded. “Aye, it is. A man I know, a Highlander, told me it was done.”

He turned aside and looked around the hellish scene surrounding us. “They’ll be bringing men in here for hours to come and there’s little we can do for any of them. May sweet Jesus have mercy on us all …” He inhaled a great breath and expelled it noisily. “And the worst of it,” he continued, “the worst, most evil and satanic part of all of this, is that some arrant, self-important, witless fool—some worthless, prancing, prating, high-born stay-at-home buffoon who thinks he has a right to send his fellow men to die—will proclaim a God-given victory here, as though some great and wondrous thing has been achieved and this foul crime, this
slaughterhouse
, should be remembered as a signal token of God’s favour.” He grunted, a bitter, disgusted sound. “They’ll say that England won and Scotland lost, or Scotland won and England lost—I neither know nor care which might be held correct—but look around you, Father James, and tell me, if you will, what was won here in this awful place, and whose brow will wear the victor’s laurels?”

I had no words with which to answer him, and it was clear that he expected none.

“Where will you go now?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Return to the castle, I suppose, although I don’t know why.”

“No more do I,” he said, looking at me from beneath one raised eyebrow. “What is a Scot doing in an English army?”

“Spying?” I said, and his face twisted in a rueful smile.

“Go with God, then, Father James, but I warn you, don’t look for Him out there on the field. Not for a few days. He has too much to do here.”

“I came to tell you that they are bringing in one of the Scots commanders, a young man called Andrew de Moray. He was stabbed in the back.”

“I see.” He looked disappointed. “One of the architects of this debacle, and you want me to have an eye to his wounds?”

I searched for words that would address what he had said without demeaning myself or endangering the outcome of what I was asking of him.

“You wrong him when you name him architect of this, Reynald,” I said. “There is but one sole architect involved in this entire debacle, as you call it. Many actors, many participants, and many victims, but no more than one architect. That man is Edward Plantagenet. He alone conceived the elements of all of this when he decided to claim Scotland as his own.”

His face betrayed nothing of what he was thinking.

“I have little more to say,” I continued. “You are an Englishman, and I am a Scot, and so we may regard the matter differently between the two of us. But we are both priests, and our oaths of fealty and worship are to the God we serve, not to any worldly king with human weaknesses and vices and a lust for foreign conquest. As for the wounded man, Andrew de Moray, I know him well and find him truly admirable—a fine, upstanding, noble young man who knows and understands his God-given duty to his people. He was a leader here today purely because there was a crying need for someone, somewhere, to step forth and raise a hand against the tyranny that threatened him and his and all of Scotland.”

When I fell silent he twisted his mouth as though nibbling at the inside of his lip, then dipped his head in the smallest of nods. “Where is he?”

“They’re bringing him in. On one of your stretchers.”

“He is fortunate,” he said quietly, “that you and I share a distaste
for the greed of ambitious monarchs. When he comes in, bring him to me here.” He turned away without another word and stepped back up to the bloody table.

There were hundreds of people coming and going all around me, and I watched them curiously while I waited for Andrew’s stretcher, distracting myself by trying to identify the colours and escutcheons of the various English knights I saw being carried here and there. I saw no Scottish colours, for there had been no Scottish lords present as far as I knew, apart from Andrew de Moray himself, who would be wearing his father’s crest of three white stars on a field of dark blue. And as I thought of those white stars, I saw them on a banner in the distance, being carried by a stripling lad who should have been at home with his mother that day. I would have recognized the group without those stars, even had Alistair not been walking ahead of them—eight tall Highlanders, four of whom held their young chief’s stretcher while the others walked along on either side of them, ready to relieve them.

I made my way directly to them. Andrew lay motionless on the bier, on his belly, his eyes closed.

“How is he?”

Alistair shook his head. “He was like this when I got back and he has not stirred since. Some English priest dosed him with something, some powder he claimed to have received from a Muslim physician when he was in the Holy Lands. He swore it would ease Andrew’s pain and make him sleep. He wouldn’t have done it had I been there, I can tell you, for I’d have gutted any Englishman who tried to come near Andrew. But Sandy Pilche told me that Andrew knew the fellow well, from his time in England, and that he drank the stuff down willingly enough. I suppose it’s reassuring that the priest made no attempt to flee afterwards.”

“Bring your men and follow me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

AFFAIRS OF STATE

W
e left the hospital compound while Brother Reynald tended to Andrew, walking until we found a place to sit on the riverbank. Alistair cocked his head to one of the younger men, holding up a hand and wiggling his fingers.

“Duncan,” he said. “The flask.”

The young fellow hitched a knapsack around from where it hung by his hip and reached into it, producing a tightly stoppered bottle made from hard leather. He removed the stopper and handed the bottle to Alistair, who took a sip from it and rolled the liquid round his mouth pensively, then swallowed it and took a mouthful more before offering it to me. I started to wave it away, then changed my mind. I tilted my head back and filled my mouth with the fiery spirits. My entire mouth seemed to explode and I swallowed, feeling the liquor burn its way down to my stomach. It was well named,
uisge beatha
, the water of life. I had no will to fight it. I simply lay back in silence and let it do its work until Alistair poked me and thrust the bottle at me again.

“So,” he said eventually, “what do you know of what’s happened?”

“Nothing except what you’ve told me and what I’ve witnessed with my own eyes. How much more do
you
know?”

“No more than you. I saw the Englishry strung out across the bridge and along the causeway, and then we started our attack, running across the flats. After that I saw nothing except what was happening right there beside me. I killed a few men, no more than five or six, but they were all trying their best to send me off. At first, I spent most of my time safely behind a wall of swords, playing the
captain and keeping the wall in place against everything the English threw at us. And they were good. Someone said they were young Baron Percy’s men, but I don’t know if that was true or not. No one really knew. But whoever they were, the whoresons were hard men who knew their business. Their weapons and armour were well made—easily as good as our new supplies—and they had been trained long and hard. As soon as we cut one of them down another stepped right in to fill his place, and they kept coming forward, no matter how many of them we killed. But then the MacDonalds on our right broke through the line and turned their flank, leaving the men against us unprotected on that side. That was the end of them, for once they started to crumble, their entire wall collapsed, and that’s when I started fighting. The next thing I knew, there were no English anywhere around us, and someone brought the word that Andrew had been killed. That’s what I heard at first, but no one with a whit of sense ever believes a rumour.”

“Where was he?”

“Safe off the field. Sandy had taken charge and he saw to it they carried him away to where he would come to no more harm, back the way we had come, towards the Abbey Craig. But they were thinking clearly. They stopped at the first dry spot they found well clear of the fighting and stayed there, then set up a shelter to keep him out of the sun.”

“You mean a tent?”

“A canopy—they had no tent. But the sun was high and the mud was steaming. And flies were swarming, with all the spilt blood.”

“And Andrew was conscious?”

“Aye, and clear headed. But he was in great pain.”

“So where is Sandy Pilche now?”

He shook his head. “I can’t tell you. He wasn’t about when I went back to fetch Andrew, and I didn’t think to ask where he’d gone.”

I paid no real attention when Alistair said that, because at that particular moment, I was more interested in finding out about Will’s whereabouts than I was in anything else, and so it was not until much later, days later, that I realized that no one, in fact, had thought
to ask where Sandy Pilche had gone. He had simply vanished and was never seen again, one of the uncounted multitude, including my colleague Father Thomas, whose existence had been unambiguously blotted out in that awful place. They died unnoticed and were gone, either drowned and washed away by the river or coated beyond recognition by the mud that covered the entire battlefield. Days were to elapse, though, before the chaos died down and folk began to realize that they had lost friends and kinsmen they had assumed were safe elsewhere, and that was the case with me, searching for Will and assuming my other friends were safe.

“And you heard nothing more of Will?”

“No, not a word. But he’s out there somewhere, still alive, for if William Wallace had been hurt or killed, we would have heard of it by now. News like that always travels fast.”

“So how did we turn the English? We were outnumbered in every way.”

“We were, but we hit them and cut them off before they could all cross the bridge. That was what did it. We cut them in half at the outset, then kept them pent up where they couldn’t fight other than by our rules. We stopped them from using their horsemen, and their archers did them no good, stuck on the far side of the river.”