The Forest Laird: A Tale of William Wallace

by Jack Whyte

“Aye. I’ve heard it said we are raising an army here, but I tell you, Cuz, if we are, it’s an army of gulls and gannets—save that gulls and gannets fly away once their bellies are full. I swear, I’ve never seen so many hungry people.” He leaned back, stretching out his legs and crossing his hands over his belly. “But the food is good and plentiful, thank God, and we yet have room to sit and spread our legs. And here’s Tearlaigh. Ewan has taught our cooks to make a passable beer from local hops, and Tearlaigh’s been his best pupil. His beer is almost as good as Ewan’s. You’ll find it goes down smoothly.”

  A giant of a man had come bustling towards us carrying a leather bucket and with a loop of wooden beer tankards strung around his neck, and now he served us, unhooking tankards from his string and filling them with foaming beer.

  “So where is Ewan?” I asked, having taken my first gulp of what was a truly excellent brew.

  “He’s around somewhere. I saw him a while ago.” He stood up and looked around, but sat down again immediately. “He won’t be far away. He never is.”

  “And Mirren, she is well?”

  “Aye, blooming like a flower. She’ll be glad to see you, Cuz.”

  I had my own ideas on that, for Mirren, I believed, had little time or liking for me, but I smiled and brought my two companions back into the conversation.

  It was good to be off the road after the long journey, and as the sun went down fires began to appear between the scattered tables, and soon we moved to sit by one of them, enjoying the heat, the drifting smoke, and the dancing firelight. The beer was excellent, and some time later I woke myself up by nodding forward and tipping the brew into my lap. I know the three of us slept that night in one of the new huts by the kitchens, but I barely remember moving from the fire, and when I awoke the next morning before dawn, I had no idea where I was.

  My two charges and I spent several hours after morning Mass sorting through our clerical provisions and selecting the items we would need in our first week in our new communities. Those included basic liturgical vestments for ceremonial occasions like the consecration of the new churches we would build, and sacramental items like chalices and ciboria used for the Eucharist, as well as mundane but necessary clerical supplies like writing materials. Each of us had his own consecrated altar stone, of course, but we needed bread and wine, for the consecration of the Mass, and salt, holy oil, and chrism for dispensing the other sacraments. We knew we could restock our supplies simply by walking back to the main encampment, but we knew, too, that we would have enough to do in the days ahead of us to waste time fretting over supplies.

  Afterwards, Will walked us the length and breadth of the territories that his men now commanded, an area almost two full miles in length and close to a mile in width, comprising a rough oval of low, rolling, tree-covered terrain containing three primitive settlements surrounded by a wide belt of undisturbed, heavy-growth forest. Building was under way in all three settlements, and people were already living in the newest dwellings.

  Having left Declan and Jacobus to begin their new ministries in the first two settlements, I was at the mercy of whatever I might find at the third. Any fears I might have had were soon proven groundless, though, for the last site was the most beautiful of the three, and I felt at peace there from the moment I saw it. It lay the farthest from Will’s main encampment, a full half-hour’s walk, but it was set in a tranquil and lovely place, a gently sloping, oak-grown, and mosscovered hillside above a wide, rocky stream. The rocky hilltop above the settlement was split by a yawning ravine, exposing sheer sides where great slabs of stone, stained by lichen and moss, appeared to be bound together by a network of massive, mossy tree roots. I could see several cave openings up there, and guessed that people had been using these natural shelters for habitation long before Will Wallace and his outlaws came this way.

  Today, the caves were being used by Alan Crawford of Nithsdale and the crew of men assigned to him to build shelter for the newcomers. Alan’s was the largest of the crews I had seen, and their work was well in hand when we arrived. I counted six sturdy military-style barrack buildings made of heavy, new-cut logs. Four of those already bore thick roofs, and the remaining two were raftered and being covered with planking that would soon be covered with a thin coating of sod.

  Alan remembered me and greeted me cordially as soon as I dismounted.

  “Well met again,” I said to him, shaking his hand. “If this is to be my new home—and it appears it is—I thank you for preparing it against my coming. But where is everyone else?”

  Alan pointed a thumb towards his men, who were already back at work. “We’re a’ there is for now. The new settlers winna start comin’ till tomorrow. That’s whit wey we’re tryin’ to get these last twa huts finished afore it gets dark. That first group will a’ be men, mind—about twa score o’ them—and we’ll put them to work the minute they get here. They’ll build mair huts, bigger yins, for families, weemin and bairns.”

  “Ah. And at what time do you start work in the morning?”

  He looked at me blankly. “Why, when we ha’e broken fast.”

  “Prayed and broken fast, you mean, do you not?” I said.

  He grinned. “Aye, of course … now that you’re here, Father James.”

  “Good. Mass will be at daybreak. You can let your men know.”

  He nodded, still smiling, and walked away, and I turned to Will.

  “What? You’ve got that old Will Wallace look on your face. What are you thinking?”

  He gave a small shrug. “Nothing. I was just wondering where you will say your first Mass. You’ll need an altar.”

  “No, I won’t. Not a real one, not at first. You know that as well as I do. Any flat surface will do—any tabletop, anywhere, as long as it’s big enough to hold the altar stone.”

  “Fine. But you will need a church of some description, sooner or later, even if it’s no more than a roof on pillars, a shelter to keep your people dry in foul weather. We can build you a real altar then. But you’ll have to tell Alan’s builder yourself what you need. Don’t leave it to Alan to instruct him, or you’ll be sorry. Alan’s a fine organizer and driver of men, but he’s none too good with abstract notions. The builder’s name is Davie Ogilvie, and he’s a northerner like Shoomy. You’ll do well to put yourself in his good graces, for he can build anything you can describe to him. He’ll build you a cathedral out of kindling, if that’s what you ask for.”

  “I’ll settle for a solid little chapel, but I’m grateful for the advice. In the meantime, though, where should I sleep tonight? Do you know or care?”

  “Neither one nor the other, Cuz. Alan’s people are sleeping in the finished huts over there, but I think that might not suit your needs anyway … nor theirs, now that I think about it. A priest should have a place to be alone and do whatever priests do when they’re alone.” He paused, then waved towards the nearest cave. “Were I you, I’d throw my belongings in there. It’s dry, and it’s warm and draft free, with a couple of separate chambers, and Alan has told me it has a natural chimney that draws smoke right up through the roof.”

  “So if it’s that good, why isn’t Alan himself using it?”

  Will grinned and ducked his head. “Because I told him to leave it for you. I knew you’d be coming, sooner or later.”

  “You sly snake! You asked Wishart to send me here, didn’t you?”

  “Not in so many words. It was more of a suggestion, a word of encouragement. I knew he’d send you anyway. He needs you as a go-between from him to me, so it makes sense to have you billeted with me, where you can do the most good.”

  I shook my head in mock disgust and hoisted my heavy pack. “Right, then, show me this cave and you can light a fire while I unpack.”

  3

  Ever since we left Glasgow, I had been fretting privately about our collective inexperience. All three of us had been cloistered in the sanctified atmosphere of the cathedral, yet now, of a sudden, we would be living and working wit
h a real congregation, men, women, and children of all ages and descriptions who would look up to us as God’s own representatives. They would depend upon us for their sacraments and for their moral and spiritual guidance and welfare, and they would have a never-ending need for help in clinging to their faith in the midst of their daily lives. It was a terrifying prospect, and I entered into the experience like a boy dropping into a swimming hole from an overhanging branch, remembering Will’s exhortation from years earlier when he and I had discovered the deep hole in the river by Paisley Abbey. “Jump in,” he had told me, “and swim out.”

  I hung up my liturgical vestments in an alcove dug into one wall of my cave on that first night, thinking that by the time I had need of them, they would have had a few days for the wrinkles to smooth out. A full month later, those garments were still where I had hung them. In all that time, I had worn the same hooded, monkish robe—a single, dark grey, ankle-length garment, ragged beyond belief and tied with a rope at the waist. I had gone barefoot, too, most of that time, while building my own church side by side with Davie Ogilvie the builder. He was an immensely strong man, though he did not look large, and I quickly developed a great regard for his skills, which included the astonishing ability to visualize complex constructions in his mind and then translate them into charts and drawings from which others could work.

  I used up my supply of Communion bread very quickly, but that was easy to replace. Bread is bread, plentiful at most times. Wine, however, is an entirely different matter, scarce and difficult to come by in rural Scotland. I was not short of it to begin with, but I knew I had little prospect of renewing my supply easily, and so I quickly cut down the amount we used in the Mass and found that, by diluting even that fastidiously, I could stretch my supply well enough.

  For the first week I celebrated Mass each morning as the first of our new settlers began to trickle in, but by the end of the second week I had to schedule a second Mass on the Sunday, and soon after that I was saying Mass twice a day, every day. By the third Sunday, I found myself exchanging nods with those faces among my congregation that had already grown familiar, and by the fourth, I knew most of the people’s names. We were one hundred and twelve souls by that time, and our numbers would exceed two hundred within the year. From the moment I awoke in my cave that first day and went to celebrate Mass with Alan Crawford’s work crew, I never again had time to fret about being capable of fulfilling my obligations.

  I was celebrating the second nuptial Mass among my congregants, early in June, when Will stalked into the roofed building we called a church, and as soon as I saw the set of his shoulders and the cast of his face I knew something was gravely wrong. It had been raining intermittently all morning, and he wore a heavy cloak of wool, waterproofed with a thin coat of brushed-on wax. He made a place for himself at the rear of the congregation, where he stood with his head bowed while I continued with the service. The young couple I was marrying that day were a delightful pair, well thought of by everyone, and the church was filled with well-wishers, so I put Will out of my mind as well as I could for the time being and returned my attention to the sacrament I was conferring on the young pair, not wishing to give them anything less than a ceremony they could recall throughout their lives. I distributed Communion to the throng, Will included, and then brought the service to a close by leading the radiant new wife and her goodman out to meet their families, friends, and neighbours. I stood at the threshold of my poor little church and watched the parade weave away, with great hilarity and jubilation, to enjoy their wedding feast.

  When Will and I were once more alone, I stepped to the altar and carefully cleaned and wrapped my precious chalice and ciborium, then packed them carefully into their leather case and carried them with me as I led Will to the cave that was my home. One of the women who insisted on caring for my few comforts had built a roaring fire against the day’s dampness, and as we reached the fire, Will threw back his cloak and unslung a fat, heavy wineskin from where it had hung beneath his shoulder.

  “One of my fellows took this from a knight he and his men stopped this side o’ Selkirk town. It’s miraculous wine, they say.”

  “Miraculous?” I took the skin from him and hefted it appreciatively. “This will be put to good use, I promise you. I’ve been thinking I would have to send Father Declan back to Glasgow for a fresh supply, because we are already on the last of what we brought with us. My gratitude, then, to whoever was responsible. But miraculous? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Miraculous, for one thing, that he and his men didn’t drink it themselves. But also that they brought it back because they knew that you and the other priests are short … I confess, Cuz, that astonished me. Tousle-arsed forest outlaws saving good wine for a priest? Impossible, I would have said.”

  I smiled. “Well, take off your hat and offer thanks to God for your enlightenment, and have more charity in future. Would you like a cup of it?”

  “After all that? I would to God I could, but I would feel like a thief, so, no.”

  I had started to remove my vestments and now I paused, eyeing him and smiling to take any sting out of my words. “But you are a thief, Cuz. That’s why you are here in the forest, after all.”

  “That is true, Cousin Priest, and I had no need to hear it. But I am grateful, nonetheless, for the thought about the cup of wine and I’ll gladly drink some ale if you have any.”

  “In the chest there, between the chairs. Pour one for me, too.”

  I finished taking off my chasuble and stole and hung the garments carefully in the niche I used for them, and then I stripped off my long, white alb and folded it meticulously into its box on the floor of the niche. I had but the one and I seldom wore it because it was almost impossible to keep clean and fresh looking, and so I reserved it for special occasions like this morning’s Nuptial Mass. Normally, I celebrated the Sacrifice in my plain monk’s robe, believing that God cared little how I dressed so long as I served him in the spirit of love and piety.

  By the time I turned back to the fire, Will had poured ale for both of us and set a flagon for me on the rough table between the two chairs that flanked the fireplace. I drank deeply, then set the vessel down before looking across at my cousin.

  “All right, what’s wrong, Will? You’re plainly angry over something. What brings you here? Apart from bringing the wine, I mean.”

  “Reprisals.”

  I heard the word, and understood it, but for several moments it meant nothing to me.

  “From the English,” Will said. “They’re punishing folk for what I did last April.”

  “April! That was months ago.”

  “Aye, it was, but they’re taking payment now. Plainly they took a while to think about what to do next, that’s all. And now they’re doing it.”

  “Doing what, Will? Are they coming here?”

  “No. They’d never dare, unless they came in strength, to wipe us out, and they won’t risk that … unless they have permission from King John, and I don’t see that coming. Nothing would please Edward more than to have right of passage from the border to here, but there’s too much going on between the two kingdoms and their Kings right now to permit our wee affairs to take on that kind of import. But reprisals are being carried out against us, Jamie. I’ve had reports, and we have had casualties coming in, to bear witness to what’s going on. Farms and whole villages laid waste and burned, their people hanged or slaughtered. Men taken on the road, about their own affairs, and hanged without trial. Their women ravaged, sometimes spared, sometimes not … And no one, anywhere, able to identify the killers.” He dragged his hands down over his face and mouthed a formless moan of weariness and frustration.

  “I want to send some of them here, the survivors, to the main camp, but we can’t handle them. We’ve no room, and we’re too close to any enemy that comes against us. Close enough to fight them, certainly—that’s why we’re there. But there’s no safety for any but ourselves, the fighting men. Ca
n you take some of the others, d’you think? Have you room?”

  “Of course we can take them, and we’ll make room if need be. Where are these people from?”

  “They’re plain folk from around here, on the outskirts of the forest.”

  “Which outskirts?”

  He shrugged. “Nowhere, everywhere. Some attacks were close by our territories, others were farther afield, near places like Selkirk village. But none were actually within our reach for retaliations. Most were in the southwest, though … west and southwest.”

  “How far?”

  That made him frown. “Ten miles? No, more than that.” He hesitated, thinking rapidly. “Twenty miles at least, perhaps more.”

  “Twenty miles south and southwest of your main camp. That’s Bruce country.”

  “Aye. It is.” He glanced at me and nodded. “They would ne’er ha’e dared try such a thing when old Bruce the Competitor was alive, God rest his soul. The old man would ha’e gone to war over it. But now his son, the Lord o’Annandale, sits in England’s Carlisle Castle as its custodian, and his grandson, the Earl of Carrick, is in London, playing the popinjay at Edward’s court. So you’ll hear no complaints from the Bruces.”

  “And why have these survivors come to you?”

  “Because they have no other place to go, why else?”

  “Do you know them? And if the answer to that is yes, then how do you know them, that they should come to you?”

  “I don’t know them. They are just folk who had heard of us, that we were in the greenwood, and who came to us when they lost everything. I knew none of them before they came, and none of them knew me.”

  “But if that’s so, if they had no connection to you, why were they harmed?”

  “Come on now, Jamie, don’t vex me. We’re dealing with Englishmen here! Think you they need a reason to be as they are? To behave the way they do? Have you forgotten Ellerslie and what they did to us and our kin?”

  “No, Will, I have not. But this is different—”

  “How is it different? How can you sit there, knowing nothing about what is going on, and say it is different? Different to what? I’ll send you three wee boys who watched their parents being butchered like stirks. Three wee boys younger than we were, with ravaged arses sorer than ours were! Tell them how different this is, then watch how they walk, hobbling in pain and shame, and how they look around them at the men they meet, waiting to be jumped upon again. Different? The only difference I see is in the time. When they did it to us, we were children, weak and helpless. Now, by the living Christ, I am a man grown, and I will meet these English whoresons with a man’s strength and judgment.”