The Forest Laird: A Tale of William Wallace

by Jack Whyte

  And so it was. Under Ewan’s guidance, several of Robertson’s bowmen spent time that evening making a carrying frame for me out of two floorboards from the wrecked wagon. With cross pieces made from wheel spokes and the whole thing tied together with pieces cut from the harness reins, it was ungainly but light and well suited to its purpose.

  I barely slept at all that night, unable to find comfort or relief from the pain of my ribs and head, but the following morning, strapped tightly into immobility in my new bed, I fell asleep on the road before I had been carried for half a mile and slept like a dead man, undisturbed by stops or bearer changes, until they woke me up in the humble monastery outside the walls of Lanark. Ewan was bending over me, looking very serious and telling me something that appeared to be important, but my head was swimming and the pain was unbearable and I must have passed out again. I remember waking up again some time after that, to find an aged monk holding a cup to my lips and forcing me to drink some foul-smelling brew, and then I remember nothing for several days until I awoke to find Father Jacobus sitting close by my side, peering intently into my face.

  Startled to see his face so near my own, I blinked myself awake and tried to sit up, but that was an unwise thing to do, since I had forgotten about my injured ribs and I almost passed out again from the pain of trying to move against my restraints.

  When I recovered from my near swoon and was able to catch my breath again, I discovered, with a flaring surge of horror, that I was utterly mute, incapable of even opening my mouth.

  Jacobus leaned towards me. “You can’t speak,” he said. “Your jaw is wired shut. I have never seen the like of it. Can you hear me? Blink if you can.” I blinked eagerly and he held up a hand. “Are you really here this time?” He interpreted my confusion correctly, for he nodded quickly and held up his hand again.

  “I thought you were here yesterday. And the day before, and the day before that. But you weren’t, because you couldn’t remember me having been here when I came back next time. Yesterday I would have sworn on oath that you were fully here. Do you remember me being here yesterday? If you do, blink once. If you do not, blink twice.”

  I blinked twice and he frowned, then reached into the depths beneath his scapular and pulled out a folded letter, holding it up so that I could see my own name written on the front of it.

  “Do you recognize this?” he asked me.

  I blinked twice, with exaggerated slowness, and he sighed and leaned in closer, speaking more to himself than to me. “Yet again then, I must try. You appear to be wide awake, alert and aware of me, but I thought the same thing before, and here you are, with no memory of any of it.”

  He sighed again. “Father James Wallace. Do you recognize that name?”

  I blinked once.

  “Is it your name?” Blink.

  “Do you know where you are?” That stopped me, for I did not know how to respond. I thought I knew where I was, in a tiny monastery near Lanark, but suddenly I was unsure. Jacobus was watching me and must have divined what I was thinking, because he went on, “Do you remember speaking of the monks of Lanark?” I blinked, and he nodded. “Well, that is where you are. You have been here for five days, and have been in the care of Brother Dominic of Ormiston. Brother Dominic spent his life as a Knight Hospitaller. He was crippled early in the siege of Acre and is one of the few survivors of that catastrophe. He was shipped back to England, but his family is Scots, and so he came to Lanark and became hospitaller to the brethren here, using his medical and surgical skills for the good of the community. It was he who encased your body in restraints and wired your mouth shut to ensure that the break in your jawbone will heal cleanly, and he has been treating you with medicines from the Holy Land, medicines he calls opiates, to keep you free from pain. Sadly, those same medicines also cause you to forget everything that happens. Dominic believes, though, that it is better to have you slightly confused and free of pain than it would be to have you bright-minded and in constant agony. And so he feeds his opiates to you in the honeyed milk that is the only food you can consume. He says, in fact, that as long you are confined to bed and unable to move, honeyed milk is all the food your body needs. Thanks be to God that your ability to suck is unimpaired, for were it not, you would surely starve to death in the midst of plenty.” He broke off, looking perplexed, then asked, “Does none of what I am saying sound familiar? I have told you all of this three times already.”

  I gazed straight at him and blinked twice. No, none of this is familiar. He shook his head in bemused disbelief, then looked away.

  “Brother Dominic says it will take months for your injuries to heal, and weeks, at least, before you will be fit to travel to Glasgow. He told me that if all goes well, you should be able to sit up without restraints within the month, but you will be feeble and weak at first and will have to learn to walk again and to eat solid food again, as though you were an infant. And that reminds me of what else I must ask you. Remember, one blink for yes, two for no.”

  Blink.

  “Do you know who I am?” Blink.

  “Do you know a man called Ewan Scrymgeour?” Blink.

  “Is he a friend of yours?” Blink.

  “Do you remember sending Ewan Scrymgeour to gather information?” Blink.

  “Can you remember where you sent him?” Blink.

  “Was it Lanark?” Blink.

  “Do you remember what it was that you instructed him to find out?” Blink.

  “Aye … Well, that’s good. Because Ewan’s not here now. He came back, three days ago, but you were too sick to talk with him, drifting in and out of awareness, and he had no time to wait for you to wake up properly. It was more important, he said, for him to reach Will in the forest before anyone else could. And so he dictated a message to me, for you to read when you grew well enough, and left it in my care. Since you cannot move, would you like me to read the letter to you?”

  Blink.

  “Very well, then. I must tell you that the words are Ewan’s own, exactly as he spoke them. He explained to me very clearly that he wanted me to transcribe his words verbatim. That was difficult, for he was speaking in the vulgate, and all my training has been in the formal Latin of the Church. Nevertheless, I have managed, I believe, to capture his words exactly.” The elderly priest sat up straighter and carefully unfolded the single sheet of parchment he was holding. Then he moved away, holding it at arm’s length and tilted towards the small window that was the room’s sole source of light, and when he was satisfied that he could see sufficiently well he coughed to clear his throat. “Can you hear me clearly?”

  He paused, as though waiting for an answer, and then he came quickly back to my bed and peered down at me with a contrite look that might have made me laugh under other circumstances. “Forgive me, Father James,” he said. “I forgot you cannot speak. Could you hear me clearly?” I blinked once, and he moved away to the window again, clearing his throat nervously for a second time before he began to read.

  “Jamie,” he began reading, his tone declamatory. “They tell me you will live and probably come out of this with no permanent damage. I’m glad of that. I am sorry I can’t stay here to wait for you, and I know you know that already. My place is in Selkirk, with Will, since you can’t be there, and I am sick with the thought of what I have to tell him. I am sick of it all, Jamie; sick to my soul of the pettiness and cruelty of men who should be better than they are; sick of the greed and the ambition of men who are called noble but who disgrace the very name of manhood.

  “I went back to Lanark, as you bade me, knowing you were right and that I needed to go back. Gareth Owens was not there when I arrived, but some of his men recognized me from the previous night and made me welcome enough. I asked them about Mirren, but no one there could tell me anything. They were archers and none of them had been there when we met Redvers, so most of them knew nothing about what had happened. So then I went looking for the jailer after that, the one called Dyllan, but he was off duty and
had gone into Lanark for the market day.

  “Soon after that I found myself out by the swine sties, searching the muck for any signs I could find of a dead baby, though I knew myself mad for even looking. The pigs were snorting and wallowing in their filth and I wanted to take my bow and kill every one of them. But they were just being pigs, doing what God intended pigs to do. It was the swine who fed such food to them who deserved to die for what they had done.

  “Gareth arrived back late in the afternoon, and he had been drinking, so I plied him with more ale and followed up on the story of Mirren, telling him I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her losing the baby. I called it a brat. He was looking at me strangely, I saw, but there was no anger in him. And then he poured me more ale, and put an arm around my shoulder. He told me that hours later, after I had left, he still remembered the way I looked when I asked Dyllan about leaving her lying on the floor in all that blood, and he had felt ashamed. He and Dyllan were both very drunk by then, he said, having used up the entire shilling I had left them, but that only added to the shame he felt, and so he had convinced Dyllan to go back to the cell to look in on her, and they had found her dead in a corner of the cell, in the middle of a big pool of blood.

  “The animal called Simon, the jailer on duty who had knocked her down and kicked her, grew angry when Dyllan challenged him for an explanation. The bitch had gone mad, he said, screaming and howling for some brat she’d lost, crying out his name, Willie, and throwing herself at the cell door, trying to break it down. He had finally lost patience with her noise and gone back into the cell, where he had knocked her down again, after which she had obviously learned her lesson, since she hadn’t made another sound.

  “So there you have it, and that’s the message I am going now to deliver to Will. His family is gone, wiped out at the whim of exactly the kind of man he refuses to follow or recognize. His son is dead, at less than a year and a half. His second child is dead, murdered and still-born, its sex unknown, its body fed to pigs. His wife’s mother is dead, for the crime of having given her daughter to Will Wallace. And now his wife, too, is dead, murdered by a witless, shambling monster.

  “That the monster is dead changes nothing and affords no satisfaction, but I cut off his head myself and fed it to the pigs that night, before I left Lanark castle.

  “I have to say that Gareth Owens surprised me. I heard the following day that he took a report of what had happened to the sheriff, the next morning: two women arrested and then abused and murdered in the sheriff’s cells with no official supervision between their being admitted and Gareth’s own complaint. Redvers was arrested immediately, but nothing will come of it. English law decrees that no English knight may be accused of a crime by anyone of less than knightly blood. Hazelrig could charge him with dereliction and irresponsibility, but he would have nothing to gain by doing so, and the charges, if seen as frivolous, might return to haunt him someday.

  “This is the kind of incident that Scotland’s people are fighting against, this wanton disregard for the lives, freedom, and rights of anyone not of noble birth. This is the kind of excess that breeds revolt, and Will Wallace will have much to say about it, once his first grief has turned to the need for vengeance. And when that happens, I would not like to be in Hazelrig’s shoes.

  “I’ll say adieu and hope we’ll meet again someday, Jamie. Get better soon, and get yourself back to Glasgow and to Wishart, though I fear the news of this will be familiar to the Bishop before you can reach him. Be well.”

  3

  I was an invalid for more than a month and a half, although I was improving visibly after three weeks, despite a drastic loss of weight and muscle tone caused by a liquid diet and a complete lack of exercise. By the end of the fifth week, the bindings around my rib cage were less tight and I no longer had to be restrained while I slept, so I could breathe more deeply, though it still pained me to do so, and the thought of laughing or coughing chilled me. I was permitted to leave my bed in the seventh week, but it took me four full days to build up the strength to walk for fifty paces. After that, though, I grew stronger daily, and Brother Benedict soon removed the iron wiring from my jaw. Two days after that I could eat normally again.

  A week later I was back in Glasgow, having made the journey by wagon and accompanied by Father Jacobus. Bishop Wishart made us both welcome and we found the entire cathedral community agog with the news of armed rebellion in the north and in the south.

  Only then, after an interval of almost three full months, did I learn what had been taking place during my time recovering.

  Wishart had heard the news of Miriam Braidfoot’s arrest from her parish priest, who was outraged by the arrest and confinement of one of his most devout and influential parishioners. When he then heard of her subsequent death in custody, he launched an official diocesan inquiry, in the course of which the investigators learned that Mistress Braidfoot’s daughter Mirren, or Marian, had somehow contrived to have herself killed by what was officially described as misadventure in precisely the same prison and on the same day as her mother. Sir Lionel Redvers, who had been responsible for the arrests of the women, was arraigned by the cathedral chapter, but he laughed at the summons and refused to attend the hearing. A week later he was ambushed and murdered one evening outside Lanark. He was accompanied by a round dozen mounted troopers, all of whom died with him, their weapons unbloodied and their bodies riddled with hard-shot arrows. Redvers himself had been dragged from his horse and decapitated. His body bore no other wounds. His head was never found.

  The arrows, of course, indicated clearly that the outlaws of Selkirk Forest were responsible, and William Hazelrig assembled all his forces for a pre-emptive strike into the greenwood, calling for them to assemble on a given morning near the village of Lamington, and apparently seeing no irony in that choice of rallying points. Among the forces that assembled were a half-score of veteran archers whom none of the others knew. The newcomers were freshly arrived from Wales, they said, dispatched north as part of a new intake of Welsh bowmen recruited for the wars in Scotland.

  The sheriff’s expedition reached the forest outskirts and searched the woods diligently for three days, finding nothing and no one, but during that last night, in the middle watch, the darkest part of the night, the outlying sentries died in silence, while the newly arrived archers set aside their bows and used daggers and stealth to surprise and kill the guards on duty inside the camp. The man guarding the entrance to the sheriff’s tent likely neither saw nor heard the arrow that killed him and threw him backward into the tent, and before Sheriff Hazelrig knew what was happening, he was clubbed senseless and abducted. Once free of the sleeping encampment, the archers were joined by the others who had approached in the darkness and who had spent the previous hour disposing of the outlying guards and preparing pitch-dipped fire arrows. When the word was given, a hailstorm of flaming missiles swept the English camp, setting fire to tents and sleeping men, and the ensuing slaughter was merciless. Very few of the English sheriff’s punitive expedition escaped alive.

  William Hazelrig, King Edward’s sheriff of Lanark, was found dead the following day. His hands had been severed and his throat cut, and a parchment scroll was fastened to his chest with a deepdriven dagger. The scroll said simply:

  In Memoriam

  Marian Wallace

  Requiescat in pace

  The news of Wallace’s vengeance sent shock waves rippling across the whole south of Scotland, and for two weeks no English force of any description moved anywhere, least of all into Selkirk Forest.

  By the end of that second week, Robert Wishart himself was in Selkirk Forest, haranguing Will. Andrew Murray had raised all of Scotland north of the Forth in rebellion, and the English up there were in total disarray. Wishart reminded Will, forcibly, that Murray, too, came of a knightly family but that his opinion of the magnates and their divided, self-centred, and ever-fluctuating loyalties was precisely the same as Will’s. Murray’s army was an a
rmy of the common folk, the Scots people who provided the solid backing underlying the community of the realm. Now was the time, Wishart said, for Will to join Murray, to throw in his lot with the northerner and march with his own people from the south to unite the whole of Scotland under their joint leadership. They knew each other. They admired and respected each other. And they were friends, sharing a detestation of all that kept Scotland from being what it should be, a strong, free land.

  Wishart was an eloquent persuader, a fact that I knew well. He was also a bishop and a lord of the Church who ought not to have been fomenting rebellion. But above and beyond all else, Robert Wishart was a patriot who believed in his heart of hearts that Scotland had a destiny that could be fulfilled only if it rid itself of English occupation, certainly, but also of the English loyalties and English obligations evinced by its most powerful lords in their tenacious adherence to feudal allegiances that had lost all relevance. I now believe that Bishop Wishart was a man born before his time in that respect, a man of keen insight who foresaw the inevitable death of the feudal system that once governed all of Christendom but has fallen into ruin these past two hundred years.

  My main belief about Robert Wishart, though, is that through his patriotism and his enthusiasm, his manipulative ways and his iron, stubborn, single-minded wilfulness, he brought about the end of the cousin I had known and loved. Perhaps I am being too harsh, too judgmental, but that is what I now believe. When Robert Wishart left to return to Glasgow on that occasion, he left a different man behind him than the William Wallace I had known.

  The man who followed him out from the greenwood shortly afterwards, emerging, as some Englishman has written, like a bear from his forest den, was the William Wallace all men know today, Edward Plantagenet’s scowling, giant, merciless nemesis, and all England, along with much of Scotland, would regret his awakening. The laughing archer I had known was gone forever, obliterated in the destruction of his beloved Mirren and their children. The implacable avenger who came out of Selkirk Forest finally had set aside his long yew bow forever and taken up the massive sword his friend Shoomy had brought him in earlier, better days. I found it strange, thereafter, that the enormous sword, elaborately beautiful and lethal and taller than an ordinary man, should so completely usurp the place held for so long in Will’s life by his great yew bow, but as he himself pointed out afterwards, the bow lacked the close immediacy of a hand-held blade, and the sword he swung with his enormous archer’s muscles enabled him to smile more closely, face to face with every enemy he met.