by Jack Whyte
The Guardian
Also by Jack Whyte
A DREAM OF EAGLES
The Skystone
The Singing Sword
The Eagles’ Brood
The Saxon Shore
The Sorcerer, Volume I: The Fort at River’s Bend
The Sorcerer, Volume II: Metamorphosis
Uther
THE GOLDEN EAGLE
Clothar the Frank
The Eagle
THE TEMPLAR TRILOGY
Knights of the Black and White
Standard of Honor
Order in Chaos
THE GUARDIANS SERIES
The Forest Laird
The Renegade
Jack Whyte
The Guardian
A TALE OF ANDREW MURRAY
To my granddaughter Jessica and her husband, Jake Strashok, who is what I have always secretly wanted to be: a metalsmith.
And to my dear wife, Beverley, for being herself.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In my recent travels, meeting and greeting my readers, and even in my daily interactions with people who are not my readers but who know, from various sources, that I write historical novels, one question recurs with frequency: “What is historical fiction?”
I’ve heard this question ever since I first became a published author, but in the past few years the number of people asking it has multiplied so noticeably that I now feel obliged to try to answer it. So let me see if I can.
On the most visible level it’s a genre, of course, a recognizable story form that’s easy to hang a label upon. (Allow me to digress. Although this genre is growing increasingly popular everywhere in the English-speaking world, it is one of the strangest anomalies of the book-selling trade in North America that the major bookstore chains refuse to recognize it. Readers everywhere are clamouring for it more and more loudly each year, but bookstores appear deaf. There are no Historical Fiction departments in our North American bookstores, and that gives rise to strange bedfellows. This book you are holding now—very clearly a historical novel—is probably shelved in the Fantasy and Science Fiction section. That is because my first series of books, called A Dream of Eagles in Canada and the Camulod Chronicles in the U.S.A., offered a speculative but feasible perspective on the probable beginnings of the Arthurian legend, set in fifth-century post-Roman Britain. It was historical, but it was also speculative fiction. Most telling of all, though, it mentioned King Arthur, and so it was designated fantasy and shelved accordingly. But because of that, my last two historical trilogies, dealing respectively with the rise and fall of the medieval Knights Templar and the fourteenth-century Scottish Wars of Independence, have also been consigned to the Fantasy and Sci-Fi shelves, in utter disregard of the minor consideration that they contain no slightest hint of either fantasy or science fiction.)
So what is historical fiction? I believe the best of it amounts to a transcription of thoroughly researched records of genuine historical events embellished, emphasized, and made more appreciable to modern readers with one single element of historical commentary that is taboo among academic and classical historians. That element is speculation. Historians know, for example, that King Edward I of England spent an entire night in May of the year 1290 cloistered with Antony Bek, the Prince Bishop of Durham, in a guarded room in Norham Castle on the Scots border, and that Bek left for Scotland the following morning, there to announce himself as King Edward’s deputy in arranging the union of the Crowns of England and Scotland through a marriage between Princess Margaret of Norway, the child heir to the vacant Scottish throne, and King Edward’s first-born son, the boy Edward, Prince of Wales. They know that, but the all-night meeting was behind closed doors with nothing written down for posterity, so they know nothing of what was actually said between the two men that night, and as academic historians they are forbidden to speculate.
That speculation falls within the purview of the writer of historical fiction, who is completely at liberty to put words into the mouths of the participants, with the sole proviso that he or she can say nothing that contradicts the known historical record. And so the historical novelist possesses a power that is almost magical compared with the straightforward recitation of known facts inhibiting the academics: the novelist can breathe life into the otherwise lifeless and unappreciated protagonists and participants in great historical events, and the really gifted storytellers can transform ancient worlds into reality, enabling their readers to appreciate and understand that their ancestors, the people who inhabited those times and places and lived through great and remarkable events centuries or millennia ago, were people like themselves, facing exactly the same fundamental problems that beset us today, with all our supposed advantages. For then, as now, the problems facing an ordinary, undistinguished man were straightforward and unavoidable—to feed his family and dependents and to keep them safe, with the best and strongest roof over their heads that he could provide— and the role of a responsible woman, in any society, has been unchanged since Eve first smiled at Adam. It is the skill of historical novelists in making those things clear while cleaving as closely as possible to historical accuracy that has led to the recent enormous upsurge in demand for the wondrous stories that are found in historical novels, the genre that the booksellers will tell you doesn’t exist.
What most people don’t know about, though, is the genuinely massive difficulty in dealing with language accurately, and that, too, increases the demand for accuracy in reporting by the historical novelist. Standard English, as we know it today, became standardized only during the reign of Queen Victoria. Before that there was no such thing as orthography, no formal rules of spelling or syntax. Everyone who was literate was free to spell anything the way he or she thought fit. And even more confusing, less than two hundred years ago people from different regions of the same country—of any country—couldn’t speak to or understand one another. Every little town and village had its own dialect and its own idioms. In Scotland, for example, the port town of Aberdeen had its own language, spoken only by Aberdonians. Two hundred years ago in Britain, which is where I grew up, Londoners couldn’t speak with people from Devon or Cornwall or from Yorkshire or Lancashire or Dorset, and God knows they couldn’t converse with Gaelic-speaking Scots or Irishmen or Welshmen. But they all understood their neighbours perfectly, and they conversed fluently in whatever dialect was common to them; and when they needed to, as people always have, they invented bastard languages to permit them to trade with one another. The only means the historical novelist has of dealing with such delicate intricacies is his or her own skill in the manipulation of language and suggestion.
And so I invite my readers, once again, to share my perception, my interpretation, of the world in which my heroes lived in fourteenth-century Scotland. Seven hundred years have elapsed since William Wallace, Andrew Murray, and Robert Bruce fought their campaigns in the name of freedom, but their struggle against tyranny and usurpation is still going on today, around our modern world.
Jack Whyte
Kelowna, British Columbia
August 31, 2014
CHAPTER ONE
FATHER JAMES WALLACE, 1343
I discovered many years ago that Sir Lionel Redvers was the first English knight ever to die at the hands of my cousin William Wallace of Elderslie, and while the discovery pained me at the time, it also gave me a moment of vengeful satisfaction. I have confessed that sin on many occasions but it remains within me unforgiven, for I have never really regretted the satisfaction I derived from it.
Redvers was an undistinguished knight from the county of Suffolk. I only ever met him once, and briefly, and had immediately dismissed him as a nonentity. But within minutes of our encounter he proved how strange are the ways of God, for even a
nonentity may be a catalyst. That headstrong, zealous fool changed every life in Scotland and plunged the whole of Britain into chaos because he brought about the deaths of a woman, her small son, and her unborn second child. The woman was in my care at the time and her name was Mirren Wallace. She was William Wallace’s wife and therefore cousin to me by marriage.
My name is Wallace, too, and I am a priest. A very old priest. I was born in 1272, which makes me seventy-one years old. Sir William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland, was my first cousin and my dearest boyhood friend. Thirty-eight years ago, on the day he died, he asked me, as his confessor, to bear witness to the manner of his dying and to attest to it should men seek to malign him in times ahead. I swore I would, and that is why I am writing this today, so long afterwards.
For nigh on thirty years I had no reason to recall that promise to Will. From being greatly out of favour with his fellow Scots before his death, he was reborn as a hero during King Robert’s struggle to unite Scotland, when the Bruce himself chose to adopt the tactics Will had used against the English, turning the land itself, as well as its folk, to the task of defeating England’s plans to usurp our realm. And from the King’s open admiration of my cousin’s single-minded struggle, a new recognition of Will’s worth and integrity grew up in Scotland. I was content.
I have no idea when the substance of his recognition began to change or who set that in motion, and neither have I any doubt that the change continues. It first came to my attention through a chance conversation with an old friend, another priest, whom I had not seen for years. His name was Declan, and we had served together as chaplains to Will’s outlawed band in Selkirk Forest many years before, when we were both young. Mere chance threw us together again one night about ten years ago, in the abbey at Dunfermline in Fife, where we arrived separately one autumn afternoon on church business. After dinner that night, reminiscing by the dying fire, my old friend unwittingly destroyed my peace of mind.
We were speaking, as always, in Latin. This is not unusual among priests, since we learn it as soon as we begin to train for the priesthood, and we often find it useful to adopt the language of the Church when conversing privately, particularly if there are others nearby with whom we do not wish to share our thoughts. With Father Declan, though, there was another reason. Declan spoke poorly, even haltingly, in our native tongue, as though he had difficulty finding his words in the common language of everyday life. When he spoke Latin, though, he became another person altogether, his conversation fluid and sparkling with wit and ease. I always took pleasure in that difference.
“This is where I last saw your cousin Will,” he said that night.
“In this abbey?” I said, surprised. “I didn’t know he’d ever come to Dunfermline. When was that?”
“It was soon after the defeat at Falkirk,” Declan said, “but I couldn’t tell you exactly when. He was a different Will Wallace from the man I’d known in Selkirk Forest, though. That I can swear to. He looked decades older—haggard and … haunted is what I remember thinking at the time. He spoke to me civilly enough, but I never saw him smile in all the time I was there—he who had always had a smile for everyone and loved to laugh. And then within the month I heard that he had laid down the guardianship.”
“Aye,” I said, “haunted is a good word for how he looked then. He was a man transformed and disfigured by what occurred at Falkirk. He blamed himself for the debacle and would not be consoled, no matter how passionately we condemned the magnates who quit the field with their cavalry and left him and his men alone on foot to face the English bowmen. He carried all the guilt himself for the hundreds killed in the skirmishes, for he had never trusted the loyalty of the magnates and he believed he should have known they would desert him. He never recovered from the shame of it, though God knows there was no shame in it for him. But it sapped his spirit, and he lost the will to fight.”
Declan looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “You seem very sure of that. Did you confess him at that time?”
“No. I offered, but he would have none of it. It was plain to see he had lost all faith in God, in the realm, and even in the King’s cause that had sustained him. He had been King John’s most stalwart supporter since the outset, even in the face of everything that happened, and he saw Scotland’s abandonment of Balliol as a form of suicide—the self-willed death of the realm. He was a man in despair, and I could do nothing to comfort him. All I could do was commend him to his friend Bishop Lamberton, perhaps the single man in all of Scotland he still trusted. Eventually he left on the embassy to France—that was at Lamberton’s instigation—and thence to Rome to parley with the Pope and the cardinals on Scotland’s behalf, and I did not see him again for four years. Not until the night I visited him and heard his last confession in Smithfield prison.”
“But he had regained his faith by then?”
“Aye, he had, and I have thanked God for that. He made a good confession and died in a state of grace, his mind at rest—as far as it could be, knowing what faced him that day. When I left him before dawn that morning, he was the same old Will I had always known and loved.”
Declan smiled. “The Will we both knew and loved in Selkirk Forest. But that’s not the William Wallace men talk about today.”
I shrugged. “That’s as it should be. They see him now, too late, as the man he truly was.”
Declan looked at me strangely. “No,” he said, “that’s not what I meant, Jamie. The man he truly was? What they’re saying today has nothing to do with the man Will Wallace truly was. How can you even pretend to be amused by such a thing? Men speak of him now as if he were a demigod of the ancients, another Finn MacCool, bigger than any living man, greater even than King Robert.”
“Finn MacCool would be flattered,” I said, smiling at the foolishness of what he had said. “Fond memories play tricks on everyone—especially on those who were not there to share what happened. But I’m surprised to hear the ‘greater than King Robert’ slur. That’s inane. And dangerous. In their cups, I suppose.”
“I’ve heard it said, nonetheless, Jamie. On many occasions and by people who were not drunk.”
“Drunk or not, they must have been mad to malign King Robert openly.”
My friend turned to look at me squarely, and again I saw that expression of perplexity on his face.
“What?” I said. “You disagree with me?”
A deep cleft appeared between his brows and he stared at me for several moments. “Forgive me, Jamie,” he said and sat back in his seat. “I thought you must be aware of what I mean—even though I can’t imagine how you can truly not know.” He drew a breath. “They’re changing him, Jamie. Changing everything about him. Will has been dead, what? Twenty-eight years? Most of the folk who knew him are dead themselves. Those who talk about him now are young—not old priests like you and me but plain, very young Scots folk everywhere. They never knew him, never saw him, and they believe what they are being told.”
I could feel myself glowering. “Speak plain, man. What are they being told? And who is telling them?”
I suddenly saw my friend, whom I had known for so long and who had not aged in my mind, as what he really had become, a careworn, middle-aged priest perplexed by the strange inconsistencies of mankind.
“I don’t know, Jamie. I don’t know who is behind such talk, or even when or how or where it began. But folk are saying nowadays that Sir William Wallace was a giant. Not merely in his body, which God knows was big enough, but in everything else, too. In his passions and his convictions, his patriotism and his prowess, in the things he did and the things he believed and the things he achieved. They’re saying that he was a giant in his virtues, too, a towering, saintly figure, divinely inspired, without flaw and lacking any human faults. They’re speaking of him as they would a saint, saying that he had the privy ear of God Himself, and that in the Deity’s name he named and publicly condemned this country’s treasonous enemies, the Comyns and their like, who abandoned Scot
land’s cause at Falkirk fight.”
I sat open-mouthed, appalled by what I was hearing, yet knowing that Declan would not lie about such things, and as I closed my mouth, swallowing the sourness on my tongue, he spoke on.
“I knew Will Wallace, Jamie,” he said in a voice that sounded as shaken as I felt. “Not as well as you did, I know, but that last part frightens me near to death when I think of it, for I know how wrong it is. Will Wallace was no saint.”
I have never felt anything quite like the helplessness that filled me then as I sat there, wordless, beside the smoking embers of the fire. It shook me to the bottom of my being, because the truth that rang in Declan’s voice was unmistakable and it convinced me that I had been derelict in my duty to protect my cousin’s name. I had to swallow hard to moisten my mouth before I could respond.
“I’ve heard none of this, Declan,” I said eventually. “Tell me more, all of it.”
And he did, in great detail.
Wallace was being reborn, he insisted, this time stripped of all human frailties and fallibilities and held up to the adoring crowds as a conquering champion who had been sent by Heaven to rally Scotland against its ancient enemies, and who had been betrayed and undone by traitors. Even as I listened, believing what he said, I had to fight the temptation to shout him down and try to make a liar out of him. The clear suggestion underlying everything he told me was that those ancient enemies were the English, and that was monstrously untrue. They had been our enemies for a time, yes, and we had fought a war with them that lasted, off and on, for eighteen years until we bested them at Bannockburn in the seventh year of King Robert’s reign. But the people of England had not been our enemies until their aging King, Edward Plantagenet, sensing a weakness in us that did not exist, decided to lay claim to our realm and add it to his own, exactly as he had done earlier with Wales. His barons, hungry for Scots land and wealth, had flocked to support him, but the common English folk had never been our enemies before Edward himself provoked us into war with them.