by Jack Whyte
“Ye’re sure he’s a knight?” The question was an idle one, Gaptooth knew, for the tone of the man’s voice indicated that his thoughts were elsewhere.
“Shite, aye, look at him,” the one called Scrymgeour growled. “That fancy sword, an’ thae spurs. He’s a knight, right enough.”
“Aye, I suppose. His name’ll be de Vries, then. Sir Roger de Vries, Hazelrig’s deputy.”
The leader turned his back on the dead knight and looked around him, and Gaptooth quickly closed his eyes, not daring to breathe, but the other had no interest in him, for a moment later he spoke again, his voice coming this time from the far end of the bridgewalk parapet. Harald opened one eye with great care and saw the fellow standing there looking down, then turning back to gaze up at the crossbeam of the great gallows overhead. He stood there for a moment and then bent over the bridge, looking down into the street below.
“Shoomy!”
“Aye, Will.” The response from below was immediate.
“How many bodies have you down there? English.”
A pause, then, “Seven.”
“Any alive?”
“No.”
“Have some of your men cart them up here. And see if you can find some rope. We’ll need lots of rope.”
“There’s loads o’ rope in the wee turret room, there, Will,” one of the two men flanking him said. “Coils o’ the stuff. They must keep it here for the gallows.”
“Aye,” the leader growled, then raised his voice again. “Forget the rope, Shoomy. We hae plenty. Just bring up the bodies.” He turned back to look up at the gallows again, then spoke to the man Scrymgeour. “Hang this one up there, right in the middle. Take his sword, and ye can keep his spurs, but lash his shield across him so folk can see who he was. Hang the other seven up there, too, on each side o’ him. We’ll let folk see that Lanark town is no’ a welcoming place for Englishmen.”
“What about him on the pole? Do we hang him, too?”
Gaptooth’s breath stopped in his throat as the big leader glanced at him. “No,” he said, “I like him just the way he is. Died at his post, that one, failing to guard the dead men over his head. Let him hang where he is. People will notice him, probably more than the rest.”
They all turned away and Gaptooth snatched a cautious breath that was suddenly full of the odour of smoke. The man Scrymgeour cocked his head.
“Are we burnin’ the toun?”
The leader, Will, raised his head and sniffed, then stepped quickly back to the edge of the walkway and bellowed, “Shoomy? I said nothing about burning the toun. What’s going on?”
“I dinna ken, Will, but I’ll find out. If it’s organized, d’ye want it stopped?”
“If it’s organized? Christ Jesus, Shoomy, this is a Scots toun, full o’ Scots folk—of course I want it stopped. An’ if it’s organized I want the organizer right here, to look me in the face an’ tell me when God put him in charge. Gather up the English that are left alive, but put a stop to any wildfire burnin’. And gin anybody winna pay heed, tie him up and hold him for me.”
There followed a brief period wherein the wind sprang up with renewed ferocity, forcing Harald to concentrate hard on not shivering and betraying himself. Scrymgeour and his companion worked hard in the meantime, finding and raising a long ladder to rest against the gallows crossbar and separating heavy coils of rope while their leader stood silent, lost in his own thoughts and seemingly oblivious to the wind. Then a small knot of well-dressed, unarmed men appeared from Harald’s right, eyeing him nervously as they shuffled by him. The man called Will saw them but made no move to acknowledge them until one of them raised a hand timorously to attract his attention.
“Maister Wallace,” he stammered. “Yer pardon, but are you William Wallace?”
The leader drew himself to his full height and frowned as he closed his fingers tightly on the cross-hilt of his sword so that his knuckles showed white against the darkness of his skin. He looked the speaker up and down, then scanned the small group with him before glancing at Scrymgeour and his companion, who had stopped working and now stood watching. He glared at them until they registered his look and turned away to busy themselves again.
“Who are you?”
“Simpson, Your Highness. Maister Tod Simpson, provost o’ Lanark toun. Your men are burnin’ our toun, sir. Can ye no’ stop them?”
The man Wallace—Gaptooth remembered the name now as belonging to the outlaw Hazelrig had been hunting—sighed and flexed his fingers and his frown deepened to a scowl. “Provost,” he said civilly. “Look about you. What can you see? Look up, above your head. That’s a gallows, built for hanging ordinary folk like you and me—Scots folk. In a wee while it will bear new fruit— Englishmen. So, as I said, look around you. My men are burning out a nest of Englishmen. That you and yours will suffer by that, I hae no doubt. But you wouldna be having this much grief gin ye’d been a bit less welcoming to your guests. Surely you see that?” He paused, his face solemn, his scowl less evident. “I’m no’ saying ye harboured the enemy gladly, mind you. But harbour them ye did, and ye stood by wi’out complaint while they loaded these same gallows, time and time again, wi’ your friends an’ neebours. You bought your ain comfort by no’ complainin’ too loudly about the death o’ others, but it was a chancy purchase and now the times hae changed. And so ye maun pay now for that comfort ye enjoyed while other folk, aiblins better folk sometimes, suffered and died at the hands o’ your guests, and if that means some of your houses might burn down, then so be it. Some would ca’ that justice, Provost, so console yersel’ wi’ bein’ yet alive and able to rebuild your toun later on.”
He spun on his heel and stalked away, leaving the delegation of townsfolk to make their own way back whence they had come, and Scrymgeour and the other man were soon joined by a large group carrying the bodies of the seven dead Englishmen from below. By the time the beacons were replenished by the raiders, sometime close to midnight, eight corpses swung from the bar above the gates in the freezing wind, and Harald Gaptooth, ignored and untouched, had come to believe that he would, in fact, die there, nailed to the gallows post. But though he was stiff and sore and bruised and chilled to the bone, he was close enough to the beacon brazier for its heat to keep him alive.
By dawn the storm had passed. The snow had stopped, the screams of maimed and wounded men had been silenced, and as far as Gaptooth could tell from where he was, the flames of the burning houses were dying down. Drifting in and out of awareness as he was, though, he could not have said afterwards when it was that he became aware that the Scots raiders had moved on. There came a time when he noticed that he appeared to be alone on the bridgewalk. The creak of ropes above his head told him the English bodies hung up there still, twisting in the little wind that remained, but he could see or hear nothing to indicate that any other living being shared the walk with him, and as the sun began to crest above the trees in the distance beyond the gates he finally dared to rouse himself.
He straightened his legs and pushed the small of his back against the gallows post, and then, braced for the first time in hours, he raised his right hand and grasped the arrow that had saved his life and pushed it sharply up and away from him. The shaft snapped, his bracing leg gave way, and as he fell, the fleece wrappings slid free, spilling him to the ground with fresh, warm blood gushing down from his neck and into his clothing. He landed hard and heard himself cry out at the agony that seared his left side from neck to ankle, and he knew that something in him was broken. But he was alive, and for a while he writhed on the snow-covered bridgewalk, trying without success to move his left arm and shoulder. Then, weary and chilled and sweating with pain despite the cold, he managed to crawl, on his right side, as far as the centre of the bridgewalk before he lost consciousness.
He was found there by the first searchers from the town, and for the rest of his life he would tell anyone who would listen how he witnessed the fury of the outlawed felon William Wallace on the night th
e Scotch Ogre had first raised his head to ravage Lanark town after killing its sheriff and slaughtering its garrison.
CHAPTER THREE
AWAKENING
When Harald Gaptooth’s rescuers discovered that he was still alive they hurried him into shelter, and because he was the sole survivor of the English garrison of Lanark— the few other wounded had died quickly, after lying in the snowstorm all night—they went to great lengths to keep him alive. His wounds were far more serious than he himself had suspected, and the local medicus—the title was ironic and the man himself little more than a cattle handler—was afraid that the Englishman would die while in his care, a notion for which he had little stomach. Accordingly, within hours of being found on the bridgewalk, Gaptooth was carried to the newly rebuilt Cistercian priory close by the town, where he was placed in the care of the brethren. It was probably the sole place in that entire region where the Englishman might have found sufficient care and attention to enable him to survive.
I know that, because I was there in the priory with him, recovering from wounds of my own, wounds that I had suffered in an unforeseen encounter with a band of hostile Englishmen while escorting my cousin Will’s wife and family to visit her widowed mother the previous month.
Mirren’s father, a prosperous wool merchant named Hugh Braidfoot, had protested against the rapacious taxation policies of Hugh de Cressingham, whom Edward had appointed treasurer for Scotland after the Dunbar battle the year before. Outraged at how Cressingham’s crushing greed was destroying the entire country’s ability to support the wool trade, the driving force behind Scotland’s prosperity, Braidfoot had set out in person in late January that year to bring his concerns for the country’s economic welfare, and for the short-sightedness being shown by the English tax collectors, to the attention of Cressingham in Berwick, where the treasurer was stationed. Whether he had met with Cressingham remained a mystery, for by late February it had been established that Hugh Braidfoot had vanished on that journey, never to be seen or heard from again.
His wife, Miriam, whose health had been failing for some years, collapsed and had been confined to bed ever since, and Will had promised Mirren that he would take her home to Lamington to visit the old lady. But at the last possible moment he had been unable to make the journey, and he had asked me to accompany Mirren and young Willy in his stead, along with a small escort of trusted retainers. Expecting no trouble at all, we had ridden into disaster, unaware that Miriam Braidfoot had been revealed to the sheriff of Lanark as the woman whose daughter was the wife of the outlaw William Wallace.
No one was ever blamed for the betrayal, if betrayal it was. People were inclined to blame it on misfortune rather than on anything else, the odds favouring a casual discussion overheard by unfriendly ears in some tavern. A group of locals had been talking about the disappearance of the wool merchant Braidfoot and someone else asked if he was the same Braidfoot whose daughter was wed to the outlaw Wallace. The question had been reported to Sir William Hazelrig, the new English sheriff of Lanark who had been charged with apprehending the Selkirk Forest outlaws. Instead of setting up surveillance on the widow Braidfoot’s home, where they might easily have captured Wallace or his wife, Hazelrig had sent one of his knights, Sir Lionel Redvers, to arrest the old lady and bring her from Lamington to Lanark for questioning.
We had met the Redvers party on the road, and Mirren had recognized her mother and run to her as she passed by, carried in a litter. The English had reacted predictably, as had Will’s men, and in the fight that followed, Mirren and her young son, Willy, were taken and subsequently killed, as was Mirren’s unborn child, and the widow Braidfoot died on the road. I myself was unarmed, but in running to help Mirren I was knocked down and savagely beaten, then left for dead, with several badly broken bones, my teeth kicked out, and my jaw shattered so that I could neither eat nor drink.
I ought to have died there, by the side of that woodland track, and for a long time, ridden by guilt and feelings of failure, I wished that I had. But my companions managed to keep me alive for long enough to carry me to a monastery outside Lanark town, where I found the care and attention I needed. It was there that I met Harald Gaptooth.
He and I must have arrived within days of each other, but I was unconscious when they brought him in and I remained that way for many more days, so I have no memory of meeting him. He was simply there, in place, when I awoke and began to take notice of my surroundings. At first, he told me, I was no more than a sleeping hulk occupying the cot next to his and he ignored me completely other than to complain at first to the brothers about my incessant snoring. They explained to him that my snoring was a result of my injuries, and indeed he acknowledged later that I grew quieter from day to day as my throat and neck began to heal. As my condition improved, he began to talk to me, as I was the only living being in the place with whom he could communicate. The Cistercian brothers of the priory seldom spoke, even to one other.
The truth was that I spoke even less than the monks who tended us, for my jaw was wired tightly shut. My hearing, though, unfortunately for me at the time, was unimpaired.
I have only distant, pain-hazed impressions of what happened in the first two weeks of our shared confinement, but I believe that Gaptooth took quick advantage of my inability to talk back to him, no matter how foolish or offensive I found his opinions to be. Because I could neither shut out his words nor walk away in protest, he accepted that God had given him a captive audience, undoubtedly for the first and probably the last time in his life. I tried hard, in those first few weeks, to accept his never-ending ramblings dutifully as a penance, but Harald Gaptooth’s mind was an empty vessel—a dark, featureless, echoing place wherein ideas were smothered before birth and words were rendered meaningless—and his constant, droning monotone brought me close to despair many times.
One evening, he was whining about how he had almost been killed on some bridgewalk and how unfortunate he was that all the world seemed set against him despite his desire to be left alone. I had been trying to ignore his self-pitying monotone when my cousin Will’s name snapped me from boredom to eager attentiveness and left me frustrated that I had not been listening more closely, but I could do nothing to interrupt Gaptooth’s drone or induce him to begin all over again.
Having heard his story once, though, and despite being unable to remember most of it at the time, I knew that God had sent me to this place for a purpose: to hear and heed Harald Gaptooth’s tale of woe. And so I waited, with all the patience I could muster, until the wires were removed from my jaw and I could speak clearly enough to ask him to tell me again the story of his last night in Lanark. He was more than happy to repeat his tale, this time with more frowning thought and effort and far more detail, while I asked questions and soaked it all in like a sponge, knowing that one day soon I would write it down.
I erred greatly in my estimation of when I would write it, however, because forty-six years were to elapse before I did.
After hearing his story for the second time, I experienced mounting feelings of anger and frustration over my own inability to do anything useful. That recollection will be familiar to anyone who has ever undergone a prolonged period of convalescence, when one’s mind and spirit are improving measurably from day to day but the physical capacity to express oneself adequately lags far behind. On one such day, when I was feeling at my lowest, the prior himself, Richard of Helensburgh, came to visit me, carrying a sheaf of paper much like the paper on my table today, along with some slender, sharpened sticks of charcoal. The mere sight of him—his friendly smile and the way he raised what he was carrying, brandishing it for my approval—did more for my well-being than anything that had happened since first I woke up and recognized where I was. That had been weeks before, but it felt like years, and now the sight of his gift, which I understood at once would give me back the power of communication, brought tears to my eyes. He noticed them and nodded, as though in commiseration, then laid the paper and char
coal gently on my cot and went to pull the small room’s only chair to where he could sit on it beside me.
Most of my pain had finally died away during the previous few days, save for the unrelenting ache and tightness of my face. The padded wooden braces that framed my head had only recently been removed, finally permitting me to move it from side to side, and only a few hours earlier a pair of monks had raised me up to a halfsitting position for the first time—no simple feat, since my entire torso was heavily braced with splints that were tightly bound in place—and I had at last been able to look cautiously about me.
Gaptooth, whom I saw clearly then for the first time, appeared shocked to see me gazing at him, for he himself was not yet fit to do anything but lie on his back and talk. Clearly jealous of my increased mobility but also gratified that I was yet unable to speak, he had been ranting on ever since in his incessant, grating whine. The unheralded appearance of Prior Richard, though, had stricken him mute, and I felt a smile at his discomfiture, despite my inability to move my mouth. The prior, having placed his chair beside my cot, nodded courteously to my companion and then turned to me before Gaptooth could say a word.