The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  My imagination shied away from thoughts of what Will’s vengeance might entail in the times ahead. I loved him deeply and admired him greatly, but I had known Will since we were children together and I had shared with him the unspeakable shame and terror of being sexually violated by the drunken English soldiers who had murdered his parents and decapitated his baby sister while he watched. Perhaps because of my vocation, I had eventually forgiven the benighted souls who had abused us, but my cousin never had. The wounds inflicted on William Wallace’s soul that day had been deep and grievous, and he had never forgotten a single detail of what had happened. Nor had he ever considered, even for a moment, forgiving either the crime or its perpetrators, whom he had classified thereafter as “the English.” And now, two decades later, he had been deprived again, by other, equally rapacious Englishmen, of his nearest and dearest loves, the wife and children who had, within his own mind, been his sole reason for living.

  I had no doubt of my cousin’s unquenchable capacity for vengeance, and none at all about the single-minded, implacable ferocity with which he would set about inflicting revenge upon those he believed had wronged him.

  Now, I turned away from the concealed door and stepped to where I could reach out and touch the weapon. Though superb, it was simply too large and too heavy for an ordinary man to use. It had stood here unused, in the corner by Will’s fireplace, from the time Shoomy had claimed it for Will until Will learned of the murder of his wife and children. From that day on, the sword had gone wherever William Wallace went, and its fame was spreading as rapidly as was his own.

  “Jamie, welcome!” I leapt with fright at the sound of Will’s voice, for I had not heard the door opening at my back, and I spun to face him. He was holding something in his hands, something draped in a cloth. “Arnulf told me you were here. It’s good to see you, Cousin,” he said in his deep, rolling voice.

  I was watching his eyes, trying to gauge his mood and fighting to conceal my apprehension. It had not really been a long time since he and I had last seen each other, a mere few months, and the last words he had said to me when we parted had been instructions on protecting and safeguarding his family. Within hours of that conversation, though, both our worlds had changed forever.

  Mirren’s mother had been identified and taken into custody by Sir Lionel Redvers, a knight from Yorkshire who had been charged by the sheriff of Lanark, William Hazelrig, to find and detain the wife and family of the notorious outlaw William Wallace. We— Will’s family and I—had encountered the arresting party by purest accident. Mirren had recognized her mother and gone to her assistance. In the melee that followed, I had been left for dead by the side of the road, my responsibilities grossly unfulfilled and my precious charges ripped from my care. Will’s two-year-old son, William, had died soon after that, fatally injured in the skirmish—whether by accident or not we will never know—and callously thrown aside to die among the bushes lining a forest track, and Mirren, with her unborn child, had died even more brutally the following night, kicked to death by a drunken, oafish lout of a jailer who had fed her stillborn baby to his pigs.

  Within a week of hearing those tidings, Will had killed both Redvers and Hazelrig, before attacking the garrison at Lanark and marching south to Sanquhar Castle to savage and destroy another English force. William Wallace had unleashed his fury and given notice to Englishmen throughout southern Scotland that they could no longer ride roughshod over the people here without suffering dire consequences.

  I saw the changes in him at first glance and felt the shock of seeing them, even as I wondered whether he was being similarly taken aback by the ravages in my own face.

  He was as big, as broad, and as strong as ever, and perhaps even larger—wider in the shoulders and deeper in the chest than he had been before. But there were deeply chiselled lines in his face that were new and cruel looking. His eyes looked feverish, brighter than was natural, I thought, and they seemed to flicker and pulsate with nervous energy. The most striking change, though, was in his hair, now shot through with silver. It was not old-man grey—he was not yet twenty-five, after all—but it was greying nonetheless, individual strands of silver standing out clearly in the haloed light from behind him.

  “Wait,” he said, “let me put this down.” He went to the sideboard by the hidden door, where he carefully set down what he had been carrying, a large jug of some kind. “Fresh buttermilk,” he said, smiling as he turned to look at me again. “New from the churn.”

  He came back to me then and reached out a hand to cup my chin, digging thumb and forefinger into my cheeks and tilting my head towards the light as he peered closely at my face. “They made a mess of you, Cuz,” he murmured, “but at least there’s no scars. And you were too pretty anyway. I always thought a face like yours was wasted on a priest … You haven’t said a word. Can you talk?”

  I managed to find a smile at last. “Yeth,” I said, exaggerating wildly. “I can thpeak and thay nathty thingth to people that they don’t underthtand, and thometimeth I even thing with the monkth at Thunday thervitheth.”

  He laughed, and I cannot recall ever hearing a more welcome sound. “Dear God,” he said, “it’s good to see you again. I’ve missed you this past while. Come, sit down, for we’ve much to talk about, even if Wishart hasn’t sent you here to put me to work of one kind or another.” He stepped back to the sideboard and removed the cloth covering from the jug, then held the jug up to me. “Will you join me? It’s cold and it’s fresh.”

  “Pour two, then,” I said, hooking a chair from the table with my foot and preparing to sit down. “And I do have instructions for you from his lordship, but they can wait until later.”

  “Fine, but don’t sit down yet. There’s a well-built fire in the grate and a live coal in a firebox on the mantel there. I just brought it from the main fire outside, so it should flare up easily. And there’s tapers in that long tube beside it, so you light us a fire while I pour us our drinks. And keep talking while you do it. Do you know how long it’s been since I last spoke Latin?” He paused. “How long has it been since we two last spoke? Because I’ll swear I haven’t said a Latin word since then. No one around here speaks anything but Scots.”

  For the next half-hour, while the fire grew stronger and the buttermilk lasted, we sat together and enjoyed each other as amicably as we had when we were boys, and not until we had been conversing for at least half that time did I become aware of strangenesses in his way of speaking.

  I had brought up the matter of his loss and my own feelings of guilt over what had happened, talking about how I had been unable to help Mirren and the children in all the awful consequences of our encounter with the English knight Redvers. It was not a subject I would have willingly confronted, but I was aware of its being there between us, like an open wound, and I knew I would never be able to look Will directly in the eye until I had admitted my fault in the whole thing and laid bare the guilt that had been haunting me ever since. And so, despite the fear that clutched me like an icy fist, I acknowledged my dereliction and asked my cousin if he could ever forgive me.

  He sat up straighter suddenly and bent towards me, his eyes filled with concern. “Jamie,” he said, “in God’s holy name, how can you believe that what happened that day had anything to do with you? You are a priest—you’ve always been a priest, even before you were ordained. You were never a warrior, and no one ever expected you to be one, so what nonsense is this you’re babbling? What could you have done against such odds, even had you owned a sword or a bow? No, Cousin, put your mind at rest on this matter. It was no fault of yours that the woman and the wee boy died that day. That was the Devil’s work, done by the Devil’s minions, Redvers and Hazelrig, and they have died for it.”

  In the brief silence that followed, two things became startlingly clear to me: he was being completely truthful, and he had not once spoken either Mirren’s name or young Will’s, referring to them only as “the woman” and “the wee boy.” Was he aware
of what he was doing, working so carefully to avoid naming them? Had he lost his mind in his grief? Mayhap he had simply decided it was better and less painful for him not to call them by their names, thereby avoiding the pain and distress of contemplating them too freshly.

  He rose up then and crossed in front of the fire to place his mug on the tabletop by the empty jug. “So, Wishart has instructions for me. I’m surprised it has taken him so long to send them, for I’ve been expecting them since I left him in Glasgow last month. How is the old warlock?”

  “He’s well, Cuz, but he’s not as young and spry as he was when we first met him.”

  “God’s blood, is anyone? He was old even then, and that was a half score years ago at least.”

  “Closer to three-quarters. I was ten, I think—perhaps eleven.”

  “But he’s hale, eh?”

  “He is, thank God, and as curious as ever. He wants to know how many men you have with you now. I do, too.”

  “Altogether? I couldn’t tell you. I’ve made no attempt to count them recently. They’re here aplenty, but there’s been no need for an actual tally, though I suppose that’s a stupid thing to say. There’s always a need for such things. But I came back from Perth with close to two hundred new men. God knows I never sought them out or asked them to come with me—they just followed me back. They wanted to fight for King John and the realm, and they were willing enough. But they would have been worse than useless in a real fight—farmers and labourers, shepherds and swineherds, many of them with no weapons other than a wee knife or a heavy stick, and some with not even that much. Made Ewan and Shoomy near sob with sorrow when they saw them.

  “We’ve been training them since we got back—them and others like them—though we’re sorely lacking in weapons, even for training. But at least they all know the difference now between the dangerous end of a club and the end they have to hang on to. And a very few of them can even use a bow. So they’re getting better all the time, but not fast enough to suit Long John and the others. What we need to do now is to take them raiding somewhere. That’s when they’ll really start to learn in earnest, when they’re pitted against folk who are fighting back, for their lives.”

  “So how many actual fighting men do you have, can you guess?”

  He inhaled deeply. “Let’s see … perhaps five hundred, ready to fight. There are three other camps here in the forest, with two or three hundred in each.”

  “That’s nigh on twelve hundred men.”

  “Aye, give or take a hundred or so. Do you have a use for them?”

  He laughed again. “And am I being the fool even to ask? Of course you have a use for them. Or Wishart does. Come on then, Cousin, for I think the time has come. What does the old hawk want?”

  “He wants the English out of Scotland, above and beyond all else. I know you spoke with him at length before you came back here, but how much do you know of what he plans to do?”

  Will eased himself back in his chair and narrowed his eyes, gazing at me with an expression I found hard to read. “He was talking of holding his army in check at Irvine … to dance a pavane with Percy and Clifford’s force but not to fight with them. I think that’s worse than foolish and I told him so to his face, but he wouldn’t listen. Nor would Stewart.”

  I nodded. “Do you know what he hopes to achieve by doing that?”

  “Let me guess. A lingering death from old age?” His voice was heavy with sarcasm. “No, I don’t know what his hopes are. But I know what Henry Percy is likely to do, once he has figured out a way to—”

  I spoke right over him. “He’s playing the doddering old fool and poltroon, as is the Steward, fussing and fretting and refusing to commit their army—though he’s keeping it safe against attack— because he is attempting to buy sufficient time for you and Andrew Murray and several others in the realm to unite the folk in a general uprising and act decisively.”

  He grunted. “So now we come to it,” he said. “Go ahead, then. Tell me what he wants me to do.”

  I drew a deep breath and told him, speaking words that I had never imagined I could ever say: “He wants you to behave like the Plantagenet at Berwick: to raise the dragon banner against the English garrisons in Lothian with fire and sword and no quarter.”

  “Does he, by Jesus?” He pursed his lips as he sank back into his chair. “Fire and sword in Lothian, eh?” He pondered that for a moment longer, then nodded slowly. “Aye, it makes sense. My first thought was to refuse, because we’d be waging war against our own. But are they our own, these Lothian folk? Or are they Edward’s? They’ve made no effort to rise up against anyone, and God Himself knows that Lothian is a hell-nest of Englishry, right enough.”

  “Aye, it is, and most of those are safe behind high walls much of the time. Which leads me to something else he bade me tell you. You are to harass the garrisons in any way you can—to coax them out into the open and then smash them—but he doesn’t want you wasting any time in sieges. There’s no time for sieges. He said to tell you that you need to savage the lands outside and around the castles and garrisoned towns, burning crops and killing livestock to keep them out of English hands and bellies.”

  “And the folk who live there? What happens to them?”

  “They suffer. And that’s regrettable because they’re Scots, but you yourself just said that of all the folk in Scotland’s realm, those in Lothian have been more tolerant and supportive of the English. So now they must pay the piper for being too friendly to the enemy. Just as the townspeople of Lanark did when you went there.”

  He stared at me, his eyes narrowing, but I did not look away, for I knew the truth of that story, as witnessed by Harald Gaptooth.

  “And what will Wishart and the Steward be doing while that is happening?” he asked me.

  “Keeping Percy and Clifford away from you for as long as may be, preventing them from striking at your back. They won’t dare march against you if it means leaving an undefeated army intact at their own rear. I can’t speak for Clifford, but I know not even Henry Percy would be that foolhardy.”

  “So be it, then. Tell me exactly what their lordships want me to do.”

  Half an hour later, he professed himself satisfied and went to the door, where he shouted to someone outside to summon his lieutenants to meet him at the command centre in one hour.

  “So,” he asked me, coming back and sitting down at the table again, “how will you find Murray when you arrive up there? From what I’ve heard, his territories are vast beyond comprehension and mainly trackless, and he could be anywhere among them, high or low. Where will you even start to look for him?”

  “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. I know his home is Auch Castle, on the promontory called the Dark Isle, but if he is campaigning as well and as widely as his uncle David of Bothwell says he is, I don’t expect to find him there. What I do hope, though, is to find someone there who knows where he is and will take me to him.”

  “That makes sense,” my cousin growled, “but by the sweet Jesus, Jamie, that’s a long way to ride, all by yourself and in a hurry and through inhospitable lands. You’ll never make it in time.”

  “I have to. I’ve no option. If I don’t reach Moray in time to send Andrew south to meet you at Dundee at the appointed time, then what the bishop said is likely to come true: all of Scotland will go down into slavery under Edward’s heel.”

  I saw his eyes darken and his brow wrinkle as he absorbed that, but before he could comment I continued: “It’s not as bleak as it sounds. We’ve calculated the total distance from Selkirk town to Inverness, erring always on the side of caution, and it’s close to twelve score miles. That is the farthest it can be.”

  He stared at me as if he thought I had lost my wits. “Twelve score miles? Is that what you said? Twelve score? That’s nigh on two and a half hundred! Who did the calculation?”

  “I did, with the help of some priests who know the terrain up there. If I leave here tomorrow morning, I’ll have th
ree clear weeks to find Murray and ensure he can gather his people and meet you in time. Twenty-one days, to travel two hundred and forty miles. That’s less than twelve miles a day.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off. “I know, twelve miles a day would be nothing in England with good English roads beneath my horse’s hooves, but there are no good roads north of Stirling. Depending upon the weather, among other things, twelve miles a day over open moors and mountains and up along the coast might turn out to be difficult, but I’m sure it won’t be impossible. And coming back south with Murray to Dundee will be more straightforward. According to his uncle David, the shortest route for him would be directly south from Inverness, using the mountain passes through the Highlands of Badenoch and the Mounth until he reaches Perth, and from there it’s scarce twenty miles east along the Tay to Dundee. He could do it easily in thirteen days and be waiting for you when you arrive in Dundee.”

  Will was frowning at me. “Why Dundee, Jamie? Why would we meet up there? It’s a nothing place.”

  I told him then about the supply ship full of armour and weapons that would be waiting for him there. “It’s a quiet place, too, don’t forget, away from normal traffic paths, and it has a garrisoned castle, a legitimate target for an attack. Taking that will give you and Murray time to blood your armies as a united force, to renew your friendship, and to become familiar with each other’s forces. All without too much attention or distraction from the English, who will have other things to occupy them elsewhere. The bishop expects the entire southwest to be crawling with English armies by the middle of August. Percy and Clifford’s group are already there, of course, and they’ll stay there, but there are rumours of another force being sent north to reinforce them, a levy raised from the northern sheriffdoms of Lancaster, Westmoreland, and Cumberland and commanded by Cressingham. Three hundred horse, according to our source, supported by ten thousand foot. A rumour, as I said, but not unreasonable and more than likely probable.”