by Jack Whyte
“We Murrays held few possessions in England, but I wrote to Edward when I came home last year, renouncing all of them on behalf of my family.” He smiled diffidently. “It was not difficult to do, and we will scarcely feel the loss of what we have resigned, but there was principle involved, and that was what dictated my actions.”
He held up one hand in mock penitence. “I know what I have said flies in the face of centuries of usage and tradition, but times change and customs change with them. The old feudal ways are no longer suited to this world in which we live. I have examined my conscience with great care and I can find no good reason for believing, in the depths of my heart, that Edward of England has even the slightest, most minute claim on my fealty—not on my personal life, not on my life as a free-born Scot. And that entirely spurious question of ancient feudal loyalty is the cause of our country becoming mired in this politically engendered swamp in the first place, when our noble families, my own prominent among them, recognized the Plantagenet as feudal overlord and Lord Paramount of Scotland, according to arcane and obscure criteria unused for hundreds of years. In doing that, they jeopardized their own future existence and gelded our land’s new King before he was even crowned. And we all know how things have progressed since then.”
Will stood up and walked away, but took no more than three paces before he stopped and drew himself up to his full, imposing height. I watched, wondering what he would do, while he stood unmoving. Then he swung back, and stepped forward to confront Andrew de Moray with his outstretched hand. And when he did, he was the other William Wallace, the one of whom men spoke in hushed tones.
“I ask your pardon, Andrew Murray,” he said. “For doubting you. Doubting your good faith in spite of what I knew in my heart.”
Andrew grasped the outstretched hand. “Freely granted,” he said, smiling. “But don’t ever doubt my prowess with a quarterstaff again. For as long as you promise to do that, I will promise never to hit you again as hard as I did.” He threw open his arms, and my cousin stepped into his embrace.
They had not yet finished their colloquy on tactics, though, and it continued in the newly rekindled warmth of their friendship.
“So, then,” Will said, “we are agreed between us that from this day forth, we will focus upon destroying knights and men-at-arms ahead of foot soldiers. Is that correct?”
“It is. But how will we do that? The footmen are there to protect the others, to throw a screen between them and do casual harm until the horse are ready to attack. If the mounted men should be our targets, how will we reach them?”
“Any way we can,” Will said. “We’ll use the land itself against them—to entrap them. We’ll dig holes, set snares, burn the forests and the countryside around them. Whatever we need to do, we’ll do, and Edward of England can roast in Hell for all we care. We’ll stalk his knights and kill them any way we can.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
BERSERKER
We walked slowly along the hillside after that, all three of us leaning to our right against the slope, Andrew and I leading our horses for the couple of miles taking us back to Will’s camp. It was probably awkward and uncomfortable walking, now that I think of it again, but our mood was lighthearted by then and we were fit young men, so we barely noticed any discomfort. We had the luxury of time in hand, for once, with no need to hurry, and so we dawdled along, enjoying our fleeting freedom from responsibility, and reminiscing, as friends do, about bygone days. And as we went, the mass of Andrew’s army overtook us in good order, spilling along the hillside track below us in quickmoving, disciplined divisions of about a hundred men apiece. Their path was wide in places, and reasonably level in others, after hundreds of years of foot traffic. On their left, as they went south, the slope fell steeply to the sea, which stretched away, empty of visible life, to the eastern horizon.
“They don’t even know we’re up here,” Will said. “But they’re moving well.”
“Aye, their morale is good,” Andrew said. “As for their not knowing we’re here, that’s not surprising. The sun’s at our back.” He turned and squinted up, over his right shoulder. “Our scouts found us quickly enough, though.” It was true. The flanking scouts ahead of the march had found us, but since they could see who we were, they had not come close enough to interrupt our talk.
Will hawked and spat, then pointed down the hill. “Look at that. You were saying earlier that the magnates will join hands wi’ the English nobility to keep the likes of you and me from threatening their way of life.”
“Aye, what of it?”
“You said they wouldn’t … what was it you said? They wouldn’t deem us worthy of recognition as a fighting force, for fear of granting us legitimacy.”
“Nor will they.”
“Ah, but they will. You’re wrong for once, Andrew de Moray, and I’m glad to be able to tell you that here, so I can rub your nose in it.”
“Excellent, then. It pleases me that I can make you happy.” Andrew’s grin was wide. “But rub my nose in what?”
“In your lack of insight. You’re looking too closely at the one aspect of this thing—the magnates’ self-centred need for selfprotection—and you are not seeing the other sides of it at all.” He nodded towards the men moving on the hillside below, most of whom had overtaken us and were now rapidly leaving us behind. “Those are your men down there, on their way to join mine. Between the two of us we have, what? Five thousand men? Six? Perhaps even as many as seven thousand, though I would be surprised at that. We should take the time to count them one of these days. And now they’re all heavily armed and freshly supplied, thanks to Wishart and his sailor friends. So which of your self-interested magnates is going to turn us away in the face of the coming fight?”
“What coming fight?”
“The fight that’s going to happen when Percy’s army marches north to the Forth and the remaining Scots magnates realize that you and I have the men to stop them going any farther.” Will had stopped walking again and was watching Andrew’s face, and when he saw the doubtful look in the Highlander’s eyes he grinned exultantly. “They’ll want to lead them, won’t they? They’ll demand to lead our men, because they’re magnates and they will assume that gives them the right to take any men available. Am I right? And so we won’t object. We’ll let them take command. And once they think they are in command, they’ll come to fight as magnates, armed and armoured and mounted, all bright in their knightly colours and flapping banners, and we’ll line up behind them, against the English.”
“What? And sacrifice all our folk?”
Will shook his head pityingly. “Listen to yourself, Andrew de Moray. D’you think me completely mad? Who do you think our men will listen to, once the fighting starts? The magnates, or you and me?”
“They’ll listen to their commander—the senior man present, whoever he is.”
“And he will be a buffoon like all the rest of them, who won’t think twice about throwing our folk to the wolves, pitting them head-on against the English horse to be slaughtered while he and his cronies plot to surrender and negotiate more lands and money out of Edward. You might listen to a fool like that, but you were born and bred in that tradition. The men who follow you today would shake their heads over your foolishness. They’d think you crazed. This time, for the first time ever, our men will be ours, under our command. We’ll tell them, well before the fighting starts, exactly what we want them to do. And then we’ll do it. Have you ever been to Stirling?”
The young lord of Moray cast a quick look at me before he answered, as though to gauge what I was thinking. “I was there once, as a boy, at the castle with Lord Balliol.”
“And what do you remember of it?”
“Almost nothing, apart from the castle itself, or the view from the battlements. It was a long time ago, about when I first met you and Jamie. In fact it was then, during that same excursion. We had travelled down from Aberdeen, through the mountain passes of the Mounth to Scone Abbey, and t
hen to Perth, and from there all the way to Glasgow Cathedral and Paisley Abbey, by way of Stirling.”
“And what do you remember about Stirling Castle?”
“The height of it,” Andrew said, “up on that massive crag. It was the most wondrous thing I had ever seen. The rock itself is astounding, and at its base, hundreds of feet beneath, the bright, broad miles of land that stretch eastward to the sea are like a carpet spread at its feet.”
“Did you ever go down and look at that bright green carpet?”
“What? Go down there? No. What reason would I have had for doing that?”
“Did you cross the bridge as you continued south from there? You must have.”
“The bridge … Oh yes, you mean the bridge across the river there, the Forth. Aye, we did. I remember thinking it was a strange place to build a bridge, for the river was neither deep there nor swift flowing. And I recall it was very narrow, the bridge. When we reached it, a wagon, a farm cart, was crossing towards us and we had to sit there and wait for it to pass because the farmer could neither turn his cart around nor back his horse off with safety.”
“What season of the year was that, do you remember?”
“Hmm. It was early spring, because we had waited in Aberdeen for the snow to melt in the mountain passes.”
Will nodded. “Aye, I recall. And the grass around the bridge at Stirling that day, was it green?”
“Of course it was green. It was springtime.”
“Aye. Bright green?”
“Very bright,” Andrew replied, frowning a little at this odd line of questioning.
“It wasn’t grass,” Will said. “It was new-sprung water weeds.” Andrew de Moray gaped at him. “We’ve been standing here too long, and we should get down to the road. We’ll talk as we walk. You might have already heard some of the things I’m going to say next, for there’s nothing secret about them, but just listen.”
We made our way diagonally downhill for several hundred paces before he spoke again.
“The English have never had great difficulty invading Scotland south of the Forth,” was how he began. “The road across the border at Berwick is wide open, even when the castle there isn’t occupied by an English garrison, and smaller forces—raiding parties—can cross farther west, fording the tidal flats of the Solway Firth, north of Carlisle. That is not always easy. In fact it’s difficult most of the time, but it’s far from impossible. No matter which way they come, though, through Berwick or Carlisle, once the English armies are north of the border they may come and go as they please—south of the Forth.
“North of Forth, though, it’s another matter, different in almost every respect, and that is because of Stirling.” He turned to address Andrew. “Nowadays you have English garrisons everywhere up there, from what I hear.”
“We do,” Andrew said. “All over the north. When I arrived home last year, there wasn’t a castle north of Forth that wasn’t garrisoned by Englishmen—even my own was in English hands.” He flashed a grin. “That’s not the case today, for we took some of them back. But there are still too many foreign garrisons up there that need to be thrown out. But what point are you trying—?”
Will suddenly lurched to one side, spun around, and half fell. He only stopped himself from falling by clutching at my horse’s stirrup leathers. He half hung, half stood there for a moment, holding one foot raised behind him. His head was down, and he was sucking air loudly through his teeth.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
He released his grip on the stirrup leathers and straightened up. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I am.” He grasped his ankle in one hand and probed deeply at it with his forefinger. “I think I’m fine. The way my ankle twisted under me, I feared at first I had wrenched it badly, but I think I’ve been more fortunate than I deserve.” He stood erect again, testing his weight on his foot. “It’s fine,” he said quietly. He glanced at me. “I wasn’t looking where I put my feet, and it might have cost me dearly. I could have broken my ankle or worse, and endangered our entire venture.” He faced downhill again and stepped forward resolutely. Andrew and I fell in on either side of him. “What was I talking about before that happened?”
“About the situation in the north,” Andrew answered. “The occupation up there.”
“Aye … What has happened up there is an entirely new situation, as you know, Andrew. It’s important to understand that, and how it came to be. What happened was … unconscionable.” He looked quickly at me. “I remember that word from our school in Paisley. Is it right?”
“Of course,” I said. “It means neither right nor reasonable and, by extension, morally blameworthy.”
“Aye, I thought so.” He turned back to Andrew. “It was unconscionable. The English garrisons were allowed to march into Scotland, north and south, uncontested and in good faith, in order to hold the royal castles safe until the succession was resolved. That was misguided optimism, of course—sheer stupidity. There’s no disputing that now. But it was done in good faith, nonetheless. That the English were in fact invading the northern half of the realm that had always been closed to them was a truth that no one witnessing the events at the time could have imagined, let alone suspected, because Edward Plantagenet had not yet shown any signs of the duplicity that is now recognized as his standard behaviour.”
He stopped walking and stamped his foot down hard on a slab of stone beside him. “Good,” he said. “No pain at all. That’s hard to believe.” He started walking again. “But now let’s think back again to Stirling. The last thing I heard, and that was two weeks ago, before we left the south to strike into Fife and find Dundee, was that Percy and Clifford were at Ayr, awaiting reinforcements from England. Don’t ask me what became of the nonsense with Wishart and the Stewart, for I’ve no idea. We have heard nothing from anyone on that topic for nigh on two clear months. But the reinforcements for Percy are our main concern, because two weeks have passed since then. As soon as those reinforcements arrive, which should be any day now, Percy will take them north to reinforce the garrisons in Moray and elsewhere, and recapture the castles that you took back from them, Andrew. And that’s where we may have our opportunity.”
“What opportunity? To do what?”
We reached the flat surface of the road as Andrew asked his question.
“To beat the whoresons,” Will answered. “To stop them and savage them and send them running home with their tails between their legs.”
Andrew’s eyes opened wide. My cousin seldom used profanity, and each time I heard him do so I was struck by the potency he achieved by using it so sparingly.
“Now there is a feast I would like to attend,” Andrew said admiringly. “Would you be willing to tell me how you think it might be achieved?”
“Happily,” Will said. “If you are content to let me dream a little.”
“Dream away.”
Will grinned. “D’you recall that beautiful carpet of green grass at the foot of the castle rock in Stirling, the one that reaches all the way east to the sea?” Andrew nodded, cautiously. “Well,” Will said, “it is my understanding that all that lush greenness is no more than the fragile skin of a giant bog. There are a few cultivated fields and meadows in places, mainly on the outskirts of Stirling town itself, but for the most part that green plain, so pleasant from above on the castle crag, is a muddy wilderness, and filled with dangers. They call it the Carse of Stirling, and it bars the way north from there to the Highlands. It’s a huge area, the valley of the River Forth, which twists and turns all the way through it like a great, looping serpent, flooding with each heavy rain and keeping the surrounding ground almost liquid throughout the year. There’s no drainage there at all, I’m told, because the whole region lies on top of a bed of clay and the ground is so low that there’s no place for the water to drain into. So you have one enormous, horse-devouring bog.” He turned to me. “Did you know that, Father James?”
I noted the use of the honorific. “I did,�
� I said, “but solely because I have read some of the records of the Abbey at Cambuskenneth describing some early efforts of the monks to reclaim arable land from the carse when the abbey was built, more than a hundred years ago.”
“That’s my cousin Jamie,” Will said fondly, smiling at Andrew. “He has never been there, but he knows everything there is to know about the place.” I had heard this song before and knew it was useless to attempt to contradict him. “He carries so much knowledge in his head that I am constantly expecting it to overflow, but it never seems to fill up.
“Anyway,” he continued. “Thank God for a level road underfoot, eh? But what I wanted to say was that the most important section of the carse is what the locals call the Yett, the Gate. It’s a narrowing passage, like a funnel, that runs south to north between the two big crags that flank the river there—the one the castle’s built on, and Abbey Craig, about a mile and a half west. That mile-and-a-halfwide space is, quite genuinely, the solitary gateway by land to the Highland north. Any army—no, every army—marching north has to pass through it, crossing the carse, with the Forth River in the middle of it. Once through the Yett, the entire country opens up ahead, so if an invading army is to be stopped at all, then it’s there, in that narrow gap.”
Andrew’s expression was thoughtful. “So all the English garrisons in the north today came up that way?”
“They did. Every last man of them. But no one disputed their passage.”
“What difference would that have made?” When Will did not reply, Andrew’s eyes narrowed. “I asked the question hoping for an answer. Would it, could it, have made a difference?”
Will shrugged. “Beyond question. As I’ve said already, I’ve never been there, but there’s not a doubt in my mind. Had the right man been at the Yett to meet them, the English would never have passed the Forth.”
“None of them? That seems like wishful thinking, Will.”