by Jack Whyte
“And what if Bek is not in Glasgow?”
“Then we’ll have to find him.”
“That could take weeks. And we haven’t got weeks to waste. We need to get to Stirling. That’s our first priority.”
“Then make a special plea in your prayers that he be elsewhere when we reach Glasgow, for if he is there, he might well answer Warrenne’s letter directly and send us straight back here with it. And if it turns out he is elsewhere, we’ll be able to send someone from Glasgow to find him, without going ourselves.”
We went about our business for the remainder of the day until it came time to take delivery of the dispatches for Bishop Bek. And the next morning we travelled north obediently.
We parted company with the other delegates before we reached Paisley, and we made our way directly to the cathedral in Glasgow. We had barely settled ourselves at the table in the room we had been shown to when, greatly to my surprise, for I knew that he must be busy beyond belief with diocesan affairs, with little time for unexpected guests, Canon Lamberton himself swept in. He welcomed us both warmly, expressing his own surprise to see us there when he had thought us safely lodged with Earl Warrenne. The first thought that had crossed his mind, of course, was that our illicit activities had been detected and we had been banished, but then he realized that had we been caught spying in the enemy camp we would have been hanged—after being tortured to find out what we had learned.
I quickly set his mind at ease and told him why we were there, that we had brought confidential dispatches from the earl himself to Bishop Bek, and he frowned, though whether from displeasure at our mission or at the mere mention of Bek’s name I could not tell. Bek was not in Glasgow, he told us, and he did not know where the man was.
“We have to find him, Canon,” I said. “Have you no slightest notion where he might be?”
“None at all. He barely spoke to me in all the time he was here. He could be back in England by now, for all I know. Though I doubt that. He has work to do on his master’s behalf, and he’ll be here until it’s done. You will simply have to wait here for him to return, or for someone to come along who can take you to him.”
“You know we can’t afford to simply sit around idly waiting, Canon. We should be in the English camp, doing what you sent us there to do.”
“You could leave the dispatches here for him and go back.”
“Someone might be curious why we did not wait and complete our task. If he has responses to anything, we’ll be expected to deliver them to the earl.”
“Hmm.” He had been holding a folded letter in his hand when he entered the room, and now he held it out to me wordlessly. I took it from him and held it towards the nearest light, peering at the inscription.
“This is my letter,” I said, surprised. “The one I asked you to send to Stirling. Why didn’t you send it?”
“I did. The priest who carried it collapsed and died within a few miles of here on the very day he left. Sadly, he was not found for more than a week, and then the discovery was accidental. It was the smell that was found, in truth, for the man himself was not known to be missing before his body was discovered. The wallet he was carrying was returned to me, since I had sent him out on his last journey.” He grimaced. “I was looking at it this very afternoon, wondering what to do with it—send it to you or await your return—when word came to me that you were here. Was it important, your letter to the abbot?”
“No.” I had been fingering the letter, squeezing it, and now I tore it open, exposing the other one inside it. “This was important, though. It’s to Will, explaining what I’ve been doing among the English—or what I was about to start doing.” I held it up now between finger and thumb, brandishing it gently as thoughts began to click into place in my mind. “Now I really have to find Bek—but not too soon.”
Father Thomas gave me a puzzled look. “What does that mean?”
I turned back to Lamberton, still shaking the letter in my hand. “I have to talk to Will. I need to explain this to him. He has not heard a single word from me in weeks, so he’ll be wondering what’s wrong. How long will it take to get to Stirling in a hurry?”
“It’s about thirty miles. Two days, mayhap three, depending on the weather and your own strength and stamina.”
“Good, then I’ll need a week. Three days there, three days back, and one day with Will and Andrew. In the meantime, we’ll have to make a show of hunting for Bek. Where is he least likely to have gone?”
“God alone knows,” Lamberton muttered. “Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Scone, Paisley—he could be anywhere. What are you driving at?”
“Priorities, Canon Lamberton. I need to talk with Will, face to face. To do that, I need to go to Stirling, where he’s headed. So I’ll say we went to Stirling looking for Bek at the abbey. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going, so he can’t expect to be easily found. As soon as I’ve seen Will and Andrew, I’ll come back here. If Bek’s back by then, so be it. If he’s not, then I might wait, depending on what Will and Andrew have to say about it. By that time, we’ll have been away from Earl Warrenne for about two weeks, and he’ll be the first to see the folly of simply sitting around waiting and wasting any more time than we’ve already lost.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE ENEMY CAMP
No matter how many times I see the castle at Stirling, it always leaves me with a fresh sense of wonder, due in no small measure to the changes I have noted over the years since I saw it first. When I was a young lad barely out of boyhood, the place was already formidable, perched atop its great, towering crag and overlooking all the land below. But in those days its main fortifications were wooden palisades of heavy logs—enormous logs, to be sure, but logs nonetheless—backed with ramparts of packed and hardened clay. King Alexander, an admirer of Edward Plantagenet’s prowess and opinions on all things military, had already begun replacing those with walls of stone, copying the new castles the English King had started to build everywhere, and that task has been continuing ever since.
Now, five decades later, the incessant construction has brought about changes that would have seemed incredible in those earliest days. The wooden palisades are all gone, replaced by massive walls of sculpted stone that announce the place, even from afar, as being impregnable, and those walls continue to increase in height and bulk from day to day even now, fed by an unending stream of labourers and masons, so that, after an interval of mere months, a returning visitor may perceive great changes in the sweep or shape of a certain wall, or the height of a flanking tower, signs of growing strength adding to the aura of invincibility that surrounds the place.
Father Thomas and I rode into Stirling village from the south, riding our mounts openly beneath the slopes of the great crag and relying on our obvious religious trappings to suggest to anyone curious enough to look that we were on our way east to Cambuskenneth, the abbey that had graced Stirling’s name for nigh on two hundred years. The English garrison was pent up within the castle’s walls that day and no one appeared to take any notice of us as we passed by, making our way along the road that led out north from the castle crag towards Stirling Bridge and the causeway that Will and Andrew and I had talked about a few weeks earlier. As I crossed the bridge this time, my faculties were on high alert, and I took careful note of all the details that I had never thought to look for in times past.
I looked eagerly for the bright green water weeds that Will had spoken of, but saw nothing of the kind. Instead, I was vaguely disappointed to see that much of the land on both sides of the narrow causeway appeared to be firm and solid, some of it even cultivated. I looked farther afield, comparing what I saw to what I remembered of Will’s description of the terrain. The causeway was just as he had described it: long and straight and built up above the surrounding land, but so narrow that only one wagon, or two men riding abreast, could cross at a time, and there were slightly widened sections at both ends of the bridge, fashioned to permit one wagon to wait while another crossed towards
it. Below the causeway, on each side, the land was flat, featureless, and largely dry, with what appeared to be sluggish, shallow channels of water meandering among low, reedcovered rises. Marshy was the word that came to me as I looked at it, but from what Will had described, I had been expecting wide expanses of wet, glistening mud flats offering transit solely to the intrepid local folk.
The causeway rose slightly as we approached the bridge, and the clattering of our mounts’ hooves on the wooden deck was amplified by the low wooden walls on either side. Halfway across, I kneed my horse to one side and looked down into the river beneath us. It was fairly narrow, a clear channel less than twenty paces wide, I estimated, its waters black and seemingly still and bordered on either side with long, trailing weeds.
Thomas had stopped when I did, and now he kneed his mount forward until he could see what I was looking at. He sniffed loudly and looked at me from beneath a raised eyebrow.
“So that’s the mighty Forth,” he said. “It looks cold. And deep. An armoured man would vanish quickly, falling in there.”
“Any man would,” I said, surprised by his comment. “Unless he could swim.”
“Can’t swim in armour,” he said, and swung his horse’s head away to move on, leaving me wondering, despite the obvious inference, what had provoked him to think of drowning armoured men. I had not told him about Will and Andrew’s discussion on that very topic.
We rode for a mile or so in silence after that, following the causeway to its end and then leaving the road to head overland towards the jutting upthrust of the Abbey Craig, the pillar of rock that lay across the Forth from its twin, the giant crag that was crowned by the castle itself, which was visible at our backs, a mile and a half away. Behind the Abbey Craig, the swell of the Ochil Hills was clearly visible, and we steered our mounts towards them, keeping the heights of the Abbey Craig on our right.
I had been hearing the raucous cawing of crows and rooks in the distance for some time, and the noise grew louder as we approached the far edge of the carse, prompting me to draw rein and stand in my stirrups, scanning the skyline ahead of us for a sight of the birds, but there was nothing to see.
“Trees,” my companion murmured. The word was barely audible, more for his own ears than mine, I felt.
“What about them?”
His eyes widened and he sat up straighter. “What about what?”
“Trees, you said.”
“Ah! Forgive me, didn’t know I’d spoken aloud. Trees fascinate me. Especially the ones that grow in places like that.” He waved a hand towards the great crag. “Look at the trees at the base of the crag over there. It’s all shut in—a damp, fetid place, nurtured by the swampy valley of the river, so everything’s always green and moist, the rocks and the moss and even the trees. No one ever cuts down trees in there, because they cling to the rocks of the cliff sides, their roots exposed and moss-grown like everything else. In fact the roots sometimes look thicker than the trees themselves. I lived near a place like that when I was in France, and it was like having my own personal cathedral—a dark, steep-sided ravine with light filtering down through trees that grew above a wide, running stream, clinging by their outstretched fantastical roots to the vertical slabs of fractured stone that formed the sides of the nave.”
I was gazing at him in astonishment, leaving my horse to pick its own way forward over open ground, and Thomas glanced at me and grinned, evidently delighted by the shock he must have seen on my face. “It’s true,” he said. “I spent months trying to decide if I should become a priest or run from the seminary and live the life of an anchorite in my favourite ravine among God’s beautiful trees.”
Unable to think of a single word to say in response to that, I turned my eyes away to look again for the birds, for the noise they were making had grown intolerable, and I was surprised to note that we were no longer on the flat surface of the carse. A quick turn of my head told me that we had left the flats and our horses were following a faintly defined track that was little more than a game trail.
“We’re climbing,” I said.
Thomas looked around, almost furtively, before answering, “We are. Probably because we’re going uphill.”
I shook my head at his obtuseness, then decided to ignore him and concentrated on the path ahead. I was still trying to locate the source of the noisy birds, but the trees above and ahead of us continued to conceal them.
The path we were following was rising rather more steeply here, curving discernibly to the right as it went, and I nudged my horse forward, moving in front of Thomas and increasing my speed to a canter. A copse up ahead seemed to move away from me as I approached and began to skirt it, an illusion created by my own speed and the curve of my approach, but as the open space behind the copse came into view, it exposed a sight that was no illusion. I heard Thomas’s indrawn hiss of breath as he saw it, too, and I hauled on my reins, pulling my horse back hard enough to make it rear in outraged complaint.
On the hillside above us, two naked men, recently hanged, dangled side by side from the single outstretched limb of a dead tree. There was no slightest breath of wind where we were, and yet the corpses above us turned slowly on the ends of their ropes. We exchanged glances and Thomas nodded, and we made our way cautiously forward.
The birds were visible now, their noise deafening as they gyred and swooped around the dead men like black leaves swept up in a whirlwind. And I was appalled to see that on the hillside directly below the two dead men, capering about like a man possessed, was a third man, wearing a startlingly bright green jerkin and wielding a long, leafy branch or sapling that he was using to beat the corpses above his head.
“What in God’s holy name is happening here? What kind of madman flogs dead men?”
“He’s not flogging them,” Thomas said. “He’s fighting off the birds. He must have known the men. But you’re right about him being a madman. He must be mad even to try that. What can he hope to achieve? We had best offer him some comfort.”
“He won’t hear you, Thomas. They must be newly hanged, those two.”
“Aye, within an hour or two. He’s kept the birds off them thus far.”
As he spoke I sensed a sudden stillness and looked back to see the man poised motionless now, peering down at us like a startled deer. Before I could even open my mouth to call to him, though, he bounded down the slope away from us, gaining speed with every running leap until he vanished from our sight, concealed by the swell of the hillside.
“We should go after him,” I said half-heartedly.
“Why? You’d never catch him,” Thomas said. “And even if you did, what then? Let’s take a closer look at his friends, if that’s who they were. What could they have done, I wonder, to be hanged naked? As if mere death by hanging weren’t bad enough.”
Moments later we were within ten paces of the hanged men, and could see that not only were the men naked but they had been mutilated, their genitals severed. Their thighs and legs were coated with dried blood.
“This is Will’s work,” I said.
Thomas swung towards me, wide-eyed. “Your cousin? How can you even say such a thing without knowing what happened?”
“It was Will. These were Will’s men.”
“Fine. I’ll believe you. But how can you be so sure?”
“Because these two were condemned for gross sexual sins—for brutal, mindless violation of some unfortunate soul. Will has no mercy for such creatures.”
“This outlawed cousin of yours disapproves of outlawry? Does he then deem himself to be some kind of godlike being? Is he on some divine mission?”
I looked at him with reproach. “No, Thomas, he does not think himself a god of any kind. Had you ever met him you would know that he is the last person who could be accused of such a thing. And if he has a mission, it is to save our realm.”
“But we don’t even know Wallace is here. We’ve seen neither hide nor hair of him or any of his men.”
I gazed about me,
studying the grass. “He’s camped close by, judging by the way the ground’s been trampled here. We’ll find him soon, or he’ll find us.”
He found us, or his people did, less than a mile from the scene of the hangings. We had climbed several hundred feet, and the track we were following had changed dramatically, growing steeper and more dangerous as the hillside became more mountainous. At one point, a shoulder of rock thrust out from the side of the hill, forming what appeared to be a flat wall as we approached it, and our path narrowed and almost pinched out around the base of it, the ground beneath our horses’ hooves dropping away precipitously to our left. I estimated the drop to be perhaps twice my own height, hardly sufficient to strike terror into anyone’s soul, but nonetheless dangerous enough to inspire caution in those who had to travel this way. I was happy to see the gentle slope that lay on the far side, falling down and to our right again. And there we saw four men who were struggling to restrain a fifth.
“That’s the fellow who ran away,” Thomas said. “The crow fighter.”
The bright green jerkin was unmistakable, and even as I took note of it his captors subdued him and two of them began to lead him away, holding him tightly by the arms. One of the others came towards us, smiling broadly.
“Father Jamie!” he shouted. “Well met! Will’ll be right glad to see ye.”
“And I him,” I said. “It’s Rab, isn’t it?”
He looked pleased that I remembered him. “Aye, Faither, that’s me. C’mon, I’ll tak ye right to him.”
“My thanks. Tell me, who was that fellow you were struggling with?”
“Och, him? That’s Daft Danny. He’s no’ a’ there, ye ken? Maist o’ the time ye’d never see or hear him, he’s that quiet, but we hung his brither Geordie this mornin’, alang wi’ a right wild whoreson cried Henderson. Geordie wisna much cleverer than Danny, but he fell in wi’ a bad crew when he met the Hendersons, and it got him hung. An’ poor Danny canna handle it.”
“They ravaged a woman?” Thomas asked.