The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  It is a fact, witnessed by many including myself, that when Hugh de Cressingham, enormous in black plate armour and mounted on a massive horse, gave the order to the assembled host to proceed that morning, no one questioned his right to do so. He was co-commander of the army, with full power in the absence of the earl, and so the procession moved out obediently in orderly alternating formations of four hundred infantry marching in fours, followed by sixty cavalry riding two abreast. Less than a half-hour after the first columns had set out, though, Earl Warrenne emerged from his quarters in a state of undress and in a towering rage. He had given no orders to proceed, he said, and Cressingham had had no right to usurp his authority as commander of the army. He screamed at his subordinates with a malevolence I had never seen in him before, and heralds were sent at the gallop to stop the advance and order everyone, including Cressingham, to return to the castle immediately. By the time the heralds were able to catch up to the front ranks and present their orders, the sun had already cleared the low hills on the horizon and the leading infantry column had crossed the old bridge. A deal of confusion and much milling about followed thereafter, as the advance formations had to be turned around to reverse their course on the narrow strip of the causeway, no easy feat to accomplish. The exercise was completed, though, and without attracting any unwelcome attention from the Scots, whose closest formations were visible less than a mile from the north end of the bridge.

  It was mid-morning by the time the army was re-formed outside the castle gates, ready to march again, and Thomas and I were still perched on our wall above all the activity, waiting, along with everyone else, for Earl Warrenne to issue his own word to advance. He had summoned Cressingham inside to talk to him privily as soon as the treasurer returned, and that conversation had been brief and, everyone assumed, less than comfortable for Cressingham, who had emerged white faced with anger at the end of it and had not spoken a word since to anyone. The earl had then summoned his senior troop commanders, both horse and foot, to an assembly within the castle yard while the army completed its regrouping, and when they finally re-emerged, all of them radiating confidence and eagerness, someone called out the ancient British war cry that had greeted Caesar’s legions when they first landed in England: hip-hip-hiphurrah!

  Trumpets sounded as the last cheer died away, and orders were bellowed into the silence that followed, and then the front ranks lurched forward on command and the army began to advance for the second time. But even as the first ranks began to move, before their shuffling gait could grow into the tramp of marching feet, Thomas jumped up and stood peering northward, one hand shading his eyes from the glare of the sun on his right.

  “Somebody’s coming,” he said. “A large party, crossing the bridge. It looks like the High Steward.” He fell silent again, peering, and then said, “It is the Steward, with cavalry. I can see his banner, and they’re coming this way.” I stood up to look as well, and he asked me, “D’you think he actually did it? Betrayed Wallace?”

  It appalled me even to hear the question asked, but I shook my head firmly. “Of course not. He was the man who first put Will up against England, years ago. Betray him now, and at the cost of everything he holds most sacred? Never.”

  “Then where did all those horsemen come from?”

  “They’re his, Thomas! His and Lennox’s and Strathearn’s. They all have followers and bodyguards.”

  “Then quickly, tell de Warrenne he has to stop them.”

  “Stop the Steward?”

  “No, his own folk. Stop the march!”

  “Why?” I had no idea what he meant.

  “Because if the Steward’s people meet this army on the road they’ll all be killed before they can prove who they are. Stop the march!”

  I had already turned to obey him, but I stopped short and turned back, suddenly anxious. “I can’t. I’m not supposed to speak English, remember?”

  He scowled at me, then pushed by me, taking two swift steps to where he could best see Earl Warrenne below. Then he cupped his hands over his mouth and bellowed, “Your Grace!” at the top of his voice. Twice more he yelled, and I joined him, both of us capering and waving our arms wildly until someone, some officer standing near the earl, looked up and saw us. He pointed us out to Warrenne, who recognized Thomas immediately and swung an impatient arm, beckoning him down.

  “Stay here,” Thomas said to me and began to run towards the steps. But I was close behind him when he reached ground level and ran to where the earl was waiting for him, surrounded by his mounted officers and commanders and controlling his sidling, nervous horse with a strong hand and tight reins.

  “Someone’s coming, my lord earl,” Thomas gasped. “Across the bridge. The Scotch party you met with. I recognized their colours.”

  “Stewart.” To give him his due, Warrenne grasped the implications instantly, and his eyes met mine briefly and utterly without recognition. “How many men are with him?”

  When Thomas said he had seen perhaps three score, the earl swung to face the treasurer. “This could mean capitulation. No need to fight and spend your precious money.” He pointed a rigid finger at a heavily armoured knight. “Despencer, send some of your best riders to stop the advance. Immediately. Stop it now, then pull everyone back here. Move, man!”

  The knight saluted with a clenched, mailed fist, then wheeled his destrier noisily on the cobblestones of the yard and clattered out through the gateway. Warrenne then spoke to another visored knight close beside him.

  “You, Mortimer,” he snapped. “Find my grandson. He’ll be making ready to depart, to guard the bridge approaches. Send him to meet Lord Stewart and bring him and his people straight here to me in the anteroom beside the armoury. You understand?”

  The knight nodded, cuffing up his visor. “The anteroom by the armoury. Aye, my lord.”

  “Good, then go now. Now, quick as you can.”

  Mortimer, who wore the gaudy blue and yellow bars of the earldom of March, in Wales, slapped his visor down, then pulled his horse up into a rearing turn and went cantering off at a lumbering trot.

  The earl now addressed the remaining knights grouped around him. “Dismount and rest your horses, but don’t go far away. We’ll be on full alert until I have heard what the Scots lords have to say.”

  He then swung his leg over the rump of his great warhorse and dismounted, handing the reins to a groom. “You have good eyes, Father Thomas,” he said, nodding to me in vague recognition. “Well done, and you were right to summon me. If Lord Stewart brings the word he said he would, we may save thousands of lives today. You know the anteroom by the armoury?” Thomas nodded. “I’ll want you in there, with your writing tools, in case we have need of them, so you had best make ready.” Someone else spoke to him then, and he stalked away, leaving the two of us standing by ourselves as stablemen, grooms, armoured knights, and bustling messengers moved all around us.

  “Do you keep records of his meetings, too?” I spoke in French, in case anyone was listening, but the question came naturally to me, for the earl’s request had surprised me.

  “No,” Thomas said in the same language. “But I am a cleric, and clerics do write things down and keep records. I have done His Grace a similar service once before, solely because then, as now, I was conveniently at hand. So come, then, and help me prepare.”

  By the time Sir Henry Percy led in the Steward’s party, Thomas was set up at a table off to one side of the anteroom, with parchment, pens, and inkwells laid out should they be required, and I sat across from him, prepared to assist in anything that might be asked of me. Sir John de Warrenne sat with Cressingham at the end of a table similar to the one he had used in his field pavilion, and he was flanked by several knights, none of whom had been present at his meeting with the High Steward the previous Sunday. Two of those I recognized as the knights to whom he had issued orders earlier, Sir Hugh le Despencer and Sir Roger Mortimer of March. They sat on opposite sides of the table with their crested war hel
ms upright in front of them, and I was surprised to see that, lacking the bulk and menace of their heavy helms, both men were younger than I had thought them. They sat stiffly, neither acknowledging the other, and it took no great insight to see that they disliked each other intensely.

  There came a rap at the doors, which then swung wide, and Henry Percy stepped inside, accompanied by another knight unknown to me and closely followed by Lord James Stewart and the Earls of Lennox and Strathearn. All three were grim faced.

  “What is wrong?” De Warrenne spoke directly to Lord James, and the tone of the question was accusatory, while the one that followed immediately made it clear that the niceties of rank and protocol were not to be observed this time around. “Did you do what you promised? I’ll tell you bluntly I never thought to see your face here again. And I have to say in truth I never thought, from the very outset, that you would succeed. But you’ve come back, so you must have been successful—you would scarcely return to report a failure. And yet the three of you look like men who’ve seen their favourite sons killed. So what is the truth? Success, or failure?”

  He was interrupted by a snort of wrath from Cressingham, but he slammed the flat of his hand on the table and raised a warning finger. “Enough, sir! Not one word.”

  The High Steward looked from one to the other of them before he answered. “Failure. I came back solely because I said I would return before you launched your vanguard. I considered that to be a promise, and I keep my promises.”

  Warrenne was frowning now. “But if you failed, who are the three score riders who came out with you?”

  “They are four score, not three, and they are our personal retainers and escorts.”

  “And Wallace simply permitted you to leave? All of you?”

  Lord James looked at the Englishman with something akin to sympathy in his eyes. “What could he do otherwise? We spent two days within his camp, attempting to dissuade both him and de Moray from confronting you, while my men tried privily, with equal lack of success, to wean away his knightly followers. When it was clear that I could change neither of their minds, I expressed my regrets and took my leave.”

  “And they made no attempt to stop you.”

  “No. They had spent the same two days trying to convince us to join them. When they saw that we would not be moved, as we had seen they would not be, we parted amicably.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Why should you? Did you think perhaps they might believe they could force us to fight for them? That is foolishness. They accepted the inevitable, as did we, and when we left they were preparing to confront you.”

  “Damnation! Then so mote it be. If confrontation is what they seek, they shall have it until they choke upon it.”

  The Steward smiled a wintry little smile. “That is precisely the sentiment, if not the words, that Wallace expressed to me before we left. He may be a common bandit, but he is far from being a stupid man, and it requires no great intellect to guess that we would be brought here after we left his camp. Your folk control the bridge, the sole way into and out from where he is, after all.”

  Warrenne frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean he knew we would be coming here now, to talk to you, because we could not hope to pass by Stirling without being stopped by your people. And so he sent you a message, knowing I would bring it to you. Let me cite his words precisely: ‘Tell your English friends,’ he said, ‘to send us no more olive branches, for we have no need of firewood.’ And then he said, ‘We are not here to forge a peace. We came here to do battle and to liberate our country. So let them come on, in war, with all their force, and we shall prove it in their very beards.’”

  The earl grunted. “He has no lack of balls, I’ll give him that for all his folly. Very well, your message is delivered, and its arrogance will be amply rewarded. Now you may leave, and if you have any regard for your own welfare you will take your men south, and quickly, clear of our lines. For I warn you, if any of my people encounter you more than one hour from now, you will be treated as Scotch rebels and dealt with accordingly.”

  He stood up and beckoned his ever-present guard captain. “Captain Sallis, send a troop of your guardsmen to escort his lordship’s group to the rear of our lines in safety. Tell your troop commander to notify our outlying guards to treat the group as enemies should they attempt to return to Stirling. Clear?”

  There were no farewells, no more civilities. Lord James’s group stood up and left in silence, and as soon as they were outside the earl issued orders to Sir Hugh le Despencer to have the army prepared to move out yet again.

  “Wait.” This was a new voice, and hearing himself addressed so firmly, the big knight paused in the act of turning away and cocked his head towards the speaker, Henry Percy. “You will pardon me, I hope, Grandfather, but I have a question that needs to be asked. Have you an alternative plan for today’s movements?”

  The old man glared at him and appeared ready with an angry retort. But he hesitated, and asked, “What d’you mean, Grandson?”

  Percy snatched a deep inhalation and straightened his shoulders almost imperceptibly. “I fear we have alerted the Scots. They must have scouts and spies watching our every move, and our activities today have clearly signalled our intention to attack. And now our army stands assembled again, in full public view, prepared to set out yet again—for a third time, sir—to assault an enemy who appears to have no solid line of battle prepared.”

  “So much the better, then. With no solid line to hold, they’ll have no anchor. We’ll push them back until we can surround them.”

  “That may not be possible, my lord earl. They hold the slopes over there, with soft ground below and to their front and thickly wooded hillsides at their back. No place for either cavalry or archers.”

  “Nonsense! We’ll turn the hills at their back into an anvil and pound them flat against it with our horse and infantry. They may fight doughtily, but they cannot prevail against our army. They are undisciplined and untutored.”

  “But they have numbers, my lord. More numbers than we had thought possible for such a crew. There are thousands of them, perhaps ten thousand.”

  “Ten thousand walking corpses, then. That’s what Stewart was afraid of, why he sought to bring about a truce: he fears a bloodbath that will wipe their manhood out for generations to come. And extermination is a fate that they have earned. But even should they avoid our direct thrust and slip away sideways through the valleys to the north, we will simply pursue them and achieve our ends no matter where they go or how they fight. Once we cross the Forth and penetrate the lands beyond those marshes, all the north will lie open to us.”

  “They might attempt to stop us at the bridge, my lord. It is discomfortingly strait.”

  “Nonsense again! How would they do that? By leaving their safe hillside and charging across open fenland for a mile to challenge us?”

  “My Lord Surrey, may I speak?”

  This was another new voice, unmistakably Scottish, and I turned my head quickly to see that the speaker was the unknown knight who had entered with Percy. I was not alone in failing to know the man, because the earl glowered at him and barked, “Who are you, sir? You are here in my privy council but I do not know your face.”

  It was Percy who answered him. “Sir Richard is with my household, Grandfather. I invited him to attend me here, in the belief that he has something to offer us. I present to you Sir Richard Lundie, who joined our ranks and entered the King’s peace at Irvine, before we concluded the terms of surrender with the group organized by Stewart, Wishart, and the Earl of Carrick. Sir Richard’s lands are near here and he has information that can be of great use to us.”

  “Has he, indeed?” The earl sounded less than enthused, eyeing the Scots knight from head to foot as though affronted by his presence. “Well, man, speak up. What is this information that we need so greatly?”

  Lundie cleared his throat nervously, but before he c
ould say a word Percy spoke up again. “He offers us a means of protecting our advance upon the en—”

  “Let the fellow speak for himself. If he is, in fact, capable of speech. We know already he is capable of changing his allegiance with some ease.”

  “My lord,” Percy protested, sounding genuinely outraged, but the older man cut him off with an upraised hand.

  “My council, Grandson, my rules.” Again he scanned the man from head to foot, scowling. “Well? Can you speak?”

  “Aye, er … I can, Your Grace.”

  “Speak up, then, and tell me why you changed sides. If you were out as a Scot, you could have felt no loyalty towards our King. So why cross over to his peace? That brands you as a turncoat, and no turncoat of any kind is welcome in my council. I have fools enough around me whom I trust. I need no extra mouths I cannot trust. So why the change?”

  The Scots knight’s face was flushed, his eyes fierce. “I rode oot in the first place to kill Englishry. For Christ kens they had kill’t a wheen o’ us, wi’out cause ither than they wanted to. So I joined Stewart, thinkin’ he was at war wi’ you. But he wasna … he wasna there to fight! He just wanted to talk, an’ talk, an’ talk, an’ he would dae nothin’. An’ so I took a scunner to the lot o’ them.”

  “You what?”

  Lundie glared back at him blankly, and Percy stepped in again. “A scunner, my lord. It means disgust. He was disgusted by the behaviour of the Scots leadership.”