The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  I pulled my knapsack around from between my shoulders, and within moments I was kneeling by the dying man’s side with my priestly stole about my neck, administering him the last rites and listening to his confession. He heard my words of absolution and squeezed my hand as he drew his last breath, and for a brief moment I felt exultant … And then I looked about me. I moved to the nearest living soul and began the ritual afresh.

  I cannot say how many times I moved from spot to spot, or how many viatica I administered long after my supply of the sacred chrism had been used up, for I lost track of everything save the need to comfort as many of the dying as I could. I had no wine, nor even water, but I had a crusty loaf of bread in my knapsack, and I blessed it and transformed it, then doled it out in pinches as the Body of Christ until nothing remained of it. Fighting men came back and swirled about me from time to time, but intent upon my work I paid no heed to them and, as God protects both drunken men and children, so too did He protect me from being struck down that day.

  At last there came a time when all the noises close to me had ceased and I sat there exhausted and unmoving, slumped back on my heels. I knelt among the dead I had been praying with for hours, and I wept as I seldom have, grieving for the senseless loss of life I had witnessed that day, for the destructive and debilitating waste of it all, and, be it said, for my own lost innocence, for never again would I be able to regard human strife and the shedding of men’s blood, in any cause, as being either acceptable or justifiable. I felt empty, hopeless and desolate and close to despair, sitting there, but I know I was exhausted, and I lapsed into a kind of waking stupor, dead to all awareness of my surroundings and the passing of time.

  But then I heard my name, spoken in a voice that seemed to echo as though it came from a great distance away, and I looked up to see a familiar face frowning down at me.

  “Jamie?” he said again. “Father James, in God’s name, is that you?”

  He spoke in Gaelic, and I nodded. “Alistair,” I answered, in the same tongue, and I heard my voice come out a croak. “Where have you come from?”

  His eyes widened. “Where have I come from? My God, man, where have you been? Look at you. You’re clarted in mud and blood. I’ve never seen the like. You could not be dirtier if you lay down in the mud and wallowed like a sow.” He had been looking about him as he spoke, and now he shook his head and his voice sank to become barely audible. “God’s sweet blue eyes,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Look at this place. How many men died here? I have never seen this many dead in one small place.” He looked back at me. “What are you doing here, Father James? This is no fit place for a priest.”

  I stopped him with a raised hand, astounded to find myself close to smiling at the outrage in his voice. “It is the perfect place for a priest, Alistair,” I told him. “Places like this remind us of why we are priests. I have been ministering to those in need of God’s mercy, and if I grew soiled and dirty in the doing of it, so be it. Dirt is no more than earth, and it will wash away in the river.” I was on the point of saying I doubted the blood would ever wash away, but I bit back the words and held out my hand to him. “Help me up, if you will.”

  He reached out and pulled me easily to my feet, and I looked him up and down, content to see that he appeared to be unscathed. He looked clean, which surprised me, and there were no visible signs of blood on his clothing, armour, or weapons, though his round targe bore a few fresh scars and there were streaks of dried blood below his right knee. His legs were bare beneath a kilted woollen tunic, and over that he wore a loose shirt of mail, belted at the waist. A heavy sword belt hung across his chest, and the hilt of a long sword thrust up above his shoulders. I drew a great breath and blessed him with the sign of the cross.

  “You have not answered my question, Alistair. How come you here?”

  “To find the Hospital Knights. Andrew has been wounded. Stabbed from behind in a melee.”

  “Dear God! How badly is he hurt?”

  His sharp shake of the head told me as much as the grim jut of his jaw. “Who knows? It doesn’t look too bad, because there’s not a lot of blood, but it’s wide and we don’t know how deep the blade went. There’s no such thing as a good sword wound. The knights will be able to tell us how serious it is.”

  “A single wound? No more than one?” My relief must have made me sound dismissive, for he frowned quickly.

  “No more, but will that not suffice?” He caught himself and shook his head. “Forgive me, Father. That was uncalled for. I know what you meant and, yes, there’s but the single wound.”

  “And what about Will?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve not seen him since we launched our attack. He and his led the right flank of the charge and we the left. Anyway, I must go. Do you know where to find the Hospital people?”

  “I do not, but I should. I was with them, working with them, before the fighting separated us, but that was a long time ago and I have not seen them since. Wait!” I turned in a circle, concentrating hard and trying to orient myself by the few landmarks I could distinguish. I found the Abbey Craig in the north with ease, but when I faced south towards the castle crag I gasped. The bridge across the river was no longer there. I blinked, seeing only the ruins of its remains.

  “Aye, the old brig’s gone,” Alistair said. “They pulled it down for fear we’d cross after them.”

  I stared at him. “The English pulled it down? You mean the battle’s over? I can still hear fighting.”

  “No, you’re hearing our men celebrating. The English are gone, fled with their tails between their legs.”

  “Praise be to God,” I said, meaning every word, and then I saw in the distance the high black-and-white standard I had been searching for. “There it is, over there! You see yon black banner? That’s where the knights are stationed.” I looked about me, my tiredness forgotten and my mind functioning clearly again. “Look you. There’s no point in both of us going all the way over there simply to walk back again. I was working near here before I started giving the last rites to dying men. I had a stretcher, for carrying the wounded. It must be close by here somewhere. If we find it, you can use it to bring Andrew to the hospital over there. I’ll go ahead of you and tell them Andrew’s coming. Now help me find that stretcher. You’ll know it when you see it—a plain wooden bier, two long side pieces with crosswise slats.”

  It was half hidden beneath a pile of bodies, and Alistair Murray carried it away with him, holding it in front of him like a shield while I knelt above the body of my former colleague, whose name was unknown to me. He was entirely encrusted in filth, unrecognizable save by his ankle-length habit and his tonsure. His knapsack was unopened, its contents yet intact. I opened it and placed the stole of his priesthood around his neck, then anointed him with his own chrism, administering the last rites posthumously in the complete belief that he had no need of them. And then I left him there, his hands crossed on his breast, and set out to rejoin Brother Reynald and his Hospitallers.

  I found a scene of appalling horror awaiting me when I reached the hospital, but I could see I was the only person there who was aware of it, for no one else had time to look at it. I had thought myself amid the atrocities of Hell out there on the battlefield, surrounded by the dead and wounded, but the hospital was worse, for there in one small place were collected casualties from all areas of the field. Englishmen and Scots lay side by side, all race and ranks ignored in the reality of fighting now for breath and life itself. Peasants lay among noblemen, and common foot soldiers lay bleeding beside others whose bedraggled finery proclaimed them to be high-born knights and lords. And all of them were in extremis, for no man well enough to walk away from there would have thought of remaining in such a place. There was surprisingly little noise, though, there where I would have expected the screaming from so many throats to have outdone the worst I had heard earlier. I soon realized that most of the men there were too gravely injured to make much noise. Of course there were ex
ceptions, and no shortage of them, but I tried to close my ears, as those around me must have done already.

  I found Brother Reynald by the largest of the wagons, surrounded by several of his brethren. He was standing by a bloodstained table, holding his hands up in front of him as he watched one of his fellows sew an open wound shut with a large needle. Blood dripped heavily from his upraised hands, and I thought he had cut himself, but as I watched, someone handed him a ragged towel and he wiped his hands on it, taking care to clean the clotted stuff from between his fingers. Two other men moved forward, stooping over as though about to kneel for his blessing, but they went to work instead, one of them holding open a large sack while the other filled it with severed arms and legs that he drew out of a mountain of limbs that had been concealed from my sight by the tabletop. It was a sight that came close to overwhelming me, even after my earlier ordeal, but as I stood there reeling, Brother Reynald looked up.

  “Father James! Come over here.”

  I walked slowly over to where he stood. His companions paid me no heed at all, so busy were they at their work, but as I approached him I could see he was looking at my clothes much as I was looking at his. We were very similar in appearance then, save that his robes were drenched in pure blood, whereas there was more mud in the mixture that coated mine. His eyes narrowed and he nodded at me. “They tell me it is over,” he said quietly.

  I nodded. “Aye, it is. A man I know, a Highlander, told me it was done.”

  He turned aside and looked around the hellish scene surrounding us. “They’ll be bringing men in here for hours to come and there’s little we can do for any of them. May sweet Jesus have mercy on us all …” He inhaled a great breath and expelled it noisily. “And the worst of it,” he continued, “the worst, most evil and satanic part of all of this, is that some arrant, self-important, witless fool—some worthless, prancing, prating, high-born stay-at-home buffoon who thinks he has a right to send his fellow men to die—will proclaim a God-given victory here, as though some great and wondrous thing has been achieved and this foul crime, this slaughterhouse, should be remembered as a signal token of God’s favour.” He grunted, a bitter, disgusted sound. “They’ll say that England won and Scotland lost, or Scotland won and England lost—I neither know nor care which might be held correct—but look around you, Father James, and tell me, if you will, what was won here in this awful place, and whose brow will wear the victor’s laurels?”

  I had no words with which to answer him, and it was clear that he expected none.

  “Where will you go now?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Return to the castle, I suppose, although I don’t know why.”

  “No more do I,” he said, looking at me from beneath one raised eyebrow. “What is a Scot doing in an English army?”

  “Spying?” I said, and his face twisted in a rueful smile.

  “Go with God, then, Father James, but I warn you, don’t look for Him out there on the field. Not for a few days. He has too much to do here.”

  “I came to tell you that they are bringing in one of the Scots commanders, a young man called Andrew de Moray. He was stabbed in the back.”

  “I see.” He looked disappointed. “One of the architects of this debacle, and you want me to have an eye to his wounds?”

  I searched for words that would address what he had said without demeaning myself or endangering the outcome of what I was asking of him.

  “You wrong him when you name him architect of this, Reynald,” I said. “There is but one sole architect involved in this entire debacle, as you call it. Many actors, many participants, and many victims, but no more than one architect. That man is Edward Plantagenet. He alone conceived the elements of all of this when he decided to claim Scotland as his own.”

  His face betrayed nothing of what he was thinking.

  “I have little more to say,” I continued. “You are an Englishman, and I am a Scot, and so we may regard the matter differently between the two of us. But we are both priests, and our oaths of fealty and worship are to the God we serve, not to any worldly king with human weaknesses and vices and a lust for foreign conquest. As for the wounded man, Andrew de Moray, I know him well and find him truly admirable—a fine, upstanding, noble young man who knows and understands his God-given duty to his people. He was a leader here today purely because there was a crying need for someone, somewhere, to step forth and raise a hand against the tyranny that threatened him and his and all of Scotland.”

  When I fell silent he twisted his mouth as though nibbling at the inside of his lip, then dipped his head in the smallest of nods. “Where is he?”

  “They’re bringing him in. On one of your stretchers.”

  “He is fortunate,” he said quietly, “that you and I share a distaste for the greed of ambitious monarchs. When he comes in, bring him to me here.” He turned away without another word and stepped back up to the bloody table.

  There were hundreds of people coming and going all around me, and I watched them curiously while I waited for Andrew’s stretcher, distracting myself by trying to identify the colours and escutcheons of the various English knights I saw being carried here and there. I saw no Scottish colours, for there had been no Scottish lords present as far as I knew, apart from Andrew de Moray himself, who would be wearing his father’s crest of three white stars on a field of dark blue. And as I thought of those white stars, I saw them on a banner in the distance, being carried by a stripling lad who should have been at home with his mother that day. I would have recognized the group without those stars, even had Alistair not been walking ahead of them—eight tall Highlanders, four of whom held their young chief’s stretcher while the others walked along on either side of them, ready to relieve them.

  I made my way directly to them. Andrew lay motionless on the bier, on his belly, his eyes closed.

  “How is he?”

  Alistair shook his head. “He was like this when I got back and he has not stirred since. Some English priest dosed him with something, some powder he claimed to have received from a Muslim physician when he was in the Holy Lands. He swore it would ease Andrew’s pain and make him sleep. He wouldn’t have done it had I been there, I can tell you, for I’d have gutted any Englishman who tried to come near Andrew. But Sandy Pilche told me that Andrew knew the fellow well, from his time in England, and that he drank the stuff down willingly enough. I suppose it’s reassuring that the priest made no attempt to flee afterwards.”

  “Bring your men and follow me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  AFFAIRS OF STATE

  We left the hospital compound while Brother Reynald tended to Andrew, walking until we found a place to sit on the riverbank. Alistair cocked his head to one of the younger men, holding up a hand and wiggling his fingers.

  “Duncan,” he said. “The flask.”

  The young fellow hitched a knapsack around from where it hung by his hip and reached into it, producing a tightly stoppered bottle made from hard leather. He removed the stopper and handed the bottle to Alistair, who took a sip from it and rolled the liquid round his mouth pensively, then swallowed it and took a mouthful more before offering it to me. I started to wave it away, then changed my mind. I tilted my head back and filled my mouth with the fiery spirits. My entire mouth seemed to explode and I swallowed, feeling the liquor burn its way down to my stomach. It was well named, uisge beatha, the water of life. I had no will to fight it. I simply lay back in silence and let it do its work until Alistair poked me and thrust the bottle at me again.

  “So,” he said eventually, “what do you know of what’s happened?”

  “Nothing except what you’ve told me and what I’ve witnessed with my own eyes. How much more do you know?”

  “No more than you. I saw the Englishry strung out across the bridge and along the causeway, and then we started our attack, running across the flats. After that I saw nothing except what was happening right there beside me. I killed a few men, no more than
five or six, but they were all trying their best to send me off. At first, I spent most of my time safely behind a wall of swords, playing the captain and keeping the wall in place against everything the English threw at us. And they were good. Someone said they were young Baron Percy’s men, but I don’t know if that was true or not. No one really knew. But whoever they were, the whoresons were hard men who knew their business. Their weapons and armour were well made—easily as good as our new supplies—and they had been trained long and hard. As soon as we cut one of them down another stepped right in to fill his place, and they kept coming forward, no matter how many of them we killed. But then the MacDonalds on our right broke through the line and turned their flank, leaving the men against us unprotected on that side. That was the end of them, for once they started to crumble, their entire wall collapsed, and that’s when I started fighting. The next thing I knew, there were no English anywhere around us, and someone brought the word that Andrew had been killed. That’s what I heard at first, but no one with a whit of sense ever believes a rumour.”

  “Where was he?”

  “Safe off the field. Sandy had taken charge and he saw to it they carried him away to where he would come to no more harm, back the way we had come, towards the Abbey Craig. But they were thinking clearly. They stopped at the first dry spot they found well clear of the fighting and stayed there, then set up a shelter to keep him out of the sun.”

  “You mean a tent?”

  “A canopy—they had no tent. But the sun was high and the mud was steaming. And flies were swarming, with all the spilt blood.”

  “And Andrew was conscious?”

  “Aye, and clear headed. But he was in great pain.”

  “So where is Sandy Pilche now?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t tell you. He wasn’t about when I went back to fetch Andrew, and I didn’t think to ask where he’d gone.”