The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  I paid no real attention when Alistair said that, because at that particular moment, I was more interested in finding out about Will’s whereabouts than I was in anything else, and so it was not until much later, days later, that I realized that no one, in fact, had thought to ask where Sandy Pilche had gone. He had simply vanished and was never seen again, one of the uncounted multitude, including my colleague Father Thomas, whose existence had been unambiguously blotted out in that awful place. They died unnoticed and were gone, either drowned and washed away by the river or coated beyond recognition by the mud that covered the entire battlefield. Days were to elapse, though, before the chaos died down and folk began to realize that they had lost friends and kinsmen they had assumed were safe elsewhere, and that was the case with me, searching for Will and assuming my other friends were safe.

  “And you heard nothing more of Will?”

  “No, not a word. But he’s out there somewhere, still alive, for if William Wallace had been hurt or killed, we would have heard of it by now. News like that always travels fast.”

  “So how did we turn the English? We were outnumbered in every way.”

  “We were, but we hit them and cut them off before they could all cross the bridge. That was what did it. We cut them in half at the outset, then kept them pent up where they couldn’t fight other than by our rules. We stopped them from using their horsemen, and their archers did them no good, stuck on the far side of the river.”

  I frowned. “But they had archers on this side. I saw them leave the castle, behind the mounted squadrons who were first in line. There must have been a hundred of them.”

  “Aye, there were some at first, but they were useless, too closely packed on the road, and we were too fast for them—our frontrunners were among them before they could spread out to form their lines, and so they broke and ran for their lives, right into the river. Some of them even swam across, but their weapons were lost or ruined.”

  “Did we take any knightly prisoners?”

  He looked at me, pretending to scowl. “I surely hope so, for before I left to start looking for the Hospital knights I heard Andrew say we’ll need the ransom money. We’ve none of our own left, he was telling Sandy.”

  Evening was approaching, and I was suddenly anxious to be up and about, an anxiety induced, I have no doubt, by the whisky I had drunk so quickly. “How can we find out what’s going on? Who would know?”

  Alistair rose to his feet. “We can walk about and ask folk—that’s the best way I can think of.” He was right, I knew, and so I stood up and stretched, then fell into step beside him.

  We walked for almost two hours, stopping to talk to anyone we met who looked as though he might know something worth knowing. But we quickly found that no one did. Everyone else was as ignorant of what was truly happening as we were, completely dependent upon reports from others who had learned things at second hand. We heard early in our quest that a number of English horsemen had escaped, fighting their way through our ranks and swimming their horses across the Forth, and that the treasurer Cressingham had been killed. He had ridden out to battle armoured as a knight, but had apparently been recognized by his sheer bulk when his horse sank to its belly in the mire beneath his weight. He had then been pulled from his saddle and killed before he had an opportunity to defend himself. We heard, too, that he had been flayed after his death, the skin stripped from his flesh, but that detail we assumed to be exaggeration and chose to disbelieve it. And we were told, by someone who had come across the bridge shortly before the English destroyed it, that the English commander, Earl Warrenne, had been seen fleeing south, surrounded by a number of his subordinates. But that, too, was a word-of-mouth report.

  In fact it took us a full day to piece together the details of what had taken place on the Carse of Stirling that day, and another entire day would elapse after that before anyone could even attempt to begin assembling an authoritative summary of the developments. And of course the responsibility for gathering and collating the information fell to the clerics of the realm.

  I played a part in documenting that report. My association with the English army had ended when Earl Warrenne fled the field; there was no English army left in Scotland after that. I joined a cadre of monks and priests assembled from the Stirling area, and took up residence in the Abbey of Cambuskenneth, beneath the shadow of the castle rock, which remained in the hands of its English garrison. It took the better part of a month to assemble all the information we could glean from a multitude of sources and arrange it into an intelligible narrative, but when the official version of the fight took its final form, it contained a verification that Cressingham’s body had, in fact, been flayed and mutilated. No one was ever arraigned for it, though, because, incredible as it may seem even after all this time, no names were ever associated with the crime.

  It defies belief that none of Cressingham’s detractors ever grew sufficiently drunk or indiscreet to let slip some hint, some clue, about having been involved, or knowing of someone who was involved. But it seems the general hatred of the man was sufficiently profound to guarantee the anonymity of those who defiled his corpse. That would remain a mystery until a credible-seeming tale began to spread, a year or more later, that my cousin himself had used the dead man’s hide to make a belt for his great sword.

  That rumour tormented me for years, for even though I denied it and defended my cousin against the allegation whenever it came to my attention, I always wondered, deep inside, whether it might be true. Cressingham was reviled as the grossest, most excessive and detested symbol of English tyranny, and every Scot who heard the word of his death at Stirling Bridge was glad of it. It seemed likely to me, then, despite my reluctance to believe such a thing, that the rumour of Will’s sword belt might be true. I asked him about it eight years later, when he was in London, waiting to be executed. He denied it and, thanks be to God, I saw the truth of his denial in his eyes and knew him to be innocent of the crime.

  As for the report we compiled, its details are now common knowledge, the main points listed fluently by any child in the realm. It was not a massive battle, for the opposed armies were relatively small, but it was a giant victory for us. It was the first occasion in more than two hundred years on which an English army had been beaten by a Scots one. Alone, and without the guidance or battlefield support of any of the great Scottish houses, William Wallace and Andrew Murray, two relatively unknown local men, had defeated and routed an English army in the field—a well-equipped and structured army of professional infantry, cavalry, and archers. These two young leaders had achieved a monumental victory with a following of landless, untitled, and unlettered men whose sole connection was their commonness, their sense of community. They had combined two hosts of undistinguished but determined fighting men—from the south, the men of Selkirk, Galloway, Annandale, Carrick, Lanark, Lothian, and Stirling, and from the north, the free fighting men of Moray, Banff, Aberdeen, Kincardine, Forfar, Perth, and Dumbarton—to crush and humiliate and repel a far larger army so well supplied and armoured that there should have been no possibility of beating them. And they had done it in a single encounter, sending the English High Command into headlong flight back towards England and safety. The victory transformed Wallace and Murray into giants, making them, with one strike, the two most powerful men in all the realm.

  The awareness of what they had achieved changed the way the common folk of Scotland looked upon themselves. They had always had a single-minded self-awareness, a form of independence that enabled them to think themselves entitled to speak on equal terms to any man around them, including their crowned kings. Now that they had ousted the English with their own hands, they took delight in their prowess.

  One of the earliest English casualties among those cut off on the northern bank of the river when the Scots attacked was the constable of Stirling Castle, Sir Richard de Waldegrave. He had taken a full company of the garrison to the fight with him, but the news of his death, and of the lo
ss of his garrison troops, did not reach Earl Warrenne on the other side of the river until two full hours had passed. And by that time the slaughter on the north side of the Forth had run its course, the day was irretrievably lost, the unblooded English formations remaining on the south side of the bridge were disinte-grating to find their ways homeward in disgrace, and the Earl of Surrey was making his own hasty preparations to depart for England.

  One of the few English knights who had distinguished himself and behaved with great honour that day was Sir Marmaduke Tweng of York, the renowned warrior who had sat among Earl Warrenne’s men at the parley with the High Steward, and whom I later learned to be a former tutor of Robert Bruce, the Earl of Carrick. Finding himself and his mounted company surrounded and close to helpless on boggy ground, being cut down and harried by running footmen with long spears, Tweng rallied his companions and had them form up in a tight wedge-shaped formation. He then led them slowly forward, fighting off attackers on all sides, until they reached the river’s edge, where he bade them leap in and swim with their mounts, armoured as they were, across the swollen stream. He gained the safety of the south bank, having lost but six of his group of thirty men, and was on hand at de Warrenne’s side when the news of Waldegrave’s death arrived.

  A short time earlier, the earl had ordered his engineers and sappers to destroy the old bridge, for fear the Scots might come across the Forth to strike at him afresh while his forces were in disarray. So great was his fear of being taken unawares again that he had ordered his Welsh archers to let no one come across the bridge, not even the hundreds of wounded and desperate English survivors thronging the causeway. Thus the messenger who had swum across the Forth bearing the word of Waldegrave’s death found the earl close to the bridge’s end and was confronted by the astonishing sight of massed Welsh archers aiming above the heads of English sappers labouring to pull down the bridge, and threatening to shoot the English wounded who packed the bridge itself. And upon his arrival the bridge collapsed without warning, trapping and killing some of the sappers who had weakened it and hurling most of the men on the bridge deck into the deep, cold waters underneath. The messenger stood open mouthed for a time, watching with the others, and then when people started moving again he bethought himself and stepped forward to inform the earl of the constable’s death.

  De Warrenne apparently reacted with nothing more than a distracted nod, and then stood mute for a while, staring off absently into the distance before drawing himself up to his full height and turning to eye the men beside him. He pointed a gloved finger towards Sir Marmaduke Tweng and named him garrison commander of Stirling Castle, bidding him hold and maintain the castle in the name of King Edward. He then seconded the former constable of Urquhart Castle in Aberdeenshire, Sir William Fitzwarren, to assist Tweng. Having attended to the continuance of the state, he then rode away to the south with his personal guards as fast as their horses could bear them.

  To their credit, and lacking any guidance from on high, Surrey’s lieutenants marshalled the remaining portion of the army—very few of whom had come within half a mile of the enemy that day—and marched them south towards the border as quickly as was possible. Their intent, we learned later, was to avoid the main towns as far as they were able to, keeping to the hills and valleys far from the main roads. An army, though, and particularly a fleeing army, is hard to hide, and Will himself rode off in hot pursuit of them, his victorious followers ravening for blood like hungry wolves, chasing the remnants all the way to the border.

  There were other predators out there that September day.

  The eighty-strong party of horsemen led by the High Steward and the Earls of Menteith and Lennox had not ridden far beyond the southern limits of the English camp before they turned their mounts eastward and climbed gently for two miles to the high ground that afforded them a view of what was happening both at the bridge crossing and in the area called the Pows, almost below the wooded heights where they were sitting. The Pows was a wasteland, a flat expanse of bog far more perilous than the terrain over which the Stirling causeway had been built. The place was all but impassable save by an uneven ridge of rocky higher ground that formed a so-called road.

  That road was the sole southward escape route available to the English. And as the Steward’s party watched, it grew more and more crowded and less passable as the fleeing army filed onto it, until eventually it was jammed solid in places where the roadway, such as it was, narrowed dramatically, creating bottlenecks that grew more and more congested, with increasing pressure from the people at the rear of the column who could not see what was causing the delay ahead of them. The men looking down from the hillsides above could see perfectly well what was happening, though, and they could also see, behind the army, the wagons of the English baggage train, haplessly awaiting their turn to proceed. It was a target too rich to ignore.

  The High Steward led his men down to attack it, becoming the first of Scotland’s great nobles to align himself openly with William Wallace and Andrew Murray. His four score men, hungry for activity now after watching the victory at the bridge, savaged the retreating soldiers on the narrow road, striking them from behind and crushing them against the unmoving press beyond them. Then, having demonstrated their ferocity, they turned around and captured the entire baggage train with little difficulty.

  Lord James Stewart’s “conversion” to the patriots’ cause, as it became known in certain quarters, was merely the opening note of the fanfare with which the Scots magnates now rushed to shower their blessings and congratulations upon Will and Andrew. But unlike the acceptance of Lord James, who had been one of the architects of Will and Andrew’s uprising, the thanks and good wishes of the ruck of the magnates were too little and too late, and every soul in Scotland knew it.

  I had already joined the secretariat in Cambuskenneth Abbey, compiling the official report of the battle, when I heard that Will had arrived back from harrying the fleeing English, and I sent a messenger to ask him if we might meet soon. I was unsurprised that I did not soon receive an answer, for I had heard reports of how he had been overwhelmed on his return by the amount of work that needed to be done. He had returned as the seasoned, confident leader he had been before, and had had no idea of how greatly his life and all its circumstances had been altered by the victory at Stirling Bridge.

  No more had I, I soon realized, for I had assumed, with my normal naivety, that, with the English gone, life for both of us would return to normal. Nothing, in fact, could have been further from the truth, for normal was a word that no longer held any relevance for me, or for Will. My cousin was now the most powerful man in Scotland, a notion that was completely alien to me, entailing, as it did, the thought of his being now superior, in strength and immediate influence at least, if not in rank, to men like Lord James Stewart and John Comyn the Black, the Earl of Buchan. For me to have expected him to make time for me was ludicrous.

  Yet send for me he did.

  When last I saw my cousin, Will had been staying in a small camp, and he had slept in a small tent to which none of us had paid any attention beyond being aware that it was Will’s tent and he might be found in it from time to time. Now, though, he had an encampment—a military camp laid out in blocks and orderly rows of tents, with streets and cross-routes and gated entranceways, as such places had been arranged since the days of the Roman legions—and his personal tent was an imposing pavilion, fully twenty paces long on each squared side, guarded at all times and furnished within with dividing walls of cloth. I stood outside it on the sunny afternoon of the day he summoned me, feeling oddly shy and awkward in a way I had not been for many years, and reluctant to make myself known to the guards on duty in front of the tent, all of whom wore the colours and livery of the Lord High Steward. My shyness went unnoticed by the sergeant of the guard, who recognized me as soon as he set eyes on me and greeted me by name before summoning me inside. There I found my cousin sitting at a fine oak table like the one Earl Warrenne had had
in his pavilion, poring over a letter written on fine vellum and festooned with ribboned seals.

  “Jamie!” he cried, jumping to his feet and dropping the letter to the tabletop, where it sprang back into its cylindrical form and rolled off the edge. “Come in, come in. God, man, it’s good to see you. Come here and let me look at you. Are you well? How are the Augustinians treating you down at the abbey?” He cocked his head, looking at me and answering his own question. “Very well, it seems. You’re looking grander than I’ve seen you in a long, long time.”

  I knew precisely what he meant. I was wearing a new full-length cloak that day, over a fine new cassock with buttons all the way down the front from throat to ankles. The garments had been issued to me that very morning by the almoner at Cambuskenneth, whose responsibility for the provision of alms extended to the provision of new habits, robes, and vestments for the members of the abbey community. I was a guest of the community, not a member, but the clothing I had worn on the day of the battle had proved to be beyond salvage, despite the best efforts of the abbey launderers. The Augustinian brethren of Cambuskenneth wore plain black habits, but simple-looking as they were, the clothes I was wearing now were far and away the finest and most beautifully made I had ever owned.

  Now, seeing my cousin eyeing the broad, richly tasselled black belt of plaited silk strands around my waist, I felt myself flush. Determined to change the subject, I moved quickly to pick up the fallen letter from beneath the table.

  “This,” I said in Latin, “is an impressive-looking letter.” I fingered the three separate ribbons dangling from its seals.

  “It’s from the Comyns,” Will said quietly, his voice close to a growl. He resumed his seat at the table and waved me to an empty chair across from him. “Sit down. A clutch of Comyns, in one letter—Buchan, Badenoch, and the Countess of Ross—all seeking to awe me by pointing out how fortunate I am now to have their support.”