by Jack Whyte
He saw me begin to raise a hand in protest and swept my interjection aside before I could voice it. “Believe me, I am no fool babbling into my wine cup. I saw this in you years ago. And once I had noticed it, I watched for it increasingly, and I never saw it fail. But even then, I did not trust my own perceptions. I enlisted the help of others, telling them what I suspected and then bidding them observe you as I had, and they all concurred.”
This time I did stop him. “Forgive me, my lord, but who are ‘they,’ these people you set to watch me?”
“No one who would do you harm or wish any ill upon you, Father James. Your cousins, Father Peter and Brother Duncan, were glad to assist me, as were both the Abbot and Sub-abbot of Paisley, and all of them agreed that this ability of yours, whatever its source, is real and strong.” He shrugged. “So what would you have me do with such knowledge, holding as it does the certainty that your abilities can make my task as bishop and pastor much less arduous? I have no choice but to foster your talents, because I believe that once you have learned to direct and control them, they will be of immense value, not merely to me but to the realm itself.”
I tried to argue with him, claiming that he had misjudged me and overestimated my supposed abilities, but he was adamant. Much to my own surprise, I quickly came to love the challenges involved as he instructed me patiently on how to assess the records and reports, some written but most of them oral, of men’s past deeds; to look meticulously at their backgrounds and their previous activities for indications of their beliefs and motivations; and then, in face-to-face encounters, to look beyond their outer, public facades to divine their true motivations and intent.
I became something of an adept in an astonishingly short time, once I had conquered the difficulty of believing that I really had a natural acuity in such things. I soon found myself becoming increasingly aware, from day to day, of the subtle pressure being applied on all sides in normal daily commerce by the clerical community within which I lived and worked, and by the swarms of influence seekers who flocked to the cathedral as a centre of both spiritual and temporal power. More than that, though, I became acutely attuned to the predominantly malignant activities of the influence brokers who pandered to the wishes of all the others. To the Bishop alone I reported everything that came to my attention, and he reciprocated with an openness he rarely showed to others, discussing privately with me matters that he would seldom entrust to others of higher rank.
Thus I was able to observe at close range, from the earliest days of his reign, the inconsistency and the tragic need to please and to be liked that doomed John Balliol’s kingship and brought about the events that followed his removal from the throne after less than four years.
The rot had set in as early as the spring of 1293, when William Douglas and young Robert Bruce were swearing their allegiance to him, for that was the year when the common folk everywhere in southern Scotland really began to suffer widespread injustice and indignity at the hands of the “visiting” soldiery, and when the constant English presence was generally accepted as a fact of life. No one had the slightest doubt that the former was caused by the latter, yet even then no one would have thought of applying the word occupying to the English forces that were everywhere in the land.
No one would have thought, that is, of saying it aloud. But the truth was that the arrogance and intransigence of the English soldiery, fostered by their commanders and allied with the indifference of the Scots nobility, gave rise that spring to widespread injustices against the Scots folk, abuses that stirred up local unrest that was put down in turn by ruthless military reprisals.
Men and women—cottagers and householders—were dragged from their homes and hanged out of hand, with no one ever being called to account. With increasing frequency, community leaders and solid, successful farmers had their lands and holdings confiscated after they were accused of heinous crimes by blatantly unscrupulous “witnesses.” Such evidence was too often ludicrous, most particularly so when it was tendered—and accepted—in denial of verifiable testimony to the contrary offered by more reputable witnesses. In defiance of all sanity, and making a total mockery of Scotland’s laws, those spurious accusations continued throughout the summer and autumn, and large accumulations of land and assets that had been held by local folk for generations were snatched up by heavily armed outsiders.
In the spring of the year that followed, petty Scots leaders began to emerge throughout southern Scotland, driven to inconsistently organized self-defence, and to aggressive resistance, out of frustration and desperation. Reports of bands of outlaws and rebels began to circulate widely. The English made no formal complaint to King John, however, since to do so would have drawn attention to what was really going on in the countryside. They chose instead to increase their troop concentrations in the troubled areas and to deal more and more harshly with the local people. King John himself heard nothing of the increasingly urgent reports of these reprisals from the people in the southern half of his kingdom, or if he did hear of them, he chose to remain deaf to the problems of his poorest subjects.
One particular band of outlaws came into prominence soon after Easter that year. It began quietly, making its presence known in its own small area by the end of April, but it seized the attention of everyone in the southern half of the country towards the middle of June. Tales of this band’s activities began to be repeated along with the latest reports of atrocities against the people, and they seemed to offer hope in the face of despair: wherever the most blatant outrages of condoned robbery occurred—the perpetrators called it confiscation by the military administration, but it was barefaced pillaging—there occurred, too, sudden and unattributable instances of retribution.
Men who had sworn false testimony against their neighbours were found dead, with their tongues cut out and reinserted backwards; men who had seized houses and property rightfully belonging to others were found hanged within the charred ruins of the buildings they had stolen; and soldiers who had taken part in these dispossessions, beating and whipping innocent men and ravishing their women, met swift justice on the trails and pathways through the forest surrounding the places where such crimes had occurred. Most often, they were shot down from ambush and left to rot where they fell, but at other times, in deeply wooded areas where bows were ineffectual and death by a blade or club was not always assured, they were taken on the march, gathered together under stout trees, and dispatched with cut throats, and any survivors were hanged directly above them, lest anyone miss the significance of what had happened.
These outlaws became known as the Greens, because at the scene of every killing, whether of a single man or a large group, a scrap of green cloth was left pinned to the chest of one of the corpses by a knife blade.
By the end of June, rumours abounded about who these Greens were and whence they came, and more than a few young men left home, all across the south, in the hopes of finding them and joining their ranks. The English, it was said, were terrified of even going out to search for the Greens; they did not know where to start looking; and they did not even know who they were looking for, because no one had ever seen the faces of the outlaws.
Leadership of the Greens, it was said, appeared to be shared by a number of people—although no one could attest to that. There was no doubt, though, that the frequency and the far-flung nature of the band’s activities indicated that more than one leader was involved, for new reports of their exploits came daily, many of them describing events that supposedly occurred on the same day, at similar times, but many miles apart.
Mystery piled upon mystery, and the only thing that could be said with certainty was that none of the Greens was ever seen without a mask or hood. Their identities were unknown, and, according to people who had seen and heard them do so, they took great and savage pleasure in pointing out to their enemies, loudly, what it was that had moved them to rebel so openly. They would point to their own hooded faces while fighting and taunt the English with chants of
“Let’s see you point out this face to your magistrates!”
I first heard of this behaviour in early June, from a travelling priest who stopped at Bishop Wishart’s residence to deliver a pouch of correspondence to His Grace. This man, Father Malacchi, had spent some time in the depths of Selkirk Forest after he fell sick from eating something less than fresh. While recovering his health among a small community of forest dwellers, he had heard many tales of the Greens, and of how they hid their identity from everyone lest they be betrayed in return for English gold.
I had taken Father Malacchi to the kitchens that evening, after he delivered his dispatches to the Bishop, and I remained with him while he ate a large and obviously welcome meal. It was after that, while we were talking idly over a jug of the cathedral kitchens’ wondrously mild ale, that he mentioned the anomaly of the hooded outlaws.
I knew who they were immediately, of course, and saw their faces in my mind: Will himself and Ewan standing to the fore, while at their backs ranged their five companions, Alan Crawford of Nithsdale and Robertson the archer, Long John of the Knives, Big Andrew with his crossbow, and Shoomy the Gael. I had no doubt there were others by this time, but these were the men I knew, and I had no difficulty imagining them all wearing hoods. None of them were fools, and facelessness would be a great asset in Scotland nowadays, particularly for a public thief. I found myself smiling—somewhat surprisingly when what was really called for was priestly disapproval—as I thought about big Ewan and how we had met, and I could immediately hear his soft, lisping voice pointing out the advantages of a concealing hood to a man as disfigured as he was, a man who had no wish to frighten children and even less wish to be identified later as having a hairless, smashed, all too memorable face.
From that time onward, I was a leap ahead of the burgeoning lore that sprang up around the band known as the Greens. They were known to be based “somewhere in Selkirk Forest,” and I never ventured an opinion on that, even though I knew it to be true. The forest is enormous—it covers half the country—and to my mind, had Will Wallace wished his whereabouts to be common knowledge, he would have made it so. That folk were still unsure meant that he had good reason for being circumspect. What was solidly established, though, was that the Greens were better organized and more effective than any of the other groups active in Scotland’s south. The band quickly gained a fearsome reputation for dealing death to any unprepared English force that came against it or attempted to pass through its territories. As for those forces that came against the Greens ready for mayhem and military vengeance, they came in vain, for the outlaws scattered into the forest ahead of them, as insubstantial as morning fog among dense brush.
By August, everyone was talking about the Greens of Selkirk Forest. The scope and range of their activities had broadened greatly by that time, too. Crimes against honest Scots folk had begun to diminish as soon as it was clearly understood that the penalties for such behaviour were swift, savage, merciless, and inescapable, and it was then that the Greens had begun venturing into military activities, setting out to prosecute acts of war against any English force that could not justify its presence in Scotland as being necessary to the requirements of the King of England. Deputies, earls, and barons held no legitimacy in such cases; their forces were judged unnecessary and therefore inimical to Scotland’s good, and they were declared fair game for the bloodthirsty Scots insurgents.
It was also said of the Greens, before the end of that summer, that no Scots folk had ever been accosted by them, and that, from time to time, they passed surplus food from captured English supply trains on to families whose own food and possessions had been confiscated by the English. The proof of that came after two wellorganized attacks by the Greens on English supply trains in the Dumfries area, when small raiding parties of English soldiers moved swiftly into surrounding villages, searching buildings for anything that might have been taken in the attacks. The Greens’ retribution for that came swiftly, too, and subsequent raiding parties were wiped out before they could reach their objectives.
I had developed an ambivalence towards such tidings since they began to come to my attention, for they always brought my patriotism into conflict with my morality. As a priest, I knew what the Greens were doing was legally atrocious; they were defying the duly constituted authority of government, spurning and openly flouting the King’s Peace. As a Scot, however, a member of the voiceless people whose lives were being trampled underfoot by those in power, I exulted in the victories of the Greens. They were defying the King’s power, certainly, but the Scots King himself was doing nothing, and in fact the King whose power they were mainly defying was not their own. The Greens were resisting the illicit power of Edward Plantagenet, who had no right, divine or otherwise, to be exercising his regal powers or his military prowess within the realm of Scotland, despite the high-flown language of the treaties he cited in support of his activities. Scotland now had a King of its own. The Scots lords and magnates had given the English monarch legal licence for his behaviour during the interregnum, but that should mean nothing now. The interregnum was long since over, even though Scotland’s King was being painfully slow to assert himself.
Looking back now from the distance of decades, I can see that my perspective on the entire affair of the Greens was distorted, naturally and probably inevitably, by the fact that I knew, respected, and even loved their leaders. They were my friends and family, and my trust in them was such that I could not think of them as malicious criminals. No matter how much supposed evidence was laid before me for inspection, I viewed it with suspicion and sometimes outright disbelief, knowing it had been fabricated by people whose bias against my kin and my very race was beyond question.
My sole error lay in thinking that I was the only one aware of that relationship.
2
“That cousin of yours is forging quite a reputation for himself.” It was an unexpected comment, coming as it did after a long period of silence, and my chest tightened with alarm. Of course I had no slightest indication that it heralded the single most important conversation I would ever have with my mentor, Robert Wishart, the Bishop of Glasgow and Primate of Scotland.
“My lord?” I asked, allowing the inflection of my voice to demonstrate my puzzlement.
“I said your cousin’s making a name for himself among the folk.” He used the Latin word populi, meaning the common people. “We should discuss it, you and I.”
It was March 20th, 1295, and I had been working for Bishop Wishart in Glasgow for more than a year by that time, learning to cope with more and more responsibility as my duties grew increasingly complex and demanding. We were in his private study that morning, in the administrative wing of the cathedral buildings, and since before dawn we had been working our way through the mountain of correspondence awaiting his attention. Beyond the open window, a far-off thrush was singing, its enthusiasm whetted by pale March sunshine, and in the middle distance I could hear the regular, rhythmic sounds of the stonemasons and builders as they went about their daily work, adding to the Cathedral buildings. Construction had been under way now for more than forty years, and no one, not even the Bishop himself, could say when the work might be complete. The Cathedral would continue to be built until it was deemed pleasing to the Deity.
I realized that I was dawdling, avoiding eye contact, and hoping to deflect whatever was in His Grace’s mind. Now I set aside my pen and looked him in the eye.
“What do you wish to discuss, my lord?”
“Will Wallace and his Greens.” He pressed his shoulders back against the carved oaken back of his armed chair. “It’s time we spoke of it openly.”
Openly … That was the last word I would ever have thought to apply to this matter, for Will’s identity as the leader of the Greens was the sole secret I had withheld from this man. I sat still for several moments longer, then picked up an ink-stained rag and made a show of wiping my fingertips.
“Where shall we start, my lord?”
I grimaced. “I was afraid that if I said anything, my lord, you might have to act upon it.”
He gawped at me, perplexed. “Act upon it and do what?”
“I know not, my lord … Report his name to the authorities?”
“Which authorities? And had I done so, what would that have achieved? He is an outlaw already, destined to hang if taken.
Knowing his name would make no difference to the Englishmen’s incompetence. It would not affect their inability to catch him. But did you truly think I would divulge his identity?”
I half shrugged. “I thought you might have seen it as your duty, my lord.”
“My duty is to my King and his realm, to my monarch and my country.” The statement was delivered in a tone that left me in no doubt of the old man’s sincerity. “To this point the Greens have done nothing that openly defies or attacks either one of those. Their crimes, if crimes in fact they be, have all been carried out against the English, whose presence in this land I deem an abomination.”