The Forest Laird

by Jack Whyte

  “Right,” he said quietly. “This should have been the point man on our side. The others, four of them, will be behind him, spread out on either flank. They may not have met our people yet, but when they do, if anything goes wrong, we’ll hear about it quickly enough. Keep your ears open for noises on both sides of the road. We’ll give them another quarter of an hour to reach us, and if they don’t appear, we’ll know they’ve been dealt with. Then we’ll head across the road and join Long John and the others.”

  The main north–south road lay to our right, little more than fifty paces away but hidden from us by the woods. The remaining scouts, we knew, would be riding on both sides of it, four now on this side, five on the other, searching for people like us, people who might pose a threat to the train they were escorting.

  Our group, of which we were but one-fifth, faced south, commanding the eastern side of the roadway. Across the road, five more groups hunted the scouts on the western side, prepared to kill all of them if required. In the entire party of fifty dispatched to neutralize the ten scouts, only Mirren, her two women, and myself were unarmed, and we were there in the first place simply because it was the safest spot Will had been able to think of for this morning’s work, far enough removed from what would happen where he was to ensure that Mirren would be in no danger. My task, ostensibly, was to guard her, but the mere idea of that was ludicrous, and I knew I was there only because Will had been seeking some means of protecting my priestly sensibilities against the kind of murder and mayhem that was likely to erupt in the confrontation that lay ahead.

  I had arrived unannounced in his camp four days earlier, bearing strange tidings and urgent instructions from Bishop Wishart to which Will had listened initially in slack-jawed astonishment. That bemused wonder, though, had been supplanted within moments by the realities of the looming situation, and from then on everything had taken place at breakneck speed in Will’s forest camp. Edward of England had moved decisively, far more quickly than even Wishart, with his privileged knowledge, had imagined. As always, by seizing the initiative, Edward had left no opportunity for anyone else—most particularly enemies like Will and his band—to do anything other than react to what he had already set in motion. I watched with awe in the hours that followed my delivery of Bishop Wishart’s tidings as messengers were dispersed at speed to summon fighting men from all across the southeastern region of the country. Large numbers of other men soon began appearing, too, obviously summoned from close by, and I could see these were all commanders of varying rank. They wore no insignia, but there was no disguising the air of confident authority that hung about them. They were unmistakably leaders of men, set apart by their very bearing. These men vanished almost as soon as they arrived, into gatherings that were clearly planning sessions; and as those sessions progressed, more and more orders began to be issued, and activity throughout the encampment increased visibly.

  I learned within the space of that first day that my cousin’s following was far greater and his authority more far-reaching than I had ever imagined, and that made me aware, too, that my very presence there at such a time must be a distraction to him and might soon become a nuisance, and so I sought to efface myself by simply keeping out of his sight.

  Out of sight, however, did not mean out of mind, and as word reached us the next day that Edward’s messengers had already passed Berwick town, little more than thirty miles to the south of where we were, Will turned his attention to the safety of his wife, who was, he informed me, newly pregnant, and to me, his favourite, younger cousin. He knew me better than I knew myself, knew the strengths and weaknesses of my character and thus knew that the greatest of these, in both respects, was my immense regard for the sanctity of the Church. He knew I would have great difficulty in accepting what was now afoot, and so he guarded me from it by entrusting me with the care and safety of his wife and his future family, forcing me to take them away and out of danger.

  Thinking of that, I found myself smirking at the irony of what had happened just moments earlier. Had we not fled Will’s camp, we would have been nowhere near the enemy scout who had come so close to us with his long, bare blade. But the thought was overwhelmed by a sudden commotion in the trees at my back. I heard a muffled grunt, an explosive breath, and then the lethal clang of steel on steel, followed by a scream that was cut off in mid utterance. Then came the plunging, stamping sounds of a heavy horse forcing its way through thick growth, and the bushes split apart, yielding to the advance of a heavily mailed and helmeted rider on an enormous destrier, the largest animal I had ever seen. My first, fleeting impressions were of an upraised visor and a red-bearded face with bright, glowering eyes. Then I saw a broad-bladed sword sweeping down, its bright steel fouled with blood, and as it fell it seemed as though someone leapt to meet it, springing effortlessly up towards the blade to counter its thrust. Blade and body met and seemed to melt together, motionless for a flicker of time, and then in a leaping spray of blood the sword continued its downward slash, taking the body with it and casting it aside, severed and broken.

  The rider now stood up in his stirrups, ignoring his victim and looking about him. He slammed his visor closed with the crossguard of his sword and pulled his horse up into a rearing dance before launching it forward, and I found myself face to face with a charging knight at a distance of less than forty paces. He was enormous, as was the armoured creature beneath him, and the high crest on his visored helm made him look even larger. The crest was a rampant green lion, and the rider’s shield and surcoat were pale blue with the green lion, jarringly familiar, blazoned across the front of both. I knew this knight, had seen him somewhere before, perhaps even met him, but that faded to insignificance as he set spurs to his mount with a savage, rowelling kick and came thundering towards me and the three women huddled beside me. It never crossed my mind that he had seen us. I knew that with his head encased in his massive steel helm, his vision was severely restricted. He could see solely what was directly ahead of him, and that imperfectly, his sight constrained by the slits in his visor, and this close to me and my three charges, thundering directly towards us, he was no more than a blind and lethal juggernaut. His enormous warhorse, though, trained to kick down and kill any assailants in its path, was Death incarnate.

  I started to crouch down, to cry to the women to get out of the creature’s way, but even as I did so I hesitated, appalled by the lumbering spectacle of the beast’s approach, and so I merely crouched there, wide-eyed with terror and unable to move, watching death come towards us.

  But then an arrow struck squarely in the centre of the knight’s breastplate with a clean, violently metallic clang.

  Bodkin, I thought. The bodkin was a war arrow with a solid, cylindrical head that tapered to a point, and it was designed to pierce plate armour. That they seldom did nowadays was due, I knew, to their being deflected more often than not by the newer, harder steel being forged by smiths today. Sure enough, in less time than it took for its impact to register in my awareness, the missile had vanished, spinning off into the distance. Nonetheless, the mounted man felt the full brunt of the impact and reeled in his saddle, almost unhorsed by the savage weight of the strike. He threw both arms up, fighting against the thrust of the missile’s impetus, and his shield went whirling away, end over end, ripped from his grasp. His horse, too, went down on its haunches, driven backward by its rider’s rapidly shifting weight. The horse quickly regained its balance and heaved itself back up onto all fours with a triumphant scream, and precisely at the moment when it looked as though the knight had won and would wrest back control of his animal, a second arrow struck, entering one of the slits in the rider’s visor and piercing his skull, killing him instantly and hurling him out of the saddle.

  I stood stunned, weaving in shock. Someone grasped me by the shoulder and pressed me down towards the ground, and I sank gratefully to sit beside the women, my legs shaking. The man standing above me, his hand still on my shoulder, was an archer called Jinkin’
Geordie, so named because of an affliction that rendered him incapable of remaining still for any length of time without twitching. Even as I looked up at him, he twitched nervously. But it was plainly true, as I had heard before, that his affliction failed to affect his prowess in a fight.

  “Was that you?” I asked him, a little breathlessly.

  “Was what me?”

  “The knight … Did you shoot him?”

  “Aye. Can I ask ye somethin’?”

  I was staring at the fallen knight, and I assumed that the fellow wanted to ask me something about him. “Of course,” I said, asking myself already what I could possibly know about the slain man. “Ask.”

  He fixed me with an intense, furtive look. “I’ve been hearin’ folk talk, about what we’re to do. Sounds to me as though we’ll be killin’ priests afore this day’s oot, and I don’t know if I like that.”

  I felt my jaw fall in shock. “Killing priests? In God’s holy name, Geordie, how can you even think such a thing? Of course we won’t be killing priests. The very thought is an abomination.”

  The archer jinked—there really was no other word to describe it—his chin twitching down towards his right shoulder, which jerked forward to meet it as though in sympathy. “Aye, maybe so, right or no’,” he added. “But that’s what folk are sayin’. We’re goin’ to be killin’ priests this very day. I ken they’re there, too, the priests. I saw them mysel’, last night, frae up on the cliffs, aboon their camp. There was half a hunnerd o’ them.” He nodded emphatically. “Aye, easy,” he added. “Frae a’ the noise they were makin’, a’ the singin’ an’ chantin’, easy half a hunnerd.”

  I forced myself to smile at him with a serenity I suddenly did not feel, and highly aware that others, including Mirren and her two women, were listening to our exchange.

  “No, Geordie,” I told him, waving a hand dismissively and trying hard to keep my voice sounding relaxed and confident. “There’s nowhere near as many. There might be half a hundred men in that whole train, give or take a handful, but few of them are priests. We counted them last night, from the top of the same cliff. There are twenty-eight clerics in all. Two of them are bishops, six are priests, and the remaining score are Cistercian monks. And on top of that, there are these ten scouts, five on each side of the road, and this knight who was in charge of them, and perhaps half or threequarters of a score of servants.”

  He cocked his head like a bird, one eye glittering as it caught the light and adding subtly to the birdlike resemblance. “Cistercian monks, ye say?” His voice took on a conspiratorial tone. “Are they no’ French, tha’e Cistercians? Aye, they are …What are French monks doin’ ower here?”

  This Geordie was a curious soul, and simple, and I glanced down at Mirren, who was looking back up at me. She rolled her eyes as though to let me know I would receive no help from her.

  “Geordie, I can’t tell you that. You know more about them than I do, so shush you now and let me go. I have to see to the knight there.”

  I was less than ten paces distant from the fallen rider, and no one moved to join me as I walked over and stood looking down at him. I suppose there must have been some thought in my head of baring his face and identifying the man, for I was still convinced I had seen him somewhere before, but long before I reached him I knew I would do no such thing. He was unmistakably dead, reeking with the stench of voided bowels, and his face would remain unseen. The arrow that had killed him, travelling with incomprehensible speed and force, had hammered diagonally up through the front of his war helm and lodged inside, twisting the visor violently out of true and jamming it shut, and blood and grey matter from the shattered skull within had filled the helm and now oozed, thick and obscene, through the openings in the metal.

  My stomach lurched and I snatched my gaze away, trying to empty my mind and resisting the urge to vomit, and as I did so my eyes fell on the man the knight had killed. The difference was startling, and somehow pitiful. The knight appeared largely unbloodied. The man he had killed, though, had been unarmoured, and the knight’s broad-bladed sword had split him wide open, carving him like a slaughtered deer and sending his lifeblood flying in all directions to stain the grass and the bushes for yards around the spot where he had fallen. I crossed to where he lay, holding the skirts of my robe high to avoid staining them with his blood, then bent forward slightly so I could see his face. He was a stranger to me, heavily bearded and poorly dressed in a tunic-like garment of rough homespun wool, and I could see no weapon anywhere near him. I wondered what had possessed him to attack a heavily armed and armoured mounted knight, alone as he was, on foot and unarmed, for I remembered seeing him springing high towards the falling sword.

  I found myself suddenly seething with outrage. Will had sent me away from the coming day’s activities, with the women, in order to protect my feelings, because he knew I was uncomfortable with anything that smacked of defiance of Holy Mother Church. Now, though, with this single instance of mindless violence and unnecessary slaughter, a new understanding of what was happening everywhere in my country crashed down upon me. I saw that what I had been objecting to—what Will had tried to protect me from—was nothing less than an atrocity, an atrocity carried out against my fellow countrymen by a cynical foreign king using the Church’s name and privilege to abet a damnable war of aggression.

  Bishops and senior clerics, indeed all clerics, by general consent, had no need to fear travelling alone, for no one in his right mind would ever dream of robbing a priest. But the two English Bishops whose presence here today had demanded our attention were engaged in activities that set them apart from their peers, and priestly innocence played no role in what they were about. They had a screen of killers thrown out ahead of them, purely to ensure that no profane eyes would gaze upon whatever it was that they were transporting. And I had been puling and fretting like a callow, unformed boy because I was afraid that Will was doing something that might draw down the displeasure of the Church upon my head. I stood there for some time, feeling my flesh crawl with the sickness of self-loathing and thinking about what that voluntary and wilful blindness said about me, and then I swung around and strode back to where Mirren, alone, stood watching me.

  “What happened to you?” she asked as I reached her. “Did you know that man?”

  “No. Scales from my eyes,” I answered, not caring whether she understood me or not.

  “Aye? So where are you goin’ now? It’s plain to see you’re goin’ somewhere.”

  I looked at her, and then beyond her to where one of our party held the reins of her horse and my own. “I’m going back to Will. You’ll be fine without me … Better off, in fact, for we both know how feckless I’d be in a fight.”

  Her eyes had narrowed and she looked at me now with a completely different expression than the slightly scornful one that she habitually reserved for me. “And what will you do when you find Will? He’ll have no need of a priest under his feet, Jamie. D’ye not know that’s why he sent you away in the first place?”

  “Aye, I do. And I’ll stay out of his way. But first I’ll give him the absolution I’ve been withholding.”

  Her frown was quick. “Absolution for what?”

  “For what he’s about to do. It needs to be done and he’s the one to do it, but it’s taken me until now to see that. Now I need to give him my support and my blessing.”

  “D’ye think he needs those?”

  “I don’t care, Mirren, and I didn’t say he needs anything. I need to give them to him, freely. I’ve been wrong. Stubborn and stupid and short-sighted.” I pointed with my thumb to the blood-drenched corpse on the grass behind me. “I see it now, my eyes washed clean by the blood of the sacrificial lamb there.”

  “That sounds blasphemous,” she said more quietly.

  “What’s happening in this land is blasphemous, and my Church has been perverted to make it possible. I’ve only now come to see that. So now I’m going to try to help change things.”


  She nodded, a single dip of her head. “Aye, well, ye’d better hurry, or it’ll all be done when you get there. Away wi’ ye, and tell my man he’s in my mind and heart. Run now.”

  2

  Less than half an hour later, I walked out of the woods into full daylight again, leading my horse, and allowed my gaze to slide across the scene in front of me, marvelling at the rich brightness of it. The uneven surface of the rocky escarpment beneath my feet was sparsely carpeted with short, springy, startlingly green grass and striped in places by slanted, inch-high ridges of silvery-white, flaky stone. The sky was blindingly blue and cloudless. The sun had been climbing it now for nigh on two hours, yet in the valley below, the fog was still thick and solid. Directly ahead of me, seemingly just a short leap down from where I stood, a thick, flat blanket of greyish white stretched away from me. It had appeared solid mere moments earlier, but as I looked at it now I could see the topmost, budding twigs of the trees beneath it showing through, the mist that had concealed them eddying gently and dissipating in the tiny breeze. Across from me, half a mile to the south, a twin bluff loomed straight up from the fog-shrouded trees at its feet. Beyond that, stretching away like a string of green and silver beads, other hilltops sparkled in the strengthening sunlight.

  “Fog doesn’t often stay this long,” a voice said beside me, and I turned and nodded to Will, who had been standing with three of his people, gazing down into the carpet of mist when I arrived. “But the wind’s coming up now, so it’ll all be gone soon.” He turned his head slightly to look me in the eye. “What brings you back here, and where’s Mirren?”

  “She’s with Shoomy and the others. She’s fine. They’ve cleared away the scouts along the road, so you don’t need to worry about being taken from behind.”