The Forest Laird

by Jack Whyte

  “No, Will, I have not. But this is different—”

  “How is it different? How can you sit there, knowing nothing about what is going on, and say it is different? Different to what? I’ll send you three wee boys who watched their parents being butchered like stirks. Three wee boys younger than we were, with ravaged arses sorer than ours were! Tell them how different this is, then watch how they walk, hobbling in pain and shame, and how they look around them at the men they meet, waiting to be jumped upon again. Different? The only difference I see is in the time. When they did it to us, we were children, weak and helpless. Now, by the living Christ, I am a man grown, and I will meet these English whoresons with a man’s strength and judgment.”

  My mind had filled with the image of two other small boys, running in endless terror for days on end, and I held up my hand to stem his words.

  Now he checked himself. “What?”

  “I hear what you are saying. And I understand. I disagree, but that is neither here nor there. But tell me about the logic behind these attacks. How can you be sure they have anything to do with the robbery in April?” I watched the frown that came over his face. “From what you have said, or from what I think I’ve heard you say, none of these … reprisals has taken place anywhere near the scene of the April robbery. Is that correct?” I could see in his eyes that it was, and so I continued. “But you are convinced beyond doubt that whatever is going on has to do with what you did that day.” Once again, reading his face, I could see that I was right. “Yet where is the connection? Why would you not simply believe these are random raids, like the one that cost us our home in Ellerslie? Why are you so sure they are linked to the April theft?”

  He frowned again, briefly, then sat up straighter and looked me in the eye. “Because they have to be. No other explanation makes sense. Besides, it fits the nature of the beast. Edward Plantagenet is not a passive enemy. We created havoc with that raid—absolute havoc that no one, he least of all, had dreamed of. We destroyed all of his carefully structured plans, smashed them to splinters just when he must have thought he had been supremely clever. Can you imagine how he must have raged when he heard of it? But the most infuriating goad of all must have been that he could not breathe a word about any of it. How could he complain about the theft of illegal funds, funds that should never have been brought into Scotland in the first place and should never have been smuggled across the border under the protection of Holy Church under any circumstances? He would have been condemned by everyone, publicly disgraced. Mind you, I am not saying that, in itself, would have deterred him. I’ve no doubt he would have been prepared to defy the whole world had his stratagem been successful. But once his funds were lost, he had no hope of winning anything but scorn, condemnation, and harsh judgment … perhaps even excommunication.”

  As I listened to his words, the scope of what William Wallace had personally done to England’s King sank home to me as it had never done before. Until that moment, I had seen the events of that now distant day in April solely from a clerical perspective, assessing the damage done to the fabric of Holy Church by the actions of the renegade Archbishop of York. Other than the physical bulk of the royal specie we confiscated—and I had not seen so much as the image of his regal head on a single captured coin—there had been no visible trace of Edward of England present that day, and I had somehow lost sight of his overwhelming influence in the entire affair. It had never crossed my mind until that moment, listening to Will, that Edward Plantagenet, the implacable and remorseless conqueror of Ewan’s people in Wales, might come looking, in person, for vengeance against my cousin for having dared to defy him. It appalled me now to see how blind and wilfully stupid I had been, living in a fool’s paradise.

  “You’re right,” I whispered, fighting down a surge of nausea. “Edward can’t let that go unavenged. He will have you killed.”

  “He might try, Cuz, but he’ll have to come and get me himself if he wants to see me dead …” His voice died away, then resumed more quietly. “In the meantime, though, he’s serving notice.”

  “Notice? I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Killing these simple folk is what I mean. There’s no reason for it, other than to make me notice. Women and children, innocent of any crime, die or are evicted with their men. Their slaughter is a signal, nothing more. A signal to me, from him, that he knows I’m here and would have words with me. Words.” He grunted. “I’d hear few words from him, other than ‘Die,’ and he would have some other speak for him before he’d soil his tongue by using it on me. He’s a savage man, I’ve heard. D’you remember the tales of what the Turks did to Christian pilgrims, before the Great Crusade?”

  “No. I mean, I’ve heard many tales, but I don’t know which ones you mean.”

  “I’m thinking of the one Pope Urban used when first he raised the Cross in France. He told of how the Mussulmans would take a Christian man and slit his belly, then tie his entrails to a stake and chase the man around the stake until he died, gutted. I never really believed that happened, but Edward of England could do such a thing. He is that kind of man. A dire enemy.”

  “God forbid!” I shuddered and blessed myself with the sign of the cross. “No Christian king would ever kill a man in such a barbaric fashion.”

  My cousin looked at me and smiled a grim little smile. “Edward Plantagenet would, if he thought it necessary. He thinks these raids against the folk are necessary, to capture my attention.”

  I gazed down into my empty flagon. “Can you stop it, this slaughter?”

  “Aye. I can ride into Lanark, or to some other English garrison, and give myself up.”

  “No, Will. Apart from that. Can you stop the slaughter?”

  “Probably not.” He bent forward and picked out a log from the pile by the hearth, then laid it on the embers and pushed it into place with his booted foot. “But I can make it hazardous for any Englishman foolish enough to step out of doors to take a piss in southern Scotland. It will take the like of an army of men to achieve that, but Edward Longshanks and his English bullies have provided us with just such an army. At last count, we had close to nine hundred men throughout the south, most of them bowmen and all of them willing to rise at the blast of a horn.”

  “Nine hundred?”

  “Aye, from Selkirk to Teviotdale to Dumfries and as far west as Galloway. Had you asked me yesterday if it was feasible to field so many, I would have said no.” His lips quirked, but there was no humour in his eyes. “But now I say yes. It will take planning, but we can do it. We have to stop this obscenity, this wanton slaughter. And if that means killing them to stop them killing ours, then so be it. We will do what needs to be done. And we will do it as soon as it can be arranged. We’ll flood the entire south with patrols, strong foot patrols, three hundred men on any given day, and woe betide any stranger with as much as a knife who can’t appease them with good reasons for being armed and where he is. We will be declaring war on England. Let there be no misunderstanding. It will not be open war, and it will not be knightly war, or chivalrous, but it will be war—bloody and brutal and unforgiving, for as long as Longshanks wants it.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  1

  I have asked myself a hundred times, over the years that have passed since that afternoon, if I could really have changed any of the things that happened afterwards, had I behaved even slightly differently as we spoke by the fire in my cave. Could I have influenced any of what occurred, had I planted my feet firmly and objected to what Will was proposing? What might he have done, had I ranted and admonished him, reminding him that he was endangering his immortal soul? Would he have relented? Would he have chosen some other way to proceed in order to achieve his goal?

  I know, of course, that he would not. He would have done nothing differently and the outcome would have been unchanged. I have always known that, I suppose, even though I have fought against admitting it to myself. Simply by being who and what he was, William Wallace
had preordained that he and the Plantagenet King would collide. The ancients would have said that it was written in the stars. They would also have said that I was committing the sin of hubris, overweening pride, by even thinking I might have had the power to alter any vestige of what happened. But it was not hubris. The curiosity I dwelt upon for all those years was merely wishful thinking. The truth is that I was but a humble priest, eclipsed by the titanic figures of Edward Plantagenet and William Wallace, both of whom History already regards as giants. When Will left me that June day, to launch his patrols to protect the common folk, his mind was already set beyond changing. His plans had been set before he told me about them, and their preparations were already under way.

  And so the struggle that I once heard a powerful Scots nobleman refer to as “Wallace’s dirty wee war” began, and I bore witness to it, impotent to change a single part of it, appalled by its ferocity, and yet paradoxically thrilled and proud to be a part of it, even as a mere observer. When I first heard that nobleman’s description, years afterwards, I took umbrage, thinking it an insult, but then I saw its truth. The conflict was a small one, for the first two years at least, a series of skirmishes rather than a full-blown war, and it was certainly dirty—dingy and dire and destructive to everyone involved.

  I have always found it strange, though, that Wallace’s reputation as a dishonourable, disreputable fighter emerged from that time. From the perspective of those who yet adhere to the chivalric code, his methods are seen to this day as outrageous and unacceptable, no different from brigandage and lawless savagery. But when, in war, has savagery ever been unacceptable as a means to victory? When, for that matter, has the strict code of chivalry ever been respected or observed in the chaos of battle, amid spilling blood and entrails and shattered flesh? William Wallace, in those earliest days of his struggle, was an unknown, a desperate man fighting for his beliefs at the head of a small band of willing but untrained followers who were ill equipped for the task they faced and were therefore, on the surface at least, utterly incapable of withstanding the forces ranged against them. There was never any possibility that he and his ragamuffin outlaws might hope to stand toe-to-toe against the enemy that threatened them. The mere thought of such a thing was laughable; they would have been slaughtered instantly, obliterated under the hooves and booted feet of the disciplined ranks opposing them.

  Wallace’s men were peasants, farmers for the most part, but while they lacked the weapons and armour their opponents had, their supposed impotence was misleading. They were fighting on their home ground and they knew every fold and wrinkle of the land around them, and so they turned the land itself into a weapon, picking their fighting sites and then striking from ambush, their actions predictable only in the certainty that they would be unpredictable. Thus they fought, and thus they won consistently, in defiance of all the maxims of warfare, proving themselves to be adaptable, elusive, and ultimately invincible.

  Over the decades between then and now, I have found it both ironic and tragic that Wallace is condemned as a base-born, ignoble brigand for the way in which he waged war and the methods that he used, while King Robert himself, who perfected those same methods in the two ensuing decades and carried them to unprecedented extremes both on and off the field of battle, is universally hailed as the Hero King. Yet it is true; Wallace’s methods appalled his enemies, not all of whom were English, whereas Bruce used precisely the same methods and emerged victorious, his reputation unblemished.

  The reason, of course, lies in the perceptions of jealous and embittered men. William Wallace was not a belted knight. He became one later, knighted in order to allow him to assume the mantle of Guardian after the death of his friend and fellow leader, Sir Andrew Murray, but when he first moved to challenge England’s power, he was not. No matter that his father’s brother Malcolm had been a knight, or that his own elder brother wore the silver spurs. William Wallace himself did not, and that alone was sufficient to demean him in the eyes of lesser, spiteful men who set store by such things as birth ahead of ability. It laid him open to their sneering disdain and to accusations—though always from a distance well beyond his hearing—of being an upstart. He was deemed a commoner, ignoble from the outset and therefore, in the eyes of his self-styled betters, entitled neither to hold nor to voice an opinion on anything that mattered.

  They were all wrong, of course, for as history has demonstrated, my cousin had one attribute that enabled him to rise above his detractors and to capture the attention, the love, and the admiration of a society comprising many races: he was William Wallace, the only man of his time with the God-given strength and natural ability to offer hope to his broken, strife-ridden homeland and to instill in his people a sense of pride, and something greater yet, an unprecedented sense of unity and nationality.

  I saw that process begun in Selkirk Forest, with the dispatching of the first patrols sent out against the English. Yet even in writing those words, I am contributing to the general inaccuracy that surrounds that entire time. To speak of patrols sent out against the English suggests that the English were there, formally, and that Wallace fought against them formally. But in the hair-splitting language of Edward of England’s lawyers, that is demonstrably untrue. In terms of strict legality, enshrined with great formality in the annals of the English court, there were no English troops, per se, abroad in our land at that time. That term, abroad, is all-important, because it connotes mobility and far-ranging activity. Scotland’s south was swarming with English soldiers that June, and had been for more than a year, but every man of them, ostensibly at least, had a sound and defensible reason, set down on parchment by the Plantagenet’s lawyers, for being there, in residence upon their royal master’s behalf, but not abroad in the land.

  Add to that the fact that the great majority of the Scots noble families were bound by double bonds of fealty to Edward, tied to him as much by the simple truth that they all held spacious lands and rich estates in England by his grace and favour as by the ancient laws of Norman-French feudality. And of course these same Scots nobles benefited greatly from having Edward’s well-equipped fighting men conveniently at hand to assist them with policing their own lands, since they did not then have to hire and equip costly men-at-arms of their own.

  And so it becomes clear what was in truth afoot in the Scottish lands north of the border: Scots magnates, in return for the privilege of using English soldiers at no cost other than food and drink, were being induced to turn a blind eye to “irregularities” in the activities of certain of those visiting troops, even at the cost of hardship to their own Scots people. Not all the Scots noble houses were involved, and some may not have been comfortable with what was taking place, but they must all have known of it. And the alternative—the loss of well-trained auxiliary troops and a very real loss of privilege and royal favour for refusing to cooperate and be compliant—intimidated many of them and overcame the consciences of others.

  Thus, English infantry and mounted men-at-arms roamed at will throughout Scotland’s border country in that period of 1294 and 1295, free to behave as they wished, whether it was called reprisals, policing, or the collection of rents and taxes by the Scots landlords, and no Scots magnate, anywhere, spoke of abuse of power, or unprovoked aggression, or royal English displeasure and revenge.

  The first patrols we sent out late that spring were a complete success: unanticipated, rapid, and thorough. Fully five hundred men were dispatched on the first sweep, most of them bowmen, although none of them were limited to the bow alone. They dispersed from Will’s main camp, moving west and south in groups of fifty, with five ten-man squads in each group. One hundred men bound for Galloway, the farthest end of the sweep to the west, twenty-five miles distant, went first in the grey light of pre-dawn, and they were followed at two-hour intervals by the remaining groups, the last of which headed directly south to the open Annandale lands. All were ordered to proceed at speed but keeping themselves out of sight, and to be in place by nightfa
ll, ready to mount a coordinated attack at dawn the next day.

  I celebrated Mass with them before dawn on the day they left and distributed Communion to them all, and I remember that I was not in the least upset that they were setting off to do what they would do, for by then I had seen for myself the ravages inflicted by the people they were setting out to stop, and my own righteous anger overrode my priestly training sufficiently to permit me to wish them well in their assault.

  On that first morning of the sweep two groups were found, a score of miles apart from each other, in the act of committing atrocities against Scots people. In one location they had already killed a farmer and his two sons and were venting their lust on the three women of the place when our patrol arrived; in the other they had killed the householder and his wife, an elderly couple who had been granted their lands as freeholds by the late Lord Robert Bruce as a reward for decades of faithful service as his personal retainers. In both instances, the attackers were taken and hanged from the closest big tree, side by side and still wearing their identifying armour, and the corpses of their companions killed in the fight were hung up beside them.

  Elsewhere on the patrol routes, there were numerous encounters with other bands of armed men, nine of those with groups of ten or more, on foot, and six more with mounted men-at-arms. The large groups and the mounted groups were challenged and destroyed, their animals, weapons, and armour confiscated and the dead laid out and left in the care of the survivors, whole and wounded, with a warning to whoever had sent them that no further abuses would be tolerated. Smaller parties, of ten men or fewer, if they appeared belligerent, were treated accordingly. If, on the other hand, they could explain themselves and their presence, and were able to convince their interrogators that they were being truthful and had broken no laws, then they might be permitted to go free. Many of them were, and were released bearing warnings about future penalties for breaking King John of Scotland’s laws concerning trespass and molestation of the lawful populace.