by Jack Whyte
I have wondered a thousand times, over the years, if I might have changed anything by choosing differently that morning, but always my faith in God’s all-seeing wisdom convinces me—alas, never for long and never completely—that His will was carried out as He wished it to be.
We stayed in the camp for most of the morning, and for the last hour of that time the wind and the rain gradually died down and then stopped. We had already begun to break camp by then, and were having enormous difficulty in dismantling and stowing our leather tents, for their weight had been tripled by the amount of water they had absorbed. By the time we finally had the wagons loaded and were preparing to pull out, back onto the road again, the clouds were breaking up and clearing quickly, and bright sunlight was lancing down through the gaps here and there in spectacular glowing rays.
No one spoke much as we settled into the journey, but as the miles fell slowly behind us and the sun’s warmth dried our wet clothes, a semblance of good humour re-emerged and soon there was a steady flow of banter passing between the two wagons. At one point I twisted in my seat on the driver’s bench beside Big Andrew, to respond to a jibe from Ewan in the other wagon, and suddenly found myself racked by an intensely painful cramp in my left foot. My entire leg seized up and I writhed so violently against the pain of it that I lost my balance and fell sideways, barely managing to grasp the side of the bench in time to prevent myself pitching headfirst to the ground. Ewan, in the other wagon, saw me jerk and fall sideways, and for a few stupefied moments he thought I had been felled by an arrow.
The ensuing alarm was short lived, though, and turned quickly to laughter when it became clear that I had simply suffered a cramp. Alan muttered something about priests spending too much time on their knees and their backsides, and wondered aloud why it should be strange that their muscles complained of inactivity by twisting into cramps. I remember feeling rather shamefaced as I massaged the feeling back into my leg, and then I hopped down and walked beside the wagons, hobbling for the first few minutes but soon striding easily. I felt euphoric for a short time after that, wanting to run in my exuberance, in sheer celebration of being me and of being alive and of being away, for a brief time at least, from the responsibilities of my priestly life.
Striding out in front, I was a good hundred yards ahead of the wagons as I came to the brow of a little hill, no more than a slight rise in the road. As I breasted it, I saw one of Robertson’s archers jogging along the road towards me. I was not alarmed, for the archers were seldom far beyond our sight, but there was something about the way he was coming that brought me to a halt, looking around me and then at the road behind him. He was moving quickly but furtively, keeping close to the bushes that lined the road as he approached. He saw me watching him and raised a hand in greeting, but he did not slacken his pace.
When he reached me he stopped and bent over, panting for breath with his hands gripping his knees.
“Englishry, Father Jamie,” he gasped. “Robertson sent me back to warn you. He says there’s nothin’ tae be upset ower, but he thocht ye’d like to ken they’re doon there, at the crossroads at the bottom o’ this road. Ye canna see it frae here, but that’s where they are. There’s a knight in charge, on the biggest horse ye’ve ever seen, but we couldna recognize his crest or colours, an’ he has a couple o’ mounted men-at-arms wi’ him, forbye about ten archers. They’re up to somethin’, but we couldna tell what. Watchin’ for somebody or mayhap just waitin’ to see who gaes by. But Robertson jalouses they’ll stop ye and ask ye what your business is, just because they’re English.”
I thanked him, and he turned away and vanished into the dense growth lining the road. This was not unexpected, and we had planned for it and knew our story. I walked back towards the approaching wagons.
“What?” Alan asked as I pulled myself up on to the stirrup step beside him. Mirren was sitting beside him, between him and Ewan, and all three were looking at me expectantly. I smiled at Mirren and waved vaguely in the direction we were heading.
“One of the archers just warned me that there are English ahead of us, at a crossroads at the bottom of the next slope. A knight, he says, with a couple of mounted men-at-arms and half a score of archers.”
“Aye, I know the place. What are they doing, did he say?”
“No. He didn’t know. But he and Robertson think they’re up to something. Nothing to do with us, though, since nobody knew we’d be coming this way. But he thinks they’ll challenge us.”
“Of course they’ll challenge us. Since they decided to take over the ownership of Scotland they challenge everything. A knight, you said?”
“Aye, fully armed and probably English, for nobody recognized his crest or colours.” I looked at Mirren. “So remember, stay calm and don’t say anything different to what we planned. The tricky part will be to pretend we didn’t know they were there, so don’t be peering about for them. If they suspect we knew they were there, they’ll start suspecting other things as well—like how did we know? Who warned us? And why?”
She nodded at me, her face calm and peaceful, and I smiled back and dropped to the ground, making my way to the other wagon and pulling myself up to sit beside Big Andrew and Father Jacobus.
4
They kept themselves well hidden, for we saw no sign of them at all as we descended the long slope, even though we knew they were watching us. We reached the bottom of the descent, and the road flattened out just at the entrance to an open glade surrounding the junction of the two roads that crossed there. The glade was filled with shoulder-high saplings of birch and alder, new growth after a fire had swept through there a handful of years earlier, and from the height of the driver’s bench, overlooking the saplings, I found I could see clearly in all directions across the burned area to the start of the forest proper again, without moving my head obviously. Nothing was stirring, anywhere I looked, but then from the corner of my eye I saw the lower branches of a big evergreen on the forest’s edge pushed aside, and three mounted men emerged and rode directly towards us.
There was no debate over which of the three was the leader, for his appearance spoke loudly for itself. He was dressed in plate armour, which established his identity beyond question as being English. No Scots knight could afford such expensive armour, any more than he could afford a horse large enough and strong enough to bear his weight were he dressed in such a manner. Horse and armour here were emphatically and defiantly Norman-English, flaunting the wealth, puissance, and arrogance of their owner. The colours and livery were unknown to me, the knight’s shield and surcoat and his horse’s skirts all similarly quartered in red and silver, with alternating diagonal bars in the top right and bottom left quarters and three red swans on a silver field in each of the others. The crest on the knight’s enormous silvered helm was a red bird, too—I presumed it to be a swan—flanked on each side by curving spirals of red and silver. A very fine and intimidating picture the man made, trotting towards us, and we stopped to await his arrival.
He reined in directly ahead of us, blocking the road as he raised the visor of his helmet to see us as clearly as he could. His face was hard to discern within the shadowed opening, but I saw a red-veined nose above a bushy red moustache, and then his voice came rasping towards us.
“Who are you people and what are you up to? No damned good, I’ll wager. State your names and your business and give me one good reason why I shouldn’t take the lot of you into custody.”
I stood up, and when he turned his glowering gaze on me I forced myself to smile and addressed him in my best English, since I was convinced that, like most of his ilk, he would be barely literate at best, with no knowledge at all of Latin, which he would sneer at as clerkish nonsense.
“I can give you an excellent reason, Sir Knight. We are engaged upon the affairs of Holy Church. I am Father James and I am a member of the secretarial staff of Lord Robert Wishart, Bishop of Glasgow and senior prelate of the realm of Scotland. My associate here, Father Jacobus, has
been with me on a mission to the south on behalf of His Lordship and we are now returning to Glasgow to conclude our business.” I indicated Ewan on the other wagon. “The bald man there is the Bishop’s uncle, Ewan Scrymgeour, brother to His Lordship’s mother, and the young woman with him is his daughter Margaret, who is in mourning for her recently dead husband, killed by bandits near the border with England. We are taking her to be with her mother until she has the baby. The others are all employed by Master Scrymgeour. I have letters of safe conduct from the Bishop, should you wish to read them.”
That was sheer bravado on my part and I knew the risk I was taking, for the only documents I had in my possession were two brief sets of notes given to me by Bishop Wishart before I left Glasgow. But I could sense both truculence and outright hostility in the choleric-looking Englishman, and so I decided to try to allay his suspicions by gambling heavily on his being illiterate, knowing that if I was wrong, we might all die here.
The fellow glowered at me for a moment from within the cavern of his helmet, his heavy eyebrows drawing into one thick, unbroken line, then grunted and held out a peremptory hand. “Show me.”
My stomach contracted in a spasm, but I maintained my outward composure and dug into my scrip for the two folded pieces of parchment. I handed them, unopened, to the knight.
“May I be permitted to ask your name, sir?”
The knight had removed one of his gauntlets and now held it clamped beneath an elbow as he strove to unfold and open the first letter. He grunted an interrogative sound, then growled, “Redvers. Sir Lionel Redvers of Suffolk. Now let’s see here …”
Having finally unfolded the parchment, he held it up and peered at it closely, and I felt the tension drain out of me. Had he been able to read, he would already have seen that what he held was no letter of safe conduct, but a list of brief instructions on what I was to do at various stages of my journey from Glasgow. He said nothing, though, and sat staring at the parchment as though memorizing its contents. Finally he sat up straighter—no easy feat, dressed as he was in full armour—refolded the letter, and returned it to me.
“So be it,” he growled. “But you can’t leave yet. We are awaiting a marching party here, and until they come no one can pass beyond this point. Where are you headed now? You’ll never get to Glasgow before dark.”
“No, sir. We had intended to stop at the inn in Lanark town.”
Someone shouted in the distance behind him, and the Englishman spun his horse to look back. “They’re coming,” he said to no one in particular, then looked back at me. “Stay here until we are gone, and then you may follow us. Lanark is no more than three miles from here.”
He swung away, pulling his visor closed with a sweep of his hand, then set spurs to his horse and charged off, followed by his two companions. I turned back to Ewan and found him watching me, a strange expression on his face.
“Uncle to the Bishop, you said?”
“Aye. It seemed a fitting description at the time, and it worked. No English knight, no matter how much he detests the Scots, is going to risk giving serious offence to a senior churchman—particularly by interfering with his family.”
“You took a risk.”
I grinned at him, feeling much better now. “Not as big as the risk I took in showing him that letter of safe conduct from the Bishop,” and I explained how I’d banked on the man being illiterate and too vain to admit it.
No one spoke, and Ewan stared at me steadily. “I pray you, in future, don’t be so quick to gamble with my life.” He shrugged very gently. “I have no great fear of losing it, but I take much comfort from the belief, foolish though you might make it appear, that the disposition of it rests in my own hands.”
“And yet it worked, and we have been rewarded handsomely. We can now follow the English all the way to Lanark without being bothered further.”
“And we would, were we not due to turn left at the crossroads. Lamington is a mile in that direction.”
“Ah! I did not know that. I knew it was near Lanark, but I have never been there. So it’s over that way?”
“Aye, it is. Listen, did you not say there were supposed to be a half score of archers with those three? Did you see any signs of them?”
I grinned at him. “No more than I did of Robertson or his men. Archers are hard to see, Ewan. Had you forgotten?”
He threw me a look of pure disgust, then paused, his head cocked. “Well, whoever these people are, they’re coming now.”
We were less than thirty paces from the point where the two roads crossed, and it was plain from what Redvers had said that the column they were waiting for would cross directly in front of us. We moved forward slowly until we were right beside where the column would pass, and as we moved, the noise of the group approaching from our left grew steadily louder until the front ranks came into view. They were all footmen, uniformly dressed in chain-mail shirts, plain steel helmets, and leather jerkins with a small patch over the left breast, showing a red swan on a white field, and they were walking in the semblance of a march. They came towards us four abreast on the narrow road, and we fell silent as they approached.
Throughout my life, I have been troubled from time to time by terrifying dreams that I have never shared with anyone, whether from shame or fear I cannot truly say. In all of them I am being threatened or pursued by someone or something that is determined to kill me. The details of these dreams are never clear when I finally wake up, shivering, but the overwhelming sense of doom and terror they engender remain with me long afterwards. In all of them, my pursuer is always unimpaired and merciless, but I am always hindered by an inability to run fast enough, to shout loudly enough for help, or to hide quickly enough. In the moments following the appearance of the front ranks of that English column, I somehow fell into that dream state while wide awake. It happened with stunning speed; I simply found myself witnessing a situation that seethed up like milk in an overheated pot and boiled over, beyond my control.
I was watching the approaching soldiery idly, hearing the shuffling tread of their feet and the occasional clink or rattle of a piece of weaponry, and then I saw the English knight, Redvers, approaching again, riding at a lumbering trot from the rear of the marching column. As I turned to look at him directly, I noticed that four of the marching men were carrying a litter of some kind, slipping and sliding and generally making heavy going of it at one spot where the roadway was still muddy and puddled from the morning storm. They were no more than thirty paces from me when one of them lost his footing in the thick mud and almost lost his hold on the litter pole, and it was his muffled cry of alarm, a curse, really, that caught my attention. Mine was not the only notice drawn to him, though, and that is when everything around me seemed to speed up rapidly, leaving me too befuddled to do anything other than watch what happened.
I heard Mirren’s voice shouting, “Mother!” and from the corner of my eye I saw her fling herself down from the bench of the wagon and run towards the soldiers. Little Willie bounced in his strapped shawl on her back, his normal daytime roost, while she clutched her skirts above her knees in one hand and waved frantically with the other. I was still blinking and wondering what she was doing when I heard the English knight shout, “Take that woman! Hold her!” and then he was spurring his horse directly towards her, closing the distance between them more rapidly than I could adjust to what I was seeing.
Mirren paid him no attention in her dash towards the litter, and she and the huge warhorse collided directly in front of me with a sound that appalled me. The animal struck her with its shoulder and sent her flying, mother and child spinning like an ungainly top until she crashed to the ground, and only then could I collect myself sufficiently to move. I shouted something, too late either to warn or to protest, and began running to where she and the baby lay in a welter of women’s clothing, and as I ran I saw blood trickling from her nose and mouth. Little Willie was screaming, eyes screwed shut and mouth wide open, though I could scarcely h
ear him over the other noises. Men everywhere were shouting now, but I paid none of them any attention. I threw myself to the ground on my knees beside Mirren, and as I bent forward to cover her and the boy, someone kicked me in the head.
I know I was kicked only because I was told about it afterwards, for the blow broke my jawbone and knocked me senseless. I was kicked elsewhere, too, thoroughly and methodically, for when I regained awareness I was bruised all over and had several broken bones. I ought to have been killed, I suppose, but my priestly apparel may have saved my life.
Ewan and Andrew managed to escape. As archers, they both knew they needed distance between them and the enemy, and so as soon as Ewan saw what was happening—and he saw it far sooner than I did—he seized his bow case and quiver, called out to Andrew, then leapt down from the wagon and ran, using the vehicle’s bulk to shield him from English arrows.
There were no English arrows, though, because Robertson and his five men had already stalked and killed the ten bowmen Redvers had brought with him, so as soon as the two marksmen had gained sufficient distance to allow them to shoot clearly, they turned back towards the enemy and set about killing Englishmen. Redvers the knight attempted to send his footmen against them, but from less than a hundred paces Ewan’s arrows and Andrew’s crossbow bolts could punch right through their inferior chain mail, so they retreated, having no stomach for a frontal assault across open ground against marksmen now being reinforced by others as Robertson and his men came running from the woods and joined the fight. Only Redvers himself and his two mounted men-at-arms were strongly enough armoured to face the Scots fire, and in attempting to close with them, they proved that only Redvers was immune to the Scots arrows. Ewan, with his great bow of yew, brought down both men-at-arms with armour-piercing bodkins, and a direct hit on Redvers’s breastplate from twenty paces, though the missile glanced off and away, almost unhorsed the knight, who lost his sword while fighting to stay in the saddle and then turned and lumbered away to rejoin his men.