“Shh!” Isabella said. “I am unhurt.”
They walked toward the door of the palace arm in arm. Under her breath so that none but Isabella could hear, Nicolette said, “I hope your husband goes after the Scotsman himself. This Wallace will kill him for certain”
24
A BIT NORTH OF ITS GEOGRAPHIC CENTER, BRITAIN IS pierced by two jagged slashes of water that dart inland, one from the east and the other from the west, cutting the island nearly in half. The bottleneck of land that remains is a beautiful rolling plain, broken here and there by sudden promontories that jut into the north Atlantic sky. This land is the doorway to Scotland, and Stirling Castle was its gatekeeper. Rising on the noblest of the promontories, its stony battlements gazed out for miles in all directions, daring all comers.
Safe within the walls of this castle sat Lord Pickering, head of the English army in Scotland. He was in the great room with his generals, discussing the deployment of their forces, when he received the royal messenger. Reading the note the prince had sent him, Pickering replied to the messenger, “Please report that I have already sent out the cavalry. And assure the prince that I shall catch Wallace one way or another.”
The messenger left as Pickering burned the message.
At the same time, at another castle not far away, Robert the Bruce lay in bed with a young Nordic beauty. She was drowsy; the lids hung heavily over her vacant blue eyes. But the lovemaking had not defused the restlessness of Robert’s spirit. He lay on his stomach, turned away from her on the bed. She stirred and kissed his neck, but he didn’t respond.
“I wanted to please you,” she said.
He seemed not to have heard her, then at last he muttered, “You did.” But he was numb as she nuzzled him again. She sagged back, and he still stared away, lost in thought.
But then he became aware of her and realized her feelings were hurt. He tired to explain what he’d been thinking. “In Lanark Village,” he said, “The king’s soldiers killed a girl. Her lover fought his way through the soldiers and killed the magistrate.”
The blond beauty he’d spent all night and most of the morning with just looked at him blankly.
“He rebelled. He rebelled!” Robert insisted. “He acted. He fought! Was it rage? Pride? Love? Whatever it as, he has more of it than I.”
The blue eyes only appeared vacant; Robert’s young lover understood exactly what he was saying. She turned away from him. “You might have lied,” she said toward her pillow.
Robert heard the hurt in her voice. He knew there was no way to explain it away, to make her believe even for a moment that he cared about her or anything else in his life with the kind of passion he’d just been marveling at. “I’m too arrogant to lie,” Robert said at last.
He rose, pulled back the curtains, and squinted at the sunlight. Late morning. It was time.
He dressed in fresh clothes and left her there in his bed with an empty kiss that she welcomed with an empty smile.
He moved grimly up a dark castle staircase. He followed a servant who carried a candle against the gloom. The reached a door, which the servant unlocked. Young Robert took the candle and entered the room, the light from the tallow and wick barely penetrating the darkness.
Robert willed himself forward and placed the candle on a table in the center of the room. There was a shuffle in the dark; then, as if floating out of the black waters of a murky pool, came a face drifting into the candlelight. The boundaries of the face — the tip of the nose, the point of the chin, the bottoms of the ears, the mounds of the cheeks == were eaten away. A leper. Robert the Bruce, the Elder — Robert’s father.
The younger Bruce had steeled himself for the sight, and now he did into look away. His father, isolated in his disfiguration, looked back at him with the eyes of the condemned. And yet there was no pity there for himself or anyone else. The elder Bruce enjoyed these visits from his son; the chance to advice counsel, direct — to plot his son’s ascension to the throne of Scotland — it was now all he had.
“Father an armed rebellion has begun,” young Robert said.
“Under whom?”
“A commoner named William Wallace took the English at Lanark, and now people flock to him.”
“A commoner? So no one leads Scotland.”
The old man paused to ponder, and young Robert waited in heavy silence, broken only by the sputtering of the tallow in the candleflame. The elder Bruce lifted his yellow eyes and pointed a half finger at his son.
“You will embrace this rebellion,’ he said in his dusty voice. “Support it from our lands in the north. I will gain English favor by condemning it and ordering it opposed from our lands in the south. Whichever way the tide runs, we will rise.”
But young Robert did not get up immediately to carry out his father’s wishes as he usually did. He kept his seat and struggled to find the right words fro something that, at the time, he would have said held only the mildest interest for him; an yet his mind could not let it go. “This Wallace,’ Robert said. “He doesn’t even have a knighthood. But he fights with passion, and he is clever. He inspires men.”
“And you wish to charge off and fight as he did,” his father said.
But his father was not surprised; it was almost as if he’d been wondering when such emotion would spring out of his son. He shot back. “It is time to survive! Listen to me! You are the 17th Robert Bruce. The sixteen before you have passed you land and title because we ride both sides of every road. Press your case t the nobles. They will choose who rules Scotland.”
“They do nothing but talk!” Robert said.
“Rightly so! They are as rich in English titles and lands as they are in Scottish! Just as we are! You admire this man, this William Wallace. Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage. So does a dog. It is exactly the ability to compromise that makes a ma noble. And you must understand this: Edward Longshanks is the most ruthless king ever to sit on the throne of England, and none of us, and nothing of Scotland, will survive unless we are as ruthless, more ruthless, then he.”
Young Bruce rose heavily and moved to the door. But his father’s voice reached out and caught him there.
“Robert… look at me. I wish the world were different, and courage and conviction alone were enough. They are not. Even with my nose and ears falling from my head, I can face this fact. So must you.”
With a last long look at his father, Robert left him and climbed alone down the passageway of stone stairs that led back to his own rooms.
25
THE NEXT DAY TROOPS RODE THROUGH THE SCOTTISH countryside. They questioned civilians, threatening to pull down their houses and burn their fields, but none seemed to know anything; most claimed never to have heard anyone named William Wallace, even in Lanarkshire, where he had live. But when a pillar of dark smoke rose from the valley in which the Wallace farm lay, the other farmers and the villagers of the shire came out of their homes and stared at it in reverential silence.
When night came, and the villagers huddled behind barred doors, and even the rabbits of the heather seemed afraid to stir from their burrows, William Wallace and Hamish Campbell rode through the darkness along the trail that connected their childhood homes. When they reached the Wallace farm, a half moon was just peeking from behind the broken clouds, and in its light they saw the destruction.
The house in which William had been born, where his mother died, where he had known the carefree days of childhood and the happy camaraderie with his father and brother — that house had been torn down. Not one stone remained atop another; the English had made a point of that. Its timbers had been stacked and burned. The outbuildings had received the same treatment.
William looked at it all, and there was not a ripple of reaction in his face. Hamish looked for some sadness, some anger, some emotion of any kind, and saw none. This made the big redhead uneasy. He had sworn to himself that he would stay by William’s side no matter where that took them, and he would protect his frien
d even when –especially when — his friend’s pain was so great that he no longer gave any thought to his own safety. Hamish was particularly intent that he never again let William plunge off alone as he had at Lanark. So William’s stony silence frightened him.
But the deadness in William’s face was only an illusion. That face changed when they came upon the plots of the Wallace family graves.
The graves had been dug up, the bones scattered and ridden over by horses, so that only chalky splotches, gray on the earth in the thin moonlight, remained. Even the headstones that once marked the graves had been upended and set into the ground upside down as if to point the way for the wandering sprits of the dead to find their way to hell.
When William Wallace saw this, his face was no longer stiff. It came alive; though it scarcely seemed to move, all of it changed. It was a look so fierce that Hamish could smell the hatred. He had seen Scots hate before but this was different. The look that had been on William’s face when he attacked and killed the garrison at Lanark was suddenly there again, and what struck Hamish was that the hatred seemed to have grown.
That made Hamish happy. It meant they were going to kill something.
But then he had a realization — and before he could say anything to William about it, his friend had already reined and spurred his horse. Hamish cursed himself and spurred his own horse in pursuit. Why did William always have to think a half second quicker?
In the Calendonia trees sprinkled on the gently sloping hillside where Murron lay buried, the moonlight lay in flat puddles on the top sides of the leaves. The undersides of the leaves were black shadow. So were the back faces of rocks, the far sides of the tree trunks even the depressed places of the uneven earth. Everywhere you looked was ambush.
Hamish and William lay flat to the ground on the edge of the hilltop above the entire valley. They could see no details from this distance, could barely make out the light pile of neatly placed stones that mounded Murron’s grave. They had ridden an extra half hour to come into the valley from this direction and the last ten minutes of that in stealthy silence. But now Hamish whispered, “You sure they’re down there?”
William answered nothing. He had already told Hamish exactly what he had planned to do, and while Hamish was sure that William’s eyes could penetrate the shadows no better than his own, it was unsettling to the big redhead that William seemed to see the soldiers lurking there, had already seen them in his mind, before they even left their horses behind and crawled the rest of the way to this spot to peer down into the valley on their bellies.
“William…. I wish you wouldn’t ask me to do this,” Hamish said.
“The earth will still be soft for quick digging. You’ve got to help me. I won’t have the strength,” William said.
“But I—” Hamish started to protest.
William had already crawled off into the darkness. Hamish swore under his breath and crawled after him.
At the edge of the Highland graveyard, between the treeline and the graves themselves, was a rill in the earth from which underbrush sprang. This underbrush had been thickened by cuttings brought in from the forest beyond, and beneath this added camouflage lay four English soldiers. When they had first taken their places here, just as darkness fell, the promised reward for the head of William Wallace had made them alert and optimistic. Then they had grown edgy from the long vigil in a dark graveyard; now they were drowsy. But they perked up at the first sound of muffled hoofbeats.
They reached for their weapons — short swords smeared with dirt so that no gleam of moonlight could betray their position; they knew that to catch this William Wallace they would have to be crafty. Barely breathing, they lifted their heads to peer toward the stack of new stones in the center of the graveyard. They saw the lone rider moving up the valley, keeping close to the shadows, guiding his horse in a quick quiet trot rather than a louder gallop but stopping every twenty yards or so to listen and scan the shadows.
Three of the soldiers in the underbrush were new recruits, first-timers in Scotland; they now blessed the sergeant who had led them there, concocting this whole ambush. The sergeant knew these Highlanders!
He had positioned his corporal and four more men at the far side of the graveyard, so that even if Wallace escaped their first charge, he would run directly into their spears.
The soldiers in the underbrush worked themselves into crouching postures, ready to spring as soon as the rider dismounted. They strained to make out the face of the horseman as he neared the grave… and they stopped listening.
By the time they heard the hoofbeats on the soft earth behind them, it was too late. It didn’t make sense. They couldn’t make out their direction, then they whirled, their eyes bugging, as a cloaked figure galloped in from the woods behind them. The figure was swirling fire! He hurled burning torches into the clustered soldiers and the clustered brush. The four soldiers tied to scatter from the flame, and the rider — William Wallace —— cut them down with his massive broadsword.
Meanwhile, Hamish had reached Murron’s grave and was digging frantically. The stones he had scattered with a few kicks of his huge feet and a swat or two of his massive hands. The new dirt parted easily and he began to free the shrouded body from the shallow earth. He cringed, not with the effort but from the very idea of what he was doing.
Hamish could feel a charge coming. William had plotted the entire English ambush in his mind and had already warned him exactly where the soldiers would be. And now sure enough they came, more soldiers rushing in from behind the rocks at the far side of the graveyard. Hamish didn’t even look at them coming, he just struggled to get the shrouded body out of the ground. Wallace charged the soldiers and drove them back. One he rode over, another he hacked, but the others scrambled back in their shock and confusion as the ambushers became the ambushed.
William galloped to Hamish and jumped down beside him.
“I’ll take her,” William said.
He had ignored a charging soldier; Hamish cut the man down just as he reached William’s back.
William clutched the body to his chest and climbed into the saddle, a tremendous physical feat that he seemed not to feel at all. Hamish ran and bounded into the saddle of his own horse, wheeled, and drove back two more soldiers with the slash of his own broadsword. Then he galloped after William.
William rode through the moonlight as he clutched Murron’s shrouded body to his chest. Hamish rode behind, protecting against any pursuit.
At the grove on the precipice, William dismounted and stretched Murron’s body gently on the ground. Hamish dismounted, too, with the spade he had used to dig up the old grave. He lifted his eyes to William’s face and saw the moonlight shining in the tears at the edges of his eyes. “I’ll wait… back there,” Hamish said.
“Hamish, I… thank…” William stammered.
Hamish put a hand on his friend’s shoulder, then quietly led the horses away.
William started to dig.
Later in the grove William sat looking at the new grave covered with leaves, completely hidden. He touched his hand to the earth.
Hamish was waiting by the stream as William came out of the grove. There was nothing to say. They mounted their horses and rode away.
26
WILLIAM SAT CROSS-LEGGED BESIDE A SMALL HOT FIRE OF dry peat and wet twigs. It had rained through all of that day and most of the previous night, and the woolens he had his men wore were soaked through; this made them wet but warm, for the woven cloth was an even better insulator when it thickened with moisture. Most of the men in the encampment were drowsy; the rain splattering on the canopy of trees above them was like a lullaby to the tired Highlanders.
But they had placed sentries at the perimeter of their camp; old Campbell had seen to that. Now he was lovingly honing broadswords to razor edges as he shared a whiskey jug with Hamish, who sat beside the fire next to William and looked from time to time at the darkness all around like a dog sniffing for danger.
For the last hour William had been staring, not at the glowing embers of the fire as Scots sharing whiskey were inclined to do but into the smoke rising above it, as fie he saw in its twists and curls some action unfolding there. But now he picked up a stick from the pile gathered to feed the fire, and brushing away the broken leaves that matted the forest floor, he began to scratch on the wet ground. It wasn’t writing; Hamish couldn’t read, but he knew letters when he saw them. These were patterns: squares, triangles, circles. Finally Hamish demanded, “What’re ya doing’?”
“Thinking,” William replied.
“Does it hurt?”
“What do we do when Longshanks sends his whole northern army against us?”
Old Campbell stopped what he was doing and sat down beside the fire. “Aye,” he said. “I’ve studied on the question myself. They have heavy cavalry. Armored horses that shake the very ground. We have spears and broadswords.”
“They’ll ride right over our formations,” Hamish said.
“Uncle Argyle and I used to talk about it,” William said. “No army in history has ever been able to stand before a charged of armored horse. No infantry has ever had the courage. And if they did stand, it wouldn’t be courage but foolishness. Without a barrier of fortifications, the horses are unstoppable. And if we are outnumbered, as we surely will be, then giving up maneuver by hiding behind earthworks is equally stupid, for the king’s archers would kill us all.”
“So we fight the Highland way,” old Campbell said. “Attack and run. Retreat into the hill country. Burn everything as we go. Leave nothing behind us for Longshanks’s army to eat.”
“And leave nothing behind worth fighting for.” William said. “What if we could win a victory? What if we could stand against the king’s whole army with an army of Scots?”
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