And so they ran. The barks were getting very close. Wallace could feel the rising instincts of panic. The blood beat in his ears, his breath scalded his lungs.
And the hounds were relentless. Wallace’s group was down to Hamish, old Campbell, and the two new recruits; Faudron and that insane Irishman who called himself Stephen.
Suddenly William Wallace stopped running and turned on those with him.
“What is it?” Hamish said, “Come on, William, run!” The barks were getting closer and closer, but suddenly William was ignoring them.
“No matter how we go, they follow,” he said, “They have our scent. That is, they have my scent.”
Run!” You must not be caught!” Faudron pleaded.
But William Wallace just stood there.
“We can’t stop!” the Irishman insisted.
“They’re tricked us,” William said.
“What’s the crazy man saying, Lord?” Stephen of Ireland asked looking toward the stars.
“The dogs have a scent. My scent, Someone must have given it to them,” William said quietly.
“Who could do such a thing?” Stephen said with a wide-eyed look of Irish astonishment.
“Exactly,” William said. “Who?” And he pulled out his dagger.
Back among his contingent of swordsmen and royal hunting dogs, Lord Pickering felt the excitement of the impending kill. He sensed it from the dogs; he sensed it in himself. The prey had stopped running. The dogs barked frantically; they tugged so hard at their leashes that the handlers were almost dragged along. The lead handler turned and called back, “Be ready! We have them!”
The soldiers gripped their weapons, ready to take their prisoners. Pickering had already told them he wanted Wallace alive; it was always best to make an example of rebels by allowing those who shared their sentiments to witness the execution. Now he called again, “Remember, I want Wallace a prisoner!” Only a few of his soldiers heart it; most were strung out in a long line stretching far behind the dogs, but Pickering was not too worried, for he had made sure his most experienced and reliable soldiers were in front.
The dogs, their handlers, and the lead soldiers burst into the small clearing. The dogs found a body, stabbed, his throat cut; the dogs plunged their snouts into the gore and yipped wildly. The handlers had to fight furiously to tear the dogs from their bloody prize.
Lord Pickering approached the body and looked down. It was Faudron, mangled now but identifiable, with the new scarf he had given William in place of William’s own tucked into his shirt.
“Damnation! Damnation!” Lord Pickering bellowed, and seizing the arm f his assistant, he dragged the man over for a close look at the body. “That is Faudron, isn’t it"? Isn’t it?”
The assistant peered down at the bloodless face; the dogs had gotten to it, but they had left enough for the assistant to be sure who it was. “Yes, m’lord,” be told Lord Pickering.
Pickering ranted. He had conceived the plan of an infiltrator, had even picked Faudron from among the likeliest candidates. This should have worked! How could Wallace have known? Hell with it, he could wonder at that later. “After him! Get them going again!” he shouted at the dog handlers.
“Their noses are drowned in new blood. They’ll follow nothing now, m’lord!” the lead handler said. The dogs were milling around, barking aimlessly.
And just as the realization, hit Pickering that he couldn’t pursue Wallace any further, something else hit Pickering: the dagger of Stephen of Ireland, who had covered himself in a cloak and slipped in among Pickering’s men. Pickering’s eyes went wide, then rolled back as Stephen’s dagger slid expertly through his back ribs and into his heart. As Pickering fell and his men realized what had happened, Stephen had already ran back into the trees.
The soldiers hesitated for a moment, then a captain said, “After him!”
Three men raced into the darkness of the forest in the direction Stephen ran. Suddenly they heard the whistling of a huge broadsword, and the unmistakable sound of steel cutting through bone could be heard with the faint death groans of the soldiers. Then the head of one of them came rolling out of the trees, into the clearing, to stop at the captain’s feet.
The English soldiers crowded together, event he dogs whimpered and picked up the fear of the men around them. It was like they were surrounded by around them. It was like they were surrounded by something superhuman and demonic.
Then Wallace’s voice came booming out of the darkness; he played up the spookiness of it all. “Eeeinglishmennnnnn!” William shrieked.
The soldiers were terrified — and rightly so. They were realizing that they were lost in this forest; their leader had been murdered right under their noses. Suddenly they were not even secure in their numbers, for most of the other soldiers hadn’t even reached the clearing yet.
The weird Scottish voice roared from the blackness around them: “You seek William Wallace. You have found him. Tell your masters — those of you that make it home — that when you come armed into Scotland, you come into hell!”
A pause; nothing but silence and fear. Then with a bloodcurdling yell, three wild men tore out of the darkness from different directions, their swords slashing. They cut down soldiers, and the others panicked. They ran anywhere they could. Terror spread through the forest.
Wallace, Hamish, and Stephen were left alone in the heart of the woods. They howled, barked like dogs, and snarled like wolves — and then laughed like hyenas!
“I thought I was dead when ya pulled that dagger!” Stephen Said.
“No English lord would trust an Irishman!” Wallace said.
Hamish squinted down at the little Irishman, thought for a moment, and said, “let’s kill him anyway.”
They laughed again until their sides hurt.
Then William Wallace’s laughter leaked away. He found the tree where he had fallen asleep and stood beside it now and stared into the dark forest where he had seen Murron in his dream.
29
THE NEWS OF WALLACE’S VICTORY OVER LORD PICKERING raced across Scotland like an Atlantic gale.
It spread to Inverness, where tow men were drinking in the town alehouse and one said, “William Wallace killed fifty men! Fifty if it was one!”
The same tale was exchanged by two farmers at a cross roads below Glasgow, only here it was said, “A hundred men! With his own sword! He cut through the English like — “
In the taverns of Edinburgh, the story was going: “—like Moses through the Red Sea! Hacked off tow hundred heads!”
“Two hundred?!” doubted one of the listeners, still sober enough to b incredulous.
“Saw it with my own eyes,” the speaker insisted.
But in the string of valleys where William Wallace had spent his boyhood, all looked absolutely normal: sleepy and peaceful. The clansmen who lived here never spoke of William Wallace. If an outsider mentioned his name, the farmers, their wives, and even their children all took on bewildered and rather dull expressions and seemed never to have heard of the man.
It was here, between the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon, that a Highlander, a runner, slipped through the inky blackness and tapped on the door of the house belonging to Stewart the farmer, who opened the door immediately and invited the man inside. But the runner did not stay; he whispered with Stewart for a moment and then ran on up the valley.
Hamish Campbell watched the runner from behind the closed doors of the barn. When he was sure he had gone, he turned and moved to the back of the barn, where the soft light of a shielded lantern glowed on twenty Highlanders lying in the hay. Steward had fed them well; he had found fresh clothes for some and sound weapons for others. Now most of them were asleep.
Hamish did not trouble them; he climbed the ladder into the loft, where his father and Stephen of Ireland sat cross-legged on the hay. They had been whispering for hours about the secret crafts of rebellion: how to use farm implements in battle, how to set an ambush, which kinds of m
oss are best to stop bleeding. The old Scot and the young Irishman had much in common. When Hamish arrived, they kept right on whispering.
Hamish moved past them to the dark corner in the very back of the barn, where he found William Wallace asleep. Hamish knelt and watched him, not wanting to disturb his friend’s slumber; and yet that sleep clearly was not peaceful. William’s face twitched, his body jerked, his lips moved as if they desperately needed to speak but could not make the words come.
Hamish knew what he was dreaming. Hamish, in his own way, had loved Murron, too.
There was a knock on the door of the barn in the rhythm Stewart used. Old Campbell and Stephen of Ireland broke off their talk and watched as one of the Highlanders down below opened the door to their host. He moved in and moved to the ladder up to the loft as the rest of the Highlanders stirred, knowing by Steward’s hurry that their time of rest was over.
Hearing the commotion below, William awoke suddenly and gazed at Hamish with the dazed look of someone who had leaped across worlds in and instant. He stared about him and seemed to Hamish disappointed to find himself back on this side of death, where his loneliness was a physical pain. He then looked at Hamish as if nothing had happened, as if he had awakened like any other man might, and Hamish pretended the same. “What is it?” William asked, seeing Steward mounting the top of the ladder. “What’s going on?”
“A messenger has arrived,” Hamish said.
Steward looked around him at each face before he spoke. “The English are advancing an army toward Stirling,” he said. “They appear to be reinforcing the one already there. It looks like a full-scale invasion.”
Campbell sucked a long full breath into his massive lugs. Scotland invaded. Full-scale war. Everything he had dreaded, feared — and prayed for. “Do the nobles rally?” he asked.
“Robert the Bruce had been chased from Edinburgh! But word of the march has spread, and Highlanders are coming down on their own by the hundred’s by the thousand!” Steward said.
And then without anyone meaning to, they all turned and looked at William Wallace.
30
STIRLING CASTLE STOOD THEN AS IT DOES NOW, PERCHED on a hill high about a grassy field cut in half by a river spanned by a bridge. Now the bridge is made of stone and steel; in June of 1297, it was made of wood.
On the seventeenth day of that month, Scottish nobles had gathered on a smaller hill overlooking the field; they wore gleaming armor, with plumes, sashes, and banners, and were attended by squires and grooms.
The mists of morning shrouded most of the field. But from the opposite side of the bridge they heard the clattering of a huge army moving forward. Lochlan, a noble with extensive holdings near Edinburgh, galloped to Mornay, who, as the representative of the strongest alliance of noble families on the field that day and a well-known ally of the imprisoned Robert the Bruce, was accepted by the other nobles as the man best accredited to discuss battlefield terms with the English commanders. Lochlan had come to the field that day expecting to negotiate, not fight, but the sheer size of the English army had his heart pounding. “It sounds like twenty thousand!” he shouted to Mornay even before he had drawn up his horse.
Mornay was calm. He too expected no battle; his voice, unlike Lochlan’s was dull with disappointment. “The scouts say it is ten.”
“And we have but two!”
The business of slaughter is a cauldron of boiling emotion, and the same dark apprehensions that had begun to spatter within Lochlan’s belly were likewise churning in the guts of the common Scottish soldiers who stood clustered around the small hill on the northern side of the bridge. There was an abbey on this hill, and many of the Scottish commoners on the field that morning had reason to look at the abbey and wish they’d had the privilege of selling their lives into monastic slavery of the soul rather than face the lot that was theirs that day.
Most of them owned no land, nor did they own the houses where they lived. They were allowed to inhabit the huts they called home by the good graces of the nobleman whose land they were privileged to work. The commoner then paid his liege lord a share of the harvest, the portions being determined not by the laborer’s productivity or the size of the family he as trying to feed but by his station in life, a status preestablished at the moment of his birth.
But service of labor was not all the commoner owed his lord; he was also required to present himself for battle whenever and wherever his lord required. To refuse to do so was more than disgrace; it meant turning himself and his family into wanderers and beggars. Still, the Highlanders had never been known as reluctant warriors. Theirs was a beautiful, rugged, unforgiving land, lashed by furious winds and surrounded by ferocious seas. They were descendants of marauding tribes and Vikings; they believed in courage.
The arrangement of their society seemed quite normal to the common Scots on the field that day. Like all men, they drifted with the flow of their lives.
But standing on a cold hillside on a foggy morning and staring across a field where other men stand with the sole purpose of spilling your blood and brains upon the ground has a tendency to make you think in basic terms. And the Scots thought not of society but of life and death.
The English were massed below the stone battlements of the castle and the river at the base of its hill. They stood in ordered rank: arches, pikemen, swordsmen, axmen. Behind them loomed the cavalry, line after line of mounted knights with lances. It was the biggest army, the largest assembly of humanity in any form, that the Scots had ever seen. Their weapons were new and polished. They had steel helmets, iron shoulder plates, chain mail. Even the horses wore armor.
The most protection any of the common Scots wore was a shirt of padded leather. Their weapons were old, and some were only farm implements adapted to the purpose at hand, but the edges were sharp. The Highlanders were used to making do, and they credited more the wielder of the weapon than the weapon itself.
But this day did not feel like theirs. All armies have a mood, flowing down form the man the warrior see as their leader, and the Scots knew the men who led them to that dying field cared nothing for their lives or even for the victory they might win in sacrificing them. As through the mists they saw the numbers arrayed against the, a young soldier tugged at a grizzled veteran and muttered, “So many!”
The veteran took no pains to keep his voice down.
“The nobles will negotiate. If they deal, they send us home. If not, we charge. When we are all dead and they can call themselves brave, they withdraw.”
The young soldier had never seen a pitched battle, but he was no coward. He had fought in numerous clan wars. Then it seemed he fought for honor. Here nothing made sense. “I didn’t come to fight so they could own more lands that I could work for them!” he said.
“Nor did I. Not against these odds!” the veteran said. And then, with no thought, he simply lowered his pike and began to walk back through the lines, heading north toward the Highlands. The younger man, surprised at first, quickly followed him.
Like a leak in an earthen dam, the desertion quickly gathered force. At first one by one and then in clumps, more of the Scots lowered their weapons and turned their faces toward home.
Seeing their armies dissolve before their eyes, the nobles were powerless. If a few men or a small group failed to justify their obligations in battle, they could be fittingly punished, but when the whole multitude defied their noble authority…
“Stop!” Lochlan screamed. “Men! Do not flee! Not now! Wait until we have negotiated!”
But Mornay was scarcely surprised by what he saw.
“They won’t stop, and who could blame them?” he said quietly.
But suddenly they did stop. William Wallace came riding into the mob of men followed by his clan. He was striking, charismatic, his head without a helmet, his hair flowing in the wind, his powerful arms bare, his chest covered not in armor but a commoner’s leather shirt. Wallace rode a swift horse like he was born on it.
; The entire Scottish army watched in fascination a Wallace and his men rode through them toward the command hill. A half dozen of the men with Wallace were also mounted. The rest ran in that Highland scurry that was as fast as a horse’s trot; some of them carried on their shoulders mysterious wool-wrapped bundles so long it took three men in a line to carry each.
The deserting Scots whispered among themselves. The young soldier who, without knowing or intending to, had started it all now frowned a the veteran and wondered, “Could that be William Wallace?”
“Couldn’t be. Too young. Not big enough,” the veteran told him.
The common soldiers, already having broken ranks, drifted in clusters up the hill to see the confrontation. As Wallace and his mounted captains reached the nobles, Stephen of Ireland, riding beside him, laughed. “The Almighty says this must be a fashionable fight, it’s drawn the finest people,” Stephen said.
Lochlan and his noble friends stared at the tall, powerful commoner before them. So this was William Wallace. Wallace started back. “Where is thy salute?” Lochlan said, his noble pride already stinging from the defiance of the rabble.
“For presenting yourselves on this battlefield, I give you thanks,” Wallace said.
“This is our army. To join it, you give homage,” Lochlan demanded.
“I give homage to Scotland. And if this is your army why does it go?!” Wallace reined his horse around to face the mob of sullen men, all ready to desert. For a long moment he said nothing, just sat on his horse and looked down in awe at this thing that had grown beyond anyone’s imagination.
He glanced at his friends: Campbell, Hamish, Stephen. They had no suggestions; they were just as awed as he was.
Then a shout came from a grizzled veteran, deep within the ranks of the deserters. “We didn’t come to fight for them!”
And another man called, “Home! The English are too many!”
Braveheart Page 12