They began talking with each other — farmer to merchant, merchant to seaman. Wallace watched for a moment in satisfaction ad moved over to old Craig, who has seen everything from a spot beside the huge hearth. The old man was frowning, Wallace looked at him, knowing already what he wished to say. “The king will not like it,” was the old man’s comment.
“We don’t have a king yet,” Wallace said. “But when we do, he will have trade.”
“I meant Longshanks,” old Craig said. “This will antagonize him further.”
“He is not our king. And we could not possibly make him hate us more that he already does.”
Hamish moved in and whispered to Wallace, “Stephen is back.”
Wallace and Hamish hurried into the stables, where they found Stephen, tattered but smiling. They clasped forearms in greeting, Wallace delighted to see his friend alive.
“Irish! You look hungry!” Wallace said.
“H”How should I look after a month in the saddle?”
“Did you get it?”
“Did we get it, he asks us, Father!” Stephen babbled to the Almighty. “Does he not know the scripture, ‘Ask, and ye shall receive’?” He punctuated the biblical verse by brushing away some hay in the corner, uncovering a large object wrapped in hides. He pulled them back and revealed a new crossbow with a small box of bolts.
Wallace lifted and examined the instrument. He felt its heft, tried its shoulder position, tested the tension of its string, and tried it crank. When he looked back at his friends again, his face was grave. “Hamish,” he said, “order the council assembled!… Yes, order it!”
44
Since his return to Edinburgh weeks before, Wallace had said nothing whatsoever to the council of nobles. When they issued proclamations praising his victory at York, he sent word that he was too busy seeking alliances with foreign powers to attend the council protested –not openly, but through Craig, who tried to visit Wallace personally but got only as far as Hamish — that diplomacy was a power belonging to the council, Wallace replied — through Hamish—that as guardian, the security of Scotland was his responsibility. Hamish even reminded the council, in words that rang like William Wallace’s that in making Wallace the guardian they had asked him to swear to be faithful the protection of Scotland, and so help him God he would be faithful now. The council knew — knew because he passed along to them copies after he had already sent the letter — which Wallace had written the king of France, proposing a military alliance with Scotland. They also knew he had written the pope; Hamish told them he had. But Wallace did not reveal to the council the text of that letter; Hamish declared he had not read it himself and that the letter had the privacy of the confessional. Such actions troubled the council, not just because Wallace took them without consulting with them but because he thought of such actions without their advice. A military alliance with France could save Scotland; recognition from the pope of the independence of Scotland could bring support not only from France but from other nations as well. Wallace was a man of action, and he made men of politics uncomfortable.
When he ordered them to assemble on a secluded field outside Edinburgh, they grew more troubled still. Hamish has brought not only the inner council, comprise of noble family leaders, but also all the prominent relations he could gather, especially those with battlefield experience. Wallace had told him the more the better, and Hamish has pulled together everyone within a day’s ride of the capital city, more than thirty nobles. Among them was Robert the Bruce.
It was a day of unusually flat light, the entire sky a mass of slate gray clouds. The nobles stood in clumps of three or four, whispering among themselves. “What does he want with us?” young Mornay inquired of Bruce and Craig the moment he walked up to them.
Old Craig shook his head. “No one knows.”
“Who does he think he is, with this order that we come?” Mornay muttered to the Bruce. “He invades England without our instructions. He writes the king of France; he writes the pope! What is he trying to do?”
“I can’t say for sure,” the Bruce answered his friend, “but I can tell you what he’s done already. Look around you. Instead of whispering about each other, now we’re all whispering about him.” Both Mornay and Craig looked around and saw that what the Bruce said was true. “Maybe his most remarkable achievement is that he has brought us together.”
Wallace appeared, marching up in long, powerful strides. All the nobles and been declaring to each other the questions they meant to ask him, the explanations they meant to demand, but when they saw the look on Wallace’s face, they said nothing. Hamish, old Campbell, and Stephen moved along quickly behind Wallace; when he stopped and faced the noblemen, the two big Scots took positions on his left and right, like lions guarding the gates of a mythical city, while Stephen wandered silently in and out among the crowd. As deterrents to physical attack, both were amazingly effective: anyone wild enough to think of assaulting Wallace hand to hand would be sobered by the sight of the massive men at his shoulders; and yet Stephen was perhaps even more unsettling, weaving among the nobles with that saintly smile of his lips and devilish fire in his eyes and making their backs crawl and itch whenever he was behind them.
Wallace said nothing at first, just looked off toward the tree more than fifty paces away, where Highlanders were setting up a Scottish spearman’s shield against a bale of hay. They tucked a melon behind the shield. Then Wallace uncovered the crossbow he had brought, wrapped in the skins, and held it up for all of them to see. The nobles gazed at the strange new weapon of war, looking so scientific, with its short, powerful bow fixed rigidly on its side at right angles to it’s stock, completed with a trigger mechanism and a crank for drawing back the thick, strong string. They watched in stony silence as Wallace cranked the crossbow to its full cocked position, placed a bolt in its slot and fired at the armor.
The bolt slashed through the air and punched right through the armor and the melon, leaving no doubt what it would do to a man’s heart.
Old Craig turned pale. “That is why the pope outlawed the weapon! It makes war too terrible!” the old nobleman said. He wondered if this weapon, specifically forbidden by the Vatican for use in warfare was the subject if Wallace’s letter to the pope.
Wallace ignored Craig and said simply, “Longshanks ordered these from Holland. His factories are making them, too.”
“How many will he have?” Mornay asked.
“We recon over a thousand,” William answered.
“And this is not all. He is bringing his army over from France to reinforce the new army he has mustered from England. In addition, he will force Welsh bowmen into service and possibly Irish conscripts as well.”
“How do you know this?” Craig asked in amazement.
Again Wallace ignored him. “I brought you all here so you could see what is facing us. This weapon will be used against us. It will shoot through our schiltrons with great accuracy. Longshanks will not respect the pope’s bans, not if he can use the weapon to destroy the strategy that wrecked his army at Stirling.”
“It is useless to resist him!” Craig sputtered.
Wallace erupted. “No! Not useless! We can beat this! With cavalry — light, fast horsemen, like you nobles employ — we could maneuver their bowmen. Look a the weapon!” Wallace said, holding the crossbow up, shaking it at them. “Yes, it is accurate and powerful, but it is heavy and clumsy, too. It is one thing to fire it coldly at a target, but it’s something again to try to shoot it when you are being charged head on by Highlander on foot and by horsemen from you flanks and rear, all screaming like berserkers!”
“You wish us to be insane?” Mornay asked.
“I wish you to be Scotsmen,” Wallace said.
There was a long silence. Wallace looked at Robert the Bruce, who did not avert his gaze but still did not speak up. At last old Craig said, “With such a weapon and such a force arrayed against us, perhaps it is time to discuss other options.”
&nb
sp; “Other options?” Wallace asked. “Don’t you wish at lease to bring your men to the field, so you can barter a better deal from Longshanks before cover and run?”
“Sir William!” the Bruce said, trying to deflect the storm.
“We cannot defeat the power arrayed against us!”
Craig insisted through his anger.
“We can and we will!”
“Sir William!” the Bruce said with even greater vehemence.
But the storm of Wallace’s anger had already begun. He shouted at Craig, at all of them. “We won at Stirling and still you quibbled! We won at York and you would not support us! If you will not stand with us now, then I say you are cowards! And if you are Scotsmen, I am ashamed to call myself one!” With that the tossed the crossbow onto the ground at their feet, like a gauntlet, daring them.
The nobles, all of them carrying swords and daggers, gripped the handles of their weapons. Hamish and his father stepped up shoulder to shoulder with Wallace, while Stephen’s dagger silently from his belt and snuggled against the throat of the noble nearest him.
Robert the Bruce, backed by Mornay, jumped between Wallace and the nobles. “Stop! Everyone stop! Please, sir William! Speak with me alone! I beg you!”
Robert was the one man capable of drawing Wallace away from the confrontation; he was the only noble Wallace had any desire to listen to. They moved a dozen paces in the direction of the shield impaled by the crossbow bold. Stephen showed away the man he had seized, ad he moved to join the Campbells in glowering at the nobles and begging, any and all, to step forward and fight.
When the Bruce had urged Wallace far enough away that they could speak in confidence, he turned and spoke in a suppressed but passionate voice. “Sir William, please listen to me! You have achieved more than anyone dreamed. You’ve made all of Scotland and all of England as well stand and wonder at what you’ve done! But fighting these odds now” — he gestured at the shield pierced by the bolt - “this looks like rage, not courage. Peace offers its rewards! Has war become a habit you cannot break?”
The question struck deep in Wallace. For a moment his eyes flickered away toward the juncture of the green hills with the gray sky, as if everyone he had loved and lost had just moved beyond that horizon. But when he looked back to Bruce, his eyes were not dreamy but blazing with life. “War finds me willing,” Wallace said. “I know it won’t bring back all I have lost. But it can bring what none of us have ever had: a country of our own. For that we need a king. We need you.”
It was Bruce’s turn to pause and swallow. “I am trying,” he said.
“Then you tell me what a king is! Is he a man who believes only what others believe? Is he one who calculates the numbers for and against him but never weighs the strength in his own heart? There is strength in you. I see it. I know it.”
Robert the Bruce was both moved and ashamed to hear these words from William Wallace. Seeing this, Wallace pressed him further.
“These men are like all the others, they need a leader!” Wallace said. “They will never accept me, but they will you! Lead them! Lead us all.”
Robert stared at Wallace. Wide-eyed, breathless, the young nobleman seemed unable to move. Finally he said, “I must…consult with my father.”
“And I will consult with mine.”
Saying that, Wallace strode back to the main group of nobles. He glared around at all of them. Then his eyes changed, showing less anger, and more pity. “When Longshanks invades us again,” he said in a quieter voice, “the commoners are going to fight. I don’t believe I could stop them even if I wished to. When they fight, I will lead them. We need you. Even if you all come, it may not be enough, but whether all of you come or none do, we will fight. And stand or fall, live or die, whichever we do, we will do it for Scotland.”
Wallace left the field, his friends behind him, never more proud than they had been at that moment.
45
Robert the Bruce did not ride straight back to his castle. He took a long detour and did not explain to his personal bodyguard the reason. He rode silently in front of them, so insensible to the countryside around them that the captain of his guards wondered whether his master might even be unaware they were so far off their normal route home. But when he inquired, after passing through another crossroad, whether his lordship had intended to take the fork that led ever further from their castle, the Bruce nodded and kept on riding. They stopped once in a village, where the Bruce asked directions of a tavernkeeper, and once more along a farm road where a herdsman listened to his soft inquires and pointed the way.
At last they reached a small valley, marred by the shells of farm buildings burned out and never rebuilt. Robert ordered his men to remain there beside the charred rubble, and he rode over the hill alone.
To Murron’s grave.
At the ragged hole that once held Murron’s body, Robert the Bruce dismounted and stared at the barren cavity. It gaped there like an empty eye socket, among the other, undisturbed, grave. The Bruce had heard the story of Wallace riding in through the English ambush and pulling her body from the earth to bury it in a place where no enemy could find it. So the story was true.
He held the reins of this lathered horse and lifted his eyes from the grave to it’s stone marker and the delicate lines of the chiseled thistle he frowned as if this was too much to understand. He mounted up and rode away.
In the faint nimbus of the single candle, young Robert sat across from his leper father in his father’s darkened room. Young Robert reported every word of the meeting at Edinburgh, even what he had said in private to William Wallace. His father had listened with his yellowed eyes wet so droopy that it would scarcely have surprised young Robert if those eyes had fallen out of the decaying head and popped onto the table. But finally his father had spoken, telling young Bruce what course he must take. And now the son gripped his own head as if stunned by a blow.
“This…… cannot be the way,” He said to his father.
But the old man’s brain, behind those loose, weak eyes, as still as keen as ever; if anything, the endless hours he spent alone, hiding his leprosy, had only make that brain more keen. “Wallace will not survive; he cannot!” The elder Bruce said. “He can never lead this country. The nobles will not support him!”
“But, Father —”
“Everything is clear, Robert. Everything. Think of all you have told me, of everything you’ve seen and thought, and you will know this situation as clearly as I do. William Wallace wishes to spill every drop of blood in his body for the sake of Scotland. But that will not make us free.”
Heartsick, the father reached across the table, then stayed his arm, unwilling to touch his son with his leperous hand.
“My son. Look at me. I cannot be king. You, and you alone, can rule Scotland. What I tell you, you must do — for yourself and for your country.”
Young Robert held his father with his eyes and did not look away.
46
The plains of Falkirk lay not far from Stirling. Had the mists not been so heavy that morning, Wallace could have looked into the distance and seen the hill where the castle stood and the smaller one opposite it, where he had rallied the Scots to victory.
Longshanks had chosen to assemble his army upon a different field, not only fleeing the ghosts of that last defeat but escaping the battlefields features of river and bridge that Wallace had used so effectively the first time.
Wallace did not like this ground. It was open and smooth and offered no natural obstacles he could use for maneuver and strategy to neutralize the superior numbers of the English. He wanted to fight anywhere but here. Stirling would have suited him again, with it’s bridge and he could seal and its river he could use to be out of range of the arrows. When his scouts told him where the English were heading, his first thought had been to slide the Scottish army back, pull the English into a forest, a bog, a hillside, an ambush, to choose his own day and his own ground.
But the roving bands of
Highland clansmen discovered the English army for themselves, and when word was passed through the Scottish ranks that the enemy was close, it was more than their instincts could bear. They moved in the direction of Falkirk without ever receiving he order to march and in fact did not march at all but raced to the battlefield, each clan competing to be the first in position to fall on their hated foes and drive them from the land.
Wallace and his lieutenants rode to the highest ground they could find and looked out over the wide smooth stretch of grass that was about to become a vast killing field. Wallace was grave.
He heard the Highlanders chanting, banging their shields in high sprits only segments of the English army were visible through the mists, but it was clear they were there in great numbers. The Highlanders were unafraid; the more English to kill, the better.
Old Campbell looked at Wallace’s grim face and said, “If we don’t begin the battle soon, the clans will start it for themselves.”
Wallace looked toward the crest of the next hill to his left. Mornay was there at the head of his cavalry. Of all the nobles, only Mornay had come. But he had brought nearly a hundred rides, all armed and battle-ready. “At least we have Mornay,” Hamish said.
Wallace looked to the hill on his right. It was bar. He had sent a message to the Bruce asking him to anchor the right of the Scottish battle line, but he had received no reply. Seeing Wallace’s face as he gazed toward the empty hill, Hamish said, “The Bruce is not coming, William.”
“Mornay has come. So will Bruce.”
There was no time to send more messages, no time to argue, no time to plead. There would be no negotiations at this battle; it would all be settled with blood. Wallace peered across the field, trying to see the English positions, trying to see all the way to Longshanks and into his mind. “They will attack first,” he said. “That’s what I would do, before we can get set, before any of our reinforcements reach us.”
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