CHAPTER FOUR

1

The unthinkable happened less than a month after our meeting with Andrew Murray. Alexander III, King of Scots, died in his prime, killed by a lightning strike while travelling to reach his new wife in Fife. He left his country and its people leaderless, the King’s authority invalid without an heir.

His body was found the day after, sprawled on the rocks that lined the shore beneath a high cliff, and no one could say what had happened to him. Determined to rejoin his new Queen that night in defiance of the tempestuous weather and of the widespread rumours that the day in question, March 18th, was to be a Day of Judgment, he had crossed the storm-racked Firth of Forth from Edinburgh Castle in a small ferry boat. From there, refusing shelter offered him, he had ridden northeastward with two guides, against their advice and that of others who thought him mad to brave the storm. In the tumultuous darkness some time later, the three men, king and guides, had been separated.

The word spread slowly at first, for that part of the kingdom was wild and isolated, but once the tidings reached Edinburgh, the news flew from there as though on the wings of birds, so that soon all of Scotland knew of its sudden deprivation. Few of the common folk who heard the news were capable of thinking beyond the moment, and far fewer yet could begin to imagine an outcome to what they had heard. But there were others, men of power accustomed to thinking for and of themselves, who perceived everything that was involved in Alexander’s death, and those men moved quickly. They understood that Scotland, within the space of a single night, had been thrown headlong into a turmoil they might use to their advantage.

I was in the Abbey library, transcribing a document, when the tidings reached us, having taken eight days to speed from Edinburgh to Glasgow and thence to us in Paisley. I recall Brother Duncan rising from his table and moving across the room in answer to a hissed summons from someone who had entered at my back. I remember that he looked angry at being thus interrupted, but Duncan always looked forbidding and so, having my own work to occupy me, I paid no more attention as he swept by me. After a deal of whispering between him and whoever had come looking for him, I heard the door close, and he came back into the room, but moving slowly now. Sensing something amiss, I set down my pen, looking at him idly to see what might be afoot. But as soon as I saw the stricken look on his face, a rash of gooseflesh swept up my nape, and even as my mind formed the thought that something was far wrong, the great bell in the Abbey tower began to toll. In all my time there as a student, I had heard it toll but once, announcing the death of one of the senior brethren.

The Abbot’s dead was the first thought that came to me, and I would to God that had been all it was, for now I know what chaos would endure for twenty years before the next strong king would wrest back control of the realm.

Brother Duncan paid no attention to the measured sound. He stood wringing his hands like a penitent, and I became aware that everyone else was staring at him as intently and as fearfully as I was. Eventually he blinked and looked around at us all, his assistants, then summoned us to him with a wave of both hands. He waited until we had surrounded him and then he made as if to speak, raising his hands before letting them fall to his sides.

“In God’s name, Duncan, what is it?” The voice was Brother Anselm’s. “Someone has died, that much is plain, but who?”

“The King.” Duncan’s voice was so faint that I thought I had misheard him. So, clearly, did the others, for they all broke into a spate of questioning. But when he responded only by repeating the same words in the same shaken voice, the horror of it silenced all of us.

We all knew the King could not be dead. He was God’s own anointed, crowned King of Scots at Scone and beloved by all; a champion in the prime of life, healthy and hale and lusty, newly wed to a young and lovely wife. His representatives had been here in our own Abbey mere weeks earlier, conducting his royal affairs and expounding his wishes for both Church and realm. It was impossible that he should now be gone so suddenly, after ruling the kingdom so well and wisely for so many years. The sound of my own heartbeat filled my ears with a dull, leaden throbbing, and the air outside the green-tinted windows seemed to darken.

2

The Abbey routine was shattered. All the brethren who were not summoned into conference of one kind or another were sent to pray for the soul of the departed King, and soon the sound of massed chanting swelled from the Abbey church as the brotherhood immersed itself in ritual prayers for the dead. The resident students, unexpectedly left at liberty, found themselves free to do as they wished and quickly disappeared as boys will, eager to be about their own pleasures. My sole wish was to carry the news home to Will and Ewan before they could hear it from anyone else, for I wanted to see the look on their faces when they first heard of it.

The farm we tended for Sir Malcolm lay a mile beyond the Abbey precincts, on the far edge of Paisley town, and I ran the entire way, bursting with the import of my message. Will had stayed home that day, too enthralled by the new project that Ewan had set him even to consider going to school, and I ran directly to the stone cottage that he and Ewan had converted into a bowyer’s workshop.

They were huddled together, almost head to head in the dim little room, their attention focused tightly on the object that lay before them on the table, and so great was their concentration that they barely looked up when I burst through the door.

“The King’s been killed,” I blurted. “King Alexander’s dead, fallen from a cliff.”

Ewan had been in the act of picking up the object on the table in front of him when I charged into the room and had scarce accorded me a glance, so I knew that they had seen me from the open window, running across the yard. Now he raised the long, regular block of wood to his good eye and held it towards the shaft of pale sunlight from the window, squinting along the perfectly squared length of it and turning it until he had compared all four edges. Will had half turned to look at me, but he said nothing, merely turning back to watch Ewan with the length of wood. It was, I knew, the single most precious item—in the eyes of Ewan and Will at least—in the entire household, but at that moment it meant nothing to me, and I found it incredible that Ewan and Will had both ignored my announcement.

“Didn’t you hear me? King Alexander’s dead.”

“Is that why you’re home so early?” Ewan lowered his arms and turned to me, holding the heavy wooden batten easily.

“Aye. Word came from the Bishop in Glasgow not an hour ago.”

“Ah, then it must be true.” He laid his burden carefully back on the table and ran a finger across the tiny guide marks that had been inscribed into the piece at varying distances, then glanced at Will. “And what would you have us do, Jamie, now that we know?”

“What?” I felt utterly deflated, having run so far and so fast to shock them, only to find them indifferent. “What did you say?”

Ewan shrugged. “I asked what you would have us do, about the King.”

My mouth opened and closed. There was nothing any of us could do, but I felt a great lump swelling in my throat and fought to speak through it.

“We could pray for his soul and wish him well on his way.”

“We could, and we will, later, once I have finished this.” His fingers stroked the length of wood on the table, and he spoke down towards it, splaying his fingers to span several of the incised lines on its surface. “We’ll pray for him together, all of us, tonight, for I have a thought that every monk in the Abbey will be praying for him at this moment. If that’s true, God will not miss us if we are tardy by an hour or two. In the meantime, though, Will and I have been working on these measurements all morning and we need to finish them ere we forget what we’re about and have to start again at the beginning.” And then he swung towards me with a great smile on his face and reached out to tousle my hair. “So away you go now and leave us to it. Aggie has some fine stew in the kitchens, fresh made, and Will and I are stuffed with it. Fresh bread, too, with the smell of it rich enough to draw the moisture from your very soul. We’ll finish here within the hour, God willing, and we’ll come and find you.”

Crestfallen, I made my way to the farmhouse kitchen, where I told my news to Aggie the cook and Maggie the housekeeper, only to have them show even less interest than Will and Ewan.

“Oh, aye? Poor man,” Aggie said, then looked at Maggie, who laughed and responded, “We’ll ha’e a new King, then.”

“Aye, nae doubt we will. And soon.”

Maggie added, “Aye, I wonder will he ask us up to Scone to see him crowned?”

I closed my mind to their callousness and consoled myself with the wonderful food that Aggie laid in front of me. And as I ate, instead of dwelling upon things I could neither influence nor change, I thought about the new project that had kept Will away from school that day. It was a bow, of course, or it would be eventually, but for the time being and for some time to come it would remain as it was now, a straight length of plain, ordinary-looking timber.

Yet I knew well that the yew stave that fascinated both my friends was neither plain nor ordinary. It was one of four identical pieces that Ewan had brought back several years earlier from his visit to his uncle Daffyd ap Gryffyth, in the English town of York. Daffyd was a master bowyer, transformed by his skills, within the space of two decades, from an extraordinary Welsh archer into one of the most powerful and respected bow makers in all England. Ewan had been his apprentice at the battle of Lewes, where the boy had almost been killed by the mace blow that disfigured him permanently, and his uncle had developed a great pride in the singleminded determination with which his badly injured nephew had pursued his goal of becoming an archer thereafter. The two then lost touch for years, after Ewan had left Edward of Caernarvon’s army and returned to Scotland.

Ewan had gone in search of his uncle, of whose success he had heard from time to time, with the underlying intention of purchasing some decent bow staves, but Daffyd ap Gryffyth had refused to sell to him. Instead, the old man took him into the massive warehouse where he kept his finest and most precious materials, supplies of yew imported from Tuscany and the forests southeast of Salerno, and led him straight to four of the finest staves among the thousands stockpiled there, all four lying side by side in their own ventilated space. These, he insisted, were beyond price and would be his personal gift to Ewan, the sole inheritance within his power to bestow, since his sons, now full partners in the enterprise, must take precedence. All four staves had been taken from the same tree, he explained, stroking the fine wood as he spoke of them; a tall, straight tree of Iberian yew. Iberian yew was unobtainable now in its native form, since most of Iberia had fallen to the Moors in the eighth century, but prudent merchants had salvaged a few thousand seedlings and saplings from the largely unoccupied but still contested areas of Galicia and Asturias during the tenth century, and plantations had been established in Italia and had flourished there, precious and close guarded.

The bole of this particular tree, Daffyd said, had been recognized early for its excellence and tended throughout its life by careful foresters who knew its value. It had grown perfectly straight and virtually free of imperfections until it was almost twenty inches in diameter, and from it the Tuscan sawyers had obtained four magnificent, perfectly straight, and knotless staves, a thing almost unheard of. Each of the four was square in section, four inches to a side and seven feet long, and each appeared to be made of twin laminated strips of reddish-brown colours. But the striations were natural. The darker strip, which would become the inner belly of the bow, was the iron-strong heartwood of the yew, capable of sustaining great compression; the outer, paler side was the sapwood, more pliable than the denser heartwood; it would form the outer “back” of the bow, and its tension, combined with the compression of the heartwood belly, would make the war bow that sprang from it the most powerful weapon of its kind for a single man in all the world.

Ewan had brought the four staves home to Scotland with great care, for they were truly priceless and irreplaceable, but he had brought others with him, too, staves of lesser quality, perhaps, yet cleaner, finer, and less knotty than any native yew remaining today in England.

Will had been practising the bowyer’s craft for years, working until all hours of the night under Ewan’s tutelage, the size of each ash or elm bow he made increasing as his body and strength grew. He had graduated, with great but private ceremony, to fashion his current bow from one of these lesser staves of yew, slowly and patiently perfecting the art of using the bowyer’s razor-sharp, double-handed drawknives to pare down the wood and taper the bow’s length under the proud but watchful eye of Ewan Scrymgeour.

Now, however, Will was close to outgrowing his own bow, and the time had come for him to make another, a longer, thicker, stronger bow that he would be hard set to pull. I knew that, but I knew, too, that his massive muscles would grow larger yet to master its challenge. And I knew that the pride both my friends would take—had already begun to take—in making Will’s new bow from one of Daffyd ap Gryffyth’s finest staves would be fully justified. But I wondered how it could justify their lack of concern over the death of their King.

Ewan and Will came into the kitchen while I was still sitting there mulling. The aroma of fresh-baked bread and of the spicy stew in the pot was still strong in the room, and they helped themselves hungrily to more food while Aggie poured them each a pot of ale from the large, covered wooden jug she kept beneath the stone sink in the corner farthest from the fire. It was still light outside, but the winter-weak March sun was lost in heavy cloud and sinking swiftly, and Aggie left us to our own devices as she bustled away to the quarters she shared with Maggie.

The two talked incessantly about the scale and measurements they had been applying to the stave, and I sat watching and listening until Ewan shovelled the last of his broth-soaked bread into his mouth, chewed and swallowed it, then lounged back in his chair with a contented sigh and took a big gulp of ale. I waited for the inevitable belch that always followed such a draught, and when it had subsided I asked him, “Will you really pray for the King tonight?”

He pulled his bowstring-callused fingers pensively down along the ruined bowl of his cheek, tracing the concave curve of its toothless emptiness.

“I will,” he said in his soft, lisping voice. “I said I would. But, Jamie, what do you suppose this means, this death of a King? What do you think will happen now?”

I did not have to think about my response. “I know what will happen. There is an heir, the King’s grand-daughter Margaret, born to his daughter the Queen of Norway. Brother Duncan says she is an infant, and she will need guidance, but they will bring her home and crown her Queen.”

“Guidance?” Ewan’s face crumpled in what I knew to be a rueful grin. “And who will do this guiding that you speak of? How old is this princess?”

“Three, Brother Duncan said.”

“Three … A child of three, and a lass at that, forbye a foreigner. They won’t like that.”

“Who won’t?” This was Will, speaking for the first time.

“The magnates, lad. The men who think they themselves have the right to rule this land.”

The Scots magnates were the men of power in the realm. They were of varying ranks, from earls to barons and chiefs, and of different bloods, some of them Gaels, a few of Danish and Norwegian stock, and others Norman French. Collectively they called themselves the magnates and individually they each looked after their own interests.

“The magnates,” Will said with a sneer. “Ravens, you mean. They’re carrion eaters, all of them. Only the lawful King has the right to rule this land.”

“Aye, and each o’ your magnates will seek to claim that right. You wait and see.” Ewan’s voice had quieted. “They willna settle for a wee lass Norwegian-born. It has been but twenty and three years since the fight at Largs, when Alexander himself threw the last of the Norwegians out of the Isles. There are men alive today who fought there and still mind that well. They’ll not take the risk of courting that again.”

“And who stands foremost among these magnates?” Will asked. “They can’t all expect to become the next King, surely? Some of them must have stronger claims than others.”

“Some have,” Ewan said mildly. “You spoke with one o’ them yourself, less than a month ago—Lord John Balliol. He’ll claim direct descent from David I, King of Scots, whose grandson, Balliol’s own grandsire, was David, Earl of Huntingdon. He has the lineage, no doubt of that. And besides, his mother, Devorguilla, rules all of Galloway in her own ancient Gaelic right.”

Will looked at me wide-eyed, and I stared back at him, astonished that we two had met, and Will had bested, this man who was now named a potential King of Scots.

“And then there’s Bruce of Annandale,” Ewan continued. “He is an old man now, but his claim is near as strong as Balliol’s. And there are the Comyns of Buchan and Badenoch, though they’re related to the Balliols. Aye, I’m thinking there will be no shortage of claimants. Mark my words, lads, this Scotland will be shaken by wild storms before that matter’s settled.”

He took another long swallow of his ale. “But I doubt any of it will be o’ great concern to us. We’ll get on with our lives and leave the affairs o’ state to them that deal in them.”

3

For several months it seemed that Ewan would be right in his assessment of how little we would be affected by the affairs of kings and magnates. Life continued as it always had, and after no more than a few weeks had passed, people began to forget about the death of King Alexander. Will and I did not forget, but that was solely because of our kinsmen Father Peter and Brother Duncan, both of whom used us as a conduit to pass on tidings and information from the Abbey to Sir Malcolm in Elderslie. Thus as couriers we knew that there were grave and deep-set stirrings beneath the fabric of the country’s daily life.

It began most noticeably with a sudden increase in the number of religious colloquies and hurried assemblies all across the land, several of which were held in Paisley and all of which involved senior churchmen. Several of these took place at our own Abbey, and I remember one in particular that threw all of us into disarray because it was hastily summoned and included the Abbots of Holyrood, Dunfermline, Melrose, and Kelso as well as Bishop Wishart of Glasgow and William Fraser, the powerful Bishop of St. Andrews. Such men did not travel alone. They progressed like the lords they were, lords of Mother Church, and each had his retinue of followers, including secretaries, scribes, acolytes, servants, bodyguards, and camp followers, so that we were hard put to accommodate all of them within the precincts.

As unofficial messengers, we soon came to see that the churchmen had valid concerns, not always solely for the welfare of the Church. The word had come out, within a month of the King’s death, that Queen Yolande had been pregnant before he died. As such rumours often do, it spread like windblown fire and captured the attention of the entire land. If it were true, though, and the Queen bore Scotland a new heir, be it boy or girl, there could be repercussions, for the accepted word in those early days, also unconfirmed, was that the magnates had closed ranks surprisingly quickly at the King’s funeral, despite Ewan’s pessimism that first night, and had accepted the young Norwegian Princess Margaret. Some people even said they had acknowledged her as the official heir, but that, too, was merely hearsay. Nothing, according to our sources, had yet been formally declared. If this latest rumour proved true, however, the magnates would have no choice but to declare in favour of the new child.

Rumour, of course, led to counter-rumour, and many whispered that the Queen, a Frenchwoman closely related to France’s young and ambitious King Philip Capet IV, was not pregnant at all and intended to present some base-born upstart as her own in order to maintain her position as Queen of Scots and to bring the Scots realm under the influence of the Crown of France.

In the last week of April, barely forty days after Alexander’s death, our Abbot left for a great gathering at Scone Abbey, in the course of which the realm’s most powerful and important men—the earls, barons, bishops, abbots, and priors—intended to deal with the situation of the interregnum. When he returned, less than two weeks later, Will and I were sent by Father Peter to inform Sir Malcolm that the matter had been settled. In the course of the Scone parliament, as men were calling it, it was revealed that no heir was yet forthcoming, and the magnates had formally sworn their loyalty to the young Norwegian Princess as the official heir, taking a solemn oath, on penalty of excommunication, to guard the realm for her and to keep the peace of her land.

In support of that oath and in earnest of their open goodwill, the parliament had also dispatched three emissaries to find the King of England, who was campaigning in Gascony against the French, to seek his advice and protection on the rights of the young heir. That done, and for the interim governance of the land, the parliament had appointed a council of six custodians, called Guardians, chosen from what they termed the community of the realm. Two of these six, Alexander Comyn of Buchan and Duncan MacDuff of Fife, were earls; two were barons, John Comyn the Red, Lord of Badenoch, and James, the hereditary Steward or Stewart; and the final two were bishops, William Fraser of St. Andrews and Robert Wishart of Glasgow.

Sir Malcolm listened carefully to me and Will as we reported all of this, and then he nodded in satisfaction. “Three from north of Forth and three from south,” he rumbled. “Two o’ the ancient earldoms. The senior bishops, north and south. And two Comyns representing the barons, one in the north and the other in the south. Aye, cunningly done.”

Until that moment I had not given a single moment’s thought to the composition of the Council of Guardians, but now I saw what my uncle had perceived immediately: the new council was an inspired piece of political juggling, masterminded by I knew not whom, but aimed unequivocally at unifying and protecting the integrity of the Scots realm by emphasizing its differences north and south of the River Forth and ensuring that both halves were equal in voice and influence. The Forth had great significance in the eyes of all Scots. It was the river that partitioned the land into its two halves, the mountainous northern Celtic portion known as Scotia and the southern, more English- and Norman-speaking half. Along its short length from the North Sea to Edinburgh and Stirling it provided the only access routes for heavy traffic travelling between north and south.

“What’s wrong, lad?” The question startled me, but it was not directed at me. Uncle Malcolm’s eyes were on Will, who sat frowning into the fire. We were in the main room of the house, just the three of us, and Lady Margaret, who was about her needlework and seemingly paying no attention to what we had been saying. Will jerked upright and flushed.

“Nothing, sir. There’s nothing wrong. I was but …” His voice tailed away.

“But what, lad? Speak up. Is there something that troubles you?”

“No, sir. Not troubles me. Not exactly.” He was still red faced. “But it seems senseless.”

Sir Malcolm raised an eyebrow. “Senseless? Yon’s a word that could provoke an argument. What seems senseless?”

Will jutted his jaw and charged ahead. “It insults the Bruce,” he said. “Makes no recognition of his rank or status. The Lord of Annandale will take that ill, from what I’ve heard of him.”

Sir Malcolm scratched idly at his beard. “Aye, he might,” he said. “You make a good point, young Will. One worth considering.” He bent forward and struck a small bronze bell on the table by his chair, and when a servant responded he sent the man to fetch a jug of ale.

“What think you, Jamie?” he said then. “Will the Bruce be vexed?”

I could only shake my head, for the possibility had not occurred to me. Lady Margaret came to my rescue.

“How could the boy know that?” she asked her husband amiably, looking up from her work. “He spends most of his life shut up in that great library. How could he possibly know what Robert Bruce is like to do?”

“He is as like to know as I am, my dear,” her husband replied mildly. “Jamie has a long head on him, and not all his life is spent among his books.” He looked back to me. “So, lad, what think you?”

I shook my head again. “I have never met or seen Sir Robert Bruce, Uncle. But Will’s father, Uncle Alan, was his man, and though I only heard him speak of his master once, he said he pitied any fool who dared to offend Annandale. That said, I agree with Will.”

The manservant came in bearing a heavy jug of the household’s weak, home-brewed ale, known as small beer. He crossed to a table in the corner that held a pile of earthen mugs, and we watched in silence as he poured four measures and then served each of us, beginning with Lady Margaret and Sir Malcolm.

“Good,” the knight said once the door had closed again at the man’s back. “Your support of your cousin’s opinion pleases me. It shows loyalty, as well as reason, though I confess I hoped you might point out that Lord John Balliol and his House have also been neglected here. So let us look at this senselessness, as Will calls it, for what it truly is.” He glanced at each of us in turn. “Are you ready?”

We both nodded.

“Let us suppose, though God forbid it should, that everything goes wrong from this day forth. The Queen fails to produce an heir and, even worse, some tragedy befalls young Princess Margaret. What would happen then?” He did not wait for an answer. “There would be dire competition for the throne among the magnates. And among those, who would have the paramount claim?”

“Balliol and Bruce,” Will said immediately, for he and I had discussed this very matter the previous week.

“Exactly. Balliol and Bruce. And which would take precedence?” When neither of us responded, he nodded. “Wise lads,” he said. “For no one knows the answer to that question. Both men have valid claims and both are descendants of David II, though one claims through the female side and the other through a male but arguably less direct descent. The settlement of their dispute would require abler and more subtle minds than ours to arbitrate. And seen from that viewpoint, it would clearly be madness to appoint either of them to serve as a Guardian.

“But take it one step further and consider this supposedly senseless Council of Guardians. Of the six, three are close bound to Balliol by family ties and loyalties—Fraser of St. Andrews, the Comyn Earl of Buchan, and Lord John Comyn of Badenoch, who is wed to Balliol’s sister. The other three align themselves with Bruce—Wishart of Glasgow, MacDuff the Earl of Fife, and James the Stewart. A balance of power, lads. Three Guardians in support of each claimant, and equal representation from north and south. Ask yourselves now, does it truly seem so senseless?”

4

On an afternoon towards the end of autumn in the following year, our sixth year as students, William Wallace turned on the churlish monk called Brother James, picked him up, and flung him headlong to the ground. I was there, and it was in my defence that Will had acted, but in doing so he broke the greatest of the Abbey’s unwritten laws: anyone who laid angry hands on one of the brotherhood was guilty, ipso facto, of a crime against the fraternity that the Abbey represented. Certainly no Abbey student had ever done such a thing before that moment.

Appalled at what had happened, I knew we would both suffer for it, regardless of the provocation that had spurred it. Stunned as I was by the sight of the monk sprawled at my feet, I was amazed that my cousin had restrained himself as much as he had. Mere moments earlier his face had been wild, his huge fist upraised, ready to smash the older man’s face into a pulp. Now, the downed man squirmed in terror, the skirts of his robe soaked by an involuntary voiding of his bladder, while above him Will struggled with himself, his face suffused with blood and his hands clenching and unclenching as he swayed back and forth with the power of his emotions.

Will looked around for the object that had precipitated this disaster. It lay almost beneath his feet—the solid walking staff that Brother James had smashed across my shoulders without warning, driving me to my knees. Will bent slowly and picked it up, hefting it in one hand. It was a heavy, sound staff of hazel wood about five feet in length and worn smooth from long use. The monk had risen to one elbow and now remained motionless, staring up, aghast, at the fury he had provoked. Without looking at him, Will took the hazel staff in both his hands and snapped it in half across his knee, then held both halves together and did the same again, a prodigious feat of strength. He then extended his arm, allowing the pieces to drop one by one onto the man on the ground.

“You spineless, Godless lump of excrement,” he growled in his newly acquired adult voice. “If you ever dare bring your foul presence close to my cousin again I will cripple you so badly that you will never leave your cell thereafter. Do you understand me?” His voice was profoundly deep, rolling and sonorous, yet also calm, but its pitch left no doubt that he was waiting for an answer.

“Yes, yes, I understand. I do.” The monk was bobbing his head rapidly, no trace of arrogance or dislike discernible in him now.

“Then take your skinny, piss-wet arse out of my sight. Now!”

The roar of rage galvanized the wretched monk, and he scrambled to all fours and scurried away, lurching towards the Abbey.

I turned to Will. “You know he’s running straight to Father Abbot, don’t you?”

“Aye, and I don’t care. This day has been coming for years and now it’s done with.” Suddenly he switched to Scots. “And ye ken? I dinna gi’e a damn what they dae to me. Yon was worth it. Did ye see how quick he pished hissel’, the watter rinnin’ doon his robe? I could hear the gush o’ it. He didna think we’d daur face up to him.”

“They’ll expel you, Will. Me, too.”

“No, Jamie, not you.” He reverted to Latin seamlessly. “He attacked you with a weapon, unprovoked. And that reminds me.” He stooped and gathered up the four broken pieces. “We might need this for proof. Pull up your shift.”

I struggled to do as he said, suddenly aware of the band of pain across my shoulders, and when my back was bare he pressed his thumb against the welt that was evidently visible.

“Aye,” he murmured. “That’ll bruise beautifully, too clear to be denied. Don’t lose it.” I looked at him in disbelief, amazed to see him grinning.

“How can you laugh, Will? We are deep in trouble.”

He shook his head. “No, Jamie, no. I might be, but you’re not. I told you.”

“They’ll throw you out. What will you do then? You’ll be disgraced.”

“Aye.” He barked a laugh, which astounded me. “And they’ll go hungry for fresh meat forever after.” He reached out to dig his fingers into my shoulder. “I’m finished here anyway, Jamie. Nothing more here that I want to learn. I’ve only stayed this past half year to keep you company, but nowadays you’re so lost in your books that I spend most of my time alone. So if they throw me out, and I hope they will, I’ll go back to Elderslie and be a forester. That’s all I want to do anyway.”

“A forester!” I was sure he was jesting. “You can’t be a forester, you speak Latin and French! Foresters know only trees and animals, poachers and hunters.”

“And bows, Jamie. Some of us know bows. But I might be the first monk-taught forester. Think of that. And never fear, Uncle Malcolm will welcome me because he can always use good foresters, and he’ll accept my leaving here once he knows what caused it. You, on the other hand, will stay here and take up your calling and we’ll see each other often.”

I knew he spoke the truth about being welcomed back in Elderslie, for he was right about the need for a good forester on the Wallace lands, and I knew too that the old knight would forgive him, for Will and Sir Malcolm had grown close, and the older man had scant respect for clerics. Some, he would concede if pressed, were well enough, honest in their endeavours and their calling like his own two kinsmen, but he had found too many far less suited to his taste. Parasites, he called those who used the privileges and seclusion of the clerical life to keep themselves well fed in relative comfort and free of the responsibilities that encumbered other men.

Brother James, I had long known, was one such specimen. He had never overcome the dislike he had conceived for us when he had been charged with showing us the precincts on our first day there. He had not known who we were that day, and when he discovered later that we were Wallaces, close kin to Father Peter and Brother Duncan, his resentment and dislike had festered and grown deep, although he was usually at pains to mask it. But even that masking bred more resentment.

Will and I tried several times to placate him in the months that followed that first encounter, but it was a thankless task, and we soon resigned ourselves to his dislike and avoided him as much as possible. Yet, inevitably in such a small community, there were times when our paths crossed, and those occasions were generally unpleasant. That became increasingly true as the years passed and we continued to disappoint Brother James by failing to disgrace ourselves as he expected, rising instead to positions of relative prominence within the community, myself as the youngest librarian ever and Will as supplier to the pantry.

I discovered later that our final encounter that September day had been caused by jealousy, and it was inconceivable to me that any full-grown man should be jealous of me. But I learned that James had once worked in the library and had been banished for negligence after several valuable manuscripts were damaged through his carelessness. He had also applied to study for the priesthood, but had been found deficient in several areas and was rejected. The word of my acceptance as a seminarian had been brought to me by Father Peter on the morning of the day Joseph attacked me, and clearly the unfortunate man had heard of it, as he attacked me soon afterwards.

And so our shared days as students ended. Will admitted to assaulting Brother James, but he was merciless in asserting the details of how and why he had done so, offering the broken weapon in evidence and bidding the monks bare my back to show the mark James had inflicted upon me. He went out of his way, too, to describe the antipathy James had held for us since our arrival at the Abbey and offered detailed accounts of several encounters we had had with the man, to our cost each time.

Being a student and one of the transgressors by association, I was forbidden to witness Will’s arraignment, confined under the guard of two senior brethren outside the tribunal chamber until I was hauled in briefly to show my injuries. But Brother Duncan was there in his capacity of armarius, and it was he who described the proceedings to me later. The judging panel, headed by Father Abbot himself, believed Will’s tale unanimously, and Brother James was confined to his cell on bread and water for three months, an unheard-of punishment. On the matter of Will’s infraction, however, there was no recourse. He had struck down one of the community in blatant contravention of the law, unwritten though it was, and had created a precedent. Moreover, he had openly admitted during the hearing that, similarly provoked, he would do the same again, though more thoroughly and effectively next time.

But then, in acknowledgment of the troubled faces of the men who must unwillingly condemn him, William Wallace did something that confounded me when I heard about it, something so noble and so honourable in one so young that it strengthened me years afterwards when I began to hear, and to disbelieve, tales of the alleged atrocities being tallied against his name and fame: he took pity on his judges and absolved them of any guilt they might be feeling, assuring them all that he had long since decided that his time of usefulness to the Abbey community had reached an end. His dearest wish now was to become a forester on his uncle Malcolm’s estates, he told them, because that was what he truly believed God had intended for him and he was impatient to begin. He thanked them for the opportunities they had given him to learn to read and write and converse in Latin and French, as well as for the training they had offered him, perhaps unwittingly, in the paths that he would follow thenceforth, by according him the freedom of the Abbey’s lands in which to hunt and learn the lore of his future craft. And then he requested their permission to quit his formal studies immediately and to return to Elderslie.

The tribunal heard him out in silence—gratefully, I like to think—and then they permitted him to withdraw from his studies and return home with no disgrace attached to his name.

Listening to Brother Duncan’s recital of the events, I was moved to tears by the way he summed the matter up: “Your cousin Will is a fine young man,” he said, with no trace of harshness on his normally forbidding face. “And I believe God has moulded him to be what he is with some great purpose in His mind. We may never know that purpose, but I have no fears that William Wallace will ever let anything stand in his way to achieving it.”

5

Ewan accompanied Will back to Elderslie, his own tasks in Paisley completed. He left the farm, which had flourished under his stewardship for years now, functioning smoothly under the guidance of a tenant called Murdoch, who had done the actual farming and supervised the labourers over those years, quickly earning the ungrudging trust of both Ewan and Sir Malcolm. The abrupt departure of my two friends, however, meant that everything familiar in my life had changed; they had taken the entire contents of the workshop with them, leaving only an empty stone shell. They had left me my bow and a supply of arrows, and even a brace of targets, but I knew, even as I collected those to take them with me back to the Abbey, that I would probably never use them again. The Abbey cloisters would be my permanent home from then on, and although I had enjoyed my archery greatly, I knew that without Will and Ewan to keep me interested and active, I would soon abandon it. Librarians and priests have no need of weapons, even for recreation.

Somewhat to my surprise, I adapted effortlessly to life as a fulltime member of the close-knit Abbey community. My work in the library continued to absorb me, as it had since the beginning, and the time I now had to myself in the evening hours was soon taken up by my studies for the priesthood. It came as a welcome discovery, too, that Brother Duncan and Father Peter intended to continue using me as their go-between with Sir Malcolm, for it meant that for at least one day out of every fourteen I was dispatched to Elderslie to deliver information to my uncle and to bring back his reports to them. Thus I was able to keep myself informed of Will’s activities, even if I did not see him on every visit.

He had, as he had wished, become one of my uncle’s foresters, and the faithful Ewan Scrymgeour had chosen to join him. Both of them were carefree now, busily involved in a brief but intense apprenticeship under old Erik Strongarm, my uncle’s senior forester. By the year’s end they would be responsible for the care and maintenance of the surrounding woodlands. They would cull dead and dying trees, keep the forest free from the buildup of flammable undergrowth, and from time to time they would inspect the activities of the charcoal burners, whose vast smouldering turfcovered pits produced the charred, hard-burning fuel essential to the estate’s smithies. They would also be charged with the welfare of the wildlife on Sir Malcolm’s lands—the deer, wild swine, and other game, including fowl, that thrived in the woods and in the open glades and pastures among the trees—and with the safety of the cattle and domestic swine in the various pastures and paddocks close by the main farm, protecting all of them from theft and depredation.

Ewan had worn the green garments of a forest dweller when first I met him years before, and now he wore them again. But so, I discovered, did Will. The first time I saw him thus, garbed from head to foot in close-fitting, hooded green tunic and trews, I gaped, for he was bigger than ever. His arms and shoulders were enormous, larger, I thought, than those of any other man I had ever seen, and his thighs and legs were as solid and substantial as healthily growing oaks. At seventeen, he was now a man in all respects, save one that I knew nothing of, and I had never seen him happier.

He had grown quickly to accommodate the demands of his newly fashioned bow, itself a thing of beauty that glowed richly with love and care, coats of laboriously applied wax and tallow enhancing the different colours of its wood. It was tapered to perfection for his height and capped on both thumb-thick ends with ram horn tips, the horn boiled to the melting point and then moulded and slotted to anchor the loops of his bowstring. One glance at the thickness of its massive grip was all it took for me to know I could never begin to pull it. He carried it unstrung most of the time, in a protective case of bull’s hide, thickly waxed and waterproof, that hung from his shoulder opposite the bag of yard-long arrows, but he could free it, bend it and string it with hemp, nock an arrow, and be ready to shoot in mere moments when he needed it. It was the pride of his life, I could see. He told me he kept it unstrung and cased in the English fashion, to avoid any danger of the bow’s shaft shaping itself permanently to the arc of the string’s pull and thereby losing some of its power. All in all, my cousin had turned into an imposing man, and the dark growth now fuzzing his cheeks and chin would complete the transformation very soon.

I was not quite correct in that respect, though. Will’s transformation to manhood was effected by another element altogether, one which had little or nothing to do with the density of his beard. But my error was understandable: I was a cloistered boy, barely sixteen, and studying for the priesthood. I had no idea of the natural forces that can transform the merest boy into a man.

Her name was Mirren Braidfoot, and on a brilliant summer day in 1288 she came to Elderslie in a light, horse-drawn cart, accompanied by four other young women and a group of eager young men, all of those afoot. She was there to visit a cousin, a plump, plain girl called Jessie Brunton, whom both Will and I knew by sight. I witnessed the first meeting between him and Mirren, but apart from smirking to myself over his tongue-tied awkwardness, I missed the fateful significance of it, too grateful that it was Will, not I, who had to deal face to face with such a fetching stranger. Will was abashed, I knew, and that was unusual, for he had learned much about young women since leaving the Abbey, but I myself would have been struck mute by her smiling confidence had it been I who had to speak to her.

Standing beside Will, barely reaching the middle of his swelling upper arm and looking for all the world like a slight and tiny child—though she was anything but either one—the girl Mirren stood gazing up at him, watching his face with a deeply thoughtful look on her own. As I approached, the young woman stepped away from him to make room for me. I was aware of her bright blue eyes scanning me from head to foot, her lips smiling gently. But being me, I ignored her look and turned instead to Will, blissfully unaware that in the short time I had been watching elsewhere, William Wallace’s life, and all of Scotland’s destiny, had been changed forever.