CHAPTER ELEVEN

1

The remainder of that year, 1293, may have been uneventful for most of the realm of Scotland, but for me it was a hectic period, spent adapting to the practical reality of living daily as a priest. My new principal and superior, Bishop Wishart, was then the senior prelate of Scotland, and he went out of his way, from the outset of our relationship, to ensure that I became familiar with, and stood prepared to deal with, all the political developments that affected our lives, not only within the realm but even more dramatically in the closely associated circles of the Church in England as well as Scotland. It was an exhaustive field of activity, particularly in the early days, and he plunged me into it directly after my ordination, going so far as to provide me with a well-lit office cubicle so that I could study more effectively and apply myself to the tasks he set me without being interrupted.

Callow, inexperienced, and newly minted as I was, I knew nonetheless that I was being accorded extraordinary treatment for a tyro, and I braced myself to raise the matter with the Bishop, to discover why he should be at such pains before I even had a chance to prove myself to him.

But it was he himself who raised the matter. Soon after I had moved to Glasgow, exchanging my home in the Abbey for the new and ornate but yet unfinished cathedral there, he told me he had seen a talent in me years earlier, an ability that had impressed him sufficiently to ensure that he would keep a close eye on me thereafter. I must have looked truly perplexed.

“I don’t understand you, my lord,” I said. “Forgive me, but what are you talking about?”

“Your gift for reading people,” he said. “It’s quite amazing. I’ve never seen the like of it in one so young.”

I laughed aloud, at a loss for words.

“Don’t laugh, Father James,” he said testily. “If I wished to be amusing I could find more beguiling topics with which to entertain you. You have a gift, God-sent. A talent, lodged deep within you and thrusting itself forward despite your own wishes. God has granted you a rare capacity to look at men and see through all the artifices they present to mask them from the world. You do it without even being aware of it, and you see straight to the heart of whomever you are dealing with at any time. That, Father, is a capability so rare as to be priceless to a man like me, who has to treat from day to day with people whose main concern is to conceal their own true motives.”

He saw me begin to raise a hand in protest and swept my interjection aside before I could voice it. “Believe me, I am no fool babbling into my wine cup. I saw this in you years ago. And once I had noticed it, I watched for it increasingly, and I never saw it fail. But even then, I did not trust my own perceptions. I enlisted the help of others, telling them what I suspected and then bidding them observe you as I had, and they all concurred.”

This time I did stop him. “Forgive me, my lord, but who are ‘they,’ these people you set to watch me?”

“No one who would do you harm or wish any ill upon you, Father James. Your cousins, Father Peter and Brother Duncan, were glad to assist me, as were both the Abbot and Sub-abbot of Paisley, and all of them agreed that this ability of yours, whatever its source, is real and strong.” He shrugged. “So what would you have me do with such knowledge, holding as it does the certainty that your abilities can make my task as bishop and pastor much less arduous? I have no choice but to foster your talents, because I believe that once you have learned to direct and control them, they will be of immense value, not merely to me but to the realm itself.”

I tried to argue with him, claiming that he had misjudged me and overestimated my supposed abilities, but he was adamant. Much to my own surprise, I quickly came to love the challenges involved as he instructed me patiently on how to assess the records and reports, some written but most of them oral, of men’s past deeds; to look meticulously at their backgrounds and their previous activities for indications of their beliefs and motivations; and then, in face-to-face encounters, to look beyond their outer, public facades to divine their true motivations and intent.

I became something of an adept in an astonishingly short time, once I had conquered the difficulty of believing that I really had a natural acuity in such things. I soon found myself becoming increasingly aware, from day to day, of the subtle pressure being applied on all sides in normal daily commerce by the clerical community within which I lived and worked, and by the swarms of influence seekers who flocked to the cathedral as a centre of both spiritual and temporal power. More than that, though, I became acutely attuned to the predominantly malignant activities of the influence brokers who pandered to the wishes of all the others. To the Bishop alone I reported everything that came to my attention, and he reciprocated with an openness he rarely showed to others, discussing privately with me matters that he would seldom entrust to others of higher rank.

Thus I was able to observe at close range, from the earliest days of his reign, the inconsistency and the tragic need to please and to be liked that doomed John Balliol’s kingship and brought about the events that followed his removal from the throne after less than four years.

The rot had set in as early as the spring of 1293, when William Douglas and young Robert Bruce were swearing their allegiance to him, for that was the year when the common folk everywhere in southern Scotland really began to suffer widespread injustice and indignity at the hands of the “visiting” soldiery, and when the constant English presence was generally accepted as a fact of life. No one had the slightest doubt that the former was caused by the latter, yet even then no one would have thought of applying the word occupying to the English forces that were everywhere in the land.

No one would have thought, that is, of saying it aloud. But the truth was that the arrogance and intransigence of the English soldiery, fostered by their commanders and allied with the indifference of the Scots nobility, gave rise that spring to widespread injustices against the Scots folk, abuses that stirred up local unrest that was put down in turn by ruthless military reprisals.

Men and women—cottagers and householders—were dragged from their homes and hanged out of hand, with no one ever being called to account. With increasing frequency, community leaders and solid, successful farmers had their lands and holdings confiscated after they were accused of heinous crimes by blatantly unscrupulous “witnesses.” Such evidence was too often ludicrous, most particularly so when it was tendered—and accepted—in denial of verifiable testimony to the contrary offered by more reputable witnesses. In defiance of all sanity, and making a total mockery of Scotland’s laws, those spurious accusations continued throughout the summer and autumn, and large accumulations of land and assets that had been held by local folk for generations were snatched up by heavily armed outsiders.

In the spring of the year that followed, petty Scots leaders began to emerge throughout southern Scotland, driven to inconsistently organized self-defence, and to aggressive resistance, out of frustration and desperation. Reports of bands of outlaws and rebels began to circulate widely. The English made no formal complaint to King John, however, since to do so would have drawn attention to what was really going on in the countryside. They chose instead to increase their troop concentrations in the troubled areas and to deal more and more harshly with the local people. King John himself heard nothing of the increasingly urgent reports of these reprisals from the people in the southern half of his kingdom, or if he did hear of them, he chose to remain deaf to the problems of his poorest subjects.

One particular band of outlaws came into prominence soon after Easter that year. It began quietly, making its presence known in its own small area by the end of April, but it seized the attention of everyone in the southern half of the country towards the middle of June. Tales of this band’s activities began to be repeated along with the latest reports of atrocities against the people, and they seemed to offer hope in the face of despair: wherever the most blatant outrages of condoned robbery occurred—the perpetrators called it confiscation by the military administration, but it was barefaced pillaging—there occurred, too, sudden and unattributable instances of retribution.

Men who had sworn false testimony against their neighbours were found dead, with their tongues cut out and reinserted backwards; men who had seized houses and property rightfully belonging to others were found hanged within the charred ruins of the buildings they had stolen; and soldiers who had taken part in these dispossessions, beating and whipping innocent men and ravishing their women, met swift justice on the trails and pathways through the forest surrounding the places where such crimes had occurred. Most often, they were shot down from ambush and left to rot where they fell, but at other times, in deeply wooded areas where bows were ineffectual and death by a blade or club was not always assured, they were taken on the march, gathered together under stout trees, and dispatched with cut throats, and any survivors were hanged directly above them, lest anyone miss the significance of what had happened.

These outlaws became known as the Greens, because at the scene of every killing, whether of a single man or a large group, a scrap of green cloth was left pinned to the chest of one of the corpses by a knife blade.

By the end of June, rumours abounded about who these Greens were and whence they came, and more than a few young men left home, all across the south, in the hopes of finding them and joining their ranks. The English, it was said, were terrified of even going out to search for the Greens; they did not know where to start looking; and they did not even know who they were looking for, because no one had ever seen the faces of the outlaws.

Leadership of the Greens, it was said, appeared to be shared by a number of people—although no one could attest to that. There was no doubt, though, that the frequency and the far-flung nature of the band’s activities indicated that more than one leader was involved, for new reports of their exploits came daily, many of them describing events that supposedly occurred on the same day, at similar times, but many miles apart.

Mystery piled upon mystery, and the only thing that could be said with certainty was that none of the Greens was ever seen without a mask or hood. Their identities were unknown, and, according to people who had seen and heard them do so, they took great and savage pleasure in pointing out to their enemies, loudly, what it was that had moved them to rebel so openly. They would point to their own hooded faces while fighting and taunt the English with chants of “Let’s see you point out this face to your magistrates!”

I first heard of this behaviour in early June, from a travelling priest who stopped at Bishop Wishart’s residence to deliver a pouch of correspondence to His Grace. This man, Father Malacchi, had spent some time in the depths of Selkirk Forest after he fell sick from eating something less than fresh. While recovering his health among a small community of forest dwellers, he had heard many tales of the Greens, and of how they hid their identity from everyone lest they be betrayed in return for English gold.

I had taken Father Malacchi to the kitchens that evening, after he delivered his dispatches to the Bishop, and I remained with him while he ate a large and obviously welcome meal. It was after that, while we were talking idly over a jug of the cathedral kitchens’ wondrously mild ale, that he mentioned the anomaly of the hooded outlaws.

I knew who they were immediately, of course, and saw their faces in my mind: Will himself and Ewan standing to the fore, while at their backs ranged their five companions, Alan Crawford of Nithsdale and Robertson the archer, Long John of the Knives, Big Andrew with his crossbow, and Shoomy the Gael. I had no doubt there were others by this time, but these were the men I knew, and I had no difficulty imagining them all wearing hoods. None of them were fools, and facelessness would be a great asset in Scotland nowadays, particularly for a public thief. I found myself smiling—somewhat surprisingly when what was really called for was priestly disapproval—as I thought about big Ewan and how we had met, and I could immediately hear his soft, lisping voice pointing out the advantages of a concealing hood to a man as disfigured as he was, a man who had no wish to frighten children and even less wish to be identified later as having a hairless, smashed, all too memorable face.

From that time onward, I was a leap ahead of the burgeoning lore that sprang up around the band known as the Greens. They were known to be based “somewhere in Selkirk Forest,” and I never ventured an opinion on that, even though I knew it to be true. The forest is enormous—it covers half the country—and to my mind, had Will Wallace wished his whereabouts to be common knowledge, he would have made it so. That folk were still unsure meant that he had good reason for being circumspect. What was solidly established, though, was that the Greens were better organized and more effective than any of the other groups active in Scotland’s south. The band quickly gained a fearsome reputation for dealing death to any unprepared English force that came against it or attempted to pass through its territories. As for those forces that came against the Greens ready for mayhem and military vengeance, they came in vain, for the outlaws scattered into the forest ahead of them, as insubstantial as morning fog among dense brush.

By August, everyone was talking about the Greens of Selkirk Forest. The scope and range of their activities had broadened greatly by that time, too. Crimes against honest Scots folk had begun to diminish as soon as it was clearly understood that the penalties for such behaviour were swift, savage, merciless, and inescapable, and it was then that the Greens had begun venturing into military activities, setting out to prosecute acts of war against any English force that could not justify its presence in Scotland as being necessary to the requirements of the King of England. Deputies, earls, and barons held no legitimacy in such cases; their forces were judged unnecessary and therefore inimical to Scotland’s good, and they were declared fair game for the bloodthirsty Scots insurgents.

It was also said of the Greens, before the end of that summer, that no Scots folk had ever been accosted by them, and that, from time to time, they passed surplus food from captured English supply trains on to families whose own food and possessions had been confiscated by the English. The proof of that came after two wellorganized attacks by the Greens on English supply trains in the Dumfries area, when small raiding parties of English soldiers moved swiftly into surrounding villages, searching buildings for anything that might have been taken in the attacks. The Greens’ retribution for that came swiftly, too, and subsequent raiding parties were wiped out before they could reach their objectives.

I had developed an ambivalence towards such tidings since they began to come to my attention, for they always brought my patriotism into conflict with my morality. As a priest, I knew what the Greens were doing was legally atrocious; they were defying the duly constituted authority of government, spurning and openly flouting the King’s Peace. As a Scot, however, a member of the voiceless people whose lives were being trampled underfoot by those in power, I exulted in the victories of the Greens. They were defying the King’s power, certainly, but the Scots King himself was doing nothing, and in fact the King whose power they were mainly defying was not their own. The Greens were resisting the illicit power of Edward Plantagenet, who had no right, divine or otherwise, to be exercising his regal powers or his military prowess within the realm of Scotland, despite the high-flown language of the treaties he cited in support of his activities. Scotland now had a King of its own. The Scots lords and magnates had given the English monarch legal licence for his behaviour during the interregnum, but that should mean nothing now. The interregnum was long since over, even though Scotland’s King was being painfully slow to assert himself.

Looking back now from the distance of decades, I can see that my perspective on the entire affair of the Greens was distorted, naturally and probably inevitably, by the fact that I knew, respected, and even loved their leaders. They were my friends and family, and my trust in them was such that I could not think of them as malicious criminals. No matter how much supposed evidence was laid before me for inspection, I viewed it with suspicion and sometimes outright disbelief, knowing it had been fabricated by people whose bias against my kin and my very race was beyond question.

My sole error lay in thinking that I was the only one aware of that relationship.

2

“That cousin of yours is forging quite a reputation for himself.” It was an unexpected comment, coming as it did after a long period of silence, and my chest tightened with alarm. Of course I had no slightest indication that it heralded the single most important conversation I would ever have with my mentor, Robert Wishart, the Bishop of Glasgow and Primate of Scotland.

“My lord?” I asked, allowing the inflection of my voice to demonstrate my puzzlement.

“I said your cousin’s making a name for himself among the folk.” He used the Latin word populi, meaning the common people. “We should discuss it, you and I.”

It was March 20th, 1295, and I had been working for Bishop Wishart in Glasgow for more than a year by that time, learning to cope with more and more responsibility as my duties grew increasingly complex and demanding. We were in his private study that morning, in the administrative wing of the cathedral buildings, and since before dawn we had been working our way through the mountain of correspondence awaiting his attention. Beyond the open window, a far-off thrush was singing, its enthusiasm whetted by pale March sunshine, and in the middle distance I could hear the regular, rhythmic sounds of the stonemasons and builders as they went about their daily work, adding to the Cathedral buildings. Construction had been under way now for more than forty years, and no one, not even the Bishop himself, could say when the work might be complete. The Cathedral would continue to be built until it was deemed pleasing to the Deity.

I realized that I was dawdling, avoiding eye contact, and hoping to deflect whatever was in His Grace’s mind. Now I set aside my pen and looked him in the eye.

“What do you wish to discuss, my lord?”

“Will Wallace and his Greens.” He pressed his shoulders back against the carved oaken back of his armed chair. “It’s time we spoke of it openly.”

Openly … That was the last word I would ever have thought to apply to this matter, for Will’s identity as the leader of the Greens was the sole secret I had withheld from this man. I sat still for several moments longer, then picked up an ink-stained rag and made a show of wiping my fingertips.

“Where shall we start, my lord?”

“We will start at the beginning, Father James. You didn’t think I knew, did you?” Seeing the wide-eyed look on my face, he pressed onward. “You didn’t think I’d see it, the straightforward sense of it. That only Will Wallace could be the leader of the Greens. But think for a moment, if you will. How could I not know, knowing you? Your very silence would have told me, even had I not known all along. I have known you now for … how long, nigh on twenty years? Sixteen at least, and in all that time, the single person you have talked about, other than your fellows here and at the Abbey, has been your cousin Will, the outlawed verderer who dared to cross the English. And then along comes this group of thieves calling themselves the Greens, whose leader, an archer, is unknown, and all of a sudden you forget the name and even the existence of your cousin Will. Am I that big a fool, lad?”

I grimaced. “I was afraid that if I said anything, my lord, you might have to act upon it.”

He gawped at me, perplexed. “Act upon it and do what?”

“I know not, my lord … Report his name to the authorities?”

“Which authorities? And had I done so, what would that have achieved? He is an outlaw already, destined to hang if taken.

Knowing his name would make no difference to the Englishmen’s incompetence. It would not affect their inability to catch him. But did you truly think I would divulge his identity?”

I half shrugged. “I thought you might have seen it as your duty, my lord.”

“My duty is to my King and his realm, to my monarch and my country.” The statement was delivered in a tone that left me in no doubt of the old man’s sincerity. “To this point the Greens have done nothing that openly defies or attacks either one of those. Their crimes, if crimes in fact they be, have all been carried out against the English, whose presence in this land I deem an abomination.”

I opened my mouth to respond but he cut me off with a short chop of his hand. “Abomination, I said, and I meant it. And we brought it upon ourselves. We have been dancing wi’ the Devil for too long, Father James, and now I fear we’ll have to pay a high price for our dalliance. We invited the Plantagenet to come here, and he came. I fear he will not leave as eagerly when we ask him to retire.”

He rose abruptly from his chair and crossed to the open window, where he stood staring down into the courtyard below, one hand holding the window’s metal edge, the other hooked by the thumb into the white rope girdle at his waist. The thrush I had heard in the distance was no longer singing.

“I blame myself,” he said quietly, speaking into the emptiness in front of him, so that I had to listen hard to hear the words that drifted back over his shoulder. “It came to me that this might happen, but I put the thought aside and allowed myself to be gulled by the man’s reputation as the foremost knight in Christendom, the arbiter of justice and confidant of kings and popes.” He turned to look back at me, and rested his shoulders against the wall beside the window. “He was all of those things once, and widely honoured for it. But of late he has kept himself at home, nursing a growing hunger to increase his lands and his power.”

He seated himself with an aging man’s care for his comfort and appearance, arranging his clothes carefully before he spoke again. “He engineered the war against the Welsh, you know.” The hesitation that followed was barely noticeable. “You did know that, I hope.”

I nodded.

“Aye, but he did it consummately, with great skill. The Welsh fell to him like lambs to a rabid wolf. And now I fear he plans the same fate for Scotland.”

Hearing him say that so matter-of-factly startled me out of my silence.

“But King John will never put up with that.”

His back straightened again and he stared at me for a moment, expressionless. “I forget, sometimes, how young you are,” he said eventually, “because you seldom show your inexperience. But then when you do, your youth leaps out at me. You are almost right, though. King John will attempt to prevent it. There is no doubt of that. But the damage that’s already done is irreparable, and he will fail. It is already too late to counteract that. England’s King is no man’s fool and he has worn his crown for many years. He has also shown himself to be ten times the man John Balliol is.”

He reached up and removed the crimson skullcap of his office, something I had never seen him do before, and then he fell silent, kneading the silken fabric between his fingers as he stared at it with narrowed eyes, and suddenly the crimson cap disappeared within his large, clenched fist.

“Balliol looks like a king, I’ll grant you that. He has all that’s necessary there—the bearing, the appearance and the posture and the gait. On top of that, he is affable and amiable, amusing and engaging, with great charm. And he has a regal air of dignitas about him, too. But he is weak, for all that. He is too compliant, too accommodating and too much at pains to be ingratiating. He lacks the iron, the savagery a true king must own, though he use it but seldom. Our King wants people to like him, and that is a fatal flaw in any leader, be he king or bandit chief.

“Edward knew all that when he had his myrmidons choose John. He knew he could control him, bend him to his will. Bruce he could never have controlled, and I believe that fact alone barred Robert Bruce from ever being elected to the Crown. Balliol, though … Edward never had any doubt that he could control King John of Scotland, and through him he could control the realm.”

The Bishop placed the back of his fist on the oak tabletop and slowly opened his fingers, allowing the red silken cap to open up and cover his palm. He smoothed it into shape, then replaced it on the crown of his head and turned to look me in the eye.

“The Plantagenet is ruthless and calculating, and I see clearly now that he laid his plans for us long before we even knew he had a plan. We were too concerned with keeping order among our own … we being the Bishops, Fraser of St. Andrews, myself, Dunkeld, and a few others, along with the Abbots of Dunfermline, Dunblane, Kelso, Arbroath, and Cambuskenneth, and a few of the lesser magnates. We sought to avoid the crush of civil war between the Bruces and the Balliol-Comyn alliance, and initially we thought we had succeeded. Instead, though, we delivered ourselves into the hands of the English.”

I could barely bring myself to ask the question in my mind. “Do you truly believe things to be that bad, my lord?”

He looked at me with eyes that seemed close to pitying. “I do, my son. And you will, too, once you have considered all the details I will add today. You might even ask yourself how much worse it could be. We have been betrayed by those we implored to save us. Our country is now occupied by a foreign force. Occupied, Father, by an army that no one can doubt is hostile. Anyone who cannot see the truth of that is a blind fool, bemused by wishful thinking. English armies rule this land, and their leadership knows no restraint. And for reasons of politics and expediency our own so-called leaders—not the Church, but the civil leadership, including our new King—do nothing. They think they have too much to lose if they complain, beginning with the forfeiture of all their lands and holdings in England. They believe that would leave them impoverished. They cannot see that it would leave them free. They cannot see the value of this realm in which they live. They have no wish even to consider such a thing. They think of themselves as Englishmen and Frenchmen living in exile here in the north.”

“Aye,” I said quietly, unable to find a single point in his outpouring with which to disagree. “And the damnable part of that is that they ignore their people. They do not think about the Scots folk at all, and that tells me that they themselves cannot lay claim to being Scots.”

That brought His Grace’s head up quickly. “Do you truly believe that, Father James? Surely not.”

“Believe that they are not truly Scots? No, for they clearly are. But that their abuse and neglect is destructive? How can I not believe that, my lord? It is all around us, everywhere I look, in the arrogance of the English sneers and the suffering of our Scots folk. Were it not so, the Greens would not exist. The Greens were born of desperation, bred out of the people’s neglect, if not abuse, by the very leaders who should have been protecting them.”

“Your cousin and his Greens are protecting them. The people, I mean.”

“Perhaps so,” I concurred, too agitated to realize I was talking to the Bishop as though I were his equal. “But too few of them to really count, and not sufficiently to make a difference. Will is but one man, and a commoner to boot. His men are loyal and brave, but they are all outlawed, and no one in authority will heed him.”

“Not so. Will Wallace has his own authority. The English are heeding him, Jamie. And the Scots folk are heeding him.”

“Aye, but that’s not what is needed. What’s needed is for other, more powerful folk, here in the realm, to look at what he is doing and see that it’s a necessary thing. The magnates need to see what he is doing, and then they need to aid him in achieving it.”

The Bishop raised a hand, almost wearily. “They will, eventually, Father. The time is not yet right.” He looked back towards the window as the tolling of a bell began to echo outside. “It is midday, and I’m hungry and I need to empty my bladder, so go you and send someone to fetch us something to eat, but come directly back.”

3

Ireturned quickly, but to an empty room, and so I finished composing the letter I had been working on when the Bishop and I had begun to talk, and while I was doing so, two lay brothers from the kitchens brought in refreshments for us: a jug of small ale and a platter of bread and cold sliced beef, with crushed horseradish root in sweet whipped cream, and onions pickled in brine. I resisted the temptation to serve myself until my mentor returned. When he did, he was frowning.

“Forgive me, Father James,” he muttered as he bustled in. “I detest being kept waiting, and I detest keeping others waiting for me even more. Three times I was waylaid by bustling busybodies on my way back from the latrines, and I sent a fourth accoster reeling with a flea in his ear when he sought to stop me over some petty grievance that he could have dealt with himself when it arose. What is wrong with people today? No one seems to dare to risk making a decision on his own without gaining approval from someone else first. Ah! We have food, I see. Excellent. Then let us eat.”

We ate in appreciative silence, but as soon as he had devoured a second wedge of bread stuffed with beef and fiery horseradish and washed it down with a deep draft of ale, my mentor pushed away his platter and sat back, belching discreetly into his sleeve.

“We have talked about your gift many times,” he began then, “and about how I first came to notice you. But why was it, think you, that I took such an interest in your cousin Will from the first time I saw him? Can you guess?”

I pushed away my bowl and shook my head. “Because he used a bow?”

“Aye, good man. It was precisely that. He used a bow. But not merely a flat bow. Those are commonplace. He had a bow of English yew, a longbow. In Scotland, and with him so young, that was remarkable, and I took note of it.”

“So did Andrew Murray, my lord.”

“Aye, so he did. But Andrew’s awe of Will came from Will’s skill with the quarterstaff, if I remember rightly. Andrew was obsessed with that weapon, and it served him well enough, if truth be told, but he was ever an indifferent bowman.”

“Were you ever a bowman, my lord?”

“Me?” His laugh was a single bark, and he gestured towards the window corner closest to him, where his long, well-used old sword stood propped in the angle of the wall. “No, not I. Old Grey-Tongue there was the only weapon I ever needed when the time came to the do the Lord’s work. Why would you ask me that?”

“I don’t know, my lord. Perhaps because I thought that might be the reason you took note of Will.”

“Hmm. No, I noticed your cousin purely because he was a Scot, in Scotland, carrying an English bow. It marked him either as a fool or as a man to watch. Some men will carry a weapon like that solely in the hope of setting themselves apart from the herd of their fellows, imagining that the mere appearance of being different will indicate that they are dangerous. Such men are fools, for anyone who cares to look will see right through their pretense. It was obvious from the outset that your cousin was not one of those. The very ease and casual respect with which he bore the weapon proclaimed his familiarity with its use. And that made him doubly impressive.”

I waited, but he said no more, and so I prompted him. “Forgive me, my lord, but doubly impressive in what way?”

“His youth, and his indubitable prowess.” He saw that I was still not following. “Think of what I said of the fool who carries such a bow for pure effect. His foolishness is evident in that he must lack the physique to use it properly. There is but one way to acquire those mighty archer’s thews, that width and depth of back and shoulders so enormous in your cousin and his friend Ewan. They come from years of discipline and practice; hours and hours of repetitive pulling, day after day and month after month. Your cousin had those muscles when I first set eyes on him, and he was yet but a boy. That told me he had great and admirable self-discipline, but even more, it told me that young Wallace, boy though he might be, was yet his own man. It told me he possessed sufficient pride and confidence to care nothing for what others thought of him, and would bow his head to no man other than those he chose to acknowledge as being worthy. I saw all that in my first glimpse of him, the way he stood, and the manner in which his unstrung bow stave hung in a case from his shoulder. Owning and using such a weapon, and such an English weapon, would set him apart from all his fellows and practically force him to walk alone in every endeavour to which he turned his hand and mind, and he would turn to nothing lightly. It crossed my mind then and there that our realm would always have need of men like him.

“And now I would bid you go and find him for me, to take my blessing to him and to deliver a message, assuring him of my support and encouragement in what he is achieving. And tell me now, if you will, why you are scowling at me with so much disapproval.”

I had not been aware that I was frowning. “Forgive me again, my lord. I am having difficulty understanding your point of view. What is it, precisely, that you see my cousin achieving?”

He gazed at me levelly. “Not quite accurate, Father, if I may say so. You understand clearly enough what I am saying, I believe. Your difficulty springs from being unable to believe that your Bishop could hold such unlawful, even sinful opinions, let alone give voice to them. Am I not right?”

“Yes, my lord. That is true.”

“Of course it is. Listen—” He stopped short, plainly thinking about what he was about to say, then sat back. “Look you, I am a bishop, but that makes me no less a man. As a bishop, I am pastor to my flock and bound by my God-given duty to protect that flock with all my power. That means using my skills and my influence to ensure that their welfare is protected and their corporeal needs are as well tended as their spiritual ones. The soul, we are taught, is everlasting; the body merely temporal and therefore less important, its needs and requirements to be given less urgency than those of the soul. That is all well and good and theoretically splendid, but that is where my own opinions tend to diverge from those of my colleagues—more accurately, from those of my English colleagues.

“I believe our capacity for prayer, our very ability to worship God, depends heavily upon our having the time and opportunity to place our duties to Him ahead of everything else we do. And there is where my voice as a man overwhelms my voice as a bishop. I believe deeply that we cannot pay God His due when we are beset by worries about the welfare of our families, when we live in fear of being evicted or imprisoned or hanged at the whim of some passing stranger who assumes the power of life and death over us. Few decent men can live with such threats and still conscientiously donate their time and their attention to the worship of God. Those very few who can we call saints, and they seldom stay long on this earth. Most men, though, lack that kind of sanctity. They are too concerned with being decent husbands and fathers, friends and neighbours.

“That single realization—that awareness—has set me apart from most of my brethren and placed me in a moral situation the like of which I had never imagined. And it has led me to a reluctant acceptance of the fact that all the sheep in my flock are Scots sheep, Father James. I had never thought of that until a few weeks ago, but I know now that it is true. Two months ago, had I been asked about my flock, I would have said they were all equal in God’s eyes, each soul of them indistinguishable from the others. It would never have crossed my mind to look at them as Scots souls or English souls. To me they were all God’s children, pure and simple.

“But my mind has been changed on that, and forcibly. I’ve been made to see a new reality, through English eyes—even the eyes of English churchmen—and to accept that they perceive us as being different, and inferior. And so I say now, all my flock are Scots. They are like the sheep of our local hills, wiry and sturdy, dark faced, largely silent, and easily shorn of the little wool they possess. That they should be cruelly shorn and abused as they are today by outlanders, English interlopers, grieves me more than I can say. It also infuriates me, though, and it has pushed me to a point where I had never thought to find myself. It has forced me to make a choice no bishop should ever have to make: to choose between being a Catholic and being a Scots Catholic, when there should be no such difference. But the choice is real. And I have made it. And having made it, I must now live with the consequences, one of which is that I may speak of it now to no one, other than you. You understand why that is so, do you not?”

I nodded, but he went on anyway, saying the words more for his own ears, I felt, than for mine.

“Aye. Were the word to get out that I have made this choice, taken sides where no one will admit that opposing sides exist, I would quickly be removed from my Bishop’s Chair and from my responsibilities to my flock, and I cannot allow that to happen. As I am, in place here and able to act as an intermediary even if only to a limited extent, I can serve my people and look out for their interests for as long as I am permitted to remain Bishop of Glasgow. Were I to be removed, some English bishop would be installed in my place and my people would be in vastly greater peril than they are.”

It was true, I knew, for by papal dispensation only a few years earlier, in 1291, Edward of England had been empowered to appoint bishops to the Church in Scotland, thereby seizing yet another advantage from the interregnum. Neither Wishart nor I had the slightest doubt that, were he to be removed, his replacement would be an Englishman chosen and appointed, in all probability, by Bishop Antony Bek of Durham.

“So now perhaps you can understand, to some extent, why I need you to find Will Wallace for me. He is become one of the few men in Scotland I can trust to look to Scotland’s affairs ahead of his own advantage. There are others, similarly trustworthy, but very few of them, I fear, and I have not the time to go hunting for them one at a time. My hope—my devout and prayerful hope—is that men like your cousin Will here in the south and Andrew Murray in the north will be strong enough and clear enough in their summons, when the time comes, to unite others behind them in ways that I could not and dare not. This country of ours is hell-bent for war and slaughter, Father James. We were afeared for the longest time it would be between Bruce and Balliol, civil war setting kinsmen at each other’s throats, but I hope we are beyond that now—or nearly so.

“The nobles shilly-shally still, and I make shift to understand that. They are like coy young women, flirting with strutting suitors, withholding favours and denying commitment in the hope of coming to understand in full the proposals being made. But the time must come, sooner now than later, when the scales will fall from their eyes and permit them to perceive Edward for what he is.” His gaze sharpened. “You have a question.”

“What makes you think, my lord, that this time must come soon?”

His eyes grew wide and his brows arched high. “Because it must! We live in changing times, Father James, and there are shifts afoot today, even as we speak, that will reshape our very world. Look at our towns here, our burghs. What do you see?”

I blinked at him. “Towns, my lord, nothing more. Though I can see from your face that I am in error. What should I see?”

“Burgesses, Father. Merchants with counting houses, traders with warehouses full of goods, skilled artisans everywhere, masons and manufacturers. They are everywhere.”

“I know they are, my lord. But I still don’t understand what you are talking about.”

He bent forward, and there was an intensity about him that made me feel apprehensive. “Ask yourself where they came from, Father,” he said in a low voice, “and what their presence means.”

“Their presence in the burghs, my lord? They live there. What else should it mean? Forgive me, for I am not accustomed to feeling stupid, but I still don’t follow you.”

He grinned fiercely, a very un-bishoplike grin. “I know you don’t. Nor does King John, nor do his magnates, and King Edward and all his earls and barons are no more enlightened than any of those. These people, Father James, these merchants, traders, and their like, are calling themselves burgesses nowadays. Burgesses! Is that not a wondrous name? Perhaps not, you might think, but it is a new one. They were not here a hundred years ago—burgesses did not exist at that time. Nor sixty, nor even fifty years ago. But now every town in the land has its burgesses, and they all build and own guildhalls and craft centres and fraternal lodges. They are all solid, upstanding, and prosperous citizens, too wealthy to be thought of, or treated, as peasants.

“These are men of substance now, Father James. An entire new breed, a new kind of man. And they conduct their daily affairs—commercial enterprises, they call them—in every land throughout Christendom and even beyond, dealing in every kind of commerce you could imagine. Ours deal mainly in wool, shipping hundreds of bales each year to places like Lubeck and Amsterdam that have none, in return for finished cloth. But some of them send glazed bricks to Brussels, and others ship metal and ores of tin and lead and iron to France and Burgundy, and bring back wines in payment. Most of them use the good offices of the Temple bankers to conduct their business, and they pay heavy taxes in return for the rights to maintain trading premises and safe quarters in their various ports of call.

“And as they grow and prosper, their voices are being raised in the affairs of all the burghs throughout this land. They are demanding and receiving more and more say in how their towns are governed and maintained, and from year to year, as their good influence continues to expand, our burghs are being governed by their own burgh councils.”

He stopped, clearly waiting for me to respond, and when I failed to do so he succeeded in achieving the improbable, frowning and smiling at the same time. “You cannot see it.”

I was floundering in my failure to grasp his meaning, and I saw him shrug.

“Well,” he said quietly, sounding vaguely disappointed, “that is hardly surprising, I suppose. You are the first person with whom I have tried to talk about this, and I know I looked at it for years myself without seeing it for what it is.”

He coughed, clearing his throat, then began again.

“Now listen closely to me, Father James, for I am about to open a new window and show you a world you have never thought of and could never imagine. Are you listening?” I nodded. “This world of ours is changing, as I have said. It is changing visibly, from day to day. We are witnessing an upheaval that will rival the fall of Rome. Believe me when I tell you that the burgesses of our towns—and of all the other towns throughout Christendom—will change the very world as we know it.”

I confess I was half afraid that my mentor was losing his mind.

“The system cannot coexist with these new burgesses, Father James, and it cannot survive without them. And therefore it must perish. Not today, and probably not within our lifetimes, but the system will perish. Of that I have no doubt.”

“What system, my lord Bishop?” I asked. I felt like a fool.

“The system that governs the world, my son. The system within which we live and work, the one by which we have survived these hundreds of years. There is always a system governing men’s existence. The Church is one; the pagan Roman Empire was another. We have no proper name for the one that governs us now, other than the system of fealty, in which society is bound by the laws of lord and liegeman, duty and allegiance, and honour is defined by loyalty and common service. But these burgesses are a new phenomenon and they exist outside the commonality. They are beholden to no one but themselves for their success, which means they owe fealty and allegiance to no one but themselves. They have no sworn lieges to whom they are committed, for their entire commitment is to their own commerce. They cannot be levied to fight for any lord and master, for they are their own men, and therein lies their threat. Think upon that, Father, if you will: they are their own men. That is a concept that has not been heard of since the days of Republican Rome. These are men without allegiance! Imagine, if you can, what that means.”

I was aware that somewhere outside, among the trees surrounding the cathedral grounds, the thrush had begun to sing again in a soaring crescendo of magnificent sound, but though I heard it, it was as if through a thick fog. I shifted in discomfort.

“It seems to me, my lord, that should what you are suggesting become known, these burgesses would all be wiped from the face of the earth, for the nobles could not live with such knowledge. They could not afford to countenance the possibility of people living within their lands who pay them no allegiance.”

“Ah, but you are wrong, Father James. The nobles cannot simply wipe the burgesses out, for they are already too dependent upon them. These burgesses all pay taxes on the profits of their enterprises. They pay them, albeit indirectly, to the nobles, and those taxes amount to vast sums of money. The nobles, on the other hand, produce nothing. They merely own the land on which others live and work. That is news to no one.

“But now, with the emergence of these burgesses, there are different elements in play, and they refuse to fit within the system’s status quo. The towns themselves, the burghs of Scotland—Glasgow and Edinburgh, Perth and Berwick, Aberdeen and St. Andrews and even Paisley—have grown too big and much too prosperous to be controlled by any single man, no matter how powerful a lord he may be in name. They are owned now by their burgesses and citizens—part of the realm still, but no longer part of the old system. No nobleman, be he earl or baron, chief or mere laird, can dictate anything but his displeasure to the citizens of Scotland’s burghs today. The burgesses have outgrown—not yet thrown off, but definitely outgrown—the power of the nobles.”

“What does that mean?” I asked eventually. “The King and his Council of Guardians yet govern the realm.”

“What it means, Father James, is that sooner or later—and I mean not tomorrow or even a decade or a century from now, but inevitably—the common folk of this land of ours will wrest control of it from the nobility who own it now in its entirety.”

I tried to grasp that thought, but it was too large and too tenuous for me to grapple with at that moment. I did make the leap, though, from what the Bishop had just finished saying to what he had said at the start.

“You believe Will Wallace will be a part of this great change you foresee. That’s why you want me to find him for you.”

“Hmm.” The old fox hesitated, then shook his head. “No. Your cousin will have a part to play in what transpires, I have no doubt of that, but he will be part of the process of change, not necessarily a part of the change itself. No, Father, I want you to find him because I have gained information that I must pass on to him, vitally important information concerning the welfare of this realm, and you are the sole means I have of delivering it to him without anyone else being aware of it.”

Then why all the obscure digression? I thought. “Information. I see. Shall I write it down, Your Grace?”

“No. No, it is too … sensitive, too delicate and dangerous to put into writing, I suspect, and a letter can be stolen and traced. This information is but newly arrived and I must think it through. And I intend to think it through with you as my witness and sounding board, Father, so that, familiar with it and all its implications, you might then go on alone to meet with your cousin, carrying the information in your head. Would you agree to that?”

“Of course, my lord.”

“Good. Excellent. Listen, then. I received this word last night, roused from my sleep in the dead of night, the middle watches before matins. It was brought by a wandering priest whom I have known for years and trust completely. He had divined its import and brought it directly to me with all the speed he could achieve on foot. He was in Norham Castle one night nigh on two weeks ago and overheard a conversation that should never have occurred. He had arrived there late, after curfew, and unable to enter the castle proper, he had curled up in a gatehouse to sleep for a few hours out of the wind.

“Edward Plantagenet was in residence there that night, as was Bek of Durham, and they chose to walk together out of doors in the dead of the night, presumably to discuss matters of grave import without the danger of being overheard. Fortunately for us, that was not how things transpired, for they ended up walking a great distance from safety, outside the castle walls, only to have their discussion within a few paces of my visitor, who froze in place, fearing for his life.

“He told me that their entire conversation was about Scots bandits and their thieving activities in the Selkirk area—your cousin Will and his people. The stories that we hear of them up here in Glasgow are simple stories told by simple folk who enjoy having someone champion them even from afar, moral tales of wicked English trespassers brought to grief by intrepid Scots avengers. The reality, though, according to what my informant overheard, is far more potent. These Greens—and that is what the English King himself called them—are causing Edward much grief with their raids and depredations, far more so than any of us might have imagined. But it is Edward’s inability either to capture them or bring them to battle that is goading him to madness. He is faced with mutiny among his troops.”

He cut me off with a wave of his hand before I could even begin to react.

“I know there is nothing new in that rumour. That is precisely the point I wish you to make to your cousin, so listen closely. We have been hearing for years that Edward is having troubles among his own people in England, that his barons are on the point of rebelling against his incessant demands for more and more funds and fighting men for his campaigns in Aquitaine and Normandy and Gascony. That is a given of Edward’s life in governing his realm, and until now he has been able to cope with it and look after his affairs here in Scotland.

“But this … this situation here and now is different. This is in Scotland, and it is not a rebellion against unjust or overweening demands. This is a rebellion over money—gold, silver, and copper coins. The English soldiers in Scotland have not been paid in months, because three consecutive baggage convoys, northward bound from England and laden with payrolls and paymasters, have been intercepted by the Greens, their goods stolen and their armed escorts slaughtered. Each one in turn, according to English sources, was hit in overwhelming strength by outlaw forces from the forest as they passed. But now it appears that each of the last two convoys was accompanied by a military escort twice as strong as the force accompanying its predecessor, and still they were overwhelmed. Edward’s intelligence estimates an enemy force numbering upwards of five hundred in the last attack.”

“Five hundred …”

“Aye, that’s what I am told. So now the English are considering bringing their payrolls in by ship, establishing a military treasury in Leith or Edinburgh itself, and off-loading their paymasters’ cargo there. But setting up an English treasury on Scottish soil will take time to arrange, and it will involve a deal of negotiating with King John and the Guardians. It will not happen overnight.”

“No, I see no way that it could. So what will Edward do in the meantime? From what you have said, he will need to do something to change the situation as it stands.”

“He intends to. That was the purpose of such a secretive meeting between him and Bek. He will attempt to achieve by subterfuge what he cannot achieve by force.”

He hesitated but a moment, then launched into the details of the English plan.

The following morning, before dawn, I left Glasgow and headed south and east, towards Selkirk and its great forest.