CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1

I have asked myself a hundred times, over the years that have passed since that afternoon, if I could really have changed any of the things that happened afterwards, had I behaved even slightly differently as we spoke by the fire in my cave. Could I have influenced any of what occurred, had I planted my feet firmly and objected to what Will was proposing? What might he have done, had I ranted and admonished him, reminding him that he was endangering his immortal soul? Would he have relented? Would he have chosen some other way to proceed in order to achieve his goal?

I know, of course, that he would not. He would have done nothing differently and the outcome would have been unchanged. I have always known that, I suppose, even though I have fought against admitting it to myself. Simply by being who and what he was, William Wallace had preordained that he and the Plantagenet King would collide. The ancients would have said that it was written in the stars. They would also have said that I was committing the sin of hubris, overweening pride, by even thinking I might have had the power to alter any vestige of what happened. But it was not hubris. The curiosity I dwelt upon for all those years was merely wishful thinking. The truth is that I was but a humble priest, eclipsed by the titanic figures of Edward Plantagenet and William Wallace, both of whom History already regards as giants. When Will left me that June day, to launch his patrols to protect the common folk, his mind was already set beyond changing. His plans had been set before he told me about them, and their preparations were already under way.

And so the struggle that I once heard a powerful Scots nobleman refer to as “Wallace’s dirty wee war” began, and I bore witness to it, impotent to change a single part of it, appalled by its ferocity, and yet paradoxically thrilled and proud to be a part of it, even as a mere observer. When I first heard that nobleman’s description, years afterwards, I took umbrage, thinking it an insult, but then I saw its truth. The conflict was a small one, for the first two years at least, a series of skirmishes rather than a full-blown war, and it was certainly dirty—dingy and dire and destructive to everyone involved.

I have always found it strange, though, that Wallace’s reputation as a dishonourable, disreputable fighter emerged from that time. From the perspective of those who yet adhere to the chivalric code, his methods are seen to this day as outrageous and unacceptable, no different from brigandage and lawless savagery. But when, in war, has savagery ever been unacceptable as a means to victory? When, for that matter, has the strict code of chivalry ever been respected or observed in the chaos of battle, amid spilling blood and entrails and shattered flesh? William Wallace, in those earliest days of his struggle, was an unknown, a desperate man fighting for his beliefs at the head of a small band of willing but untrained followers who were ill equipped for the task they faced and were therefore, on the surface at least, utterly incapable of withstanding the forces ranged against them. There was never any possibility that he and his ragamuffin outlaws might hope to stand toe-to-toe against the enemy that threatened them. The mere thought of such a thing was laughable; they would have been slaughtered instantly, obliterated under the hooves and booted feet of the disciplined ranks opposing them.

Wallace’s men were peasants, farmers for the most part, but while they lacked the weapons and armour their opponents had, their supposed impotence was misleading. They were fighting on their home ground and they knew every fold and wrinkle of the land around them, and so they turned the land itself into a weapon, picking their fighting sites and then striking from ambush, their actions predictable only in the certainty that they would be unpredictable. Thus they fought, and thus they won consistently, in defiance of all the maxims of warfare, proving themselves to be adaptable, elusive, and ultimately invincible.

Over the decades between then and now, I have found it both ironic and tragic that Wallace is condemned as a base-born, ignoble brigand for the way in which he waged war and the methods that he used, while King Robert himself, who perfected those same methods in the two ensuing decades and carried them to unprecedented extremes both on and off the field of battle, is universally hailed as the Hero King. Yet it is true; Wallace’s methods appalled his enemies, not all of whom were English, whereas Bruce used precisely the same methods and emerged victorious, his reputation unblemished.

The reason, of course, lies in the perceptions of jealous and embittered men. William Wallace was not a belted knight. He became one later, knighted in order to allow him to assume the mantle of Guardian after the death of his friend and fellow leader, Sir Andrew Murray, but when he first moved to challenge England’s power, he was not. No matter that his father’s brother Malcolm had been a knight, or that his own elder brother wore the silver spurs. William Wallace himself did not, and that alone was sufficient to demean him in the eyes of lesser, spiteful men who set store by such things as birth ahead of ability. It laid him open to their sneering disdain and to accusations—though always from a distance well beyond his hearing—of being an upstart. He was deemed a commoner, ignoble from the outset and therefore, in the eyes of his self-styled betters, entitled neither to hold nor to voice an opinion on anything that mattered.

They were all wrong, of course, for as history has demonstrated, my cousin had one attribute that enabled him to rise above his detractors and to capture the attention, the love, and the admiration of a society comprising many races: he was William Wallace, the only man of his time with the God-given strength and natural ability to offer hope to his broken, strife-ridden homeland and to instill in his people a sense of pride, and something greater yet, an unprecedented sense of unity and nationality.

I saw that process begun in Selkirk Forest, with the dispatching of the first patrols sent out against the English. Yet even in writing those words, I am contributing to the general inaccuracy that surrounds that entire time. To speak of patrols sent out against the English suggests that the English were there, formally, and that Wallace fought against them formally. But in the hair-splitting language of Edward of England’s lawyers, that is demonstrably untrue. In terms of strict legality, enshrined with great formality in the annals of the English court, there were no English troops, per se, abroad in our land at that time. That term, abroad, is all-important, because it connotes mobility and far-ranging activity. Scotland’s south was swarming with English soldiers that June, and had been for more than a year, but every man of them, ostensibly at least, had a sound and defensible reason, set down on parchment by the Plantagenet’s lawyers, for being there, in residence upon their royal master’s behalf, but not abroad in the land.

Add to that the fact that the great majority of the Scots noble families were bound by double bonds of fealty to Edward, tied to him as much by the simple truth that they all held spacious lands and rich estates in England by his grace and favour as by the ancient laws of Norman-French feudality. And of course these same Scots nobles benefited greatly from having Edward’s well-equipped fighting men conveniently at hand to assist them with policing their own lands, since they did not then have to hire and equip costly men-at-arms of their own.

And so it becomes clear what was in truth afoot in the Scottish lands north of the border: Scots magnates, in return for the privilege of using English soldiers at no cost other than food and drink, were being induced to turn a blind eye to “irregularities” in the activities of certain of those visiting troops, even at the cost of hardship to their own Scots people. Not all the Scots noble houses were involved, and some may not have been comfortable with what was taking place, but they must all have known of it. And the alternative—the loss of well-trained auxiliary troops and a very real loss of privilege and royal favour for refusing to cooperate and be compliant—intimidated many of them and overcame the consciences of others.

Thus, English infantry and mounted men-at-arms roamed at will throughout Scotland’s border country in that period of 1294 and 1295, free to behave as they wished, whether it was called reprisals, policing, or the collection of rents and taxes by the Scots landlords, and no Scots magnate, anywhere, spoke of abuse of power, or unprovoked aggression, or royal English displeasure and revenge.

The first patrols we sent out late that spring were a complete success: unanticipated, rapid, and thorough. Fully five hundred men were dispatched on the first sweep, most of them bowmen, although none of them were limited to the bow alone. They dispersed from Will’s main camp, moving west and south in groups of fifty, with five ten-man squads in each group. One hundred men bound for Galloway, the farthest end of the sweep to the west, twenty-five miles distant, went first in the grey light of pre-dawn, and they were followed at two-hour intervals by the remaining groups, the last of which headed directly south to the open Annandale lands. All were ordered to proceed at speed but keeping themselves out of sight, and to be in place by nightfall, ready to mount a coordinated attack at dawn the next day.

I celebrated Mass with them before dawn on the day they left and distributed Communion to them all, and I remember that I was not in the least upset that they were setting off to do what they would do, for by then I had seen for myself the ravages inflicted by the people they were setting out to stop, and my own righteous anger overrode my priestly training sufficiently to permit me to wish them well in their assault.

On that first morning of the sweep two groups were found, a score of miles apart from each other, in the act of committing atrocities against Scots people. In one location they had already killed a farmer and his two sons and were venting their lust on the three women of the place when our patrol arrived; in the other they had killed the householder and his wife, an elderly couple who had been granted their lands as freeholds by the late Lord Robert Bruce as a reward for decades of faithful service as his personal retainers. In both instances, the attackers were taken and hanged from the closest big tree, side by side and still wearing their identifying armour, and the corpses of their companions killed in the fight were hung up beside them.

Elsewhere on the patrol routes, there were numerous encounters with other bands of armed men, nine of those with groups of ten or more, on foot, and six more with mounted men-at-arms. The large groups and the mounted groups were challenged and destroyed, their animals, weapons, and armour confiscated and the dead laid out and left in the care of the survivors, whole and wounded, with a warning to whoever had sent them that no further abuses would be tolerated. Smaller parties, of ten men or fewer, if they appeared belligerent, were treated accordingly. If, on the other hand, they could explain themselves and their presence, and were able to convince their interrogators that they were being truthful and had broken no laws, then they might be permitted to go free. Many of them were, and were released bearing warnings about future penalties for breaking King John of Scotland’s laws concerning trespass and molestation of the lawful populace.

In all, seventy-eight men died that first day in June. None of them were ours. Thus the word was spread, in the name of King John Balliol, that a new presence was active in Scotland’s border country and to the north of it; a vengeful presence, bent upon the protection of the common folk.

For a time after that, the entire border territory lay quiet while the harriers who had provoked Will’s anger took stock of their situations and debated how next to proceed, for it transpired that they had larger matters than an outbreak of border warfare to concern them, and far more to worry about than the threats of a ragtag collection of bare-arsed outlaws snarling at them from the shadows of Selkirk Forest. And so, hesitant and probably afraid to aggravate a situation that they did not yet fully understand, the oppressors at the local levels of the reprisals held their forces in check while they waited for further instructions from their masters.

Tension had been building for more than a year between the new Scots monarch and his increasingly impatient and domineering English counterpart, who had for all intents and purposes placed him on the throne and now saw no reason to disguise the fact that he considered John of Scotland to be in his debt and in his pocket thereafter. The pressure of an impending confrontation between the two monarchs had every political opportunist in Scotland on tenterhooks that summer of 1295, wondering which way to jump next in order to safeguard his own wealth and welfare. It was obvious that choices would soon have to be made, by every noble house and nobleman in Scotland. Which of the two kings was most like to win in this contest—a battle of wills but not necessarily a war? The odds greatly favoured Edward, but John was a relatively unknown quantity, and no one had any desire to commit to either monarch prematurely, or to be seen to pick sides too soon, lest he lose everything on a wrong bounce of the dice.

Throughout that entire period Bishop Wishart kept us informed, to the best of his considerable abilities, on what was happening politically within and even beyond his territories as the various families, houses, and personalities of the magnates manoeuvred for power and position. The Bishop’s network of clerical spies and agents, as I knew from close experience, grew ever larger and more complex, fuelled by the fierce, protective ardour of Wishart’s concern for the Church’s welfare in Scotland, its integrity and very identity within the Scots realm. Even with that backing, though, His Grace could not supply us with all the knowledge we required in such fluid conditions, for the nature of the information we needed most urgently was not the kind that lent itself to discussion in the company of priests or strangers. Men who spoke of such topics were dealing in grave risk, entailing treachery and even treason, with dispossession, imprisonment, and death looming over them. That amount of risk, aligned with such dire penalty, tightened men’s tongues, so it was unsurprising that our sources all dried up in short order as that summer settled in.

2

E very now and then, in the life of each of us, a day comes along that seduces us with its unusual delights and leads us far astray from where our so-called better judgment warns us we should be, and yet so attractive are the fruits it offers us that we can set our consciences aside for a while and give ourselves over to unaccustomed pleasures.

On the eighteenth morning of July that year I found myself in such a situation. I remember the date precisely because Ewan laughed about it when he came to visit me that morning, after attending my pre-dawn Mass. It was his natal day, he told me. He was now forty-three years old, and he and his cousin Alec had decided to celebrate the date properly for the first time in years, by spending the entire day in activities that no one, anywhere, would be able to call useful.

The statement was so astonishingly unlike anything that I had ever heard Ewan say that I had to smile when I heard it, knowing exactly whence it had sprung. I was at loose ends that morning, by merest chance and for the first time in weeks, and I can still recall the surge of high spirits with which I laughed in return and told Ewan I would be glad to assist them with their celebrations on such a beautiful day.

Alec, whom I had met weeks earlier and liked immediately, was a newly discovered cousin, another Scrymgeour. Younger than Ewan but older than Will, he had come into the forest a few months earlier, announcing loudly that he had come seeking the warrior William Wallace, to offer him his sword and services. He had been taken to meet Will, who had greeted him with cautious reserve and more than a little suspicion, wondering how anyone from Argyll could legitimately claim to have heard of activities in a forest so far to the south. Those suspicions, though, had been short lived, and the two men had become close and trusting friends within mere days. From the perspective of years I can see it was inevitable that, with his imposing size, ferocious loyalty, and formidable fighting skills, Alexander Scrymgeour would, in a very short space of time, become one of Will’s staunchest and most distinguished followers.

“When did you last draw a bow?” Ewan asked me.

I had to think, calculating rapidly. “Two years ago, at least. Why?”

“Because I think it’s time for you to reintroduce yourself to the discipline. You’re growing soft and pudgy.”

“I am not! There’s no fat on this frame, if you would care to test it.” I stopped. “Besides, I have no choice there, Ewan, and you know it. I am a priest. I cannot carry a weapon.”

“Pshaw! You could if you wanted to. Your own Bishop Wishart has no fear of carrying a sword—nor of using it if he has to.”

“But His Grace—”

“Oh, relax. I said it’s time for you to reintroduce yourself to the discipline. I did not say to killing. It’s the training, Jamie, that will keep you fit and hale. Come with us now. I’m going to try to teach Alec here to use a quarterstaff. Too late for him to hope to learn to draw a bow.”

“Mind your mouth, Cousin. I can draw a bow.”

Ewan responded without even looking at his cousin, speaking quietly as always. “Too late to mind my mouth, it’s ruined. And too late for you to learn to draw a bow—a real bow, I mean, like mine, a round yew bow. The other kind, the kind your folk use, can barely throw an arrow half the length of mine. You’ll see, Cousin. You too, Jamie, come along.”

“I’ll come, but I no longer have a bow. I have a staff, but it’s for walking and not heavy enough for fighting, even if I wished to.”

“I know that. We brought two with us. You may use mine. I’ll wager you’ve not lost the knack of it. Now then, we have food and even a flask of wine, and it’s a fine day and we have no demands on us, so come, let’s waste no more of it.”

Three hours later, I awoke from a doze with the sun burning my face through a gap in the canopy of leaves above my head. We had found a pleasant spot on the banks of a wide stream that had once been a wider river, and had made man-sized targets from a couple of ancient logs that we dragged from the stream bed and lodged upright against the flank of the former riverbank. Ewan had quickly demonstrated the truth of what he had told Alexander, for the big Scot, despite his enormous muscles and breadth of shoulder, had been unable to draw Ewan’s longbow to its full extent. He had tried manfully for almost half an hour, but had finally slumped down on the stream bank without having been able to send a single arrow effectively towards the two targets.

I had fared little better, though somehow my muscles still seemed to remember the knack of combining the series of movements that produced the archer’s pull. I managed to cast three arrows with a degree of accuracy, though I hit neither target, but then my performance deteriorated rapidly as my body rebelled against the unaccustomed stresses. For another half-hour after that, we tried one another with the quarterstaves, and I was the one who proved most useless there, my muscles long unused to the efforts and tensions of wielding the weapon. And then, eventually, we had eaten, washing the food down with some of the wine we had brought with us and diluted with clear stream water, and dozed off on the grassy bank, beneath the shade of a towering elm tree.

I rolled onto my side to escape the direct heat of the sun and saw Ewan sitting on the edge of the bank, his feet dangling in the water as he concentrated, head down, on something in his fingers.

“What are you doing?”

He cocked his head towards me without taking his eyes off whatever he was holding. “I’m getting ready to catch our dinner. There’s a deep hole not far downstream and it looks to be a haven for fine, juicy trout. I remembered I had some hooks in my scrip, but they had strings attached and now they’re all a-tangle and I’m trying to unsnarl them. If I succeed, I shall go fishing. If I do not, I’ll throw the whole mess into the river.”

“And which will it be, think you?” Alec had sat up, too, and now sat squinting towards where Ewan worked meticulously, his tongue protruding as he frowned in concentration over his hooks.

“Probably the river, the way things are looking now,” Ewan growled.

“Aye. Well, keep trying, and I’ll go and try my hand at the guddlin’.”

Smiling to myself, I rose to my feet and followed Alec, intrigued to see how he would fare. I had seen many try but few succeed at guddling, for it involved stroking the belly of a fish and lulling it until you could grasp it and flip it up onto the bank. It was not easy to do, but neither was it impossible—it merely required endless patience and an ability to lie still and move one’s questing hand slowly and imperceptibly once it was in the water.

It was clear from the outset that Alec was a master guddler. Within minutes he located a low spot on the riverbank, with a deep channel beneath it, and was soon bare from the waist up, lying full length on the grass with his arm sunk almost to the shoulder beneath the water and his gaze fixed on the large, fat trout that hovered below him. In mere minutes, it seemed to me, he surged up and threw the sparkling fish high into the air to land on the grass behind him, and by the time I had scrambled after it and killed it with a sharp blow to the head from my knife hilt, he was back on his side again, peering down into the water in search of his next catch.

Ewan, in the meantime, had untangled his hooks and was paying us no attention as he pulled up clods of earth in the hunt for worms. I watched idly as he caught one fat grub and threaded it carefully onto a hook attached to a long length of twine, then cast it out into the gentle current of the stream. He, too, had Fortuna on his side that afternoon, and between his efforts and Alec’s, we ended up with six fine trout, all about a foot in length. I foraged for firewood and suitable firestones, then kindled and tended the fire while Ewan mixed a dough for bannocks and set them to bake on a flat stone among the coals. When the time was right, Alec, who had cleaned the fish and flavoured them with salt and wild onions, spitted them expertly on sticks and arranged them over the fire, tending them carefully.

We ate surrounded by a magnificent panoply of birdsong, and none of us spoke a single word throughout the meal; we were too appreciative of God’s bounty, savouring every delicious mouthful, and when nothing remained but the fish heads, skins, and bones, Alec sighed blissfully and tipped those into the fire.

It was yet early, with a good six hours of July daylight left to us, and we decided to walk again, for the sheer pleasure of it, and so I shouldered Ewan’s quarterstaff, leaving him to carry his bow in its long case. Alec had his own staff, and so we walked for an hour or so, seldom speaking but enjoying our companionship and the beauty of the terrain that surrounded us as the deer path we were following led us gradually higher until we reached a rock-strewn hilltop from which we could look down on the greenwood spread out at our feet.

“Look at yon beauty,” Alec said, nodding downhill to our right, to where a fine stag stood poised in an open glade, his head high as he sniffed at the breeze for any hint of danger. He sensed none, and we watched as he lowered his head eventually and grazed, following the lure of the richest plants until he vanished among the surrounding trees. I was turning to look behind me when I saw Ewan freeze. “What?” Alec asked before I could even think to speak. “You see something?”

“Aye, but I don’t know what … Something, though. A flash, yonder between the hills, about two miles out.”

“Hmm. Jamie, did you see anything?”

“No, but I saw Ewan see it.”

“Right, then. Between the two hills. Three pairs of eyes are better than one …”

Several minutes passed before the next visible stirring occurred, but I saw it instantly.

“There!”

“Aye,” Alec growled. “What did you see?”

“It was a man, I think, but it might have been two.”

“Two it was,” Ewan said in his soft voice. “Two men, one right behind the other, coming towards us. They crested a small ridge, I believe. One head visible for a speck of time, followed by the other. Coming this way now, but headed where, I wonder …” He coughed gently, clearing his throat. “I don’t know the path they’re on, don’t know where it goes or whether or not it forks, but if it keeps coming straight this way, then it will have to go down there to our left, parallel to the way we came. We’ll stay here and wait for a closer look, and if we think that’s where they’re going, we can cut back down and catch them as they come out into the water meadow where we ate.” He shook his head. “Two men? Alone? They’re either mad or they’re looking for Will’s lads.”

A short time later, the two appeared again.

“One of them is wearing armour.”

“Aye, and the other is not. And one’s on a horse, the other on a mule.”

Alec jerked his head around to stare at his cousin. “How can you tell that?”

“I can see its ears. Can’t you?”

The other man looked at me and rolled his eyes. “No, but I’ll take your word for it. A horse and a mule. That means a knight and his servant.”

“It might,” Ewan said. “Then again, it might not. The man is muffled in a heavy cloak, so his armour might be no more than a breastplate, and the servant might be a woman. Would you care to make a wager?”

I had been half listening to the pair of them, keeping my eyes on the newcomers. “They turned right,” I said. “Their right, our left. I saw them go, and then they disappeared. If we’re to be in place by the time they arrive down there, we had better go now.”

Within moments we were striding back along the path we had followed on the way up, moving twice as fast as we had earlier.

“Damnation,” Alec growled. “We only have the one bow.”

“It’s all we’ll need, believe me,” Ewan answered. “Give me an open space in which to aim and shoot, and this bow against two men is far more than we’ll need.”

We reached the point where the path had started to climb, and bore right from there, leaving the path and skirting a fringe of hawthorn trees and willows until we came again to the path, where it entered the water meadow. Ewan looked around quickly and pointed to a copse less than twenty paces from the pathway, and we followed him as he made straight towards it. The strange pair, whoever they were, would have to come along the path behind us and would pass us in the open, providing us with an unobstructed view of them. None of us spoke as we entered the trees and took up positions from which we could see the pathway without being seen ourselves, and we settled down to wait. Ewan, the only one of us with a weapon, strung his bow carefully and then thrust three arrows, point down, into the ground in front of him.

Mere minutes later, the two riders came into view from the north, and at the sight of the one wearing armour I straightened up. “It’s His Grace,” I said. “Bishop Wishart, in his other guise.” I stepped from hiding and walked out into the open.

Wishart called out my name and kicked his mount to a canter as soon as he recognized me, and the man behind him on the mule attempted to follow suit, but his mount had a mind of its own and refused to change its plodding gait, so that the gap between the two men widened rapidly.

“Who did you say this is? A bishop?”

Alec sounded skeptical, and I glanced at him, grinning. “The Bishop, Alec. You are about to meet His Grace Robert Wishart, the formidable Bishop of Glasgow. He is a grouchy old terror who has no time for fools or folderols, so smile, man, for I promise you will enjoy him.”

His Grace of Glasgow rode right up to us before drawing rein and scanning each of us from head to foot as we each bowed to show him our respect. Ewan and I bent more deeply than did Alec, who watched to see what we would do before he committed himself, then bent forward stiffly from the waist and lowered his chin. The Bishop merely eyed us during his examination; offered no greeting; expressed no opinion until he had completed his scrutiny. Finally he grunted.

“An unlikely trio at first glance, but not entirely unsuited to escort a prince of Holy Church. You look well, Father James. And you, Ewan Scrymgeour, look … like yourself.” He turned slightly to eye Alec again. “This one, though, I have never seen before.”

“My cousin Alec, Your Grace. Alexander Scrymgeour, lately come from Argyll to join us.”

Wishart’s eyebrows rose. “From Argyll? Then it is little wonder that I have never seen his face.” He looked directly at Alec. “And how is my old colleague Bishop Laurence? I knew him well at one time, though we have seldom met these past two decades. He has been Bishop of Argyll for nigh on thirty years … But of course, you know that, being one of his flock. I trust he is still hale?”

Alec dipped his head, clearly less than comfortable in making small talk with a bishop. “I have never met His Grace, my lord, but I know he is yet hale—old, as you say, and growing frail, but he yet governs his flock from Lismore and keeps them in order.”

“Aye. He was ever strong in that regard.”

What neither man mentioned, yet all of us knew, was that there was little love lost between the two Bishops. Bishop Laurence was a native MacDougall of Argyll and, as such, his sympathies coincided with those of the all-powerful House of Comyn, which was enough by itself to set him at odds with Wishart and several other bishops who aligned themselves with the House of Bruce. Wishart’s comment about having known the other Bishop well at one time was a reference to the period, twenty years earlier, when he himself had come into harsh conflict with his own cathedral chapter over a disciplinary matter, and Laurence of Argyll had been one of the two judges chosen by papal mandate—the other being the Bishop of Dunblane—to try to resolve the case. His Grace never spoke of the matter, and it had become one of those arcane little secrets known of, but never discussed, by the cathedral community.

The Bishop raised a hand and beckoned his companion forward.

“Father William,” he said, “I present to you two at least, and probably three, of William Wallace’s closest friends and supporters. Father James here, of whom you have heard me speak, is another Wallace, William’s cousin and close friend since early childhood. The hairless one is Ewan Scrymgeour, an archer but much more than simply that. Ewan is the man who inspired Will Wallace and taught him how to use the long yew bow. Thus, in many ways this man is directly responsible for our having travelled to be here today. About the third man you will have just heard.” He waved a hand then to include all three of us. “And may I present to you, in turn, Father William Lamberton, newly returned from France and installed this last week as chancellor of Glasgow Cathedral.”

The man on the mule had nudged his mount forward and now smiled at us, and I studied him closely, for William Lamberton was very well known to me by repute. He was much younger than I had expected, though, and I judged him now to be no more than two or three years older than myself, which surprised me greatly, considering what he had already accomplished. I liked his smile. It was open and easy, showing both humour and intelligence, and his eyes were bright and wide. He sat erect in the mule’s saddle and I judged him to be tall, perhaps taller than I was, with wide, straight shoulders emphasized by the robe he wore, which was the plain grey habit of a monk.

As soon as the greetings were over, His Grace asked us to take him directly to Will, and he was not happy when I told him that Will would be away until at least the following day. He muttered something about having ridden for more than two days to get here, and I could see from his face that he really wanted to shout and complain, but there was nothing he or we could do about the misfortune of his timing, and so he set his jaw, bit down hard on his disappointment, and decided to make the best of the situation. He asked me about my mission in the forest, and about the small communities that Jacobus, Declan, and I tended among us, and he even managed to sound interested in my response, but he frowned with quick impatience when he detected something in my gaze.

“You find it amusing, Father James, that I should be frustrated in my failure to find your cousin here when I have travelled so far to speak with him?”

I heard a cold acerbity in his tone that was new to me. Something inside me flared with alarm, and in one moment of frightening clarity I sensed danger and a need for great caution. And then sanity returned and I remembered that here was a man who had learned, from hard and often brutal experience, to trust few men and to share his thoughts but sparingly even with those. This was a man, I knew, who had no friends, as other people thought of friends; a man to whom most people lied, in hopes of pleasing him and winning favour; and above all a man who detested hypocrisy and could smell a liar and a flatterer from another room.

I looked him straight in the eye. “No, Your Grace, I do not. I regret your frustration deeply and I know that had Will been aware you were coming, nothing could have taken him away from here. But I was smiling, inwardly I thought, at how you managed, after such a bitter and unexpected disappointment, to feign an interest in me and my activities so quickly, and to do it convincingly. I found it admirable, and typical. If that offends you, then I regret that, too.”

Robert Wishart hesitated, glaring at me with those ferocious eyes of his, so formidable beneath his shaggy, unkempt brows, and then he made the loud, harrumphing sound that I had come to recognize over the years as the announcement of a change of mind. One corner of his mouth twitched upward, and he turned his head to look at the man Lamberton.

“He is not merely impertinent, as you can see, he verges on the impious,” he growled to the chancellor, but then he reached out and dug his fingers deeply but not cruelly into the muscles of my shoulder. “It might have made me smile, too, lad, had I but thought of it, for it’s a sad prospect, after endless days of riding, to contemplate long hours of talking about nothing more exciting than the misadventures of my three most junior priests. Walk with me now.” He tossed the reins of his horse to Alec, who caught them easily and returned a bob of his head in acknowledgment. “I will accept the listening to your report as a penance, though, for my hubris in expecting that your cousin would be waiting to welcome me when I arrived.” He began to walk, slightly stooped, his hands clasped loosely at the small of his back and his bare head bowed and tilted towards me, the better to hear what I would say. “Tell me, then, about your three new parishes …”

3

“Will it disturb you if I share your fire?”

The sound of his voice startled me because it was very close and I had been unaware of his approach. I know I jumped, because Father William reared back and brought up his hands quickly to pacify me. I laughed, slightly embarrassed, as I waved him forward.

“Of course not, Father. You startled me, but I was dreaming when I should have been paying more attention.”

He smiled then, moving to sit on an upended log close by me. His eyes sparkled with humour and sympathy in the reflected light of the flames.

“To what should you have been paying attention, sitting alone by a cheerful fire in a guarded camp at this time of night? Plainly you had other matters on your mind. Would you prefer that I leave you with them?”

“No, not at all. I shall be glad of your company.” I glanced over in the direction from which he had approached and saw nothing moving. “Is His Grace asleep, then?”

He chuckled. “Aye, these good two hours, which is a blessing approaching the miraculous. And it will do him good. He is no longer young and he sleeps too little nowadays—too little and too seldom. There is always someone waiting close by him with matters demanding his attention. I went to bed when he did, but I lay awake until now. I was hoping to walk myself into tiredness, until I saw you sitting here, staring into the fire.”

“And nodding.”

He cocked his head, unsmiling now. “No, you were not nodding. You were deep in thought.”

I nodded then. “Very perceptive of you.” I wondered for a moment if I was being too familiar with him, considering who and what he was, the chancellor of Glasgow Cathedral, but then I remembered who and what he was in truth: a young priest, not too long since ordained and only slightly older than I was. “I was concerned—I am concerned. You met Mistress Wallace tonight, so you will have seen that she is with child. She is expected to be delivered of it within the week, but tonight, after Lady Mirren had retired, I saw the midwife emerge from her hut and huddle in conversation with several of the other women. I was too far away to hear what they were saying, but they all looked ill at ease—almost afraid, I thought. I sought to ask them if anything was amiss, but as I started towards them they saw me and exchanged what I took to be warning glances among themselves, and then they all sped away.”

Lamberton was frowning slightly. “You suspect there might be something wrong with Mistress Wallace?”

“No, Father, not really. But I have a reluctant and fearful respect for the way things tend to go wrong at the worst, most inconvenient times, and I should hate it if anything untoward occurred while Will was not here to know of it.”

“Aye. I know what you mean. Believe me, though, the best thing you can do is leave such things to God. All your fretting and concerns will influence nothing when the time comes for the infant to be born. I know, because I have been present at a birth—delivered the child, in fact—and I had no other option that day than to adapt to what had been thrust upon me.”

He saw the astonishment in my eyes and laughed aloud. “Upon my word as a canon of Glasgow, Father, I swear to you it’s true.” He held up his hands as though he had washed but not yet dried them. “I delivered a child with these two hands, alone and unassisted. It happened in France, not one full year ago, on a journey from Paris to a nearby village called Versailles. I was on my way to visit a monastery there, riding in grand estate in a coach owned by Maitre René St. Cyr, a prominent goldsmith of Paris—goldsmith by appointment to King Philip, in fact. Maitre St. Cyr’s wife shared the coach with me, along with her maidservant, Yvette. Madame St. Cyr was enceinte, as they say over there—with child—and was on her way to stay with her mother and sisters in Versailles until her confinement was completed the following month. Her husband’s affairs had unexpectedly obliged him to remain in Paris, and when he found out that I would be travelling to Versailles on foot at that very time—it is little more than ten miles from Paris—he insisted that I should take his place in the carriage and accompany his young wife to her mother’s home.

“Such was the intent with which we set out, on what would normally be a journey of but a few hours, but the route, although otherwise an excellent road, runs through heavy forest, and deep within the woods we were overtaken by a violent storm and met disaster when a large tree, struck by lightning, fell right atop our carriage, smashing two wheels and throwing the vehicle over on its side. The trauma of the incident triggered something within the goldsmith’s wife, for she went into labour then and there, even though she was supposedly a full month short of her term.”

“And you were there?” I was horrified, and I tried to picture what must have happened.

“There?” Again he snorted with half-smothered laughter, shaking his head at the recollection. “Yes, Father, I was there. Right there, by the grace of God, conveniently in the overturned carriage where it all took place, and apart from Madame St. Cyr herself, I was the only person conscious and able to assist with the birth. The maidservant was unconscious, the driver and his footman had been killed by the falling tree, and the full weight of the tree’s trunk lay across the carriage door and window, preventing me from climbing out. And so I stayed, and with God’s own help I delivered a baby boy who lives and thrives today in Versailles and is named Guillaume, in honour of his godfather, who also baptized him.”

He smiled at me. “None of us knows, when we join the priesthood, Father James, that the major disadvantage of our priestly life will be that we are invariably and perennially useless when it comes to involvement in the matters of women.” He laughed again, enjoying my wide-eyed discomfiture immensely. “I fear I have scandalized you, but let me reassure you of one thing.” He sobered slightly. “I can tell that you were raised as I was, in the company of men and monks and priests, in terror of the sins of carnality and the wiles of scheming women. That is true, is it not?”

I nodded.

“Therefore, on hearing what I have just told you, your mind must have filled with ill-imagined visions of that same carnality, with me among them in my priestly robes. Am I correct?”

Again I nodded, unable to speak.

“Aye, well, nothing could be further from the truth, I swear to you. No slightest trace, not the merest tinge of carnality entered my mind—I was too afraid to think of anything other than what I must do to save the lives of that woman and her child, and the other woman, too. I was so unworldly, I did not even know what was happening with the child until the woman slapped me and told me what I had to do. And from that moment on, I behaved as though I were in a dream. There was nothing remotely sexual or sinful in what ensued. The world inside that shattered carriage was a seething cauldron of pain and fear and blood and anguish—and the terrifying awareness that one careless move by me could cost at least one life and possibly more. And yet, in the midst of all that horror, all the fear, instead of death and tragedy I saw the mystery of God’s creation being enacted right in front of me, and I received a newborn child into my hands, covered in blood and watery fluids and howling in protest at being thrust into this sinful world …”

He fell silent, gazing into the fire for a while, but then he straightened. “I can say to you honestly, Father James, there is nothing to be gained by fretting over the time or circumstances of a birth. God has decreed that it will take place, and He alone will decide when and where it does, and how it proceeds. What hope, then, does a mere man, any man, have of influencing any tittle of what will be?”

He saw me still gazing at him slack-mouthed, and he grinned. “What I am telling you, my friend in Christ, is that with women, as with everything else, you merely need to have faith and place your trust in God. I swear, Father, sinful as it may be, I sometimes find it helpful to think of women as another species altogether. They resemble men in no way at all, and men will never come to understand them. It matters not if they be nuns or one’s own closest kin or honest wives or bawds—they all have an infallible propensity to make all of us men feel, and appear, and be as ineffectual as mewling babes in arms.”

The obvious truth of what he had said left me floundering, until he saved me by changing the subject.

“Tell me about your cousin.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. I have a hunger to know all there is to know about this man, for I believe he is remarkable. I have heard the Bishop speak of him many times, but always using both his names, naming him William Wallace. And I have met others who have met Wallace, but no one who speaks of him the way you do, as plain Will. You, Father James, are the one who has been closest to him throughout his life, so I would like to know what you know about him, as a cousin and a friend.”

“Well,” I began, “he is more like a brother than a cousin, to be truthful. From around the time of my eighth birthday, for the next eight years until Will was eighteen, we lived together, most of the time with Ewan the archer, and shared everything we did every day. We learned to use a quarterstaff together, and though I was never good enough or strong enough to beat him, there was a time when I could hold my own against him, for a while at least, until he wore me down …”

I talked incessantly for an hour or more, aware that he replenished the fire twice while I was regaling him with all my favourite recollections of Will and the boyhood we had shared. When eventually I fell silent, he was still sitting across the fire from me, smiling at me.

“You love the man. That is plain to see. And I find it heartening because it speaks to his humanity.”

“There’s much about our Will to love,” I answered. “Yet I know there is no lack of folk who would disagree with me. He can be wild, I’ll grant, and that is all some ever seem to see in him. And when he’s crossed—particularly in things he believes to be right and necessary—he can be hard, and even violent if he perceives that violence is called for. In addition to that, he has no love for Englishmen—indeed he hates them, for good and sufficient reason in his own eyes and, truth to tell, in the eyes of others. But with his friends and loved ones he is the gentlest of creatures.”

“You have the same reasons for hating the English that he has, Father, but you do not hate them.”

His inflection made a question of the statement. “No, I do not, but neither do I love them greatly. I am a priest, though. Turning the other cheek is part of my life. Will, on the other hand, is a warrior and an avenger.”

“Hmm … Think you he will return tomorrow, this warrior cousin of yours?”

“He won’t stay away longer than he needs to, not with Mirren so close to her time. May I ask you a question now?”

“Of course. What would you like to know?”

“Tell me a little about France, if you will, about your time there, what you learned. Is it exotic?” I knew that within two years of his early ordination, Lamberton had been selected by a cadre of Scotland’s senior bishops to attend university in Paris.

“Well, goodness, where to begin? It is beautiful, heavily forested, and it has unimaginably long, straight roads that run without a bend for score upon score of miles, joining together far-flung cities. The roads were all built by the Romans, of course, as were the great roads of England. But the French have more of them, and better, because the Romans were in Gaul for hundreds of years longer than they were in Britain. Here in Scotland, of course, we had little to attract the Romans, and so although we have some of their roads, we have no great ones.

“Is France exotic?” He thought on that for a moment and then shook his head decisively. “No, not, I think, in the way you mean. It is not strikingly foreign, in the way that Africa and Greece are foreign, visibly and tangibly. France is much like England, in fact, but not quite so green and not quite so wet all the time.”

“What did you learn there?”

“Much that you might expect. I studied canon law with some of the finest teachers in the world. But much, too, that I had not anticipated. That sprang from being exposed to brilliant and inquiring minds.”

“Such as whose?”

He pursed his lips and looked at me as though he was considering a choice of options. “There is a man called John Duns. They call him Duns the Scot. Have you heard of him?”

“I have heard the name—Duns Scotus is what they call him here. He is a Franciscan, is he not? He is earning a reputation for himself as a free and unique thinker.”

Lamberton nodded. “That’s the same man. He has been resident at Oxford now for more than a decade, beginning as a very young student, and is now a teacher of philosophy and theology. He is surprisingly young, considering his accomplishments.”

That made me smile, as it echoed what I had been thinking about Lamberton himself a short time earlier. “No, I’m serious,” he went on. “The man is no more than three or four years older than I am and already he is revered. His ideas are … I am tempted to use the word exciting, even though it is not a word normally applied to theology or philosophy. Nevertheless, his opinions are vibrant, and some of them have set the world of scholarship reeling, without scandalizing the orthodox majority—a signal accomplishment.”

“It sounds as though you know the man, Father. Have you been, then, to Oxford?”

“No.” Lamberton almost laughed at the thought. “But I do know him. I met him in Paris, when he came to debate with several of the faculty at the university, and I had the privilege of spending many pleasant hours listening to him speak, and speaking with him, during the few weeks that he remained in Paris.”

I tried to imagine what it must be like to sit in the presence of a truly brilliant and original thinker and to drink in his words. “What a privilege, to meet and speak with such a man,” I said.

“He impressed me greatly. But there was yet one other man I met there whose ideas stirred me even more, in some ways, than Father Duns’s, perhaps because I sensed a connection between their ideas that had not, and may not yet have, occurred to them. This second man made no attempt to formalize his ideas; he merely spoke to and from his personal convictions. Yet I was convinced, merely by listening to him on one sole occasion, that he lives by and would die for his ideas, and that they will forever direct his life.” The corner of his mouth flickered in a tiny grin. “His name, too, you will have heard.”

“From Paris? I think not, Father. You overestimate my knowledge of the world. I doubt if I could name a single person in all the city there.”

“Then you must expand the city to embrace the realm. I was speaking of Philip Capet.”

“Capet?” I blinked at him in astonishment. “You met King Philip of France?”

“I did. He came to speak with Father Duns one night when I was visiting him, and I was graciously permitted to remain with them.”

“That surprises me. From all I have heard, Philip the Fair prefers to hold himself aloof from human contact.”

“Aha! Then, my friend, you have been listening to people who are but repeating hearsay. All men need human contact, and there are no exceptions to that rule. Even the strictest anchorites must communicate with other men from time to time, or risk going mad. I am not saying Philip is a hearty and gregarious companion, or even that he is particularly hospitable, but he has a certain personal amiability when he chooses to display it. Yet he is a man conscious of owning a destiny. And men of destiny, I am told, are seldom easy to deal with, requiring great finesse and circumspection, even dedication, in the handling.”

“What was it that caught your attention so quickly in the discourse of the King of France?”

He smiled briefly. “It is late, now—it must be close to midnight—and this simple-seeming question of yours could take much answering. Are you sure you wish to hear my response?”

“Very sure, and I am not the slightest bit tired, so if you are prepared to think and talk at this hour of night, I am more than ready to listen. Why don’t you find some wine for us while I replenish the fire?”

4

I went in search of split logs from the neighbouring fires, for we had burned up the supply closest to us. I made short work of the quest, gathering unused logs from several dead or dying fires close by, and by the time I had emptied my arms of the fourth load of plundered fuel and came back to sit down again, there was a cup of lightly watered wine waiting for me on the log that was my seat. I picked it up, tipped it slightly towards Father Lamberton in salute, and sipped at it appreciatively, finding it far more palatable than the rough, raw wine we used for Communion purposes. Lamberton sipped at his, too, then stooped and placed his cup carefully by his feet, where it would not tip over.

“Our system is broken,” he said.

“Which system?”

“There is only one.”

“You mean the Church’s system? But that is God’s own and therefore perfect and unbreakable. What other system is there?”

“The one by which the whole world lives, outside the Church. I am talking about Christendom—more accurately, about the hierarchical system by which all of Christendom is governed.”

“Strange,” I said. “The Bishop himself once described Christendom thus to me, as a vast and complex system of governance, functioning everywhere under the same principles, yet among different peoples.”

“Aye, it is, and all of it is based upon property: land, territory, possessions—wealth. Think of it: Scotland, England, France, Norway, Italia, Germany—all land and all of it owned and operating along the same lines, radiating outward from the central landholder, who may be king or prince or duke or earl or chief. Each of these—let us call them rulers—has deputies, whom we will call barons, to whom he parcels out the land he holds, in return for their services. Those barons, in their turn, split up their holdings equally among their liegemen in return for fealty, and then the liegemen parcel out their lands to knights who will support them for the privileges they receive. The knights, the lowest rank upon the social ladder, employ freemen and serfs and mesnes and bondsmen to tend and till and harvest the tiny plots of land they have within their grant, and they garner rents and fees into their own hands, portions of which they pass up the ladder.”

I nodded. “And surprisingly, when you look at it thus closely, it all works. So why would you say it is broken?”

He grinned at me then. “I can see the crack in the edifice from where I sit.”

I looked quickly around the clearing, but we were the only people there, and there was nothing else to be seen except the darkened shapes of the huts and tents beneath the trees. “What crack in which edifice?”

“Those huts. The fact that we are sitting in this sleeping village filled with outlaws, all of whom might be hanged out of hand were they unfortunate enough to be taken. That is one end of the crack, if you can perceive it. The other end is Glasgow, or Jedburgh, Berwick, Roxburgh, Edinburgh, Stirling.”

I shook my head. “Now you really have lost me.”

“I know, you and nine-and-ninety out of any hundred men to whom I might speak of it. I know what I am saying because I have thought much about it and discussed it with men like Father Duns and King Philip of France.” He grimaced, shaking his head in what I took for regret. “Our earthly world is changing rapidly, Father. The changes are not visible to everyone who looks, but to those who know exactly where to look, the signs are unmistakable. And here in Scotland, the place to look is here, and in the burghs.”

“Here and in the burghs.” I knew I sounded dull, because that was precisely how I felt. “You mean … here among the outlaws?”

“Aye, and elsewhere among the burgesses, though I will grant the burgesses may be the more important.”

The burgesses may be the more important what? I had never considered the burgesses as anything more than they appeared to be, the townspeople of our land, the merchants and manufacturers and craftsmen, the shopkeepers and traders who lived in the seaports and centres of commerce throughout Scotland. Now, however, I recalled the mystifying conversation I had had with Bishop Wishart on the same topic a year earlier, and I could see—though the comparison itself struck me as being perverse—that the burgesses were, in fact, the opposing face of the coin to Will’s outlaws; each group took great pride, albeit for widely differing reasons, in being self-sufficient and accountable to no one.

I realized that my companion had fallen silent and was staring at me, clearly waiting for me to say something in response.

“Frankly, Father,” I told him, “I find it difficult to see any connection between outlaws and burgesses.”

“And that is as it should be, at this point. But the connection is there—merely obscured for now. Think how the system works: the land being handed downward from the rulers, and the feudal services and fruits of the harvest being fed back up the various levels to sustain them. Neither of those processes takes into account the presence of the outlaws or the burgesses. That is a new development.”

“Hardly new,” I said. “There have always been outlaws.”

“Granted. But until recently they were always—always—outcasts in the truest sense, banished beyond the limits of society, shunned and condemned by everyone, and quick to die in consequence. Now, though, we have outlaws like your cousin and his followers, entire communities of them—still proscribed and banished, still condemned to execution upon capture, but organized into social groups, and widely acclaimed by their countrymen because of this unprecedented claim of theirs to what they are calling freedom, and their determination to live their lives according to their own wishes, paying fealty to no one other than the leader of their choice. That would have been inconceivable when you and I were boys, a few short years ago.”

“And to me it so remains. Do you really believe that’s what my cousin Will is saying to the world?”

The eyes gazing at me from across the fire became, quite suddenly, the grave eyes of the cathedral chancellor. “Aye, Father James, I do, because it is what he is saying. And loudly, too, if you but stop to listen.”

“Which I have evidently failed to do. But where do the burgesses fit into this vision of yours, this break in the system?”

Lamberton reached down to his feet and picked up his cup of wine, sipping at it before he answered me, and when he spoke, his voice was calm. “The system is hundreds of years old. Would you agree?”

“Of course. It grew out of the chaos left behind when the Roman Empire fell here in the West, seven or eight hundred years ago.”

“There were no burgesses one hundred years ago.”

I blinked at him. “The Bishop himself said the selfsame thing to me more than a year ago. And I find it as incomprehensible now as I did then, even though I know it to be true. But still I keep thinking there must have been burgesses of some description.”

“Oh, they were there a hundred years ago, and they lived in burghs, but they were simple traders—fishermen, merchants perhaps, not burgesses as we know them today. You see, it has only been within the past hundred years that the traders and merchants of this realm, and every other realm, have organized themselves. Before they organized, they were single traders, merchants, whatever you wish to call them. Each was responsible for amassing his own trading goods and finding his own markets, and each bore the entire cost of protecting his own interests. Then they saw the benefits of cooperation, and they began forming guilds and brotherhoods and trading associations. Soon after that, pooling their efforts and working together, they began to prosper. They amassed greater and greater profits, in greater safety and at less expense, and once that change had begun, it continued, because it was meant to be!

“But nowhere do they fit within the corpus of the system.”

“I know. I can see that now. The Bishop explained it all to me, as I said. I did not fully understand what he was talking about at the time, and I’m not sure I understand it now, but I can accept that these people are their own men. They thrive or perish by their own efforts. And they hold themselves beholden to no other because of some accident of birth. Their burghs, too, belong to no overlord. They have emerged as public lands, free of lien or debts to the nobility …”

I broke off as I realized my companion was staring at me, looking slightly baffled. “I can see you understand what I’ve been saying, Father, but it’s obvious something is troubling you about what I’ve been saying. May I ask you what it is?”

My lips had gone numb and my tongue felt wooden in my mouth, because I remembered how I had felt on hearing all this on that first occasion, when I had anticipated chaos and disaster.

“War,” I said aloud, struggling to articulate the single word.

“What?” He bent forward quickly, peering at me. “Why would you say that?”

“How could I not? What else is there to think? Bishop Wishart reacted the same way when I said as much to him, and I thought he was wrong then. And now I think you are equally wrong. You both say no one yet sees the world you describe, the crack in the edifice, but it seems clear to me that when they do, it will bring chaos. Few things have the power to unite the magnates of the noble houses into a single force, but this threatens all they are and all they stand for. They will unite to wipe out the burgesses and their towns. And they will scour the whole land, looking for those who might stand against them.”

“Nonsense, Father James. No nobleman will move against the burgesses, for the simple reason that the townsmen of the burghs now generate more riches with their local industry than all the nobles together can raise from their vast estates. And so the nobility borrows from the wealthy burgesses and becomes ever more indebted to them. They cannot move against them, for they would be depriving themselves of their main source of income.

“And besides, it is already far too late for them to alter any of what I have described. All they can do now is wait, like every other living soul of us, for the changes that must surely come, for the world of Christendom will never revert to what it once was.” He stood up suddenly and shook out the skirts of his robe, rearranging them more comfortably before sitting down again. “The system under which we all live now will wither and die and be replaced by another, just as did Rome, the supposedly eternal city, and the empire it created.”

“Aye, but Rome was pagan and benighted. We are speaking here of Christendom, Father Lamberton. How can you—?” I paused, seeking the words to express my fear and confusion, and stooped to retrieve my cup, raising it to my mouth only to discover that it was empty, and I bent quickly and put it down again by my feet more forcefully than I intended. “How can you say such a thing, when you have barely finished saying that not one person in a hundred knows what is happening?”

The chancellor gazed at me levelly. “Fewer than that,” he said. “One in ten thousand might be closer to the truth at this time, but nevertheless, the changes are happening. You are a priest, Father. Need I remind you that in the days when our Blessed Jesus walked the earth there were not twenty men in all the world who knew Him as the Son of God? Yet there He was, and the changes He had wrought were already all in place. I believe we are experiencing something similar today. For His own good reasons, my friend, God has decided that this world must change. And therefore, change it will.”

“And what about the King? Does he know about these changes?”

“Ah, the King. King John, may God bless him, should he live and prosper and emerge the victor in his struggle with the King of England, may end up absorbing the wisdom and long-headedness of the King of France on such matters. Philip has known of it for years, since soon after he assumed the French throne. His kingdom is tiny, although it is growing constantly these days. And he is bankrupt, several times over, if one is to heed his critics. Were it not for the largesse of the Templars and their inexhaustible wealth, the realm of France would be incapable of functioning in any manner.”

He stood up again and arched his back, massaging his behind with both hands.

“Do you not find these logs supremely uncomfortable? I know they are logs, and not chairs, and I generally have little trouble with them. Then again, though, I seldom sit like this for hours at a time, and I have little padding on my bones at the best of times … and virtually none on my buttocks, where I could most use it. Will it vex you if I stand for a while?”

“Vex me? Not at all. In fact, if you wish to walk and stretch your legs I will come with you. We’ll throw some fresh logs on the fire and then walk the camp’s perimeter, checking the guards for vigilance along the way. It takes about an hour to make the circuit and we can talk as we walk. By the time we get back, the fire should be at its prime. Shall we?”

The night grew noticeably cooler once we had left the fire, and we were soon walking briskly against the chill in the air, each of us well wrapped up in our long cloaks.

“You were talking about France,” I resumed as we approached the nearest edge of the tree line around the camp and the first guard post on our route. “You say it is growing. How can that be?”

“By absorption.” He was looking at the ground ahead of him in the darkness “Philip Capet is a hard man to deny. He believes God truly wants him to consolidate under one crown the entire territory of what once was Roman Gaul. France, as you know, is but one of many duchies, and not at all the largest of them. Their names are lustrous, some of them more famous, even, than the name of France itself: Burgundy, Aquitaine, Languedoc, Flanders, Champagne, Anjou, Poitou, Picardy, Lorraine, and the rebellious Gascony, of course, currently the cause of so much grief to King Edward. All of them are in turmoil today, and Philip is determined to unite them all beneath his banners. He sees himself as King of one great entity that he has named the Nation State.”

That term meant nothing to me and I said as much, and for the ensuing part of our walk my companion held forth on the wonders of this nation state that Philip Capet dreamed of ruling. We visited two more sentries in the course of that time, but I was barely aware of them, so completely was I caught up in what I was hearing. It was a vaunting vision that my new friend described for me in sweeping words, entailing elements of politics that sounded revolutionary and impossible to me: talk of a unified state built along new and radical lines, where the state itself would become an active entity in its own governance, and the people of the state would come to think of themselves as something new—a nation, a single people united by ties of race, language, government, and common interests. They would forge this nation out of Philip’s dream, and in time their new creation, their new nation state, would dictate the behaviour of all of Christendom, for Christendom itself would be unable to withstand the threat posed by the united resources of the new nation state.

“It is an ambitious idea,” Lamberton said. “But I have thought much about it since the night Philip spoke of it to Duns and me, and I am not convinced it is as preposterous as once I thought. Now, in fact, I think he might achieve his goal.”

“But how can he do that, any of it, if, as you say, his treasury is bankrupt?”

Lamberton tilted his head in an unmistakable indication that he considered my point to be moot. “Edward of England’s treasury is bankrupt, too, but that has not prevented him from continuing to wage war against his Gascon rebels, or conducting an illicit campaign against this realm. Monarchs fight wars for widely differing reasons, but almost all of them do it—incessantly, it seems—and nothing is more ruinously expensive than conducting a war. Yet by that very token, no route to conquest and expansion or dominion is more direct or more effective than the one offered by war. A successful war results in massive riches, which, in return, defray the enormous costs incurred in waging war. It becomes a never-ending cycle.”

“Granted,” I said, nodding in agreement. “But you indicated that Philip had a new viewpoint, did you not? I interpreted that to mean he believes he can achieve this melding of all the duchies and territories where no one has done so since the days of the Caesars.”

“Aye, that is what I meant. And I believe there are several reasons why he might succeed. The first of those being that all the duchies share a common language. A common root language, that is. They all speak variants of the old Frankish tongue. We call it French, but many of them continue to call it by their local names—Angevin in Anjou, Poitevin in Poitiers, Oc in the Languedoc, and so on. There are regional differences, some of them profound, but fundamentally the tongue is French and they can all speak it and understand each other. Which means a newly conquered territory can be absorbed without great disruption.”

I stepped into the shadows beneath a dense stand of trees, where I hoped we would be challenged by the fourth and last of the guardsmen on duty. Lamberton followed at my heels, and within moments a voice rang out ahead of us, challenging us to stand where we were. I identified myself quickly, addressing the guardsman by name and telling him we were two priests with much to talk about and no desire to sleep, and after a brief exchange of greetings he waved us on, no doubt glad to have had the opportunity to speak with someone even for mere moments and even gladder, I was sure, to have been awake and at his post when we approached him.

“Tell me,” I asked as soon as he had fallen out of hearing behind us. “Are there burgesses in Philip’s France?”

“Heavens, yes—more than there are in Scotland, and they may even be wealthier, which means Philip’s problem there is more pronounced than ours yet is. Philip, gazing into his empty treasury and needy as he always is and ever was, is seeing the returns from his royal lands and holdings growing smaller from year to year, while more and more people are thriving without having to pay tribute, in the form of rent and revenues, to their so-called betters. Yet under the existing system he has no means of redress, other than to increase those holdings by any means available—namely, wars and conquest. But the riches of his burgesses must make him gag, because their wealth is laid out before his eyes in every town and city of his realm.”

“So how will he change that?”

“By changing the way things stand—by enacting new laws that will allow him to apply new taxes in ways that have never been seen before. He has already set his lawyers to work. He will tax merchants for the premises they own within his kingdom and for the use of the roads within his realm. He will tax them for their use of those ports and storage facilities they need in order to pursue their ventures. Rest assured, his lawyers will eventually find ways of taxing merchants for the nails that hold horseshoes in place. And in return he will offer them his royal protection—the protection of the state—against outside interference in their operations. Far more important, though, will be his offer to include them in the country’s governance.”

“Governance? To what extent?”

“To whatever extent he sees fit, though that will be subjected to his divine right to rule. But at least he is speaking of giving his merchants—his mercantile citizens—a voice for the first time. And that may be the single largest and most significant change in the coming new order. Like our burgesses, these men are commoners. The call themselves bourgeois in France, and it means exactly the same thing, burgh-dwellers. They have never had any voice, or any influence, in anything. But now they will. They may not speak out as loudly or as effectively as they do here in Scotland, where there is no divinely entitled monarch, but the French bourgeois will nevertheless be heard from more and more as they grow richer. Philip needs their wealth, but more than that, he needs their support. He cannot simply plunder their vaults, for they would quickly move away to a safer place where they could continue working beyond his influence, and that would be fatal to all his hopes. So he must keep them on his side. He must tax them in such a way that they will submit to his taxation, however grudgingly, and continue in their commerce. He has no choice. He will be forced to compromise, and that is a new phenomenon.”

We followed the moonlit footpath around one more bend and found ourselves back where we had started. Ahead of us the fire I had built up before we left had dwindled to a glowing pile of embers, and we made our way straight towards it.

“Have we been gone an hour?” Lamberton asked as I pushed and prodded new fuel into the coals, stirring up a storm of sparks and blue- and purple-tinted flames.

“Close to it. When was the last time you were awake this late by choice?”

He laughed. “Other than in all-night vigil, I have no idea. And I cannot even remember my last vigil, so it has been a long time. We will probably both regret it tomorrow.”

“I think not. The time has not been wasted—not from my viewpoint, at least. The discussion of ideas is never a waste of time. Tell me, if you will … It seems to me we lost sight of the importance of Will’s outlaws in all we were discussing. Where do they fit into all of this?”

“They do not, and that is precisely why they are important. Their importance here in Scotland echoes that of the French burgesses: they have never had a voice before, but from now on they will. Make no mistake, Father James, the outlaws living here today—in Will’s community, certainly—are historically different from the outlaws who once hid from justice in these woods. Most of those people had set themselves outside the law by their own actions. They were criminals at least, and some of them were monsters. But most of the people living here in the greenwood with Will are outlaws through oppression, not through choice. They have been dispossessed and uprooted, cast out of their homes and villages through no fault of their own. They are victims themselves, not victimizers.”

“I understand that. But how will they have a voice?”

“Because they are the people, Father James, and their voice is a new one, and once it has been raised, it will never die away. The people of this land are making themselves heard as they have never been before. The burgesses are demanding a new place in the scheme of things, and so are the common folk, and once that has begun, nothing can stop it. People here in Scotland are talking about themselves as a community—the ‘community of the realm’ has become a common phrase today. For the first time in history there is talk everywhere of the will of the people—the people, Father. All the people, not merely the landowners, the magnates, or the earls and barons. The people!”

He rose to his feet. “I think I might sleep now, for an hour or two. My eyelids are grown heavy suddenly. And tomorrow I will meet your cousin Will, who, though he does not yet know it, represents—or, I believe, soon will represent—the voice of the people of Scotland. Think upon that before you fall asleep yourself, tonight, if you sleep at all—William Wallace, vox populi, the voice of a people.”