CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1

Edward Plantagenet carried his war into Scotland from the border town of Berwick, which he had ordained should be rebuilt as the administrative centre for his overlordship of Scotland. He populated the town with English burgesses, having created sufficient room for them through the slaughter of fifteen thousand former residents, and brought in English engineers and architects to redesign its defences as he garrisoned the newly fortified burgh with English troops. He then established a special branch of the royal exchequer in the town and appointed a man called Hugh Cressingham to administer it as treasurer of Scotland. Cressingham, a senior royal clerk who had been, before that, an itinerant justice in the northern counties of England, threw himself into his new post with a voracious eagerness that within two years earned him the reputation of being the most hated man in Scotland.

Edward also used the months following the battle at Dunbar to seed the entire realm of Scotland with his own personnel, placing trusted functionaries of his own to fill positions left vacant by those imprisoned rebels—Edward’s own word—who had dared to oppose his invasion of their land. Then, for the last five months of that year, he and his armies trampled Scotland under their heavily mailed feet. They confiscated the realm’s crown jewels and insignia and they despoiled the countryside and its populace everywhere they went. Few could withstand them. Among those few, however, William Wallace, and the outlaws of Selkirk Forest whom he led, ranked first and foremost.

Every army lives at the mercy of its lines of supply, and Edward, as aware of that as any good general must be, had taken steps to ship supplies into northern Scotland by sea, using the port of Leith on the Firth of Forth. However, most of the supplies that fed and sustained the garrisons of western and central Scotland were channelled directly through the new administrative centre of Berwick on the east coast, because the northern route from there into Scotland was the only viable route for large numbers of personnel and heavy trains of wagons entering from England. The sole western route, north from Carlisle across the sea sands of the Solway Firth into Galloway and Annandale, was little better than a track, ill maintained at the best of times, dependent upon tides and weather, and vulnerable to attack all the way north from Carlisle. For that reason, every supply train, every reinforcing troop body, every important communication that came north from England by way of Berwick passed through Selkirk Forest, either on the high road itself or through the greenwood byways, and for the last half of 1296 and the first half of the year that followed, all of them were at hazard from the threat of attack and plunder by the Selkirk outlaws.

Cressingham, whose jurisdiction covered all things fiscal in Scotland, felt himself constantly under attack, and he took every threat of interference as a personal insult. He resorted to reprisals soon after his appointment as treasurer, taking hostages from among the populace and hanging scores of them out of hand as punishment for attacks against the King’s property and personnel. Others he executed by public beheading, irrespective of age or sex. The more people he killed, though, the greater the resistance and aggression he provoked, and by the end of the year, less than three months after his appointment, he was offering a reward to anyone who would bring him the head of any forest outlaw, and a premium in gold to any who would bring him the killer, William Wallace.

A chant of “William Wallace, Laird o’ the Forest” was popular that autumn, when some wag suggested that as de facto lord of his own woodland domain, Wallace demanded a toll of everyone who set foot upon his property. The toll for a Scot was a pledge of loyalty and silence; for an Englishman, it was forfeiture of everything he possessed; for English clergymen, it was forfeiture of everything they professed not to have at all; and for Hugh Cressingham, it was everything that bore the stink of his presence. And as the faceless forest bandit became the Forest Laird, and the fame of William Wallace spread, yet still he maintained the role of planner and supervisor and, true to his promise, did not fight in person.

I stayed in the forest with him and Mirren throughout that time, until September, when a messenger arrived to summon me back to Glasgow, where Bishop Wishart apparently had need of me, and during that time we often spoke of the imprisoned Scots leaders from Dunbar, and in particular about the calamitous effect Andrew Murray’s imprisonment in England would have on his northern people. The magnates had proved themselves to be as overconfident and ineffectual as Will had feared they might be, and he wasted no time mourning their absence now. Andrew Murray’s removal, though, was another matter altogether, for Murray was one of the few competent military leaders in all of Scotland. Edward Plantagenet was known to be whimsical when it came to forgiving rebellion and disobedience among his people, and it was generally conceded by those who knew him that he was not normally vindictive towards his own nobles. In this instance of the Scottish Rebellion, though, he was being obdurate, and when he refused his royal pardon to Sir Andrew Murray of Petty, one of the richest and most influential lords of Scotland, it boded ill for the probability of any leniency being offered to his rebellious and high-minded son. We regretted the loss of Murray, as we knew Bishop Wishart must be regretting it, but there was nothing we could do to change things.

The courier who came to fetch me also brought instructions that before I left I should divide my duties equally between my two subordinate priests, Fathers Declan and Jacobus, both of whom had flourished and matured wonderfully since moving out of the cloisters and into the world of ordinary men and women. They were both flattered to be thought worthy of increased responsibility, and I, in turn, felt confident in leaving them to tend to my erstwhile flock, and glad at the same time to be returning to my duties in the cathedral, though I knew I would miss my forest-dwelling kin greatly—most particularly my sturdy, stalwart, year-old godson—in the months ahead.

I met Cressingham, not at all coincidentally, soon after my return to Glasgow, when he presented himself at the cathedral to announce formally, for the benefit of Scotland’s clergy, his appointment to the post of King Edward’s treasurer for Scotland, and I immediately discovered that the name of Wallace was already anathema, not only to him but to all the Englishmen who accompanied him on that occasion. As senior bishop of the realm at the time, since Fraser of St. Andrews had been in France at King Philip’s court for more than a year by then, Bishop Wishart hosted the gathering at his episcopal seat in Glasgow. The Bishops of Dunkeld, Aberdeen, Moray, and Argyll all attended, hastily summoned, along with half a dozen of the country’s most distinguished abbots upon notice that the King’s party sought audience with Scotland’s senior prelates. The English contingent included several bishops and abbots, too, the most senior among them being Antony Bek, still King Edward’s deputy in Scotland. Besides the new treasurer himself and a few of his senior functionaries, a number of intermediately ranked nobles made up the English lay presence, led by one Robert Fitz Hugh, a baron from the region south of Newcastle. There were also two representatives of the Order of the Temple among the group, and I found that mildly surprising, since I had always believed—albeit without specific reason for so doing—that the Templars owed their allegiance solely to the Pope.

Hugh Cressingham, the centre of all the activity on that occasion, was a big man—not merely large or stout, but gross in his bigness, corpulent to the point of being grotesque, and crass in the hectoring loudness of his grating voice. He was tall, too, several inches over six feet in height, and the first thought that entered my mind on meeting him was that he dressed voluminously. His clothing was rich, and richly tailored, but it all seemed too much, as though it had been shaped and fashioned to make its wearer look even bigger and more important than he actually was. His face, swarthy and coarse skinned, was framed by lank, blond hair, greasy and lustreless. He barely took the time to acknowledge me when Canon Lamberton made me known to him, for he was far more concerned with speaking to another member of the visiting group, the Templar called Brian le Jay, and so he ignored me beyond a dismissive nod when I was presented to him as Bishop Wishart’s amanuensis.

All in all, Scotland’s new treasurer was an unprepossessing man, with a personality and a disposition to match, and although it may have been unsacerdotal and uncharitable of me to think so, as a purported man of God, I was never surprised afterwards to hear him widely condemned as the most hated man in Scotland, because it struck me at that first encounter that he possessed an innate gift for alienating everyone around him—including, I noted, the very men who had been dispatched to escort and introduce him.

Sir Brian le Jay, on the other hand, looked precisely like what he was, a senior commander of the Order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon. Sumptuously dressed and equipped, he exuded confidence, arrogance, and wealth with a complete disregard for any possible restriction caused by his vow of poverty. He had a haughty tilt to his head that spoke of intolerance and little patience, and the hectic colour of his cheeks suggested a fondness for good red wine. I had met him once before, five or six years earlier at Paisley Abbey, during his term as preceptor of the Temple in Scotland, but since then he had been reassigned by his superiors to England as preceptor there, and the Templars’ overall role in Scotland had been downgraded to a mere military presence, commanded by the other Templar in the gathering that night, Sir John de Sautre, Master of Cavalry. Watching le Jay then as he listened, frowning, to something Cressingham was saying to him, it came to me that I would have a hard time, had anyone asked me, deciding which of the two of them I disliked less than the other.

Among the dozen or so in the English party, though, I did find one man I liked, and I liked him immediately and wholeheartedly. His name was William Hazelrig, and he was another of Edward’s new political appointees, having been named only recently as sheriff of Lanark, with full control of the English garrison there and a mandate to keep the King’s Peace in that jurisdiction. I heard him laughing at some sally made by one of the company, and the warmth and spontaneity of the sound attracted me to the man immediately. He saw me looking, and when our eyes met he winked at me. I nodded and smiled back at him, wondering what he found to laugh about so easily in conversation with the Bishop of Moray, whom I had judged to be a humourless pedant with the conversational skills of a tree trunk.

It was during dinner, as usual, that I discovered more about, and developed a greater appreciation of, the discussions and the delicate manoeuvring that would continue over the ensuing few days. Nothing had yet been decided upon at that stage, and therefore no one yet felt constrained to speak or behave in any particular way; people were getting to know one another, and at the dinner table, where the wine flowed freely, the atmosphere grew increasingly informal as the evening progressed, and I listened carefully to everything I could overhear. Bishop Wishart had invited me to be there with that in mind, and it was no accident that his finest wines were being served.

Mathew de Crambeth, the mercurial and outspoken Bishop of Dunkeld, asked the question that set the mood of the gathering for the remainder of that night. Master Crambeth had returned mere days earlier from France, where he had been among the party sent almost two years earlier by King John to negotiate the alliance treaty. On his return, he had received a peremptory summons to present himself before King Edward and explain his atrocious conduct in daring to make alliance with the King of France. Crambeth had mentioned this to Wishart that very afternoon in my hearing and said that he would go and eat his humble pie when he got around to it, but not before he had set his own affairs in Dunkeld in order after his sixteen-month absence. Now, at dinner, he was seated across the table from me, next to the young English sheriff, William Hazelrig, with whom I had seen him talking on their way into the dining hall.

The seating at Bishop Wishart’s “intimate” table for gatherings such as these was notoriously and deliberately informal, the Bishop believing that people in small gatherings would interact more easily and honestly if they were able to seat themselves where they wished. Protocol and formality were therefore ignored more often than not, and although I saw a few raised eyebrows at first among the English guests, the word was quickly passed among them that this informality was one of their host’s episcopal idiosyncrasies, and they accepted the convention without demur.

During a brief lull in the general conversation, one of those odd moments when everyone falls silent at the same time as though at some unseen signal, Bishop Crambeth leaned forward and spoke across the table to the Templar le Jay, who was sitting a few places to my left.

“Sir Brian, Brother Brian, how are you finding life in England nowadays, as opposed to Scotland, I mean, seeing that you are, in fact, Scots born? I have not seen you since you were transferred south, what was it, five years ago? And therefore I admit, frankly, to being curious. Is the air more beneficial down there for a man such as yourself?”

All eyes turned to the dark-faced Templar, who found the grace to smile. “I find it pleasant there, my lord Bishop, and very little different from my former posting here, since the preceptor’s duties remain the same irrespective of where they apply. To those of us in holy orders, as you know yourself, it matters less where we live than how we live.”

“Well said,” Crambeth replied mildly. “Well said. But on that very topic, I have a question for you, if you would not consider me impertinent to ask it.”

“Ask away, my lord.”

“It concerns your support of King Edward … your support, and that of your order, of course. You yourself swore allegiance openly to Edward when you moved south five years ago, did you not?” He waited for le Jay’s nod. “Would you explain to me, then, how that could be so? You are a Temple Knight, and it has always been my understanding that the Knights of the Temple were forbidden to swear fealty to any temporal monarch. They owe their allegiance directly to the Pope alone. Has that changed, then?”

Le Jay’s smile did not waver, and he gave a sideways dip of his head. “Aye, you are correct, my lord, as ever … to the Pope and, of course, to our Grand Master.”

“But not to Edward of England—” Crambeth held up one hand to forestall a response. “I have no intent here to embarrass you, my friend, nor do I wish to discomfit you in any way, but there is something here I plainly do not understand.”

“I must point out,” le Jay said, ostensibly responding to Bishop Crambeth but clearly, from the pitch of his voice, addressing the whole gathering, “that Edward Plantagenet is no man’s idea of a normal, temporal monarch. He is unique, distinguished from all others in several respects, and the oath of which you spoke, my lord Bishop, was not undertaken lightly. Quite bluntly, I could not have undertaken it at all had my obeisance not been authorized by our Grand Master at the time, Sieur Tibauld de Godin. I was merely the vehicle on that auspicious occasion. It was the Order of the Temple itself that extended the privilege of its fealty to King Edward, in recognition of his outstanding exploits and achievements on behalf of the Church and the Pope.”

Aware of the effect of his words upon those to whom this information came as a revelation, le Jay sat silent for a moment before he continued. “Edward crusaded as a Prince, in the Holy Land, in Acre to be precise, on the Ninth Crusade. He stood with our order and fought beside us there against the Turkish heathen. And in his Christian monarchy, he espouses the principles of feudalism, in which it is decreed that all Christian society is hierarchical, extending upwards through monarchs to the Pope himself. Edward Plantagenet has proved his devotion and commitment to the Pope, every bit as completely as we in the Order of the Temple have proved ours, and therefore we Templars see no contradiction between our fealty to this particular King and our loyalty to the Pope.”

“Hmm.” Crambeth nodded. “So be it. I thank you for resolving that for me.” He turned away to talk to Hazelrig again, but then hesitated and swung back towards the Templar. “So, and again I beg your indulgence, but would I be correct in saying that although your sworn duties as a Temple Knight forbid you to bear arms against another Christian, your sworn fealty to England’s King might send you here to fight your fellow Scots in his name?”

A profound silence fell over the table. Le Jay sat open mouthed. His face flushed and then just as quickly grew pale, his fingers curled motionless in the fork of his great black beard. Finally, though, he found his voice and spoke in a cold monotone.

“I would not do such a thing. The King would not demand that of me.”

Crambeth sighed. “The King, if you will forgive my saying so, Sir Brian, is a king, and an oath of fealty may never be retracted. If times and your King’s needs were to become desperate enough, you could be required to fight—and kill—your fellow Scots.”

Cressingham’s harsh voice filled the room like the braying of an ass. “Aye, and you might well be called upon to do precisely that, Sir Knight, if this miscreant Wallace continues his outrages against the King’s Peace. Him you might be asked to apprehend and bring to justice. The man is an outlaw—a thief and a murderer, with a following of like-minded vermin little better than a swarm of rats.” The treasurer rose to his feet. “I have already written to King Edward, requesting his permission to stamp out this pestilence of outlaws that pollutes this ungrateful land, and to make the forests safe for honest English travellers again. I wrote most eloquently of the need for haste and vehemence.”

Amid the furor that followed, I looked down the length of the table to where Antony Bek, the King’s deputy, sat glowering, his florid face the very picture of fury and discomfiture. His frown grew ever deeper, and I could see the effort it was costing him not to raise his voice and savage everyone, including the fool Cressingham, but he clenched his fists and took them off the table, lowering them to where no one could see the whiteness of his knuckles.

Beside him at the head of the table, Bishop Wishart sat silent, his eyes moving from face to face around the gathering. When they reached me, he raised one eyebrow, very slightly, and I nodded to him, signifying my understanding of what had taken place. Will’s name was on everyone’s lips, and none of the English party had anything good to say about him, the consensus being that he should be taken into custody as soon as possible, his punishment used as an example to others of the folly of attempting to defy English rule.

I caught Sheriff Hazelrig’s eye and thought he looked amused, so I leaned across the table and asked him what his opinion was on the matter of Wallace and the forest outlaws.

“Too much smoke and not enough fire,” he said with a casual shrug. “The man is an outlaw, beyond the law and beyond the protection of Church or state. He has managed somehow to acquire a reputation and has gained a small amount of fame among the local peasants. But he is a nonentity and a common criminal, and someone simply has to make a decision to put an end to him, and then go out and do it. He and his rabble cannot be expected to prevail against a strong force of disciplined soldiers. And his past activities, from what I have heard, are of the kind that can neither be condoned nor forgiven. I do not think he has been active within my territories of Lanark, but I might be wrong. I have not been here long enough to ask about that, but I will. Then, if I find he has transgressed against my jurisdiction, I shall move against him and destroy him without hesitation. If it is not me, it will be someone else. Sooner or later, all such nuisances are dealt with properly and finally. And legally.” He smiled, good-naturedly, I thought. “You’ll see. Someone will get him, soon.”

2

“Father.”

I was striding quickly, heavily muffled in my warmest winter cloak, but something about the voice stopped me in mid-step, and I turned around carefully to peer into the shadows beneath the walls on my right. It was dark and boneachingly cold, a wet, dismal, chilly night in November, and I was on my way back to my room after a late-night visit to the cathedral’s infirmary, where one of our oldest and most beloved brethren lay dying, beyond any aid that our medical fraternity could offer him.

“Who’s there?” Strain as I would I could see no one within the blackness facing me. I knew that there was a row of four rowan trees in front of me, between the footpath on which I stood and the wall of the building, but they, too, were swallowed by the blackness. I was alone in the darkness, facing someone, at least one man, whom I could not see and whose voice was filled with strain and wariness, but I sensed no threat to myself. I was about to repeat my question when the answer reached me.

“I am a stranger here, but I mean you no harm. I but seek your help.”

“My help in what, exactly?” The voice was coming from straight ahead of me and it was close enough that I felt I ought to be able to see something of the speaker, if only a darker or lighter shade of blackness, but still I saw nothing.

“In finding shelter. Sanctuary.”

I hesitated, thinking quickly about how I should best proceed.

“Shelter is simple to provide, especially on a night like this, but sanctuary? That might be more complicated. Who are you, and why would you seek sanctuary here?”

The voice that came back was stronger this time. “My name is common enough, but I am a fugitive, a wanted man.”

“Wanted by whom?”

“By England.”

“By England? That sounds very grand. Have you offended the entire country, then? Or do you mean England’s King, in person?”

“I do. Edward Plantagenet of ill renown. Is Robert Wishart yet Bishop here?”

“He is, and has been for years. Where have you been, that you should wonder such a thing?”

“In England. Imprisoned. Can you inform him that I am here?”

“I can. But not if you are nameless.”

“Tell him Andrew Murray of Petty seeks audience with him. Murray the Younger.”

It seemed to me then that I actually felt my heart knock, physically, against my chest. “Andrew?” I asked, stunned. “You are supposed to be in England, in prison.”

“And I was. Have you not been listening? And who are you, to know me by my name?”

“Jamie Wallace. Will’s cousin. We met in Paisley years ago, you and I.”

“Aye, when Will broke my head and you pulled me from the river. I remember. Well met, then, Father James. Will told me you were to be ordained the last time we two spoke. I thought you would still be in Paisley.”

The blackness moved and he stepped forward, pushing back a hood to bare his head and show the paleness of his face, and I saw why I had not been able to see him before. Like the huge man who now moved up to stand silently by his side, he was wearing the black robe of a Dominican friar, a single, cowled garment that covered him from head to foot and rendered him invisible on a night like this. But the shock of seeing his face revealed reminded me sharply that he was indeed a fugitive and that it would be best to take him and his man indoors and out of sight as quickly as possible.

The two hours that followed passed by very quickly, notwithstanding that Bishop Wishart required a full hour of it alone with Andrew. I had plenty to do in the interim, though, organizing hot food and dry clothing and airing fresh bedding for our unheralded guests. By the time Andrew emerged from the Bishop’s quarters, and despite my own busyness, I had grown acquainted with his travelling companion, a gentle soul whose name, he told me, was Wee Mungo. Mungo himself appeared to see nothing incongruous in his name, but he was even taller and broader and thicker through the chest than my cousin Will, and I had only ever met three men that big. I had no doubt he was a warrior, probably impressive in his wrath if he were provoked, and I knew he would not otherwise be accompanying Andrew Murray under such dire circumstances. But he was a simple soul, with the gentle disposition and demeanour of a backward child. I enjoyed the way his eyes grew wide when I told him that this great cathedral was named after the saint who had first settled here and built the first church by the side of the Molendinar Burn, his own patron, Saint Mungo, whom the Islesmen called Kentigern. It was Mungo the saint, I told him, who had named this place, calling it Glasgow, which meant “the dear, green place” in the old tongue.

The big man sat enraptured while I told him the story, and when Andrew Murray joined us and stood quietly by the fire, he tousled the big man’s hair fondly and asked him if he had enjoyed the tale. Wee Mungo nodded, still wide-eyed with the wonder of what he had heard, and then went obediently to bed when Murray dispatched him as quietly and firmly as a fond father would a beloved son.

“Wine, Jamie Wallace,” Murray said as soon as we were alone. “I’ll sell you my birthright for a cup of wine.”

“There’s a mess of pottage involved, too,” I said, grinning at him. “I raided the kitchens and fed myself and Wee Mungo while you were with His Lordship. There’s a pot of stew on the hob there, and some fresh bread. Serve yourself and I’ll go and rob the sacramental wine store.”

“You won’t!” The shock in his voice was real, and I felt my grin grow wider.

“Of course I won’t. We keep the good stuff in the Bishop’s pantry. I’ll be back in a moment.”

Later, while we disposed of half a jug of excellent wine between us, I learned that he had been detained in Chester Castle in north Wales, more than a hundred miles from the Tower of London where his father was imprisoned. Once the hostilities had died down, however, his guards’ initial vigilance and zeal had changed into laxity bred of the awareness that their stronghold was the oldest in England, built as the headquarters of the 22nd Legion in the time of the Caesars, and occupied continuously by garrisons thereafter. No one ever escaped from Chester. That truth was so universally accepted that Murray had found it easy to plan his escape.

Wee Mungo had been the only one of his retainers left with him, and he had managed to achieve that by demonstrating to his English captors that the big man was utterly harmless and could be left to himself all day long without ever getting into any more mischief than a young boy would. And so when the time came to escape, Andrew Murray and his giant companion walked out through the fortress’s main gate as part of a work party, as they did every day, but on this day they had surprised and overcome their lackadaisical guard, tied the fellow up, and simply walked away. From Chester, the two men had made their way north and east to the Solway Firth, and thence north to Glasgow. It had taken them seven days.

“But didn’t they come after you? They must have tried to catch you, surely?”

Andrew sipped at his wine, his face serious. “Aye. They did. They were in better condition than we were from the outset, and seven of them caught up to us between Carlisle and the Firth.”

“They caught you, but you’re here. How did you escape?”

“They didn’t catch us. I said they caught up to us. Mungo killed them. All of them. He does that sometimes.”

That silenced me for a spell, as I thought about the childlike giant who had sat so bemusedly in front of me just a short while before. I stared hard at Andrew Murray and he stared equally hard into his cup, as though examining his reflection in the wine.

“Mungo is two very different people,” Murray explained. “One of those is the innocent, gentle soul you met tonight. The other is the antithesis of the first. A warrior, but a warrior unlike any you have ever seen. When that person takes over, Mungo becomes a killer, savage, merciless, and implacable.”

“To everyone?”

“God, no, Heaven forbid! No, he knows which side he is on at all times, and he would never turn on a comrade, but to anyone facing him on the wrong side, he is Death incarnate.”

I made the sign of the cross upon my breast. “May God forgive him.” I reached down and collected the wine jug, and divided what remained between us. “So what will you do now that you’re back in Scotland?”

“Back in Scotland and outlawed, you mean. I’m a fugitive from the King’s Peace.”

“The King of England’s Peace.”

He grinned. “Aye, but to Edward, there’s no difference. What will I do? I’ll fight him to my last breath. My lands in Moray and elsewhere are vast, and largely empty, with ample space for fighting. If Edward of England wants to seize them, he will have to come and do so in person, and I will not be standing idly by, watching him from some far mountaintop. So I am heading home, as quickly as I can, and once I’m there I intend to raise the men of Moray and stir up Hell itself against these arrogant English overlords, as they like to call themselves. I intend to teach them that Scotland is ours, that they have no place in it, and that they never have had legitimate claim to any part of it. Who do they think they are, these strutting bantam cocks? And who does this benighted king of theirs believe gave him the right to come up here and impose his will upon free folk who have no need of his interference, no desire to suffer his attentions, and no intention of lying down and allowing him and his thieving, ignorant bullies to trample them and their rights? I swear to you, Jamie, by the living God, that if no other man in Scotland will stand up against this aging, braggart crusader from a bygone day, I, Andrew Murray, will defy him alone and die, if I must, with my spittle soaking his grizzled beard—” He broke off and laughed. “Do I sound overeager? You did ask me! First, though, before I tackle any of that, I have to talk to Will Wallace. The Bishop tells me you can take me to him.”

“Aye, I can. But why do you need to talk to him?”

“Can you not guess, Father James? I need to conscript him to my cause, to help me drive these English oafs out of my country.”

“But he cannot.” It came out as a blurt, and it earned me a disconcerting look from his level blue eyes.

“He cannot?”

I flapped my hands, feeling foolish. “He cannot. He has sworn an oath not to become involved in the fighting—”

“Until Scotland produces a leader he can trust and follow. Yes, yes, Bishop Wishart did tell me.” He grinned, and the sight of his flashing white teeth almost made me feel better about what I instinctively knew he was going to say next. “Well, that has been taken care of, because Scotland now has a leader whom I will swear William Wallace can trust, a leader born on the battlefield at Dunbar, this year, and raised to maturity these past few months in England’s prisons. Andrew Murray of Petty, Lord of Avoch and Moray and commander of at least five thousand fighting men, every one of them dedicated to watching the arse of the last Englishman in Scotland vanish back over the border into England. Let us drink to that, Father James.” He raised his cup and emptied it at a gulp, then set it down and smiled at me again. “Now, when can we leave for Selkirk?”

3

I was sitting back in comfort in Will and Mirren’s hut, marvelling at the astonishing relationship that existed between the two men I admired most in the world. It had always been thus, ever since the three of us had met as boys in Paisley.

That evening, though, listening to the easy banter the two of them traded, I was unusually aware of Mirren, knowing without ever looking at her that she was watching me closely, with that secretive, inscrutable half smile that I imagined on her lips every time I thought of her when she was not around. Now, as Will and Andrew waxed enthusiastic about something, some element of training or of fighting that was less than interesting to me, she rose quietly and made her way to the small stone sink Will had installed next to a built-in cooking stove close to the window. Moved by some prompting that I did not even pause to think about, I followed her, and she cocked her head to look at me as I approached.

“What?” she asked. “You look as though you have a question to ask me.”

She was correct, but suddenly I felt awkward, almost abashed by her perceptiveness, and instead of saying what I had intended to say, I shrugged. “You like him, don’t you?” I asked, adding, needlessly, “Andrew.”

She smiled and began to stack the platters from which we had eaten earlier. “Of course I like him. Why should I not?”

I shrugged again. “You didn’t like me when first we met. What is so different about him?”

She looked at me and laughed quietly, and my breast filled up with the familiar, comfortable warmth of the respect and esteem that I had always had for her. “Jamie Wallace,” she said teasingly, and I heard the fondness in her voice. “If I didna ken ye were a priest, I’d think ye were jealous o’ the man. But why should I no’ like him? My goodman loves him like a brother … and you do, too, forbye. With two such as you on his side, how could I be foolish enough to dislike him?” She tilted her head to one side, looking at me with sudden seriousness through narrowed eyes. “What’s wrong, Jamie? Ye have a strange look about you.”

I shook my head again, but she was not about to be dismissed that easily. She stepped closer to me and lowered her voice. “Tell me.”

I squirmed, and she reached out and plucked at my bearded chin, jerking it up so that I had to meet her eye. “Tell me,” she said again.

“I think he’s here to take Will to war,” I said.

“No. He’s here to try to tak’ Will to war. I have nae doubt o’ that, but he’ll ha’e nae joy there. Will winna go. He tell’t me that again last night, just afore you two arrived. He’ll play the general, he says, but he’ll no’ fight himsel’. He swore.”

I found myself unable to look her in the eye, for Andrew Murray had been right: Will had said he would follow a worthwhile leader if Scotland could produce one. I turned and moved away to join the other two again, leaving her to her household tasks.

From then on I sat and listened closely as Will Wallace and Andrew Murray drew up their dreams and schemes for Scotland’s future. Will’s championship of nameless, faceless folk did not surprise me at all, for he had lived his life among them and was deeply solicitous of their welfare. That he came of a knightly family was true, but he himself had had no training in the ways of chivalry and he had never considered any possibility of being raised to knighthood someday. I found it amazing, though, that Andrew Murray should be voicing such ideas, let alone championing them so enthusiastically, for his makeup contained nothing that anyone could describe as common stock. Nevertheless, he appeared to accept, willingly, that aligning himself at the head of his fellow Scots, in defence of their common interests, must entail the forfeiture of his vast English holdings and the revenues that flowed from them, and he dismissed the loss as insignificant.

He stayed with us for three days, and I spent every moment I could find listening to their conversations. I was fascinated by the way their minds worked in concert. Every idea advanced by one or the other of them—and they appeared to feed off each other voraciously—generated a cascade of others, the way a smith’s hammer scatters sparks from a glowing iron bar. I listened admiringly as they discussed strategy and tactics in grand, sweeping terms, comparing possibilities of attack and manoeuvre in order to wring every advantage possible from the land itself in fighting and beating the English forces whose own disciplined formations might be—and would be, had these two anything to do with it—hampered and disadvantaged on mountainous or boggy Scots terrain.

I listened open mouthed as my cousin expounded on current political and philosophical theories that I had not even known he knew about and with which I would never have guessed he might be familiar; yet there he was, stating strongly held and obviously long considered opinions on free will and the morality of restitution and atonement, citing Edward of England’s lack of contrition for his deliberate intent to usurp the throne of Scotland after undermining and destroying its rightful occupant. I sat awestruck as he demonstrated, using flawless logic, that the King of England’s behaviour was unconscionable and indefensible and that he was therefore morally unfit to function as a truly Christian king. I knew whence those ideas had come, for I had often heard them voiced by William Lamberton, who had absorbed them in his turn from John Duns during his visits with the scholar in Paris, but I had never suspected that Lamberton and Will had been spending the amount of time together that Will’s grasp of his subject indicated.

Then, late one night, I listened to the two of them debate the propriety of the hit-and-run battle techniques advocated by Murray as opposed to the “honourable” and time-honoured system of chivalric warfare championed by Will. That confrontation, mild though it was, provided me with further cause to shake my head over the incongruities and contradictions of their alliance. Andrew, born to the nobility and to the strictures and traditions of chivalry and the feudal ways, and trained for years in the customs and the lore of the chivalric code, should have been the champion of the status quo in warfare, calling for things to be done as they had always been done and looking for ways to bring the Scots forces as close as might be feasible to parity with the English. Instead, he declared that to be impossible and committed himself to the idea of training his fighting men to use every possible advantage they could find in the terrain and the topography of the countryside to outwit, outmanoeuvre, and ultimately outfight and destroy the armies brought against them. He refused even to pay lip service to the old, “honourable” style of warfare, calling it suicidal and immoral. A man forced to fight, he said, should fight as though his life depended upon winning, because it did. Winning, he said—victory and survival—was the only measure of success in war. Everything else was failure since, even if it did not result in death, it involved defeat and the loss of liberty, which he maintained was worse than death.

My cousin, on the other hand, argued strongly in favour of formal battle between ranked armies as the most legitimate and generally accepted means of resolving conflict. He ignored Murray’s immediate heaping of scorn on that notion, holding his peace as the other denounced the rampant folly of sending hundreds or even thousands of poorly trained and equipped men to die needlessly against superior formations when far more success could be achieved, at far less cost, by using much more versatile methods of isolating, stranding, and then defeating depleted enemy battalions. When his opponent fell silent, Will merely nodded and acknowledged that the other might be right, in fact, but from the viewpoint of political reality, he believed that was ultimately unimportant. His primary concern lay, he maintained, with legitimacy and the appearance of propriety. I blinked when I heard that, and for the first time in many hours of discussion I interjected.

“Are you serious, Will? The appearance of propriety? What bearing does that have on throwing the English out of Scotland? Forgive me, but that strikes me as being the most mindless thing I have heard.”

I thought he was going to give me the rough edge of his tongue, but then he twitched his shoulders in the beginnings of a shrug. “Mindless,” he said. “You think speaking of propriety is mindless? No, Jamie. Let me tell you what mindlessness is about. Mindlessness is the ability to accept things without thought simply because they are familiar. Mindlessness is the condition of going through life without ever questioning the right or wrong of general custom. It is seeing things that frequently are wrong in the moral sense and ignoring the wrongness purely because it has become so familiar that we are no longer aware of it—or because, were we to notice it and pay attention, we would be forced to do something to change it. That is mindlessness, Cousin.” He sucked at something caught in his teeth.

“And then there is another kind of mindlessness,” he continued, “comparable perhaps, but different. The mindlessness of seeing something happen and being able to deny that it is happening—and not only that, but going ahead then and basing a set of expectations on that denial of what you actually saw.” He nodded in the direction of Andrew. “If our friend here will forgive me, I will point out to you that the group to which he belongs subscribes to that. A knight is not required to be literate or educated, except in the ways of war. The knightly code requires only adherence to the laws of chivalry. It makes no demands otherwise. It ignores logic, by and large, and it expects no moral judgments. And yet judgments are made all the time, based on the expectations it engenders, irrespective of logic. Do you have any idea what I am talking about?”

I shook my head, and he shook his in return, his mouth twisting downwards. “Aye. Well … What I am saying is that every ignorant, thick-skulled, witless bully capable of carrying a sword or swinging a club, be he knight, pikeman, or man-at-arms, will condemn us as brigands and barbarians for not fighting in accordance with their rules of combat.” He saw my lips quirk. “Don’t laugh! There is nothing even mildly amusing in what I am saying.” He paused, looking from Andrew to me and back to Andrew. “No matter how hard we fight in this struggle, no matter how many men we mobilize against them, no matter how long we fight against them or how many of them we kill, these people will afford us no legitimacy until we meet them face to face on the field of battle and defeat them according to the rules of chivalry.”

“Thereby committing suicide,” Andrew added. “That is obscene, Will. We’ve been over this before. No army that Scotland can field would be equipped to defeat the English host in battle. We might as well lay down our weapons and surrender ourselves to them right now.”

And so the argument began again.

There is no defining military word for what Will was, or for what his methods were. In those days when he and Andrew Murray first took up the sword against the English, there was only one accepted way of waging war, and that was the way of chivalry, the way wars had been fought between Christian armies for hundreds of years. There were conventions to be observed therein and rules to be followed, and a battle—any battle—was as likely to be decided by negotiation and bargaining between leaders as it was by physical combat. All of which appeared highly civilized and carefully structured to avoid unnecessary killing, until the observer took note that the only people who ever benefited from these negotiations were the leaders from each side. The remainder of the people involved, probably ninety-nine out of every hundred people in the field, were unimportant and insignificant. There at the behest of their leaders and under pain of forfeiture and punishment should they refuse, they were expected to die happily should their leaders not be able to arrive at a satisfactory settlement of their troubles.

Will and Andrew changed all that, although the doing of it all was far less simple than that plainly written statement suggests. For the first time, though, between the pair of them they raised an army of the common Scots folk led by men whose sole qualification for leadership was their ability as warriors and leaders. None of these new commanders were high born or titled or otherwise privileged, and none had anything to influence their conduct other than a will to defeat the English invaders. That, in turn, resulted in their having an unprecedented awareness of, and a dedication to, the welfare of the men who followed them and shared their dreams of victory.

I know people today, less than thirty years later, who would dispute that loudly, pointing as evidence to the large number of magnates and high-born lords present at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. But that was later, and their support had materialized with painful slowness during the first long months of the “rebellious” activities of Wallace and Murray. Only when it had become undeniable that the entire populace of Scotland had come out in support of the two rebel leaders, and that no one could hope to stand against them, did the situation change, and then it changed radically, with a sudden and total shift of support among the nobility. In the beginning, though, in the months after I sat there and listened to them talk, there were only Wallace and Murray, two disdained and widely disparaged voices crying, like the Baptist, in the wilderness.

The two men had not yet settled their differences by the time Andrew Murray left to return to the north, but they had arrived at an agreement. Will himself would not appear as a leader in the fighting. His oath to remain with his family precluded that. But otherwise he warranted that he would commit his full support, using his name, his influence, and his outlawed followers to raise the standard of resistance and rebellion in the south, should Andrew Murray ask it of him in the months ahead.

And the months ahead were active months, since John de Warenne, the English Earl of Surrey whom Edward had appointed military governor of Scotland, seemed determined to pacify the whole country within the first few months of his tenure, sending out large bodies of English troops to patrol the entire land and stamp out any signs of rebellion before they could begin to flourish. Towards that goal, he also set out to reinforce and amplify the English garrisons in various strongholds throughout the land, and Lanark, the jurisdiction of the young sheriff I had met in Glasgow, was one such place. Spurred no doubt by his officious superior, William Hazelrig let it be known that he would not tolerate outlawry, in any sense, in his lands.