Braveheart Page 9

  Hesselrig, abandoned, ran too, breaking for the darkness of a narrow lane. William saw him go and pursued him, not hurrying, not wishing to hurry, moving steadily now s if he had all the time in the world and nothing could stop him.

  Not far along a twisting lane, the bulky magistrate faltered. He turned to fight, and William slashed away his sword.

  “No! I beg you . . . mercy!” Hesselrig pleaded.

  William stunned him with a blow from the butt of his sword.

  All around the village center, it was a scene of mayhem. A panic is never pretty, but there are times in battle when the routed soldiers are allowed to flee. This was not one of those times. The Scots were killing with a vengeance. But when they saw William dragging Hesselrig back down the street, they broke off pursuing the English soldiers and stopped to watch. Pulling Hesselrig by the hair, William hauled him back into the village square, hurled him against the well, stood over him with heaving lungs and wild eyes, and stared at Murron’s murderer.

  “Please. Mercy!” the magistrate begged.

  William’s eyes shifted, his gaze falling on a stain: Murron’s blood in a dark dry splash by the wall of the well; the blotch of death dripped down onto the dirt of the street. William turned back to Hesselrig, jerked back the magistrate’s head, and drew the length of the broadsword across his throat.

  The other Scots were silenced by what they had just seen and done. On old Campbell’s face was a look of reverence and awe.

  “Say grace to God, lads. We’ve just seen the coming of the Messiah,” Campbell proclaimed.

  The English soldiers had seen it, too. One soldier, hidden on the roof of a house, seized the moment and slid down and ran for his life.

  William staggered a few steps and collapsed to his knees. There in the dirt beside the well he saw a similar checked pattern, and with trembling fingers, he lifted the strip of tartan, filthy now with blood and dirt, that he had given Murron on their wedding day.

  He seemed deaf to the sounds around him; for not just the Scottish farmers but the townspeople, too, had begun a strange hi-lo chant. “Wal—lace. Wal—lace. Wal—lace! Wal—lace! WAL-LACE!

  The cry the Scots made in Lanark in June of 1296 was the ancient Highland chant of war. William’s wild eyes slowly regained their focus. He looked at the blood of Murron; he looked at the blood of the Englishmen on the sword his father had left him.

  22

  IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE BATTLE, THE FARMERS HAD withdrawn to Campbell’s house. A dozen men were there. William sat on the floor, his back against the wall, staring at nothing and saying nothing; he had not spoken since he had spurred the horse out of the barn on his way to Lanark. Old Campbell lay by the hearth surrounded by several men who tended his shoulder wound, under Campbell’s own direction. “First take that jug of whiskey off the table,” he told them. “No, don’t drink it, ye fool, pour it into the wound. Aye, straight in! I know it seems a waste of good whiskey, but indulge me!”

  The arrow had plugged into the meat of his shoulder and had been an awful chore to get out. Yet it was not the wound itself that Campbell knew could take his life, but the possible infection afterward. Campbell’s friends did as he instructed. “Now,” he said, “use the poker.” They took a glowing poker from the fire and ran it through Campbell’s shoulder, where the arrow went. There was a terrible sizzle, and the farmers grimaced at the very sound of it. Old Campbell’s jaws clinched and his eyes watered, but all he said then was, “Ah. Now that’ll get your attention, lads.” Then he looked down at his left hand. His thumb was missing. “Well, bloody hell, look at this!” he said. “Now it’s nothing but a flyswatter.”

  As Campbell supervised the cleaning and cauterizing of this second wound, Hamish moved over and put a hand on William’s shoulder. “You’ve fought back, William,” he said.

  “But I didn’t bring her back.”

  There were noises outside. A whiskerless lad, one of the sentries Campbell had scattered along the approaches to the farm, burst into the house. “Somebody’s comin’, I think they’re soldiers!” he sang out.

  The men scrambled for their weapons and rushed to protect the entrances while they looked out every window, searching for the safest route of escape. But Liam Little came in just after the lad and said, “Nay, ‘tis not soldiers! ‘Tis MacGregor from the next valley!”

  The farmers moved to the door, opened it, and found twenty more farmers with torches and weapons, dressed in battle tartans. Campbell had made it to his feet as if he’d never been wounded and shook hands with MacGregor as easily as if welcoming him to dinner.

  MacGregor was a man Campbell’s age, darker of hair and grayer of beard. He was short and powerful, and at least three of the men behind him were his own sons. “We heard about what happened,” MacGregor said. “And we don’t want ya thinkin’ ya can have your fun without us.”

  A smile spread across Campbell’s face. “Just like a MacGregor to invite himself to a party.”

  MacGregor grinned back, but then his gaze shifted; William had moved up behind Campbell.

  William looked out to the earnest young faces glowing in the torchlight. Then he gazed around at the faces of the others gathered inside the house. Then to MacGregor he said, “Go home. Some of us are in this, I can’t help that now. But you can help yourselves. Go home.”

  “We won’t have homes to go to soon enough," Macgregor said. “Word of what you did at Lanark has spread through the whole valley, and the English garrison at the castle will be comin’ through to burn us all out.”

  They looked at Wallace—all of them did. And it seemed, at least to Hamish, that his eyes seemed to change temperature. Before they had been warm and soft with grief, but now they turned steely, like a blade left overnight on the heather and covered with winter frost.

  The castle of Lord Bottoms stood along the river an hour’s ride upstream from Lanark. Its stone walls were barely taller than a large man, but Lord Bottoms, master of the castle, took far more comfort in the presence of the two dozen English soldiers who endorsed his ownership of these dominions and augmented his own personal bodyguard of like number. It was Lord Bottoms who had taken the bride Helen to his bed upon the claim of the right of prima noctes, indulging not only his appetitie for fair young women but also that for more lands, for the understood Longshanks’s desire to dominate these people. He equally understood the certainty of Longshanks’s displeasure should an act of rebellion such as the one just occurring at Lanark go unpunished.

  So it was that in the courtyard within his castle walls Lord Bottoms was personally directing furious military preparations. Armorers pounded breastplates, honed spears, and ground swords in a shower of sparks; kitchen servants bustled about preparing rations for travel. And through all this Bottoms was shouting orders. “Gather the horses! Align the infantry!” He snatched the arm of a man running past. “Ride to the lord governor in Stirling. Tell him that before sunset tonight we will find this rebel Wallace and hang him—and twice as many Scotsmen as good men they killed! Go!” Bottoms heaved himself up onto his own horse and shouted, “Form for march!”

  The troops scrambled from every doorway and out into the courtyard. At the same time, the man Bottoms had dispatched as messenger tugged a horse to the gate and nodded for the keepers to open it. As they pulled the windlasses to wind up the chains that lifted the gate, he mounted the horse. The moment the gate was high enough he spurred the animal, galloped outside—and rode squarely into a spear that impaled him.

  Wallace and his Scots, hidden just outside the gate, came pouring through the gate before its keepers could react; they were knocked to the ground and the ambushers had control of the entrance. A whole band of them streamed through. The English soldiers were taken completely by surprise. Bottoms sat on his horse and gawked around in confusion as the troop he had thought of as so powerful suddenly broke up all around him. Many of his men still hadn’t taken their weapons from the grinders; they found themselves beaten to the earth, or t
hey knelt there on their own in surrender. Bottoms tried to shout orders: “Stop them . . . Don’t let . . . Align . . .”

  Scots dragged Lord Bottoms off his horse: One drove his spear at the lord’s heart when Wallace’s broadsword rang in and deflected the blow.

  “On your way somewhere, m’lord?” Wallace asked. The Scots, with the fortress already theirs, laughed in victory.

  “Murdering bloody bandit!” Lord Bottoms spat.

  Wallace’s sword jumped and stopped a whisker from the lord’s eyeball. “My name is William Wallace. I am no bandit who hides his face. I am a free man of Scotland. We are all free men of Scotland!”

  The Scots cheered, drunk with the new taste of victory.

  “Find this man a horse,” William said.

  Stewart, father of the abused bride, was sputtering. “This is the lord who took my daughter on her wedding night!” he said.

  William looked evenly at Stewart. “Yes. And now he would have killed this whole country if we’d let him. Now give him a horse.”

  A spearman extended the reins of the lord’s thoroughbred.

  “Not this horse. That one.” Wallace pointed to a bony nag hitched next to a glue pot. Then he glared at Bottoms. “Today we will spare you and every man who has yielded. Go back to England. Tell them Scotland’s daughters and her sons are yours no more. Tell them . . . Scotland is free.” As the Scots cheered, Wallace threw Bottoms onto the nag’s back and slapped the horse’s rear. It shambled away, followed by a handful of survivors, as the Scots chanted . . . “Wal—lace, Wal—lace, Wal—lace!”

  Into a flat patch of ground, not far from the Calendonia trees where Murron and William had met for their secret nights together, they dug the hole for her body. A carver from the village had made her a stone marker bearing the name Murron McClannough. Beneath her name he had chiseled the outline of a thistle into the stone.

  It was sleeting on the day they buried her, as if the tears of heaven had frozen on their way to the earth. Bagpipes wailed like banshees as Murron’s body, wrapped in burial canvas, was lowered into the earth under the gaze of her mother and father, her neighbors, and William Wallace. Her mother was crying loudly, her father wept in silence, and William knelt at the graveside, hiding within his closed fist the wedding cloth she had embroidered for him.

  He stared at the chiseled thistle in unspeakable grief as the village priest sprinkled in dirt and holy water and the gravediggers filled the hole.

  When others began to drift away, William stayed. When he looked up, he saw Murron’s father, old MacClannough, still there, broken in grief. The old man’s eyes stared at Wallace from across the grave of his daughter, then at last he, too, drifted away.

  Alone, William reached into the tartan that wrapped his chest and withdrew the strip of cloth he had given her. He placed it above her heart and pressed it with his fingers deep into the dirt. Then he put the embroidered handkerchief inside his woolen wrap, next to his hart, stood slowly, and walked away.

  23

  IN THE ROYAL PALACE DOWN IN LONDON IT WAS A VERY different kind of day, sunny, even warm. Prince Edward was in his garden, playing a medieval version of croquet with his friend Peter. The princess, ignored by her husband but expected to be at all time attentive to his interests, sat watching. But Nicolette was at her side, and together they could talk, always being careful not to be so loud as to be a distraction or so quiet as to cause suspicion, for whenever they whispered, Edward seemed to think they were discussing him.

  That morning Nicolette had juicy gossip she was eager to share. As Edward and Peter strolled and chatted down by the far wickets, Nicolette leaned closer to Isabella and said, “I’ve just heard the most romantic tale. It just happened up in Scotland. It is wrenching—a great tragedy!” She said this in the gravest French, and yet her dark eyes danced in dramatic delight as if she was relating the occurrences of a play. “Some village girl, exquisitely beautiful—and I say this because the man who told me the story remarked on how beautiful he had heard she was, and you know how men are, they never comment on beauty unless it is great—she was in her home village when she was attacked by a soldier. They say she attacked the soldier first, but even the English officials here do not believe that. They know she was being raped, they even admit that they encourage it. And—“

  “How can you know that?” Isabella interrupted.

  “I do know!” Nicolette insisted, pretending to be surprised and even offended that Isabella should question the accuracy of her gossip. “I know it to be true! I have my sources, they would not lie to me—for they know I would see through it.”

  “Hmp! No English official, as you put it, would ever admit that rape was encouraged.”

  You demonstrate how silly you are and how little you know about men or anything else that goes on in a royal court! Of course they would not admit such a thing to each other. Never ever to another man of any rank. But to me, under certain circumstances, they would tell everything they know. In fact it is almost impossible to keep them from telling everything they know, even when I would rather not know it!”

  “Go on with the tale. You’re boring me with your boasting,” Isabella said, but she was far from bored by either the tale or Nicolette’s brags.

  “Where was I? Oh, yes. The village girl. Exquisitely beautiful—did I say that? She was being attacked by an English soldier. And her lover, a Scottish tribesman—have you ever seen a Scottish tribesman?” Nicolette interrupted herself.

  “No. Have you?”

  “Well of course! There were some of them in France, mercenaries. I saw them when I was visiting my uncle in Normandy. They are big men with wild hair and calm eyes. My uncle pointed them out to me. He had given a band of them shelter when they had fled across the channel to avoid capture.”

  “And they fought for money?”

  “My uncle said they fought because they loved fighting. He only gave them money because he didn’t want them fighting for someone else.”

  “Get back to your story, I beg you.”

  “Ah yes. The girl. Exqui—“

  “Exquisitely beautiful, I know! You said it already!”

  “Exquisitely. And she was being raped when her lover happened along . . . But no, I don’t think he simply happened along, I think he must have been staying close to her, watching over her—don’t you think so? If she was so beautiful, and they were so in love, that is what he would have done. Yes, I’m sure of it. What do you think?”

  “I think you are making up this whole story, and I am sure now that I am bored with it, for you are a bad poet.”

  “Oh. So I am making it all up, is that what you think?”

  “It is obvious. What happens, a man fights for a woman? How unusual, how remarkable! Oh, I forget, you said it was a tragedy. So they were both killed, I suppose, and lived happily ever after.” Isabella dismissed any other conclusion of the tale by taking an apple from the silver bowl beside her and biting off an unladylike mouthful.

  “No,” Nicolette said haughtily. “In fact only one of them was killed.” She looked off across the flat green lawn and pretended to be entirely finished with the narrative, but she knew she had her friend hooked now.

  “Which one?” the princess asked after a very short pause.

  Nicolette spun back to her, delighted to spill out the rest. “The girl. She was killed—but not during the rape! The tribesman—I think in Scotland they call them clans, not tribes—he fought the soldiers, all of them, very many! Then he ran, thinking his lover had escaped by another direction. But she was captured by the sheriff. And the sheriff . . . perhaps he loved the girl himself, perhaps he was jealous, who will ever know? But he killed the girl.”

  “No!” Isabella said, believing it all.

  “Yes. Cut her throat in the town square. When her lover learned of this, he attacked the entire garrison. Rode in alone! Or they say alone, but then they say others came with him at some point, I don’t know, it all gets confusing here. Maybe the others
came later. But what I know for sure—and this is the reason I know the story at all—is that news of this event has spread all over Scotland. It is like every Scot felt the girl’s pain and her lover’s rage. And her lover—his name is Wales-es or . . . no, it is Wallace—his name has spread with the news. Like fire across a field of parched grass. The English are sending up more troops to catch him and hang him. I have heard that the king may even send—“

  And at that moment their conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the king himself. Longshanks strode into the garden followed by advisors who could barely keep up with the gait of his long legs and marched straight through the price’s game, furiously kicking aside the balls and wickets. “You play games here?” Longshanks shouted at his son. “Scottish rebels have routed Lord Bottoms!”

  Prince Edward glanced first to his friend as if to draw strength there, then lifted his chin in a show of calm. “I heard. This Wallace is a bandit, nothing more,” Edward said to his father.

  Longshanks slapped his son, knocked him down among the colored balls and wickets. Isabella and Nicolette had already jumped to their feet at the arrival of the king, and now they both gasped. Even some of the advisors who had come with the king turned pale at this public abuse of the prince.

  But Longshanks’s temper was something none of them had the least inclination to confront. The king was red faced, screaming. “You weak little coward! Stand up! Stand up!” Longshanks jerked his son to his feet. Peter, the prince’s friend, had flinched with the first blow and now tried to move to the prince’s side, but Edward lifted a white hand and warned him away.

  Longshanks’s eyes were leaping from his head. “I go to France to press our rights there! I leave you here to handle this little rebellion, do you understand? Do you?!” He had grabbed his son by the throat. It must have happened before, for Edward seemed less frightened than angry. Although the veins popped out in his neck, he glared at his father with matching hatred.