The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  I hesitated, considering whether I should tell him about Bruce’s reaction to killing for the first time that day, and about how he had made a formal confession to me afterwards.

  “You have more you wish to say, Father James?”

  “No, my lord. I think I’ve said all I had to say on the matter of Lord Bruce.” The Earl of Carrick’s inner peace was his own affair, and I had no doubt he would deal with it satisfactorily.

  “Good. Then let us move on. I need you now to go and find your cousin in Selkirk Forest.” He knitted his brow and concentrated his thoughts. “He’ll need to be ready to move out within the week. With all his men—as many as he can muster. By then, unless I’m sore mistaken, we here will be deep in the discussion of surrender terms with Percy and his minions.”

  “Clifford, you mean.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at me, impatient as always when someone missed his point. “Clifford be damned—as I’m sure he will be. I said minions, meaning all of them—knights, barons, the entire cavalcade, including Clifford merely incidentally. Our so-called English masters will be expecting a quick solution, the usual profusion of expressed regrets for hasty, ill-considered actions, couched in the customary assurances of future loyalty—all in return, of course, for royal generosity in the form of land grants and fresh revenue sources in England. The true reward, though, after all the tedious talk is over, will lie in the perception that we can all then go home.

  “I want Wallace to harry Lothian as the English would, while we delay Percy here. He and his crew must spread utter havoc among the English, and God our saviour knows there’s no shortage of them there to wreak havoc upon. I want it known that William Wallace and his army are attacking English garrisons throughout that region, creating chaos and spreading terror, and I need them to keep at it for five to six weeks before they strike inland to cross the Forth at Stirling. We here in the southwest will use the reports of their prowess to our advantage, and our drawn-out negotiations will ensure that Percy can’t go charging off to counter them. He would not dare leave an enemy army at his back, no matter how cowardly he might think us.

  “No sieges, though, and I’ll require you to make that very clear, not only to your cousin but to every other Scots commander you meet. We cannot afford to waste time and men besieging castles. Better to raid them hard—them and their surroundings—and burn the crops meant to feed them in the coming winter. I want Will to harass the garrisons, pen them up inside, and make them afraid to ride out of their gates. I want him to hit the outlying settlements at every opportunity, stripping the manor houses and estates of workers, as well as men-at-arms and foot soldiers. I want him to enlist the local folk and lay waste the whole of Lothian, stripping everything. His prime purpose, you’ll tell him from me, will be to put the fear of God into every Englishman north of the border.”

  “Will should enjoy that, my lord,” I said, “if what I’ve heard of him recently is true. How many men follow him now, do you know?”

  “A legion, folk say, but not yet enough. He’ll need far more if he’s to dislodge the English grip on Lothian. I hope he has his new folk, the ones he brought back from his Perth foray, trained by now, for we can’t afford to waste another precious hour. We are out of time. Scotland is out of time.”

  “And why, if I may ask, my lord, is Will to head towards Stirling in six weeks?”

  There was steely determination in the look my bishop turned on me then. “Because that’s all we have,” he growled. “It will take you more than half that time to deliver my message to Wallace and then get north into Moray, where you will contact Andrew Murray and make sure he brings his army south, as fast as he can travel, to join Wallace. It is now mid-June, and Murray must be on the march by the end of July, so you’ll waste no time between now and then. England will send a real army north within the next few months, and if we’re to be able to stop them, it will have to be at Stirling, as always. So Wallace and Murray must have their combined hosts at Stirling in advance of that, by the last week of August at the very latest. And that means every single hour that passes between now and July’s end will be crucial to the well-being of this realm.”

  My jaw must have dropped as I listened to what he expected of me, for he nodded grimly. “Aye, I ken,” he said in Scots. “What I’m asking of you is damn near impossible, but believe me, Jamie, if it doesna get done, Scotland will go down into slavery under Edward’s heel.”

  I shook my head. “It’s not impossible, my lord. I’ll do it, somehow. But why need it be me? You must have others who could undertake the journey faster that I can. Someone could be halfway to Moray by the time I find Will in Selkirk Forest.”

  “I know that, Father,” he said, reverting to Latin. “I could send another more quickly, as you say, but none who would be more trustworthy. You will be carrying information in your head that can’t be set on paper, lest the paper fall into hostile hands. And when you deliver my instructions, you’ll have the understanding and authority to change them, if need be.” He smiled slightly. “My old teacher Father Aloysius used to say, ‘Do right, and you need fear no man. Don’t write, and you need fear no prying eyes.’ You’ll carry word to both principals, Wallace and Murray, on a matter of great import— crucial import.”

  “And what is that, my lord?”

  “You tell me, Father, for the evidence of it is all around you, frightening in its absence. What is the most precious commodity lacking in this realm of ours today?”

  I racked my brain, rejecting everything that came to mind as being less than the most precious thing I could imagine. “You have me, my lord,” I finally said.

  “Iron, Jamie. Plain old rusty iron.”

  For some reason I had an instant vision of a coiled pile of rusted chains that I had seen lying in a corner of the castle yard a few days earlier. “Iron?” I said, hearing the incredulity in my own voice. “Iron is precious?”

  The craggy old face smiled at me. “It is indeed, indubitably so. Especially if you suffer from a lack of weaponry and armour. Look about you, Father, when next you go among the folk. Look at our army, how poorly our men are equipped. It is something we seldom think upon as priests, but our country has been stripped of weapons. All the weapons captured at Dunbar were shipped away to England, and since that time we have been scrambling to deal with the rapacity of Edward’s tax collectors. They’ve bankrupted the realm and destroyed the sole industry that brought us wealth—the trade in wool—and we have been so busy trying to protect ourselves that we have had neither the time nor the materials to fashion new weapons. And because iron is perennially in short supply here in Scotland, we have always had far fewer skilled smiths and armourers than England has.”

  He grunted as he rose to his feet, then twisted his torso back and forth. “I will explain, but there’s little bodily comfort in a hard pine pew,” he murmured. “I’m thirsty.”

  He stepped towards the altar and bent forward to open the tabernacle that surmounted it. When he turned back to me holding two jewelled goblets in one hand and a matching flagon in the other, I could not conceal my shocked surprise. He grinned conspiratorially and pointed his chin towards the red-glassed sanctuary lamp by the altar’s side, saying in Scots, “There’s nae light burnin’ there, ye see, though I’d have thought ye’d see that earlier. Nae consecrated host in the place, nor nae blesst wine.” He hefted the flagon. “This stuff here’s for drinkin’. I come here when I need to be by mysel’. Ye’d be surprised how hard it is to find a place that’s private aroun’ here.”

  He poured two goblets full of wine and handed one to me before replacing the flagon in the tabernacle. “To the realm,” he said in Latin, raising his cup, and I repeated his toast as he sipped deeply. He smacked his lips appreciatively.

  “I had a letter from Andrew Murray some time ago,” he said, “when first he threw the English out of Auch Castle. In it he begged me for assistance in equipping his men. He was training them to fight using wooden weapons, he told me, b
ecause the only real weapons they have are those they take from Englishmen they’ve killed, and it is difficult to kill a man—indeed even to fight against him—when all you have is a wooden club and he is armed with a sharp-edged sword or a steel-tipped spear.”

  “It must be, my lord. What is to be done about it?”

  “It is already in hand, Father, with orders being filled all over Christendom, save only for England. Within the year we will have replenished our armouries completely. In the meantime, we have chartered two ships expressly to relieve our immediate needs, one out of Oslo and the other out of Lübeck. Both vessels will be laden half and half—ingot iron, together with finished weapons and chain mail. Each ship will call into a different port. The Lübeck vessel will sail to Aberdeen, where Murray will receive it. Wallace will meet the one from Oslo at Dundee.”

  “But—are there not English garrisons in both those places, my lord?”

  “There are, but what would you have me do? Instruct the captains of both ships to leave their cargoes on some shelving beach along the coastline, in the hopes that they’ll be found intact when our fellows eventually reach them? Andrew and Will will have to exercise their wits in order to achieve what must be done, but that’s why they’re our leaders. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I suppose so, my lord. As you say, every day is precious. I’ll waste no time delivering your word, I promise you.”

  “I ken that, Father, and we’ll do what we can to mak it as easy as may be for ye. Ye’ll ride, and ye’ll be on official church business, so naebody will meddle wi’ ye.”

  “No Scot, you mean,” I said, more to myself rather than him as I thought about the English who swarmed everywhere.

  “No Englishman either,” he replied, reverting to Latin. “You’ll have a letter of safe conduct signed by the King of England himself.”

  I could not mask my amazement. “How can that be, my lord?”

  “Because we have such a letter,” he said proudly. “A personal guarantee of safe conduct signed by the Plantagenet and, shall we say, borrowed from a royal English courier less than a month ago. Ask me no more about it, but I assure you the document is genuine, signed by Edward himself and bedecked with a sufficient wealth of waxen seals and brightly coloured silken ribbons to overawe any who set eyes on it, no matter what their rank.”

  “And will I ride alone?”

  “You will. Providing you with an escort would have defeated our purpose, which is to get you from south to north and back again without attracting notice. An unescorted priest, even though he be well mounted and therefore noteworthy, will invite no questions. Your status as an important church courier, summoning the Scottish bishops to an assembly in Glasgow, and backed by formal documentation as it is, will stand up to all but the most malignant curiosity. And I am sure, from what I know of you, that you are astute enough to elude that kind of curiosity.”

  I nodded.

  “There’s a sound horse ready for you, and a pack horse has been readied with the usual things you’ll need to take with you. Oh, and you’ll have no trouble finding your cousin. The last we heard, two days ago, was that he’s back at his favourite old encampment in the forest, close to Selkirk town.”

  I nodded again, then knelt in front of him, facing the altar as he raised his hand over me and blessed me and my mission.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FORGIVENESS

  “Will? Are you in there?”

  I knocked and waited, but there was no reply, and I frowned, because the guard with whom I had left my horse had told me my cousin had gone inside mere moments earlier. I lifted the latch and pushed the door open, calling Will’s name again as it swung back noiselessly on stout hinges of layered leather. I stooped to avoid the lintel as I stepped inside and closed the door gently behind me, feeling an instant, stabbing pain of regret as I breathed in the atmosphere and the suddenly remembered scents of what had been Will’s home with Mirren.

  To my left, the brightly painted screen of reeds separating the sleeping area from the rest of the single chamber was as brilliant and new-looking as it had been the day Mirren first painted it, and a faint trace of dried lavender, her favourite scent, seemed to waft out towards me from the unseen sleeping space behind it. In front of it, glowing in the light from a single, late-morning sunbeam, sat the rocking cradle of birch wood that Will had made for young Will before the child was born. To my right was a small, plain table with four wooden chairs, and beyond that, in the corner by the stone-built hearth, sat the large, padded armchair that was the first thing my cousin had built for his new wife—a small couch, really, big enough and deep enough to hold both him and Mirren in the comforting glow of an evening fire during inclement weather.

  Of my cousin, though, there was no sign, and I remembered a previous occasion on which Mirren, too, had vanished inexplicably in the same manner. That was when I had learned that this single-room building had two exits, one of them sufficiently well disguised to blend perfectly into the rear wall and be next to invisible at first glance. I had questioned the need for such a thing when I first saw it, and my cousin had grinned and shrugged his massive shoulders, saying merely that strange things happen in the world of men and you could never tell when an extra way out of any place might be a blessing. I started to cross to the concealed door, but then I thought again of that first occasion and turned to look behind me, into the corner behind Will’s armchair.

  The sword was there, where I had last seen it, leaning in the angle of the walls, and it was every bit as impressive and imposing as I remembered. From its large, acorn-shaped pommel to its pointed tip, it was as tall as I am, just slightly less than six feet long. The hilt was a foot and a half of that length, made for a two-handed grip and bound in leather tightly knit with spirals of bronze wire. The slender, twisted, downward-curving cross-guard, made of the same gleaming metal as the blade, was as wide as my shoulders but no more than a thumb’s breadth in section, turned and worked throughout its entire length to give it the appearance of a length of corded rope, with decorative quatrefoils at each end. Hilt and cross-guard were both made and added to the weapon here in Scotland, Will had told me, by a Highland smith called Malachy whose brother was Will’s friend Seumas, known as Shoomy. But Malachy believed the blade itself was forged in Germania, for one of those Teutonic knights you sometimes hear about, the order founded by the Orthodox Christian emperor Frederick Barbarossa.

  The first ten inches of the blade below the guard were flat-sided and edgeless, hammered flat to provide a guiding grip for fighting at close quarters, permitting the wielder to use the weapon as a stabbing spear rather than a slashing blade. Lower down, though, the cutting edge was lethal, three and a half feet of tapered steel with an unmistakable, twinkling look of razor sharpness.

  A conversation popped instantly into my mind, perfectly recalled from the days when my cousin had first come into possession of it. He had been happily married then, with Mirren expecting their first child.

  “What do you need a sword for?” I had asked him, after seeing the huge weapon for the first time. “To enable you to be killed more easily?”

  He had smiled at me, knowing I was really chiding him not so much for thinking of giving up his great yew bow, but for what I considered his reckless endangerment of himself and his young family. I had made no attempt to conceal my disapproval of his public acknowledgment, a short time earlier, that he considered himself an outlaw, if that was what physical opposition to the increasing and illegitimate presence of English soldiery in Scotland entailed. His smile was tolerant and genuinely amused, though, warming his eyes.

  “No, Cuz,” he had said quietly. “If I ever wear that thing at all, it will be as a symbol.”

  “A symbol …” I pondered that for a moment. “Very well, then, let’s accept that a sword such as that could be a symbol. Heaven knows it’s big enough. But a symbol of what? Outlawry?”

  His smile did not falter. “No, of leadership. Bear in mind, though, th
at I said if I wear it at all.”

  “Is there doubt that you might?”

  “Enormous doubt, Jamie.”

  “Enormous is more than merely large, Will,” I had said, with more than a small measure of cynicism. “What causes such great doubt, may I ask?”

  “Aye, you may ask. It’s caused by the fact that I’m about to be a father. I’m to have a son, Jamie, or perhaps a daughter. I don’t care which it is, but whatever the result, it’ll be a thing I’ve never known before. It frightens me when I think about it: a wee, small person, wide-eyed and alive and hungry for knowledge, and completely dependent upon me for his or her existence.” He crossed his arms over his chest and peered at me. “For that reason alone I’ll be steering well clear of leadership in future. God willing, I intend to stay here safely in the greenwood with my wife and child from now on, providing for them and getting more of them.”

  God, though, for reasons known solely to Himself, had not been willing.

  I had not set eyes upon my cousin since the deaths of his family, but I had heard much about the aftermath, and I felt my soul quail inside me. By killing Will’s loved ones, the English had removed the single impediment to William Wallace’s rising up against them, the sole consideration restraining my cousin from seeking bloody, brutal, and merciless vengeance against them and theirs. They treated him as an ordinary man, tragically unaware that no man alive at that time could have been more extraordinary, and then they treated him as a Scot, beneath their lordly notice until it came time to swat him like a fly.