The Forest Laird

by Jack Whyte

  “But take it one step further and consider this supposedly senseless Council of Guardians. Of the six, three are close bound to Balliol by family ties and loyalties—Fraser of St. Andrews, the Comyn Earl of Buchan, and Lord John Comyn of Badenoch, who is wed to Balliol’s sister. The other three align themselves with Bruce—Wishart of Glasgow, MacDuff the Earl of Fife, and James the Stewart. A balance of power, lads. Three Guardians in support of each claimant, and equal representation from north and south. Ask yourselves now, does it truly seem so senseless?”

  4

  On an afternoon towards the end of autumn in the following year, our sixth year as students, William Wallace turned on the churlish monk called Brother James, picked him up, and flung him headlong to the ground. I was there, and it was in my defence that Will had acted, but in doing so he broke the greatest of the Abbey’s unwritten laws: anyone who laid angry hands on one of the brotherhood was guilty, ipso facto, of a crime against the fraternity that the Abbey represented. Certainly no Abbey student had ever done such a thing before that moment.

  Appalled at what had happened, I knew we would both suffer for it, regardless of the provocation that had spurred it. Stunned as I was by the sight of the monk sprawled at my feet, I was amazed that my cousin had restrained himself as much as he had. Mere moments earlier his face had been wild, his huge fist upraised, ready to smash the older man’s face into a pulp. Now, the downed man squirmed in terror, the skirts of his robe soaked by an involuntary voiding of his bladder, while above him Will struggled with himself, his face suffused with blood and his hands clenching and unclenching as he swayed back and forth with the power of his emotions.

  Will looked around for the object that had precipitated this disaster. It lay almost beneath his feet—the solid walking staff that Brother James had smashed across my shoulders without warning, driving me to my knees. Will bent slowly and picked it up, hefting it in one hand. It was a heavy, sound staff of hazel wood about five feet in length and worn smooth from long use. The monk had risen to one elbow and now remained motionless, staring up, aghast, at the fury he had provoked. Without looking at him, Will took the hazel staff in both his hands and snapped it in half across his knee, then held both halves together and did the same again, a prodigious feat of strength. He then extended his arm, allowing the pieces to drop one by one onto the man on the ground.

  “You spineless, Godless lump of excrement,” he growled in his newly acquired adult voice. “If you ever dare bring your foul presence close to my cousin again I will cripple you so badly that you will never leave your cell thereafter. Do you understand me?” His voice was profoundly deep, rolling and sonorous, yet also calm, but its pitch left no doubt that he was waiting for an answer.

  “Yes, yes, I understand. I do.” The monk was bobbing his head rapidly, no trace of arrogance or dislike discernible in him now.

  “Then take your skinny, piss-wet arse out of my sight. Now!”

  The roar of rage galvanized the wretched monk, and he scrambled to all fours and scurried away, lurching towards the Abbey.

  I turned to Will. “You know he’s running straight to Father Abbot, don’t you?”

  “Aye, and I don’t care. This day has been coming for years and now it’s done with.” Suddenly he switched to Scots. “And ye ken? I dinna gi’e a damn what they dae to me. Yon was worth it. Did ye see how quick he pished hissel’, the watter rinnin’ doon his robe? I could hear the gush o’ it. He didna think we’d daur face up to him.”

  “They’ll expel you, Will. Me, too.”

  “No, Jamie, not you.” He reverted to Latin seamlessly. “He attacked you with a weapon, unprovoked. And that reminds me.” He stooped and gathered up the four broken pieces. “We might need this for proof. Pull up your shift.”

  I struggled to do as he said, suddenly aware of the band of pain across my shoulders, and when my back was bare he pressed his thumb against the welt that was evidently visible.

  “Aye,” he murmured. “That’ll bruise beautifully, too clear to be denied. Don’t lose it.” I looked at him in disbelief, amazed to see him grinning.

  “How can you laugh, Will? We are deep in trouble.”

  He shook his head. “No, Jamie, no. I might be, but you’re not. I told you.”

  “They’ll throw you out. What will you do then? You’ll be disgraced.”

  “Aye.” He barked a laugh, which astounded me. “And they’ll go hungry for fresh meat forever after.” He reached out to dig his fingers into my shoulder. “I’m finished here anyway, Jamie. Nothing more here that I want to learn. I’ve only stayed this past half year to keep you company, but nowadays you’re so lost in your books that I spend most of my time alone. So if they throw me out, and I hope they will, I’ll go back to Elderslie and be a forester. That’s all I want to do anyway.”

  “A forester!” I was sure he was jesting. “You can’t be a forester, you speak Latin and French! Foresters know only trees and animals, poachers and hunters.”

  “And bows, Jamie. Some of us know bows. But I might be the first monk-taught forester. Think of that. And never fear, Uncle Malcolm will welcome me because he can always use good foresters, and he’ll accept my leaving here once he knows what caused it. You, on the other hand, will stay here and take up your calling and we’ll see each other often.”

  I knew he spoke the truth about being welcomed back in Elderslie, for he was right about the need for a good forester on the Wallace lands, and I knew too that the old knight would forgive him, for Will and Sir Malcolm had grown close, and the older man had scant respect for clerics. Some, he would concede if pressed, were well enough, honest in their endeavours and their calling like his own two kinsmen, but he had found too many far less suited to his taste. Parasites, he called those who used the privileges and seclusion of the clerical life to keep themselves well fed in relative comfort and free of the responsibilities that encumbered other men.

  Brother James, I had long known, was one such specimen. He had never overcome the dislike he had conceived for us when he had been charged with showing us the precincts on our first day there. He had not known who we were that day, and when he discovered later that we were Wallaces, close kin to Father Peter and Brother Duncan, his resentment and dislike had festered and grown deep, although he was usually at pains to mask it. But even that masking bred more resentment.

  Will and I tried several times to placate him in the months that followed that first encounter, but it was a thankless task, and we soon resigned ourselves to his dislike and avoided him as much as possible. Yet, inevitably in such a small community, there were times when our paths crossed, and those occasions were generally unpleasant. That became increasingly true as the years passed and we continued to disappoint Brother James by failing to disgrace ourselves as he expected, rising instead to positions of relative prominence within the community, myself as the youngest librarian ever and Will as supplier to the pantry.

  I discovered later that our final encounter that September day had been caused by jealousy, and it was inconceivable to me that any full-grown man should be jealous of me. But I learned that James had once worked in the library and had been banished for negligence after several valuable manuscripts were damaged through his carelessness. He had also applied to study for the priesthood, but had been found deficient in several areas and was rejected. The word of my acceptance as a seminarian had been brought to me by Father Peter on the morning of the day Joseph attacked me, and clearly the unfortunate man had heard of it, as he attacked me soon afterwards.

  And so our shared days as students ended. Will admitted to assaulting Brother James, but he was merciless in asserting the details of how and why he had done so, offering the broken weapon in evidence and bidding the monks bare my back to show the mark James had inflicted upon me. He went out of his way, too, to describe the antipathy James had held for us since our arrival at the Abbey and offered detailed accounts of several encounters we had had with the man, to our cost each time.r />
  Being a student and one of the transgressors by association, I was forbidden to witness Will’s arraignment, confined under the guard of two senior brethren outside the tribunal chamber until I was hauled in briefly to show my injuries. But Brother Duncan was there in his capacity of armarius, and it was he who described the proceedings to me later. The judging panel, headed by Father Abbot himself, believed Will’s tale unanimously, and Brother James was confined to his cell on bread and water for three months, an unheard-of punishment. On the matter of Will’s infraction, however, there was no recourse. He had struck down one of the community in blatant contravention of the law, unwritten though it was, and had created a precedent. Moreover, he had openly admitted during the hearing that, similarly provoked, he would do the same again, though more thoroughly and effectively next time.

  But then, in acknowledgment of the troubled faces of the men who must unwillingly condemn him, William Wallace did something that confounded me when I heard about it, something so noble and so honourable in one so young that it strengthened me years afterwards when I began to hear, and to disbelieve, tales of the alleged atrocities being tallied against his name and fame: he took pity on his judges and absolved them of any guilt they might be feeling, assuring them all that he had long since decided that his time of usefulness to the Abbey community had reached an end. His dearest wish now was to become a forester on his uncle Malcolm’s estates, he told them, because that was what he truly believed God had intended for him and he was impatient to begin. He thanked them for the opportunities they had given him to learn to read and write and converse in Latin and French, as well as for the training they had offered him, perhaps unwittingly, in the paths that he would follow thenceforth, by according him the freedom of the Abbey’s lands in which to hunt and learn the lore of his future craft. And then he requested their permission to quit his formal studies immediately and to return to Elderslie.

  The tribunal heard him out in silence—gratefully, I like to think—and then they permitted him to withdraw from his studies and return home with no disgrace attached to his name.

  Listening to Brother Duncan’s recital of the events, I was moved to tears by the way he summed the matter up: “Your cousin Will is a fine young man,” he said, with no trace of harshness on his normally forbidding face. “And I believe God has moulded him to be what he is with some great purpose in His mind. We may never know that purpose, but I have no fears that William Wallace will ever let anything stand in his way to achieving it.”

  5

  Ewan accompanied Will back to Elderslie, his own tasks in Paisley completed. He left the farm, which had flourished under his stewardship for years now, functioning smoothly under the guidance of a tenant called Murdoch, who had done the actual farming and supervised the labourers over those years, quickly earning the ungrudging trust of both Ewan and Sir Malcolm. The abrupt departure of my two friends, however, meant that everything familiar in my life had changed; they had taken the entire contents of the workshop with them, leaving only an empty stone shell. They had left me my bow and a supply of arrows, and even a brace of targets, but I knew, even as I collected those to take them with me back to the Abbey, that I would probably never use them again. The Abbey cloisters would be my permanent home from then on, and although I had enjoyed my archery greatly, I knew that without Will and Ewan to keep me interested and active, I would soon abandon it. Librarians and priests have no need of weapons, even for recreation.

  Somewhat to my surprise, I adapted effortlessly to life as a fulltime member of the close-knit Abbey community. My work in the library continued to absorb me, as it had since the beginning, and the time I now had to myself in the evening hours was soon taken up by my studies for the priesthood. It came as a welcome discovery, too, that Brother Duncan and Father Peter intended to continue using me as their go-between with Sir Malcolm, for it meant that for at least one day out of every fourteen I was dispatched to Elderslie to deliver information to my uncle and to bring back his reports to them. Thus I was able to keep myself informed of Will’s activities, even if I did not see him on every visit.

  He had, as he had wished, become one of my uncle’s foresters, and the faithful Ewan Scrymgeour had chosen to join him. Both of them were carefree now, busily involved in a brief but intense apprenticeship under old Erik Strongarm, my uncle’s senior forester. By the year’s end they would be responsible for the care and maintenance of the surrounding woodlands. They would cull dead and dying trees, keep the forest free from the buildup of flammable undergrowth, and from time to time they would inspect the activities of the charcoal burners, whose vast smouldering turfcovered pits produced the charred, hard-burning fuel essential to the estate’s smithies. They would also be charged with the welfare of the wildlife on Sir Malcolm’s lands—the deer, wild swine, and other game, including fowl, that thrived in the woods and in the open glades and pastures among the trees—and with the safety of the cattle and domestic swine in the various pastures and paddocks close by the main farm, protecting all of them from theft and depredation.

  Ewan had worn the green garments of a forest dweller when first I met him years before, and now he wore them again. But so, I discovered, did Will. The first time I saw him thus, garbed from head to foot in close-fitting, hooded green tunic and trews, I gaped, for he was bigger than ever. His arms and shoulders were enormous, larger, I thought, than those of any other man I had ever seen, and his thighs and legs were as solid and substantial as healthily growing oaks. At seventeen, he was now a man in all respects, save one that I knew nothing of, and I had never seen him happier.

  He had grown quickly to accommodate the demands of his newly fashioned bow, itself a thing of beauty that glowed richly with love and care, coats of laboriously applied wax and tallow enhancing the different colours of its wood. It was tapered to perfection for his height and capped on both thumb-thick ends with ram horn tips, the horn boiled to the melting point and then moulded and slotted to anchor the loops of his bowstring. One glance at the thickness of its massive grip was all it took for me to know I could never begin to pull it. He carried it unstrung most of the time, in a protective case of bull’s hide, thickly waxed and waterproof, that hung from his shoulder opposite the bag of yard-long arrows, but he could free it, bend it and string it with hemp, nock an arrow, and be ready to shoot in mere moments when he needed it. It was the pride of his life, I could see. He told me he kept it unstrung and cased in the English fashion, to avoid any danger of the bow’s shaft shaping itself permanently to the arc of the string’s pull and thereby losing some of its power. All in all, my cousin had turned into an imposing man, and the dark growth now fuzzing his cheeks and chin would complete the transformation very soon.

  I was not quite correct in that respect, though. Will’s transformation to manhood was effected by another element altogether, one which had little or nothing to do with the density of his beard. But my error was understandable: I was a cloistered boy, barely sixteen, and studying for the priesthood. I had no idea of the natural forces that can transform the merest boy into a man.

  Her name was Mirren Braidfoot, and on a brilliant summer day in 1288 she came to Elderslie in a light, horse-drawn cart, accompanied by four other young women and a group of eager young men, all of those afoot. She was there to visit a cousin, a plump, plain girl called Jessie Brunton, whom both Will and I knew by sight. I witnessed the first meeting between him and Mirren, but apart from smirking to myself over his tongue-tied awkwardness, I missed the fateful significance of it, too grateful that it was Will, not I, who had to deal face to face with such a fetching stranger. Will was abashed, I knew, and that was unusual, for he had learned much about young women since leaving the Abbey, but I myself would have been struck mute by her smiling confidence had it been I who had to speak to her.

  Standing beside Will, barely reaching the middle of his swelling upper arm and looking for all the world like a slight and tiny child—though she was anything but either one�
��the girl Mirren stood gazing up at him, watching his face with a deeply thoughtful look on her own. As I approached, the young woman stepped away from him to make room for me. I was aware of her bright blue eyes scanning me from head to foot, her lips smiling gently. But being me, I ignored her look and turned instead to Will, blissfully unaware that in the short time I had been watching elsewhere, William Wallace’s life, and all of Scotland’s destiny, had been changed forever.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1

  “Where first we find love, there also we encounter grief.”

  I cannot remember who said that, but it springs into my mind unbidden whenever I think of Mirren Braidfoot and my cousin Will, and it never fails to grip me like a fist clenching around my heart. I am a priest, and although that in itself is no guarantee of chastity or lack of prurience, I have never known the love of a woman, either physical or emotional. I have known temptation, certainly, for that is the common burden of mankind, but I have always managed, somehow, through no strength of my own and most often by the power of fervent and sustained prayer, to avoid yielding to it.

  That said, however, I have been fascinated all my life by the overwhelming strength of the love one sometimes finds between certain men and women, and I have always found the power of it, for both good and ill, to be close to frightening. Had King Alexander not yearned for the welcoming warmth of his young wife, for example, he would not have died as he did on his way to join her. And had William Wallace never met Mirren Braidfoot, he would not have died as he did in London’s Smithfield Square.

  I do not mean this to be taken as a condemnation of Mirren. In all the years that passed after that first meeting in Elderslie, neither Will nor she did any wilful thing to harm the other. As a courting pair, two young people discovering each other, they were the very essence of God’s intent for His beloved children; as a married couple, they knew bliss together; and as supporters of each other’s dreams, even when apart, they were unshakable. There was no weakness in their love, no inborn flaw, no fault; merely perfect love and fidelity. But as these attributes buttressed their love, they also left them open to their enemies.