Braveheart (12 page)

Wallace leaned forward to spur the horse, then heard a shout.

“Wait!” Hamish shouted.

Hamish, Campbell, and four others rode up.

Again William and Hamish exchanged a look. “All right,” Hamish said. “Now we’re ready.”

William raised his sword. He screamed and charged.

His horse pounded toward the barricade, closer and closer to the English soldiers, their eyes grown wide and white with fear. For a moment they seemed to freeze; then half of them stood, raising bows. Not all at once, but like the sharp spattering of hail upon a stone fence, their bowstrings twanged.

The arrows cut through the air, toward William. They sliced the air around his head, they tore his clothes, but none caught his flesh; almost all were fired high in haste, and there was no time for a second volley. He charged through them, his horse leaping the barrier as William simultaneously swung the broadsword. The soldier who had first seen William and judged his heart for battle by the stillness of his face now saw that he was not just good with the sword, he was an expert and more. The stroke was smooth, appearing effortless and unhurried, and the tip, at the end of a huge arc, whistled faster than the arrows. The blade bit through the corporal’s helmet and took off the upper half of his head.

The soldiers tried to rally to shoot him in the back as his horse leaped over them—one of them had sighted William’s back—but the other Scots crashed into them. William’s charge had mesmerized them; they had forgotten about the others. Now, as all fights become, it turned into a melee, the soldiers trying to rely on their training while the Scots gave themselves to wild fury. Old Campbell took an arrow through the shoulder but kept hacking with his sword. Hamish battered down two men with a huge ax. Still it was but a few against more than twenty, and no force in battle is greater than the confidence that one’s own side will prevail. The soldiers, overcoming their first urge to flee, saw their advantage in numbers and had just begun to swarm over their outnumbered attackers when more Scots arrived. Carrying hoes, hay scythes, and hammers, they charged into the backs of the soldiers and overwhelmed them.

William raced on through the village, spurring his horse, dodging obstacles in the narrow streets—chickens, carts, barrels. Soldiers popped up: the first he galloped straight over; the next he cut down with a forward stroke, and another he chopped down on his left side with a backhand. With each swing of his broadsword, a man died.

A village woman shouted from her doorway, “William Wallace! Go, William! Go!” He galloped on, his farmer neighbors and people from the village following in his wake.

Hesselrig heard the approaching shouts. He and thirty more of his men were barricaded around the village square. The sounds were not comforting; they heard the panicked cries of English soldiers and the frenzied screams of the Scots drawing nearer. He called out to his men, “Don’t look so surprised! We knew he’d bring friends! They’re no match for professional soldiers!”

They saw Wallace gallop into sight, then suddenly stop and rein his horse into a side street.

Hesselrig and his men didn’t like this: Where did he go? Which way would he come from? And then they heard the horses and saw the other Scots at the top of the main street. The soldiers unleashed a volley of arrows in their direction.

They were fitting a second volley of arrows to their bowstrings when Wallace ran in—on foot—and cut down two soldiers. At the same time the other Scots were charging. The startled soldiers broke and ran in every direction.

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 they 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!”