Braveheart (17 page)

Hamish Campbell watched the runner from behind the closed doors of the barn. When he was sure he had gone, he turned and moved to the back of the barn, where the soft light of a shielded lantern glowed on twenty Highlanders lying in the hay. Steward had fed them well; he had found fresh clothes for some and sound weapons for others. Now most of them were asleep.

Hamish did not trouble them; he climbed the ladder into the loft, where his father and Stephen of Ireland sat cross-legged on the hay. They had been whispering for hours about the secret crafts of rebellion: how to use farm implements in battle, how to set an ambush, which kinds of moss are best to stop bleeding. The old Scot and the young Irishman had much in common. When Hamish arrived, they kept right on whispering.

Hamish moved past them to the dark corner in the very back of the barn, where he found William Wallace asleep. Hamish knelt and watched him, not wanting to disturb his friend's slumber; and yet that sleep clearly was not peaceful. William's face twitched, his body jerked, his lips moved as if they desperately needed to speak but could not make the words come.

Hamish knew what he was dreaming. Hamish, in his own way, had loved Murron, too.

There was a knock on the door of the barn in the rhythm Stewart used. Old Campbell and Stephen of Ireland broke off their talk and watched as one of the Highlanders down below opened the door to their host. He moved in and moved to the ladder up to the loft as the rest of the Highlanders stirred, knowing by Steward's hurry that their time of rest was over.

Hearing the commotion below, William awoke suddenly and gazed at Hamish with the dazed look of someone who had leaped across worlds in and instant. He stared about him and seemed to Hamish disappointed to find himself back on this side of death, where his loneliness was a physical pain. He then looked at Hamish as if nothing had happened, as if he had awakened like any other man might, and Hamish pretended the same. "What is it?" William asked, seeing Steward mounting the top of the ladder. "What's going on?"

"A messenger has arrived," Hamish said.

Steward looked around him at each face before he spoke. "The English are advancing an army toward Stirling," he said. "They appear to be reinforcing the one already there. It looks like a full-scale invasion."

Campbell sucked a long full breath into his massive lugs. Scotland invaded. Full-scale war. Everything he had dreaded, feared -- and prayed for. "Do the nobles rally?" he asked.

"Robert the Bruce had been chased from Edinburgh! But word of the march has spread, and Highlanders are coming down on their own by the hundred's by the thousand!" Steward said.

And then without anyone meaning to, they all turned and looked at William Wallace.

30

STIRLING CASTLE STOOD THEN AS IT DOES NOW, PERCHED on a hill high about a grassy field cut in half by a river spanned by a bridge. Now the bridge is made of stone and steel; in June of 1297, it was made of wood.

On the seventeenth day of that month, Scottish nobles had gathered on a smaller hill overlooking the field; they wore gleaming armor, with plumes, sashes, and banners, and were attended by squires and grooms.

The mists of morning shrouded most of the field. But from the opposite side of the bridge they heard the clattering of a huge army moving forward. Lochlan, a noble with extensive holdings near Edinburgh, galloped to Mornay, who, as the representative of the strongest alliance of noble families on the field that day and a well-known ally of the imprisoned Robert the Bruce, was accepted by the other nobles as the man best accredited to discuss battlefield terms with the English commanders. Lochlan had come to the field that day expecting to negotiate, not fight, but the sheer size of the English army had his heart pounding. "It sounds like twenty thousand!" he shouted to Mornay even before he had drawn up his horse.

Mornay was calm. He too expected no battle; his voice, unlike Lochlan's was dull with disappointment. "The scouts say it is ten."

"And we have but two!"

The business of slaughter is a cauldron of boiling emotion, and the same dark apprehensions that had begun to spatter within Lochlan's belly were likewise churning in the guts of the common Scottish soldiers who stood clustered around the small hill on the northern side of the bridge. There was an abbey on this hill, and many of the Scottish commoners on the field that morning had reason to look at the abbey and wish they’d had the privilege of selling their lives into monastic slavery of the soul rather than face the lot that was theirs that day.

Most of them owned no land, nor did they own the houses where they lived. They were allowed to inhabit the huts they called home by the good graces of the nobleman whose land they were privileged to work. The commoner then paid his liege lord a share of the harvest, the portions being determined not by the laborer’s productivity or the size of the family he as trying to feed but by his station in life, a status preestablished at the moment of his birth.

But service of labor was not all the commoner owed his lord; he was also required to present himself for battle whenever and wherever his lord required. To refuse to do so was more than disgrace; it meant turning himself and his family into wanderers and beggars. Still, the Highlanders had never been known as reluctant warriors. Theirs was a beautiful, rugged, unforgiving land, lashed by furious winds and surrounded by ferocious seas. They were descendants of marauding tribes and Vikings; they believed in courage.

The arrangement of their society seemed quite normal to the common Scots on the field that day. Like all men, they drifted with the flow of their lives.

But standing on a cold hillside on a foggy morning and staring across a field where other men stand with the sole purpose of spilling your blood and brains upon the ground has a tendency to make you think in basic terms. And the Scots thought not of society but of life and death.

The English were massed below the stone battlements of the castle and the river at the base of its hill. They stood in ordered rank: arches, pikemen, swordsmen, axmen. Behind them loomed the cavalry, line after line of mounted knights with lances. It was the biggest army, the largest assembly of humanity in any form, that the Scots had ever seen. Their weapons were new and polished. They had steel helmets, iron shoulder plates, chain mail. Even the horses wore armor.

The most protection any of the common Scots wore was a shirt of padded leather. Their weapons were old, and some were only farm implements adapted to the purpose at hand, but the edges were sharp. The Highlanders were used to making do, and they credited more the wielder of the weapon than the weapon itself.

But this day did not feel like theirs. All armies have a mood, flowing down form the man the warrior see as their leader, and the Scots knew the men who led them to that dying field cared nothing for their lives or even for the victory they might win in sacrificing them. As through the mists they saw the numbers arrayed against the, a young soldier tugged at a grizzled veteran and muttered, “So many!”

The veteran took no pains to keep his voice down.

“The nobles will negotiate. If they deal, they send us home. If not, we charge. When we are all dead and they can call themselves brave, they withdraw.”

The young soldier had never seen a pitched battle, but he was no coward. He had fought in numerous clan wars. Then it seemed he fought for honor. Here nothing made sense. “I didn’t come to fight so they could own more lands that I could work for them!” he said.

“Nor did I. Not against these odds!” the veteran said. And then, with no thought, he simply lowered his pike and began to walk back through the lines, heading north toward the Highlands. The younger man, surprised at first, quickly followed him.

Like a leak in an earthen dam, the desertion quickly gathered force. At first one by one and then in clumps, more of the Scots lowered their weapons and turned their faces toward home.

Seeing their armies dissolve before their eyes, the nobles were powerless. If a few men or a small group failed to justify their obligations in battle, they could be fittingly punished, but when the whole multitude defied their noble authority …

But suddenly they did stop. William Wallace came riding into the mob of men followed by his clan. He was striking, charismatic, his head without a helmet, his hair flowing in the wind, his powerful arms bare, his chest covered not in armor but a commoner’s leather shirt. Wallace rode a swift horse like he was born on it.

The entire Scottish army watched in fascination a Wallace and his men rode through them toward the command hill. A half dozen of the men with Wallace were also mounted. The rest ran in that Highland scurry that was as fast as a horse’s trot; some of them carried on their shoulders mysterious wool-wrapped bundles so long it took three men in a line to carry each.

The deserting Scots whispered among themselves. The young soldier who, without knowing or intending to, had started it all now frowned a the veteran and wondered, “Could that be William Wallace?”

“Couldn’t be. Too young. Not big enough,” the veteran told him.

The common soldiers, already having broken ranks, drifted in clusters up the hill to see the confrontation. As Wallace and his mounted captains reached the nobles, Stephen of Ireland, riding beside him, laughed. “The Almighty says this must be a fashionable fight, it’s drawn the finest people,” Stephen said.

Lochlan and his noble friends stared at the tall, powerful commoner before them. So this was William Wallace. Wallace started back. “Where is thy salute?” Lochlan said, his noble pride already stinging from the defiance of the rabble.

“For presenting yourselves on this battlefield, I give you thanks,” Wallace said.

“This is our army. To join it, you give homage,” Lochlan demanded.

“I give homage to Scotland. And if this is your army why does it go?!” Wallace reined his horse around to face the mob of sullen men, all ready to desert. For a long moment he said nothing, just sat on his horse and looked down in awe at this thing that had grown beyond anyone’s imagination.

There was a rising clamor of agreement. Wallace raised his hand, and the army fell silent. “Sons of Scotland!” he shouted. “I am William Wallace!”

“William Wallace is seven feet tall!” the young soldier called.

“Yes I have heard!” William shouted back. “He kills men by the hundreds! And if he were here, he’d consume the English with fireballs from his eyes and blots of lightning from his ass!”

Laughter rumbled through the Scottish ranks. It was not a noise that anyone on the battlefield had expected to hear that day. Wallace was smiling, but now the smile left his face.

“I am William Wallace. And I see a whole army of my countrymen, here in defiance of tyranny! You have come to fight as free men. And free men you are! What will you do with freedom? Will you fight?”

“Two thousand against ten?” the veteran shouted.

“No! We will run – and live!”

“Yes!” Wallace shouted back. “Fight and you may die. Run and you will live at least awhile. And dying in you bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance to come back here as young men and tell our enemies that they may take our lives but they will never take our freedom?”

And the army of common Scotsmen, who only moments before had been trudging away from the battlefield, united in a shout that made the ground shudder. The sound – not the noise of many small creatures but the roar of one great one – quivered in the chest of every man and made him feel a part of something too big to control.

Down on the plain, English emissaries in all their regal finery galloped over the bridge under a banner of truce. The Scots grew silent watching them come.

The veteran, ashamed of what he had been doing five minutes before and wishing to justify his actions, pointed out to the bridge and yelled to his comrades, “Look! The English come to barter with our nobles for castles and titles. And our nobles will not be in front of the battle!”

“No! They will not!” Wallace boomed. He dismounted and drew his sword. “But I will.”

Slowly the chant began and kept building louder and louder: “Wal--lace !
Wal—lace!
Wal-lace!
”

The bagpipers played and pulled the mob back into the clan units. They lifted their weapons – spears and hoes, short swords and axes – toward the overwhelming numbers of the enemy army, and they stood.

Old Campbell, Hamish, and Stephen moved up beside William. The two Scots, father and son, were inward and quiet, but the Irishman’s tongue was quick, and he said what they were all thinking: “Fine speech. Now what do we do?”

“Bring out our spearmen and set them in the field,” Wallace said and watched his three friends gallop to the center of the front row of the Scottish battle line, where their clan had taken up a position.

Mornay rode over to Wallace bringing the horse he had dismounted and extended its reins to him, an invitation to join the prebattle talks. Wallace mounted up and rode out with the Scottish nobles to the near end of the bridge, where the English contingent was waiting.

The two groups of riders met. Cheltham, a black-bearded noble whose square face bore the scars of previous battles and who would be expected to lead the English charge should this confrontation result in actual battle, glared at Wallace; Could this fierce-looking commoner be who Cheltham thought he was? Cheltham knew the others: “Mornay. Lochlan. Inverness,” he said, nodding to each.