Braveheart (9 page)

William looked around the group, lastly at MacClannough.

“I came back home to raise crops. And, God willing, a family. If I can live in peace, I will,” William said. He looked once more at old Campbell, then at Hamish, and walked out of the cave, leading his horse with him.

Campbell shook his head. No one else spoke. Then MacClannough followed William.

The two rode back in silence; they reached the crossroads on the ridge above the Wallace farm. As they were about to part, MacClannough stopped his horse and spoke. “If you can keep your intention to stay out of the troubles, you may court my daughter. If you break your intention, I’ll kill you.”

MacClannough rode away. William rode down to his farm. But along the lane, he stopped and looked for a long time at the graves of his father and brother.

16

THEY DID NOT SEE EACH OTHER AGAIN FOR TWO WEEKS. BUT when one of the MacClannoughs wed his daughter to the son of another local farmer, he sent out a runner to announce the event and invite friends to the celebration. Young Wallace was included in the circle—scarcely anyone was left out, and yet he took the invitation as a sign of acceptance by his old neighbors. So on a Saturday afternoon in late summer he found himself beside Murron, strolling through grass up to their kneetops, in a field beside the church. All the farm families had turned out, but very few of the villagers, as the bride’s family, being tenents on the land of a nobleman, was not prosperous enough to invite and feed them all. Yet there was ample food and flowers full of spirits followed the nuptial couple about and serenaded them with bawdy songs.

William and Murron had sat on opposite sides of the aisle during the wedding, she with her family, he alone. The words of the Latin mass, mysterious to most of the congregation, had bathed the ceremony with a majesty; and Murron, who had seen so many of her friends make the solemn journey into marriage and had turned down so many offers to take the trip herself, felt the spirit of the wedding in a way she had never felt it before, as if those holy words had been shaped at the dawn of time and sent down the ages specifically for her.

Then she and William had met at the door of the church as the congregation had filed out behind the bride and groom to begin the real celebration. As Murron and William came face to face, they scanned each other’s features suddenly and desperately, as if afraid that in the days since they’d last met everything had changed, they’d gotten it all wrong somehow, the face that had been filling their waking thoughts and their sleeping dreams was really just like every other. But once their eyes met, they saw the same dreams, the same promise, the same gleam, like looking into the face of someone who is gazing through the door of heaven.

So now they walked side by side, their steps matched, not daring to hold hands though their knuckles brushed as they matched steps. It seemed to them that everyone was watching them. And yet that didn’t seem to matter.

“Your father doesn’t like me, does he?” William said, smiling.

“It’s not you,” she said. “He dislikes that you’re a Wallace. He just says . . . the Wallaces don’t seem to live for very long.”

He didn’t have an answer for that. His father, his brother, his grandfather . . . Death was a part of life; diseases and accidents seemed to take someone every day. But only William’s mother had died in her bed of what was known as a natural cause. The men –well, with the Wallaces it seemed that death in battle was a natural cause. And yet as William walked beside Murron and looked at her auburn hair drawing in the warmth of the sunlight and her eyes absorbing the green of the grass and the blue of the sky, he wanted his hands to know nothing but the touch of her skin and the feel of a plow in his hands. He wanted life. Babies. Crops. Life! Here, forever, in peace.

And just as he drifted in the sweet flow of those vital dreams, he heard the horses. A group of riders appeared—mounted knights with banners and flying colors. At the head of the group rode an English nobleman, plumed and polished.

The wedding guests grew quiet. What could this be, the presentation of a gift? Would the noble grant the young couple a plot of land of their own? Would he give money as dowry? The bride’s father had been a good tenant, helping to fill the noble’s barn year after year. Surely such a surprise visit could only mean something extraordinary. The bride, a girl named Helen, with hair the color of a flaming sky, held tight to Robbie, her beloved, and watched them come.

The riders stopped in front of the bride and groom. The nobleman was gray, in his fifties. His face plump, his cheeks red and puffy above his beard. He rose in his stirrups and announced, “I have come to claim the right of
prima noctes!
As the
lord of these lands, I will bless this marriage by taking the bride into my bed on the first night of her union!”

The warm breeze rattled through the trees; the horses shook their necks in their bridles, but no one could make a sound. Yes, the noble had such a right. He owned the land; in effect he owned the people, for he could require every able-bodied man to fight in any campaign he wished for up to one month out of every twelve. Yet in recent years the right of
prima noctes
had seldom been invoked. It created hatred, it destroyed families. Perhaps that was the whole point.

Stewart, the father of the bride, lunged forward. “No, by God!” he yelled.

The knights carried short battle pikes, and they were ready for this; in an instant their pikes were pointed down at the unarmed Scots. “It is my noble right,” the nobleman said quietly. “I have recently come into possession of these lands. Perhaps you have not been made sensible of late of the honors due to your lord. I am here to remind you.”

The bride, Helen, felt her husband’s arm go taut; even unarmed, Robbie and Stewart, his new father-in-law, were about to duck beneath the pike points, grab at the horses’ bridles, pull a few knights down, and kill as many as they could before they were killed themselves. But Helen was already reacting, holding Robbie tight, snatching at her father’s shoulder, pulling them both back, away from the blades and the confrontation. Perhaps she thought faster, or perhaps seeing the nobleman coming, she had already anticipated what the others there had not.

Everyone watched as she held them both close and whispered to them, frantically yet steadily. Their faces were red with fury, and they kept glancing u with eyes that blazed at the nobleman, and each time they did she whispered faster. And there was no one there that day, English or Scot, who doubted what she was telling them: that she would sooner do anything for only one night with that nobleman than lose the two of them—and God knew how many others—forever.

Then Helen stepped away from her new husband and her old father and held back tears as she allowed herself to be pulled up behind one of the horsemen. They rode away, her flaming red hair bouncing behind her, and she did not look back.

The Scots were left sickened. The bride’s mother was weeping among her friends; the groom and his father-in-law stared at the ground, their jaws clenched.

And William Wallace watched it all and kept his thoughts to himself.

17

MURRON LAY SLEEPLESS UPON THE STRAW MATS OF HER bed. All night she had thought of Helen. She kept seeing Helen’s eyes—those eyes refusing tears—as she stepped to the nobleman and consented to go with him. Every time she closed her own eyes, she saw Helen’s.

Then Murron heard a noise, a scratching at her window. A mouse? The wind? But the scratching was persistent, and she understood; she slipped to the window and opened it to find William out in the moonlight.

“Murron!”

“Shhh!” she whispered, but he was already whispering.

“Come with me.”

“I don’t think my parents are asleep. They’ve been restless all night!”

“So am I. So are you. Come with me.”

She slipped out the window and into his arms and to the ground. They ran across the grass to the trees, where William had two horses tied.

They rode, silhouettes along a ridge, as the horses’ breath blew silver clouds in the moonlight.

He guided her to a grove and asked her to dismount. She followed him as he led both horses into the grove and found it open in the center—a thick ring of trees around a small grassy circle. He tied the horses to a branch, took her hand, and drew her to the far side of the circle. The trees there opened onto endless sky. A precipice! She drew back in surprise, then gasped at the beauty she saw. They were high above a loch, gleaming in the moonlight. She gripped his hand. They looked out upon together all of Scotland, the whole world below them. So beautiful, it was sacred.

“You’ve been here before,” she said.

He nodded. “Some nights, I have dreams. Mostly dreams I don’t want. I started riding at night to fill up my mind so that when I did sleep, I’d dream only of the ride and the adventure.”

“Did it work? Did it stop you dreaming?”

“No. You don’t choose your dreams. Your dreams choose you.”

They sat down on the smooth rocks where the tree roots embraced the earth. The wind off the loch was steady and cold. Neither of them noticed it. Both seemed willing to sit there forever.

“William,” she said, “I wondered so many times what had become of you. Where you had gone. What you were doing…” She looked out over the loch. They say no one can see the wind, but she could see it, moving over the surface of the water, making tracks where the windwaves caught the moonlight. “And if you would ever come back.”

He nodded. “I’ve come back,” he whispered. No one could have heard them, there was no other soul for miles. But it was as if he had too much voice in his throat, and all he could do was whisper.

“When you gave me the thistle. . . That you saved it. . . “ She couldn’t make her words come together into a whole sentence. “I understood then . . . You, too. You . . .had thought about me, too.”

“Aye. Oh . . . aye.”

“You’ve had learning. That uncle of yours, the one you went to live with—my father said he was an ecclesiastic. He must have taught you so many things.”

William nodded.

“I . . . I don’t even know how to read.”

“You can learn. I can teach you.”

She was silent for a moment, knowing he had just opened the door to the inner room of his life. “But, William you’ve been out into the bigger world. I’ve never been far from home. No farther than this spot right here, right now.”

He stared off, beyond the distant mountains. “Murron, I’ve traveled in my body only as far as the home of my uncle Argyle and his shire. But he has shown my mind worlds I never dreamed of. I want to share those worlds with you.”

He was looking at her now.

She took his hands in hers. “William, there are scars on your hands. You’ve done more than study.”

“Aye. I have fought. And I have hated. I know it is in me to hate and to kill. But I’ve learned something else away from my home. And that is that we must always have a home, somewhere inside us. I don’t know how to explain this to you, I wish I could. When I lost my father and john, it hurt my heart so much. I wished I had them back; I wished the pain would go away. I thought I might die of grief alone; I wanted to bring that grief to the people who had brought it to me.” His words were coming fast now. Slow to get started, they had become impossible to stop. “But later I came to realize something. My father and his father had not fought and died so I could become filled with hate. They fought for me to be free to love. They fought because
they
loved! They loved
me.
They wanted me to have a free life. A family. Respect from others, for others. Respect of myself. I had to stop hating and start loving.” He squeezed her hands so tight. He reached with trembling fingers and combed her wind-blown hair away from her face, so he could see it fully. “But that was easy. I thought of you.”

They kissed—so long and hard that they tumbled off the rocks. They rolled on the soft heather between the trees and devoured each other.

“I want . . . to marry you!” he said, gasping.

“I . . . accept your proposal!” she gasped back.

“I’m not just saying it!”

“Nor I!”

“But I won’t give you up to any nobleman.”

That caused her to stop. “You scare me.”

“I don’t want to scare you. I want to be yours, and you mine. Every night like this one,” William said.

“This night is too beautiful to have again.”

“I will be with you, like this. Forever. And I will never share you with any man.”

And all of their fears and all of their sorrows became but old dry logs in one great bonfire of love.

18

ONE MONTH LATER, MURRON SLIPPED OUT OF HER WINDOW and ran silently across the soft ground to the distant line of Calendonia trees, where a horse stood tethered and waiting. She fetched a bundle hidden in the crook of one of the trees, loosed the horse, and led it further from the house. When she was sure she was far enough away that her mother and father would not hear the hoofbeats, she mounted and rode off.