Lion at Bay (23 page)

Shame.

He stared at the stones as if he could dig through them with only his gaze, as if his eyes could search out those left and shame them into rescue.

In the dark, he knew most of them were dead. Those who had stuck by him, that is – the others would deny him faster than Saint Peter did Christ. He crossed himself for the blasphemy, but could not stop the wry thought creeping in, that even God had forsaken Will Wallace faster than he did Christ on the Cross.

Who else had forsaken him? He thought of them then, the faces coming at him like dead leaves whirling in a wind. Fergus the Beetle, arguably the most loyal of all, had died of the coughing sickness last winter, slick with sweat and pain and fear and still able to call Wallace ‘the best chiel he had ever walked with’.

There had been others there to meet Fergus when he slipped into God’s Grace, good men – aye, and women as well – who had followed him for the belief in it. They had fought and laughed, taken hunger and plenty in equal measure and had found the understandings that come with a life so close together, so shared in the one desire – a good king in a realm that was their own.

Gone. All gone, snuffed like a guttering candle and the best part of him with it. He looked at his hand, grimed and shackled; once it had slashed Hell into his enemies, had pressed an arrogance of seal into letters on behalf of the Kingdom. Now it was fastened to the wall of the cell they called Lickstone, because the only way of quenching your thirst was to suck the damp from the run-off near the lintel.

He knelt in the darkness, shivering and silent and wondered who had betrayed him. Lang Jack Short, of course – but he would have been put to it, by appeals to vengeance as much as a fat purse. Should not have broken his neb before, Wallace thought. Even if the wee moudiewart bastard had deserved it, carping on and on about what should be done and what should not, as if he had been leader …

Leader of nothing now. Left to pay the price for it – his fist closed, as if on the hilt of the sword he no longer had. Everything worked for, gone like smoke.

Like dreams.

Who had betrayed him? A woman, possibly, though he could not recall any he had treated particularly badly – nor any he had loved particularly well.

Menteith, mayhap. No, he was only the luckless chiel who had to carry it out and was clearly unhappy at it. He had come to Wallace not long after he had been huckled into the cell, loaded with enough chains to stagger a pachyderm. Poor Sir John, Wallace had thought at the time, seeing the man standing with his mourn of a face and his feet shuffling in the filthy straw, trying to summon up the words to say how sorry he was.

‘When you decide that peace is best at any price,’ Wallace had told him, ‘the price you pay is in chains.’

‘It is you in chains,’ Sir John had spat back, unable to contain his pride, even now.

‘Here,’ Wallace had replied, shaking his shackled wrists, not yet fastened to the wall.

‘No’ here or here,’ he added, touching his heart and his head.

Clever Will, who could not button his arrogant lip. Menteith had flushed to the brim of his fading hairline and ordered ‘the prisoner’ fastened to the wall.

Not Menteith, then. Buchan or Badenoch, playing some cat’s cradle game of their own in which they saw Will Wallace’s end as some new beginning for the Comyn.

But if it was new beginnings we are speaking of, he thought to himself, then Bruce is at the heart of it. He heard himself say it, clear as running water, when they had crossed swords at Haprew.

If I remain, you cannot get started
.

In the end, it did not matter which black heart had done it, for he knew that his time was done and that all he had fought and bled for – aye, and all the bodies he had stepped over, on both sides, to achieve what he did – was come to nothing.

Freedom was as far from the Kingdom as it now was from himself and he knelt in the sodden dark and felt the black years of it leak from him in a series of hacking sobs, a brief collapse into pity for poor Will Wallace, abandoned and alone and facing sure death.

Just as quickly, he reeled back from it. A last few sobs, a snort of snot into the back of his throat and he hoiked out his fear and loss in a disdainful spit. That life was gone and what was broken could not be mended. All he could do now was die well, so as to leave some flame for others to follow.

He knew they would – and if they had to do it over his body, then it was no more than he had done over others. It does not matter if I fall as long as someone else picks up my sword and keeps fighting.

He climbed unsteadily to his feet, though there was no-one to see. Better to die standing than live on your knees.

London

The Vigil of St Bartholomew, August, 1305

The great pillared aisles sweated with those craning to see, genuinely curious even if many had only come because the King wished it. They watched him, sitting in state, in ermine and gold circlet, one hand stroking his curled silver beard, the drooping eye like a sly, winsome invite to the giant who stood alone and overloaded with chains on the top step of Westminster.

The great and the good, crusted with finery and stiff in their curule chairs, stared back at Wallace with fish eyes while le Blound, Mayor of London, cleared his throat and read the indictment, uncurling the considerable roll of it as he did so.

‘… trial at Westminster before Johannes de Segrave, P. Maluree, R. de Sandwich, Johannes de Bakewell, and Jean le Blound, Mayor of the Royal City of London, on the vigil of St Bartholomew, in the thirty-third year of the reign of King Edward, son of Henry …’

Bruce watched Segrave, who had brought Wallace to London in an overloading of chains and would take away the pieces of him afterwards – and be handed a purse of silver for his expenses.

Bruce wondered if there were thirty pieces in it, which would be in keeping with the mummery of the affair – he looked at the figure on the steps, sagging with exhaustion, dripping with shackles and crowned with a wreath. Oak, to signify that he was king of brigands and had dared try and usurp the rule of Scotland from King Edward.

A poor decision, he thought to himself. Edward has made a mistake and one which will rebound on me, too, for that oak wreath gave Will the air of Christ himself, bound and scourged and crowned with thorns – and this day might be dedicated to St Bartholomew, but it was also the Feast of St Longinus, the defiant soldier who had thrust a spear into Christ’s side for mercy and was later martyred as a Christian.

A Christ-like Wallace did not bode well and Bruce, even as he marvelled at the strength still left in Will, frowned at the thought of him as a martyr in the name of King John Balliol.

Treason, murder, robbery, incendiarism, the felonious slaying of William de Heselrig, Sheriff of Lanark … the long litany of it rolled on, interrupted only once, when Will raised the bruise of his face.

‘Treason?’ he thundered back, taking everyone by surprise with the power in his voice. ‘I never swore to you, Longshanks. John Balliol is my king. Treason there never was.’

Mayhap – the wee legals could argue the finer points of it until Judgement Day. Yet there is enough, Bruce thought, in all the rest.

‘… and after this, joining to himself as great a number of armed men as he could, he attacked the houses, towns and castles of that land, and caused his writs to run through the whole of Scotland as if they were the edicts of the overlord of that land … and he invaded the Kingdom of England and especially the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland, and all whom he found there loyal to the King of England he feloniously slew in different ways … and he spared no-one who spoke the English tongue, but slew all in ways too terrible to be imagined, old and young, brides and widows, babes and their mothers …’

Edward, brooding as a raven waiting for a sheep to die, listened to the meticulous detail of it all, thinking only of the one felony which remained unmentioned and never would be, though the single eye of that ruby Apostle glinted balefully in front of the King every day.

By God’s Holy Arse, this Wallace had contrived to reach out from the north and rob him in his own treasury – the sly, ingenuous term ‘brought unease to the King’ was a shouted laugh of understatement.

Wallace said nothing more in answer to any of the charges, which brought a deal of cold satisfaction to Edward. Did he think a legal wriggling off the hook of treason would save him?

Bruce sat and looked at the stone face of Wallace, his thought racing like wild horses. He once vowed to march on London, Bruce recalled, so this was a sour jest by God on the man – the best view of Edward’s capital, elevated above all of London, was hanging where the crows circle the gate spikes.

‘So resolved that the above-mentioned William Wallace should be dragged from the Palace of Westminster to the Tower of London and from the Tower of London and thus through the middle of the city to the Elms at Smoothfield and as a punishment for the robberies, murders, and felonies which he has committed should there be hung and afterwards decollated. And because he had been outlawed and had not been afterwards restored to the King’s peace he should be beheaded. And afterwards as a punishment for the great wickedness which he had practised towards God and His holy church by burning churches, vessels and reliquaries, his heart, liver, lungs, and all internal organs should be thrown into the fire and burned …’

Segrave read the verdict loudly, smugly, revelling in his moment in the light, with his king approving at his back and his son, Stephen, admiring on one side. Bruce, even though he had been expecting such a verdict, winced at little, so that Monthermer glanced sideways, feeling the jerk.

‘Harsh,’ he murmured, ‘but fair enough. This should set the seal on matters. There will be no rebellion in the north again and that land might raise some sensible chief to advise the governor, Sir John de Brittany. Good – now that this Passion Play is ended, we can go and find some wine.’

Bruce offered the man a smile. He liked Monthermer – counted him a friend – but he was Edward’s man, which tie limited how far Bruce’s friendship went.

‘I will join you presently,’ he said, received a shrug and a stare in response as he went out in the throng, nodding here and there, acknowledging a bow, feeling his hooded face numbed in a fixed smile.

He thought to go alone, just another hooded figure in a crowd following the sorry mess that was Wallace dragged on an oxhide by four horses all the way to Smoothfield, through the gawpers who had gathered to jeer and those who just wanted to get out of the path of it, not realizing who was dying in Cow Lane.

Even those ones fell in with the mob, for Wallace was now a grim-faced freak that they wanted to hear scream, would applaud like an audience at a performance of mummers. It was the last look Wallace would get of his fellow man, a thousand black-rotted mouths spitting and jeering, shrieking at the hangman to get to the next act, the handful of privates held high and dripping.

Bruce, elbowed sideways and jostled, scowled at the man next to him and the man disappeared, replaced by Kirkpatrick.

‘Ye are at risk in all this,’ he said and Bruce, his thoughts fevered, realized he was easy prey for a secret blade in the crowd. He did not care, felt that it did not matter much and his head echoed with Wallace’s words at Happrew, delivered with the lopsided cynical grin, as if he had known all along how matters would turn out.

If I remain, you cannot get started.

Kirkpatrick saw it in Bruce’s eyes as the executioners began their work on their victim, turning God’s brilliant creation into offal, unwrapping the secret, the mystery whose viewing changed everyone who saw it, the cloak of skin drawn back to let the light walk where it had no right to step.

Wallace threshed and kicked and gurgled on the gallows. Not quite dead when they cut him down, he was not dead enough when the executioners, expert surgeons in their way, sliced his cock and balls off, holding the bloody mass up for the gawpers to shout at in triumph.

He was certainly not dead when they opened his belly and drew out his tripes and, with horrific marvel, they heard him protest only once, when the assistants drew back his arms so that the ribcage was raised enough for the executioner to reach in through the gaping belly wound and up to grasp the heart.

‘Ye are gripping my arms too hurtful,’ he said and neither Kirkpatrick nor Bruce could speak for the choke of listening to a man complaining of his elbows as another’s hand clawed at his still beating core.

Bruce did not know why he was there. He had had half an idea to catch the last look of Wallace, to stare the man in the face at least, to share the final pain. Now he did not want to be seen by him while they gralloched him like a stag and the blood grew sticky and deep enough to suck the shoes off one of the executioners.

His mind, flashing like a kingfisher wing in sunlight, spun him back years, to a night by a campfire with the men from Herdmanston, one of whom – a ragged wee lad, no more – had questioned him about the vows of knighthood.

He recalled it vaguely, for he had been drunk – but he remembered the bitter bile of realizing how many of those vows he had broken even then, even as he listed them solemnly, dropping them like water on to the upturned petal of a dirt-grained face that thirsted for something finer.

Dog Boy, he recalled suddenly. The lad had been called Dog Boy. Didn’t even own a real name, yet had made me feel less than he.

He felt the same way now and, in the end, stumbled away, the thick metal stink and the flies in his mouth, so that he spat and had to stop himself from gagging. Then, eventually, he straightened, looked ahead and walked away from the baying and the blood, only half aware of Kirkpatrick at his back.

Who would know Hector, he litanied to himself all the way back to safety, if Troy had been happy?

Winchester Castle

Feast of St James the Almsgiver, January, 1306