The Forest Laird (31 page)

It was also said of the Greens, before the end of that summer, that no Scots folk had ever been accosted by them, and that, from time to time, they passed surplus food from captured English supply trains on to families whose own food and possessions had been confiscated by the English. The proof of that came after two wellorganized attacks by the Greens on English supply trains in the Dumfries area, when small raiding parties of English soldiers moved swiftly into surrounding villages, searching buildings for anything that might have been taken in the attacks. The Greens’ retribution for that came swiftly, too, and subsequent raiding parties were wiped out before they could reach their objectives.

I had developed an ambivalence towards such tidings since they began to come to my attention, for they always brought my patriotism into conflict with my morality. As a priest, I knew what the Greens were doing was legally atrocious; they were defying the duly constituted authority of government, spurning and openly flouting the King’s Peace. As a Scot, however, a member of the voiceless people whose lives were being trampled underfoot by those in power, I exulted in the victories of the Greens. They were defying the King’s power, certainly, but the Scots King himself was doing nothing, and in fact the King whose power they were mainly defying was not their own. The Greens were resisting the illicit power of Edward Plantagenet, who had no right, divine or otherwise, to be exercising his regal powers or his military prowess within the realm of Scotland, despite the high-flown language of the treaties he cited in support of his activities. Scotland now had a King of its own. The Scots lords and magnates had given the English monarch legal licence for his behaviour during the interregnum, but that should mean nothing now. The interregnum was long since over, even though Scotland’s King was being painfully slow to assert himself.

Looking back now from the distance of decades, I can see that my perspective on the entire affair of the Greens was distorted, naturally and probably inevitably, by the fact that I knew, respected, and even loved their leaders. They were my friends and family, and my trust in them was such that I could not think of them as malicious criminals. No matter how much supposed evidence was laid before me for inspection, I viewed it with suspicion and sometimes outright disbelief, knowing it had been fabricated by people whose bias against my kin and my very race was beyond question.

My sole error lay in thinking that I was the only one aware of that relationship.

2

“T
hat cousin of yours is forging quite a reputation for himself.” It was an unexpected comment, coming as it did after a long period of silence, and my chest tightened with alarm. Of course I had no slightest indication that it heralded the single most important conversation I would ever have with my mentor, Robert Wishart, the Bishop of Glasgow and Primate of Scotland.

“My lord?” I asked, allowing the inflection of my voice to demonstrate my puzzlement.

“I said your cousin’s making a name for himself among the folk.” He used the Latin word
populi
, meaning the common people. “We should discuss it, you and I.”

It was March 20th, 1295, and I had been working for Bishop Wishart in Glasgow for more than a year by that time, learning to cope with more and more responsibility as my duties grew increasingly complex and demanding. We were in his private study that morning, in the administrative wing of the cathedral buildings, and since before dawn we had been working our way through the mountain of correspondence awaiting his attention. Beyond the open window, a far-off thrush was singing, its enthusiasm whetted by pale March sunshine, and in the middle distance I could hear the regular, rhythmic sounds of the stonemasons and builders as they went about their daily work, adding to the Cathedral buildings. Construction had been under way now for more than forty years, and no one, not even the Bishop himself, could say when the work might be complete. The Cathedral would continue to be built until it was deemed pleasing to the Deity.

I realized that I was dawdling, avoiding eye contact, and hoping to deflect whatever was in His Grace’s mind. Now I set aside my pen and looked him in the eye.

“What do you wish to discuss, my lord?”

“Will Wallace and his Greens.” He pressed his shoulders back against the carved oaken back of his armed chair. “It’s time we spoke of it openly.”

Openly
… That was the last word I would ever have thought to apply to this matter, for Will’s identity as the leader of the Greens was the sole secret I had withheld from this man. I sat still for several moments longer, then picked up an ink-stained rag and made a show of wiping my fingertips.

“Where shall we start, my lord?”

“We will start at the beginning, Father James. You didn’t think I knew, did you?” Seeing the wide-eyed look on my face, he pressed onward. “You didn’t think I’d see it, the straightforward sense of it. That only Will Wallace could be the leader of the Greens. But think for a moment, if you will. How could I not know, knowing you? Your very silence would have told me, even had I not known all along. I have known you now for … how long, nigh on twenty years? Sixteen at least, and in all that time, the single person you have talked about, other than your fellows here and at the Abbey, has been your cousin Will, the outlawed verderer who dared to cross the English. And then along comes this group of thieves calling themselves the Greens, whose leader, an archer, is unknown, and all of a sudden you forget the name and even the existence of your cousin Will. Am I that big a fool, lad?”

I grimaced. “I was afraid that if I said anything, my lord, you might have to act upon it.”

He gawped at me, perplexed. “Act upon it and do what?”

“I know not, my lord … Report his name to the authorities?”

“Which authorities? And had I done so, what would that have achieved? He is an outlaw already, destined to hang if taken.

Knowing his name would make no difference to the Englishmen’s incompetence. It would not affect their inability to catch him. But did you truly think I would divulge his identity?”

I half shrugged. “I thought you might have seen it as your duty, my lord.”

“My duty is to my King and his realm, to my monarch and my country.” The statement was delivered in a tone that left me in no doubt of the old man’s sincerity. “To this point the Greens have done nothing that openly defies or attacks either one of those. Their crimes, if crimes in fact they be, have all been carried out against the English, whose presence in this land I deem an abomination.”

I opened my mouth to respond but he cut me off with a short chop of his hand. “Abomination, I said, and I meant it. And we brought it upon ourselves. We have been dancing wi’ the Devil for too long, Father James, and now I fear we’ll have to pay a high price for our dalliance. We invited the Plantagenet to come here, and he came. I fear he will not leave as eagerly when we ask him to retire.”

He rose abruptly from his chair and crossed to the open window, where he stood staring down into the courtyard below, one hand holding the window’s metal edge, the other hooked by the thumb into the white rope girdle at his waist. The thrush I had heard in the distance was no longer singing.

“I blame myself,” he said quietly, speaking into the emptiness in front of him, so that I had to listen hard to hear the words that drifted back over his shoulder. “It came to me that this might happen, but I put the thought aside and allowed myself to be gulled by the man’s reputation as the foremost knight in Christendom, the arbiter of justice and confidant of kings and popes.” He turned to look back at me, and rested his shoulders against the wall beside the window. “He was all of those things once, and widely honoured for it. But of late he has kept himself at home, nursing a growing hunger to increase his lands and his power.”

He seated himself with an aging man’s care for his comfort and appearance, arranging his clothes carefully before he spoke again. “He engineered the war against the Welsh, you know.” The hesitation that followed was barely noticeable. “You did know that, I hope.”

I nodded.

“Aye, but he did it consummately, with great skill. The Welsh fell to him like lambs to a rabid wolf. And now I fear he plans the same fate for Scotland.”

Hearing him say that so matter-of-factly startled me out of my silence.

“But King John will never put up with that.”

His back straightened again and he stared at me for a moment, expressionless. “I forget, sometimes, how young you are,” he said eventually, “because you seldom show your inexperience. But then when you do, your youth leaps out at me. You are almost right, though. King John will attempt to prevent it. There is no doubt of that. But the damage that’s already done is irreparable, and he will fail. It is already too late to counteract that. England’s King is no man’s fool and he has worn his crown for many years. He has also shown himself to be ten times the man John Balliol is.”

He reached up and removed the crimson skullcap of his office, something I had never seen him do before, and then he fell silent, kneading the silken fabric between his fingers as he stared at it with narrowed eyes, and suddenly the crimson cap disappeared within his large, clenched fist.

“Balliol looks like a king, I’ll grant you that. He has all that’s necessary there—the bearing, the appearance and the posture and the gait. On top of that, he is affable and amiable, amusing and engaging, with great charm. And he has a regal air of
dignitas
about him, too. But he is weak, for all that. He is too
compliant
, too accommodating and too much at pains to be ingratiating. He lacks the iron, the savagery a true king must own, though he use it but seldom. Our King wants people to like him, and that is a fatal flaw in any leader, be he king or bandit chief.

“Edward knew all that when he had his myrmidons choose John. He knew he could control him, bend him to his will. Bruce he could never have controlled, and I believe that fact alone barred Robert Bruce from ever being elected to the Crown. Balliol, though … Edward never had any doubt that he could control King John of Scotland, and through him he could control the realm.”

The Bishop placed the back of his fist on the oak tabletop and slowly opened his fingers, allowing the red silken cap to open up and cover his palm. He smoothed it into shape, then replaced it on the crown of his head and turned to look me in the eye.

“The Plantagenet is ruthless and calculating, and I see clearly now that he laid his plans for us long before we even knew he had a plan. We were too concerned with keeping order among our own … we being the Bishops, Fraser of St. Andrews, myself, Dunkeld, and a few others, along with the Abbots of Dunfermline, Dunblane, Kelso, Arbroath, and Cambuskenneth, and a few of the lesser magnates. We sought to avoid the crush of civil war between the Bruces and the Balliol-Comyn alliance, and initially we thought we had succeeded. Instead, though, we delivered ourselves into the hands of the English.”

I could barely bring myself to ask the question in my mind. “Do you truly believe things to be that bad, my lord?”

He looked at me with eyes that seemed close to pitying. “I do, my son. And you will, too, once you have considered all the details I will add today. You might even ask yourself how much worse it could be. We have been betrayed by those we implored to save us. Our country is now occupied by a foreign force.
Occupied
, Father, by an army that no one can doubt is hostile. Anyone who cannot see the truth of that is a blind fool, bemused by wishful thinking. English armies rule this land, and their leadership knows no restraint. And for reasons of politics and expediency our own so-called leaders—not the Church, but the civil leadership, including our new King—do nothing. They think they have too much to lose if they complain, beginning with the forfeiture of all their lands and holdings in England. They believe that would leave them impoverished. They cannot see that it would leave them free. They cannot see the value of this realm in which they live. They have no wish even to consider such a thing. They think of themselves as Englishmen and Frenchmen living in exile here in the north.”

“Aye,” I said quietly, unable to find a single point in his outpouring with which to disagree. “And the damnable part of that is that they ignore their people. They do not think about the Scots
folk
at all, and that tells me that they themselves cannot lay claim to being Scots.”

That brought His Grace’s head up quickly. “Do you truly believe that, Father James? Surely not.”

“Believe that they are not truly Scots? No, for they clearly are. But that their abuse and neglect is destructive? How can I not believe that, my lord? It is all around us, everywhere I look, in the arrogance of the English sneers and the suffering of our Scots folk. Were it not so, the Greens would not exist. The Greens were born of desperation, bred out of the people’s neglect, if not abuse, by the very leaders who should have been protecting them.”

“Your cousin and his Greens are protecting them. The people, I mean.”

“Perhaps so,” I concurred, too agitated to realize I was talking to the Bishop as though I were his equal. “But too few of them to really count, and not sufficiently to make a difference. Will is but one man, and a commoner to boot. His men are loyal and brave, but they are all outlawed, and no one in authority will heed him.”

“Not so. Will Wallace has his own authority. The English are heeding him, Jamie. And the Scots folk are heeding him.”

“Aye, but that’s not what is needed. What’s needed is for other, more powerful folk, here in the realm, to look at what he is doing and see that it’s a necessary thing. The magnates need to see what he is doing, and then they need to aid him in achieving it.”

The Bishop raised a hand, almost wearily. “They will, eventually, Father. The time is not yet right.” He looked back towards the window as the tolling of a bell began to echo outside. “It is midday, and I’m hungry and I need to empty my bladder, so go you and send someone to fetch us something to eat, but come directly back.”