The Forest Laird (59 page)

“What do we do now, Jamie?” I said nothing, and he added, “We have to do something. We can’t do nothing. But what do we
do
? We have to tell Will, and how will we do that? This will kill him,
kill
him.”

“No.” I could barely get the small word out, and Ewan stooped quickly again to place his ear close to my lips. I breathed slowly, then tried again, hearing my own words mangled by my inability to move my broken jaw. “No. He won’t die …” That emerged as “Ee owned eye,” but Ewan jerked away and looked at me and I knew he had understood. I took several steady breaths before I tried again, articulating each word as slowly and clearly as I could. “You’ll have to tell him, Ewan. I can’t. I can’t talk.”

He nodded, and then he asked, “What’ll we do with you now? I can’t take you back in that shape. You’d die on the road. You might die anyway, if you can’t eat anything.”

“Yakobus,” I whispered. “There are monks in Lanark. Yakobus will ge’ me there … ’morrow … An’ they’ll ge’ me to G’asgow …”

Ewan prepared to stand up, but I hissed at him. “No!”

“What?” He bent to my lips again.

“Can’t go … can’t go back wi’out knowing … Back to Lanark, about Mirren … Can’t tell Will he’s lost his children and not know how his wife is. You have to go back and make sure she … she’s well.”

“Jesus, Jamie, how can she be well? She’s lost her bairns and her mother.”

“Not her life, though … Not her life, pray God. Find out, Ewan.”

This time his headshake was decisive. “All right. We will. We’ll make a bier for you tonight, from bits of the wagon, then we’ll leave first thing in the morning and we’ll take you with us. There’s eight of us, not counting Jacobus, so we can take turns carrying you in teams of four. It’s only three miles. We’ll leave you with the monks and I’ll go back into Lanark. When I know how Mirren is, I’ll go and tell Will. You’ll get to Glasgow in the meantime, as soon as you can travel, and get your friend Wishart started on setting Mirren free. There must be something he can do, otherwise what’s the point of being a bishop?”

And so it was. Under Ewan’s guidance, several of Robertson’s bowmen spent time that evening making a carrying frame for me out of two floorboards from the wrecked wagon. With cross pieces made from wheel spokes and the whole thing tied together with pieces cut from the harness reins, it was ungainly but light and well suited to its purpose.

I barely slept at all that night, unable to find comfort or relief from the pain of my ribs and head, but the following morning, strapped tightly into immobility in my new bed, I fell asleep on the road before I had been carried for half a mile and slept like a dead man, undisturbed by stops or bearer changes, until they woke me up in the humble monastery outside the walls of Lanark. Ewan was bending over me, looking very serious and telling me something that appeared to be important, but my head was swimming and the pain was unbearable and I must have passed out again. I remember waking up again some time after that, to find an aged monk holding a cup to my lips and forcing me to drink some foul-smelling brew, and then I remember nothing for several days until I awoke to find Father Jacobus sitting close by my side, peering intently into my face.

Startled to see his face so near my own, I blinked myself awake and tried to sit up, but that was an unwise thing to do, since I had forgotten about my injured ribs and I almost passed out again from the pain of trying to move against my restraints.

When I recovered from my near swoon and was able to catch my breath again, I discovered, with a flaring surge of horror, that I was utterly mute, incapable of even opening my mouth.

Jacobus leaned towards me. “You can’t speak,” he said. “Your jaw is wired shut. I have never seen the like of it. Can you hear me? Blink if you can.” I blinked eagerly and he held up a hand. “Are you really here this time?” He interpreted my confusion correctly, for he nodded quickly and held up his hand again.

“I thought you were here yesterday. And the day before, and the day before that. But you weren’t, because you couldn’t remember me having been here when I came back next time. Yesterday I would have sworn on oath that you were fully here. Do you remember me being here yesterday? If you do, blink once. If you do not, blink twice.”

I blinked twice and he frowned, then reached into the depths beneath his scapular and pulled out a folded letter, holding it up so that I could see my own name written on the front of it.

“Do you recognize this?” he asked me.

I blinked twice, with exaggerated slowness, and he sighed and leaned in closer, speaking more to himself than to me. “Yet again then, I must try. You appear to be wide awake, alert and aware of me, but I thought the same thing before, and here you are, with no memory of any of it.”

He sighed again. “Father James Wallace. Do you recognize that name?”

I blinked once.

“Is it your name?”
Blink
.

“Do you know where you are?” That stopped me, for I did not know how to respond. I
thought
I knew where I was, in a tiny monastery near Lanark, but suddenly I was unsure. Jacobus was watching me and must have divined what I was thinking, because he went on, “Do you remember speaking of the monks of Lanark?” I blinked, and he nodded. “Well, that is where you are. You have been here for five days, and have been in the care of Brother Dominic of Ormiston. Brother Dominic spent his life as a Knight Hospitaller. He was crippled early in the siege of Acre and is one of the few survivors of that catastrophe. He was shipped back to England, but his family is Scots, and so he came to Lanark and became hospitaller to the brethren here, using his medical and surgical skills for the good of the community. It was he who encased your body in restraints and wired your mouth shut to ensure that the break in your jawbone will heal cleanly, and he has been treating you with medicines from the Holy Land, medicines he calls opiates, to keep you free from pain. Sadly, those same medicines also cause you to forget everything that happens. Dominic believes, though, that it is better to have you slightly confused and free of pain than it would be to have you bright-minded and in constant agony. And so he feeds his opiates to you in the honeyed milk that is the only food you can consume. He says, in fact, that as long you are confined to bed and unable to move, honeyed milk is all the food your body needs. Thanks be to God that your ability to suck is unimpaired, for were it not, you would surely starve to death in the midst of plenty.” He broke off, looking perplexed, then asked, “Does none of what I am saying sound familiar? I have told you all of this three times already.”

I gazed straight at him and blinked twice.
No, none of this is familiar
. He shook his head in bemused disbelief, then looked away.

“Brother Dominic says it will take months for your injuries to heal, and weeks, at least, before you will be fit to travel to Glasgow. He told me that if all goes well, you should be able to sit up without restraints within the month, but you will be feeble and weak at first and will have to learn to walk again and to eat solid food again, as though you were an infant. And that reminds me of what else I must ask you. Remember, one blink for yes, two for no.”

Blink
.

“Do you know who I am?”
Blink
.

“Do you know a man called Ewan Scrymgeour?”
Blink
.

“Is he a friend of yours?”
Blink
.

“Do you remember sending Ewan Scrymgeour to gather information?”
Blink
.

“Can you remember where you sent him?”
Blink
.

“Was it Lanark?”
Blink
.

“Do you remember what it was that you instructed him to find out?”
Blink
.

“Aye … Well, that’s good. Because Ewan’s not here now. He came back, three days ago, but you were too sick to talk with him, drifting in and out of awareness, and he had no time to wait for you to wake up properly. It was more important, he said, for him to reach Will in the forest before anyone else could. And so he dictated a message to me, for you to read when you grew well enough, and left it in my care. Since you cannot move, would you like me to read the letter to you?”

Blink
.

“Very well, then. I must tell you that the words are Ewan’s own, exactly as he spoke them. He explained to me very clearly that he wanted me to transcribe his words verbatim. That was difficult, for he was speaking in the vulgate, and all my training has been in the formal Latin of the Church. Nevertheless, I have managed, I believe, to capture his words exactly.” The elderly priest sat up straighter and carefully unfolded the single sheet of parchment he was holding. Then he moved away, holding it at arm’s length and tilted towards the small window that was the room’s sole source of light, and when he was satisfied that he could see sufficiently well he coughed to clear his throat. “Can you hear me clearly?”

He paused, as though waiting for an answer, and then he came quickly back to my bed and peered down at me with a contrite look that might have made me laugh under other circumstances. “Forgive me, Father James,” he said. “I forgot you cannot speak. Could you hear me clearly?” I blinked once, and he moved away to the window again, clearing his throat nervously for a second time before he began to read.

“Jamie,”
he began reading, his tone declamatory.
“They tell me you will live and probably come out of this with no permanent damage. I’m glad of that. I am sorry I can’t stay here to wait for you, and I know you know that already. My place is in Selkirk, with Will, since you can’t be there, and I am sick with the thought of what I have to tell him. I am sick of it all, Jamie; sick to my soul of the pettiness and cruelty of men who should be better than they are; sick of the greed and the ambition of men who are called noble but who disgrace the very name of manhood.

“I went back to Lanark, as you bade me, knowing you were right and that I needed to go back. Gareth Owens was not there when I arrived, but some of his men recognized me from the previous night and made me welcome enough. I asked them about Mirren, but no one there could tell me anything. They were archers and none of them had been there when we met Redvers, so most of them knew nothing about what had happened. So then I went looking for the jailer after that, the one called Dyllan, but he was off duty and had gone into Lanark for the market day.

“Soon after that I found myself out by the swine sties, searching the muck for any signs I could find of a dead baby, though I knew myself mad for even looking. The pigs were snorting and wallowing in their filth and I wanted to take my bow and kill every one of them. But they were just being pigs, doing what God intended pigs to do. It was the swine who fed such food to them who deserved to die for what they had done.

“Gareth arrived back late in the afternoon, and he had been drinking, so I plied him with more ale and followed up on the story of Mirren, telling him I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her losing the baby. I called it a brat. He was looking at me strangely, I saw, but there was no anger in him. And then he poured me more ale, and put an arm around my shoulder. He told me that hours later, after I had left, he still remembered the way I looked when I asked Dyllan about leaving her lying on the floor in all that blood, and he had felt ashamed. He and Dyllan were both very drunk by then, he said, having used up the entire shilling I had left them, but that only added to the shame he felt, and so he had convinced Dyllan to go back to the cell to look in on her, and they had found her dead in a corner of the cell, in the middle of a big pool of blood.

“The animal called Simon, the jailer on duty who had knocked her down and kicked her, grew angry when Dyllan challenged him for an explanation. The bitch had gone mad, he said, screaming and howling for some brat she’d lost, crying out his name, Willie, and throwing herself at the cell door, trying to break it down. He had finally lost patience with her noise and gone back into the cell, where he had knocked her down again, after which she had obvi
ously learned her lesson, since she hadn’t made another sound.

“So there you have it, and that’s the message I am going now to deliver to Will. His family is gone, wiped out at the whim of exactly the kind of man he refuses to follow or recognize. His son is dead, at less than a year and a half. His second child is dead, murdered and still-born, its sex unknown, its body fed to pigs. His wife’s mother is dead, for the crime of having given her daughter to Will Wallace. And now his wife, too, is dead, murdered by a witless, shambling monster.

“That the monster is dead changes nothing and affords no satisfaction, but I cut off his head myself and fed it to the pigs that night, before I left Lanark castle.

“I have to say that Gareth Owens surprised me. I heard the following day that he took a report of what had happened to the sheriff, the next morning: two women arrested and then abused and murdered in the sheriff’s cells with no official supervision between their being admitted and Gareth’s own complaint. Redvers was arrested immediately, but nothing will come of it. English law decrees that no English knight may be accused of a crime by anyone of less than knightly blood. Hazelrig could charge him with dereliction and irresponsibility, but he would have nothing to gain by doing so, and the charges, if seen as frivolous, might return to haunt him someday.

“This is the kind of incident that Scotland’s people are fighting against, this wanton disregard for the lives, freedom, and rights of anyone not of noble birth. This is the kind of excess that breeds revolt, and Will Wallace will have much to say about it, once his first grief has turned to the need for vengeance. And when that happens, I would not like to be in Hazelrig’s shoes.

“I’ll say adieu and hope we’ll meet again someday, Jamie. Get better soon, and get yourself back to Glasgow and to Wishart, though I fear the news of this will be familiar to the Bishop before you can reach him. Be well.”