The Guardian (39 page)

I was appalled. I had anticipated, at most, some minor difficulty in smoothing Will’s ruffled feathers and cajoling him into acknowledging his lifelong bias against magnates. It had never occurred to me that I might find myself facing the very real possibility that these two men, my two closest friends in the world, would refuse to bury their differences—differences I was fully aware Andrew Murray had not known about. I knew too, beyond doubt, that the Highlander would not back down and would not be bullied, even by William Wallace. And for once in my glib-tongued life, at a time when I really needed to be eloquent and persuasive, I found my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.

Andrew turned his back on Will and took one long step across the distance that separated him from where I stood holding the reins of his horse and my own. He bent forward and around his animal to pull his heavy quarterstaff from where it hung securely beneath the skirts of his saddle, then sprang away before either Will or I could react. He flipped the heavy quarterstaff up and caught it in a two-handed grip.

Will watched, one eyebrow rising high on his forehead. Andrew kept moving, with exaggerated stealth and slowness, looking about him carefully until he found a spot where he could stand and fight easily.

“Well?” he said. “Are we to fight, you and I, or merely stand here all day staring at each other?”

I thought I detected the first flickering of a smile at the edge of Will’s mouth, and my relief was instantaneous.

“You hae no more chance of beating me today than you did the first time we fought,” Will said.

“That was years ago and we were boys. But remind me about it when we are done.” And with that Andrew attacked, crossing the
space between them in two swift strides and launching a lightning-fast series of thrusts and strokes. Few of the moves he made were like anything I had seen before. He was using his staff more as a short lance or a two-handed stabbing sword than as the standard flailing-broadsword quarterstaff, and it was clear to me from the outset that Will thought the same, for he fell back at once and snapped into a classic defensive pattern of block and parry. He responded to Andrew’s new moves with great caution, and I was hugely impressed, for I had never before seen Will Wallace being less than fully committed in a fight.

Will was narrow-eyed in concentration, refusing to commit himself to an all-out fight before he had gleaned some kind of understanding of the tactics being used against him. After a time, though, I saw the tension start to drain from him as he began to grasp the elements of Andrew’s strategy, and after that the tempo of the bout increased appreciably. The clacking rattle of heavy staves of seasoned oak and ash hammering against each other grew faster and faster until it was almost impossible to say which of the two opponents was working harder.

Andrew took the first blow, a hard sideways rap to the outside of his thigh. It almost felled him, but he swung sharply out of the fight zone, throwing himself into an elaborate spinning dance on one leg that whirled him close to a boulder. There he dropped his staff and braced himself against the stone surface while he sucked air harshly through tight-clenched teeth and massaged his thigh with one hand until life returned to it.

Moments later, when the whirling reel was at its height again, Will took the brunt of a hard-swung shot that must have come close to breaking his arm, and probably would have shattered the bone had it not been for the spectacular layers of archer’s muscle that transformed my cousin’s upper arm and shoulder into a limb that not one man in a thousand might possess. That caused another break in the proceedings, but no one made any suggestion that the trial might have gone far enough.

The two opponents faced off to each other for a third time, and
this time there was no question of either man going for a quick victory. They circled each other warily, filled with obvious respect for each other’s prowess, and I could not remember ever having known it to take so long for the opening blow to be struck in a two-man contest. Once that opening blow was struck, though, the rest followed quickly, and the air was filled again with the rushing sounds of whirling quarterstaves and the staccato clattering of attack following retreat and circling to renewed attacks, with neither combatant showing the slightest sign of flagging.

The end came suddenly. The two men came together, as they had so often before, their weapons windmilling but under tight control, and then it seemed to me that Andrew swayed or dipped somehow and stepped in closer on one foot before switching away on the other, bypassing Will as he went. But as he went he bent to his left from the waist and braced himself on the ball of his outstretched left foot to sweep his right leg backwards, catching my cousin behind the knees and knocking him off balance precisely at the moment when the right end of Andrew’s trailing staff, firmly held in a cross-chest, levered grip, swept up and out to catch him square beneath the jaw. Will staggered and spun, cross-legged and cross-eyed, trying valiantly to remain upright, and as he did so Andrew pivoted tightly and swung his staff up and over to crash down across Will’s shoulders, smashing him to the ground, face down.

Even as I opened my mouth in shock, though, Andrew spun towards me, raising a finger to his lips and bidding me with an outstretched hand to stand still. He stepped nimbly away, back towards the pot simmering on the nearby coals. Once again I watched a cloud of fragrant vapours swirl about his head as he lifted the lid.

“This smells really good,” he said to me. “And the bannock looks freshly made. Come on over here and let’s eat before our quarrelsome friend wakes up and adds his hunger to our own.”

“Let me see to the horses first,” I said, only then beginning to marvel at how quickly things had developed here, for tending to our mounts would normally be the first priority of any rider at the end
of a journey. I led the two horses away cautiously, for the ground was uneven and littered with sharp-edged, flinty stones that could easily split a hoof. As I did so I heard Will groan, and I looked back just in time to see him thrust himself up onto one elbow.

By the time I had finished tending to the horses and returned to the fireside, the two erstwhile combatants were sitting side by side, Andrew staring thoughtfully into the fire while Will glowered morosely into the bowl from which he was eating. Neither of them spoke to me as I rejoined them, although Andrew glanced up at me and winked, tacitly indicating that he had the situation in hand to his liking, before looking back into the fire. And so I ignored both of them and went about helping myself to some food. I split and spread a slab of bannock and drenched it in the delicious-smelling gravy from the stewpot on the firestones before adding a plump thigh and other pieces of meat from the hares. I then moved to a spot close by the fire, keeping carefully upwind of it, and made myself as comfortable as I could before I started to eat. And still neither man so much as looked at me.

I ate in silence, consuming everything on my plate until I could mop up the last remaining traces of gravy with my last piece of bannock. When I was replete I stood up and carried my plate to the stream, where I used some sandy grit and a piece of cloth to scrub away the congealed grease carefully, without scratching the metal unduly. I then rinsed it again and dried it meticulously before replacing it in my travelling bag. The platter, my own personal salver, was in all probability the most valuable possession I owned at that time. It had been given to me, with a matching cup, by Bishop Wishart a few years before and it was made of pewter, a rare and precious alloy. It had been made in France and was quite literally irreplaceable, since no one in all Scotland knew the secrets of making pewter.

Will groaned, loudly enough that I thought immediately that he was doing it for effect rather than out of great discomfort. Sure enough, as I turned to look over at him, he flexed his right shoulder dramatically and raised it above his head, bringing his hand down to cup the back of his thick neck.

“Holy Mother of God,” he said. “Did you have to hit me that hard?”

“Don’t play the fool,” said Andrew. “You know damned well I did. And even so, I wasn’t sure I had hit you hard enough. Have you seen yourself recently? Anyone hoping to put you down for long has no choice but to hit you with everything he can muster.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm?” Andrew said, his eyebrows raised. “Is that all you have to say? What does ‘hmm’ mean?”

Will sniffed. “I suppose it means I hope you won’t hit me again, for a while at least,” he said.

Unnoticed by either man, I resumed my seat by the fire.

“Where did you learn all those fancy moves?” my cousin asked.

“In England.”

“They’re … elaborate. Flamboyant, even.”

Andrew shrugged. “Aye, mayhap. But effective, too. That was you face down on the ground there, not me. In England nowadays they’re using techniques that were brought back from France and other places overseas. The German states are very enthusiastic about all that, and very thorough in their studies of the tactical uses of what was formerly a simple wooden staff but has become a wooden sword and sometimes a lance.”

“Hmm. Teutons.”

“Aye, Teutons. They started it, or the Emperor Barbarossa’s Teutonic Knights, but that was a long time ago. Barbarossa has been dead for more than a hundred years and matters have come a long way since then. Warfare has changed. Armour and weapons are different and better. Even steel is harder and holds a better edge. And why were you being so evil-tempered and foul-minded when Jamie and I arrived?” The unexpectedness of the question made me blink. “Are you really angry at either one of us?”

“No,” he said, frowning more in perplexity than anger. “Of course not.”

“Well then, what’s wrong with you?
Something
is stuck in your craw.”

Instead of answering, Will surged to his feet and looked about him, carefully avoiding eye contact with either one of us. His gaze settled eventually on our horses, hobbled nearby. I had seldom seen my cousin so ill at ease. He was even shifting from foot to foot.

“You’re not angry at me,” Andrew said. “I know that because I have done nothing to anger you. But you are angry at something
about
me. Am I right?” He raised a hand to stop any response before it could emerge. “It’s clearly not the smell of me, for after that fight we must both stink like goats, so it must be something else, something more subtle. Could it be … my rank?”

“Your what?”

“My rank, I said. My status in this land and among its people. As heir to Bothwell and to Petty, I rank highly among this realm’s nobility, both Scots magnate and Gaelic mormaer. You don’t like magnates, I know—that’s one of the things
everyone
knows about you—and while I doubt you might ever have known a Highland mormaer, I would guess you hold them in the same contempt. You don’t trust
noblemen
and you never have, not since you were a boy. That’s why you are the William Wallace you’ve become today.” He looked Will straight in the eye. “I am not saying you are wrong. Your opinions are your own and you are entitled to hold them. But now your lifelong attitudes are bidding you look at
me
with jaundiced eyes, purely because of where and how I was born and the parents who produced me. And you judge me solely by your prejudices.”

“That is not true.”

“Nor should it be, I agree. And I agree as well that it is equally true, and every bit as evident, that horses ever shit.”

The silence that followed seemed as though it might stretch forever. Andrew stood up, the white stars of his crest bright even in the shade of the hollow. He looked every inch the magnate.

“Ask yourself this, Will Wallace,” he said at length, his voice emphatic. “Why are we two here, in this place and at this time?” He held up his hand again. “And don’t tell me it’s because Robert Wishart called us here, because that, too, is horseshit. We are here,
today and together, because we are the sole leaders in all this realm who still have fighting men in the field and are capable of stopping—or even attempting to stop—Edward Plantagenet from usurping this realm we call ours. Am I right?”

Will’s frown was still in place, but it was altogether different now, keen and intent rather than bearish. He nodded minutely.

Andrew nodded, too, but fiercely. “Right,” he said. “There is no one else but us, Wallace and Murray, and the folk we lead between us. We are all that stands in Edward’s way, and as soon as he is rid of us, he’ll conquer all of Scotland. When Balliol led the realm to war, not two years ago, he raised the standards and called the armies out and all the land responded—all the magnates and the mighty of Scotland who thought it unimportant that no Scottish army had fought a battle of any kind in more than ninety years, who assumed that, simply because they were Scots and under arms, they would emerge victorious. And at Dunbar the English armies smashed them beneath the hooves of their horses like baskets of eggs. More than half of all the realm’s nobility imprisoned after that debacle. All the weapons from the battlefield and from the captured men, along with every remaining weapon that could be found in Scotland, impounded by the English for use against us. All hope lost. All pride abandoned … save in Selkirk Forest and in Moray these past few months.”

One side of his mouth curved up into a half smile. “I know your feelings about magnates, Will Wallace, and I even agree with them to an extent, though for reasons different from yours. But I’m not here today, leading the men I lead, because I am a magnate. I am here because I’m a Scot and it turns my stomach to have to grovel to some ignorant, uneducated English lout for permission to live and breathe the air in my own land—
on
my own land! I would rather die than put up with that, and the men who follow me know that and march with me because of it. Those among them who followed me from the start did so because they are my folk, but now there are hundreds at my back who are not my folk and never were. Those men, and their families, follow me because they have chosen to do so.
Chosen
, William Wallace, of their own free will. And that’s why
we are who we have become, you and I. We lead the
folk
, the people of Scotland, and they trust us to lead them and to speak for them. And that, old friend, is something wondrous and new in this land of ours: the folk trust
us
, you and me, to lead them. And that is as frightening as it is new, for
where
are we to lead them?” He paused, though only for the briefest of moments. “Have you any ideas? For I confess I have none.”