The Guardian (58 page)

This was our sole chance to cross the Forth, Reynald said, and we would have to take it now, before the hard-pressed army on the other side could turn itself around and render the bridge impassable again. We would cross on foot, and we would carry with us what we needed, for our wagons would be useless on the causeway. Once across, we would set up a hospital directly west of the bridge, on the southward bend of the river where we would be close to both the water and the fighting.

In crossing that bridge, we walked into Hell.

We found ourselves floundering ankle-deep in a sea of blood, slipping and falling and close to drowning in it and surrounded by sundered corpses and dying men, severed limbs and spilled entrails, and gouting fountains of fresh gore from deep-trenched wounds, as though the crimson ocean already spilt by then was nowhere near sufficient. We heard the screams of dying, maimed men mingle insanely with the shrieks and cries and frantic, despairing pleas of wretches who fought in abject terror for their very lives, fought in the crazed belief that their survival lay in slaughtering or maiming every panting, screaming wretch who faced them.

At one point—and I have no idea when this occurred or how long the battle had been going on by then—I remember coming to a halt, sobbing with exhaustion and looking about me in despair, feeling the knotted rope across my shoulders digging into my flesh like an iron rod. My role as supervisor had changed to that of porter when a young Dominican priest called Alaric, one of my twelve charges, suddenly dropped to his knees in front of me with the lethal barbs and bloodied shaft of a broadhead arrow jutting from his shattered neck. He dropped his end of the stretcher and toppled forward onto the man he had been carrying, and the sudden weight tore the stretcher from the hands of the man on the front end. I heaved the Dominican aside and snatched up the end of the stretcher, signalling to the other bearer to do the same, and from that moment on I scarce remember anything. I recall my hands being so sore at one time that I could no longer hold the stretcher, and so I snatched up a fallen length of rope and tied its ends to the arms, with great difficulty because of my bruised and bleeding fingers, then laid it across my shoulders, transferring much of the weight from my arms to my back.

Another time, caught in the middle of vicious fighting between two large groups, I was struck heavily from behind and sent flying. I landed awkwardly, face down and momentarily stunned, aware that I had lost my stretcher and had no idea where or how. I lay there for a while, gasping to regain my breath and quite incapable of movement, though I was being trampled and kicked within what appeared to be, from where I lay, a forest of straining, pushing legs. Unable even to try to roll over, I closed my eyes and imagined that I was covered with a heavy, stifling blanket of appalling sounds: grunts and thuds and smashing, concussive, meat-cleaving sounds; clanging, clashing, slithering sounds of metal blades and the incisive, clean-edged strikes of hard-swung blows; there were spitting, hissing, snarling, keening sounds of human voices in there, filled with rage, confusion, and terror and mingled with panic-stricken whines and unintelligible snatches of half-formed words, prayers, or curses; and one awful, instantly recognizable combination of two sounds close to my ear: the heavy strike of a pointed blade—a spear or a broadsword—piercing
mail and driving deep with a squealing noise of metal scraping metal and a gritty rending of flesh and bone, and the instant, chilling scream of agony and grief that accompanied it.

And then, in the blink of an eye, it seemed, all the legs that had surrounded me were gone, moving away from where I lay gasping, and taking much of the deafening noise with them. I was alone for a while then, safe from the madness for long enough to catch my breath, then roll over onto my back and explore myself for injuries. There was blood everywhere, of course, thinning and liquefying the glutinous mud underfoot. I was awash in it, my clothing slick and greasy with it, much of it in clotted lumps and clumps, but none of it appeared to be my own. My right arm and shoulder, where the blow had landed, were numb and lifeless, but even as I probed the area with my left hand, the numbness started to wear off and the pain from the blow began to assert itself, forcibly, so that my vision blurred.

I gritted my teeth, and after a while, squirming and grunting, I succeeded in hauling myself into a sitting position, my back supported by a hard object that I hoped was a boulder and not a corpse, and I sat there for a while with my eyes screwed tightly shut, fighting desperately not to think of the carnage around me. I dug my fingers hard into my damaged shoulder, trying to focus my mind on the pain there and use it to my own ends. But then I heard a high, wavering scream and the approaching sounds of a running fight that seemed to be coming directly at me. I opened my eyes and turned my head slightly to see a knot of men rushing towards me, flailing at one another with heavy weapons. I could not tell which of them were Scots or Englishmen, for they were uniformly filthy and indistinguishable one from another, but within moments they were on top of me, their blades hissing all around me. I saw one man go to his knees, blank-eyed with shock as he lowered his head to look at the heavy spear that had plunged into his chest and killed him. Dully, I saw someone standing in front of him and raising one leg to brace his foot on the dead man’s torso as he hauled on the spear’s shaft, but the weapon’s barbs were buried
deep in the flesh it had pierced and would not be dislodged. The fellow cursed and heaved again, but then a long blade struck him sideways from the rear, splitting his face wide open at the junction of the jaw and throwing him aside like a discarded garment. I did not turn to look at his assailant, nor did I move to see where the dead man fell. I willed myself to stay motionless, my eyes closed again, and some time later, I have no idea how long, I noticed there was silence around me. The knot of fighters had all died or moved on.

I managed to struggle to my feet, and then I simply stood swaying and looking around me for a while. The entire landscape, every yard of it, it seemed to me, was strewn with dead and dying men, some of them piled deep in places, and it occurred to me, incongruously, that no army I had ever seen had looked as large or numerous as this battalion of the dead. We tend to look at soldiers, when we see them, in terms of units and formations: densely packed, shoulder-to-shoulder foot soldiers, archers, or men-at-arms. It is not until you see those disciplined units scattered and heaped and piled in banks and rows and swaths of sprawling, stiffening limbs and the lifeless, unnatural attitudes of violent death that you see just how much space they really do take up.

I was alone there, I realized, the only man left standing in a wilderness of death.

I could still hear the far-off noise of the fighting, though there were other, more urgent noises all around me, a chorus of them, all human, all filled with misery, and all demanding my attention. They ranged from quiet whimpers to sustained groans and sudden cries, and occasionally to harrowing, demented screams born of unbearable agony. And then, looking down at one of the whimperers, a disembowelled but still living man who lay at my feet, I discovered one more novelty to add to my growing list of appalling non-clerical realities. I became aware of the stink that filled my nostrils, the stomach-turning stench of battle-slaughter: the sharp and acrid tang of new-spilt, visceral fluids from ruptured entrails and other riven and severed organs, mingled with urine and feces. The smell of hot,
fresh blood is in there, too, with its coppery, metallic, almost tangible texture. And all of those are added to the predominant military stink of mouldy fustian; dirt-encrusted, too-long-worn chain mail; rank, sweat-stained leather; unwashed bodies; and rancid human and equine sweat.

The man at my feet was speaking to me, though I could hear no sound from his moving lips. I stooped, reaching out carefully like an old, weak man to stop myself from falling on top of him, and bent forward to where I could hear his words. He wanted me to kill him. I felt mindless panic welling up in me as I stared back into his imploring eyes. He would die soon, of that I had no doubt, for his intestines lay beside him on the ground, trodden into the blood-thick mud. A voice inside my head was telling me that it would be an act of mercy to kill this man and free him from his torment, but I ignored it, knowing I could never kill another human being, and searched my mind instead for some other way I could aid him. The answer shocked me like a sudden dousing with cold water, for in all the disorientation of my surroundings, I had forgotten what I was.

I pulled my knapsack around from between my shoulders, and within moments I was kneeling by the dying man’s side with my priestly stole about my neck, administering him the last rites and listening to his confession. He heard my words of absolution and squeezed my hand as he drew his last breath, and for a brief moment I felt exultant … And then I looked about me. I moved to the nearest living soul and began the ritual afresh.

I cannot say how many times I moved from spot to spot, or how many
viatica
I administered long after my supply of the sacred chrism had been used up, for I lost track of everything save the need to comfort as many of the dying as I could. I had no wine, nor even water, but I had a crusty loaf of bread in my knapsack, and I blessed it and transformed it, then doled it out in pinches as the Body of Christ until nothing remained of it. Fighting men came back and swirled about me from time to time, but intent upon my work I paid no heed to them and, as God protects both drunken
men and children, so too did He protect me from being struck down that day.

At last there came a time when all the noises close to me had ceased and I sat there exhausted and unmoving, slumped back on my heels. I knelt among the dead I had been praying with for hours, and I wept as I seldom have, grieving for the senseless loss of life I had witnessed that day, for the destructive and debilitating waste of it all, and, be it said, for my own lost innocence, for never again would I be able to regard human strife and the shedding of men’s blood, in any cause, as being either acceptable or justifiable. I felt empty, hopeless and desolate and close to despair, sitting there, but I know I was exhausted, and I lapsed into a kind of waking stupor, dead to all awareness of my surroundings and the passing of time.

But then I heard my name, spoken in a voice that seemed to echo as though it came from a great distance away, and I looked up to see a familiar face frowning down at me.

“Jamie?” he said again. “Father James, in God’s name, is that you?”

He spoke in Gaelic, and I nodded. “Alistair,” I answered, in the same tongue, and I heard my voice come out a croak. “Where have you come from?”

His eyes widened. “Where have
I
come from? My God, man, where have
you
been? Look at you. You’re clarted in mud and blood. I’ve never seen the like. You could not be dirtier if you lay down in the mud and wallowed like a sow.” He had been looking about him as he spoke, and now he shook his head and his voice sank to become barely audible. “God’s sweet blue eyes,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Look at this place. How many men died here? I have never seen this many dead in one small place.” He looked back at me. “What are you
doing
here, Father James? This is no fit place for a priest.”

I stopped him with a raised hand, astounded to find myself close to smiling at the outrage in his voice. “It is the perfect place for a priest, Alistair,” I told him. “Places like this remind us of why we
are
priests. I have been ministering to those in need of God’s mercy, and if I grew soiled and dirty in the doing of it, so be it. Dirt is no more than earth, and it will wash away in the river.” I was on the point of saying I doubted the blood would ever wash away, but I bit back the words and held out my hand to him. “Help me up, if you will.”

He reached out and pulled me easily to my feet, and I looked him up and down, content to see that he appeared to be unscathed. He looked clean, which surprised me, and there were no visible signs of blood on his clothing, armour, or weapons, though his round targe bore a few fresh scars and there were streaks of dried blood below his right knee. His legs were bare beneath a kilted woollen tunic, and over that he wore a loose shirt of mail, belted at the waist. A heavy sword belt hung across his chest, and the hilt of a long sword thrust up above his shoulders. I drew a great breath and blessed him with the sign of the cross.

“You have not answered my question, Alistair. How come you here?”

“To find the Hospital Knights. Andrew has been wounded. Stabbed from behind in a melee.”

“Dear God! How badly is he hurt?”

His sharp shake of the head told me as much as the grim jut of his jaw. “Who knows? It doesn’t
look
too bad, because there’s not a lot of blood, but it’s wide and we don’t know how deep the blade went. There’s no such thing as a good sword wound. The knights will be able to tell us how serious it is.”

“A single wound? No more than one?” My relief must have made me sound dismissive, for he frowned quickly.

“No more, but will that not suffice?” He caught himself and shook his head. “Forgive me, Father. That was uncalled for. I know what you meant and, yes, there’s but the single wound.”

“And what about Will?”

“I have no idea. I’ve not seen him since we launched our attack. He and his led the right flank of the charge and we the left. Anyway, I must go. Do you know where to find the Hospital people?”

“I do not, but I should. I was with them, working with them, before the fighting separated us, but that was a long time ago and I have not seen them since. Wait!” I turned in a circle, concentrating hard and trying to orient myself by the few landmarks I could distinguish. I found the Abbey Craig in the north with ease, but when I faced south towards the castle crag I gasped. The bridge across the river was no longer there. I blinked, seeing only the ruins of its remains.

“Aye, the old brig’s gone,” Alistair said. “They pulled it down for fear we’d cross after them.”