Hamish knew what he was dreaming. Hamish, in his own way, had loved Murron, too.
There was a knock on the door of the barn in the rhythm Stewart used. Old Campbell and Stephen of Ireland broke off their talk and watched as one of the Highlanders down below opened the door to their host. He moved in and moved to the ladder up to the loft as the rest of the Highlanders stirred, knowing by Steward’s hurry that their time of rest was over.
Hearing the commotion below, William awoke suddenly and gazed at Hamish with the dazed look of someone who had leaped across worlds in and instant. He stared about him and seemed to Hamish disappointed to find himself back on this side of death, where his loneliness was a physical pain. He then looked at Hamish as if nothing had happened, as if he had awakened like any other man might, and Hamish pretended the same. “What is it?” William asked, seeing Steward mounting the top of the ladder. “What’s going on?”
“A messenger has arrived,” Hamish said.
Steward looked around him at each face before he spoke. “The English are advancing an army toward Stirling,” he said. “They appear to be reinforcing the one already there. It looks like a full-scale invasion.”
Campbell sucked a long full breath into his massive lugs. Scotland invaded. Full-scale war. Everything he had dreaded, feared — and prayed for. “Do the nobles rally?” he asked.
“Robert the Bruce had been chased from Edinburgh! But word of the march has spread, and Highlanders are coming down on their own by the hundred’s by the thousand!” Steward said.
And then without anyone meaning to, they all turned and looked at William Wallace.
30
STIRLING CASTLE STOOD THEN AS IT DOES NOW, PERCHED on a hill high about a grassy field cut in half by a river spanned by a bridge. Now the bridge is made of stone and steel; in June of 1297, it was made of wood.
On the seventeenth day of that month, Scottish nobles had gathered on a smaller hill overlooking the field; they wore gleaming armor, with plumes, sashes, and banners, and were attended by squires and grooms.
The mists of morning shrouded most of the field. But from the opposite side of the bridge they heard the clattering of a huge army moving forward. Lochlan, a noble with extensive holdings near Edinburgh, galloped to Mornay, who, as the representative of the strongest alliance of noble families on the field that day and a well-known ally of the imprisoned Robert the Bruce, was accepted by the other nobles as the man best accredited to discuss battlefield terms with the English commanders. Lochlan had come to the field that day expecting to negotiate, not fight, but the sheer size of the English army had his heart pounding. “It sounds like twenty thousand!” he shouted to Mornay even before he had drawn up his horse.
Mornay was calm. He too expected no battle; his voice, unlike Lochlan’s was dull with disappointment. “The scouts say it is ten.”
“And we have but two!”
The business of slaughter is a cauldron of boiling emotion, and the same dark apprehensions that had begun to spatter within Lochlan’s belly were likewise churning in the guts of the common Scottish soldiers who stood clustered around the small hill on the northern side of the bridge. There was an abbey on this hill, and many of the Scottish commoners on the field that morning had reason to look at the abbey and wish they’d had the privilege of selling their lives into monastic slavery of the soul rather than face the lot that was theirs that day.
Most of them owned no land, nor did they own the houses where they lived. They were allowed to inhabit the huts they called home by the good graces of the nobleman whose land they were privileged to work. The commoner then paid his liege lord a share of the harvest, the portions being determined not by the laborer’s productivity or the size of the family he as trying to feed but by his station in life, a status preestablished at the moment of his birth.
But service of labor was not all the commoner owed his lord; he was also required to present himself for battle whenever and wherever his lord required. To refuse to do so was more than disgrace; it meant turning himself and his family into wanderers and beggars. Still, the Highlanders had never been known as reluctant warriors. Theirs was a beautiful, rugged, unforgiving land, lashed by furious winds and surrounded by ferocious seas. They were descendants of marauding tribes and Vikings; they believed in courage.
The arrangement of their society seemed quite normal to the common Scots on the field that day. Like all men, they drifted with the flow of their lives.
But standing on a cold hillside on a foggy morning and staring across a field where other men stand with the sole purpose of spilling your blood and brains upon the ground has a tendency to make you think in basic terms. And the Scots thought not of society but of life and death.
The English were massed below the stone battlements of the castle and the river at the base of its hill. They stood in ordered rank: arches, pikemen, swordsmen, axmen. Behind them loomed the cavalry, line after line of mounted knights with lances. It was the biggest army, the largest assembly of humanity in any form, that the Scots had ever seen. Their weapons were new and polished. They had steel helmets, iron shoulder plates, chain mail. Even the horses wore armor.
The most protection any of the common Scots wore was a shirt of padded leather. Their weapons were old, and some were only farm implements adapted to the purpose at hand, but the edges were sharp. The Highlanders were used to making do, and they credited more the wielder of the weapon than the weapon itself.
But this day did not feel like theirs. All armies have a mood, flowing down form the man the warrior see as their leader, and the Scots knew the men who led them to that dying field cared nothing for their lives or even for the victory they might win in sacrificing them. As through the mists they saw the numbers arrayed against the, a young soldier tugged at a grizzled veteran and muttered, “So many!”
The veteran took no pains to keep his voice down.
“The nobles will negotiate. If they deal, they send us home. If not, we charge. When we are all dead and they can call themselves brave, they withdraw.”
The young soldier had never seen a pitched battle, but he was no coward. He had fought in numerous clan wars. Then it seemed he fought for honor. Here nothing made sense. “I didn’t come to fight so they could own more lands that I could work for them!” he said.
“Nor did I. Not against these odds!” the veteran said. And then, with no thought, he simply lowered his pike and began to walk back through the lines, heading north toward the Highlands. The younger man, surprised at first, quickly followed him.
Like a leak in an earthen dam, the desertion quickly gathered force. At first one by one and then in clumps, more of the Scots lowered their weapons and turned their faces toward home.
Seeing their armies dissolve before their eyes, the nobles were powerless. If a few men or a small group failed to justify their obligations in battle, they could be fittingly punished, but when the whole multitude defied their noble authority…
“Stop!” Lochlan screamed. “Men! Do not flee! Not now! Wait until we have negotiated!”
But Mornay was scarcely surprised by what he saw.
“They won’t stop, and who could blame them?” he said quietly.
But suddenly they did stop. William Wallace came riding into the mob of men followed by his clan. He was striking, charismatic, his head without a helmet, his hair flowing in the wind, his powerful arms bare, his chest covered not in armor but a commoner’s leather shirt. Wallace rode a swift horse like he was born on it.
The entire Scottish army watched in fascination a Wallace and his men rode through them toward the command hill. A half dozen of the men with Wallace were also mounted. The rest ran in that Highland scurry that was as fast as a horse’s trot; some of them carried on their shoulders mysterious wool-wrapped bundles so long it took three men in a line to carry each.