“Our army wiped out at Stirling, and you have done nothing?!” Longshanks spat and, choking on his own bile, began to cough.
“I have ordered conscriptions. Through all of the autumn and winter we can raise a new army. And through that same winter we can starve the Scots. By next spring they will have hung this bandit Wallace themselves and will beg us to come rule over them!” Edward delivered this speech, rehearsed and revised with Peter’s great care, and glanced to his friend for his approval. Peter nodded subtly and glanced back to the Longshanks.
But before the kind could respond, a messenger rushed in, bowing as he entered. Seeing the king there, too, he hesitated, not knowing whether to hand the message he carried to the prince, who had dispatched him, or to the king himself. “Here, give it to me!” the prince ordered, feeling a growing sense of being in command.
The messenger handed the price the scroll he had brought. Edward unsealed it, read the message, and nearly lost his balance. He stared around the room blankly, as if he had forgotten where he was and who these people were who stood there with him.
“What is it?” Longshanks demanded.
“Wallace has sacked York.”
“Impossible,” Longshanks answered. He turned on the messenger. “How dare you bring a panicky lie!”
The messenger had also brought a basket. He approached the central table with great dread, placed the basket on it, and uncovered its contents. Prince Edward was closest; he peered in, then staggered back. Longshanks moved to the sack coldly, looked in, and withdrew the severed head of his nephew, York’s governor. Former governor.
Peter, seeing Edward falter, spoke up quickly. “Sire! They own nephew! What beast could do such a thing?!” he said.
The kind seemed not to have heard. He dropped the head back into the sack, unmoved. After a moment he said, “If he can sack York, he can invade lower England.”
“We would stop him!” Peter insisted.
“Edward, who is this who speaks to me as if I needed his advice?”
The prince looked up and drew himself into a defiant posture. “I have declared Peter my high counselor,” he announced to his father.
Longshanks nodded as if impressed. He moved to Peter and examined the gold chain of office that the young man wore about his neck. Then Longshanks seized Peter by the throat and the waistbelt and threw him out the window, the same one Edward and Peter had looked out, six stories above the courtyard. Peter screamed, but not until he was almost to the ground.
Edward rushed toward the window in horror. He looked out at the man he had loved, the only one he had ever fully trusted, broken and bloody on the paving stones far below. He stared for a long time. Then Edward drew himself back inside the room and turned toward his father in shock and hatred and only then remembered the dagger.
He drew it and went for his father.
He stabbed at Longshanks. The old king dodged back, shouting to the advisors who jumped forward to interfere, ” No, let him come!” The kind smiled at the attack, parrying with his left arm, letting it be cut. His eyes burned. “Your fight back at last!”
Then Longshanks unleashed his own hateful fury; he grappled with Edward, knocked the dagger away, hurled him to the floor, and began to kick his son. Again and again he kicked, exhausting his strength and his fury on the young man, broken in heart and in spirit.
Edward lay passive and bloody; Longshanks coughed up a bit of blood. He ignored it and his son’s wreckage and went back to the discussion as if this fight was normal business.
“We must sue for a truce,” Longshanks said, still winded but trying to hide it, as if even to be breathing hard after beating his son was an insult to his own manhood. “Failing that, we must buy him off. But who will go to him? Not I. If I came under the sword of this murderer, I would end up like my nephew. And not you. If an enemy of England saw my faggot son, he would rather be encouraged to take over this country. So whom do I sent?”
Longshanks calculated.
36
AT THE CITY OF YORK, EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED. THE walls were still there, but there were no longer any gates. The streets lay deserted. The Scottish warriors who had fought since Stirling, some of them since Lanark, and had covered hundreds of miles in relentless marches, had slept in wind and rain and frost with little more than their tartans to wrap around their bodies for shelter, now found the vacant buildings of this English city to be repellent. They took what food they could find and carried it outside the walls, where they built cook fires and made their encampment beneath the stars.
Since taking the city, they had rested, letting wounds heal, mending woolens, and sharpening weapons, for they knew more battle was coming. Some busied themselves in plunder of the city’s goods, but others cared nothing for that. They were Highlanders — farmers, herders of sheep. What did an English city have that they needed? York was just the first stop! They fought under William Wallace, and with Wallace leading them, they could fight into London itself!
Wallace, Hamish, and Stephen were within the late governor’s map room, poring over the finest intelligence Longshanks’s royal servants could offer. They had maps of roads, harbors, trading points, wells, everything they could want to know to plan their next move. A man didn’t even need to be able to read to glean the riches of the maps — everything on the parchments was portrayed with fine drawings, some of them illuminated with colored pigments. Hamish, somewhat dazzled by it all, looked up from the map he had been studying and said, “It’s a banquet either way we choose. West are farms full of meat, east and towns fully of drink.”
Stephen piped up, “I say drink first and eat later and as usual the Almighty aggress with me.”
Wallace shook his head. “South. We attack south. Where they have Longshanks.”
Campbell hurried in, so excited he could hardly get the words out. “A royal carriage comes. An entourage. They sent riders under a banner of truce, asking you to meet them at a crossroad. The carriage flies the banners of Longshanks himself!”
“What if it’s an embush?” Hamish wondered.
“I hope it’s an ambush,” Stephen said. ” I haven’t killed an Englishman in five days.
Wallace buckled on his sword.
Taking six riders with him on the road and deploying Serous and his Highlanders to scurry through the woods on either side as a screen against ambush, Wallace traveled the short distance to the designated crossroad. When they were almost there, the Scots stopped as they had planned, and serous went forward alone, silent as a shadow. He returned in ten minutes and reported to Wallace. “It’s a pavilion tent out in the middle of the grass. Fancy. I counted ten soldiers outside and could make out one, maybe two more, in the shade inside. But no ambush. I circled the whole camp. But we’ll be in the woods just in case.”
Wallace and his lieutenants remounted their horses when serous topped them. “One other thing Strange. The soldiers aren’t English.”
“What do you mean they aren’t English?” Stephen said.
“Let Seorus talk,” Wallace said for the sake f Stephen more than for Seorus. Seorus was a compact, tightly muscled Highlander, leader of a band of mountain warriors who followed Wallace with financial devotion. Seorus, like the others he had brought down from the Highlands, was intensely loyal and intensely proud; if anyone doubted him, especially in the presence of Wallace, he tended to kill without warning.
“I mean not English in the sense that they are French,” Seorus said with a slight glance toward Stephen. “French it not English. Or would you care to argue about that?”
“It just makes no sense, that’s all,” Stephen said.