“It is useless to resist him!” Craig sputtered.
Wallace erupted. “No! Not useless! We can beat this! With cavalry — light, fast horsemen, like you nobles employ — we could maneuver their bowmen. Look a the weapon!” Wallace said, holding the crossbow up, shaking it at them. “Yes, it is accurate and powerful, but it is heavy and clumsy, too. It is one thing to fire it coldly at a target, but it’s something again to try to shoot it when you are being charged head on by Highlander on foot and by horsemen from you flanks and rear, all screaming like berserkers!”
“You wish us to be insane?” Mornay asked.
“I wish you to be Scotsmen,” Wallace said.
There was a long silence. Wallace looked at Robert the Bruce, who did not avert his gaze but still did not speak up. At last old Craig said, “With such a weapon and such a force arrayed against us, perhaps it is time to discuss other options.”
“Other options?” Wallace asked. “Don’t you wish at lease to bring your men to the field, so you can barter a better deal from Longshanks before cover and run?”
“Sir William!” the Bruce said, trying to deflect the storm.
“We cannot defeat the power arrayed against us!”
Craig insisted through his anger.
“We can and we will!”
“Sir William!” the Bruce said with even greater vehemence.
But the storm of Wallace’s anger had already begun. He shouted at Craig, at all of them. “We won at Stirling and still you quibbled! We won at York and you would not support us! If you will not stand with us now, then I say you are cowards! And if you are Scotsmen, I am ashamed to call myself one!” With that the tossed the crossbow onto the ground at their feet, like a gauntlet, daring them.
The nobles, all of them carrying swords and daggers, gripped the handles of their weapons. Hamish and his father stepped up shoulder to shoulder with Wallace, while Stephen’s dagger silently from his belt and snuggled against the throat of the noble nearest him.
Robert the Bruce, backed by Mornay, jumped between Wallace and the nobles. “Stop! Everyone stop! Please, sir William! Speak with me alone! I beg you!”
Robert was the one man capable of drawing Wallace away from the confrontation; he was the only noble Wallace had any desire to listen to. They moved a dozen paces in the direction of the shield impaled by the crossbow bold. Stephen showed away the man he had seized, ad he moved to join the Campbells in glowering at the nobles and begging, any and all, to step forward and fight.
When the Bruce had urged Wallace far enough away that they could speak in confidence, he turned and spoke in a suppressed but passionate voice. “Sir William, please listen to me! You have achieved more than anyone dreamed. You’ve made all of Scotland and all of England as well stand and wonder at what you’ve done! But fighting these odds now” — he gestured at the shield pierced by the bolt - “this looks like rage, not courage. Peace offers its rewards! Has war become a habit you cannot break?”
The question struck deep in Wallace. For a moment his eyes flickered away toward the juncture of the green hills with the gray sky, as if everyone he had loved and lost had just moved beyond that horizon. But when he looked back to Bruce, his eyes were not dreamy but blazing with life. “War finds me willing,” Wallace said. “I know it won’t bring back all I have lost. But it can bring what none of us have ever had: a country of our own. For that we need a king. We need you.”
It was Bruce’s turn to pause and swallow. “I am trying,” he said.
“Then you tell me what a king is! Is he a man who believes only what others believe? Is he one who calculates the numbers for and against him but never weighs the strength in his own heart? There is strength in you. I see it. I know it.”
Robert the Bruce was both moved and ashamed to hear these words from William Wallace. Seeing this, Wallace pressed him further.
“These men are like all the others, they need a leader!” Wallace said. “They will never accept me, but they will you! Lead them! Lead us all.”
Robert stared at Wallace. Wide-eyed, breathless, the young nobleman seemed unable to move. Finally he said, “I must…consult with my father.”
“And I will consult with mine.”
Saying that, Wallace strode back to the main group of nobles. He glared around at all of them. Then his eyes changed, showing less anger, and more pity. “When Longshanks invades us again,” he said in a quieter voice, “the commoners are going to fight. I don’t believe I could stop them even if I wished to. When they fight, I will lead them. We need you. Even if you all come, it may not be enough, but whether all of you come or none do, we will fight. And stand or fall, live or die, whichever we do, we will do it for Scotland.”
Wallace left the field, his friends behind him, never more proud than they had been at that moment.
45
Robert the Bruce did not ride straight back to his castle. He took a long detour and did not explain to his personal bodyguard the reason. He rode silently in front of them, so insensible to the countryside around them that the captain of his guards wondered whether his master might even be unaware they were so far off their normal route home. But when he inquired, after passing through another crossroad, whether his lordship had intended to take the fork that led ever further from their castle, the Bruce nodded and kept on riding. They stopped once in a village, where the Bruce asked directions of a tavernkeeper, and once more along a farm road where a herdsman listened to his soft inquires and pointed the way.
At last they reached a small valley, marred by the shells of farm buildings burned out and never rebuilt. Robert ordered his men to remain there beside the charred rubble, and he rode over the hill alone.
To Murron’s grave.
At the ragged hole that once held Murron’s body, Robert the Bruce dismounted and stared at the barren cavity. It gaped there like an empty eye socket, among the other, undisturbed, grave. The Bruce had heard the story of Wallace riding in through the English ambush and pulling her body from the earth to bury it in a place where no enemy could find it. So the story was true.
He held the reins of this lathered horse and lifted his eyes from the grave to it’s stone marker and the delicate lines of the chiseled thistle he frowned as if this was too much to understand. He mounted up and rode away.
In the faint nimbus of the single candle, young Robert sat across from his leper father in his father’s darkened room. Young Robert reported every word of the meeting at Edinburgh, even what he had said in private to William Wallace. His father had listened with his yellowed eyes wet so droopy that it would scarcely have surprised young Robert if those eyes had fallen out of the decaying head and popped onto the table. But finally his father had spoken, telling young Bruce what course he must take. And now the son gripped his own head as if stunned by a blow.
“This…… cannot be the way,” He said to his father.
But the old man’s brain, behind those loose, weak eyes, as still as keen as ever; if anything, the endless hours he spent alone, hiding his leprosy, had only make that brain more keen. “Wallace will not survive; he cannot!” The elder Bruce said. “He can never lead this country. The nobles will not support him!”
“But, Father —”
“Everything is clear, Robert. Everything. Think of all you have told me, of everything you’ve seen and thought, and you will know this situation as clearly as I do. William Wallace wishes to spill every drop of blood in his body for the sake of Scotland. But that will not make us free.”