The Guardian (57 page)

“Henry?”

If Percy was surprised to be addressed by his first name, he showed no sign of it. Instead he cocked his head to one side. “I don’t know, Grandfather,” he said. “We’ll fight one way or the other, and we’ll win, but I have a feeling, almost a conviction, that the Fords of Drip offer us the greater advantage. What say you, Despencer?”

It was obvious from his tone that he expected Sir Hugh Despencer to agree with him, and I, too, expected Sir Hugh to support him, if for no other reason than to spite Mortimer. Despencer pushed his chair back from the table and sat staring at the ground between his feet, and when he looked up, it was to Earl Warrenne that he spoke.

“My lord,” he said, “I believe you are right in wanting to strike now. I think your judgment is sound in trusting the wisdom of your veterans and their opinions on what seems best for you and for them. On the other hand,” he added, raising one hand towards the Scots knight, “looking at Lundie’s plan to cross the fords at Drip, I cannot
fault it. We could do exactly as he suggests—send men upstream to cross the stream in safety and swing around to outflank Wallace’s people in the morning. The logic of such a move is self-evident, and there is no valid reason for not executing it. None, that is, save for one consideration. Is there really any
need
for such a move? Certainly, it might protect us against a counterattack as we advance, but is a counterattack being planned? The evidence indicates to me that there is not. The rebels have not set up any battle lines, and therefore, as you said, they have no anchor point, no rallying place. They also have no formal leadership, in the sense that we understand leadership—they have no senior commanders of proven worth and experience, trained in the craft and tempered in the realities of war, to lead and inspire men by example.

“They have two men in charge, as do we.” He indicated Cressingham with a wave of his hand. “But theirs are men of straw, unbloodied and untried in formal battle. Even their own Scotch nobles have no faith in either one of them. We heard the High Steward himself say they are too young and too callow to be taken seriously by any man of rank. And to top everything, they have no cavalry—at least, no cavalry that we would recognize as such. I’m told they have a hundred mounted men on Highland garrons, but garrons are hill ponies, not warhorses. So, no cavalry, no archers, and no discipline among their rank and file. In fact, my lord, they
have
no rank and file!”

That earned him a few grim smiles from his listeners, and as they were nodding and grunting in agreement he rose to his feet.

“I think, Your Grace, that you should strike now. A wiser man than I once said, ‘
Carpe diem
,
quam minimum credula postero
.’ It means seize the day and make the most of it; put not your faith in tomorrow.” He paused, smiling, aware of the astonishment on every face around him. Thomas turned to me with raised eyebrows. I looked back at him equally wide-eyed, amazed at hearing a knight, even a well-spoken English knight, quoting Horace, and not merely spontaneously but accurately.

Despencer spoke again into the admiring silence. “We have the
strength to win, my lord, and since they think we will not move again today, we have the opportunity. We might not have as much tomorrow.”

It was a truly astounding speech for a young knight, and in other circumstances I would have stood up and applauded him, but of course he was advocating a surprise attack upon my own friends and kinsmen, and I felt no enthusiasm. It was not so with the remainder of his audience, though. Every man around the table had been caught up in his sweeping declamation, and there was no doubt at all that he had wholly won their approbation.

The Earl of Surrey spread his arms, commanding silence, and when it fell he looked at Despencer. “Well spoken, Sir Hugh,” he said. “I could not have said it more clearly myself. And you have aided me to my decision.” He looked around the table. “To your positions, my friends, and rally your charges. We march within the hour to teach these Scotch rogues the error of their rebellious ways. Spread the word and make your preparations immediately.”

Within moments, Thomas and I found ourselves alone in a suddenly empty room, staring at each other apprehensively across our table. We could hear voices shouting in the distance, and from even farther away came the sound of trumpets, but otherwise the silence surrounding us was unsettling.

“It’s happening,” Thomas said, his voice low and strained. “What should we do?”

“We should send word to Will and Andrew faster than a bird can fly, but we can’t. It would mean stealing horses and fleeing, and we would never make it through the gates, let alone across the bridge. So all we can do now, really, is wait, and pray that Will has keen-eyed scouts down there watching for signs of activity on the road down from the gates.”

Thomas shook his head impatiently, “I know all that, Jamie. What I meant was, how do we get down there? We’ll be needed, once the battle starts.”

“Aye, but we can’t go now. There’s no place for us on that road, and anyway no one would make way for us. Until the blood starts to
spill they won’t tolerate us among them. We’ll wait until the way is clear and then go down with the Hospitallers and the other priests. Do you know any of the Hospitallers?”

“No. I met their commander, when the army assembled weeks ago. His name’s Reynald, and he has a cadre of about fifteen brethren with him, plus a score or two of ancillaries, I believe. But he would not remember me.”

“Probably not, but I’ll wager he will not refuse your services today. Nor mine. I think we should align ourselves with them. We’ll go and find Brother Reynald now, and travel down with his people.”

It was the right thing to do, I knew, for once the fighting started, it would be left to the Hospitallers and their helpers to tend to the wounded. And they would do so with perfect impartiality. There were no enemies among the gravely injured; all were equal in being victims of the evil that is war.

We had no difficulty in finding Brother Reynald and his companions, for the black robes they wore, adorned on breast and back with the eight-pointed white cross of St. John, made it impossible not to recognize them. We found them making their preparations for the fighting that lay ahead, busily loading eight sturdy wagons with equipment and materiel, none of which looked familiar to me.

We told Brother Reynald who we were—I saw no need to maintain my pretense of being Basque—and asked if he could use our assistance.

“Have you done this kind of thing before, Father James? Have you been involved in a battle?”

“No,” I said, “but a priest is a priest and his duties apply under all circumstances.”

One side of his mouth quirked slightly upwards. “True,” he said. “I merely wondered … I have found there is no worse place on earth than in the midst of a battleground when there are people dying all around you and you are powerless to influence anyone or anything. That is what you face today, my friend. But as you say, a priest is a priest. And of course we can use your help. Yours and that of everyone else for miles around, could we but enlist them. Pardon me.”

He called to someone behind him, and an enormous fellow came towards us.

“This is Frère Etienne,” Brother Reynald said. “Brother Steven. Steven, we have two new volunteers, chaplains of the Earl of Surrey’s household. They would like to be of help to us, and our Heavenly Father knows how grateful we will soon be for whatever assistance is offered. Will you introduce them to the others and show them what will be required of them?”

Brother Steven nodded and smiled, but said not a word, and Reynald turned back to us.

“I will leave you in Steven’s hands, knowing you could not be better served. He will have no shortage of work for you, and he will keep you sufficiently occupied that you will be ready to sleep well by the end of this day. Go with God, and we may meet again later.”

Less than an hour later, we were walking behind one of their wagons as we wended our way down the castle hill, aware that we could already hear the rising sounds of conflict in the distance ahead of us.

And so I went to war, real war, for the first time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

THE STIRLING FIGHT

T
he most astonishing part of the journey we took at the tail end of the Earl of Surrey’s army that September day, wending our way down the steep slope from Stirling Castle towards the Carse of Stirling and the causeway, was that most of us had no notion at all of what we were walking into.

The marching troops were far ahead of us, hidden from our sight by the twisting of the road, and we walked sedately in procession behind the Knights of the Hospital and their wagons as if we were on pilgrimage to some hallowed event. The high ground under our feet was dry and rocky, and there was nothing to indicate that the river valley below might be different, but the truth was that the heavy, sustained rains of the previous ten days had thoroughly soaked the ground on both sides of the causeway, making it too soft to withstand the churning feet of Warrenne’s ten thousand marching soldiers, and too dangerous to trust with the weight of mounted men. The army that preceded us down the hill had been in high spirits, moving jauntily along in the expectation of a short fight and a swift victory, and we followed them in silence for the most part, a few of us praying, perhaps, but most of us simply talking quietly and feeling grateful to varying degrees, I am quite sure, that we were non-combatants and therefore not at risk.

Most of us among the hundred or so volunteers that day were priests, forbidden by our calling to spill blood yet driven by our very humanity to minister to those who fought and whose blood was spilt. Our allotted task—Brother Steven had appointed me to be in charge of six two-man teams of stretcher-bearers—was to roam the
battlefield, identifying wounded men and taking them on stretchers to the wagons at the Hospitallers’ site, where their wounds would be treated.

Anyone who has ever been in battle will already have seen the extent of our naivety, in our failure to ask what was meant by “roam the battlefield, identifying wounded men.” But even had we asked, I doubt that anyone would have seen a need to explain the absurdity of the mere thought of
roaming
anywhere on a battlefield without being killed. That should have been self-evident to anyone with a brain in his head, and so no one saw a need to warn us that we would have no need to roam; that we would literally be surrounded by dead and dying men.

We were aware, at some cerebral level, that men were going to die. We knew, too, again in that same abstract sense, that some of those wounded men were going to be gravely wounded and would require our assistance to reach the care of the Hospitallers. But we were simple priests, sheltered by our blessed vocation from the harsh realities of armies and fighting men. In our stupid, credulous gullibility we could never have suspected that the God-filled, safe, and prayerful world in which we lived and worked was about to be destroyed—set at naught as though God Himself had turned His back on it. We could not possibly have known that Satan and his cohorts, with all their swarming minions, were about to be loosed in havoc on the field surrounding us.

We had no sense of anything being amiss—at least I, for one, did not—until we reached the quarter-mile-long stretch of level plain leading to the south bank of the river and the narrow wooden bridge over the Forth. But when our single file of loaded wagons slowed and then stopped altogether, unable to proceed farther, we were able to tell from the tumult ahead that something had gone wrong. I shifted the knapsack containing all my priestly tools until it hung comfortably at my back, then hauled myself up to perch on the hub of a rear wheel of the wagon in front of me, and from there I was able to see that the brothers driving our wagons were all standing on their benches, peering forward to the north and shouting questions
to those in front of them. Behind them—for there was no room to spread on either side—we could see and hear nothing, and so all we could do was speculate among ourselves about what might be happening.

From my vantage point of the wheel hub, I saw Brother Reynald coming straight towards us, leaning slightly sideways because of the closeness of the wagons on his left, and I jumped down from my perch to let him pass. He thanked me with a nod and clambered up onto the wagon’s side and thence to the tailboard, and we clustered around to hear what he had to say.

The Scots had taken the initiative, he said gravely, by launching an attack across terrain that the English scouts had deemed to be impassable after weeks of torrential rain and rising water levels. It had proved to be as impassable as predicted, he reported, for both “our” cavalry and infantry formations—he was a Norman-French Englishman, born and bred—but not for the Scotch hordes who ran across it lightly, many of them barefoot and wearing little or no armour. My astonishment grew to awe as he then explained that the road on the far side of the bridge was long and straight, built up above the surrounding flatlands for a full half-mile, and that the Forth River enclosed much of it in a loop to the right of the bridge, forming a spur of marshy land surrounded on three sides by the river. The Scotch attack, swift, unexpected, and unstoppable, had been devastating, capturing that entire spit. Armed with light, abnormally long spears that enabled them to reach their tightly restricted enemies without being reached in return, they had come running from the northeast, down from the woods at the base of the Abbey Craig, in a great, sweeping charge that arced from right to left to cut across the road at the end of the causeway and then drive south on both sides of it, isolating and containing the hapless English cavalry and infantry units, thousands of men in all, who had crossed the bridge but remained stranded on the causeway, far short of its northern end.

The high banks on either side of the road had thus become a kind of prison, for their height and steepness ensured that any mounted
man seeking to leap or ride down to the valley floor risked plunging his mount into soft ground that could swallow his animal to the chest and break its legs. In similar fashion, though to a lesser extent, the ranks of heavily armoured men crowding the road would be hampered and weighted down upon reaching the flats, their very numbers churning the muddy ground to the consistency of softened butter. Thus the people on the bridge were cut off, Reynald said. They had been stopped and rendered useless, their front ranks facing annihilation as they marched four abreast against the hordes awaiting them at the causeway’s end, while the men and horses behind them, being pressed unbearably from their rear, were unable even to turn around on the narrow roadway in order to retreat. De Warrenne had halted the advance and ordered the remnants of his force on the south side of the bridge, something close to half his army, to deploy to each side of the entrance, so that the bridge itself was now relatively clear.