Braveheart (2 page)

It may have been a lie of a half-truth with some other man behind the murder. There was plenty of ruthlessness to go around Scotland’s nobles fought with Longshanks and with each other for the throne. Alliances were made and broken; nobles grew richer each time they switched sides, oblivious to the suffering of the commoners whose lands and lives they controlled and whose welfare they neglected.

As the hostilities wore on, even the nobility began to suffer. Trade suffered crops failed because the farmers who tended the fields were forced away from them so often to fight for the nobleman who owned them. So Longshanks invited them to talks of truce. He chose the most warlike of the nobles, the ones most insistent that their country remain independent. Although they were the most stubborn, they were the ones bravest enough to answer the call to come unarmed, with one page boy only, to discuss peace.

And so it was that the nobles appeared on the misty, muddy roads that converged on the prosperous farm of a man called MacAndrews, who had been willing to offer up his spacious barn as a private place to discuss such a noble thing as peace. The nobles, riding in from opposite directions or coming in on the same road at cautions intervals, eyed each suspiciously, but the truce held. One by one, they tied their horses outside MacAndrews’s farmhouse and entered the quite barn, with their pages.

Among the other farmers of that shire was a man named Malcolm Wallace. He owned his own lands, where he had built a stone house as a gift to his wife, though she had died in childbirth the year it was completed. Like his friend MacAndrews, Malcolm Wallace as a patriot; he wanted Scotland ruled by Scots. This was a dangerous opinion, and those who held it kept it secret it was the measure of MacAndrew’s trust for Malcolm Wallace that he was the only neighbor to whom he whispered about the great occurrence that had been set for his barn that morning, and Malcolm and promised to drop by when the meeting was over.

So midafternoon of that same day, Malcolm Wallace stopped his work and saddled a horse. John, his eighteen-year-old son, did the same and together they mounted up for the ride over the ridge and into the next valley. Watching them from the loft of the barn, where he had been gathering eggs, was seven-year-old William.

William had his father’s blue eyes. He had sometimes stared into the still water of a loch and stared at himself, trying to make his features grow into an exact replica of the face f this father, who he was sure was the finest man ever born. William idolized the strength of his father’s silence, the power in his hands, his arms, his shoulders. But most of all he admired the strength of his father’s heart. He had heard other men bluster and boast. But his father never made loud predictions. He simply did what he was going to do, and let that say it. Once William had been on the road to the village with his father when they met a neighbor returning from the marketplace with a fine new horse. Malcolm had stopped the man in a quiet voice asked for the money the man owed him. The man had looked at his father with a squint of defiance, but William was never sure because the look, whatever it was, vanished when Malcolm hit him with a single blow to the middle of the chest. The man crumpled and lay like a log in the road. Malcolm took the horse and thanked the man, who never moved as they rode off.

It was that same horse that William looked at now.

His father and brother were halfway up the rise when they heard hoofbeats behind them and tuned to see William riding bareback, talking to the horse through this knees, a natural rider. He stopped the horse beside his father and looked steadily at him from beneath the blond thatch of his hair.

“Told ya ta stay,” his father said.

“ I finished my chores. Where we going’?’ William said.

“MacAndrews’s. He wanted us to visit when the truce was over.” Malcolm spurred his horse, and William fell in line behind his father and brother.

They rode on, over the hills of emerald grass dotted there and there with the purple flowers of wild thistle.

They stopped high above the next valley and looked down at the MacAndrews farm. The ground in front of the house was pitted from the hooves of many horses, but they were nowhere to be seen now. The house was silent; the whole place looked deserted.

Up on the hill, Malcolm Wallace felt both sons glance at him. They didn’t like it either. “Stay here,” he said. He meant William.

The boy watched as his father and brother spurred their horses and rode down the hill. They pulled up at the barn and looked around. “MacAndrews!… MacAndrews!?” Malcolm yelled.

They dismounted. Malcolm found a pitchfork. John lifted the woodpile ax. They moved to the door of the barn and pushed it open. They waited for a moment on either side of the door; in a country where stealing livestock was an art form, it paid to be careful. But no sound came from within the barn.

Makeshift weapons held high, they darted inside.

John staggered. Malcolm, whose heart had borne many death, felt that heart skip in his chest.

Hanging from the rafters of the barn were thirty Scottish noblemen and thirty pages, their faces purple and contorted by the strangulation hanging, their tongues protruding as if they were tasting the dusty light.

Malcolm stabbed the pitchfork into the ground in useless anger; john gripped the ax as he followed his father through the hung bodies of the noblemen to the back row and saw the one in commoners dress, like theirs. “MacAndrews,” Malcolm said quietly, then he and john spun around at the sound of the shuffle behind them

William stood there near the front door, gazing up at the hanging bodies.

“William! Get out of here!” John barked.

William frowned in bewilderment. “Why would MacAndrews make so many scarecrows?” he asked.

Before his father and brother could think of anything to say, William, with a boy’s curiosity, touched the spurred foot of one of the hanged noblemen. It was too solid; realization flooded over him. “R-real!!!!…. Ahhhhhgggg!” he yelled. He turned and ran but knocked back into the feet of the hung man behind him. In blind panic he darted in another direction and ran into another corpse and another; the hung men began to swing, which made it harder for William’s father and older brother to fight their way to him.

“William!
William
!” Malcolm called after him.

Then, worst of all, William saw the pages, boys like himself, hung in a row behind their masters.

Finally his father and brother reached William and hugged him tight. There in the barn, among the swinging bodies of the hung nobles, Malcolm Wallace threw his arms around both his sons. They gripped him back. William was shaking, but within the circle of his father’s powerful arms he felt the pounding of heart subside and could hear sounds again instead of its throbbing inside his body.

“Murderin’ English bastards,” his father said.

2

OUTSIDE THE WALLACE FARMHOUSE THAT NIGHT, THE COTtage looked peaceful, the windows glowed yellow into the night. Inside, John rose and closed the shutters of the kitchen, where men were gathered.

In his bedroom, young William lay tossing in nightmarish sleep. He mumbled in smothered terror, he twitched.

In the blue grays of this dream, William stood at the door of the barn and gazed at the hanged knights. Their faces were garish, horrible. Then one of the heads moved and its eyes opened! William wanted to run, but he couldn’t get his body to respond, and the hung nobleman’s bloated tongue burst through his lips, and the ghoul moaned, “William!”

William tore himself from sleep; he looked around and swallowed back his tears and panic.

Then he heard voices coming up from the kitchen. Many voices, low and angry. He climbed quietly down from the upper corner space where he slept beneath the roof thatch that kept out the rain and cold, and tiptoed down to the doorway of the kitchen. He stopped in the shadows at the dark rim of the candlelight.

A dozen tough farmers were huddled around the kitchen table. William’s brother John was among them, and William recognized the others. Some lived close by, a few lived several valleys over, but they were all men his father trusted; at one time or another he had seen his father walking and talking quietly with each of them. But he had never seen a meeting like this before.

Redheaded Campbell, scarred and missing fingers, was stirred up. “Wallace is right!” he barked to his friends. “We fight ‘em!”

But MacClannough, a slender man with fine features, was counseling caution and countered, “ Every nobleman who had any will to fight was at that meeting.”

“
So it's up to us!
We show them we won’t lie down and be their slaves!” Malcolm Wallace said in a voice so hard and low that William felt chilled.

“We just can’t beat an army with just the fifty farmers we can raise!” MacClannough said.

“We don’t have to beat ‘em, just fight ‘em,” Malcolm said. “To show “em we’re not dogs, but men.”

Young William watched from the darkness as his father dipped his finger into a jug of whiskey and used the wet finger to draw on the tabletop. “They have a camp here,” Malcolm said, looking from face to face. “We attack them at sunset tomorrow. Give us all night to run home.”

The next day Malcolm and john saddled horses and led them from their barn; they were checking the short swords they had tucked into the grain sacks behind their saddles when William came out of the barn with his own horse.

“William, you’re staying here, “ his father said.

“I can fight,” William said.

These words from his youngest son made Malcolm pause and kneel to look into William’s eyes.

“Aye. But it's our wits that make us men. I love ya, boy. You stay.”

Malcolm and John mounted their horses and rode away and left William watching them go. At the edge of their oat field they turned in their saddles and waved to him.

William waved back and watched them until they disappeared on the curving trail up the valley.

3

THE PEACE OF THE SUMMER TWILIGHT HAD BEGUN TO SETtle over the Wallace farm. The wind whispered across the straw thatch of the rooftops, and the chickens scratched lazily around the barn. All was strangely quiet.

Then William and this friend Hamish Campbell, redheaded like his father, ran from the rear of the house and ducked in beside the barn, breathless, gasping. The tow boy pressed their backs against the wall. William peered around a corner, then shrunk back and whispered, “They’re coming!”

Hamish leaned forward for a look, but William pulled him back and breathed hot words into his friend’s ear: “Not yet! Here he comes; be ready!”

They waited heard heavy footsteps. Then from around the corner three enormous, ugly hogs appeared. The boys hurled rotten eggs. The eggs slapped the snouts of the pigs, who scattered as the boys charged, howling.

The sun went down on their play. The boys walked toward the house, beneath a lavender sky. The house looked so much darker and emptier now. “Wanna stay with me tonight?” Hamish asked.

The sky had gone fully black and the stars were hard and bright above the house when William’s face appeared at the window and he looked toward the distant hills, where he saw trees and heather, but no sign of life. He turned back to the cook fire he had built in the grate and stirred at the stew he had made. He spooned up two steaming bowls full and set them out on the table.

But he was only hoping. He looked out the window again; he was still all alone. So he left a candle burning on the table beside the stew and moved up the stairs.

Night thawed into a foggy dawn, and William rose from his bed, where he had huddled, afraid to sleep, through a night that seemed to have no end. But now, with gray showing through the cracks of his broad windows, he rose, dressed, and moved down the hall. He stopped at the door of this father’s bedroom and saw the undisturbed bed. He moved on and passed the door of this brother’s room, also unrumpled.

In the kitchen he found the two cold bowls of stew beside the exhausted candle. He spooned up his own cold porridge and ate alone.

After his breakfast, William was in the barn loft, shoveling corn down to feed the hogs, when he glimpsed something coming. He saw an ox cart rumbling down the curving land. Its driver was Campbell, with MacClannough walking behind it. The farmers glanced up at William, their faces grim.

From his perch in the loft, William saw what the neighbors had brought: the bodies of this father and brother. The car stopped; Campbell, with a bandage around his left hand where more of this fingers ere now missing, studied the back to the ox as if it could tell him how to break such news. The butt of the ox seemed to tell him to be matter-of-fact.

“William… Come down here, lad,” Campbell said.

William looked away, he took quick breaths, he looked back, but the bodies were still there.

4

THE OUTSIDE OF THE HOUSE WAS NOW SURROUNDED BY horses, wagons, and neighbors. The undertaker arrived in his hearse, preloaded with coffins.

William sat at the kitchen table, weeping holding the bowls of stew, hugging them as if they were his family. A neighbor woman moved up beside him. “Poor dear. That’s cold,” she said. “Let me get you something hot.”