Braveheart (21 page)

35

WITHIN THE TAPESTRIES WALLS OF HIS LONDON APARTMENTS, Price Edward and his friend Peter heard a contingent of horsemen clatter into the courtyard below. They looked out the window and saw the arrival of Longshanks. They leaned back into the room, and Edward began to pace nervously.

"It is not your fault! Stand up to him," Peter urged.

Edward showed Peter the dagger he had concealed in his belt behind his back. "I will stand up to him and more."

Longshanks banged the door open and staled in angrily, followed by two advisors. First he glared at Peter with obvious loathing, then turned his piercing stare to his own son. "What news of the north?" Longshanks said, his voice husky with anger.

"Nothing new, Majesty," Edward answered. "We have sent riders to speed any word." They had known for some time of the massacre at Stirling, but they had heard nothing for days from York. Edward had sent an angry message to his cousin, York's governor, demanding to know why no intelligence had been coming down from the north. His cousin knew Longshanks was returning to London and would be furious. Edward suspected his cousin was intentionally trying to erode the prince's relationship with the king even further.

"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.

"Seorus," Wallace broke in, "let's move."

Seorus waved for his clan to follow him, and Wallace rode ahead with the horsemen into the crossroads itself. There they found it exactly as Seorus said: a royal carriage to the side of the tent, out in the middle of a sun-drenched meadow, with nearly a dozen soldiers milling about, and not stocky Englishmen clothed in red but slender Frenchmen in royal French blue.

Wallace and his men rode in a complete circle around the tent. The soldiers watched warily, but they were disciplined and made no threatening moves. The Scots stopped thirty feet from the tent entrance.

No sound from the tent. Wallace rested his hand on the handle of his broadsword, ready.

"Longshanks! I have come!"

Servants pulled back the sides of the tent door, and a tall, slender, shapely female figure appeared. There in the shadows, she looked just like Murron! William was not the only one who noticed the resemblance; he glanced at Hamish and Campbell and saw them haunted by it, too. Was this another dream? William paled as she stepped into the morning sun. She moved toward him, her face lowered. It
was
Murron! He was dreaming again -- or he was insane.

She reached him, lifted her face --- and he saw the princes.

Not Murron! And yet as William saw the princes more closely, he was still shaken by the resemblance. In the way she carried herself, in her shape, in the way the regal lace framed her face as wedding lace had once framed Murron's she hunted the empty rooms in the secret chambers of his heart.

And while the princes reminded, William Wallace of everything he had loved and lost, he haunted her with everything she wanted and had never found. Tall, powerful, commanding his shoulders thick, his hair wild, his eyes soft, even pained. A man facing the hatred of the world's most powerful king; a man who had won great battles and commanded armies, yet who looked as if he could spur his horse away right now and ride away from adoration and glory and never miss any of it. She had never seen a man like this. She had never known such a one existed.

Wallace dismounted and moved to face her. Their eyes hung on each other. She saw something that she had not seen in the face of a man in her whole life. It was grief. Whatever else they said about him, this must she knew was true:" He had loved the woman he had lost; the pain of it was still etched in his face.

She surprised him by bending at the knee in a half-submissive yet proud curtsey.

"I am the Princess of Wales," she said.

"Wife of Edward, the king's son?" William asked.

She nodded; somehow she was already ashamed. "I am sorry to be a disappointment. I come as the king's servant and with his authority," the princess said.

"It's battle I want, not talk."

"But now that I am here, will you speak with a woman?" When he said nothing, she led him under the pavilion, a purple canopy shading rich carpets laid on the bare ground. Hamish, Campbell, and Stephen dismounted and flowed, shouldering their way in beside the princess's guards, so they could watch Wallace's back.

Inside the Scots found more opulence than they had ever before seen, even in Edinburgh Castle. A carved, gleaming table supported a silver serving bowl full of fruit, and even the apples and oranges there seemed to sparkle as if they too had been polished. Attending the princess were a beautiful young handmaiden -- Nicolette -- and a thin graying nobleman in a rich tunic embroidered with the king's symbols. The royal servants had brought a throne for the princess and a lower chair for Wallace. She sat; he refused the chair. She studied him and took in his anger and his pride.

"I understand you have recently been given the rank of knight," the princess began.

"I have been given nothing. God makes men what they are."

"Did God make you the sacker of peaceful cities? The executioner of the king's nephew, my husband's own cousin?"

"York was the staging point for every invasion of my country! And as for that cousin, I regret that he had but one head to lose. To try to repel us, he hanged a hundred Scots, even women and children, from the city walls."

"That is not possible!" Isabella protested. But she knew Longshanks and knew his family, She glanced at Hamilton, the richly dressed royal crony that the king had sent with her as both advisor and informant, and Hamilton averted his eyes.

"Longshanks did far worse the last time he took a Scottish city!" Wallace said.

Wallace watched as Hamilton, his silver hair smoothly combed, his beard finely groomed in the style of the court, his white hands graceful and delicate, tilted himself toward the princess and said softly in Latin, "he is a murdering bandit. He lies."

Wallace replied in Latin, "I am no bandit! And I do not lie!"

They were startled at Wallace's fluency in the language of scholars. He saw this; it made him angrier still. "Or in French if you prefer!" he went on. "
Certainment, c'est vrai!
Ask your king to his face, and see if his eyes can convince you of the truth!"

She stared for a long moment at Wallace's eyes.

"Hamilton, leave us," Isabella said.