The Forest Laird (42 page)

The obvious truth of what he had said left me floundering, until he saved me by changing the subject.

“Tell me about your cousin.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. I have a hunger to know all there is to know about this man, for I believe he is remarkable. I have heard the Bishop speak of him many times, but always using both his names, naming him William Wallace. And I have met others who have met
Wallace
, but no one who speaks of him the way you do, as plain Will. You, Father James, are the one who has been closest to him throughout his life, so I would like to know what
you
know about him, as a cousin and a friend.”

“Well,” I began, “he is more like a brother than a cousin, to be truthful. From around the time of my eighth birthday, for the next eight years until Will was eighteen, we lived together, most of the time with Ewan the archer, and shared everything we did every day. We learned to use a quarterstaff together, and though I was never good enough or strong enough to beat him, there was a time when I could hold my own against him, for a while at least, until he wore me down …”

I talked incessantly for an hour or more, aware that he replenished the fire twice while I was regaling him with all my favourite recollections of Will and the boyhood we had shared. When eventually I fell silent, he was still sitting across the fire from me, smiling at me.

“You love the man. That is plain to see. And I find it heartening because it speaks to his humanity.”

“There’s much about our Will to love,” I answered. “Yet I know there is no lack of folk who would disagree with me. He can be wild, I’ll grant, and that is all some ever seem to see in him. And when he’s crossed—particularly in things he believes to be right and necessary—he can be hard, and even violent if he perceives that violence is called for. In addition to that, he has no love for Englishmen—indeed he hates them, for good and sufficient reason in his own eyes and, truth to tell, in the eyes of others. But with his friends and loved ones he is the gentlest of creatures.”

“You have the same reasons for hating the English that he has, Father, but you do not hate them.”

His inflection made a question of the statement. “No, I do not, but neither do I love them greatly. I am a priest, though. Turning the other cheek is part of my life. Will, on the other hand, is a warrior and an avenger.”

“Hmm … Think you he will return tomorrow, this warrior cousin of yours?”

“He won’t stay away longer than he needs to, not with Mirren so close to her time. May I ask you a question now?”

“Of course. What would you like to know?”

“Tell me a little about France, if you will, about your time there, what you learned. Is it exotic?” I knew that within two years of his early ordination, Lamberton had been selected by a cadre of Scotland’s senior bishops to attend university in Paris.

“Well, goodness, where to begin? It is beautiful, heavily forested, and it has unimaginably long, straight roads that run without a bend for score upon score of miles, joining together far-flung cities. The roads were all built by the Romans, of course, as were the great roads of England. But the French have more of them, and better, because the Romans were in Gaul for hundreds of years longer than they were in Britain. Here in Scotland, of course, we had little to attract the Romans, and so although we have some of their roads, we have no great ones.

“Is France exotic?” He thought on that for a moment and then shook his head decisively. “No, not, I think, in the way you mean. It is not strikingly foreign, in the way that Africa and Greece are foreign, visibly and tangibly. France is much like England, in fact, but not quite so green and not quite so wet all the time.”

“What did you learn there?”

“Much that you might expect. I studied canon law with some of the finest teachers in the world. But much, too, that I had not anticipated. That sprang from being exposed to brilliant and inquiring minds.”

“Such as whose?”

He pursed his lips and looked at me as though he was considering a choice of options. “There is a man called John Duns. They call him Duns the Scot. Have you heard of him?”

“I have heard the name—Duns Scotus is what they call him here. He is a Franciscan, is he not? He is earning a reputation for himself as a free and unique thinker.”

Lamberton nodded. “That’s the same man. He has been resident at Oxford now for more than a decade, beginning as a very young student, and is now a teacher of philosophy and theology. He is surprisingly young, considering his accomplishments.”

That made me smile, as it echoed what I had been thinking about Lamberton himself a short time earlier. “No, I’m serious,” he went on. “The man is no more than three or four years older than I am and already he is revered. His ideas are … I am tempted to use the word
exciting
, even though it is not a word normally applied to theology or philosophy. Nevertheless, his opinions are vibrant, and some of them have set the world of scholarship reeling, without scandalizing the orthodox majority—a signal accomplishment.”

“It sounds as though you know the man, Father. Have you been, then, to Oxford?”

“No.” Lamberton almost laughed at the thought. “But I do know him. I met him in Paris, when he came to debate with several of the faculty at the university, and I had the privilege of spending many pleasant hours listening to him speak, and speaking with him, during the few weeks that he remained in Paris.”

I tried to imagine what it must be like to sit in the presence of a truly brilliant and original thinker and to drink in his words. “What a privilege, to meet and speak with such a man,” I said.

“He impressed me greatly. But there was yet one other man I met there whose ideas stirred me even more, in some ways, than Father Duns’s, perhaps because I sensed a connection between their ideas that had not, and may not yet have, occurred to them. This second man made no attempt to formalize his ideas; he merely spoke to and from his personal convictions. Yet I was convinced, merely by listening to him on one sole occasion, that he lives by and would die for his ideas, and that they will forever direct his life.” The corner of his mouth flickered in a tiny grin. “His name, too, you will have heard.”

“From Paris? I think not, Father. You overestimate my knowledge of the world. I doubt if I could name a single person in all the city there.”

“Then you must expand the city to embrace the realm. I was speaking of Philip Capet.”

“Capet?” I blinked at him in astonishment. “You met King Philip of France?”

“I did. He came to speak with Father Duns one night when I was visiting him, and I was graciously permitted to remain with them.”

“That surprises me. From all I have heard, Philip the Fair prefers to hold himself aloof from human contact.”

“Aha! Then, my friend, you have been listening to people who are but repeating hearsay. All men need human contact, and there are no exceptions to that rule. Even the strictest anchorites must communicate with other men from time to time, or risk going mad. I am not saying Philip is a hearty and gregarious companion, or even that he is particularly hospitable, but he has a certain personal amiability when he chooses to display it. Yet he is a man conscious of owning a destiny. And men of destiny, I am told, are seldom easy to deal with, requiring great finesse and circumspection, even dedication, in the handling.”

“What was it that caught your attention so quickly in the discourse of the King of France?”

He smiled briefly. “It is late, now—it must be close to midnight—and this simple-seeming question of yours could take much answering. Are you sure you wish to hear my response?”

“Very sure, and I am not the slightest bit tired, so if you are prepared to think and talk at this hour of night, I am more than ready to listen. Why don’t you find some wine for us while I replenish the fire?”

4

I
went in search of split logs from the neighbouring fires, for we had burned up the supply closest to us. I made short work of the quest, gathering unused logs from several dead or dying fires close by, and by the time I had emptied my arms of the fourth load of plundered fuel and came back to sit down again, there was a cup of lightly watered wine waiting for me on the log that was my seat. I picked it up, tipped it slightly towards Father Lamberton in salute, and sipped at it appreciatively, finding it far more palatable than the rough, raw wine we used for Communion purposes. Lamberton sipped at his, too, then stooped and placed his cup carefully by his feet, where it would not tip over.

“Our system is broken,” he said.

“Which system?”

“There is only one.”

“You mean the Church’s system? But that is God’s own and therefore perfect and unbreakable. What other system is there?”

“The one by which the whole world lives, outside the Church. I am talking about Christendom—more accurately, about the hierarchical system by which all of Christendom is governed.”

“Strange,” I said. “The Bishop himself once described Christendom thus to me, as a vast and complex system of governance, functioning everywhere under the same principles, yet among different peoples.”

“Aye, it is, and all of it is based upon property: land, territory, possessions—wealth. Think of it: Scotland, England, France, Norway, Italia, Germany—all
land
and all of it owned and operating along the same lines, radiating outward from the central landholder, who may be king or prince or duke or earl or chief. Each of these—let us call them rulers—has deputies, whom we will call barons, to whom he parcels out the land he holds, in return for their services. Those barons, in their turn, split up their holdings equally among
their
liegemen in return for fealty, and then the liegemen parcel out their lands to knights who will support them for the privileges they receive. The knights, the lowest rank upon the social ladder, employ freemen and serfs and mesnes and bondsmen to tend and till and harvest the tiny plots of land they have within their grant, and they garner rents and fees into their own hands, portions of which they pass up the ladder.”

I nodded. “And surprisingly, when you look at it thus closely, it all works. So why would you say it is broken?”

He grinned at me then. “I can see the crack in the edifice from where I sit.”

I looked quickly around the clearing, but we were the only people there, and there was nothing else to be seen except the darkened shapes of the huts and tents beneath the trees. “What crack in which edifice?”

“Those huts. The fact that we are sitting in this sleeping village filled with outlaws, all of whom might be hanged out of hand were they unfortunate enough to be taken. That is one end of the crack, if you can perceive it. The other end is Glasgow, or Jedburgh, Berwick, Roxburgh, Edinburgh, Stirling.”

I shook my head. “Now you really have lost me.”

“I know, you and nine-and-ninety out of any hundred men to whom I might speak of it.
I
know what I am saying because I have thought much about it and discussed it with men like Father Duns and King Philip of France.” He grimaced, shaking his head in what I took for regret. “Our earthly world is changing rapidly, Father. The changes are not visible to everyone who looks, but to those who know exactly where to look, the signs are unmistakable. And here in Scotland, the place to look is here, and in the burghs.”

“Here and in the burghs.” I knew I sounded dull, because that was precisely how I felt. “You mean … here among the outlaws?”

“Aye, and elsewhere among the burgesses, though I will grant the burgesses may be the more important.”

The burgesses may be the more important
what?
I had never considered the burgesses as anything more than they appeared to be, the townspeople of our land, the merchants and manufacturers and craftsmen, the shopkeepers and traders who lived in the seaports and centres of commerce throughout Scotland. Now, however, I recalled the mystifying conversation I had had with Bishop Wishart on the same topic a year earlier, and I could see—though the comparison itself struck me as being perverse—that the burgesses were, in fact, the opposing face of the coin to Will’s outlaws; each group took great pride, albeit for widely differing reasons, in being self-sufficient and accountable to no one.

I realized that my companion had fallen silent and was staring at me, clearly waiting for me to say something in response.

“Frankly, Father,” I told him, “I find it difficult to see any connection between outlaws and burgesses.”

“And that is as it should be, at this point. But the connection is there—merely obscured for now. Think how the system works: the land being handed downward from the rulers, and the feudal services and fruits of the harvest being fed back up the various levels to sustain them. Neither of those processes takes into account the presence of the outlaws or the burgesses. That is a new development.”

“Hardly new,” I said. “There have always been outlaws.”

“Granted. But until recently they were always—
always
—outcasts in the truest sense, banished beyond the limits of society, shunned and condemned by everyone, and quick to die in consequence. Now, though, we have outlaws like your cousin and his followers, entire communities of them—still proscribed and banished, still condemned to execution upon capture, but
organized
into social groups, and widely acclaimed by their countrymen because of this unprecedented claim of theirs to what they are calling freedom, and their determination to live their lives according to their own wishes, paying fealty to no one other than the leader of their choice. That would have been inconceivable when you and I were boys, a few short years ago.”

“And to me it so remains. Do you really believe that’s what my cousin Will is saying to the world?”

The eyes gazing at me from across the fire became, quite suddenly, the grave eyes of the cathedral chancellor. “Aye, Father James, I do, because it
is
what he is saying. And loudly, too, if you but stop to listen.”