Randall Wallace - Braveheart

The blond beauty he’d spent all night and most of the morning with just looked at him blankly.

“He rebelled. He rebelled !” Robert insisted. “He acted. He fought! Was it rage? Pride? Love? Whatever it as, he has more of it than I.”

The blue eyes only appeared vacant; Robert’s young lover understood exactly what he was saying. She turned away from him. “You might have lied,” she said toward her pillow.

Robert heard the hurt in her voice. He knew there was no way to explain it away, to make her believe even for a moment that he cared about her or anything else in his life with the kind of passion he’d just been marveling at. “I’m too arrogant to lie,” Robert said at last.

He rose, pulled back the curtains, and squinted at the sunlight. Late morning. It was time.

He dressed in fresh clothes and left her there in his bed with an empty kiss that she welcomed with an empty smile.

He moved grimly up a dark castle staircase. He followed a servant who carried a candle against the gloom. The reached a door, which the servant unlocked. Young Robert took the candle and entered the room, the light from the tallow and wick barely penetrating the darkness.

Robert willed himself forward and placed the candle on a table in the center of the room. There was a shuffle in the dark; then, as if floating out of the black waters of a murky pool, came a face drifting into the candlelight. The boundaries of the face — the tip of the nose, the point of the chin, the bottoms of the ears, the mounds of the cheeks == were eaten away. A leper. Robert the Bruce, the Elder — Robert’s father.

The younger Bruce had steeled himself for the sight, and now he did into look away. His father, isolated in his disfiguration, looked back at him with the eyes of the condemned. And yet there was no pity there for himself or anyone else. The elder Bruce enjoyed these visits from his son; the chance to advice counsel, direct — to plot his son’s ascension to the throne of Scotland — it was now all he had.

“Father an armed rebellion has begun,” young Robert said.

“Under whom?”

“A commoner named William Wallace took the English at Lanark, and now people flock to him.”

“A commoner? So no one leads Scotland.”

The old man paused to ponder, and young Robert waited in heavy silence, broken only by the sputtering of the tallow in the candleflame. The elder Bruce lifted his yellow eyes and pointed a half finger at his son.

“You will embrace this rebellion,’ he said in his dusty voice. “Support it from our lands in the north. I will gain English favor by condemning it and ordering it opposed from our lands in the south. Whichever way the tide runs, we will rise.”

But young Robert did not get up immediately to carry out his father’s wishes as he usually did. He kept his seat and struggled to find the right words fro something that, at the time, he would have said held only the mildest interest for him; an yet his mind could not let it go. “This Wallace,’ Robert said. “He doesn’t even have a knighthood. But he fights with passion, and he is clever. He inspires men.”

“And you wish to charge off and fight as he did,” his father said.

But his father was not surprised; it was almost as if he’d been wondering when such emotion would spring out of his son. He shot back. “It is time to survive! Listen to me! You are the 17 thRobert Bruce. The sixteen before you have passed you land and title because we ride both sides of every road. Press your case t the nobles. They will choose who rules Scotland.”

“They do nothing but talk!” Robert said.

“Rightly so! They are as rich in English titles and lands as they are in Scottish! Just as we are! You admire this man, this William Wallace. Uncompromising men are easy to admire. He has courage. So does a dog. It is exactly the ability to compromise that makes a ma noble. And you must understand this: Edward Longshanks is the most ruthless king ever to sit on the throne of England, and none of us, and nothing of Scotland, will survive unless we are as ruthless, more ruthless, then he.”

Young Bruce rose heavily and moved to the door. But his father’s voice reached out and caught him there.

“Robert… look at me. I wish the world were different, and courage and conviction alone were enough. They are not. Even with my nose and ears falling from my head, I can face this fact. So must you.”

With a last long look at his father, Robert left him and climbed alone down the passageway of stone stairs that led back to his own rooms.

THE NEXT DAY TROOPS RODE THROUGH THE SCOTTISH countryside. They questioned civilians, threatening to pull down their houses and burn their fields, but none seemed to know anything; most claimed never to have heard anyone named William Wallace, even in Lanarkshire, where he had live. But when a pillar of dark smoke rose from the valley in which the Wallace farm lay, the other farmers and the villagers of the shire came out of their homes and stared at it in reverential silence.

When night came, and the villagers huddled behind barred doors, and even the rabbits of the heather seemed afraid to stir from their burrows, William Wallace and Hamish Campbell rode through the darkness along the trail that connected their childhood homes. When they reached the Wallace farm, a half moon was just peeking from behind the broken clouds, and in its light they saw the destruction.

The house in which William had been born, where his mother died, where he had known the carefree days of childhood and the happy camaraderie with his father and brother — that house had been torn down. Not one stone remained atop another; the English had made a point of that. Its timbers had been stacked and burned. The outbuildings had received the same treatment.

William looked at it all, and there was not a ripple of reaction in his face. Hamish looked for some sadness, some anger, some emotion of any kind, and saw none. This made the big redhead uneasy. He had sworn to himself that he would stay by William’s side no matter where that took them, and he would protect his friend even when –especially when — his friend’s pain was so great that he no longer gave any thought to his own safety. Hamish was particularly intent that he never again let William plunge off alone as he had at Lanark. So William’s stony silence frightened him.

But the deadness in William’s face was only an illusion. That face changed when they came upon the plots of the Wallace family graves.

The graves had been dug up, the bones scattered and ridden over by horses, so that only chalky splotches, gray on the earth in the thin moonlight, remained. Even the headstones that once marked the graves had been upended and set into the ground upside down as if to point the way for the wandering sprits of the dead to find their way to hell.

When William Wallace saw this, his face was no longer stiff. It came alive; though it scarcely seemed to move, all of it changed. It was a look so fierce that Hamish could smell the hatred. He had seen Scots hate before but this was different. The look that had been on William’s face when he attacked and killed the garrison at Lanark was suddenly there again, and what struck Hamish was that the hatred seemed to have grown.

That made Hamish happy. It meant they were going to kill something.

But then he had a realization — and before he could say anything to William about it, his friend had already reined and spurred his horse. Hamish cursed himself and spurred his own horse in pursuit. Why did William always have to think a half second quicker?

In the Calendonia trees sprinkled on the gently sloping hillside where Murron lay buried, the moonlight lay in flat puddles on the top sides of the leaves. The undersides of the leaves were black shadow. So were the back faces of rocks, the far sides of the tree trunks even the depressed places of the uneven earth. Everywhere you looked was ambush.