Randall Wallace - Braveheart

The soldiers were terrified — and rightly so. They were realizing that they were lost in this forest; their leader had been murdered right under their noses. Suddenly they were not even secure in their numbers, for most of the other soldiers hadn’t even reached the clearing yet.

The weird Scottish voice roared from the blackness around them: “You seek William Wallace. You have found him. Tell your masters — those of you that make it home — that when you come armed into Scotland, you come into hell!”

A pause; nothing but silence and fear. Then with a bloodcurdling yell, three wild men tore out of the darkness from different directions, their swords slashing. They cut down soldiers, and the others panicked. They ran anywhere they could. Terror spread through the forest.

Wallace, Hamish, and Stephen were left alone in the heart of the woods. They howled, barked like dogs, and snarled like wolves — and then laughed like hyenas!

“I thought I was dead when ya pulled that dagger!” Stephen Said.

“No English lord would trust an Irishman!” Wallace said.

Hamish squinted down at the little Irishman, thought for a moment, and said, “let’s kill him anyway.”

They laughed again until their sides hurt.

Then William Wallace’s laughter leaked away. He found the tree where he had fallen asleep and stood beside it now and stared into the dark forest where he had seen Murron in his dream.

THE NEWS OF WALLACE’S VICTORY OVER LORD PICKERING raced across Scotland like an Atlantic gale.

It spread to Inverness, where tow men were drinking in the town alehouse and one said, “William Wallace killed fifty men! Fifty if it was one!”

The same tale was exchanged by two farmers at a cross roads below Glasgow, only here it was said, “A hundred men! With his own sword! He cut through the English like — “

In the taverns of Edinburgh, the story was going: “—like Moses through the Red Sea! Hacked off tow hundred heads!”

“Two hundred?!” doubted one of the listeners, still sober enough to b incredulous.

“Saw it with my own eyes,” the speaker insisted.

But in the string of valleys where William Wallace had spent his boyhood, all looked absolutely normal: sleepy and peaceful. The clansmen who lived here never spoke of William Wallace. If an outsider mentioned his name, the farmers, their wives, and even their children all took on bewildered and rather dull expressions and seemed never to have heard of the man.

It was here, between the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon, that a Highlander, a runner, slipped through the inky blackness and tapped on the door of the house belonging to Stewart the farmer, who opened the door immediately and invited the man inside. But the runner did not stay; he whispered with Stewart for a moment and then ran on up the valley.

Hamish Campbell watched the runner from behind the closed doors of the barn. When he was sure he had gone, he turned and moved to the back of the barn, where the soft light of a shielded lantern glowed on twenty Highlanders lying in the hay. Steward had fed them well; he had found fresh clothes for some and sound weapons for others. Now most of them were asleep.

Hamish did not trouble them; he climbed the ladder into the loft, where his father and Stephen of Ireland sat cross-legged on the hay. They had been whispering for hours about the secret crafts of rebellion: how to use farm implements in battle, how to set an ambush, which kinds of moss are best to stop bleeding. The old Scot and the young Irishman had much in common. When Hamish arrived, they kept right on whispering.

Hamish moved past them to the dark corner in the very back of the barn, where he found William Wallace asleep. Hamish knelt and watched him, not wanting to disturb his friend’s slumber; and yet that sleep clearly was not peaceful. William’s face twitched, his body jerked, his lips moved as if they desperately needed to speak but could not make the words come.

Hamish knew what he was dreaming. Hamish, in his own way, had loved Murron, too.

There was a knock on the door of the barn in the rhythm Stewart used. Old Campbell and Stephen of Ireland broke off their talk and watched as one of the Highlanders down below opened the door to their host. He moved in and moved to the ladder up to the loft as the rest of the Highlanders stirred, knowing by Steward’s hurry that their time of rest was over.

Hearing the commotion below, William awoke suddenly and gazed at Hamish with the dazed look of someone who had leaped across worlds in and instant. He stared about him and seemed to Hamish disappointed to find himself back on this side of death, where his loneliness was a physical pain. He then looked at Hamish as if nothing had happened, as if he had awakened like any other man might, and Hamish pretended the same. “What is it?” William asked, seeing Steward mounting the top of the ladder. “What’s going on?”

“A messenger has arrived,” Hamish said.

Steward looked around him at each face before he spoke. “The English are advancing an army toward Stirling,” he said. “They appear to be reinforcing the one already there. It looks like a full-scale invasion.”

Campbell sucked a long full breath into his massive lugs. Scotland invaded. Full-scale war. Everything he had dreaded, feared — and prayed for. “Do the nobles rally?” he asked.

“Robert the Bruce had been chased from Edinburgh! But word of the march has spread, and Highlanders are coming down on their own by the hundred’s by the thousand!” Steward said.

And then without anyone meaning to, they all turned and looked at William Wallace.

STIRLING CASTLE STOOD THEN AS IT DOES NOW, PERCHED on a hill high about a grassy field cut in half by a river spanned by a bridge. Now the bridge is made of stone and steel; in June of 1297, it was made of wood.

On the seventeenth day of that month, Scottish nobles had gathered on a smaller hill overlooking the field; they wore gleaming armor, with plumes, sashes, and banners, and were attended by squires and grooms.

The mists of morning shrouded most of the field. But from the opposite side of the bridge they heard the clattering of a huge army moving forward. Lochlan, a noble with extensive holdings near Edinburgh, galloped to Mornay, who, as the representative of the strongest alliance of noble families on the field that day and a well-known ally of the imprisoned Robert the Bruce, was accepted by the other nobles as the man best accredited to discuss battlefield terms with the English commanders. Lochlan had come to the field that day expecting to negotiate, not fight, but the sheer size of the English army had his heart pounding. “It sounds like twenty thousand!” he shouted to Mornay even before he had drawn up his horse.

Mornay was calm. He too expected no battle; his voice, unlike Lochlan’s was dull with disappointment. “The scouts say it is ten.”

“And we have but two!”

The business of slaughter is a cauldron of boiling emotion, and the same dark apprehensions that had begun to spatter within Lochlan’s belly were likewise churning in the guts of the common Scottish soldiers who stood clustered around the small hill on the northern side of the bridge. There was an abbey on this hill, and many of the Scottish commoners on the field that morning had reason to look at the abbey and wish they’d had the privilege of selling their lives into monastic slavery of the soul rather than face the lot that was theirs that day.

Most of them owned no land, nor did they own the houses where they lived. They were allowed to inhabit the huts they called home by the good graces of the nobleman whose land they were privileged to work. The commoner then paid his liege lord a share of the harvest, the portions being determined not by the laborer’s productivity or the size of the family he as trying to feed but by his station in life, a status preestablished at the moment of his birth.