Braveheart

  Braveheart

  Randall Wallace

  For love of country, for love of maiden, for love of freedom… he became the hammer and scourge of England.

  In one of history’s darkest hours there arose from humble beginnings a man of courage and honor—the likes of whom the world may never see again. Amid the color, pageantry, and violence of medieval Scotland unfurls the resplendent tale of the legendary William Wallace, farmer by birth, rebel by fate, who banded together his valiant army of Scots to crush the cruel tyranny of the English Plantagenet king.

  Mel Gibson is William Wallace, the valiant highlander whose epic adventures changed the course of history.

  BRAVEHEART

  A novel by

  Randall Wallace

  To Scottish friends I lift a glass

  To you, who’ve kept alive

  The memory of heroes past

  Across dark moors of time

  To you who know this simple truth

  And show it near and far

  It is the tales we tell ourselves

  That make us who we are

  So let us drink to Scotland fair

  Its sorrow and its solace

  And lift our glasses in the air

  To you and William Wallace

  And to the Clan that bears his name

  My sisters and my brothers

  I’d rather be a man in your eyes

  Than a king in any others

  Randall Wallace

  “BRAVEHEART”

  William and Murron rode along the ridge to a grove, from which they could see a breathtaking loch. There he turned to her in the moonlight…

  “I have fought. And I have hated. I know it is in me to hate and to kill. But I’ve learned something else away from my home. And that is that we must always have a home, somewhere inside us. I don’t known how to explain this to you, Murron; I wish I could. When I lost my father and brother, it hurt my heart so much. I wished I had them back! I wished the pain would go away. I thought I might die of grief alone! I wanted to bring that grief to the people who had brought it to me.”

  William’s words were coming fast now. Slow to get started, they had become impossible to stop. “But later I came to realize something. My father and his father had not fought and died so I could become filled with hate. They fought for me to be free to love. They fought because they loved! They loved me. They wanted me to have a free life. A family. Respect from others, for others. Respect for myself. I had to stop hating and start loving.”

  He squeezed her hands. He reached with trembling fingers and combed her windblown hair away from her face, so he could see it fully. “But that was easy. I thought of you….”

  Acknowledgments

  The journey of Braveheart has taught me about clanship, that bond of loyalty and shared devotion that unites across time and miles. I have seen in new ways how those who have loved me and prayed for me have become a part of all I do.

  Such a bond goes beyond thanks; but there are some who, because of the miles they walked on the path that led to his book, must not go unmentioned here. They are:

  Evelyn and Thurman Wallace, my mother and father, for the legacy of their example that all freedom begins with freedom of the sprit, and that it has a price, pain the currency of love. And my sister, Jane Wallace Sublett, who, by loving me so consistently through victory of defeat, has helped me accept both, and fear neither.

  James W. Connor, who, even before I did, believed I would write novels someday.

  Dr. Thomas Langford of Duke University, who taught me that deeds were the finest sermons, and who opened my life to the possibility that every prayer was a story, and every story a prayer.

  Judy Thomas, who helped me believe that all writhing should sing the silent music of the soul.

  James J. Cullen, whose screenplay about heroism and honor was the first-and still is one of the finest-I ever read, and whose poetic glories inspired me to attempt such a work of my own.

  Rebecca Pollack Parker, who when the inspiration for Braveheart was but a spark, embraced it in the lantern of her sprit and nurtured it to flame.

  Lisa Drew, editor of this book, whose relentless faith in my novels has brought me back to writing them.

  And let me not forget Blind Harry, roving minstrel of Scotland, who kept alive the tales of William Wallace.

  And always and forever, my wife, Christine, and our sons, Andrew, and Cullen. Among all the other gratitudes for my family, there is this: to write truly of love and women of strength, one must know them- and I know Christine. And the sprits of our sons are a constant revelation of God’s sweetest strategy: he gives us a gift so great that we would give our lives in return.

  This book is for you all.

  Prologue

  I will tell you of William Wallace.

  I first encountered his story when my wife and I came upon the statue of him that, along with one of King Robert the Bruce, guards the entrance to Edinburgh Castle in Scotland. I am an American; I had grown p in the American South within a family I know to be Scotch-Irish, and although I had always been interested in history, I never through much about our roots extending beyond America. We were dirt farmers from Tennessee. What I am trying to say is that I never thought of our having famous relatives.

  Songs of William Wallace have been sung for hundreds for years, and not just by Scotland’s poets along- even Winston Churchill wrote, with keen admiration, about Wallace’s courage and sprit. But to me, an American, his story seemed lost, a great treasure of the past, utterly precocious of our time, lying neglected and forgotten. His story began to speak to me, to haunt me; it entered my live as divine gifts do, quietly, overwhelmingly irreversibly.

  Historians agree on only a few facts about Wallace’s life, and yet they cannot dispute that his life was epic. There were times when I tried myself to be a fair historian, but life is not all about balance, it’s about passion, and this story raised my passions. I had to see through the eyes of a poet.

  No one knows what William Wallace whispered into the ear of the woman he loved most. No one else heard the words he spoke to God when he prayed. And the words he shouted to his army, when the men who fought behind him were desperately outnumbered were recorded only in their hearts and can be read there.

  In my heart, this is exactly how it happened….

  THE BOY

  1

  THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS ARE A LAND OF EPIC BEAUTY: cobalt mountains beneath a glowering purple sky fringed with pink, as if the clouds are a lid too small for the earth; a cascading landscape of boulders shrouded in deep green grass; and the blue lochs, reflecting the sky. In summer, the sun lingers for hours in its rising and setting; in winter, day is a brief union of dawn and twilight. In all seasons the night is a serenade of stars, singing white in the silence of an endless black sky.

  Elderslie lies between Glasgow and Edinburgh, at the gateway into the Highlands. It was in the shire or Elderslie, in or about the year 1276, that a contingent of mounted Scottish noblemen converged on a farm nestled in an isolated Scottish valley. The noblemen wore sparkling chestplates and woolens colored with the richest dyes of the day; even their horses draped in luxurious cloth. But they had left their armed escorts far behind, for this was a meeting of truce, and the terms were that each nobleman could be accompanied by a single page boy. The nobles had agreed, for each know that their country needed peace, and to have peace, Scotland’s crown must have a head to wear it, and they had to have a meeting to establish just whose head that should be.

  Their old king had died without an heir. The rightful succession belonged to an infant girl, called the Maid of Norway, and the nobles of Scotland sent for their new queen. The Vikings, cousins to the Scots, agreed to bring her down on one of th
eir ships.

  On the English throne in London sat King Edward I, known as Edward the Longshanks because of his lengthy legs. He disputed the ascension of the baby to the throne and claimed the right to chose Scotland’s new monarch lay with him and him alone. Longshanks was a Plantagenet, a line of rulers renowned for their ruthlessness and accused by their enemies of worshiping pagan deities that delighted in cruelty. And so when the baby died on her journey south, there were those who said she had been smothered and Longshanks was to blame.

  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 pan
ic.

  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.