After Falkirk
A Scottish archer walks north from a broken field, his body carrying him before his mind has caught up.
I am still holding the bow.
This is the first thing I know. Not the walking, which my legs are doing without me, and not the direction, which is north because north is away. The bow. Three fingers of my right hand cramped around the stave where I have been gripping it for — I do not know how many hours. Since before. Since the formation. The yew is smooth under my palm and rough where the grip ends, and my hand will not let go of it because my hand has not been told.
The man who stood to my left is not walking. The man who stood to my right is not walking. I am walking. I do not have a thought about this yet. The thought is somewhere behind me on the field, still looking for a shape it can hold, and my legs are not waiting for it.
The sky is the colour of nothing. Late afternoon, the sun somewhere behind thin cloud, the light flat and even over the ground. July. The ground is churned — not mud exactly, but the memory of mud, the rigs of barley trampled into a surface that is neither field nor road. My boots make a sound on it like a man chewing with his mouth open. I hear this very clearly. I hear my own breathing. I hear crows.
I do not look back.
There are others on the road. Not a column. Not a retreat. Men walking in the same direction the way water runs downhill — without conference, without command, because the ground tilts north and their bodies have found the tilt.
Some are wounded. A man ahead of me has his left arm pressed to his side at an angle that means the arm is broken or the ribs beneath it are, and he walks with a gait that compensates for this, a hitch in every third step, a rhythm I listen to for a long time because it is easier than listening to my own thoughts. Another man has no shoes. His feet leave dark prints on the packed dirt. I look at my own feet. I still have my shoes. I do not know what this means.
No one speaks. Not in sentences. A man says water and another man points. A man says Christ and no one answers because it is not a question.
I come to a burn crossing the track — a thin thing, ankle-deep, running clear over gravel. I kneel and drink from it on my hands and knees, like a dog, and the water is so cold against my teeth that for a moment there is nothing else in the world, just cold water and the grit of the stream bed under my palms and the smell of wet earth and something green — watercress, maybe, bruised where men before me have knelt in the same place.
I drink until my stomach cramps and then I stay on my knees for a while because my legs have found their limit, and I watch the water run between my hands. It comes from somewhere and goes somewhere and does not know about Falkirk. I get up. I keep walking.
In a field off the road, a horse stands alone. No saddle. No rider. It stands very still, its head low, cropping grass, and when I pass it lifts its head and looks at me with the large, uncomprehending patience of an animal whose situation has changed in ways it cannot describe. I look at the horse. The horse looks at me. We understand each other in no way whatsoever, which is a kind of mercy.
The light goes on and on. This far north, this time of year, the sun will not set until past nine and the dark will not come until after ten, and the grey half-light between will stretch for hours. I walk through it. The barley in the fields stands waist-high, still green, the bearded heads bending slightly in whatever wind there is, and the fields do not know. The burns do not know. The road does not know. I carry the knowledge alone in my legs and in the stave of the bow I cannot put down and in the three fingers that will not open.
The schiltron held.
I need to say this. The schiltron held. It held against the horse, against the armoured weight of them coming at us in lines, the ground shaking, and the spears held because that is what spears do when men stand close enough and hold them level and do not look at what is coming. The man to my left had his shoulder against mine and the man to my right had his shoulder against mine and I could smell them both — sweat, wool, the iron-rust tang of the blood on someone’s spear tip from the first charge — and the formation held. It was a living thing. It breathed. I felt it breathe. The whole circle contracting and expanding, tightening when the horse came and loosening when they wheeled away, and the spears bristling outward like a creature that was all spine and no flesh, and it held.
Then the arrows came.
Not one volley. I need to say this too. Not the single fall of shafts that you can brace against, that strikes and stops and lets you count what you have lost. A sustained thing. A tearing. The sound was not what I expected — not the whistle of a single arrow, which I know, which any man who has drawn a bow knows. This was something else. A collective ripping, as though the air itself were linen being torn by many hands at once, and then the sound of them arriving — not sharp, not clean, but a thick percussive rattling, points hitting wood and leather and the iron of helmets and then, beneath that, the other sound, the one that was flesh, which was softer than you would think.
The man to my left went down. His shoulder left mine and where it had been was an absence that the formation could not close fast enough, and then the man behind him was trying to fill the gap and the arrows were still falling, still falling, they did not stop falling, and I understood then — this is the thing I carry — that the arrows were not an event. They were a condition. They were the weather now. And the schiltron was standing in the rain.
It held. It held longer than it should have. And then something passed through the formation — not a thought, not a decision, not cowardice — something that moved through all of us at once, a shudder, the way a rope under tension does not fray strand by strand but holds and holds and then is simply not holding. A collective flinch. The circle was a circle and then it was not. I was running before I knew the shape had broken. I was part of the rope.
I do not know whether this makes it better or worse.
The woman is standing in the dooryard of a farmstead somewhere north of Linlithgow. Stone wall, beaten earth, chickens. Her sleeves are pushed to her elbows and her hands are wet from whatever work I have interrupted. Peat smoke seeps through the thatch behind her in a slow horizontal drift that smells like every house I have ever been inside.
She sees the bow. She sees whatever is on my face.
“Where from,” she says. Not a question, quite. More the shape of one, offered so I can fill it or not.
“Falkirk,” I say. “South of the town. The field is —” I stop. I was going to say flat or open or the wrong ground, and none of these words are what I mean. “There was a battle.”
She waits.
“The cavalry left,” I say. “The horse turned and —” I stop again. The sentence has no end because the event has no shape. The cavalry left. The arrows came. The formation. The — I stop.
She watches me fail to finish. Her face does not change. She has seen men walk north before, or she has not, but either way she does not ask again.
She goes inside. She comes back with bread and a cup of water and sets them on the wall beside me. The bread is barley, dense and gritty, yesterday’s baking. The water is from a well.
I stand there with the bread in my hands and I consider — I am aware of considering — telling her that it was close. That we nearly held. That if the horse had stayed, if there had been archers of our own, if the ground had been different — the bridge at Stirling, say, where the ground was right and the spears were enough and a man could hold and have the holding mean something —
I do not say it.
Not because I am honest. I am not an honest man, or a dishonest one. I am a man whose mouth will only produce what happened, and what happened does not have the shape of nearly. The schiltron held and then it didn’t. The cavalry left and the arrows came and the men around me fell inside a circle that was no longer a circle, and there is no version of this that arrives at close.
I eat the bread. My hands shake holding it. The bread is the first food since the morning before the battle — two days, or nearly — and my teeth work through it slowly and my jaw aches and the taste of it is barley and salt and something like weeping, though I am not weeping. My eyes are dry. I am standing at a wall eating a woman’s bread and my hands are shaking and my eyes are dry and I do not know which of these facts to trust.
She has gone back inside. The chickens investigate my feet. I drink the water.
The thing I have not been thinking about. The thing I have been walking away from, though you cannot walk away from something you carry in the muscles of your eyes.
The cavalry turning.
I saw it from inside the schiltron. Not from the edge of the field, not from high ground — from inside the press of bodies, over the tops of the spears, through the narrow corridor of sky visible between one man’s shoulder and another’s. Horses turning. Not charging, not fleeing. Turning. The controlled pivot of men who have decided, or who have been told, and the banners going with them — pennons I could not read at that distance, snapping in whatever wind came across the field — and the rumps of the horses growing smaller.
The men in the formation saw it. I do not mean they looked and understood — I mean their bodies knew. The way the schiltron had been a living thing that breathed, it now became a thing that knew it was alone, and the breathing changed. The arrows were already falling. The arrows had been falling. And the horsemen were riding the wrong direction, and the two facts occupied the same moment, and between them was everything.
I think about the man who told us to stand. The one whose name I know and will not say, because every man on this road knows it and no one is saying it, because the name is a weight none of us can set down or carry. He told us to stand. We stood. Standing was the thing we had. And the horsemen — the lords, the mounted men, the ones with names that meant things — they took the other thing, the thing that would have made our standing matter, and they rode it off the field.
I do not know whose decision it was. I do not know whether it was treachery or calculation or the simple recognition that the day was lost and a lord on a horse can afford to recognise this while a man on foot cannot. It does not matter. What I know is this: I stood in a circle of men who were dying because they had been told that standing was enough, and it was not enough, and the men who could have made it enough were already gone.
He held. The man whose name I am not saying. He held, or he did not hold, or he held and it did not matter. I cannot find the difference between these things. I carry all three.
I stop because my legs stop.
The ground is higher here. Not mountains — low hills, rough grass over stone, heather beginning where the farmland gives up. The Ochils, maybe, or the country beyond them. I do not know exactly. I know only that it is north enough. The English cavalry will not come this far today, or tomorrow, or perhaps at all, because heavy horse does not climb and English ambition has a limit, even if I have not yet found it.
I sit. The bow goes across my knees. The yew stave is warm from my hand, warm from two days of carrying, and the string is slack — I did not string it at Falkirk; there was nothing to string it for; a bow against that rain of arrows is a stick against a flood. I carried it because my hand would not let go. My hand was right. A man should carry something.
The ground under me is thin turf over stone. I can feel the rock beneath the grass, close to the surface, cold even in July. The wind comes from the west and smells of peat — not burning, just the raw wet scent of bog — and heather, and the faintly mineral breath of exposed stone. A curlew calls from somewhere I cannot see. The sound carries and carries and does not come back.
I put my hands flat on the ground beside me.
The earth is cold. The grass is rough and short and damp. The stone beneath it pushes up against my palms the way stone does — not yielding, not welcoming, just there. The pressure of it against my hands is the pressure of a thing that does not know about schiltrons or cavalry or the man whose name I am not saying. It does not care about any of it. It holds my weight because that is what ground does.
I sit in the last of the long light. The sun is somewhere behind the hills to the west, not setting yet, not for another hour, and the sky is the colour of thinned milk, and my palms are flat against the cold ground, and I am still here.
The cause is broken. The formation is broken. The name that held us together is a name no one on the road will say. I do not know what Scotland is now. I do not know what it was before. I know the ground is cold and holds my weight, and my hands against it feel something I have no word for — not hope, which requires a future I cannot see, and not belonging, which requires a home I have not yet reached, but something beneath both. The pressure of the earth pushing back. The fact of a surface that does not give way.
My feet will have to learn the rest.
Tomorrow I will walk again. I do not know where. North, probably. North is what I have. My legs will carry me because that is what legs do when they have not been told to stop, and my hand will grip the bow because my hand has not been told to let go, and somewhere ahead of me there is ground I have not yet reached, and it will hold my weight too.
The light fades. The curlew calls again. I keep my hands where they are.