He bent over me then, bringing his ear close to my mouth and being extremely careful not to touch me in any way.
“Talk to me. Can you do that, if I stay like this?”
“I don’t know,” I wheezed, unable to move my jaw. “I’ll try.”
“What do we do now, Jamie?” I said nothing, and he added, “We have to do something. We can’t do nothing. But what do we do? We have to tell Will, and how will we do that? This will kill him, kill him.”
“No.” I could barely get the small word out, and Ewan stooped quickly again to place his ear close to my lips. I breathed slowly, then tried again, hearing my own words mangled by my inability to move my broken jaw. “No. He won’t die …” That emerged as “Ee owned eye,” but Ewan jerked away and looked at me and I knew he had understood. I took several steady breaths before I tried again, articulating each word as slowly and clearly as I could. “You’ll have to tell him, Ewan. I can’t. I can’t talk.”
He nodded, and then he asked, “What’ll we do with you now? I can’t take you back in that shape. You’d die on the road. You might die anyway, if you can’t eat anything.”
“Yakobus,” I whispered. “There are monks in Lanark. Yakobus will ge’ me there … ’morrow … An’ they’ll ge’ me to G’asgow …”
Ewan prepared to stand up, but I hissed at him. “No!”
“What?” He bent to my lips again.
“Can’t go … can’t go back wi’out knowing … Back to Lanark, about Mirren … Can’t tell Will he’s lost his children and not know how his wife is. You have to go back and make sure she … she’s well.”
“Jesus, Jamie, how can she be well? She’s lost her bairns and her mother.”
“Not her life, though … Not her life, pray God. Find out, Ewan.”
This time his headshake was decisive. “All right. We will. We’ll make a bier for you tonight, from bits of the wagon, then we’ll leave first thing in the morning and we’ll take you with us. There’s eight of us, not counting Jacobus, so we can take turns carrying you in teams of four. It’s only three miles. We’ll leave you with the monks and I’ll go back into Lanark. When I know how Mirren is, I’ll go and tell Will. You’ll get to Glasgow in the meantime, as soon as you can travel, and get your friend Wishart started on setting Mirren free. There must be something he can do, otherwise what’s the point of being a bishop?”
And so it was. Under Ewan’s guidance, several of Robertson’s bowmen spent time that evening making a carrying frame for me out of two floorboards from the wrecked wagon. With cross pieces made from wheel spokes and the whole thing tied together with pieces cut from the harness reins, it was ungainly but light and well suited to its purpose.
I barely slept at all that night, unable to find comfort or relief from the pain of my ribs and head, but the following morning, strapped tightly into immobility in my new bed, I fell asleep on the road before I had been carried for half a mile and slept like a dead man, undisturbed by stops or bearer changes, until they woke me up in the humble monastery outside the walls of Lanark. Ewan was bending over me, looking very serious and telling me something that appeared to be important, but my head was swimming and the pain was unbearable and I must have passed out again. I remember waking up again some time after that, to find an aged monk holding a cup to my lips and forcing me to drink some foul-smelling brew, and then I remember nothing for several days until I awoke to find Father Jacobus sitting close by my side, peering intently into my face.
Startled to see his face so near my own, I blinked myself awake and tried to sit up, but that was an unwise thing to do, since I had forgotten about my injured ribs and I almost passed out again from the pain of trying to move against my restraints.
When I recovered from my near swoon and was able to catch my breath again, I discovered, with a flaring surge of horror, that I was utterly mute, incapable of even opening my mouth.
Jacobus leaned towards me. “You can’t speak,” he said. “Your jaw is wired shut. I have never seen the like of it. Can you hear me? Blink if you can.” I blinked eagerly and he held up a hand. “Are you really here this time?” He interpreted my confusion correctly, for he nodded quickly and held up his hand again.
“I thought you were here yesterday. And the day before, and the day before that. But you weren’t, because you couldn’t remember me having been here when I came back next time. Yesterday I would have sworn on oath that you were fully here. Do you remember me being here yesterday? If you do, blink once. If you do not, blink twice.”