The Forest Laird (8 page)

Brother Duncan, or Brother Armarius, ignored us, looking without expression at our guide.

“And so you have completed your duty?”

“After this, aye, Brother.”

I turned to whisper something to Will, but before I could open my mouth, a stinging blow to my ribs made me catch my breath in pain.

“Silence!” Brother James hissed. “Keep your mouth shut in the presence of Brother Armarius.”

Will stepped in front of me, raising clenched fists and glaring at Brother James. “Keep your hands to yourself,” he snarled.

Brother James swung his hand hard at Will’s face, but before the blow could land it was caught firmly by Brother Duncan.

“That will be all, Brother James,” Duncan said quietly, releasing the other’s wrist slowly. “You may return to your duties. I will see to these two.”

Brother James glared, his pinched face flushed again, but then he dropped his eyes and nodded. “As you wish, Brother Armarius. I pass them to your care.” He threw one last, venomous glance at us, and then he stalked away, his sandals scraping on the stone floor until the solid thud of the door closing at his back left us in silence again.

Our cousin looked down at both of us, his face disapproving. “This is the library,” he said. “I am its custodian. I believe it to be the most sacred place in all the Abbey, save for the sanctuary itself. I am not without prejudice, admittedly, but there is nothing within these walls, within this library, that any single person could afford to purchase, even were that possible. Nothing in here is for sale, and nothing has an assigned value. Everything you see here, and much that you will never see, is beyond price, for there are no duplicates, other than those we make ourselves here in this room. So you may look but you must never touch anything. Is that clear?”

When we had both nodded in acknowledgment, he walked to the closest table, where he waved a hand over the single sheet of parchment that lay there, its colours, gold, crimson, blue, and bright green, coruscating in the bright sunlight that shone down on it. “This piece was made more than seven hundred years ago.” He stopped, giving us time to react appropriately to this unimaginable span of time, then picked the document up reverently, and set it down carefully out of the direct light. “Sunlight can harm it, leach the colours. This came from Ireland, from a monastery at a place called Kells, and the name of the man who made it is forever lost. Think of that. A faceless, nameless monk, working alone, in close to darkness for countless years, created it to the glory of God. It is unique. Our very finest artists cannot duplicate it. Copy it, yes, but poorly, inadequately, for we have lost the secret of the pigments and cannot replicate the colours. Do you begin to see why I permit none but myself and a few others to touch it?”

We nodded, and he dipped his head in return. “Good. Come, then, and meet those others.”

With that, we were introduced to the other monks in the room, Brothers Anselm, Joseph, Bernard, and Bede. Brother Joseph was the eldest and most frail, his bald, mottled pate fringed with wispy, pure white hair. Brother Anselm and Brother Bernard were next in age, and Brother Bede was the youngest, with a full beard and a head of dense, curly black hair surrounding the shaved square of his tonsure. Brother Duncan introduced us by name, although he made no mention of our relationship to him, and all of them welcomed us warmly, the first members of the community at large to do so. Bede and Bernard were librarians, tasked with the care of the library’s contents, while the other three were transcriptors, who spent their entire time copying the collection’s most valuable texts.

Brother Duncan then led us on a journey around the library, explaining what it held and how it functioned. It was easy to tell that he loved his library, and yet his grim face never relaxed from its scowling watchfulness, which led me to think he did not really want us there. When we had completed a full circuit of the room, he asked us if we had any questions.

“If you please, Brother, I heard—” My voice had emerged as a squeak, and I coughed and tried again, relieved to hear it come out normally this time. “Brother James called you Brother Armarius, but I thought your name was Brother Duncan. Which is correct?”

A sudden change came over his face and his eyes gleamed, so that I thought, for the merest instant, that he was about to smile. But then his face resumed its normal expression.

“Both are correct. I am Brother Duncan and Brother Armarius, but the first is the mere man, while the other is a title. The word
armarius
means provisioner, and it describes my duties. I am the director of the scriptorium, this room in which my colleagues and I work. One of my responsibilities is to provide the material that we need—inks and pens and parchment and fine brushes. Another is to supervise the work being done. Thus the armarius is a form of supervisor. Do you know that word? Excellent. Then I am the supervisor here. I have other duties within the Abbey as armarius, but you will learn of those later. For the time being, supervisor will suffice, and my brethren address me as Brother Armarius. Do you understand now?”

“Yes, Brother,” I said.

He looked from one to the other of us then. “And what think you of our library? Be frank.”

Will shrugged vaguely, but I had no qualms about what was in my mind. I told Brother Duncan that his library was the most wondrous place I had ever seen, and I meant every word I said.

He studied me for a few moments, his lips pursed. “Then you may see it again someday,” he said. “But now we must return you to the Abbey. Father Peter is waiting for you and will tell you all about your tasks, your daily duties, your tutors, and your classes. Off with you, then. Brother Bede will see you safely to where you must be.”

4

O
ur first year as pupils at the Abbey school quickly defined the differences that would circumscribe our lives from that point on, although neither Will nor I was aware of anything unusual occurring at the time. Our bright new life in Paisley was
too
new, too different, and too exciting for either one of us to have concern for subtleties or self-examination. We were healthy boys, full of enthusiasm and engrossed by the challenges thrown at us daily, and we were too involved in conquering the ever-changing aspects of our diverging pathways even to be aware of the divergence.

We shared a single room at night, in truckle beds that we stowed upright against the wall each morning, and we were up and astir every day before dawn, grateful for the few extra hours of sleep we would have lost to prayer had we been lodged at the Abbey. Ewan was frequently up and about before we awoke, but Aggie the cook served breakfast to us every day—oatmeal and bannock invariably, with goat’s milk to wash it down, and, very infrequently, a slice of salted pork or venison that was delicious to eat but always made us thirst long before the noon break in our lessons.

I was the scholar, Will the earnest, plodding student. Latin, Greek, French, and mathematics came so easily to me that I barely thought of them as tasks; they were simple pleasures that I soaked up like sunshine. For Will, though, they were chronic tribulations that he tackled grimly every day, jaws clenched, eyes squinting in ferocious concentration. Latin and French he mastered eventually with much help from me, but Greek remained Greek to him—incomprehensible. Simple arithmetic he grasped easily, but the more arcane elements of mathematics, the recently discovered algebraic calculations from Arabia, failed to capture his interest. It was the same with the more classical elements of what the monks tried to teach him: the theories of logic and polemic were lost on Will, and yet he would debate some point of philosophy for hours, principally because some assertion of Augustine of Hippo, or Plato or Aristotle, had struck a chord in him, challenging or confirming something he believed intuitively.

Now that I think about it, it may have been at that time, towards the end of our first scholastic year, that I first began to suspect my cousin lacked imagination. I was very young at the time, of course, but I had been soaking up knowledge like a sponge for close to a twelvemonth by then and I can remember being puzzled about what I sometimes saw as a startlingly obvious inability in Will to connect salient points of a debate; to make intuitive leaps from one abstract notion to another. God Himself knows William Wallace had no difficulties with logical thought or decisive action, but something occasionally troubled me about the way he would seem to hamper his own progress in a manner that struck me as obtuse. I remember, hazily, one of our teachers saying something about Will being unable to assimilate shades of grey in striving for a goal. I know that Will saw life, particularly in later years, in black and white: bad and good, darkness and light, perfidy and honour.

Or perhaps I never did think of him as lacking in imagination, if I am truthful here. The gulf between ten years of age and seventy is vast, and memory can make fools of us, so my opinion on these things might be misguided, formed unwittingly in retrospect while mulling over all that William Wallace did and might have done.

Be that as it may, a different rule applied at eveningtide. Released from our scholastic studies each afternoon just before vespers, we would hurry home to eat, and then our daily studies with Ewan would begin, and in those our roles were completely reversed. This was the arena within which Will Wallace soared while I stumbled behind him; here he was the gifted and intuitive disciple offering advice and assistance to me while I laboured in his wake, flailing and floundering as I tried to absorb the lessons and the disciplines that to him were the basic elements of life.

We had no bows at first. Instead, every day after school in the first week after our move to Paisley, Ewan took us deep into the surrounding greenwood, where we spent the hours until dusk, each evening for six days, finding and then painstakingly selecting eight straight, heavy lengths of sapling ash and elm, the thinnest no less than a full thumb’s length wide and the thickest half that width again. Our search was for whole young trees that contained a straight length greater by a hand’s span than the length of each of our bodies and did so without tapering, which meant we had to gauge each selection with great care before we cut it, and then trim it so that when we held it close it rose perfectly straight from the ground at our feet to where we could hold its upper end with the base of our hands resting on the top of our foreheads. It was not a simple task, and the time taken to complete it reflected that: six whole evenings to find and cut eight poles. But then, these were not mere poles: each of them was an axis around which our training, our entire lives as Ewan’s students, would revolve for the next two years, until we outgrew them and had to make new ones.

The next stage of our instruction started immediately after Mass the following day, which was a Sunday, our only day of rest from school. As soon as we arrived home from the Abbey after morning Mass, Ewan set us to work. Each of us began with a staff of green elm, solid and heavy with sap. We stripped it of bark and then rubbed it with a compound of alum that Ewan provided, which soaked up the natural slippery outer juice of the wood, leaving it smooth and dry to the touch. We set these two aside for what Ewan called daily use, although we had no idea at the time what that meant, and turned our attention to the other six, stripping those as we had the first pair, while Ewan cut long, finger-wide strips of leather from a cured hide. He had a big iron pot of water boiling over the fire, and he immersed the strips in the boiling pot until they were supple again. Then he pulled them out one by one with a pair of tongs and laid them to cool on the stone floor. We stopped for a meal at noon, and as soon as we were finished, Ewan tested each of the stripped poles for straightness, holding each one up to his eye to peer along its length. He then separated them into groups of three, one elm and two ash in each, and had Will and me hold each bundle securely while he bound it tightly with the wet strips of hide.

That was slow work, and clamping the poles together for so long taxed our hands and arms sorely. Ewan worked patiently and methodically, knotting the strips together end to end until he had several individual strips each five or six paces long. Then he knotted six long lengths together at one end and wove them tightly around the rods in careful, overlapping spirals from top to bottom. When the bundles were fully bound, he gathered the overlapping ends at the bottom of each, clamped them between the jaws of an iron clamp, and twisted them tightly until Will and I could no longer hold the bundle steady against the torque. He then bade Will hold the bundle securely while I took hold of the clamp, and while we strained against each other, fighting to keep the tension he had gained, he bound the twisted ends together with another tool, a long, bent iron needle into which he fed the end of yet another wet strip and knitted it tightly crosswise through the clamped bindings. When he had finished, he straightened up, tossing the first bound package into the air and catching it again.

“There,” he said. “That should do the job. Now all they have to do is dry properly, which will keep them from warping.”

Will’s head jerked up. “What’s warp?”

“Twisting out of true. By the time they warp, they’ll be dry, and when they’re dry we can fix the warp. It’s tedious, but it can be done.”

“How do you do it?”

Ewan rubbed his hairless pate. “You take the warped stave, soak it with hot steam, and bend it until it’s straight again. All it takes is time and a measure of care.”

“Will these warp, d’you think?”

“Not if we watch them and tend them carefully. The leather straps will dry as hard as iron. We’ll set them on the rafters here above the fireplace and turn them every day so that they never get too much heat on any side for too long. That way, they should dry evenly.”

Will studied the bundles. “You haven’t told us what they’re for.”

Ewan raised his hairless eyebrows. “What do you think they’re for?”

“To make bows.”

“No, they are not, so you’re wrong. That must be a new feeling for you, eh?” His toothless grin removed any sting from the words. “When they’re done they’ll be what the English call quarterstaffs. And before you ask, a quarterstaff is a fighting stick for men who can’t afford a sword. They’ve been around for hundreds of years. The ancient Romans used them. They’re twice the weight of a sword and you’ll learn to fight with them as swords. Then, if you ever have to use a real blade, it will seem featherlight in your hands.”