The Forest Laird (9 page)

“I don’t
want
to use a sword,” Will said. “I want to learn to use a bow.”

“I know that, boy, but look at yourself. And look at Jamie here. And then look at me.” He quickly shrugged his tunic over his head, baring his upper body, and as we gaped at him he crossed his arms on his chest and grasped his enormous shoulder muscles, then tensed himself and raised his elbows forward stiffly to display the corded strength of his forearms, the bull-like thickness of his massive torso, and the pillar of his neck. Beneath the taut arch of his ribs, his belly bulged with twin columns of muscled plates.

“Here’s what you’re lacking, lads,” he said, making his belly muscles twist and writhe from side to side like some thick snake. “Thews. Archers’ muscles.” He dropped his arms and reached for his tunic. “You’ll never pull a bow until you have them, and the quarterstaff’s the only thing that will give them to you. You’ll use it every day, hour after hour until you can’t lift your arms and the staff falls from your fingers, and then you’ll rest until the blood returns and start all over again.”

He faced Will. “You want to be an archer, William Wallace? Well, I’ll teach you to be one and you’ll hate me while I’m doing it. But I promise you, within this year you’ll see the benefits of the quarterstaff. You’ll see muscles growing where you don’t have places yet. And once you’ve seen the first of them, you’ll never want to stop. Believe me on that.” He pointed at the two lengths of stripped elm that we had set aside at the start. “Those are your first ones, and they’re green with sap—wet and heavy and cumbersome. They’ll introduce you to the pains of becoming a warrior. Tomorrow, after school, I’ll teach you how to hold one.”

He spoke the truth, and we spent the whole of the next evening learning how to hold a quarterstaff. Anyone with hands can grasp a stick, we thought at first, so whence was the promised difficulty to come? The answer, of course, lay in what we had not yet considered: a quarterstaff is not a mere stick of wood but a potent weapon, and there are many ways to hold one but only a very few in which to hold one effectively. And so began three months of torment as we sought in vain to please our tutor, whose amiable nature had vanished when we first laid hold of those elm staves. He made us work so hard, so endlessly, that by day I found myself falling asleep at my lessons and often incapable of closing my bruised fingers on my pen, a situation that too often drew my tutors’ disapproval.

But then came a day when I survived my entire schedule of lessons without lapse or mishap and began to realize that the agonies that had plagued me for so long were no longer noticeable. I went directly to Will with the news, and he told me that his, too, had died away, and we marvelled together over the difference, wondering what had caused it. The regimen so grimly imposed on us each evening by Ewan was no less brutal or demanding; he still badgered us relentlessly for hours each day, driving us harder and faster every time, but the pains had receded and the effort we expended on our drills no longer sapped us to exhaustion.

Three months had elapsed by then. A month later, Ewan had been summoned to Elderslie by Sir Malcolm, leaving us with an unaccustomed gap in our after-school training. It was late summer, and so Will and I had gone swimming in the river that flowed near our house.

“Wait,” Will cried out as I prepared to dive back into the pool from which I had just emerged. He was standing neck-deep in water, fanning his arms to hold himself in place against the sluggish current. “Wait you. Stay there.”

“What?” I said hastily, looking down at my loins. “Is there a leech on me?”

He launched himself forward and swam until he was directly below me, then stood again and peered up at me, flicking the wet hair out of his eyes. I still could see no leech, though the thought of one unnerved me. I loathed the things.

“Where is it, the leech?”

“There’s no leech,” he said. “I see muscles. Your belly’s hard and your shoulders have grown out. And look at your arms.”

I looked, but could see no difference there from the last time I had looked. And then I realized what he was talking about, even before he went on to say, “Ewan was right. You’re growing muscles where you had none before. What about me, am I?”

He pulled himself up onto the bank, and as I looked at him this time I saw it, the change that had been so gradual that I had not noticed it before. Naked, Will was now far bigger than he had been when we first arrived in Paisley. His shoulders were wider, his chest broader and deeper, and his arms and legs were sculpted with muscles that I had never seen before. So impressed were we, so enthused by what we had discovered, that we raced home to work at our drills without Ewan’s supervision for the first time.

Neither one of us had yet raised his staff against the other. All our drills were carried out against an immovable, unconquerable enemy: a thick length of elmwood that neither of us could encircle with our arms. We had found it close by the firewood pile at the bottom of the garden and had helped Ewan to dig a posthole and entrench the thing. Now it reared high above us, impervious to the worst assaults we could inflict on it. For months now, all we had done was hit it with our staves. But four months had brought great change in how we hit it. In the earliest days, our blows had been clumsy—heavy, sullen, and repetitive, aimed at areas that Ewan had marked clearly—and we had tired rapidly without being permitted to rest. Now we could hammer out tattoos on the different marks, using both ends of our staves to attack several simultaneously. The sound of our hammering blows was as fast and clear as the rapping of a woodpecker.

The staves now felt natural to us, extensions of our arms and hands, and our minds and eyes directed our assaults without conscious thought. Little wonder our bodies were now responding visibly to what we had demanded of them. As we had grown inured to the monotony of the drills, we had devised another use for them; the regular, rhythmic staccato of our drumming blows turned out to be the perfect accompaniment for the daily exercise of learning our Latin and French vocabulary, so that each evening we would hammer through declensions and conjugations as we belaboured the unyielding post.

When summer turned to autumn that year, Ewan presented each of us with bows that he had made for us, and that occasion was the first time I had ever stopped to wonder what he did all day while we two were at school. The bows were beautiful, made of elmwood and a finger-width flat in section, less than half the size of Ewan’s own giant weapon of rounded yew. Each came with a dozen arrows fletched in different colours, blue for me and red for Will, and iron points that sleeved the ends and had no barbs. These were not hunting bows, Ewan told us. They were practice instruments through which we would learn accuracy and rhythm, the two most vital elements of archery.

The following year, he made two more for us, larger this time to fit our growing size, these fashioned of ash and round in section, which gave them greater tension and demanded far more strength in pulling. I worked hard with both bows for the space of those two years, practising diligently until I became adequately skilled, but Will, from the outset, was a prodigy. By the time I was thirteen and he fifteen, from sixty paces I could plant five arrows out of six within the central ring of the straw targets Ewan had built for us. Will could do the same with all six arrows from a hundred paces and group them so closely that they often touched one another in the very centre of the ring. Even Ewan doffed his hood to Will the first time he achieved that feat, but having done it once, Will then proceeded to do it almost every time, steadily increasing the distance of his casts until he could hit the ring from one hundred and sixty-three paces, the extreme range of his ash bow. No matter how he tried, he simply could not hurl a projectile any farther than that distance. But then, he was fifteen years old, and not a single man we knew, other than Ewan, could match him with the same bow. He had already begun supplying fresh game and venison to the Abbey kitchens.

Watching ruefully as Will outstripped me yet again in matters physical, I was facing a difficult decision of my own, one that I knew would lead us apart from each other. Brother Duncan had invited me to work in the library, where I would take over the duties of Brother Bernard, who would in turn replace the aged and increasingly blind Brother Joseph. I knew that to have been invited to replace Brother Bernard was an unprecedented honour for a boy my age. It was also a dream come true for me.

Brother Duncan told me that he believed I had a natural talent for the kind of work to which he had dedicated his life—the study and care of books—and had been watching me closely since my first visit to his library. He had taken note for several years now not only of the frequency of my visits but of the care and attention with which I treated the texts and documents to which I was permitted access. He also enumerated the reasons why I could be forgiven for refusing the position, explaining that the work itself could be injurious to one’s health. “Few people recognize how arduous is the writer’s path,” he said. “It dims the eyes, makes the back ache, and knits the chest and belly together. It is, in short, a terrible ordeal for the whole body.”

His warning had no effect. I wanted that librarian’s position more than I had ever wanted anything, and no mere threat of physical affliction would deter me from taking it. The single obstacle was my life with Will.

We two had never been apart for any length of time since coming to the Abbey, and everything we had experienced had been shared. I now faced a choice that would alter our relationship forever. I would have to abandon my archery and the sheer enjoyment of all the time spent with Will daily at the butts, and making that break frightened me. Though he knew something was troubling me, I put off telling Will until I had no other choice and no time left.

After five full years of tuition, we spoke to each other all the time in fluent Latin, the primary language of our studies, and he listened carefully to what I had to say, his head cocked in the way I still associate most closely with him. When I had stammered my way through my tale and asked him what I should do, he narrowed his eyes at me. But then, instead of saying anything, he unslung his ashwood bow from across his shoulders and held it up in front of him.

“D’you know what this is?”

I blinked at him. “Of course I do. It’s your bow.”

“No, Jamie, it’s far more than that. This is my life. I know it makes no sense to you, but I live only to master this weapon and I can’t say why or how; I only know I have to learn everything there is to know about it and about the craft of it. I have to learn to wring every ounce of power out of it, to cast my arrows farther and more truly than any other man I will ever meet. I have no choice in any part of that and no understanding of why it should be so. It’s like being bewitched. It is simply something that consumes me, all the time, and I will never have my fill of it.”

He pulled an arrow from his quiver, nocked it, and sent it, almost absent-mindedly, flying into the centre of the target that stood more than a hundred paces away.

“I am an archer. That is what I do, what I am, and it’s all I want to be.” He slung the bow across his chest again and pulled the bowstring snugly against his back. “You feel the same way about books, Jamie. I know that. Your need to learn about the library is just as strong as my need to learn the bow. So why waste time in wondering if you should? Go and do what you want to do, and do it to the full. You already know all you need to know about archery, but you know almost nothing yet about what you truly love most—your library. I’ll miss you in the evenings, but it’s not as if we’ll never see each other again, is it? You’ll still live with me and Ewan, and you can bore me with your talk of inks and parchment just as I’ll bore you with mine of bowcraft. But you’re not gone yet, so we had better be about our drill, or Ewan will have our heads. Come on.”

He hooked an arm around my neck, and I came close to weeping with gratitude.

CHAPTER THREE

1

O
ne Friday morning in February 1286, we were released from our lessons at mid-morning and informed that there would be no more classes that day. This was a rare enough occurrence to be welcomed boisterously by the Abbey’s small student body, and there followed a frantic exodus as almost two score of boys sought to escape the premises before some joyless monk could come along and set them all to work at other tasks.

Will and I had been forewarned by Brother Duncan, who had heard from Father Peter what was happening that day, and so we knew that we had no need to run and hide. On those rare occasions when the Abbey was visited by distinguished guests, the entire complement of the brotherhood turned out to honour them and to participate in the ceremonies attending the visits. Today’s visitors had come to the Abbey as representatives of the King of Scots, Alexander III. We knew little more than that the Bishop of Glasgow headed the religious element of the deputation.

It was a bright, beautiful day for the time of the year, the third one in succession and a harbinger, everyone hoped, of an early, welcome spring. We made our way contentedly to one of our favourite spots, far enough away from the Abbey buildings to be secure from interruption and yet close enough for us to be able to return quickly in the unlikely event of an alarum being sounded on the iron triangle that hung by the main entrance. Our destination was an oxbow loop in the small river that ran through the heavily wooded area to the north of the Abbey, a place of dappled shadows on a sunny day but one that could be cold, boggy, and treacherous in inclement weather. The loop of the river there was wide and placid, the dry land within the oxbow covered with lush grass. Below an outcrop of rock was a long, chest-deep swimming hole for our personal enjoyment. There were fish in there, speckled trout that hovered, barely visible, at the edge of the current below the falls, and the soft earth of the banks showed the cloven hoof marks of the deer that came there daily to drink.

The main attraction of the place for us was a recent modification, the result of a violent windstorm that had brought down an enormous ash tree athwart the stream the previous spring. At first we had been dismayed, thinking our favourite place ruined. It had taken us several days to become aware that the collapse of the giant had resulted in a double bridge over the deepest part of our swimming hole, the main trunk splitting in such a way as to lay two major limbs side by side and less than three feet apart. We lopped off all the trailing branches, leaving only the two bare poles of the main limbs in place, the thinner of the two resting slightly less than a foot below the level of the other. It was perfect for our purposes, and we had put it to good use throughout the summer and autumn months that followed.

That February day was the first time we had returned to the spot that year, and we wasted no time. Will ran lithely out into the middle of the lower limb and leaned against his staff, propping it on the upper pole and looking down into the water as I sprang up and across the narrow gap to the upper log.

“Sunshine or no,” he said, “that water’s cold enough to kill the first man in.” He leered up at me. “And guess what? It’s not going to be me.”

“Then we’ll both go home dry, for it won’t be me, either,” I said, grinning back at him.

I remember I felt strong and confident that day, highly aware of my own physique and conditioning. It was true that I was a librarian now and spent much of my time cooped up indoors and out of the sun, but I was far fitter than any of my contemporaries and most of the brotherhood’s younger members. Five years and more of constant drill and exercise with the heavy quarterstaves had made a man of me, in physical size at least. I was broad and strong, nimble and sure-footed and filled with energy and stamina. I can see, looking back now, that I was quite proud of myself, but I had good reason. I also had a constant reminder that I should never crow too much, for Will dwarfed me. He towered a full head over me, and his shoulders seemed twice the width of mine. He had legs like tree trunks and arms to match, and his chest was almost as broad and deep as Ewan’s though he was not yet seventeen.

It was that difference in our sizes that made the twin bridges perfect for our needs, because the extra height I gained by standing on the upper log fairly cancelled out Will’s advantage, and the few extra inches of girth in the log beneath my feet accorded me an added measure of stability and foot room, so that when we faced each other across the narrow gap we were as close as we could come to being evenly matched.

We began slowly—not cautiously, for we knew what we were doing, but we had not stood on the logs for months and they had become coated with a thin film of moss, so our opening moves were tentative, each of us gauging his own balance and ease of mobility rather than paying attention to the other. Finally Will straightened his back.

“Are you ready?”

In reply I hefted my staff in both hands and snapped my arm straight in front of me, rapping one end against the centre of his weapon, but even as I made contact he was whipping his staff away to the side, raising it high and bringing it straight down in a tightly controlled, two-handed slash that would have cracked my skull had I been there to receive it. But I had already swayed back on my heels and raised my own staff in a horizontal block that stopped his attack but left both my hands stinging. He grinned at me and dropped one end of his staff to rest against the log by his feet.

“I almost had you there, Cuz,” he said, in that quiet voice I had long since come to recognize as signalling a coming attack, and I took two quick steps to my left, placing myself to the right of his natural swing, fully prepared to take revenge if he lunged at me and missed. He grinned again and shifted his staff to a two-handed grip, and for several moments we manoeuvred opposite each other in watchful silence, each waiting for the other to make an error and invite destruction. When neither of us did, though, and it became plain that neither would, Will straightened up again.

“Basics, then,” he murmured, and we went into the fundamentals of our daily drill, our early movements stiff and formal, exactly as we had learned them in the beginning, each move and countermove precise and cleanly executed. As we progressed through the familiar exercises our ease and speed increased, until our staves rang loudly and rhythmically against each other, the intervals between the strikes growing shorter and shorter until the noise was an incessant rattle and the sweat began to roll down our bodies.

And then I saw something from the corner of my eye, and in the instant my concentration broke, Will smashed the staff from my hands, sending it flying to the grassy bank.

“Hold!” I shouted, and he hesitated, his staff already drawn back to push me off my log.

“What?”

“There.” I pointed to a cloaked and hooded figure watching us from the trees along the riverbank.

Will glanced over his shoulder and spun immediately to face the silent presence, twirling the heavy quarterstaff in one hand so that it spun in his fingers. “Get your staff,” he said to me over his shoulder, and I ran to obey him, not looking at the figure on the other bank again until I had rearmed myself and returned to stand by Will’s side. The watcher had not moved, and the shadows of the trees in which he stood obscured him sufficiently that we were unable to tell whether we knew him or not.

“Come out, then, and let us look at you.”

Will’s voice was quiet yet pitched clearly enough for his words to carry to the fellow, who straightened up from the tree he had been leaning against and stepped into the light. He was a stranger, and as he came into full view he reached up and slipped the hood from his head, exposing a full head of thick, golden, shoulder-length hair that caught the sunlight. The face was young and beardless, barely older than Will’s own, and unsmiling as it gazed at us. But it was the size of the fellow, the immense width of the shoulders beneath the cloak, that made me catch my breath. He was almost of a height with Will, I thought, though I could not be sure from the distance that separated us, but he was slimmer somehow. The legs beneath his kilted tunic were long and well formed, bare above the knees and swathed in furlined leggings below, the latter secured by criss-crossed leather straps attached to heavily soled, ankle-high boots. His tunic was richly made, some thick, green fabric that marked him as well born; Will and I had never owned, and seldom seen, anything so fine. A heavy, supple leather belt that held a long, sheathed dagger cinched in his narrow waist.

“Have you no manners, then?” Will said in Scots. “Or are you a thief, creeping up on folk to steal whatever takes your fancy?”

I stiffened at the calculated insult of the jibe, but the yellowhaired stranger merely smiled, flashing brilliantly white teeth, and came to stand at the edge of the bank, beside the bridge. He moved like a cat, lithe and flowing, his arms hanging loosely by his sides.

“You have nothing worth stealing,” he answered easily, the lilt of his voice proclaiming him a Highlander from the North. “I saw that at first glance.” He was still smiling. “I merely wished to cross this bridge and decided to wait until you had thrown the poor wee fellow off before I bothered you for passage.”

I drew myself up, stung, but before I could say a word Will waved me to silence. “The poor wee fellow, as you’ve seen, is no’ so easily budged,” he replied, his voice dangerously quiet to my ears.

“Aye, I know that now. He is stronger than he looks beside your bulk and he fights well. Well enough to withstand the flailings of an oaf twice his size.” His eyes moved to me and I saw that they were startlingly bright blue. “Well done, lad,” he said, and then looked back at Will. “Now, if I ask you civilly, will you move off and let me cross?”

I saw the wolfish grin light up Will’s face and my stomach churned. I sensed that nothing good could come of this.

“Let him cross, Will.”

Will bared his teeth in what I thought of as his mad grin. “Let him cross? I’ll do that, Jamie. I’ll let him cross. But he’ll have to climb over me first.” He turned back to the stranger. “Well, Saxon, d’ye think you can do that?”

The stranger pointed at the staff in Will’s hand.

“What?” Will asked, all innocence, hefting his staff. “Does this bother you? Think naught o’ it. I’ll throw it on the bank there and we’ll settle this bare-handed, just you and me.”

“No, you misunderstand me,” the stranger said quietly. “And misjudge me. Mine is Norse blood, not Saxon. My folk were Vikings, on a time. And you may keep your stick, so be it I can borrow your friend’s.”

“Borrow it?” Will’s grin seemed to grow even wider. “Aye, I think you could borrow it. Jamie, hand the man your staff and show him how to hold it.”

“No need,” said the Viking, as I had already named him. “Throw it to me. I’ll manage.”

“Will …”

“Just throw it, Jamie. You heard the man.”

I bit my lip, knowing this was wrong, and lobbed my quarterstaff across the gap. The stranger caught it easily in one hand, and as I left the bridge he hopped up effortlessly to stand on the upper log, facing Will, who was suddenly frowning, his mad grin vanished. He was now aware, I realized with relief, of the grossly excessive advantage he would have over his unsuspecting opponent.

“Do you know how to use one of these things?” Will’s voice was rough now with concern, and I began to feel better, but the Viking merely flicked the hair off his forehead with a toss of his head and took the staff in both hands, holding it as though it were a felling axe.

“I’ll manage,” he said again, flexing his knees. “Don’t worry about me. Look to yourself.”

With that he launched a swift attack that left me open-mouthed with shock, a spear-like thrust so fast and well executed that Will had to spring back to avoid it, whipping his staff up in a defensive block that the stranger immediately used against him, dropping to one knee and hooking a vicious crosswise blow under Will’s horizontal guard, aiming for his knees and almost connecting as Will leapt back again, giving ground for the second time.

From that point on, their battle was hard and heavy, each of them giving the other the respect due to an opponent who was his match and neither of them taking foolish risks, ever conscious of their footwork on the curved, moss-coated surface of the log beneath their feet.

The tempo increased suddenly as Will’s foot caught on a slight bump on the log, throwing him off balance just long enough for his opponent to seize the advantage. As Will swayed, the Viking swung a short-handed, chopping blow that caught him high on his right shoulder. I thought it was all over as soon as I heard the solid thump of the hit, for I knew Will’s arm must be deadened, but he surprised me by dropping to one knee, still clutching the right end of his staff with now lifeless fingers, and brought the other end sweeping inward for a crashing blow as powerful as a swung axe, hammering towards the Viking’s knees and pivoting through chest and shoulders for added impetus.

It was a prodigious effort, but the Viking’s response to it was miraculous to me. Like a threatened cat, he sprang into the air with both feet, drawing his knees clear up to his shoulders as Will’s staff whistled through the air where his legs had been a moment earlier, and the blow that would have shattered his knee almost missed him completely. But the tip of the scything staff struck the edge of the thick sole on the Viking’s left boot and smashed it sideways, tumbling him violently while he was still close to the top of his mighty leap. He fell headfirst in a sidewise somersault and his skull struck solidly on the log before he slipped into the deep water of our swimming hole. He sank instantly, his eyes closed and blood streaming from his yellow hair.

“Will!” I threw myself forward in a running jump, but even before my feet had left the ground I saw the arc of my cousin’s body as he dove ahead of me, and we landed together, one on either side of the sprawling body.

“I have him!” Will shouted, surfacing with his hands beneath the floating shoulders. “Take his legs.”