The Forest Laird

by Jack Whyte

  Ewan’s eyes had grown wider as he listened, and now the big archer hesitated, looking from Will to me to Sir Malcolm. “You would entrust me with this?”

  “I would, for I believe you worthy of trust. I decided that when first we spoke in this very room, you and I. As well, these boys have seen much evil this past week, but they appear to see no evil in you. Were it otherwise, I wouldna have mentioned it.”

  Ewan hesitated again, then nodded decisively. “Then I will do it. Gladly.”

  3

  I loved the library at the Abbey from the moment I first saw it, despite the glowering look of displeasure from its warden, Brother Duncan, each time he thought I came too close to touching any of the treasures on display there. The occasion was our first day as students, and we were taken on a tour of the Abbey and its precincts by a visibly long-suffering monk called Brother James, who left us in no doubt of our menial status as newcomers and ignoramuses.

  We had begun by visiting the Abbey church itself, primarily because it was empty of priests and worshippers at that time of day, after morning prayers and before nones, the afternoon prayer gathering that would fill the church again. And seeing it deserted, we experienced its humbling vastness, craning our necks as we peered up at the massively vaulted roof that was so far above us that its height defied belief. We stood abashed, side by side in front of the high altar, speechless with awe at the opulence of the shrine and the sheer scope of the sacred space surrounding us.

  Brother James gave us little time to absorb its beauty, though. He hustled us away, impatiently identifying the various areas of the building, from nave to transept, sanctuary and choir, baptismal font to votive chapels to confessionals, telling us where we would be permitted to go and where we were forbidden to approach, let alone trespass, and he sneered at every turn, as though incredulous that anyone could be as ignorant as we were of such self-evident verities.

  When we had finished in the church, he hurried us along the cloistered walkway outside to the corner of a vast quadrangle that lay beyond the Abbey proper, striding so quickly that we almost had to run to keep up with him. Meanwhile he spat out the names and functions of all the buildings that surrounded the quadrangle, all necessary to the maintenance of such a complex community: stables and dairy, cowsheds, pigsties and goat pens and sheep cotes and fowl yards and stone-built barns of fodder for all those creatures; wool manufactories with wheels for spinning yarn; charcoal pits; sawyers’ pits; a shoemaker and cobbler’s shop; a busy smithy filled with smoke and sparks and noise; a wheelwright’s shop; a harness maker’s barn for saddlery and trappings; pottery manufactories with potters’ wheels and kilns for baking pots and bricks; bakeries and a brewery; tanneries and a cooperage where new-made barrels were stacked up to the roof; dyeing vats and felting ponds stinking of sheep’s urine, and clothmakers’ galleries with different-sized looms and what seemed like miles of shelving laden with bolts of woven fabric. There were also carpentry shops and stonemasons’ yards; metal and glassmakers’ foundries; roofed threshing floors surrounded with bales of straw and mountains of hay; a stream-fed mill for grinding grain; storage houses for lumber, fine woods, grains, oats, barley, flour, hides, beer, and a hundred other things, and a long, low building in a far corner of the complex where the sole occupation of the brothers assigned there was the manufacture and preparation of fine vellum sheets for use in the scriptorium, the writing room attached to the library. And, of course, there were men everywhere, swarming like ants wherever I looked, and so I asked Brother James how many monks were in the community.

  He stopped in mid-word, plainly astonished that I would dare to interrupt him, and an angry surge of red suffused his narrow face. “That is none of your affair,” he said venomously. “Suffice you should know there are enough to live and work together to keep the likes of you in more comfort than you merit.” And then he strode away, not waiting for us to follow. I looked at Will and saw the broad grin on his face, and I knew two things with certainty: I had made an enemy on my first day here, and Brother James had never had any idea of, nor interest in, the size of the community to which he belonged.

  Hurrying to fall into place behind him again, I wondered how that could be so, and suddenly, even at that young age, I understood that such oblivion, for many men, must spring from a monkish and unchallenging existence. Brother James’s place within the Abbey’s ranks was finite, his duties clearly defined. He had no need for curiosity, no reason to explore his surroundings. By asking him a question that he could not answer, I had, in his mind, attempted to belittle him. I resolved to say not another word that day.

  My resolution vanished as soon as we entered the library. I still remember the awe, verging upon sanctity, that swept over me as soon as I crossed the threshold. Though I often thought, afterwards, that sanctity should have been a strange descriptive after having so recently seen the majestic interior of the Abbey church, I never sought to change it, because the reverence I felt in those first few moments never faded, and it remains with me to this day. This, I knew instinctively, was a place of wonders and incalculable value, of power and mysticism, of great learning and knowledge, and of immense worth, inestimable beauty, and abiding peace and tranquility—grand words, I know, for a small boy, who knew none of them at that time and nothing at all about libraries.

  I know I stood gape-mouthed, because Brother James hissed angrily and pushed me sharply forward into the soaring space that was filled with light, brilliant with stark-edged sunbeams and dancing dust motes. I knew the floor beneath my feet was of flagged stone like all the other floors, but somehow it felt softer, cushioning my soles from making any noise that would disturb the peace. Scattered throughout the central space were tables, some large, some small, some flat, and others sloped like pitched roofs, and all of them covered with books and parchments.

  I saw three men in there at first, then four and then five, all of them hard at work. Two of them glided silently along the walls beneath high, pointed windows filled with thousands of tiny, diamond-shaped panes of clear, green-tinged glass, each man stooping to peer into deep, box-like shelves filled with rolled parchments and big leather-bound books. The other three sat hunched, with pens in their hands, each focused on the parchment sheet in front of him. Brother James cleared his throat loudly and all five men turned to us. One of the three writers rose from his seat and came swiftly towards us.

  I heard Will quietly gasp, and then I recognized the sombre, scowling face of Brother Duncan.

  “Brother Armarius,” our guide greeted him. “These two are new boys. Father Abbott instructed me to show them the Abbey and to bring them here last.” He did not attempt to name us, and I knew he could not have done so. To him, we were nameless nuisances, inflicted upon him as a penance for some unremembered sin.

  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 co
usin 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

  Our 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 in
tuitive 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.