CHAPTER TWO

1

“Now sit down, all of you, and tell me again. Will, you tell me. And this time, take your time. Tell me all of it and leave nothing out. Sit.”

Sir Malcolm Wallace’s voice was a deep, rumbling roll of sound, his mouth hidden beneath a bushy, greying beard. He was nowhere near as large as the archer Ewan, but he somehow conveyed the impression of being much larger than he was. I suspected that had more than a little to do with the fine quality of his clothing, which even I could see had been tailored to emphasize the width of his chest and shoulders. He had dropped into what was obviously his own chair by the unlit fireplace, one side of his head and upper body bathed in light from the window in the wall. Will, Ewan, and I stood in what felt to me like darkness in the middle of the large, wood-panelled room.

All three of us moved obediently to sit facing him on three straight-backed wooden chairs, and as Will cleared his throat nervously, I looked about me, noting the richness with which I was surrounded. Sir William’s house was as big and solid as its owner, built of sandstone and far more grand than the house in Ellerslie where I had lived for the past two years with his brother’s family. The room in which we now sat had two windows and housed a heavy table with eight plain wooden chairs. The room’s only other furnishings were a massive sideboard against the rear wall and a slightly smaller armchair, padded with brightly coloured cushions, that sat across the fireplace from Sir Malcolm’s. His wife, Lady Margaret, had gone to the kitchens to prepare food for us.

Will cleared his throat a second time, then launched into his tale—our tale—from the start of it on that already distant-seeming day in Ellerslie a week earlier. Sir Malcolm had already heard it once, a garbled, blurted version, but now he sat stock-still, his fingers in his beard, and listened closely. Will stumbled in his description of what the men had done to the two of us, unsure how much to say or how to phrase it, but Sir Malcolm asked no questions and sat stone-faced throughout the recitation. Only once did his eyes move from Will, and that was to gaze speculatively at Ewan Scrymgeour when Will spoke of how we had come to meet, and eventually his eyes returned to his nephew, who was already talking about the final stage of our journey, leading to our arrival here half an hour earlier. The knight waited until he was sure Will had no more to say, then turned to Ewan.

“You have my gratitude, Master Scrymgeour, but you’ll forgive me if I ask a few questions.” Ewan’s nod of agreement was barely perceptible as Sir Malcolm continued. “Forbye the tragic matter of the murders committed here, which remains to be dealt with but canna be changed, it’s clear you saved the boys from further harm and brought them safely here. But I have to ask myself why. Why would a grown man leave his life and walk away from everything he knows to help two lost and hapless stripling boys? Few men I know would do that.”

Will had said nothing at all about Ewan’s background and had left out the episode of the Ormiston slaughter, because we had decided, he and I, that we owed too much to the archer ever to name him outlaw. Ewan’s plan, which we boys had decided to subvert so we could remain with him, had been to deliver us close by Sir Malcolm’s house, then continue on his way to Selkirk Forest, where he hoped to join a band of others like himself, living in the greenwood. As it turned out, though, we had been discovered by a large group of Sir Malcolm’s own workers, who had brought us to the home farm to meet their master face to face.

“Aye, yon’s a fair question and I’ll answer it fairly.” There was no hint of subservience in Ewan’s voice. He spoke as a free man addressing an equal. The big archer flexed his fingers and sat up straight in his chair. “I buried my mother the day before we left to come here, and there was nothing to hold me there any longer. No friends, no loyalties, nothing to bind me. The boys were alone and helpless, headed for Elderslie or Paisley. I have friends in Selkirk. So it made sense to me to see them safely here in passing.”

A silence filled the room, broken only by the song of a blackbird beyond the windows. Finally Sir Malcolm nodded. “Friends in Selkirk, aye … That would be in the forest there, I’m thinking?”

Ewan dipped his head again. “Aye, Sir Malcolm. In the forest.”

Sir Malcolm rose from his chair and went to stand by the window, gazing out, his hands clasped loosely at his back. “It comes to me that I know no one in all these parts who has friends in Selkirk Forest,” he said softly. “In the town, yes. I have two friends in the town. It is a small place. But in the forest? No. The men there are … different. What did you do to earn their friendship, these men?”

“Nothing. I have never met a one of them. My home forest is Ettrick.”

“Ettrick Forest covers all of south Scotland, with Selkirk Forest but a part of it. You are an archer.”

“Aye, sir, I am. Trained in England and in Wales. I fought with Prince Edward.”

Sir Malcolm turned back slowly, silhouetted now against the window’s light. “Did you, now? I hear he is a doughty fighter. And what happened to make you change?”

For the first time, Ewan looked surprised. “He turned to invade Wales, to conquer my folk and make us part of England. I am but half Welsh, but I would have no part of that, and my father was newly dead, so I came to Scotland to care for my mother, who was Welsh.”

“Scrymgeour. Your father was a Scot?”

“Aye, from Kyle. Bruce country.”

“Archers are seldom farmers.”

“True. Nor am I one.”

“Your father did not own a farm?”

“Once, he did. But it was hard, sour ground. He fell sick and could not work. And then he died.”

“So what entitles you to live in Ettrick Forest?”

I was having difficulty making sense of what was being said here because the two men were talking obliquely, their tones, although I could not see how, evidently conveying more than their mere words. I glanced at Will and saw from the frown between his brows that he was as perplexed as I was.

“Entitles me?” Ewan’s voice was suddenly harder, and he moved his jaw in a way that emphasized the disfigurement of his mashed nose. “I might argue with you, Sir Malcolm, on your choice of words. But the entitlement, if such it was, sprang from the ill nature of a bullying, strutting fool who thought himself all-powerful.”

Sir Malcolm’s head tilted slightly.

“My mother, rest her soul, was a healer,” Ewan continued. “Had been one all her life and was famed for it. A good woman with a good calling. A local lairdling had an infant son who fell sick, and so he sent his people to fetch her, to cure the boy. But the child was beyond help. He died of whatever ailed him and his mother named my mother witch and they tried to hang her. I saved her life, but in the doing of it blood was spilt and I was outlawed.”

“What lordship was this?”

Ewan met the older man’s eye. “Ormiston.”

“Of Dumfries? Sir Thomas?”

“No, sir. Of Clewes, Sir Walter.”

“Thomas’s brother. I know him well. You call him fool, but he is not.”

“Sir Walter is dead, sir, these three years. His son William is now Laird of Ormiston.”

“Aha. And he seems not to be the man his father was. Is that what you are telling me?”

“I tell you nothing, Sir Malcolm. I was but answering your question.”

“Aye, right.” Sir Malcolm hesitated. “You said you saved your mother’s life, yet buried her but recently. Were the two events connected?”

“Aye, sir. They found her again, in a place where I thought her safe.”

“And?”

“They hanged her.”

“I see. And this time you were not close enough to save her.”

“No. But they were still close by when I arrived. They sought to hang me, too.”

“And?”

“They will hang no more old folk. Nor young, for that matter.”

“And so you head for Selkirk … How many did you kill?”

Ewan sniffed. “All of them. I am an archer. They had clubs and blades.”

Sir Malcolm was frowning. “How many?”

“Fourteen men, all save one of them hirelings bought and brought to keep the local folk in terror. And four dogs.”

“Sweet Jesus! And William of Ormiston?”

“He was the fourteenth man.”

Sir Malcolm’s frown deepened to a scowl, and suddenly Will spoke up, his voice taut with urgency. “He was trying to kill us, Uncle. The man Ormiston. Ewan had left him alive. We were watching from the slope above and he came at us, trying to ride us down. His horse almost trampled Jamie, but he rolled clear and the rider turned around again to kill him with his sword, and Ewan shot him from the valley bottom, two hundred yards below us.”

The tense, dark brows smoothed slightly and the eyes beneath them turned to Ewan. “Is that true?”

The big man shrugged. “It was a touchy shot. I might easily have missed and had but one arrow left.”

“From so far away?”

“It was a good distance. I made the shot.”

“And my nephew and his cousin are here. Then we have much to thank you for, it seems. More than I thought.”

“Not much. I was there, and I was fortunate not to miss. After that, the walking was simple, since we were all headed eastward.”

“You could have travelled southeast and sent the boys on alone.”

“Aye, but I enjoyed the company along the road and I was in no great haste.”

“Hmm. And now what?”

Ewan smiled. “And now, if you will grant me your blessing, I’ll move on south, to Selkirk.”

I sensed Will look at me but I resisted the temptation to look back, knowing that his eyes would be filled with apprehension, for if Ewan left now, so too would Will’s newborn dream of mastering the longbow.

Sir Malcolm looked from Will to me, his gaze lingering on each of us, before he turned back to Ewan. “You say you buried your mother. Will she be found?”

“Not easily, no. They found her alive, but they’ll no’ find her grave.”

“And the others. Will they find them?”

“Aye, sooner rather than later. I left them where they fell, made no attempt to hide them. They were too many. But I cut my arrows out of them before I left.”

“Because someone might have recognized them?”

“No. Because they were all I had, too valuable to leave behind.”

“And think you anyone will believe a single man killed all of them? Fourteen, you said, and four dogs?”

The question surprised Ewan, for his eyes widened. “Aye, that’s the number, but that thought had not occurred to me.”

“Nor would it to most men. Whoever finds them will believe they were surprised by an armed band. No one will imagine a single man might be to blame. But will they think to name you as the leader?”

“No.” Ewan’s headshake was firm. “I had not been seen in those parts for more than two years until that day, and none expected to see me then.”

“So you will not be accused. You are sure you left none alive?”

“I am.”

Sir Malcolm nodded abruptly. “So be it, then. Blessings come in many guises. You can stay here with us, if you would like. No one knows you here, save the boys, and God knows I can find employment for a man of your size and strength.”

“So be you mean that and are not jesting with me, I will stay gladly.”

Sir Malcolm slapped his hands on his thighs and surged to his feet, unaware of the elation with which Will had beaten him to it. “It is done, then,” he growled. “Welcome to Elderslie and to my household. Now I have much to do. I must send word of the boys’ tale to Ayr, to the Countess of Carrick. My murdered family’s blood cries out for justice and she will know what to do. I doubt the husband’s there yet. Robert Bruce has troubles in his own lands of Annandale, and young Will’s two brothers ride with him. The Countess will pass on the word to where it needs to go. Then I must summon my brother Peter and my cousin Duncan here, to meet these lads and help me decide what should be done with them. In the meantime, you three are hungry and road weary, so we will feed you and find you a place to sleep for a few hours, and after that you’ll feel much better.

“Now, let’s be about our business.”

2

I thought at first that I would dislike my cousin Duncan the monk, for he looked cold and unfriendly the first time I set eyes upon him, but I was to learn that he was one of those men whose forbidding exterior conceals a vastly different reality. Of all men I have known, save only Ewan Scrymgeour, there has been none whom I loved more than my perpetually scowling cousin, for Brother Duncan Wallace’s soul was a brilliant light shut up inside a leather bottle, its luminous purity glimpsed but occasionally through a dried seam. He was a transcriptor at Paisley Abbey, responsible for the translation, copying, illumination, maintenance, and welfare of the library’s priceless manuscripts. Though at our first meeting I knew none of those words, and far less what they entailed, I quickly came to know them more than passing well, for they became my life as Duncan passed his great love of them on to me.

His cousin, Father Peter, was a priest at the Abbey, as open and friendly as Brother Duncan seemed aloof and distant, and Will and I both liked him immediately. He welcomed us with wide-stretched arms, and then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he invited us to walk with him around his brother’s grounds, and there he spoke to us of Will’s parents and the happy times he had shared with them. By the time we arrived back at the house, both of us felt we had known Father Peter all our lives.

The family gathering that followed was precisely that: a gathering of Sir Malcolm’s family, with ourselves as the new additions. Lady Margaret was there—presiding was the word that occurred to me immediately upon seeing her matronly presence—as were her two younger sons, Henry and Malcolm, aged fourteen and twelve. The eldest son, Steven, was squire to a knight in Lanercost, we learned, and had not been home for a year. The family’s two daughters were also in attendance, Isabelle, the younger at seven, being firmly kept in her place by her older sister Anne, who, even at eleven, showed signs of becoming a beauty. In addition to these, clustered around the table were Sir Malcolm, his brother Peter, his cousin Duncan, myself and Will. Ewan attended as Sir Malcolm’s guest and stood at the rear of the room, close by the doors, leaning back against the wall with his hands clasped loosely in front of him as he watched.

This was only the second time I had ever seen Ewan without his longbow and quiver—even when they were not hanging from his body, they were usually within his reach. But this was also the first time I had ever seen him around children other than myself and Will. It was obvious that the children, especially the girls, had been severely warned about their behaviour, but children are children, and I had seen the fearful glances they cast in Ewan’s direction. He had seen them too, of course, and carefully avoided making eye contact with either little girl and kept his face expressionless—insofar as that was possible—at all times.

The wide-eyed children often turned to stare at Will and me as Sir Malcolm told them, in a greatly simplified version, the story of what had befallen us in Ellerslie and later on the road. That we would join the family as adopted sons was not disputed, but there was more to be decided concerning our futures. Will and I could have happily blended into the family’s life, working on the farm to earn our keep, but Father Peter and Brother Duncan were firm in their opinion that we should be educated as befitted our stations as the sons of a landowner and the adopted sons of a belted knight. Father Peter suggested that we be sent to Paisley Abbey as students, where he and Brother Duncan could oversee our studies. Sir Malcolm glanced at Lady Margaret, who nodded, and then he thumped his fist upon the table and declared it should be so.

I was excited at the prospect of going to school in the Abbey. Even in the far west, in Kyle, we had heard tell of the great Cluniac Priory of Paisley that had been famed for a hundred years before being raised to the exalted status of an Abbey. It was one of the wonders of the realm, as grand as the famed sanctuaries at St. Andrews, Glasgow, York, and London.

Will, though, was far from happy with what was transpiring. I could see both misery and panic in his eyes as he tried to come up with a sound reason for objecting to the elders’ proposal. Paisley lay seven miles from Elderslie, a mere two-hour walk at a fast pace. But that time doubled if you had to return within the day, and we already knew that Will’s scholastic life as a student in Paisley would be too full to permit any such effort. He would not have four clear hours and more in any day—and that fact eclipsed any possibility of his being able to work with Ewan on his archery. Both of us knew that Ewan had made no such commitment to Will, but Will ignored that truth. He was determined to become a longbow archer, and he was determined that Ewan Scrymgeour would be his tutor and trainer.

The entire dilemma was resolved within moments, however, when Sir Malcolm brought up the matter of our lodging. We could live at the Abbey, he said, as part of the establishment, but having endured and hated the same regimen himself as a boy, he believed that complete immersion in the Abbey’s life might be unhealthy for us over the long term if we were not cut out by nature for the priesthood. Better, he suggested—ignoring the startled silence from the two clerics at the table—that we study at the Abbey school for the sake of our minds but remain lodged outside the precincts for the sake of our growth and independence.

Father Peter expressed his dismay at that, pointing out what he perceived to be obvious: the mere idea of our living unsupervised beyond the Abbey and its discipline was untenable, he said. We were too young to know our own minds, and that, to him, opened us and our immortal souls to great risk.

Sir Malcolm sat back in his chair and eyed his brother shrewdly. “It is not their souls I am concerned about, Peter, but their minds,” he growled. “You and your brethren should be able to see to their souls. My thought is to ensure their minds are left free to grow without being influenced by too much … sanctity.”

He raised a hand to forestall the other, whose eyes had gone wide with pious outrage. “I know, I know what you’re thinking and I’ve heard it before. There canna be such a thing as too much sanctity. But I am here to tell you that there can. I, too, studied at the Abbey. The years I spent there taught me many things, among them the basic truth that while some men and stripling boys may thrive on being surrounded all the time with clouds of incense and constant choruses of prayer and hymns, others will not. I was one who did not, and I thank God I had the will and strength of mind to come through it unscathed. But I could name you others who did not fare so well, men who, as young lads, lacked the temperament that you call vocation, yet lacked the strength forbye to overcome the guilt of being seen by themselves and others as unfit to hear the calling. To this day many of those who survive are blighted by their failure, condemned to live as half-formed beings, neither men nor priests. Unable to enjoy the companionship of women yet incapable of renouncing them, they live between the two worlds of normal humanity and sanctity. I will not risk that happening to my wards, and if you seek to argue with me you will leave my house, so pay attention to me. I am not proposing anything unfitting, merely that the boys live outside the Abbey while they study within it. As to their ability to do so without supervision, I take your meaning and I am not entirely witless.” He turned in his chair to look towards the rear of the room. “Master Scrymgeour, will you come forward?”

A quick frown came to Ewan’s face, but he moved towards the table obediently and stood behind Brother Duncan at the lower end, directly opposite Sir Malcolm.

“We are all in your debt, Master Scrymgeour, and I told you on the day that you arrived that I could easily find work for you here in my household should you wish to stay. It comes to me now that I have a more important task for you than I originally thought.”

Ewan was still frowning slightly.

“An uncle of ours died three years ago in Paisley, another Malcolm Wallace. He was my godfather and I was named for him. He was old and had outlived all his family, and so his farm and his lands passed down to me.” I saw Father Peter’s expression soften as he realized where this might be leading, and he sat back in his chair “It is a small farm,” Sir Malcolm continued, “though larger than some around it, and it has pleasant lands attached to it—a large apple orchard, a fine paddock, and several arable fields of good size, forbye the house itself and surrounding byres and pigpens. I have done nothing with it these three years, despite my best intentions, and I fear it is falling into disrepair.

“Now, I know you have said you are not a farmer, but your father was, and this place I speak of is far richer and more fertile than your father’s place that you described to me. If you have any feeling for the land at all, I think you might enjoy it. I wouldna set you to the plough, though, unless you chose to be a ploughman. You would be my overseer, your charge to see the farm well kept and well worked, without theft or shirking by the men I’d send you. The house is big enough to need a cook and a housekeeper, and large enough to accommodate you and my two new charges. By day you would be my factor. By night, you would tend and guard the boys, keeping them at their books and out of mischief. What say you?”

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 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

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 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.”

“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.