The Forest Laird (16 page)

It was an outrageous proposition, the short distance and halfwidth targets putting Will at an enormous disadvantage with his great yew bow. Will pursed his lips, appearing to think long and hard and be on the point of refusal, but then he sniffed and nodded. “Agreed. Even bets?”

“What? D’ye take me for a fool? Against that thing?” Robertson nodded at the longbow’s case as though he were not convinced that he had already crippled Will’s chances of winning. “Two to one. On your side.”

Will gazed for a long time at Robertson’s own bow, a flat, layered weapon of wood and sinew that flared to a hand’s breadth wide above and below the grip before tapering to the ends. Five feet long, I estimated. Will nodded, stone faced. “Accepted,” he said. “Set them up.”

Laithey shouted the terms to the waiting crowd, and a cluster of men quickly set about making the targets from the pile of six-inch posts at the edge of the butts, some of them splitting the lengths of wood into quarters and others hammering the stakes firmly into the ground until they were of uniform height, their freshly split wedged faces towards the archers. The crowd along the edges of the range grew denser as others were attracted by the activity. To my eyes the target stakes, barely projecting above the ungrazed pasture of the narrow strip, were barely visible from a hundred paces, and for the first time I could remember, I found myself doubting Will’s ability to hit them, recalling his missed shot at the sick doe earlier.

Will was by now stringing his bow and pulling target arrows from among the broadheads in his bag. The target arrowheads were long and heavy, solid and round and tapered like armour-piercing bodkins, shorter but no less sharply pointed; hollowed out, they fitted tightly over the arrows’ shafts, and were fletched with grey goose feathers. When he was satisfied with his six selections, he stepped forward to the firing line and thrust the arrows point first into the ground in a row by his right side.

Robertson had defined the range and the targets; Will’s was the choice to shoot first or last, and the right to determine the number of casts.

“One flight,” he said to his adversary. “Six shots only. You first, then me.”

Robertson nodded, plainly having expected this. “Six each, then. All at once, or shot by shot?”

“All at once. Straight count. Your six first, then mine. The winner the man who leaves most arrows in the marks. No repeats. I ha’e to get back to work.”

“Right. Let’s be about it.”

The crowd had separated in anticipation of the contest, a few of them flanking the firing line to watch the bowmen, but the majority crowding near the targets at the end of the narrow firing lane. I could see they had no fear of being killed by a stray shot. They were accustomed to such contests and they knew the skill of the contestants.

Robertson stepped forward to his side of the aiming line, nocking his first arrow to his string, and Laithey raised his arms and shouted for silence, bringing a hush to the crowd. Will’s eyes were narrowed, taking stock of his opponent’s stance and missing no single element of the man’s preparation.

The targets were small and the distance to them was short, but no one there, man or woman, would have thought to criticize. Every one of them knew how difficult the contest was, precisely because of those constraints.

Robertson stood stock-still, his eyes narrowed to slits as he stared at the first mark, its bottom half obscured by waving fronds of seeding grass. He held the bow loosely, resting horizontally across his left thigh, the fingers of his right hand gripping the string above and below the nocked end of the arrow. Then, still slit-eyed, he spread his feet, taking a half-step back with his right, and brought the bow up smoothly, leaning into it and drawing the taut string to his cheek as though it was weightless. He released quickly. The sound of the arrow’s flight was lost in the snap of the bowstring against the shaped guard of bull horn that protected his forearm, and the crowd hissed as his shaft struck solidly, within a palm’s width of the top of the distant mark. The peg was deeply buried, almost twothirds of its length firmly seated in the earth, but the force of the arrow’s impact moved it visibly and split it; the arrow was gripped there, pointing sideways and down.

Without pausing, Robertson drew and loosed again, nocking a fresh arrow within seconds of each shot until he had fired all six within the span of a single minute. As the sixth hit home, some of the distant watchers clapped and whistled. Only his third shot had missed its mark. Another, his fourth, caught the very top of its stake, where the wood was flattened and frayed by the maul that had hammered it into the ground; the point lodged in the damaged wood, but the arrow hung precariously in place. The other four missiles were firmly lodged in the target stakes. He turned to Will with a tiny smirk.

“Five, you agree?”

“Aye, five hits. A fine try. Not bad at all. I’ve seen far worse.”

“Not bad?” The smirk widened. “Let’s see you do better, then.”

Will’s six arrows were still where he had set them in the ground, about a pace behind the firing line, and now he moved to stand beside them, plucking up the first of them and laying it across his horizontal bow stave, holding it in place with his left index finger while he nocked the end slot securely onto the taut string. His arrows were longer than Robertson’s by a full finger’s length, thicker and therefore heavier than the other man’s. He flexed his fingers on the bow’s grip, then froze, concentrating.

For long seconds he stood there, looking at the first slender target. Robertson harrumphed and muttered something. It was surely intended as a distraction, but Will ignored it. He drew a deep breath and went to work.

He stepped forward, leaning into his pull as his left foot went forward to the line, his straight left arm pushing the arcing bow stave forward while his massive chest, back, and shoulder muscles pulled the thick string of densely braided hemp back smoothly to his ear. The release was immensely powerful, and the line of flight was low, the arrow sinking so swiftly that I thought, for an instant, that it had fallen short. But then the target stake whipped violently and the arrow in its cleft sprang free and spun to the ground, its fall accompanied by a great shout from the crowd.

Will had already nocked another arrow by then, and before the shout could die away he stepped into his second shot. His movements were a joy to watch, a sacred dance to a rhythm known only to himself, and he loosed all six of his arrows in less time than Robertson had taken for his. But Will struck five marks close above the ground, within a hand’s breadth of their bases, and two of them dislodged arrows that Robertson had already placed. The sixth arrow had struck the ground at the base of the mark the other man had missed, but on closer examination it was found to have pierced the stake beneath the surface. Even without it, though, Will’s tally stood at five to Robertson’s remaining three.

To his credit, the other archer said nothing. He walked the hundred measured paces to the line of target posts, where he stood looking down at Will’s handiwork. He shook his head in disbelief, for Will’s grouping truly was astounding. Of the five shafts that had struck above the ground, the highest was less than an inch above the lowest. Robertson reached into the pouch at his waist and brought out a small leather purse; he hefted it in his hand, then lobbed it underhand to Will.

“I’ve never seen the like,” he said. “And I’ve never been so outmatched. I’ll stay out of your way, ’gin we ever meet again, Will Wallace.”

The two nodded to each other, in mutual respect, then bent to gather up their spent arrows as the crowd surged forward, and there was pandemonium as every man there wanted to shake the hand of each of the contestants. Will turned his back on the well-wishers and caught my eye. He threw the purse to me. “Take that to James while I finish up here.”

I took the money to Laithey, and as I turned away I saw the group of young people who had come to visit Jessie Brunton now thronging around Will. Jessie, I knew, had been recently married to a friendly young fellow called Tam Brunton, a miller who worked on Sir Malcolm’s estate. I had known her by her unmarried name, Jessie Waddie. She was the eldest daughter of Ian Waddie, a prosperous Paisley wool merchant. Waddie, it now turned out, was married to Margaret Braidfoot of Lamington, near Lanark, whose brother Hugh, a successful sheep farmer and therefore a valued associate of Ian Waddie, had a daughter called Mirren, whose presence was the underlying reason for today’s visit from all these young people. Mirren, aged seventeen, had come to Paisley on what had become an annual visit, to spend the summer with her beloved Auntie Meg and her daughters.

Jessie herself was standing close by, a slightly bemused smile on her face as though at a loss to explain her sudden popularity even to herself, and I went and spoke to her for a few moments, asking about her visitors. When I turned away from her again, I saw the tallest youth in the party struggling to pull Will’s bow, and I was amazed that Will would permit such a thing. It was only later—much later—that Will gave me his own slightly dazed account of what had happened while my back was turned.

2

“W
ho was the fellow trying to pull your bow? The big fellow the girls were all admiring?”

“Who? I don’t know. He’s one of Mirren’s friends.”

“He was dressed as a forester. Had you ever seen him before?”

“No, but he’s a Bruce man. He’s a woodsman, though, not a forester.”

“Is there a difference?”

That earned me a stare from beneath slightly raised eyebrows. “Aye, there’s a big difference, and fine you know it. A woodsman patrols the woods, looking for poachers, but that’s all he does. He has a forester to tell him what to do and where to go and when. He wears the green and he works in the woods, but he knows nothing of forestry, beyond being able to move quietly in the thickets.”

“Which Bruce does he work for, Annandale or Carrick?”

“The old man, Annandale. He owns the land alongside ours, to the south and west.”

We were sitting together by the fire in Sir Malcolm’s main room, late that same night. Sir Malcolm and Lady Margaret were long since abed, and we would have been, too, save that I was enjoying my time away from the Abbey too much to want to sleep, and Will was too tightly wound over the events of the afternoon. If he had mentioned Mirren Braidfoot once since we came home that day he had mentioned her a score of times; her name was rarely absent from his conversation, what little there was of that. I was perplexed, for I could hardly remember him ever mentioning any girl by name twice in the same day. But there he was, sitting across from me yet barely there, his gaze focused on whatever vision he was seeing in the leaping flames in the grate.

“So you don’t know this fellow’s name, the one who had your bow?”

“No.”

“Why did you let him take it?”

“What? Oh, because he wanted to.”

“He
wanted
to. And you just
let
him? Will, you won’t even let me
carry
that bow. Why would you give it to someone you didn’t know, and let him play with it?”

“Mirren wanted me to.”

“Mirren wanted … I think you’d better tell me— Will? Are you listening? Tell me what happened when you met this Mirren. How did you meet her?”

He frowned, blinking. “I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I don’t remember. She was just there, suddenly, yellow and blue …”

It was enough for me to see her clearly. She had been wearing a yellow kirtle over a blue gown, and Will’s eyes were wide again with the recollection of it.

“I’d seen them there,” he continued, “the folk from Paisley, but I hadn’t noticed her before they all came flocking around me, and then there she was. Sweet Jesu, Jamie, but she’s bonnie. She was looking right at me, her eyes on mine, and I swear I near fell into them, they were so big. And so blue, like her gown. They were all talking to me, shouting at me, but I could hardly hear them and she never said a word. She just stared at me, and then she smiled. I thought she was going to laugh at me and my heart nearly stopped for shame, but she didn’t. She just looked and smiled. And God help me, I couldna smile back at her. I tried, I wanted to, but my face felt as though it was made of wood. I couldna make it work. And I just stood there, gawking at her like some daft wee laddie …

“And then that fellow tried to take my bow, wanted to try it. She saw me start to turn on him and stopped me … with her eyes. She didn’t speak. Her eyes … they flashed at me, warning me, I thought, though I didn’t know against what. Then she looked at him, and at the bow, and back at me, and nodded. And I let him take it, along with an arrow from my bag, a broadhead. Then he walked away and all the others followed him to see how he would do. And we were left alone, the two of us.” He looked at me, and his eyes were wide with wonder.

“What did she say to you?”

“That her name was Mirren. She knew mine already. Someone must have told her. She asked me where I lived, and when I told her, she said that I should come and look for her within the week, at her uncle’s house in Paisley, in the evening when my work was done … It was the strangest thing, Jamie. She told me how to find her, and when to come, and yet she never looked at me. She kept her eyes on the young fool with the bow the whole time, as though watching him and leaving me ignored, like a log on the ground. And then she said I should take my bow back, so I did. The poor gowk hadn’t even drawn it to half pull. I took off the string, put the stave back in its case, and when I turned around again he was helping her up onto the wagon, and they left. She never looked at me again. Just left me standing there like a witless stirk.”

“But she told you when and where to find her, Will. And did it privily, with no one being the wiser. Plainly she wanted none of them to know. Women do that sometimes.”

He looked at me as though I had crowed like a cockerel. “Do what?”

I shrugged, aware of my own witlessness. “Behave strangely.”

“How would
you
know that? Who told you such a thing?”