The Forest Laird (5 page)

The water didn’t seem as cold as it had the night before, either, and we washed the remains of Ewan’s poultice from our bodies quickly, remarking to each other that we could no longer feel the throbbing ache that had seemed interminable the day before.

Ewan had almost finished skinning the small deer when we got back to the banked fire pit, where heat still smouldered under a covering of crusted earth. We watched him sever the head and lower legs—I was amazed by the colour and the sharpness of the curved blade he used—and wrap them in the still-steaming hide. He then lifted the entire bundle into the centre of the cloth that had covered his shoulders.

“Here,” he said, tying the corners together. “One of you take that shovel and the other the pickaxe, then go and bury this along the bank of the stream. But bring back the cloth. And mind you take it as far from here as you can carry it. Dinna think to bury it close by. Bury it deep and stamp down the ground and pile stones over it. We dinna want to be attracting scavengers, animal or otherwise. Then get back here as quick as you can.”

It took us some time to follow his instructions, and we barely spoke a word to each other, so intent were we on doing exactly as he had said. As we made our way back, we walked into the delicious aroma of cooking. Ewan had rekindled the dormant fire, and a flat iron skillet filled with fresh meat and some kind of onion was sizzling on the coals.

We ate voraciously, as though we had not fed in weeks. Those two days of running had whetted our appetites to the point of insatiability. The deer liver was perfect, coated in flour and salt and lightly fried with the succulent wild onions, and when the last fragment was devoured we sat back happily.

“How’s your bum?”

The question, addressed to both of us, was asked casually as Ewan wiped his knife carefully, removing any signs of food from its gleaming, bluish blade. We both assured him that we were much better.

“Good.” He gestured with a thumb over his shoulder to where the deer carcass lay covered with fresh ferns. “I’ll cut some of this up into bits that we can carry, and leave the rest here to smoke later. You can help me carry my mother’s share to her.”

“Does she live far from here?” Will asked.

The big outlaw shook his head. “Not far, a two-hour walk. Far enough away to be safe when anyone comes here hunting me. Laird William suspects I’m still around, so every now and then patrols come looking. But they haven’t found me yet.”

“Are you no’ afeared they’ll find your mother?” Will asked.

“She’s to the north o’ here, across the hills, on the far edge o’ William’s land. I leave signs to the south and southeast from time to time, to keep them hunting down there. Besides, she knows how to take care o’ herself.” Ewan took up his knife again and began to strop it against a much-used device that had been lying beside his foot. I looked closely at it, never having seen one quite like it before, a strip of leather, perhaps a foot long and a thumb’s length in width, that he had fastened to a heavy strip of wood. The leather had a patina of long use, its colour darkened almost to blackness by the friction of a lightly oiled blade, and I watched him test the blade’s edge with the ball of his thumb.

He had no beard. That was part of why he had frightened me so badly when I first looked at him. In a world where all men went unshaven, a beard would have done much to conceal the frightfulness of his visage, yet he had made no attempt to cover the deformity of his face by growing one. If he would wear a mask, why not a beard?

I had seen beardless men before, but very few, and my father had been the only one I knew personally. As a child, I had watched with fascination as he went to great pains, daily, to scrape his cheeks, chin, and upper lip free of hair, using a thin, short-bladed, and amazingly sharp knife that he kept for that purpose alone. It was hard work to shave a beard, I knew, a meticulous and time-consuming, seemingly pointless task, except that my father’s commitment to it had a purpose that I discovered by accident one day, listening to my mother speaking to a friend. My father, she had said, had an affliction of the skin that he could hold at bay only by shaving daily. He might perhaps miss one day, but three successive days without the blade would bring his face out in boils and scaly patches. I never did discover what this malady sprang from, but from that time onward I accepted my father’s daily regimen as necessary. Watching Ewan wield his strange bluish knife, I knew his blade was far sharper than my father’s, and that he could use it to shave quite easily. Yet there was a smoothness to his skin that showed no sign at all of being scraped.

“Ewan, why have you no beard?”

He looked at me in surprise, then laughed. “For the same reason I have no eyebrows. I can’t grow one.”

I gaped at him in astonishment, noticing for the first time that it was as he said. He had brows, the undamaged one boldly pronounced, but they were hairless.

He laughed again. “I was born bald, young Jamie. And I have never grown a single hair anywhere on my body. Look.”

He stretched out a hand towards me, exposing the skin on his forearm. It was perfectly smooth, tanned, and heavily corded with muscle but innocent of any trace of hair.

“No hair at all?” I asked.

“Not a single strand. That’s another reason for the mask, and the hood. My bare head makes me too easy to notice. Folk will remember a hooded, masked outlaw, but they won’t be able to describe him. But a bald and beardless man is another matter altogether.”

My mind raced to absorb what he had said. “Did you not wear a hood, then, before you were an outlaw?”

“No, why would I? I didna need one. I had no reason to fear people knowing who I was. I had nothing to hide and nothing to protect. But that’s all different now. And what about you two? Where will you go next?”

“I don’t know,” Will said quietly. He had been listening closely to our conversation. “I think we ought to go and see the Countess.”

“The
Countess
? In Kyle? That’s back where you came from, thirty miles away. How will you get there? And what will you do when you
are
there? Have you other kin close by?”

“No. There was only us, and Jamie’s folk in Auchincruive, but they’re all dead, too. I ha’e two brothers, but Malcolm’s training to be knighted and John was knighted two years ago and they’re both with the Bruce forces, somewhere in Annandale. I don’t know how to find them, to let them know what’s happened. But they’ll ha’e to be told. But that leaves just Jamie and me.”

“And ye’ve no other kin anywhere?”

Will shrugged. “Oh aye. There’s my father’s brother Malcolm. The one my brother’s named for. He lives in Elderslie, near Paisley.”

The big archer blinked. “Ellerslie and
Elderslie
? There’s two places with the same name?”

“They’re no’ exactly the same,” Will answered. “They just
sound
the same. I don’t think there’s any connection.”

“Except they both ha’e knightly tenants called Wallace.”

“My father wasna a knight, but my uncle Malcolm is. He has lands there, and a house.”

“And how did he and your father get along? Are they friends?”

“I … think so. They’re brothers, and I know they like each other. Or
liked
each other …” His voice faltered only slightly, but he ploughed ahead. “And I’ve another two uncles, or an uncle and a cousin, close by there. At least I think they’re close by. Peter and Duncan Wallace. My mother talks—talked about them a’ the time. They’re both at Paisley Abbey, one a priest, the other a monk.”

Ewan sat up straight. “Then you have a whole clan there, in this Elderslie, even if they be all men. Are there no women there?”

Will shrugged. “I think so. My uncle Malcolm has a wife called Margaret.”

“That’s where you should go, then, to your kinsmen there. There’s nothing left for you where you came from. The Countess would not let you run your farm yourselves, two young boys, mere bairns. And besides, if the men who killed your family found out you were back, they’d finish what they started. I think the two o’ you should go to Paisley, to your kin in the Abbey. They’ll take you to this Elderslie place.”

“But Paisley’s miles away,” I said, hearing the dismay in my own voice, and Ewan swung his big head to look at me.

“Miles away? God bless you, laddie, it’s a lot closer than the place you came from. That’s thirty miles and more back, but Paisley’s less than twenty miles from here.”

I looked to Will, but he just shook his head, as ignorant as I was, and big Ewan took that as a sign that he was right.

“That’s what we’ll do, then,” he said, his voice filled with certainty. “My mother will find you something to wear, to cover your bare arses, and she’ll wrap up some food for you. And then she’ll tell you the best way to go and we’ll set you on the road. You’ll see, it will be easy, and you’ll be in Elderslie in no time, chapping at your uncle’s door.”

3

F
rom that day onwards, each time I have heard that kind of certainty in someone’s voice, I have held my breath and braced myself for the worst that could happen, for the days that followed were far from being easy for any of us.

It began that afternoon as we reached the base of the low, forested range of hills that Ewan told us contained his mother’s cave. The land there was heavily treed, but there were great stretches of open meadow too, dotted with dense copses in the low-lying lands in the approach to the hills, and they were home to herds of deer. We had been walking for almost three hours on a rambling route, skirting the open glades and keeping to the edges of the woodlands because Ewan had warned us that it was not only unsafe but foolish to risk crossing the open meadows, where we might be seen by anyone from any direction. The deer, which were plentiful and grazed in small herds of eight or ten, ignored us for the most part, aware of our presence as we passed but seeming to sense no danger from us.

But that changed in an instant when all movement among them froze and all their heads came up as one. Ewan froze, too, in midstep, and held up a warning hand to us. A moment later the entire meadow on our left was transformed as all the deer broke into flight at once, bounding high in the air as they fled towards the nearest cover, and when they had all vanished Ewan still stood motionless, urgency in every line of him.

I started to ask him what was wrong but he silenced me with a slash of his hand.

“
Listen
,” he whispered.

I strained my ears, aware that Will was doing the same, and then I heard what must have frightened the deer, a strange, ululating sound far in the distance, although in what direction I could not tell.

“What is it?”

Ewan dropped the parcel of meat and slid the great strung longbow over his head. “Hounds,” he growled, already launching himself into a run. “Hunting hounds. You two stay here!”

His last words were shouted over his shoulder as he went, but Will and I had no intention of remaining where we were. We looked at each other with no need to speak, then dropped our own two cloth-bound packages and set off after him. We ran as fast as we could, but Ewan was moving like a man possessed, in great leaping bounds, paying no attention now to his own warnings about being seen. We saw very quickly that we could not catch up to him but we kept running, pushing ourselves to the limits, uphill and down, and watching hopelessly as he outstripped us with every frantic stride and finally disappeared among dense undergrowth on another rising slope far ahead.

Moments before we crested that slope, we heard a single, chilling howl somewhere ahead of us. It was human, and it was filled with anguish. We crashed through the last of the undergrowth and stopped abruptly. We were at the top of a steep, grassy hillside overlooking a narrow, tree-hemmed clearing that ran for half a mile to either side of us. I saw movement everywhere down there, but I was so winded by the effort of running that at first I could make no sense of what I was seeing, and I threw one arm over Will’s shoulders and hung there gasping, trying to take in the scene below.

My first impression, still sharp in my mind today, was of two points of stillness among an eddy of distant, wheeling, far-flung, and fast-moving men, some of them mounted, others on foot. One of those points was Ewan Scrymgeour, poised at the foot of the slope below us and looking across the narrow valley to the other, hanging from a large, isolated tree on the opposite slope, a shapeless, brownish bundle. And then in the blink of an eye the horror broke over me. The giant archer screamed again and set off at a run, headed directly for the hanging bundle.

The eddying men had grouped at either end of the narrow valley, and now they turned back towards him, gaining speed as they came and shouting orders and instructions to one another. I became aware of Will’s clawed fingers digging deep into my arm.

“We have to help him. They’ll take him.”

Even as I heard the words, I heard the futility in them, too. We had not a weapon between us, and there was nothing we could do. We both knew that. Knew, too, that exposed as we were on the open hillside, we were as good as dead. If we were taken here, obviously having come with big Ewan, we would not be hanged as outlaws. We would be chopped down by the first man to reach us, if we were not first used again as women.

The attackers were stringing out now, six mounted men spurring downslope hard from our right and two more charging more uphill from the left, the latter followed by six running men who had loosed four big dogs from their leashes, hunting hounds that bounded past the two horsemen leading their group and were now racing towards our friend.

In the space of the moments that I had been looking at his attackers, Ewan Scrymgeour had reached the tree, and I saw the flash of his blade as he cut the rope, then leapt to catch his mother before she fell to the ground. He barely succeeded, and he lowered her gently, stooping over her so that I could not see what he was doing. But then he knelt, his head bowed, and I clearly saw him cross himself before he rose to his feet and took up his longbow. His full quiver, with almost a score of arrows—I had admired them that morning—hung at his shoulders from the strap across his back, and now he reached behind him and drew one, nocking it to his bow and looking from side to side at the men approaching him.