The Forest Laird(10)

His assailants soon recognized that he never missed, and they lost all desire to fight. But these men had murdered his mother, and Ewan shot them down mercilessly as they rode and ran away until only two of them remained alive—a man on foot, who had hung back beyond range of the archer’s bow, and the leader of the mounted group. This man, who wore the mail and half armour of a knight, had held himself well clear of the fighting, sitting his horse below Will and me at the base of our slope and watching as the action swirled and eddied.

Ewan lowered his bow, still holding an arrow nocked, his eyes fixed on the man below us. But then the man on foot began to run away. I do not believe Ewan had been aware of the fellow until he began to run, but the archer spun towards him and raised his bow again. He stepped into his pull, drew the bowstring back to his ear, held it there for a moment, then released. The fleeing man had been close to three hundred paces distant when he broke into his run and he was running almost as fast as Ewan had run earlier when the arrow struck between his shoulders, its force, even from such a great distance, tumbling him forward, wide armed, into a sprawling, motionless lump.

Even at the age of eight and never having seen a longbow used before, I knew that the feat I had just witnessed was extraordinary. But the mounted knight had missed it, for he had swung his horse around as soon as he saw the other man divert Ewan’s attention and was now driving hard up the slope towards us, his bared sword held high. I could not see his face, for he wore a visored helmet, but I knew that he meant to kill us.

Will pushed me down and away from him, shouting at me to roll, and as I threw myself to the ground I saw him run towards the oncoming man and then dive into a downhill roll, his head tucked into his knees. I heard a thunderous thumping of hooves above and beside me, then heard a violent hiss as the point of a hard-swung sword flashed past my face, and frightened out of my wits I rolled again, as the rider reined in his mount and turned, gathering himself to slash at me again, sure this time of his target. I saw his arm go up and heard myself whimper, and then came a sound like a dull, hard hammer blow. My would-be killer flew backward over his horse’s rump and crashed to the ground.

I had not seen the arrow hit him, but when I scrambled to my knees to look it was there, transfixing him, buried almost to its feathered fletching in the very centre of his chest, sunk through the layers of armour meant to protect him. I could see Will’s feet and legs beside me, and when I looked up at him his eyes were wider than I had ever seen them. Still dazed and hardly believing I had not been killed, I stood up to look for big Ewan, and there he was with his bow by his side, standing motionless where I had last seen him, beneath the tree, beside the body of his mother. It would be years before I learned to appreciate how difficult it is for a bowman to shoot accurately at a target that is far above or below him.

Will was still staring at the arrow buried in the dead knight’s chest. He turned to me and blinked, then looked down the slope.

“Let’s help Ewan bury his mother,” he said.

As we stood silent over the grave Will had helped Ewan dig with the shovel his mother had used in cultivating her wild crops—I was judged to be too small for such heavy work—I found myself thinking of the carnage that had swept into our lives during the previous few days. Numbed by the grief in Ewan’s face, I stared down at the mound of fresh dirt over the woman I had never known and saw the faces of my own recent dead—my uncle Alan and my aunt Martha, Will’s parents; Timothy and Charlie, Sir Alan’s oldest and most faithful retainers, bound to him and his family by a lifetime of service and dedication to the bloodlines of the healthy little herd of cattle they had bred and reared; Jessie, the plump, careworn household cook who had mothered me after my arrival in Ellerslie; Roddy and Daft Sammy, the slow-witted pair of labourers who had worked the cattle stalls and sometimes served in the stables with Angus, the dour old Highland groom; and sunny little Jenny, the laughing child whose severed head had bounced and rolled across the ground in Dalfinnon Woods before my eyes. Had that been only three days before? Ten dead, including the unknown woman we had buried here, and behind us, in the little valley, an additional eighteen, fourteen of them men, the others dogs. So much death. So much blood.

I have no recollection of leaving the graveside, no memory of entering the cave that had been Ewan’s mother’s home. I regained my awareness only after night had fallen, when I opened my eyes to find myself sitting against a wall close by a roaring fire. Ewan and Will were seated on the other side of the flames that filled the hollow space with leaping shadows. Ewan’s legs were apart, stretched towards the fire, and he appeared to be asleep, his single eye closed and his slumped back supported by the sturdy frame of a shortlegged chair of the kind my mother had used while nursing my younger siblings. Behind him, the mouth of the cave was outlined in light, its centre filled with blackness.