The Forest Laird(130)

“But His Grace—”

“Oh, relax. I said it’s time for you to reintroduce yourself to the discipline. I did not say to killing. It’s the training, Jamie, that will keep you fit and hale. Come with us now. I’m going to try to teach Alec here to use a quarterstaff. Too late for him to hope to learn to draw a bow.”

“Mind your mouth, Cousin. I can draw a bow.”

Ewan responded without even looking at his cousin, speaking quietly as always. “Too late to mind my mouth, it’s ruined. And too late for you to learn to draw a bow—a real bow, I mean, like mine, a round yew bow. The other kind, the kind your folk use, can barely throw an arrow half the length of mine. You’ll see, Cousin. You too, Jamie, come along.”

“I’ll come, but I no longer have a bow. I have a staff, but it’s for walking and not heavy enough for fighting, even if I wished to.”

“I know that. We brought two with us. You may use mine. I’ll wager you’ve not lost the knack of it. Now then, we have food and even a flask of wine, and it’s a fine day and we have no demands on us, so come, let’s waste no more of it.”

Three hours later, I awoke from a doze with the sun burning my face through a gap in the canopy of leaves above my head. We had found a pleasant spot on the banks of a wide stream that had once been a wider river, and had made man-sized targets from a couple of ancient logs that we dragged from the stream bed and lodged upright against the flank of the former riverbank. Ewan had quickly demonstrated the truth of what he had told Alexander, for the big Scot, despite his enormous muscles and breadth of shoulder, had been unable to draw Ewan’s longbow to its full extent. He had tried manfully for almost half an hour, but had finally slumped down on the stream bank without having been able to send a single arrow effectively towards the two targets.

I had fared little better, though somehow my muscles still seemed to remember the knack of combining the series of movements that produced the archer’s pull. I managed to cast three arrows with a degree of accuracy, though I hit neither target, but then my performance deteriorated rapidly as my body rebelled against the unaccustomed stresses. For another half-hour after that, we tried one another with the quarterstaves, and I was the one who proved most useless there, my muscles long unused to the efforts and tensions of wielding the weapon. And then, eventually, we had eaten, washing the food down with some of the wine we had brought with us and diluted with clear stream water, and dozed off on the grassy bank, beneath the shade of a towering elm tree.

I rolled onto my side to escape the direct heat of the sun and saw Ewan sitting on the edge of the bank, his feet dangling in the water as he concentrated, head down, on something in his fingers.

“What are you doing?”

He cocked his head towards me without taking his eyes off whatever he was holding. “I’m getting ready to catch our dinner. There’s a deep hole not far downstream and it looks to be a haven for fine, juicy trout. I remembered I had some hooks in my scrip, but they had strings attached and now they’re all a-tangle and I’m trying to unsnarl them. If I succeed, I shall go fishing. If I do not, I’ll throw the whole mess into the river.”

“And which will it be, think you?” Alec had sat up, too, and now sat squinting towards where Ewan worked meticulously, his tongue protruding as he frowned in concentration over his hooks.

“Probably the river, the way things are looking now,” Ewan growled.

“Aye. Well, keep trying, and I’ll go and try my hand at the guddlin’.”

Smiling to myself, I rose to my feet and followed Alec, intrigued to see how he would fare. I had seen many try but few succeed at guddling, for it involved stroking the belly of a fish and lulling it until you could grasp it and flip it up onto the bank. It was not easy to do, but neither was it impossible—it merely required endless patience and an ability to lie still and move one’s questing hand slowly and imperceptibly once it was in the water.

It was clear from the outset that Alec was a master guddler. Within minutes he located a low spot on the riverbank, with a deep channel beneath it, and was soon bare from the waist up, lying full length on the grass with his arm sunk almost to the shoulder beneath the water and his gaze fixed on the large, fat trout that hovered below him. In mere minutes, it seemed to me, he surged up and threw the sparkling fish high into the air to land on the grass behind him, and by the time I had scrambled after it and killed it with a sharp blow to the head from my knife hilt, he was back on his side again, peering down into the water in search of his next catch.