A tiny frown grew instantly between his brows. “But you don’t think it is likely to happen. I can hear it in your voice … see it in your eyes.”
“No, I did not say that, Will, but you yourself will have to admit, if you but think on it, that the odds against your winning that peaceful isolation are great. Your name is too well known now for you to simply disappear, especially after your announcement of your name and your intentions to His Lordship of York in April. I am not saying you could not vanish from the ken of men, because of course you could, but it would not be easily arranged. Nor easily maintained.”
“The ease of doing it and the difficulties of sustaining it do not concern me,” he said slowly. “It will be done, if I wish it to be done. Determination to stay hidden is what I’ll require most—that, and a place where no one will find me accidentally. Will you help me with that, if I call upon you?”
“Of course I will, and happily. And I will apply myself from this time on to making it possible. This will be a worthwhile task.”
He lowered his head. “My thanks, Cousin.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Wait until I’ve found the way to make it work. In the meantime, though, take my advice and keep this sword well hidden. Thank Shoomy for it, but ask his leave to hold it safe against a time when you might really need it. It will attract too much attention if you wear it openly, for it smacks too much of something a leader might carry for effect. And that brings us around in a complete circle to what we were talking about when we began. Whence did this all spring, this notion of symbols and leadership?”
“Murray,” he said, and I did not know whether he meant Andrew Murray or the place called Moray, for they both sounded the same when spoken.
He grimaced then and clawed at his beard with hooked fingers, scratching deeply as he continued speaking. “This has to come off. I swear it’s full of fleas. And I should know better than to sleep with the dogs when I’m on the road. Mirren will flay me.” He paused, collecting his thoughts. “Where did this thing about leadership and symbols come from?” He shrugged. “I first heard of it from Andrew Murray, when I saw him in the north a few years ago, on that errand for the Bishop. He carries a battle-axe with him everywhere now because it has become his emblem. He even has one blazoned on his standard, which is laughable. Murray is a swordsman, as you know—always has been. And because he’s trained all his life on the English quarterstaff, there is no one in Scotland who can best him face to face and toe to toe with a sword in his hand.
“Several years ago, though, when his father’s lands were invaded by raiders from the far northeast, he won a dire fight using an axe against a mounted raider after he himself had been unhorsed. The axe was all he had, he told me, for when he was knocked from the saddle, he had fallen on his sword and shattered the blade. When his opponent charged him for the kill, Andrew managed to dodge aside and hooked the end of his axe blade behind the knee joint of the fellow’s armour. He couldn’t say afterwards if it actually hooked behind the fellow’s knee brace or caught in a flaw in his chain mail, but he knew it was a fluke, the sheerest accident, and he told me he could never have done it again. It worked, though, for when the fellow’s horse spun away, Andrew’s weight on the lodged axe pulled the rider from its back. The fellow hit the ground hard and Andrew split his helm with a single blow. The word spread that Andrew Murray was a peerless axe man. He has never used an axe in a fight since then, he says, but he carries one with him everywhere he goes, because his people expect to see it. And he rides beneath a yellow banner marked with a blood red axe head, a symbol of his puissance, as the French call it.”
“And he thought you might wish to bear one, too, someday?”
“No, it was not quite that straightforward.” He crossed the tiny room in a few strides to where a jug stood, covered with a white cloth, beside a quartet of earthen mugs. He poured a mug of ale for each of us and brought one to me, waiting until I raised it in a salute that he returned before bringing the rim of his mug to his own lips. He drank deeply, then lowered his cup and belched softly. “There, now that tasted good.” He reached out to touch the cross-guard of the great sword, his hand side by side with mine.
“What Murray said was that every leader, great or small, needs a recognizable emblem—a symbol of his leadership. His became a battle-axe, irrespective of what he himself might have wished for, and that led him to wonder what mine might be, if ever I should become a leader of men here in the south.” He flicked his thumb against the metal of the guard, then turned away and moved back to his big chair. “It was whimsical thing, of no real import, and we were but passing idle time. I had forgotten all about it until I came in here one day and saw that great thing leaning in the corner. It came to me then that Andrew’s symbol should have been a sword but ended up being an axe, and I knew that my own should be a bow, but that as a symbol, a bow, contrary to all my love and respect for it as a weapon, now seemed somehow … insubstantial. Slender and slight looking and not at all weighty or solid.