The Forest Laird(19)

I was the scholar, Will the earnest, plodding student. Latin, Greek, French, and mathematics came so easily to me that I barely thought of them as tasks; they were simple pleasures that I soaked up like sunshine. For Will, though, they were chronic tribulations that he tackled grimly every day, jaws clenched, eyes squinting in ferocious concentration. Latin and French he mastered eventually with much help from me, but Greek remained Greek to him—incomprehensible. Simple arithmetic he grasped easily, but the more arcane elements of mathematics, the recently discovered algebraic calculations from Arabia, failed to capture his interest. It was the same with the more classical elements of what the monks tried to teach him: the theories of logic and polemic were lost on Will, and yet he would debate some point of philosophy for hours, principally because some assertion of Augustine of Hippo, or Plato or Aristotle, had struck a chord in him, challenging or confirming something he believed intuitively.

Now that I think about it, it may have been at that time, towards the end of our first scholastic year, that I first began to suspect my cousin lacked imagination. I was very young at the time, of course, but I had been soaking up knowledge like a sponge for close to a twelvemonth by then and I can remember being puzzled about what I sometimes saw as a startlingly obvious inability in Will to connect salient points of a debate; to make intuitive leaps from one abstract notion to another. God Himself knows William Wallace had no difficulties with logical thought or decisive action, but something occasionally troubled me about the way he would seem to hamper his own progress in a manner that struck me as obtuse. I remember, hazily, one of our teachers saying something about Will being unable to assimilate shades of grey in striving for a goal. I know that Will saw life, particularly in later years, in black and white: bad and good, darkness and light, perfidy and honour.

Or perhaps I never did think of him as lacking in imagination, if I am truthful here. The gulf between ten years of age and seventy is vast, and memory can make fools of us, so my opinion on these things might be misguided, formed unwittingly in retrospect while mulling over all that William Wallace did and might have done.

Be that as it may, a different rule applied at eveningtide. Released from our scholastic studies each afternoon just before vespers, we would hurry home to eat, and then our daily studies with Ewan would begin, and in those our roles were completely reversed. This was the arena within which Will Wallace soared while I stumbled behind him; here he was the gifted and intuitive disciple offering advice and assistance to me while I laboured in his wake, flailing and floundering as I tried to absorb the lessons and the disciplines that to him were the basic elements of life.

We had no bows at first. Instead, every day after school in the first week after our move to Paisley, Ewan took us deep into the surrounding greenwood, where we spent the hours until dusk, each evening for six days, finding and then painstakingly selecting eight straight, heavy lengths of sapling ash and elm, the thinnest no less than a full thumb’s length wide and the thickest half that width again. Our search was for whole young trees that contained a straight length greater by a hand’s span than the length of each of our bodies and did so without tapering, which meant we had to gauge each selection with great care before we cut it, and then trim it so that when we held it close it rose perfectly straight from the ground at our feet to where we could hold its upper end with the base of our hands resting on the top of our foreheads. It was not a simple task, and the time taken to complete it reflected that: six whole evenings to find and cut eight poles. But then, these were not mere poles: each of them was an axis around which our training, our entire lives as Ewan’s students, would revolve for the next two years, until we outgrew them and had to make new ones.

The next stage of our instruction started immediately after Mass the following day, which was a Sunday, our only day of rest from school. As soon as we arrived home from the Abbey after morning Mass, Ewan set us to work. Each of us began with a staff of green elm, solid and heavy with sap. We stripped it of bark and then rubbed it with a compound of alum that Ewan provided, which soaked up the natural slippery outer juice of the wood, leaving it smooth and dry to the touch. We set these two aside for what Ewan called daily use, although we had no idea at the time what that meant, and turned our attention to the other six, stripping those as we had the first pair, while Ewan cut long, finger-wide strips of leather from a cured hide. He had a big iron pot of water boiling over the fire, and he immersed the strips in the boiling pot until they were supple again. Then he pulled them out one by one with a pair of tongs and laid them to cool on the stone floor. We stopped for a meal at noon, and as soon as we were finished, Ewan tested each of the stripped poles for straightness, holding each one up to his eye to peer along its length. He then separated them into groups of three, one elm and two ash in each, and had Will and me hold each bundle securely while he bound it tightly with the wet strips of hide.