The Forest Laird(21)

But then came a day when I survived my entire schedule of lessons without lapse or mishap and began to realize that the agonies that had plagued me for so long were no longer noticeable. I went directly to Will with the news, and he told me that his, too, had died away, and we marvelled together over the difference, wondering what had caused it. The regimen so grimly imposed on us each evening by Ewan was no less brutal or demanding; he still badgered us relentlessly for hours each day, driving us harder and faster every time, but the pains had receded and the effort we expended on our drills no longer sapped us to exhaustion.

Three months had elapsed by then. A month later, Ewan had been summoned to Elderslie by Sir Malcolm, leaving us with an unaccustomed gap in our after-school training. It was late summer, and so Will and I had gone swimming in the river that flowed near our house.

“Wait,” Will cried out as I prepared to dive back into the pool from which I had just emerged. He was standing neck-deep in water, fanning his arms to hold himself in place against the sluggish current. “Wait you. Stay there.”

“What?” I said hastily, looking down at my loins. “Is there a leech on me?”

He launched himself forward and swam until he was directly below me, then stood again and peered up at me, flicking the wet hair out of his eyes. I still could see no leech, though the thought of one unnerved me. I loathed the things.

“Where is it, the leech?”

“There’s no leech,” he said. “I see muscles. Your belly’s hard and your shoulders have grown out. And look at your arms.”

I looked, but could see no difference there from the last time I had looked. And then I realized what he was talking about, even before he went on to say, “Ewan was right. You’re growing muscles where you had none before. What about me, am I?”

He pulled himself up onto the bank, and as I looked at him this time I saw it, the change that had been so gradual that I had not noticed it before. Naked, Will was now far bigger than he had been when we first arrived in Paisley. His shoulders were wider, his chest broader and deeper, and his arms and legs were sculpted with muscles that I had never seen before. So impressed were we, so enthused by what we had discovered, that we raced home to work at our drills without Ewan’s supervision for the first time.

Neither one of us had yet raised his staff against the other. All our drills were carried out against an immovable, unconquerable enemy: a thick length of elmwood that neither of us could encircle with our arms. We had found it close by the firewood pile at the bottom of the garden and had helped Ewan to dig a posthole and entrench the thing. Now it reared high above us, impervious to the worst assaults we could inflict on it. For months now, all we had done was hit it with our staves. But four months had brought great change in how we hit it. In the earliest days, our blows had been clumsy—heavy, sullen, and repetitive, aimed at areas that Ewan had marked clearly—and we had tired rapidly without being permitted to rest. Now we could hammer out tattoos on the different marks, using both ends of our staves to attack several simultaneously. The sound of our hammering blows was as fast and clear as the rapping of a woodpecker.

The staves now felt natural to us, extensions of our arms and hands, and our minds and eyes directed our assaults without conscious thought. Little wonder our bodies were now responding visibly to what we had demanded of them. As we had grown inured to the monotony of the drills, we had devised another use for them; the regular, rhythmic staccato of our drumming blows turned out to be the perfect accompaniment for the daily exercise of learning our Latin and French vocabulary, so that each evening we would hammer through declensions and conjugations as we belaboured the unyielding post.

When summer turned to autumn that year, Ewan presented each of us with bows that he had made for us, and that occasion was the first time I had ever stopped to wonder what he did all day while we two were at school. The bows were beautiful, made of elmwood and a finger-width flat in section, less than half the size of Ewan’s own giant weapon of rounded yew. Each came with a dozen arrows fletched in different colours, blue for me and red for Will, and iron points that sleeved the ends and had no barbs. These were not hunting bows, Ewan told us. They were practice instruments through which we would learn accuracy and rhythm, the two most vital elements of archery.

The following year, he made two more for us, larger this time to fit our growing size, these fashioned of ash and round in section, which gave them greater tension and demanded far more strength in pulling. I worked hard with both bows for the space of those two years, practising diligently until I became adequately skilled, but Will, from the outset, was a prodigy. By the time I was thirteen and he fifteen, from sixty paces I could plant five arrows out of six within the central ring of the straw targets Ewan had built for us. Will could do the same with all six arrows from a hundred paces and group them so closely that they often touched one another in the very centre of the ring. Even Ewan doffed his hood to Will the first time he achieved that feat, but having done it once, Will then proceeded to do it almost every time, steadily increasing the distance of his casts until he could hit the ring from one hundred and sixty-three paces, the extreme range of his ash bow. No matter how he tried, he simply could not hurl a projectile any farther than that distance. But then, he was fifteen years old, and not a single man we knew, other than Ewan, could match him with the same bow. He had already begun supplying fresh game and venison to the Abbey kitchens.