“I’d had an arrow nocked to my string since before Will swung his first strike, and now I brought it up and pulled. There were three runners close to catching Will. I felled the first of them, shattering his left shoulder and throwing him backward with the force of my arrow. By the time I had another arrow set, the second man had recognized me and knew what was coming. Still running flat out, he threw himself sideways into the brush by the side of the path and lay there, making no attempt to come out. The third man had pulled a sword from his sheath and was swinging it up to hack at Will when my arrow took him low, just above the left knee, knocking the legs from under him. I nocked a third arrow, but no one moved now among the small group of Englishmen remaining in the clearing.
“I counted five men left there, each of them staring intently at either Will or me, and I knew our descriptions would be spread and they would hunt us down for this, or try to. I waited until Will ran past me and then I spun and followed him, neither of us slacking our pace until we reached the market square and reclaimed our clothing and weapons from Nichol and his companions. We told them to scatter and deny they had ever seen us, and then we made our way to where we had left our horses, and we were quickly out of Lanark.”
I sat silent for some time, absorbing all that he had told me. “So that was three months ago?” I asked eventually.
He shrugged. “Don’t know for certain. Where are we now?”
“September. Today is the sixteenth.”
“Then it would have been four months ago. Late May.”
“And where have you been since then?”
“In the forest, near Selkirk village.”
“Did Mirren go with you?”
“Aye, she had to. Too many people knew who we were. It would no’ have been safe for her to stay. Besides, she wouldna leave Will.”
“A rough life for a woman, that, living in the forest, under open skies.”
“Not at all. They live in a cave, those two, and it’s better than many a house I’ve seen. It’s dry, warm, spacious, and well lit, comfortably furnished, and well hidden. It even has separate bedchambers and a clean pool.”
“A pool? You mean for bathing?”
“Aye, though it’s chilly, even in high summer. It’s spring fed. Pure, crystal water.”
“Do they live alone there?”
“Aye, except for me and half a hundred others. We have an entire community there.”
“Hmm. So why does Will want to leave?”
Ewan shrugged. “Who can say? He doesna talk about it much, but I think he’s had enough of the outlaw life, and I think he would like to bring Mirren home to meet her new family here in Elderslie and visit her aunt and cousins in Paisley.”
“Then he should do so,” I said, “as soon as he can.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
1
I have not had to resort to writing a commentary for many years, perhaps not since the day I left my beloved Abbey library in Paisley; real commentary requires time and leisure to reflect upon abstractions, and everyday life leaves ordinary men and priests little time for such luxuries. But commentary is a natural outgrowth of the translator’s art, and I learned to use it soon after I gained full membership in Brother Duncan’s library fraternity. In those days, left to my solitary work and encouraged to trust my instincts, I would add a notation whenever I encountered some anomaly in an ancient text on which I had been set to work. Sometimes I would merely note the oddity of a word or character, but once I grew more confident in my own judgment, I would write down my observations, and less frequently the opinions I drew from those observations, on whatever I had found anomalous in the document. Compiling such commentaries was, I found, enjoyable, and they were certainly invaluable later, when I would return to a document that I had not, perhaps, examined in months, to find my own notations carefully attached to the manuscript, usually by a tiny blob of wax at one edge.
This passage, then, is a commentary, an observation set aside from, but necessary to the understanding of, this chronicle of my cousin’s life. And yet it troubles me that I should find it necessary to add it at all. My studies for the priesthood intensified during those same months, spurred by a mystifying display of interest in me and my progress by the revered and powerful Bishop of Glasgow, and my superiors decided that I would be ready for ordination by Christmas that year. The time flew by, and almost without our noticing, the trees fell bare and winter’s onset grew steadily more threatening from day to day.
The death of the Maid of Norway, which had dealt the trivial blow of delaying my ordination, turned out to have far more important repercussions. It took eleven days for word to reach the mainland, and it came first to the attention of Bishop Fraser of St. Andrews on the eastern coast. A week after that, Robert Bruce was on the march to claim what he perceived to be his indisputable right to Scotland’s Crown, headed for Perth by way of Stirling and summoning all his supporters to join him, once again beating John Balliol to the initiative. The Earls of Mar and Athol called out the men of their earldoms in support of Bruce, and for a time it looked yet again as though the entire country might be plunged into civil war, for the full might of the House of Comyn, the most powerful family in Scotland, under the Lords of Badenoch and Buchan, stood aligned with Balliol’s claim and would not stand idly by while Bruce usurped the throne.