The Forest Laird

by Jack Whyte

  He picked up the pan that he’d set by the fireside earlier, testing its heat again with the back of a finger. “There, this is ready.”

  I watched closely as he folded each of the two large pieces of torn shirt into four and then carefully poured half of the mixture in the pan onto each of the pads he had made. I wrinkled my nose at the smell of it.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s a nostrum.”

  “What’s a nostrum?”

  “A cure, made from natural things. This one is a poultice made of burdock leaves and herbs and a special mixture of dried things given me by my mother, who is a famous healer. Usually poultices have to be hot, but this one needn’t be. It’s for you.” He glanced up to see how I reacted to that, but I merely stared at the nostrum. “There’s one for each of you. What we’ll do is put them into the crack of your arses, where the pain is worst, and bind them into place with those long strips. Then you’ll sleep with them in place, and come morning, you should both be feeling better. You might not be completely without pain by then, but the worst of it will be bye. Now, let’s get them on. They’re cool now, so they’ll not burn you.”

  Will and I eyed each other fearfully, acutely mindful of what had happened last time a man had come near our backsides, but the big archer was patient and unmistakably concerned for us, and so we suffered the indignity of allowing him to set the things in place and tie them securely. It felt revolting, but I imagined very soon afterwards that the pain of my ravaged backside was subsiding, and I sat still, enjoying the heat from the replenished fire and leaning against Will, who was looking around at the archer’s camp.

  I looked then, too, and noticed that what I had thought must be a purely temporary place had signs of permanence about it. The fire pit was well made, its stones blackened with age and soot, and there were several stoutly made wooden boxes, or chests, that looked too solid to be picked up and carried away by one man on a single journey. I peered more closely into the dimness and saw that they were fitted into recesses in the hand-cut bank that ringed the campfire and provided us with seats, and that their sides were hinged and could be closed by a latch.

  “Do you live here all the time?” Will had voiced the question in my mind.

  “No,” Ewan said. “But I spend a lot of time here. My mother lives close by.”

  “Why don’t you stay wi’ her?”

  “Because she lives in a cave.” Then, seeing the astonishment on our faces, he added, “I stay away because I don’t want to leave signs of my being there. I only go to see her when I think she’ll need more food. To go too often would be dangerous.”

  “Why?”

  The big archer gave a snort of indignation. “Because someone might see me coming or going, and if they did they might search and find my mother. And if they find her they’ll kill her.”

  The enormity of that left us speechless, and Will, having seen his own mother killed mere days before, wiped at his eyes, suddenly brimming with tears. It was left to me to ask the obvious question.

  “Why would anybody want to kill her?”

  “Because she’s my mother and I’m an outlaw. So is she.”

  “An outlaw?” I was stricken with awe. “How can somebody’s mother be an outlaw?”

  He reached out a long arm to tousle my hair. “Aye,” he said quietly. “It’s daft, isn’t it? But she is, because I saved her life and was outlawed myself for doing it.”

  He looked into the fire, and I drew my blanket closer about me, sensing a story to come. And sure enough, he began to speak, slowly and clearly in that wonderful soft-edged voice. “D’you recall my saying she was a famous healer? Well, she was. She lived in a wee place east of here, about twelve miles from where we’re sitting now. It doesna even have a name—just a wee clump o’ houses near a ford over a river. But she was known in a’ the countryside, and whenever somebody got sick, they’d send for her. The land belonged to an auld laird called Sir Walter Ormiston, one o’ the Dumfries Ormistons, but when he died it passed to his eldest son, a useless lump of dung called William, like your friend there. But he liked to call himself William, Laird of Ormiston. The old man had been plain Ormiston, but the son demanded to be called the Laird of Ormiston, by everybody. Anyway, this Laird William had a wife as silly as himself, and a wee son called Alasdair. The bairn took sick and the Laird had my mother brought to the big house to see to him. She was a great healer, my mother, but she couldna compete wi’ God’s will, and the bairn died. The father went mad, and his wife called my mother a witch, said she had put a curse on the bairn. They locked her up in a cellar in the big house.

  “I heard all about it the next morning, and I went directly in search of her and got there just as they were going to hang her from a tree. I was too far away to stop them, too far away even to shout at them and be heard. I couldna believe what I was seein’. They put a rope around her neck and threw the other end over a high branch, and then three men gathered up the other end of the rope, meaning to run with it, hoisting her up into the air.”

  He stopped talking, and I had to bite my tongue to keep still and wait, but it was Will who spoke up.

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? I used my bow and shot them a’ when they started to run, before they could hoist her off the ground. The rope burnt her neck, but they dropped her before she was even in the air. I was already running towards them. When I saw Laird William, I took a shot at him, but he was running to hide behind a tree and I took him in the shoulder. Sent him flying, but didna kill him. By the time I reached my mother there was just me and her and the three men I had killed. Everyone else had scattered.”

  He drew a deep breath and blew it out mightily. “That was two years ago, the end of my life as it had been. I took my mother up on my horse with me and we escaped, but we could not go home again, for they put a price on my head for murder, for the murder of the three men and the attempted murder of Laird William. I knew they would, but by the time the word got out we were far away, my mother and I. I took her into the forest and we stayed there for a few months, but then when the hullabaloo had died down I brought her back here, close enough to her own land to be familiar, but far enough away from everywhere to be out of harm’s way.

  “We hid in the woods here for a month or two longer, while I looked for a place for her to live that would be safe and comfortable, and one day I found the cave she lives in now. It’s hard to find at the best o’ times, and she’s happy enough, but the ground below the hillside at the entrance to her place is boggy, and it’s too easy to leave tracks that might be followed. That’s why I stay away most of the time.”

  “Except when you think she needs more food,” I said.

  “Aye, that’s right. She has a few goats that run wild but come to her call, and that gives her milk and cheese. And she grows her own small crops in the clearings among the trees. I bring her oats and fresh meat from time to time, meat that I smoke out here so that it will keep.”

  “What kind of meat?”

  “Deer meat. From Laird William’s deer. I’m a poacher and a thief o’ his deer. It’s thanks to him that I’m an outlaw and so I show my gratitude by killing and eating his deer.”

  “What’s it like to be an outlaw?” I asked him.

  The big man smiled at me and I saw his face clearly, but saw nothing ugly there now. “It’s like being sleepy. You learn to accept it and you hope it won’t last.” He nodded towards Will. “Your cousin’s asleep already. Now let’s get you both to bed. We can talk more tomorrow.”

  We awoke the next morning to the sight of Ewan standing beside the fire pit, gazing down at us with what passed for a smile.

  “Will you sleep all day then, you two? I’ve done an entire day’s work while you lay snoring there. Up, now, and down to the stream and wash the mess from your arses, quick. I need you to help me cut this up, and then we’re going to visit my mother, so up with you and scamper about!”

  If we were bleary eye
d at all, that vanished at once, for the gutted carcass of a small deer was draped on a rough cloth spread across his shoulders, its pointed hooves held together at his chest in one massive fist. We sprang from our ferny beds as he lowered the dead beast to the ground and we ran the short distance to the burn with his hectoring voice in our ears all the way.

  The stream was narrower and faster than I had thought the previous night, and it swept around us in a bow, the outer edge of which followed a steep, treed bank every bit as high and sheer as the one at our backs. The only way to see the sky was by looking straight up through a narrow, open strip between the overhead branches, and I saw at once that Ewan’s camp was as safe as it could possibly be, for anyone finding it would have to do so by accident. Not even the smell of woodsmoke would betray it, for by the time the smoke reached anyone it would have been dissipated by the thick foliage on the slopes above.

  The water didn’t seem as cold as it had the night before, either, and we washed the remains of Ewan’s poultice from our bodies quickly, remarking to each other that we could no longer feel the throbbing ache that had seemed interminable the day before.

  Ewan had almost finished skinning the small deer when we got back to the banked fire pit, where heat still smouldered under a covering of crusted earth. We watched him sever the head and lower legs—I was amazed by the colour and the sharpness of the curved blade he used—and wrap them in the still-steaming hide. He then lifted the entire bundle into the centre of the cloth that had covered his shoulders.

  “Here,” he said, tying the corners together. “One of you take that shovel and the other the pickaxe, then go and bury this along the bank of the stream. But bring back the cloth. And mind you take it as far from here as you can carry it. Dinna think to bury it close by. Bury it deep and stamp down the ground and pile stones over it. We dinna want to be attracting scavengers, animal or otherwise. Then get back here as quick as you can.”

  It took us some time to follow his instructions, and we barely spoke a word to each other, so intent were we on doing exactly as he had said. As we made our way back, we walked into the delicious aroma of cooking. Ewan had rekindled the dormant fire, and a flat iron skillet filled with fresh meat and some kind of onion was sizzling on the coals.

  We ate voraciously, as though we had not fed in weeks. Those two days of running had whetted our appetites to the point of insatiability. The deer liver was perfect, coated in flour and salt and lightly fried with the succulent wild onions, and when the last fragment was devoured we sat back happily.

  “How’s your bum?”

  The question, addressed to both of us, was asked casually as Ewan wiped his knife carefully, removing any signs of food from its gleaming, bluish blade. We both assured him that we were much better.

  “Good.” He gestured with a thumb over his shoulder to where the deer carcass lay covered with fresh ferns. “I’ll cut some of this up into bits that we can carry, and leave the rest here to smoke later. You can help me carry my mother’s share to her.”

  “Does she live far from here?” Will asked.

  The big outlaw shook his head. “Not far, a two-hour walk. Far enough away to be safe when anyone comes here hunting me. Laird William suspects I’m still around, so every now and then patrols come looking. But they haven’t found me yet.”

  “Are you no’ afeared they’ll find your mother?” Will asked.

  “She’s to the north o’ here, across the hills, on the far edge o’ William’s land. I leave signs to the south and southeast from time to time, to keep them hunting down there. Besides, she knows how to take care o’ herself.” Ewan took up his knife again and began to strop it against a much-used device that had been lying beside his foot. I looked closely at it, never having seen one quite like it before, a strip of leather, perhaps a foot long and a thumb’s length in width, that he had fastened to a heavy strip of wood. The leather had a patina of long use, its colour darkened almost to blackness by the friction of a lightly oiled blade, and I watched him test the blade’s edge with the ball of his thumb.

  He had no beard. That was part of why he had frightened me so badly when I first looked at him. In a world where all men went unshaven, a beard would have done much to conceal the frightfulness of his visage, yet he had made no attempt to cover the deformity of his face by growing one. If he would wear a mask, why not a beard?

  I had seen beardless men before, but very few, and my father had been the only one I knew personally. As a child, I had watched with fascination as he went to great pains, daily, to scrape his cheeks, chin, and upper lip free of hair, using a thin, short-bladed, and amazingly sharp knife that he kept for that purpose alone. It was hard work to shave a beard, I knew, a meticulous and time-consuming, seemingly pointless task, except that my father’s commitment to it had a purpose that I discovered by accident one day, listening to my mother speaking to a friend. My father, she had said, had an affliction of the skin that he could hold at bay only by shaving daily. He might perhaps miss one day, but three successive days without the blade would bring his face out in boils and scaly patches. I never did discover what this malady sprang from, but from that time onward I accepted my father’s daily regimen as necessary. Watching Ewan wield his strange bluish knife, I knew his blade was far sharper than my father’s, and that he could use it to shave quite easily. Yet there was a smoothness to his skin that showed no sign at all of being scraped.

  “Ewan, why have you no beard?”

  He looked at me in surprise, then laughed. “For the same reason I have no eyebrows. I can’t grow one.”

  I gaped at him in astonishment, noticing for the first time that it was as he said. He had brows, the undamaged one boldly pronounced, but they were hairless.

  He laughed again. “I was born bald, young Jamie. And I have never grown a single hair anywhere on my body. Look.”

  He stretched out a hand towards me, exposing the skin on his forearm. It was perfectly smooth, tanned, and heavily corded with muscle but innocent of any trace of hair.

  “No hair at all?” I asked.

  “Not a single strand. That’s another reason for the mask, and the hood. My bare head makes me too easy to notice. Folk will remember a hooded, masked outlaw, but they won’t be able to describe him. But a bald and beardless man is another matter altogether.”

  My mind raced to absorb what he had said. “Did you not wear a hood, then, before you were an outlaw?”

  “No, why would I? I didna need one. I had no reason to fear people knowing who I was. I had nothing to hide and nothing to protect. But that’s all different now. And what about you two? Where will you go next?”

  “I don’t know,” Will said quietly. He had been listening closely to our conversation. “I think we ought to go and see the Countess.”

  “The Countess? In Kyle? That’s back where you came from, thirty miles away. How will you get there? And what will you do when you are there? Have you other kin close by?”

  “No. There was only us, and Jamie’s folk in Auchincruive, but they’re all dead, too. I ha’e two brothers, but Malcolm’s training to be knighted and John was knighted two years ago and they’re both with the Bruce forces, somewhere in Annandale. I don’t know how to find them, to let them know what’s happened. But they’ll ha’e to be told. But that leaves just Jamie and me.”

  “And ye’ve no other kin anywhere?”

  Will shrugged. “Oh aye. There’s my father’s brother Malcolm. The one my brother’s named for. He lives in Elderslie, near Paisley.”

  The big archer blinked. “Ellerslie and Elderslie? There’s two places with the same name?”

  “They’re no’ exactly the same,” Will answered. “They just sound the same. I don’t think there’s any connection.”

  “Except they both ha’e knightly tenants called Wallace.”

  “My father wasna a knight, but my uncle Malcolm is. He has lands there, and a house.”

  “And how did he and your father get along? Are they
friends?”

  “I … think so. They’re brothers, and I know they like each other. Or liked each other …” His voice faltered only slightly, but he ploughed ahead. “And I’ve another two uncles, or an uncle and a cousin, close by there. At least I think they’re close by. Peter and Duncan Wallace. My mother talks—talked about them a’ the time. They’re both at Paisley Abbey, one a priest, the other a monk.”

  Ewan sat up straight. “Then you have a whole clan there, in this Elderslie, even if they be all men. Are there no women there?”

  Will shrugged. “I think so. My uncle Malcolm has a wife called Margaret.”

  “That’s where you should go, then, to your kinsmen there. There’s nothing left for you where you came from. The Countess would not let you run your farm yourselves, two young boys, mere bairns. And besides, if the men who killed your family found out you were back, they’d finish what they started. I think the two o’ you should go to Paisley, to your kin in the Abbey. They’ll take you to this Elderslie place.”

  “But Paisley’s miles away,” I said, hearing the dismay in my own voice, and Ewan swung his big head to look at me.

  “Miles away? God bless you, laddie, it’s a lot closer than the place you came from. That’s thirty miles and more back, but Paisley’s less than twenty miles from here.”

  I looked to Will, but he just shook his head, as ignorant as I was, and big Ewan took that as a sign that he was right.

  “That’s what we’ll do, then,” he said, his voice filled with certainty. “My mother will find you something to wear, to cover your bare arses, and she’ll wrap up some food for you. And then she’ll tell you the best way to go and we’ll set you on the road. You’ll see, it will be easy, and you’ll be in Elderslie in no time, chapping at your uncle’s door.”