The Way of the Warrior-Wizard

Duncan was so exhausted from the day's activities that he was having trouble keeping his head up. Davy the dog kept licking his face in order to keep him alert, but he was fighting a losing battle.

Dean Andrews had introduced him to the Faculty, who had met him with far less enthusiasm than his students had done the week before. He had talked with the Faculty to give them some “pointers” on teaching, and perhaps half of them had received him with grace. The other half seemed irate if not downright hostile. Obviously, they did not want to be told what to do by a mere kid. There had been one professor who was having an especially difficult time accepting the young “genius”: his name was Jerome Donaldson.

Donaldson had been very challenging towards him and had lambasted him with criticism every time he made a point.

“Do you think that you know more than people who have been teaching for thirty or more years?” he had asked disdainfully.

“No, Sir, not at all,” Duncan had replied as respectfully as he was able, “I in fact have learned many of my methods from people who have been teaching for thirty or more years. I incorporate the Socratic Method because of an old professor that I knew back in Scotland, who demonstrated to me the use of it in order to keep his students awake and alert.”

“Well,” Donaldson had conceded grudgingly, “I suppose I’ll accept that answer for now...although I suspect that you’re engaging in disingenuous flattery in order to shut up us ‘oldsters’. I better not hear any arrogant comments coming out of your mouth, youngster. I don’t care if you are a ‘star’, you need to mind your place at this teaching institution.”

“Of course,” Duncan had replied in a courteous fashion, “I am honoured to be teaching here, and I don’t expect to be treated any differently than anyone else.”

“Yes,” Donaldson had countered, “but you will be treated differently, and I think everyone here knows that.”

Duncan had felt discouraged by Donaldson’s critique of him, but Dean Andrews had told him not to worry.

“There are going to be those, like Donaldson, who are less than pleased with a young boy arriving upon the scene as their peer; but don’t let them push you around. You have as much right as anyone else to be here, Duncan. We would not have hired you if we did not think that you were capable of doing this job.”

Duncan had thanked Dean Andrews for his support, but he felt less than reassured. He could not really blame people like Donaldson, for they had been honing their craft years before he was even born. Perhaps he should not be intruding upon the adults’ ‘territory’ after all.

Mairi stopped the car in front of a big farmhouse, interrupting his hazy, half-awake thinking. Davy barked to let his master know that he was finally at home.

“Here we are, laddie,” Mairi announced to her somnolent brother, “I think you had best get to bed early tonight. I will be here to pick you up tomorrow morning.”

“Father will expect me to do my evening chores first,” Duncan countered sleepily, “I can’t start falling down on that or he won’t let me teach.”

“You let me deal with Father,” Mairi told him fiercely, “The farm will not fall apart because you have not swept the floor for one day.”

“Father has given me fewer chores than the others during this time when I’m becoming accustomed to my new position,” Duncan countered, “I have to do the bare minimum at least.”

Mairi grunted. She and her father Hamish often had arguments over his rigidity when it came to imposing rules on the family. Even so, she would need to respect the fact that Duncan was Hamish’s son and not hers.

Mairi already had her own child, a little girl who, like Duncan’s brother wee Hamish, had been born with Down Sydrome. Her name was Angela, and she was waiting at home with the babysitter. Mairi would not be able to linger long at the MacGregor farm, but she did want to check in with the family to make sure all was right with them.

When they entered the farm-house, Hamish had two plates of supper waiting for them, as well as a bowl of food for the dog.

“You’ll have supper before you leave, Mairi,” Hamish told her in Gaelic, voicing it as a command rather than as an invitation.

“Angela’s waiting at home for me,” Mairi countered, “I must not tarry.”

“Father sent me over with a meal for Angie and the Nanny,” Duncan’s seventeen-year-old brother Glenlachlan told them, clutching a big mug of coffee, “I can’t believe how big she is—two years old already!”

Angela was Glenlachlan’s birth daughter, but Mairi had adopted the girl as the parents had not been mature enough at the time to raise a child.

“The wee bairns do have a way of growing, Glenlachlan, mo ghaol,” Mairi said to him as she relented and sat down for a quick meal.

Duncan’s older brother Glenlachlan was short for his age—he was even shorter at seventeen than Duncan was at fourteen—and so he had grown the wisp of a moustache to demonstrate to people that he was no longer a boy.

“I was talking with Father about changing his title to ‘Warrior-Wizard’ instead of ‘Warlock’,” Glenlachlan stated, switching to English in order to emphasize the difference in the words, “‘wizard’ originally meant ‘wise-man’ and I think that’s better than being a ‘cunning man’, one of the original meanings of ‘warlock’. ‘Cunning’ sounds like a tricky fox-man.”

“What’s in a name?” Hamish switched to English in order to quote Shakespeare, “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. And yet, 'The Leopard' is a wee bit old to be changing his spots the now.”

“You’re an ageless leopard, Father,” Duncan told him as he dug in hungrily to the delicious ham and potatoes meal, “not old.”

“Maybe you can be the ‘Warrior-Wiz’, Duncan,” Glenlachlan suggested, “after all, you’ve got the ‘right stuff’ to be one...unlike me. I’m struggling to keep up with just about everything at school, and here you are, younger than me and with your PhD...hey, that rhymes. Maybe I can be a Warrior-Poet.”

“I don’t want to be a ‘Warrior-anything’,” Duncan countered, “I may have studied the battles of the past, but war is not my way.”

“Stay away from war if you can, laddies,” Hamish agreed with his younger son, “because there’s little else in this world as bloody awful as war...I can attest to it.”

“The word ‘warrior’ doesn’t necessarily mean someone who is in an actual war,” Glenlachlan explained, “nowadays, it can mean someone who is courageously and vigorously involved in an activity. That would be you, Duncan. I admire you, taking on those old battle-axe profs at all the Universities you go to.”

“They aren’t ‘battle-axes’, Glenlachlan,” Duncan corrected him, “they’re just a little apprehensive of someone who’s different.”

“Right,” Glenlachlan conceded, “well, I guess you have to be a diplomatic warrior, then.”

After Duncan had finished his supper and had bidden a good evening to Mairi, he began his evening tasks of sweeping the floors and cleaning the bathrooms. He was determined not to let his father down. In the middle of scrubbing the bath-tub, however, Hamish came in and stopped his hand in mid-scrub.

“Mairi says you’ve had a difficult day, my boy,” he said to him, abandoning the Lowland Scots brogue that he had used during his army days in favour of the softly lilting Gaelic language of his youth in the Highlands, “It is time for you to go to bed, now.”

Duncan looked up at his father, surprised. Hamish was not normally known for being ‘soft’ on his children, especially not Duncan. He tended to be particularly hard on the boy because of all the praise and glory that the young lecturer had received from the outside world within the past few years. He did not want Duncan to develop “too high an opinion of himself” and so he tended to be very strict with him.

“Yes, Father,” Duncan replied in astonishment, “I can finish it tomorrow morning—I will rise early in order to do so.”

“No, my son, Glenlachlan will do it. He needs to get off his backside; whereas you are constantly striving, Mairi has informed me. I am very proud of you, Duncan...perhaps you are a ‘Warrior-Wizard’, as Glenlachlan has inadvertently named you.”

Duncan felt a warm stirring in his heart for the elderly yet timeless man that was his father.