by Fiona Faris
Iain grasped, in turn, each man’s calloused hand and gave it a single firm shake.
“Very well, then,” he concluded. “Let us go to it.”
Chapter Eighteen
Later the same day
About an hour later, back on the walkway atop the castle keep, Iain, Lewis, and Gillespie spotted the approach of the Campbell host.
A long, ragged column of men wound its way along the riverbank, a mile or two downstream of the castle. To the east, at a similar distance upstream, the much smaller band of refugees picked its way towards the towering hills. A shiver of fear ran through Iain. Fergus had been accurate in his assessment: at least five hundred men on foot and horse.
“They will want to parley,” Iain observed. “I suppose we must go out and hear what they have to say.”
They descended the tower to the courtyard, where their horses were saddled and waiting.
Stepping out of the keep door, Iain let his eyes scan the walls and the fortifications of the gatehouse, taking in the scant numbers who manned them. The men stared back at him, each face set with the same grim determination he had earlier seen on those of his lieutenants. The men were silent, just waiting for the fight to begin and for its inevitable outcome. Out of the corner of his eye, Iain spotted the smith, with his hammers in hand, ready to flatten Campbell skulls. From the gatehouse roof came the reek and smoke of the cauldrons and braziers that were heating the water, oil, and coals that would be dropped onto the Campbells through the murder holes in the ceiling of the passage below.
Iain nodded approvingly, his spirit swelling with pride. The clansmen were ready to die for him that day. And they would gladly die, sooner than submit to the chains and slavery of the mighty Campbells. They would show the Campbells how to die a good heroic death. The bards would sing of this day for all eternity.
Iain pulled his broadsword from his belt and brandished it in the air.
“Àrd-Choille!” he cried the clan war-cry. “Royal is my race!”
“Àrd-Choille!” the men roared back as one.
It was not long until the Campbell host was encamped beside the river, only four hundred yards from the castle gates. Cailean and two of his lieutenants rode up to the gatehouse and presented themselves for parley. Though he felt they had nothing to talk about, Iain climbed into the saddle of his gray stallion and rode out with Lewis and Gillespie to meet them.
Cailean was sitting astride his chestnut gelding. He was got up in cuirass, faulds, and chausses, with a gleaming steel bonnet protecting his head. His lieutenants were less ostentatiously dressed in the traditional bright yellow leine croich, or war shirt, beneath tough deerskin jerkins that had been proved with pitch and wax. Silence reigned as the two parties came together; the only sounds to be heard were the rush of the river and the twittering of the field-birds.
Iain surveyed Cailean Campbell and his garb and sneered with contempt.
“Aye, aye, Cailean, son of Neil,” he drawled. “It is nice to see that you have dressed for the occasion.”
Lewis and Gillespie guffawed. Iain thought he detected the merest twitch of a smile on the faces of Cailean’s two lieutenants as well.
Cailean colored, and his eyes flashed. His nose wrinkled with a dismissive look of disgust.
“Just let us get this charade over with,” Cailean grumbled. “I call on you to yield, not that you are going to, I expect. In which case, I look forward to the slaughter and the clearance of the MacGregors from Argyll.”
Iain’s temper flared, but he kept it under control. He would gladly have taken the wee dandy’s head from his shoulders there and then, but that would have been a treacherous thing to do, and he, Iain Mor, chief of the clan MacGregor, knew himself to be better than that. He shifted and settled again in his saddle. His stallion sorted. He raised his voice so that the men on the walls and battlements could hear him.
“You are right there, you wee bucket of piss; I shall not yield.”
He jutted his head in the direction of Cailean’s impressive army.
“Do you want me to wait until you send for reinforcements? Or will you come ahead with the toy soldiers that you have?”
The entire garrison castle jeered and gestured obscenely towards the waiting Campbells.
Cailean let out a howl of rage. His mount startled, reared, and pranced in alarm, in response to its rider’s violent outburst.
“Do you not think that your horse is a bit too highly strung for you to be riding it into battle?” Lewis taunted, pressing the advantage.
“I wat that it’s the man rather than his pretty pony that is too highly strung,” Gillespie observed.
They both laughed.
Cailean unleashed a torrent of foul abuse.
Iain laughed too. He heeled his stallion, walked it over to Cailean, and drew the back of his hand sharply across his jaw.
A huge cheer went up from the castle walls. Cailean burst into tears of rage, his eyes wild and unfocused with fury. He looked for all the world like a small child who was having a tantrum.
“That is how I deal with spoilt brats,” he hissed. “Away home and get your father. I was surprised at first that Neil wasn’t here to fight today, but now I do not find it quite so strange. He’d have been too ashamed to be seen on the same field as his poor wee blubbering excuse of a son. If you are his son, that is, and not the get of your mother’s wee powdered French hairdresser.”
He turned and rode leisurely and with exaggerated dignity back to the castle gate. Lewis and Gillespie followed him, but not before running their eyes up and down the seething figure of Cailean Campbell with a withering look of contempt.
“You shall pay for your insults, Iain MacGregor,” Cailean screamed after him, rising and falling in his saddle, spittle flying from his lips, his fists clenched impotently by his sides. “I shall take you alive, back to Inveraray, and break you with a slow and painful death. Before I am done, you shall be licking my boots and begging me to kill you. You think you can humiliate me? I will show you humiliation.”
The three MacGregor men rode unhurriedly on, throwing their heads back and laughing at Cailean’s petulance. As they passed through the gate, Iain turned to his two lieutenants.
“You know,” he ventured, “maybe I could bargain my surrender in return for the Campbells’ sparing of the rest of the clan.”
Lewis raised his brows.
“Do not even think of it, Iain Mor. It would break our hearts to see our chieftain broken.”
“I had better make sure that I am not taken alive, then,” Iain decided, speaking more to himself than to his companions. “The Campbell may take my life this day, but he will never have my honor.”
The battle did not last long. The Campbell host made light work of overrunning the meager defenses of Meggernie Castle. The quickly secured the gatehouse and poured into the courtyard. They swarmed up the stairways and onto the walls and made short shrift of dispatching the warriors who manned them.
No mercy was shown; outnumbered ten to one, every MacGregor was quickly overwhelmed put to the sword. The courtyard ran with blood. The rooks were joined by ravens and corbies on the castellations of the keep, where they waited patiently for their carrion-meat.
The last to die was Iain himself. He and half-a-dozen other survivors retreated and shut themselves in the keep. But the door was quickly breached, and the Campbells forced their way in. Iain and his remaining few men took to the warren of narrow passages and staircases that led higher and higher into the tower so that the Campbells could only come at them in ones and twos.
Iain backed slowly up the stairs, slashing and hewing at the heads and shoulders of the Campbells who pursued him. The left-handed spiral of the stairs hindered the sword-arms of the attackers, while it allowed those of the defenders free swing at those same attackers. The stairs and passageways were soon littered with dead and dying Campbells.
The MacGregors were gradually driven higher and higher up the tower. Cailean was determine
d that Iain should be taken alive so that he could exact painful revenge on him for his earlier insults as well as his stubborn resistance. However, his own stubborn determination was exacting a terrible cost in Campbell lives. His lieutenants complained to him bitterly about the pointless waste, and eventually, he was prevailed upon to give it up. The soldiers were withdrawn, and the tower was sealed and set alight. Soon the keep was spewing reek and flames, like a giant chimney, high into the Summer sky.
Cailean’s lieutenants let out a collective sigh of relief; the battle was over. It had been a vain exercise; the castle could have been besieged and the defenders starved out or worn down by attrition; there had been no need to storm it in the costly way that Cailean had demanded. Good Campbell men, and many of them, had died simply to vent the young lord’s vindictiveness.
Cailean’s eyes gleamed at the sight of the conflagration. He delighted in the thought of how Iain MacGregor would meet his end, in despair, suffering the torments of the flames, his clan lying in ruins around him.
But then, just as Cailean had sated his spite and was turning, a gasp arose from the onlookers. He squinted through the glare of the leaping flames. There, on the smoke-smothered walkway on the roof of the keep, a figure appeared. As Cailean watched in horror and disbelief, the figure began to tear stones from the crumbling parapet and hurl them down at the soldiers in the courtyard below.
“Àrd-Choille!” Iain Mor cried in a hoarse, ragged voice. “Royal is my race!”
Then the roof collapsed, and Iain was swallowed by the tower.
Chapter Nineteen
Clyth Castle
Later that evening
Uilleam carefully applied a thin smear of oil to the blade of his sword with a linen rag. It was after dine; Angus Gunn and his family had withdrawn to the solar, and Uilleam was sitting at a table in the body of the great hall of Clyth, cleaning his weapons. A few servants and retainers were already fussing around the hall, in a low babble of murmurs and whispers, preparing their beds for the night. The hounds lay half asleep near the fire, their ears turning lazily this way and that, monitoring the quiet activity that was going on around them. The sconces around the walls were lit still, though the heavy wooden chandeliers had been let down from the rafters on their chains and the candles extinguished, and the fire had already been banked in the grate of the large fireplace.
Uilleam caressed the cold steel of his sword-blade lovingly with his fingertips and examined the edge for nicks and fractures. The rancid smell of the cleaning oil plundered his nostrils, but he felt a deep sense of satisfaction. His sword was his best friend. It had served him well over the years and saved his life on many occasions. It deserved all the care he lavished upon it. He had nothing but contempt for those who neglected their weapons, allowing them to dull, lose their gleam, and become tarnished with rust. He carefully wiped the excess oil from the blade, laid his sword down on the table, and picked up his dirk.
Despite the peace and satisfaction that the moment brought him, he was troubled. The peace that attending to his weapons usually brought him was incomplete. A nagging doubt irked him, like a stone in his boot. He could not understand the sudden attraction he felt towards Siusan Gunn, the nature and strength of it. It was not the familiar attraction of carnal lust. Certainly, he found her extremely pleasing to the eye, and she did arouse in his groin the stirrings that any comely lass would do. But there was more, much more to it than that, and he could not explain it to himself.
He squinted at the long dagger in the poor light and frowned when he saw a thin line of dried blood encrusted around the joint, where the hilt met the cross-piece. He began to scrape it away with his thumbnail.
The trouble was that the feeling was unprecedented; he had nothing to compare it with and therefore identify it as. The closest he could come was the longing he had for his dead mother, the emptiness he had always felt from time to time while he was growing up, a yearning left by the yawning absence of her in his life.
He scraped the dried blood out from under his thumbnail on the breast of his soft-leather jerkin.
As far as the Gunn lass was concerned, this longing had suddenly risen and possessed him during the conference at Meggernie, at the point she had made her impassioned outburst. It was as if scales had all at once fallen from his eyes and he had been able to see her clearly for the very first time, how intolerable her situation was. More than that, he had actually felt in his own blood the anguish and anger she had been feeling at being bartered like a slave, a mere chattel, a baggage. He had suddenly seen her as someone just like himself, someone who had hopes and dreams, ambitions, feelings, and desires…
He scrunched up his brows, unused as he was to the mental exertion of such deep personal reflection.
He admired her spirit and its longing to be free of the schemes and machinations of clan politics and their petty dynastic struggles. He was drawn to her, and not just because of her physical charms – her cascading golden curls, her pretty face, her voluptuous figure – but also as to a kind of ‘kindred spirit’ that would fill the absence he felt in his life and complete him, much as his sword completed the warrior in him.
But he did not know what to do about it or how he should approach her. All he knew was that he was powerfully, almost irresistibly drawn to her and impelled to remain in her proximity. That was why he had decided to accompany them back to Clyth; that was why he was still there, several days into a visit that he could not warrant but could neither seem to end.
He was irresistibly drawn by his longing towards its object, but he also resented being possessed and driven by feelings he could neither understand nor control. He considered just upping and leaving, screwing his courage to the sticking point, striding out to the stables, and riding back to Meggernie without looking back, as if he were having to swallow down some unpalatable medicine. Alternatively, he considered seducing her, having his way with her and, hopefully, sating that longing in sating his physical lust for her. But, as much to his own horror and to his surprise, he found he did not have the courage to do the first and had too much regard and respect for the Gunn lass to do the second.
‘Regard and respect’? Were those the words, he wondered, that named the passion that had possessed him?
He shook his head in perplexity, taking up the cloth and smearing the rancid oil on the dirk-blade. He resolved to tarry a few more days at Clyth, to see how things turned out. Perhaps the turbulence within him would settle, and things would become clearer in his confused mind.
However, he doubted it very much.
Suddenly, the hall door burst open. A man stood in the doorway, bloody and haggard-looking, like a wraith from beyond the grave. The room fell silent. Every pair of eyes looked up, surprised and curious; even the hounds raised their sleepy heads from the straw. The chill dampness of the evening air reached through the door to Uilleam’s nostrils. He too was astonished by the sudden apparition; he was also immediately on the alert. He picked up his sword and held it ready by his side.
The flames in the sconces swayed and flickered in the draft from the doorway. People exchanged a few whispers of disapproval.
The man stood silently for a moment, swaying uncertainly in the torchlight, seeming to flicker as if the spark of life was also at risk of being extinguished in his breast, and scanned the room.
“Uilleam MacGregor. It is Uilleam MacGregor that I am seeking.” the man called in a breaking voice.
The hilt of his sword felt familiar and reassuring in Uilleam’s hand. He remained wary as he stepped out from behind the table.
“I am Uilleam MacGregor,” he called back. “Who is the man that seeks me?”
The man squinted in Uilleam’s direction, struggling to locate the source of his voice as if his eyes were dim. Then he hurried towards him, his spurs dirling on the wooden floorboards.
Uilleam’s eyes narrowed with distrust. He tightened his grip on the hilt of his sword and planted his feet more firmly on the ground.
Uilleam saw that the man was armed; a long dirk was tucked in his belt, and a sword hung from the loop in his belt. He lifted his own sword and leveled its tip at the man’s chest.
“Just stop there, my friend,” he said, “and identify yourself.”
The man stopped dead.
“Thomas MacGillivray of Duiletter, clansman of the Gunns,” he announced with a loud sob, fighting back his tears. “I bring news from Meggernie.”
A chill ran through Uilleam’s veins. By the look of the man, the news he had brought was not good news.
“Well?” he barked. “Out with it, man?’
Thomas’s face crumpled. Tears suddenly spurted from his eyes and began to streak his filthy cheeks.
