Except that this one seemed to think he wasn’t. But Fin’s father suddenly straightened his back and showed his teeth. If his laird could be canny and ruthless, so could he. He would march to the castle as ordered with his two older sons beside him – and his pregnant wife and younger sons at his heels. Let the laird turn them back if he dared.
Now all was activity and preparation, inside the castle and throughout the laird’s lands and tenantries.
Those summoned to defend the castle mustered there, and many had had the same idea as Fin’s father. They brought their families with them. McLennan, watching the little motley groups approaching the castle from three sides and crowding across the drawbridge, scowled furiously, for indeed he lacked the face to take in the men and reject the women and children. But perhaps it was for the best. No doubt the men would fight better to defend their families who were with them. The men left outside to make the surprise assault would fight like wild boars to keep the enemy from attacking their homes. A good strategy, surely.
The castle filled up with people. The men had to begin preparing its defences. The women and children had to settle in as best they could. Soon, they would have duties, too.
Fin, who knew every nook and cranny, led his mother and Jamie to the hayloft above the stables, a good warm private place, and helped settle them there. He felt fiercely glad that the grim walls stood between them and danger. And so did his father, preparing arrows and receiving orders in the ward, but he also had a thought to spare for those who’d been ordered to stay outside. This wild man, McInnes, had a reputation that was almost a legend. If the man had not scrupled to murder the laird’s children and carry off his wife (who had died, it was said, of grief and shame), what might he do to theirs, left unprotected when their men had to go and fight?
As soon as he could, Fin ran to the kitchen to find food for his mother. The kitchen servants were frantically working to feed ten times their usual number.
‘Have ye seen Wee Eyes?’ he blurted out as he burst in.
‘Wee Eyes, indeed!’ muttered the cook, who, for Peony’s foreignness, had always suspected her of spell-making. ‘She’ll no’ be souring the milk and burning the meat nae more!’
Fin turned white. ‘What d’ye mean?’ he gasped.
Others gave him fearful looks. ‘Dunna ask!’ one whispered, and nodded her head at the floor. ‘She’s—’
‘Ye mean he’s no’ let her out? Two whole days – nearly three—’
‘Hush, Fin! Hush! She’s no’ to be spoke of!’ said another under her breath. ‘Do ye no’ know, she’s a witch?’
Fin stared at her, winded by the hugeness of this lie.
‘Didna I always say so?’ called the cook, almost in triumph, looking like a fat goblin herself in the glow of the fire and a cloud of steam. ‘Such a queer thing as she was, no’ like a natural lassie! Besides, otherwise the Master’d never have locked her up, her that was his wee pet, and be stridin’ about without shame, wi’ the key hung from his belt. The spell she had him under must have broke, and he saw her clear for what she was!’
When hope is gone, Li-wu had once told Peony, there is only patience left.
She had patience. She had learned it. She sat quietly on the stone floor for hours, her eyes closed, trying to keep Li-wu’s words vital and meaningful.
‘We pass through this world many times. This hard life will pass. You will have others. In one of them perhaps you will reach Nirvana, where one is free of desires.’
But she had not reached Nirvana yet. She knew it because she had desires. She desired to live. She desired – longed, passionately – to see the daylight, to breathe freely, to eat, to drink, to stay alive and to be with Fin.
If Li-wu was right, these longings were for things as unimportant as dreams. She would pass through this world again. Next time would be better, if she could accept her fate this time. She must be resigned. The worst that could happen to her had surely happened. The hunger and thirst were not very much worse than she had often felt before. The cold and darkness, too, she might endure. And death? Just a door to something better.
But there was one truly cruel thing, one unbearable thing. It was her master who had put her here to die alone in the darkness. He had heartlessly abandoned her. Not only did he care nothing for her, but now she must face the fact that perhaps he was not just a damaged man, but a bad one. For the first time, it crept into her mind that she, a poor, humble slave-girl, was worth something better than to have wasted herself serving him.
This awful thought saddened her so terribly, it weakened her resolve to accept her fate in the spirit of Lord Buddha.
The attack came on the fourth day after McLennan had shut Peony in the dungeon. In all that time he had not thought of her because his mind was completely occupied by the coming struggle.
He was fairly confident of his plan. But he had reckoned without McInnes’s low cunning and ruthlessness.
McInnes was a man without honour and without scruples. His strategy was to win at any cost. He had learned from McLennan’s failure. He did not muster in a wood where spies could warn of his approach, or come marching up the hill in the dark of night, dragging a clumsy siege-engine. He didn’t march on the castle at all, at first. He had other work to do.
The lookouts posted on the castle battlements ran down, white-faced, to report that columns of smoke were rising from farmsteads near and far.
An almost audible tremor seemed to pass over the people gathered in the castle. Men defied orders to rush up the steps to the top of the walls nearest to their own homes. Many were too distant to be seen, even from this height, but the men knew precisely which column of smoke showed that their particular house was afire. They leaned out as if they could reach their burning homesteads and put out the flames that were destroying them and their hard-won crops. But at least their families were safe! Each man sent up a prayer of gratitude for that. Then they descended, full of grim determination to be avenged when the enemy came within reach.
But when, some hours later, it became clear that not only the empty farmsteads, but those of their neighbours, who’d been left outside to fight, were being torched, a stifled outcry arose. McLennan was above on the battlements, and when he saw what was happening across the countryside, and sensed the mood in the castle below him, he felt seriously alarmed. He knew he had done wrong in leaving those families outside for his own strategic purposes, and he knew that the men he was counting on to fight for him could rebel, and would be within their rights if they did.
But luckily for him, rebellion was not foremost in their hearts. Foremost was retribution against the villain McInnes who had made such a cowardly attack on undefended homesteads, full of women and children.
Meanwhile, the men outside the castle knew nothing of the tragedy that had overtaken their homes and loved ones. Mustered in hiding-places amid the crags, they stood with their commanders, stolidly prepared to fulfil their obligations to their liege-laird. And when the order came – a beacon, lit from the castle walls – they deployed according to plan. As McInnes’s main force at last made its frontal attack through the village below the castle walls, they closed in swiftly behind them, meaning to drive them forward into the hail of arrows and missiles the castle defenders were poised to deliver.
From behind the wall of the main gatehouse, McLennan could see the whole pattern of the battle. He watched in some amazement as McInnes, in heavy armour, mounted on a charger, broke easily through the gate in the palisade wall of the village, and directed his men to set fire to houses there. He watched his own men, his secret weapon, a jagged fringe of heads, then bodies, then running legs, appear over the top of the hill behind the enemy and charge down on them. And then, with a bellow of dismay, he saw a number of smallish groups – no men of his, the enemy’s men! – suddenly appear as if from nowhere and charge in on his men from the flanks. Why had his scouts not warned him? He didn’t know that they had all fallen into McInnes’s hands, and, suitably pers
uaded, had revealed all they knew of McLennan’s plans.
The enemy, out of reach of the castle’s arrows, turned on the attackers and drove them away. Many were killed or wounded. The survivors ran to take refuge in their farmhouses. And there they made the horrible discovery of McInnes’s treachery.
McInnes now laid siege to the castle.
McLennan was frantic. What could he do? He could try to get a messenger through the lines to make his way to some neighbour, and beg for support to break the siege. But the nearest was seventy miles away, and why should he risk his own men to save McLennan? Still, it was their only hope. So, just before the ring was closed, in the dead of night McLennan ordered three horsemen out through the postern gate and down to the river along the steep walled path. They were ordered to swim the river on horseback and ride like the wind to this neighbour and promise anything if he would send reinforcements to the beleaguered castle.
McInnes closed the circle the next morning. He even brought up some boats – his own land bordered the same river, higher up – to prevent escape and any supplies reaching the castle that way. Then, calmly confident, he settled down to starve McLennan and his people out.
He had the nearby village in a stranglehold. He plundered it of food, and kept the able-bodied men penned up in the hall that had once been McLennan’s house, except for those too old or feeble to resist or run off. He forced the women to cook for them and serve them in other ways. Any man who resisted was killed and his home burnt. Resistance soon stopped, but in the big timber-framed hall, the men seethed and plotted.
There was nothing McLennan and his people could do but wait. Nobody could get in or out of the castle. There was no battle yet, because neither side’s weapons could reach the other. But now McInnes assembled three siege-engines, brazenly, in daylight and in full sight of the castle’s defenders. To McLennan’s fury and chagrin, all were based on his Chi-na model that had been abandoned after the failed attack – his own weapon was to be turned against him.
At night McInnes sent parties down into the moat-ditch to undermine the walls. They did this under cover of portable wooden sheds covered with animal skins so that when McLennan’s defenders fired flaming arrows down at them, they didn’t catch fire. The spoil from the diggings was heaped in an adjoining part of the big trench, for use later when they would attack the walls with siege-towers, battering rams and ladders.
Watching the progress of this work every morning from the battlements, McLennan knew it was only a matter of time before missiles would begin hurtling over the walls, perhaps before portions of the walls themselves began to collapse. McLennan knew McInnes would only make his assault when the castle’s defenders were weakened with hunger, and that must come soon. With the overcrowding, food stocks couldn’t last long. McLennan had laid in stores, of course, but not having expected the families, he had failed to lay in enough.
The enemy, meanwhile, was not going hungry. They had all the food they needed. In fact they took a delight in feasting in full view of the castle, carousing on stolen casks of ale and wine, building fires and roasting whole sheep, pigs and oxen taken from the farms. They would wave their cups towards the castle as if toasting those they’d robbed. They danced with the dead animals before they cooked them, shouting mocking thanks for the good food.
They did worse. They brought up their captives and displayed them. The men inside the castle walls watched helplessly as the womenfolk of their neighbours and the villagers were paraded or held up or abused in clear sight below them. They could hear their cries and pleas mingled with laughter and jeering. Some of the men, when drunk, would prance almost to within range of the castle’s arrows, lift their kilts and show their nether parts as the ultimate taunt.
All this drove the defenders to an unbearable pitch of helpless fury. Many arrows were let fly from bows shaking in the hands of men too outraged to hold back. They willed the slender missiles on, only to see them burying themselves in the turf twenty feet from their nearest enemy. And that enemy would then dare each other to creep forward at night and recover the arrows for use later against those who had shot them. This waste infuriated McLennan, who said he would flog the next man who let fly an arrow until he ordered it.
And hunger as well as thwarted rage began to grind the vitals of the men, sharpening them like steel against stone.
Meanwhile, as the days went by, Fin was locked in misery. His thin body felt like a cage that held nothing but awful imaginings which exhausted him so that, when at last he lay down each night on his bed of straw, he slept as the dead sleep, dreamless and deep and held down as if under layers of stones by an unwillingness ever to waken to more terrible thoughts.
His mother, Janet, who saw him every day about the castle – he still had to look after the horses, though there was no use for them now – watched him getting paler and thinner and more silent until she thought she was watching him waste away. But she didn’t guess what was in his mind or she would have been panic-stricken.
Peony couldn’t tell how time passed. She had no way to measure the hours, the days and nights. She tried to be patient and desire nothing. In this dire moment, she remembered her garden.
Her imaginary garden! It had been left behind somehow. Since she’d known Fin, she hadn’t needed to visit it. Her real world was too all-absorbing. Now, as her eyes groped endlessly in the dark for some hard shape to give her her bearings, she saw her garden in front of her more clearly than ever before. And it dismayed her.
Like a real garden that isn’t visited or tended, it was sad. The paving-pebbles were covered with dead leaves. The pavilion was unpolished, dull and silent, deserted by its musicians and by its guardian spirits. The pond was scummy with weed and the graceful red and white carp were all gone – dead, no doubt, or taken by herons because she hadn’t looked after them.
And when, dreading what she would see, she looked up at the roof-corners for her dragons, she found they were gone, too. They had always been so alive for her. Naturally, she thought desperately, they would have flown away when she didn’t come to see and talk to them. So there was nothing now to keep the evil spirits away. They would find the straight way to her, despite the care she had taken to make all the paths crooked.
Sad and lonely place, neglected and deserted! Her dear guardian dragons no longer perched above, protecting and caring for her!
She wept at last. She wept bitterly and aloud. Now if she had been outside the enemy’s walls, those inside might indeed have thought that a lost soul was circling, for she shrieked and wailed without restraint as she had never done in her whole life, even from the pain of her bound feet.
Suddenly she fell silent, and a moment later, she sat up. A rebel thought had invaded her. Perhaps Li-wu was wrong. Perhaps this life was not just one of many. Perhaps McLennan was robbing her of the only life she would ever have.
Anger and fear washed over her and she was filled with violent feelings. She needed to take some action.
She felt around on the floor. She found a chip of loose stone. She felt its edges. They were sharp. She stood up, and put her hands on the walls in the pitch darkness. She found a large, smooth, upright stone.
She knew she was going to go against everything Li-wu had taught her. But she thought, ‘I have been a good person, and this is what has come of it. I have a bad person in me, too. I’ll let my badness visit me and perhaps it will help me.’
Blindly she scratched some characters with the sharp stone. They were not words of patience and acceptance. They were a threat. She hoped she wouldn’t be punished for them in her next life, but she couldn’t help herself.
When the characters that she couldn’t see were on the wall, she didn’t sink down again on to the floor. She walked instead around the inside of the dungeon, her empty left hand touching the walls. When she touched the wood of the door, she stopped and leant against it, willing it to melt and let her out, but it was solid as the very earth that surrounded the dungeon. It would never open
for her – never! How much more must she bear? Was Lord Buddha never going to take pity and come for her?
She began to walk again, but suddenly she stopped. She needn’t wait for Lord Buddha! She had command of her fate. She had the power of death. The sharp stone that had carved her epitaph was clutched in her right hand. Despite her hunger and weakness, that right hand was still strong and obedient enough to do what she told it to.
She drew herself up.
‘Wo shi mudan,’ she said steadily aloud into the engulfing dark. ‘I am Peony.’
It was like saying goodbye to herself.
Chapter Thirteen
In the dead of night, McLennan, who had at last left the battlements and gone to his chamber to snatch some sleep, woke suddenly in the dark, his heart almost stopped in his breast. Someone was moving in his room.
The footsteps were light. He heard them on the stone floor. He heard some rustling, some unidentifiable movement. Then the steps were coming closer. He strained his eyes through the darkness. The slit window let in a strip of moonlight. A small shadow crossed it.
McLennan was not entirely free of superstition. He had the deaths of many people on his head. Fear flashed across his brain like fire. And then there was another flash, the flash of a knife blade.
McLennan’s good arm shot up and as the blade came down, he grasped the hand that held it. He twisted it. There was a cry. This was no ghost! Gripping the thin arm, McLennan slid out between the silk sheets and dragged its owner into the moonlight.
It was the boy from the stable.
Once, McLennan would not have hesitated. He would have rammed his head against the stone wall and broken his neck.
But he couldn’t. He lacked the strength and even the will to kill the intruder. Instead he dragged him out to the stables and woke the groom.
‘This vixen’s whelp tried to kill me,’ he growled. ‘Punish him. Punish him hard. Tell his father I’ll hang the boy if he doesna control him.’
The Dungeon Page 12
