by David Hewson
“Pah!” the big one cried and spat out the gobs of meat she was eating, choking and coughing as she did so. “The crone was right. He does taste of fish and smoke. Pah!” More coughing, more lumps of flesh fell upon the crackling fire. “Men are useless. Tomorrow I’ll snare a rabbit, I tell you. Not eat this muck again.”
The young one had found the taste vile from the outset and quietly sat there eating cheese and hard rye bread, offering them none. The sailor’s right haunch still hung on gorse sticks, roasting and burning over the flames.
The two of them stared at her.
“Take the taste away with this,” she said, and cut off two shavings of the sourest, oldest truckle in her bag. “We are creatures of the earth. This is the price of magic. We eat for reasons other than base hunger.”
The old witch pushed the mess of gray hair away from her face, reached across the embers, and took the dry, half-rancid cheese, and then the other did the same.
“I know who I am,” the crone spat at her. “I kept this from him!”
She reached into her tattered robes and withdrew something small and crooked. “A sailor’s thumb is a magical thing,” the hag declared. “I had one once before when we trounced that English pilot by Findhorn Bay, on his way to the royal palaces. Stripped him bare and stole his gold...” She threw back her head and laughed at the bright moon. “I went back after we stuck him. I took his thumb and, with it, cast a spell that gave some stuck-up priest a canker of the bowels that ate him inside out.” More objects emerged from beneath her grubby shawl. “With this and antic potions and a little blood from my teat, I could blast that crow Duncan dead by morning. Watch me.”
“You do nothing unless I order it,” the girl said quietly, remembering now that night by the bay near Forres and the way the pilot had pleaded so meekly for his life.
“As for this latest man,” the second interrupted, “I stole his lodestone. Since he said it was magic. Fool. What magic there? To point at nothing but the north, to ice and darkness. I can find those anytime. Some use—”
“I took his prick,” the girl said, and that shut them up. “More pleasure than business, I thought. Although...”
She reached toward the fire and retrieved the long, thin branch of gorse she’d slipped onto the embers earlier without their noticing. The limp, cold shaft she’d speared with the wood was now blackened and cracked. She blew until the thing was cool enough to touch, then held it beneath her nose, sniffing, the way a man smelled a roll of blood pudding, full of himself, of hunger, too.
They watched and didn’t move.
She raised the flesh to her lips, bit hard, took a lump, chewed, and swallowed. Then offered it to the crone.
“My teeth,” the old one said, and scowled, exposing fangs as black and crooked as her crutches.
“Are good enough...”
“My teeth.”
The thing stayed in the girl’s hands. She did not flinch.
“These men we deal with are powerful and determined,” she said. “Not a halfwit sailor lost in the night. The hexes and invocations we need I know alone. You follow or I send you back whence both you came.”
They shivered at that and the old one shrank into the shadows.
“Do this,” the girl commanded, her voice full of anger and authority, “and I will forgive your impudence for now. There is necromancy here beyond your understanding. Do it.”
The crone reached forward, took the thing, bit, and choked only a little.
“Give me,” said the second and snatched it from her. “I’ve no need of reasons. The doing’s enough.”
Well said for once, the girl thought. The doing was everything.
She watched the giant, manlike face munch hard on the piece of meat. Then she took the half-eaten thing from her, retrieved the secret items from her bag, and rolled the flesh in unguents and other substances from her bag. She thought hard, waited for the words to come, not knowing their source, not caring either, or that they were little more than strange nonsense.
The doing...
All this was nonsense, a dumb show for their sad amusement. And perhaps they knew it. Faith and superstition walked hand in hand. Even the priests from Rome had their share of something close to magic. Wine that turned to holy blood. A man who died and then was risen.
Belief was all. She threw the messenger’s prick, dressed in its fresh finery, into the fire. There it spat and shrieked as if the sailor’s dead voice struggled in the flames, trapped inside the ripped flesh and sinew of his manhood. When the noise died down, she held out her hands. The other two came closer, took them, formed a circle.
“Thrice to thine and thrice to mine and thrice again, to make up nine,” the girl sang.
“Thrice!” the sisters echoed.
“Silence,” she hissed at them. “Someone comes.”
There was a sound then, not far off. The drumming of horse hooves on well-worn grass.
“Macbeth approaches,” she said, and was up as quick and as lithe as a cat. “Scatter into the shadows till I call.”
“Where are you going?” the old woman asked, anxious as ever at losing her.
The girl cupped her ears forward and grinned with her perfect white smile. “To listen, sister. Great lords are about to bless us with their presence. It’s wise we creep and listen, to know what’s in their heads.”
Macbeth was a big man, six foot, broad-shouldered, with a ruddy complexion, a trimmed black beard, and deep-set gray eyes. Banquo was larger still, a lion in the field, yet gentle in style, in words, and in manner, even with the wolf’s pelt around his shoulders and the animal’s fearsome jaws over his brow. Their friendship ran back into the distant years of childhood, hawking and hunting in the glens, taking salmon from a spinning coracle in the Spey, living off the land for days on end, free in the way that was open to the privileged sons of minor nobles, forever aware that one day they would be called to battle, asked to lay down their lives for whoever was the king.
There’d been moments in the previous few days when Macbeth believed his time had come. Banquo, too, had dodged many arrows, axes, and blades. The impact of the carnage lay upon them, dents in their armor, bloodstains and gore, man and beast, smeared upon their own muddy metal as well as the thick hide bardings and cloth caparisons that had protected their weary mounts in the fight.
But a complete report had to be brought. The king was owed it. So now the two men wound through the mist and rain of the hillsides, following the familiar path of the Great Glen from the head of Loch Linnhe in the west on to the long, dark inland sea of Loch Ness and then out to the coast and the royal palaces of Forres. Both men checked the sky and prayed they might meet a messenger from Duncan along the way, saving themselves a journey through the black night.
Foul times spark grim humor. Banquo, though nursing a deep and painful wound to his sword arm, rode a few yards ahead throughout, keeping up the pace, regaling Macbeth with stories of their boyhood, the perils and the pranks.
“Do you remember the time...?” his great voice boomed through the moonlit night.
“Enough remembering, friend,” Macbeth interrupted after the fifth such tale. “We live now, not in an idyllic past. Which was not so idyllic, I seem to recall. Not always.”
“Not so idyllic now, either, but men will be talking about it—about you—for centuries. To best MacDonwald and slice off his treacherous head...then fall upon that fool Sueno while he was in his bath!”
A king taken naked. That story would run the length of Scotland before the week was out.
The gigantic figure ahead shook with mirth.
“I wish I’d been there to see MacDonwald’s end. The stinking traitor.”
“I wish you had, too,” Macbeth replied, but he was talking to himself. Banquo, who possessed a fine, deep voice, had launched into a bawdy Highland ballad, the kind of filth that soldiers liked when the fighting was done.
“Why do men always sing of love after slaughter?” Macbeth asked w
hen the tune came to an end.
The man in front turned round. He looked puzzled. “Love? Love?”
“You know what I mean,” said Macbeth.
“I surely do not! We spent today sending men to hell. What’s more natural than to pass the night dreaming of procreating a few more to take their place?” He reined in his exhausted nag and slowed to ride by Macbeth’s side. “Do you remember that time we took on those Irish pirates at Greenock? What? Five, six years ago? Here’s the truth and I’ve told it to no man before. Duncan himself—our king—came home from that glorious rout and seized his queen straight to bed. After which, no more than an hour later, he took his pleasure with a Spanish concubine he kept on the side. After which...”
Banquo leaned into his side and whispered from behind a vast, mailed gauntlet. “Here’s a revelation; keep it to yourself. After which, he visited the wife of that fool Wallace and spent midnight till dawn bouncing her from one end of the mattress to the other. Do your sums, friend. Before the year’s out, the queen gives birth to twins, that Spanish trollop calves a daughter, and Madam Wallace finds herself blessed with triplets, each one a boy with red hair.”
He chuckled.
“You ever seen a Wallace with red hair? No. Me neither. What’s good for the king is good for his subjects, I say. My lady knows what’s coming. She’ll be in her hip bath the moment I get home, dousing herself in perfume I bought from a French molly in Edinburgh not long ago, with this very eventuality in mind. And don’t tell me yours won’t be doing the same. That day...fifty Irish in the earth and six new Scots in return...We’re in credit, that’s for sure.”
Macbeth remembered only too well. “Duncan left the field too quickly. I lost seven good men in skirmishes that night. While he was home leaping from bed to bed.”
The broad, armored figure next to him went quiet for a moment. “He’s our lord, Macbeth. It’s his right.”
“I know. I know...”
“The king is the land. The land is the king.”
“Kings are men, and men will die,” Macbeth retorted. “Scotland lasts forever. So long as we guard it well. So long as we are strong and rule with a firm, just hand.”
“Yes, yes,” Banquo replied quickly. “That goes without saying.”
“It’s not said enough. If we were strong and beloved of our people, how would treason such as MacDonwald’s prosper? What foreign marauder dare invade a happy, prosperous land where every man’s of a single mind and defends it to the hilt?”
“You’re a dreamer, man,” Banquo said, laughing. “That’s paradise you’re talking of and we got kicked out of there a while back. You speak as if this is a good world with a little evil in it. Rubbish. It’s a hellish one where the best a man can do is put a little sanity back and look after his own.”
Macbeth gazed at his friend and realized that most men he knew would think the same. Which confirmed, he thought, his point.
“This land deserves better stewardship than that,” he murmured.
Banquo shook his head and the wolf’s jaws nodded with him. “Well, it won’t get it. A nation’s not a child, for God’s sake. You raise it well enough only to find there’s a saint sitting by the hearth. It’s like a wild horse you tame by breaking it. Or a fiery woman you slap till she sees sense and warms your bed.”
“Your son might make a saint,” Macbeth observed. “Fleance is a fine young man.”
“Fat use we’d have had for saints today. Give me a potion that’ll make that boy a warrior...I’d pay plenty for such magic, that I would.”
He is a decent, loyal son, Macbeth thought wistfully. Quiet and thoughtful—dreamy, even. Not like his father at all.
Banquo sang another line of the bawdy ballad, then paused.
“If by chance we should be delayed,” he whispered, “there’s a widow I know who lives by Loch Knockie, as pretty as a picture, always willing to put up a gentleman for the night if he’s kind. I hear it’s good sport to go a-knocking in Knockie.” A hard elbow nudged Macbeth’s side. “Perhaps she’s got a sister, eh? No. I’m sure of it. She does. It’s a long ride home with nothing but me for company. I bore myself sometimes. Not often. Just now and again.”
Macbeth laughed and closed his eyes, exhausted. “You’re an evil rogue, Banquo. I wonder we were ever friends. Here we ride, doused in the blood of men, and all you can talk about is fornication.”
“All? All? Priorities, man. If it weren’t for fornication, there’d be nothing in the world but death. If sheep can do it so can I...”
Macbeth fell quiet. It was six years now since his own wife gave birth to a boy, the only child they’d ever had, the only one they ever would, a sickly babe who barely opened his eyes in his short life spent mainly suckling at his mother’s breast. All of Duncan’s court knew of this tragedy. None spoke of it, not in Macbeth’s hearing, nor did he address the subject much, even with his wife. What was there to say? Bleak fate had spoken. After the bloody, prolonged birth, Skena’s womb was judged torn and fruitless. There would be no line, no comfort in old age through watching a son or daughter grow from fond childhood to a knowing maturity. Like every thane, he was but a tenant of the king. So when he died, the name Macbeth perished with him, and his estate would fall to the monarch as was the crown’s right. This seemed a cruel turn of fortune, undeserved. What made it worse was that he knew, through brief murmurs, glances, and quiet asides, that his wife felt the loss daily, more than he ever could.
A picture of her waiting in that dismal black fortress in Inverness rose in his head and refused to leave. He stared into the dusk where the broad, dark line of Loch Ness wound snakelike ahead, lit by the silver sky. The knowledge that it led straight home stirred a pang of longing in Macbeth’s breast.
“Visit your mistress in Knockie, if you wish. The only sheets I’ll ever long for are my own.”
Banquo guffawed. “Come, come, friend. The Spanish have potions to cure that malady...What? Ho? Who’s there?”
From the west there came a distant rumble of thunder. Macbeth pulled his cloak tighter about him.
Something moved in the bushes, flitting through the undergrowth. Voices. Female ones, one gruff and coarse, another musical. And laughter.
“Get out where I can see you,” Banquo ordered. “We’re tired and bloody soldiers and have no time for games.”
The two men stayed immobile on their steeds. The rustling increased. Heavy black clouds drifted across the moon. When the silver light returned, three shapes stood before them, became clear in the bright evening, standing on the path ahead, blocking their way.
A bent and wizened old woman dressed in rags, leaning on a stick, stood closest to Banquo, head upturned, cocked sideways. Next to her was a figure in little more than a hessian sack running down to her ankles, tall and muscular, though it was her bare head that caught Macbeth’s attention it was so large, the skull shining, half bald, half cloaked in long, black, matted hair, a zigzag scar across her temple, not quite man, not quite woman.
By the bridle of his own steed stood the youngest, a slender, lithe, and beaming creature in a full and half-fetching black cloak, which she held round herself with bare, skinny arms. Her face was both beautiful and shocking, the eyes so large and wide they seemed inhuman, the mouth a broad slashed gape showing even white teeth.
“All hail Macbeth!” cried the old hag in a cracked, hoarse voice. “Hail to thee, thane of Glamis.”
The second took a step forward and curtseyed in front of his horse. “All hail Macbeth,” she said. “Hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!”
He wanted to laugh but somehow couldn’t.
The third stayed silent, staring at her fingertips, picking at a stray piece of skin there and nibbling it with her queer teeth.
“Do you have no nonsense for me, girl? Or are you dumb?”
She glowered, not at him, but at Banquo.
“Hail to you, sir. A lesser creature than your companion,” the girl said in a sullen voice that came from elsewhe
re, the lowlands—England, even.
“What is this gibberish?” Banquo demanded. “Will you read our palms next, then ask for silver or else we’re cursed?”
The young one came to stand in front of his mount. “Your palms are fixed, lord. And we own sufficient silver to last your lifetimes twice over. Whatever curses you carry come from yourselves, not us. You are both the lesser and the greater. Do you not wish to know why?”
The two men glanced at each other.
“We have better business than riddles,” Macbeth said, and shook his reins. “Good evening, ladies. May I hope you escape the coming storm.”
“We are the coming storm, you fool,” the large one murmured in a gruff, deep voice.
“Banquo...”
The girl was whirling, changing in front of them. The black cloak flew through the air, became a midnight mist, and then was gone. The two men sat transfixed on their steeds. The child stood naked in front of them, a writhing, swirling figure, her front covered by a dark-blue tattoo that ran from her groin to her neck, three salmon interlinked, nipples and navel for eyes, fins and scaly flesh seemingly alive as she twisted and contorted lasciviously in front of them.
Then she stopped, placed a hand on her skinny hip, looked at him with a coquettish, come-on grin.
“What do you crave most, Macbeth?” the girl asked, grinding her narrow hips with a coarse and carnal rhythm. “A fuck or a future?” She stopped, as if considering the answer, then said, “I can assist you, lord, with both or either. The choice is yours.”
“I fear you flatter yourself for the first,” he said.
“What a fortunate woman is that lady of yours,” she declared. “To share the bed of such a noble figure. You possess a majestic visage, sir. Too splendid for a thane. More fit for a baron or a pope. A countenance that is positively...” She hesitated, put a hand to her mouth as if struggling to find the word. “Majestic...That’s the word.”
“Thanes are ten a penny,” the big one cut in. “Nothing more than peasants who know where to shit.”
