by David Hewson
She turned and barked at the others in a language that was unrecognizable. They shrank back to the circle, one walking with a heavy, awkward gait, the other skittering across the turf on her crutches.
“What do you want?” Skena asked in a low, nervous voice that she felt belonged to someone else.
“Only that, in the days ahead, you find yourself and, in doing so, discover that which lies hidden in him, his true nature...” She hesitated, thinking. “A noble and ambitious one, I think. Or else...” The girl stopped and smiled at her, her strange distended face full of impudence.
“Or else?” Skena demanded.
The torch flew toward her face. She felt the flames singe her forehead, smelled the acrid stink of burning rags and oil.
“Or else go back to your bed, madam, and cry yourself to a sleep like a wee girl who’s afraid of the dark. Wait on King Duncan to come and bestow his favor upon you, grunting in your face as he does with the wife of every other thane he covets. Find your mettle or go hide away like a bairn in terror of the night.”
A light grew in her black eyes, and it was fury.
“You sneer at us as if we’re animals. But what are you? With a nod of our heads and a kick of our heels we’ll be out of here and away to the fighting in the west before daylight. Free as the eagles, bold and alive. And this great lady?” She shook her head, and her long hair moved hypnotically as she did so. “Trapped in your fortress, powerless behind your stone walls. No man owns us. Courage comes from the heart...”
“Courage?” Skena cried. “Courage? You lecture me on courage. You know nothing, child...”
The torch flew at her again. She closed her eyes, her legs frozen as if turned to the same solid rock as the standing stones and cairns around her.
When she looked again, the tall, limber child let loose a wordless banshee howl that flew shrieking to the moon; then her skinny arms gripped the firebrand and ran the flame and embers up and down her pale, bare skin, not flinching, not crying or giving for a moment some single indication of hurt.
Her black eyes never left the woman in front of her, nor the smile on her face.
The girl stood there, dashing the flame over her too-smooth skin for a minute or more as if it were a bath-time rag. When she stopped, there was no mark on her, no sign of burn or scorch.
“Should you find the pluck to speak the brave, bold truth,” the child said, “say it came from you, not us. If it happens, that will be true, I think. Skena is a fine name. An old one. Do it justice.”
And then they were gone, the youngest flying into the night like a fox, the second grunting and falling into a soldier’s steady march, the last, the crone, vanishing crablike, a bent figure on her sticks.
This strange encounter had revolved around Skena Macbeth’s imagination, searching for reason, for three long days and nights. Now, seeing the path back to Culloden and the cairns beyond, thinking on Macbeth’s letter and his meeting with these same weird sisters—they could be no other—a kind of answer finally came to her. It had lain in her head all the while, and made its presence known in her earlier unspoken admonition to her absent husband.
What must be done must be done, whatever the price, the cost, the pain. One day we all must walk through fire.
She was the daughter of a thane, a great and powerful lord himself, one who’d died through the anarchy and violence of civil war. An inner voice, long trapped and kept in harness, burst from its dark quarters deep inside her guts and broke furiously free.
“I do not fear a thing,” she screamed over the battlements, oblivious to the beetling heights that stretched before her.
“Since Duncan’s cruelty stole from me my child, I will be nothing but a vessel of hatred for him. Bring your witches, demons, hags, and all,” she raged. “If Duncan steals from us all hope of destiny, then unsex me, fill me head to toe with cruelty. Turn my mother’s milk to venom. Thicken my blood, remove from me the least temptation to remorse or decency...”
She ripped open the cloak and then the gown, snatching from the folds at her waist the short, sharp dagger she kept about her always.
“Hear me, crones...hear me?”
There was no one across the water on the meandering path to Culloden. She knew her words flew into empty air, and did not care. The moment of wild madness had passed. The festering wound inside, years of silent, bitter resentment, now was lanced and open.
“Hear me you did, wherever you are, whatever you be,” she murmured, and felt a door had opened and closed somewhere, and with it, a milestone passed. “Should these tales prove true, I’ll not let that villain thieve all hope from me and mine.”
She waited. After a few minutes, a filmy sheet of cloud returned and hung around the moon. It sent a gray and mournful cast upon the land.
Those three must come back soon, she thought, the image of the thrashing blue salmon fast in her thoughts. Return. Inform me.
Do not tell him we spoke.
Yet it was wrong to wish for their return. The child’s words rang true. The resolution had to come from within, not some artificial external force or an accident that stole away their determination and wrapped itself inside the comfortable name of fate.
She stared over the precipice, down to the rocky ground that led to the river below, feeling a cold thrill of sanity, a sudden shock of fear. She would as easily launch herself out into the empty air as kill a king if this would bring her man the destiny he merited.
A wan reflection appeared on the puddled rain along the wall. Turning, she saw a glint of light rising from the eastern sea beyond the firth. Morning approached—and with it, surely, her husband, riding steadily home.
Each day was a journey toward an unseen destination. To glory or the grave. What counted was action, not faint hope, a sense of purpose over patience, will over duty.
These they would embrace or fail together.
She retreated to the cabin and stared back into the west to await him.
The sun had been in the sky three hours by the time Macbeth reached the sprawling, open plain along the southern shore of Beauly Firth. The weather had abated. He could see the green shoots of winter barley emerging from the fields of the farms they called the Mains of Bunchrew. When he was past the final mount of Craig Phadrig he could see a dark figure on the dingy ramparts of Inverness, scanning the route to the castle.
He had made better time than he’d hoped, not lingering with Cawdor’s servants as they shivered beneath the cold breath of Nevis. A simple question was all he’d asked.
“Will you be as loyal to your new thane as the man who ruled before him?”
None said no. None asked the pertinent question, “And will that extend to treachery for you too, my lord?”
It had seemed an important point at the time. Now, with war behind him and home ahead, the question wished to scurry and hide in the shadows of his mind.
No matter.
He raised his standard and brought his exhausted horse to a trot. That soon became a gallop and then he was over the defensive ditch, through the gate, inside the courtyard, leaping off as the beast slowed, handing over the reins to a servant he didn’t see, so desperate was he to race up the keep steps straight into her arms.
By then she had come to stand at the top of the tall flight of stairs, her pale face stiff with suppressed emotion, her long blonde hair pinned up, exaggerating her gaunt and angular features. Her bright blue eyes held him, sharp and knowing. The very sight of her filled him with awe and love and passion.
He fought with his leggings as he took the staircase two steps at a time. The hall was empty, sharp winter sunlight streaming through the single window and the side arrow slits. She helped him remove the last of his armor, berating him mildly for his impetuous nature. Then as metal gave way to mail, to fabric, and finally, to flesh, she led him to a pewter bath before the fire, kissing each cut and bruise, washing him down slowly, lovingly, her pale, fine hands working with a rag and soap, then musk, and for the wound
s, ointment.
Silent in the metal tub, Macbeth reflected all the while on Duncan and Banquo and the three women in the hills.
His thoughts troubled him and there was one sure way to dispel them. He climbed out of the bath, reached down, and lifted his wife in his strong arms, carried her, half protesting, but only half, to the great four-poster in the bedroom, where he gently lowered her damp form onto the coverlet.
Her fingers ran through his soaking hair.
“Macbeth?” she whispered, not objecting. “It’s morning. Time for breakfast. There’s a summons from Duncan. The king comes. We must prepare...”
“Not yet,” he said, and raised her gown, spreading his fingers across her belly.
“There are weightier matters than this,” she whispered, though he knew that short catch in her voice and what it meant. “The words of the weird sisters...”
He lifted the soft fabric over her head, threw the dress to the floor, bent forward, kissed each nipple, then the navel.
“They can wait,” he said, and took her on the coverlet, found the familiar position, felt his throat tightening as the two of them locked in place.
“Not long,” she seemed to sigh, then moaned and kissed him, hard, tongue working into his mouth.
A brief and anxious coupling, the rising of desire—and with it, the doubts.
He was tired, exhausted. It had to be that. She felt for him. Touched below.
A dim bitterness rose in his head. So many times, so much effort. And one feeble body to show for it, the brief life of a boy.
He was failing again and she could not help but tell him through the familiar tears, damp and warm against his bristles.
“It’s my fault,” Skena whispered in that soft lowland voice that was the loveliest he’d ever heard. “You are tired from the fray. Macbeth...”
“No,” he muttered, and tried again.
“Mine...” her warm mouth whispered in his ear. “I will make up for this, my love.”
Eyes closed, mind reeling, he could not keep the battles and the encounters from running through his head like a bloody waking nightmare. The strange, dark night. Banquo’s hinted warnings of great changes to come. Duncan’s preferment, which now seemed tainted. The idea, long buried, that a nation made whole was a peerless state, a happy one, raised like a perfect child who knew only love and prosperity and chased away all fear.
And, more than anything, the three weird sisters who rose like spirits out of the loch or the peat, then disappeared into the cold, damp air.
A living image rose in his imagination: the youngest, naked and writhing in front of him like a succubus, a twisting, turning triangle of leaping salmon, eyes bright and inquisitive through nipples and navel, fins and scales animated all the way from her chin across a ribbed chest and tiny tits down to the hairless cranny below.
A fuck or a future?
The creature’s lilting words came back to hang there in his mind, gently repeating like a dying echo in his mind.
“Fuck,” he grunted, and something moved inside him, a fierce and urgent power bringing life to that which was dying.
She sighed beneath his struggling frame as he arched and pumped and roared above her.
Then in one sweet-sad moment of damp violence it was done and a long-elusive joy held fast between them, conjoining him to her, two creatures made as one. Her eyes, the color of Lochaber gems, were wide open, staring at him.
“What was that?” she asked straight out.
“Love,” he said. Then, tentatively, “A gift. An offering, perhaps. God knows there’s been sacrifice enough these last few days.”
“You think so?” she said quietly. “Duncan arrives this afternoon. The rumor is he has an announcement to make. About his heir.”
“The crown’s not his to give.”
“You know, then?” she asked, and seemed relieved.
“I know there’s gossip. Where’s the surprise there?”
“When does he leave, husband?”
“Tomorrow. Back to Forres.”
Her voice changed; her eyes grew fixed and steely.
“And if these rumors prove true? That he will hand all to that brat of his?”
Macbeth shook his head and brushed the fine, fair hair away from her eyes.
“I should have brought a gift,” he said. “Some bauble looted from MacDonwald or the Viking. I apologize...”
“Do not play that game with me! I thought from your letter your mind was rightly turning...”
“No, no, no,” he groaned. “I wrote in haste.”
Her hands went to his cheeks; her eyes, steely and hard, stared into his.
“Listen to me, husband, and listen well. Your face is an open book. When Duncan enters, have nothing but welcome in your eye, think nothing but the thoughts of a generous host. If he sees in your all-too-open features what I see now—”
“You see nothing!” he cried.
A long sigh racked his aching body. He pulled himself from her, rolled over on the soft linen coverlet, a cherished heirloom of hers from Glamis, woven from flax that grew no more than a mile from that castle’s soft and welcoming stones.
She rolled back above him, straddling his waist, staring into his face, hands on his shoulders.
“It may please you to come home and play the part of conquering victor, bedding me like a slack-minded mistress. But remember this: you cast your seed on stony ground. My womb is as bare and cold as Nevis. You shall have no heir and no more station in this world than we can make for you.”
“I am lord here. Do not forget your place.”
She laughed at him, propped on an elbow, her long hair falling down to his chest.
“Oh, I know my place, lord,” she said cheerily. “More’s to the point, I know yours, too. And Duncan’s. These sisters you met spoke true, spoke for all of us. They saw this land for the desolate place it would become if we allow it.”
“What makes you so sure?” Macbeth asked.
“Because I know you,” she replied quickly. “The man you are. What you deserve.”
He thought of the king, with his mane of white hair, his saintly demeanor. Thought of the red-haired children Wallace raised as his own and that gap on the battlefield that should have been filled by the men from Forres, not the bodies of his own. Scotland was a fractious, insecure nation. It would not be long before war, civil or foreign, gripped the land again.
“What happened in the forest...the letter...the weird sisters,” he said. “That was a kind of insanity.”
Her face lowered until it was so close to his he could feel the sweet warmth of her breath.
“The world is mad, Macbeth,” Skena told him. “Whose lunacy would you impose upon it? That foul brute Duncan’s or our own?”
Then she bent down and kissed him tenderly on the cheek. This close, she smelled of primroses and lavender, and he wondered what he’d ever done to deserve such beauty by his coarse and brutal side.
“Now, take me again, lord, rough and quickly,” she whispered, then nibbled his ear. “Or let’s get about our business. Which you shall smile through and leave the working of to me.”
Banquo watched as they began to arrive midway through the cold morning, thanes in furs, their wives with gold wound into their hair and dresses hitched daintily over the frozen mud. Every Moray household of note was here, summoned at brief notice, along with all the lords from the armies who’d fought against the traitors and the Vikings. The men bore the weary, hunted look of soldiers who had traveled difficult country in dangerous times. Even the glowering darkness of the castle came as a welcome respite after the wilds, and though they swaggered about, talking too loudly about how utterly they had crushed the rebels, there was a lingering sense of anxiety that hung about them like smoke. They had dressed for the occasion and were relieved to put the walls of the castle between them and whatever scattered remnants of MacDonwald’s and Sueno’s forces might be skulking outside. Banquo could not help but notice how they un
belted their swords reluctantly and scanned the eyes of every man they met inside.
The day was bright and brilliant, with not a cloud in the clear blue sky. It was as if the heavens wished to witness everything there was to see.
A pecking order had quietly emerged, Macbeth at its summit, MacDuff from Fife as second fiddle. He was a quiet, thoughtful warrior and had now come with his wife and three children from the eastern battlefield where they’d mopped up the last of the rebels in Moray. The oldest boy, a wild-eyed child called Gregor, joined some play fighting with the boys in the courtyard, wielding wooden swords, till one of them split his lip and buried his head in his mother’s skirts. Banquo watched MacDuff’s disappointment at his tears and felt a pang of sympathy—the young today. His own boy, Fleance, though older, was no better with a weapon. MacDuff’s wife, Ailsa, was black-haired and pale-skinned, her limbs lithe and strong from work. A formidable woman, she had hard gray eyes, and as she hugged her injured son, they flashed over the others with a warning fierceness.
Banquo embraced them all and accepted their compliments—Angus, Ross, Menteith, and the rest—with a hearty laugh. The rebellion was over and this was to be a day of feasting and celebration.
What else? He wasn’t sure.
The memory of the weird women lingered in the sharp mind of the Highland warrior, however much he tried to shrug it off. The castle felt brooding and cheerless in spite of all their efforts to make it otherwise. Fleance had arrived at dawn with a guard provided by Macbeth. The boy had been tired and a little wary of his father, who had been fighting in the hills for more than a month. Banquo, never the easiest father, had misplayed the meeting, roaring and shouting like a berserker with overacted joy and bloody tales of battle. He didn’t know why. Fleance had always been a dreamy, solitary child, his quiet and sensitive manner taken entirely from his mother. There was a wall between them. Love, though, that was never questioned. The moment he saw the boy ride into the castle Banquo’s relief had been so real, so complete, that he had forgotten himself and had run to him, arms wide, the hint of tears in his steely eyes.
