by David Hewson
MacDuff looked away.
“No,” said Malcolm, “I thought not. But what if it’s so? What then, MacDuff? Would your delicate scruples prevent you from joining with one less admirable than your good self, even if it meant leaving Scotland to the blood-soaked fiend who wears its crown? Say it’s all true. When I am king, I will take what women I please, ransack the treasury for my personal gain, and run a court full of licentiousness and riot. Yet I would not be Macbeth, and that should be sufficient.”
MacDuff turned on him, his eyes flashing. “Enough!” he bellowed. “No, sir! We will not hurl one tyrant from the throne to plant another in his place, however the first one came by it. Nor risk the lives of thousands of decent men to crown a debauched villain in his stead.”
Malcolm gazed at him for a long moment and then, without warning, began to laugh.
“You get carried away, man,” he said. “I am not the devil they portray. But your righteous anger does you credit and makes me happier to have you cross the border beside me.” He took MacDuff’s arm, peered into his eyes. “You see, don’t you? You’re too good a man to be taken in by malicious rumor. I am the rightful king of Scotland.” A glance at Fleance. “Nor will you prosper with a puppet. Follow me!” He shrugged. “And if I fail you, it’s a dagger in the dark, I guess. And another coffin for Iona.”
Malcolm waited for an answer, and when it didn’t come, he began to worry. He could not let this man leave. If such an important lord were to return to Scotland and join Macbeth’s side...
“Why do you remain silent, sir?” he asked.
MacDuff scowled at him and answered, “There are so many welcome and unwelcome things at once. It’s hard to reconcile them. This world is out of joint, and for the life of me, I find it hard to know what’s good, what’s evil anymore.”
“Go eat and drink,” Donalbain said, clasping his arm. “Think on it, friend. And when you have more questions...”
His eyes caught those of his brother, and Malcolm knew they shared the same thought: these two would be kept close in a Scottish tent till they changed their minds, or became expendable.
There was a commotion at the door. A man in armor, breathless, wild-eyed, marched in.
Malcolm stared down the intruder and said coldly, “This is a private conversation...”
“Cousin?” MacDuff said, turning. “You look tired and out of sorts? What’s the matter?”
“The matter?” Ross panted. “The matter?”
MacDuff shook his head at the spectacle of him and said, “We’ve been riding for a week now. Do not expect us to be current with the news.”
Ross went white and removed his helmet. He tried to speak but couldn’t.
MacDuff’s demeanor changed. “I pray you,” he said finally. “This is no time for games.”
“It is a time for war and bloody revenge,” the man spat back.
“Revenge?” said MacDuff. “For what?”
Ross looked at his hands and said nothing. MacDuff rose and took two steps toward him. When he spoke it was in a voice so low Malcolm barely caught the words.
“Who must seek revenge?”
There was another pause, and then Ross took a long, unsteady breath. “You,” he said.
MacDuff’s eyes closed and he became quite still. “My castle,” he said.
Ross nodded, hung his head, and began to choke with anger and emotion. “They were looking for you,” he said. “When they realized you’d gone, they killed Ailsa, Gregor, the girl, the babe. What can I say?”
MacDuff’s face creased with grief, and for a moment, he said nothing. “All of them?” he managed in the end. “You are sure? All?”
“Wife, children, servants. All that could be found.”
“You know this was Macbeth?” Donalbain cut in.
“No question, sir. They came on a ship from Forres and fled back to Perth straight after. There’s a vile steward named Fergus. He does the bastard’s dirty work...”
MacDuff fell into a seat by the table spread with maps and sheets of troops and armaments. Tears stood bright in his eyes. His hand went to his mouth. No words emerged. Long minutes passed. The thane of Fife seemed lost to all.
“I should not have left them,” he said.
“The blood’s on Macbeth’s hands, not yours,” Malcolm told him. “Be sane, man. You cannot blame yourself. Macbeth’s a murderer and will kill in his own time.”
He gestured at the group around them.
“Look at us here. A man robbed of his wife and bairns. A youth deprived his father. Two sons who’ve lost theirs, too. And a nation their king. For what? To put a crown on the head of a villain unfit even to gaze on it from afar.”
“Let your grief sharpen your sword for revenge,” said Donalbain.
“Revenge?” MacDuff asked softly. “How? He has no children.”
Malcolm’s hand went out to touch the weeping man slumped on the chair. “Come. We need you to be a man.”
MacDuff leapt to his feet and seized Malcolm by the throat. “Be a man!” he roared. “If a man doesn’t greet for his family, what else is he? No better than a beast.”
He was powerfully built and furious. Yet Malcolm stood his ground and, when Donalbain looked to get help from outside, shook his head.
“We’re friends here, bound by tragedy,” he said, unwinding himself a little from MacDuff’s grip. “The blood of those we loved joins every one of us. If you will ride with us, side by side, I’ll make you the general of this righteous war. A finer soldier, a better man we could not find. Nor one with more good reason to see it through.”
“Fleance?” MacDuff said, staring up at the lanky youth who had come with him.
“Give me a sword, sir,” Banquo’s son replied. “My father told me I had no talent for fighting. So teach me. All of you. I will learn quickly. That I promise.”
MacDuff glowered at Malcolm, then released him. “There is a condition,” he said eventually.
“Name it,” Malcolm answered.
The bleary eyes of the seated man held them all.
“When the battle’s won, that creature’s mine,” said MacDuff. “None deals with him save me.”
Then he strode outside into the bright spring day, not waiting for an answer. As Donalbain scurried after, Malcolm turned to hide his smile.
It took a day to ride from Perth inland to Dunsinane, past meadows waking from the long cold winter, past verdant pastures and fields where the green shoots of a new summer’s barley and wheat began to make their way out of the rich brown earth. This was her native land. Glamis was not far away, and all the places of her childhood. In her head, Skena could see the place come July, the fields full of crops and flowers, the world alive with birdsong, cuckoos and woodpeckers in the woods, larks and thrushes in open meadows.
A quiet voice inside her said she would not witness that glorious sight again. Macbeth remained unshaken in his confidence. Yet forces now moved around them, troops and teams of scouts and couriers. Less visible powers, too, the common, uncertain spirit of the people they passed along the way, racked by the nervous atmosphere of villages that felt themselves upon the brink of a great and fearful calamity. Her mind returned continually to Inverness, that night with Duncan, the earlier encounter with the witches. At some point in that chill, bleak winter, all certainties, all fixed points that set out the boundaries of the world, had tumbled to the ground. In their place came a gray and shapeless landscape where good and bad, right and wrong, seemed indivisible, brothers in arms joined in an irrational fight against the common daily round of life.
There was no fathoming this change, no explanation for it. No blame, she thought, other than the fractured nature of humanity itself.
Then they rounded the bend in the valley and she saw the grim, dark peak of Dunsinane ahead. A fortress since men walked here, back in the distant times before the Romans, before the Picts and the distant races none could name. This castle made Inverness seem graceful. Its unrelieved timber wall
s rose thirty feet high, surmounting the steep mound on which it sat like a circular coffin made for a race of goliaths.
She had them stop the carriage then and stared at the cruel construction on the peak ahead. No words seemed able to describe its dreadful prospect. No words seemed necessary anymore. So, silent as a mute, she let them take her up the zigzag path, past gorse and heather, past stray sheep and straggling windblown groves of rowan and blackthorn now in blossom.
Two days she spent alone in the cold, bleak room they gave her. No window, no light, for this was a place for battle or siege, not the warm and daily pleasures of company. At night she lay awake, fearful of sleep, since it brought only waking dreams—the dark halls of Inverness and then the dreadful booming of the bell. Once, twice, and then the blood on her hands, Ewan, the serving boy, drinking greedily of the drugged wine, which would kill him. She hadn’t seen him do it, but her sleeping mind painted the picture clear as memory and would not let her intervene. When she realized he was slipping into sleep she tried to warn him, but Duncan was alive again, clawing at her throat despite the gashes in his chest and throat. She fought to get away, only to find herself in the chill nursery with its tiny crib, the one her husband had carved so carefully from supple ash, the first and last thing that he ever made with his own hands. The crib rocked back and forth, and though she did not want to look inside, the dream always made her.
Afterward, she woke crying, deep racking sobs that cramped her belly till she gasped with pain, surging, pulsing, wrenching stabs of agony deep as childbirth.
The sleepwalking began on the second night. She woke in the kitchens rubbing her hands as if washing them, and though she could remember nothing of the dream that led her there, she skulked back to her chamber oppressed with guilt and horror. From that night on, she insisted that a lantern burn beside her bed at all hours, a talisman against darkness of all kinds.
It didn’t help.
Macbeth tried to talk her. She listened patiently to his stories, smiling, unable to think of anything to say. The English had moved beyond the border. That much she understood. Somewhere across the valley lay Duncan’s old town of Dunkeld, now occupied by foreign forces along with the great green wood of Birnam that lay beside it over the waters of the Tay. They were weak and divided, and would fall like corn beneath Scottish scythes once the battle was joined.
He’d taken her hands, grown desperate—angry, even—as she listened, a distant, amused expression on her face.
Nothing changed. The bond between them, once so close and indivisible, was gone.
After that, he left her. A doctor and a nurse kept close by, day and night. The coffin of the fortress became a prison, too. And all beyond, invisible, lay the green paradise of the lowlands, a land that had enchanted her since birth.
Three days after they entered Dunsinane—or four, she could no longer recall—she went to bed early, desperate for the rest that had eluded her. Twice, she was woken by versions of those same dreams of Inverness, though now the staircase up to Duncan’s chamber was strewn with the corpses of children, pale and ghastly as the owl that picked over them—not just Ewan and her own tiny infant, but the thane of Fife’s as well, and others she could not name. She had to pick her way down the stairs between tiny white hands, all flecked with blood.
A third dream came to her one afternoon when exhaustion had dragged her into sleep. The children’s bodies moved unnaturally, rose, and hemmed her in, muttering and pointing accusingly. She fled from them through the castle’s black corridors, but they always seemed to find her, moving with impossible speed in the dark.
When she woke, shrieking, she was outside on Dunsinane’s battlements, clutching her jeweled dagger. One of the sentries was staring at her with frightened eyes, his halberd held in front of him as if she might attack. Behind was another, approaching warily out of the darkness.
In the castle courtyard she saw the game of war had yet to start, though preparation was everywhere. Troops hammered to make the dark wooden walls of Dunsinane stronger, forged daggers, sharpened swords. Somewhere across the valley others did the same. The noise was deafening, and as her awareness of who she was and where returned, Skena found herself amazed that she had slept through this din, let alone walked half dreaming through the throng.
She turned, shamefaced, to the nearest guard and saw approaching the man she loathed more than any in the world—the fox-faced Fergus, porter once, now steward and much more.
He waved the guards away, then looked her up and down, not kindly. Gradually, she lowered the knife.
She spoke—the first words she’d uttered since she stepped inside this dark, grim tomb—and said, “I wish to walk, man. Here, take this.” She unhooked the purse around her belt and gave him everything in it. “And let me loose.”
He checked the coins, one by one, then nodded. Then he led her to the rear gate through which provisions came and opened it without a word.
A green world beckoned in the dusk beyond. Finally, she felt free.
The sonorous cry of a cuckoo lured her beyond the castle. Its call kept her wandering the hillsides till darkness fell completely. It was a welcome sound after a winter that seemed composed entirely of owl hoots and the dread shrieks of eagles.
Stumbling across the perfumed heath, she heard the bird again. The gentle, two-note refrain seemed like a benison, a welcome harbinger of the summer to come, so verdant and glorious in this, her native lowlands.
The starry sky hung over her, endless and full of a pendulous, inky grace. The evening was mild, the moon so full and glorious she had no need of a brand to see her way. The fortress stood on a steep mound of the Sidlaw range to the southern side of the valley of Strathmore, which now lay before her, a broad, shallow strip of farmland set around the river Tay. On the far side rose the Grampians, the vast stretch of mountains running north almost to Inverness, bleak and bare, difficult and dangerous to cross. Beneath its dark silhouette, the bright line of the river wound toward Dunkeld and the bulging outline of Birnam wood, rising from the water’s edge.
Free of the doctor and his nurses, away from the dark dungeon that was Dunsinane, able to walk alone near the gentle meadows of her childhood, she felt, briefly, close to peace. Sleep might come when she returned to the castle. Somewhere behind those high wooden walls it was possible there was a room where the night did not stir to the low, malevolent moans of terror.
The cuckoo called again, so close she wondered if she might see its darting shape against the stars.
Her foot caught in a tussock of hard grass. She stumbled, fell, then found herself turning over and over, rolling rapidly down the steep hill, past the gorse, hawthorn, and elder that marked the edge of the winding path from the vale.
She cried out, surprised by the fragile, frightened quality of her own voice, felt the breath forced from her by the impetus of her fall. Then the ground became more level, the grass softer, and finally, she found herself brought to a halt by a tussock of heather, a bewildered, pained bundle, a distant way down the incline, head hurting, fighting for sense.
One deep breath. Two. She looked up and saw the cruel ramparts of the fortress above piercing the starry curtain of the sky. It seemed tiny from here, like a child’s toy, so ridiculous she wanted to laugh.
There were movements nearby. Sheep, she guessed. Or Malcolm’s scouts, scurrying ever closer. She felt for the dagger in her belt, the jeweled blade that once stabbed a king called Duncan deep in his scrawny throat. The dagger that had killed Ewan and MacDuff’s children.
No, she recalled vaguely. That isn’t right. Not precisely.
The knife’s handle fell to her fingers. She rolled to face whatever approached, blonde hair flying in the moonlight, spat a wordless hiss of warning from her lips, looked, and saw them—three dark shapes gathering toward her across the heath.
“Lady,” said the girl in the black cloak, reaching her first, smiling, eyes as dark and opaque as Skena remembered from that freezing night by th
e cairns in Clava.
The slender thing bowed and curtseyed. The crone hobbled quickly over on her crutches and fell upon the grass. The third, the large one, more soldier than woman, came casually and crouched on her haunches.
“You’re bleeding,” the old woman declared, then hobbled across, took out a rag. Skena felt the soft brush of fabric on her forehead, snatched the material from her, looked at the fresh smear there, gingerly tested her own skin. A cut. No more serious than the scratch she’d taken from the furious woman in Perth. No broken bones. No lasting harm.
The touch of the crone disconcerted her. It was delicate, like that of a mother sadly tending a hurt child. Not the quick and sharp aggression she’d expected.
“Blood,” the young one said, staring at her. “So easily set flowing. So hard to staunch.” A smile. Those level, even teeth, like a bairn’s before they’re shed. “But then,” she added, “I fancy you know that.”
Her pale features rose to the turrets and walls of the fortress on the vast, towering stump of hill above them.
“It’s a long climb back,” the girl said with a sigh. “You think you’ll manage?”
The jeweled knife was still in Skena’s hand.
“Put that thing away,” the big one muttered. “You think it scares us?”
No, she realized, and stowed the dagger in her belt.
“Who are you?” she asked, not wanting to know the answer.
The one on the crutches laughed and cried, “You mean...what?”
Skena lacked the courage to go on.
“Tell her,” ordered the young one. “It’s time. She has the right.”
The crone came closer, stared into her face. Beneath the grime, the wrinkles, the signatures of hate and madness, there was a woman here once, she thought. Perhaps pretty. Happy. Content.
“I lived in Arran with my son, his wife, and three wee brats,” the old one began. As she spoke the name of that isle, her voice took on a gentle, crooning tone, soft and thoughtful. “We cut peat, kept sheep and a still for the barley we’d malt.” She snorted. “I can taste that whisky even now. All earth and smoke and fragrant fire—the finest in the west.” She stared at her hands. “One day, there’s men come from Ireland with malice in their faces. I says, ‘We’re Irish, too, a generation apart, no more. We speak the same ancient tongue, sing the same tunes. Don’t you know that? Do you steal from your own?’ ”
