Firebrand

by Gillian Philip

  ~ Stay here, I told her, exasperated. ~ You must.

  This time she did as she was told. My block was down anyway, so I took my chance.

  ~ Conal!

  No answer. Only his remorseless block.

  ~ Cù Chaorach!

  Nothing. I shivered once, and then I was running and leaping, jarring my knees on the impossible slope but not slowing down. When the blackhouse came into sight, I only just managed to brake my hurtling run and slither onto my backside behind a great grey rock. My heart choked me; it thrashed like a hammer high in my chest, constricting my lungs.

  They had Conal. Six of the brutes, and the priest looking on with satisfaction. I don’t know if he’d tried to fight, but now he was on his back, wrists manacled, face bloodied as they hauled him towards a rough cart. He was conscious, but that block of his was immovable.

  ~ Conal! I screamed.

  He winced as his head cracked against a stone, then tried to scramble to his feet, but it was impossible, they kept on pulling him backwards, six of them. They were afraid of him, I thought. At the cart they stopped, kicking him over onto his stomach, then one put his foot against his head and shoved his face into the mud. Cowards, bloody cowards. As he kicked and struggled for air they looped a chain round his manacles, fastened it to the cart, then backed swiftly away. One of them whacked the pony’s rump, and it tossed its head and jerked the cart forward. Conal staggered to his feet before he could be dragged along the ground.

  They were going to make him walk, I thought, and that was what finally lit the fuse of my incoherent rage. I knew one thing: they weren’t taking my brother, not without a fight from me.

  I ran faster than I’ve ever run, and that was fast. I kept low and silent, my teeth sunk into my upper lip; I was biting it so hard I could taste my own blood but I didn’t care, I couldn’t contain my fury any other way and I had to reach them before I released it. I knew I would catch up. I had no other choice. We’d die today, or they would. I was close, so close, coming at them through a forest of birks down the last stony slope of the hill.

  They hadn’t seen me. Or so I thought till I felt the most incredible bolt of pain in my head. From temple to temple it seared my brain like cold fire; it hurt too much even to scream.

  I thought they’d killed me. I thought the priest had killed me. That’s what I was certain of as the world swung on its axis, and darkened around me, and turned into a cold blackness and deafening silence, and then into nothing at all.

  17

  SEVENTEEN

  I’d expected death. When that didn’t happen, when awareness and life and hard reality leaked back, I expected a dungeon. I remembered everything, instantly. I lay with my eyes shut, still unable to move for the pain that lanced my eyeballs. I did not want to open them and see utter darkness. I barely wanted to breathe, in case I would smell foulness and rot and fear.

  There was cold dampness beneath my bruised cheek: that was what I’d expected, but not fresh air, and the rich scent of earth and leaf-rot. Instead of looming silence, birds were singing once again, and there was a whisper of what might have been a breeze. I felt its breath on the skin of my limp hand, and that made me curl my hand into a fist.

  My fingers clutched damp leaves and scratchy bracken. Shocked, I let them go and opened my eyes. Daylight blinked and shimmered through the shifting branches above me. I closed my eyes briefly again as pain like a shower of sparks filled my brain. Then I forced my eyelids wide.

  I lay where I’d fallen, beneath the birks. I didn’t know how long I’d been unconscious, but a raging thirst and a biting hunger told me it had been a long time. Though it was summer, it was a Highland summer, and I’d lain on the cold ground too long. My bones were rigid with cold. As violent shivers erupted through my body, I realised that of course the priest hadn’t struck me down. The priest hadn’t shattered my block like some half-formed cobweb of thought. Conal had.

  I was shaking uncontrollably as I clambered to my feet, and almost fell again. Clutching a branch, I steadied myself. It was impossible to walk properly. I fell to my hands and knees and began the long painful crawl back up the hill. I was crying, and I don’t mind admitting it. The cold cut through my body like knives; moving was a torment. My brain felt swollen to twice its size, as if it was trying to burst free. I thought I would never be warm again. And none of that would have mattered, if they hadn’t taken my brother.

  I desperately wanted to be warm, but I was afraid of it. If I began to feel warm I would lie down in gratitude, and then I would die out here. I knew that, I’d learned it young. I kept reminding myself of that, repeating it over and over in my head as I put one hand and one foot in front of the other, again and again. I was almost in a trance when my scrabbling hand splashed into shallow cold water.

  A feeble burn seeped down the rocks: I recognised it as the water that ran near to the sett. My throat was on fire, so despite the cold that racked my body I let myself collapse into what was barely more than steep bog, desperately gasping at the trickle of water, licking the wet rock, sucking on the moss that covered the rocks. I don’t know how long that took, either, but when at last I wasn’t thirsty any more, my body was shaking violently. I made myself crawl again.

  When I reached the sett, a hundred yards or a hundred years later, I felt for the crumbling opening and pulled myself in by my fingertips. The cubs were still and trembling, but as I forced myself into the tiny space they crept around me, pressing their bodies against mine. I couldn’t stand or even kneel, but there was space for breath, and the warmth of animal bodies filled the tiny den so fast that another century or two later, I began to feel warm again. And that was all right. It was all right, now. This much was all right.

  I had time to tug the Veil around us all like a comforting blanket, and then I think I slept again, may whatever God exists forgive me.

  * * *

  I must have been unconscious or crawling on my belly for two days and nights. I don’t want to imagine what happened to Conal in that time. It was what he intended, but that did not help me forgive myself. When I could feel anything other than physical pain and cold, all that seeped in to replace it was impotent anger and despair.

  But that too passed, and far more quickly than the pain. The cubs had been surviving fine on grubs and beetles and small game, but it was time they had a decent feed. Nervously I dug my way out of the sett, wondering how desperate I must have been to dig myself in in the first place. My head had almost stopped hurting; my body still ached, but it was a healing ache.

  There were signs of a desultory and belated hunt, and I blessed the Veil yet again. Bracken lay in broken swathes, earth had been disturbed, branches snapped. Clumsy brutes as well as cruel. It dawned on me that the priest had been no part of the hunt: I don’t know why I was so sure of that. He would not have been clumsy, that was all, and I knew he would have found us.

  My block was still in place. I did not move it.

  At least the cubs seemed to understand, now. They stayed at the entrance to the sett when I told them to, and did not try to follow me down the hill to the blackhouse. I made my way down in silence, with far greater care than when I’d crawled up. I waited an age in the moving shadows of the birks, an unmoving shadow myself, but there was no sign of a watch, no stir of life, no stamp or spit from careless guards. Perhaps they were just not that interested in me. Perhaps they had what—or who—they wanted.

  The place was a mess, but our remaining belongings tossed onto the floor did not amount to much. The worst blow was that our weapons were gone, but of course they would be. Some attempt had been made to torch the place, but the fire hadn’t caught well, and they obviously couldn’t be bothered to finish the job. The door and all the timbers had been stolen, the larder emptied of meal and bread. The heather thatch was charred to fragments—that must have solved the mouse problem—and they’d burned our alien-looking clothing rather than steal it, but otherwise there was only some blackening of the earth and an acr
id smell of charring. Not a lot of difference there, since our own and our predecessors’ cooking fires had darkened the whole place to a black hole anyway. Taking a sharp stick, I dug down in the earthen floor to the stone-lined pit we had excavated for a meat store. The butchered deer was starting to reek, but the wolves wouldn’t care.

  For that matter, neither did I.

  To this day it remains the best-aged piece of game I’ve ever eaten, and I ate it raw, tearing at it with my teeth. I did not look to see if there was anything moving in it: there was no point. I needed something in my belly, and it wouldn’t kill me. At least I hoped it wouldn’t. It was probably better than anything Conal would be getting.

  That thought killed even my ravening appetite. I pulled some pieces of deer together into a charred scrap of linen that had once been a shirt of Conal’s, then made my way back up the hill. The cubs were waiting for me, no more than a yard from the mouth of the sett, though their muzzles were wet and they must have recently drunk from the burn. They were clever animals, and obedient.

  I shoved the stinking bits of carcass into the sett, then picked the wolves up one by one and hugged them against me, tears leaking from my eyes into their fur. Warm tongues lashed my face and they whimpered.

  ‘You stay here,’ I whispered. I couldn’t make myself speak out loud. ‘You stay here till I…you stay here till we come for you.’

  I didn’t know where to start looking, and I knew that Veil or no Veil, I couldn’t go openly back to the clachan. At the edge of the forest I turned in the other direction and walked for as long as I could, dodging off the track to hide whenever I heard someone approach. Night fell, moonless but alive with stars and a meteor shower. I lay in a ditch and watched the sky, wrapping myself in a stolen plaid that I’d found drying over a bush outside another mud-walled hovel. I still disliked the things, scratchy and crude and utterly lacking in style, but I can’t deny that it kept me warmer than I’d have believed possible. Even when it was wet with rain and ditchwater, it kept my body heat locked inside me, and I felt a first grudging admiration for the full-mortals’ practicality with so few material goods.

  By morning, which paled the sky perhaps four hours past midnight, I had a plan of sorts. I stripped off my trews, shivering, and wrapped them in a bundle with a few thieved bags of meal (I felt bad about that, but hunger beat my conscience by a long mile). My good shirt was by now worn and stained and muddy enough to pass for a peasant’s clothing, and after a few failed attempts I managed to wrap the plaid around myself much the way the clansmen did. I was barefoot, which was fine: a lot of the men wore shoes, but certainly not good boots like mine, and plenty of them—including all the women—wore none. I hitched my bundle onto my shoulder, left the stony track behind, and took to the heather.

  I made my way over the hill, to the neighbouring glen and its bailes and farms. There no-one knew me, and I could mingle freely with the full-mortals, playing the simpleton and begging for food and ale. They gave it to me. I marvelled at their capacity to combine such kindness and hospitality with such cold savagery, but perhaps, in that one respect, they were not so very different from us.

  It took me half a day’s travelling, and then a day of lurking and eavesdropping. You hear a lot, and you hear it quickly, when people think you’re too stupid to understand. Besides, they were a naturally gossipy race, and the witch trials had brought excitement and scandal into their lives.

  Conal had not been taken anywhere in this glen; he was in a keep at the desolate place where the two glens merged, farther inland. He’d been taken there four days ago, along with the witches they’d manage to scrape up from this clachan and the neighbouring ones. People were full of the spells that had been cast on their cattle and their crops and their genitals. It would have made me laugh, if I hadn’t wanted to cry. The excuses a man will find! But I quickly grew sick of their fantasising, and I’d heard enough. I went back to the heather, and made my own road inland, but I left no tracks.

  Before the MacLeod’s father had built his new stronghold, the MacLeod ancestors had had this meaner castle keep. It had fallen into dilapidation, being a relatively unimposing square tower in a less than defensible position and too far from the sea to suit the MacLeod. The great hall and courtyard had been colonised by small brown sheep and black cattle, the rafters by crows. But its walls and roof and its cramped chambers were intact, and so were its dungeons.

  Running straight in there, defiant and weaponless, would have been beyond stupid, no matter how angry and desperate I was. I skulked in the woods close to the keep, and found a tall pine that was far enough from the keep to be relatively safe, but gave me a vantage point to see right into the courtyard. Then I made myself comfortable, and watched for another day.

  The courtyard had been cleared of its livestock. I watched the guards, and I timed them, and learned their positions. I saw brushwood piled high in the centre of the courtyard—they wouldn’t waste good timber—and in the afternoon I saw it lit with human fuel.

  I don’t know how to describe that first sight I had of a burning. For the best part of it I was numb. I felt for a long time as if I was watching some bizarre piece of theatre. The audience, boisterous and over-excited, had trickled in through the morning, and by afternoon they were a heaving mass of enthusiasm. It was theatre. And the actors, two of them, played their part. Unwilling; begging, screaming, burning; but they played it till they were dead, and the crowd ate their picnics and teased their children and set off home in the dusk.

  Last of all, so did the priest. Smiling, his bible clasped against his breast, he nodded to the guards, mounted his fat pony and set off on the rough track to the clachan five miles away.

  I followed, paralleling his route for a short distance, silent among the trees. It was stupid, and risky, but above me the blanket of cloud was fraying, thinning, glowing with a last sickly sunlight. The bright paleness broke feebly through latticed cloud cover just as the pony came out of a rowan thicket. The priest had been humming to himself, but now he stopped. A little guiltily, he glanced around and behind him; then he visibly relaxed, and smiled, and rode on.

  Something bothered me, but I couldn’t place it. Maybe the sun was too late or too weak, but I had no idea what Conal was on about. If he trusted me, I thought bitterly, he might have given me something to go on.

  Well, I did not know what the priest was, but Conal’s orders about blocking were all to do with him, I was sure. Only when I’d made it back to the grim keep, and I could be sure the priest was far away and in the clachan again, did I let down my block.

  I searched the keep for Conal, but he was far too clever and determined for me. I was reduced to picking the minds of the guards, and the other prisoners, and the things I found in them as I searched made me dizzy and nauseous in a way that even the burning hadn’t. I tried not to linger in the prisoners’ pain and indignity and terror, or in the sub-human brutality of the guards. When I had Conal’s location narrowed down to one corner of the keep, I went as far as I dared from the evil place, slunk into the heather and waited for nightfall. I’d learned a lot.

  There was a burn. I stripped off the plaid and my shirt, washed myself as well as I could, and scraped a hole to bury the plaid, glad to see the back of the filthy thing. I was even more glad to be back in my own soft leather trews, battered and dirty as they were. I’d have liked to wash the shirt, but the muddier the better; I needed camouflage. I mixed some oatmeal with cold water from the burn, left it to soften, then made myself eat it. Just as well I had no meat and could light no fire. I couldn’t have stomached roasted flesh, not that evening.

  I know how to be silent, I know how to be as close as possible to invisible. And what were the men posted outside the keep guarding against? They were barely watching at all, and it was almost time for the evening guards to relieve their daytime colleagues. I waited at a distance, then as the new guard settled himself for the night, and the other pissed against the wall, I darted across a small patch
of rough ground and into the black evening shadows beneath the keep.

  The priest had brought men from the distant town, hard-eyed professionals, strangers. These weren’t them. They were local clansmen roped in to help, and enjoying the change of scene and the excitement. They resented the arrival of the newcomers, but not enough to complain to the priest. Complaining about anything to the priest resulted in a dungeon, and inventive torments, and smoke too close to your nostrils. One of the men in the keep, waiting for his turn on the brushwood, was that solemn-eyed crofter who liked his own company. When had they decided he was a witch? He was there for saying the baby was exposed, for saying witchcraft was nonsense. That his name was Malcolm Bhan Mackinnon is all I know about him, that and the fact that he died on a slow fire two days later.

  The clan guards took their time exchanging places, bored and in the mood for talk. The new one brought out a flask of whisky, and the other took an appreciative swig.

  ‘They eat babies,’ growled the off-duty one. ‘It’s true. The minister told us.’

  ‘Aye, I heard. Sacrifice them to the Devil’—the second guard crossed himself quickly—‘and then they feast on them. And they want us all enslaved to their godless ways.’

  ‘This one here’—the first jerked his head at the wall —‘there’s no doubt about it. Witches have unnatural strength, they say. Well, this one does. He’s a warlock and no question. How else do you explain it? It’s four days since that little man came from town with his…equipment.’ It was this guard’s turn to cross himself.

  His colleague nodded, and took another mouthful of whisky. ‘They tried everything. I never would believe anyone could last so long. He wouldn’t, not without supernatural help. Know what broke him?’

  My heart turned over and I almost fell. They’d broken him? My brother was not breakable. I forced back my tears and tried not to listen.