Jennifer Roberson (10 page)

Dair laughed aloud. “She would.”

“She made me swear to tend your welfare, MacDonald . . . I dinna see how I can do that whilst you’re here and I’m there.”

“Ask Jean to give up
her
clan, and see what she’d say.”

“Aye, well—for a woman ’tis no’ so hard, is it? She need only marry a man.” Robbie grinned slyly, blue eyes alight. “But you didna hear that from me . . . she’d have both my ears for it!”

“Or your ballocks, knowing Jean.” A distant glint caught Dair’s eye. He stared hard, squinting, at Killiecrankie Pass. All his muscles tautened. “Christ . . . ’tis Mackay!”

Robbie snapped upright, poised as a hunting hound. He expelled a hissing sigh of joyous anticipation. “Aye, ’tis Mackay . . .”

As the general’s Lowland troops poured down the pass toward the lower slopes of Craigh Eallaich, Dundee’s voice was heard exhorting his Highlanders. “
Claymore!
Gaels for Gaeldom!”

Robbie’s laughter skirled into the air as the bagpipes began to rant. “Gaels, is it? Christ, there are none better!”

’Tis here, then . . . at last.
The flesh rose on Dair’s bones as he stood upright. In concert with every other Highlander he deftly unclasped his brooch and stripped out of his plaid, unwinding heavy wool. His own words seemed to come from a great distance. “If you’re to lead the Appin men, you’d best go. We’ve no time—”

Pipes wailed across the braes. Torch- and sunlight flashed from naked blades. “Christ, MacDonald—” Robbie clasped Dair’s shoulder fiercely a moment. Fingers dug into flesh. “We’ll give the bards something to sing about!”

“So we will,” Dair said roughly, gripping Robbie’s forearm. “Now
go!
”

Robbie went, stripping himself of plaid as he ran back toward the Appin men. Dair turned toward the pass, marking Mackay’s men. His own plaid lay in a tangle at his bare feet. He unsheathed his dirk, then bent and took up his sword. “
Fraoch Eilean
, ”he murmured, seeking his father’s face in the cluster around Dundee.

He found it: the face of an eagle atop massive shoulders. MacIain also had shed his plaid. The proud, fierce laird bared his teeth briefly, then threw back his head and added his shout to Dundee’s.

“
Claymore!
”

Heaps of wool, like tartan spoor, were left behind as Dundee’s Highlanders, barefoot and bare-legged in the ancient tradition of Gaeldom, drew dirks and hoisted claymores, screaming for their king as they charged the enemy.

C
a
t, who had agreed to practice her needlework only at Una’s insistence, unhappily began to pull out every last stitch she had made in the threadbare, yellowed cambric—also at Una’s insistence. Her temper was mutinous.

—
I am not made to be quiet
—

“Catriona.”

—
I am not MADE to hem shirts
—

“Catriona.”

Una never called her by anything but her Christian name. Since Lady Glenlyon’s death a decade before, the woman had labored with excessive dedication to train her mistress’s daughter to refinement; Cat knew better than any it had not been successful. She still preferred trews to skirts, despite little opportunity to wear them; on her seventeenth birthday the laird had declared she was a woman and he would no more tolerate a daughter clad in her brothers’ breeks.

“Catriona, mind the thread . . . no, not like that! Dinna break it. ’Tis dear.”

Cat gritted her teeth as she worked the stitches loose. The thread, once near-white, had darkened from the contortions of awkward, grimy fingers. “ ’Tis
all
dear, aye? The coin for such things as thread is spent on dice, or whisky—”

“
Catriona!
”

“ ’Tis true.” She was heedless of snapping thread and Una’s soft protest. “I’m not blind, aye?—he’s
fou
most of the time, and he talks when in his cups—” Cat clamped her mouth shut as Una’s face congested into two brilliant spots of color high in her face.
Dinna have a fit, Una!
She scowled. “You may beat me for lying, but not for the truth. He lost the sawmill and the river leases to a Lowlander—”

“ ’Tis none of your concern,” Una said tightly. Light sparked off the steel needle that was dearer yet than thread as she made tiny, meticulous stitches; her supple fingers were clean, and left no residue. “ ’Tis for your father to tend.”

“And he tends it gey well!” Cat glared down at the ruined needlework, marking broken thread and crumpled, sweat-soiled cambric. “You’ll set me to stitching his hems as if ’twere all he needed, shirts with hems in them, when what he
needs
is his purse stitched shut so he willna spend all our silver!”

Una’s mouth sprang open—like a gawping salmon, Cat decided—to make answer, but what she intended to say was lost in the crashing of the door.

Cat was glad of any excuse to cease hemming shirts, but as her eldest living brother crossed the threshold she forgot stitchery altogether and leaped to her feet. “Jamie—?”

His face was corpse white, stretched taut, too taut over the rigid contours of his skull. She thought at first he was ill, until she saw the hard glitter in his eyes, the shapeless line of his mouth, the balling of big-knuckled fists as he braced himself against either jamb.

“By Christ—” Jamie said thickly “—I should shoot the man, I should—had I the ballocks to do it—”

Behind him, pushing through with a snarled protest that Jamie should no’ block the way, came Dougal, equally furious. Only Colin, entering last, appeared less angry; but Cat saw it was shock in fury’s place as he methodically shut the door and set the latch. Even his lips were white.

She looked at the eldest again. Apprehension redoubled the pounding of her heart.—
never SEEN him so angry
—“What has happened?”

Jamie spun in place and smashed a fist through the glazing, shattering costly glass. Cat recoiled. Una’s shocked outcry was lost in his furious shout. “By Christ, I’ll see to it no Murray enjoys this house!”

“Jamie!” It was Dougal, markedly less angry now that his older brother had turned to violence, who reached for a taut shoulder. “He’s not sold Chesthill. You’ll be breaking your own house!”

“Or his hand,” Cat declared; but one glance at Jamie’s face kept her from going to him, to inspect his flesh for cuts—
too angry
—“What is it?”

Colin’s voice was hoarse. “Murrays.”

“Murrays?” It made no sense, none at all; they had naught to do with Murrays. “What Murrays?”

Jamie swung from the shattered pane, tearing down for a bandage the yellowing lacework curtain his mother had hung there the day after her wedding. Again Una blurted a protest; again he ignored her. “Murrays of Atholl,” he said tightly, “who now own Glen Lyon.” He glared at Una, thrusting bloodied lace before her face. “D‘ye think this matters? ’Twill be Murray’s, one day; see if the bastard doesna sell
this
house, too!”

The unhemmed shirt fell from Cat’s hands. “He’s not sold
Glen Lyon!
”

“Aye. For debts.” Jamie’s mouth was a rictus of rage. “He’s no silver, he says, with creditors hounding him . . .
Christ
, the man will destroy us all—”

Dougal’s tentative hand touched a rigid shoulder again. “We’ll have something of him, Jamie. There’s still Chesthill, and our mother’s dower lands—”

Jamie spurned reason, shaking off his brother’s hand. “Have you not thought? Any of you?” Tears stood in his eyes as he looked from Dougal to Colin, then glanced briefly at Cat. “There will be nothing left for us . . . we’ll be no more than
tacksmen
, paying rent to Murray of Atholl on lands that have belonged to Campbells for centuries—” Both large hands shut themselves into fists he raised to batter the air. “I’ll be the sixth Laird of Glenlyon, and ’twill mean
naught!
”

Cat stared blindly at him, transfixed by shock as well as the magnitude of his anger. Then comprehension filtered through astonishment, lurid brushstrokes against brittle canvas, and at last she understood. She understood too well.

In the tense silence it was difficult to breathe. Cat’s mouth was dry. Her lips were numb.
Tacksmen . . . to Atholl Murrays, on Campbell lands.
She looked from one to the other: from Colin, to Dougal, and lastly to Jamie, heir in dead Robbie’s place. Her brothers, born to wealth and power, were in one heedless, selfish act impoverished by a father’s folly, by his weakness, and summarily stripped of a future even as she was stripped of the dowry that might buy her a husband.

A man might have to wife a plain woman who came with a dowry. But a plain woman with naught was worth naught; and she would have no name, no family pride, because he had sold it away.

Dair MacDonald had said it long ago: ‘
Glenlyon’s girl is worth something
.’ Cat swallowed painfully.
But Glenlyon himself is worth naught . . . and his children less than that!

She shivered once, then thrust aside such petty concerns as climate; as the response of her flesh to a thing so unimportant as a shattered window. None of it mattered. None of it mattered at all.

With meticulous deliberation, as her brothers stared incomprehension, Catriona Campbell retrieved from the floor her father’s half-hemmed shirt. Before Una’s startled gaze she tore the cloth in half. “
That
for your hems! I’ll no’ sew another for the man who sells Glen Lyon!”

 

The sound of battle was terrible. Dair, whose experience until Killiecrankie had been limited to skirmishes quickly ended, had not anticipated the cacophony of war: the wailing song of skirling pipes, the clashing of steel on steel, the exhortation of those in command, the cracking like bones of musketry, the hammer-beating of drums, the shouting of the living and the screaming of the dying.

“
Claymore!
” Dundee shouted.

“
Claymore!
” the lairds roared.

“Claymore!”
echoed the Highlanders as they left behind Craigh Eallaich and swarmed upon Mackay’s forces.

The first volley thundered in the Pass of Killiecrankie. The Highlander immediately in front of Dair fell at once, gargling out his life in a spray of blood and throat flesh; but Dundee had made it clear the first volley would kill or wound hundreds, and it was only by immediately engaging Mackay’s men that a second more lethal volley would be avoided.

Dair leaped the fallen Scot and continued his wild charge, wielding the wicked claymore. In that moment it was but a blade of grass, not steel; an extension of his arm, his hand, his heart, his soul. In his left fist he clutched the dirk, distributing the balance of steel and flesh; offering a two-pronged threat to the forces who found themselves unweaponed in the aftermath of the volley, scrambling to fix the bayonet plugs that might yet ward off the bare-legged Gaels who poured down the mountain—

Dundee planned it gey well
. . . But the thought was gone, banished by the powder-dusted face that fixed itself in Dair’s vision. A man, a young man, a frightened young man whose gun, discharged, offered him no defense; the bayonet fell from trembling fingers as he dropped the gun and ran.

A second man offered himself: another face, more black powder grains embedded in fright-whited flesh; bulging eyes, a gaping mouth, then teeth bared as the lips writhed; and the musket, with steel attached, swinging up to implant itself in Dair’s abdomen—

Dair twisted, offering a side in place of belly, warding himself with targe; then dirked the man high in the crimson-clad shoulder as he stumbled forward, caught off guard by the maneuver. The blade stuck briefly, trapped in flesh and bone and leather baldric; Dair wrenched it free even as the man, crying out, twisted and fell against the heather, banging his head on a scattered cluster of granite—

—another—
Dair wheeled, dropping his dirk as he clamped both hands on the hilt of his claymore. He swung from hips, from shoulders, from elbows, from wrists; legs spread, bare feet heather-planted—
“Fraoch Eilean!”
—and the man went down in an arc of blood, while silver steel ran red.

Dair was in that moment a man alone, a man completely apart: the skirl of pipes retreated, and the screech of steel on steel, the grunts, the cries, the screams; the crack of muskets as yet unsilenced by Highland dirk or sword. He heard only the noise of his own survival: the rasp of breath in his chest, the catch-gasp of a grunt in his throat, the throttled, almost-bestial growl as he stood his ground beside the dead man and warded off his
own
death as it snooved through the heather in the guise of Mackay’s man.

Uphill, with the advantage of placement, Dair raised and brought over the claymore. Beneath the steel the skull split cleanly in half, spraying blood and brain as the blade sheared through neck to trunk, where it lodged high in the ribs. The body, in falling, wrenched itself free of claymore and collapsed slackly across Dair’s feet; he stumbled, went briefly to one knee in bloodied, slippery grass, climbed up the braced, equally bloody claymore, and stood again. Breath roared in his chest.

“MacDonald!”

—Robbie’s voice—
and a blade was there beside him, and the black-pitted face of Robert Stewart as he blocked another blow, turning the bayonet-spiked rifle aside.

An acrid pall of powder rolled across the braes, clouding clarity. Dair heard Robbie’s grunt of effort, a hissed curse, and then the manifest pleasure of a man who had succeeded in killing another before that one killed him.
—or killed a friend . . .
And then another man was there, another enemy . . . and Robbie already taken a pace away, shrouded in blackened smoke—

Dair swung, brought up the claymore nearly too late; the blade caught bayonet in a screech of metallic protest that offended his ears. He turned it aside, but footing was treacherous with blood-slick and fallen bodies; caught in a tangle of lifeless arms and legs sprawled against soaked ground, Dair staggered—
—too close now—
—the face was a rictus of rage as it swam into Dair’s focus. He could not turn the claymore in time to offer blade; he offered instead the pommel, thrusting toward the powder-burned face to hammer it with steel.

—beat him back . . . gain room—
The man fell away briefly, then surged forward again, emboldened by Dair’s inability to swing the broadsword properly. The bayonet ran red, shining wetly in the sunset.
—has had a Highlander, then . . . now hungry for a MacDonald—
Dair flung himself across the sprawled bodies, rolled
—dinna stab yourself, Alasdair Og!—
and came up at once onto one knee, claymore levelled.

Mackay’s man, unmindful of Dair’s quickness, skewered himself. But in dying he sagged forward. Deadweight tore the sword from Dair’s grasp; on one knee he grabbed for the blood-slicked hilt, wishing for his plaid to wipe it clean—

A shoe, and a foot in it. In the corner of his eye.

Dair flung himself headlong against the rock-encrusted turf. The blade followed him unerringly, cutting through the loose crumple of shirt at the juncture of upper arm and back. It snicked briefly on targe edge, then by. The flesh of Dair’s side caught fire even as the rib beneath protested the grate of steel on bone.
—no’ so bad . . .
He twisted, splayed hands against the ground, thrust himself up even as he snatched at his
sgian dhu.
Fabric tore; his shirt, pinned to the turf
—blade planted, then—

With the sweep of his targe he knocked aside the empty musket now empty of threat as well, with its bayonet too firmly rooted, and caught a clutch of scarlet jacket.
“For James—”He
thrust the
sgian dhu
into the soldier’s belly, driving home the blade, digging deeply; it was neither sword nor dirk, and its steel short. But wielded properly in the hand of a Highlander, the
sgian dhu
was nonetheless deadly.

Bagpipes were screaming. So were Sassenachs. As the dead man fell Dair hung on to
sgian dhu.
Blood thundered in his ears; he turned, squinted, saw the last glory of the sun as it slid beneath the ridge of mountains. In disbelief he marked the retreat: red-coated men deserting the field by the hundreds, leaving behind fallen comrades, muskets, swords, and William’s cause as they ran toward the baggage near the river.