Jennifer Roberson (21 page)

“A kettle.” A vast disgust was in the words: such as a kettle meant nothing to Glenlyon, who valued in place of pots and pans usquabae and dice.

“I’ve little enough of my mother,” Cat said unsteadily. “ ’Tis the only thing left of her, now.”

It enraged him. “Oh, aye? Is it? Then what have you of me? What have you of
me?
Christ, Cat—’twas
my loins
that sired you; you forget it often enough!”

She stared at him, transfixed by the sudden eruption of anger and anguish. “Of you—?”

“Of me! Have you anything? Or are you too ashamed to claim it?”

Humiliated, she glanced sidelong at the Campbells, thinking of dignity long banished, now destroyed again. “Father—”

“They ken what I am!” he said. “Christ, Cat, you’ve cut at me so many times I’ve no more blood to shed. You come to tell me MacDonalds and Stewarts have lifted our cattle, then draw your dirk again—the one in your mouth!—to bleed me of dignity. But now when you’re faced with the truth, with what comes of cattle-lifting, you play the woman with me and appeal for his life!”

She retreated from his attack. “Because—”

“Because you say he’s been kind to you. Well, he hasna been kind to me.” Glenlyon drew his claymore. “ ’Tis time you learned what responsibility means, Cat. You canna use it this way and that, according to your whims. There is only one way—”

“No
—no—”
She threw herself from the garron. “No, Glenlyon . . .
NO—
” She tripped and fell, landing painfully on hands and knees. “Father—
dinna do it
—”

He turned from her to the garron with its MacDonald burden. Glenlyon brought the flat of the sword down across the broad rump—

—watched the man jerked free of his mount—

“—Oh Christ . . .”—
oh God, oh God, no—”

—then sliced through the rope cleanly. “There.” He turned on his daughter as Dair dropped heavily from the parted rope. “Hanged, but not dead. Should serve both sides, I’m thinking.” He stared out at his Campbells. “Those of you going with me to Stirling had best prepare; we’ve a ways yet to march. The rest of you who came for cows, drive them back home. We’re done here this day.”

Cat knelt on the ground beside the sprawled body. Loose hair dragged in the dirt, was caught beneath her knees. “Father—”

“You’d best get yourself to Kilchurn,” he told her. “Breadalbane willna wait forever.”

Trembling, she sat back onto her heels, pressing bleeding palms into the tartan fabric of her breeks.
“Why?”

“Why that? Or why this?” Glenlyon’s face warped briefly, then solidified. “Because you shame me, lass. ’Tis time you learned you canna have your own way always.” He jerked his head at her garron. “Mount your horse, Cat. You’ll come with us until the road splits.”

“But—” She looked at Dair, who lay on his side with his arms yet tied behind him. He breathed; she could see the heaving of his chest, the puff of dirt dusting from beneath his warped and gaping mouth with each noisy exhalation. “But what of—”

“Mount your horse. He’s breath yet, aye? The walk will restore his spirits.”

Cat considered rebellion.
If I say no, you canna make me.
But she looked at the man again, the man her father had hanged, and offered nothing at all. She would not risk him again.

She got to her feet and went to the garron, gathering dangling reins. She wanted very much to protest, to insist upon leaving a horse, but did not. She had won him his life; she refused to win him his death.

Cat mounted her horse. As the Campbells set themselves the task of gathering and driving the cattle back to proper lands, she fell in beside her father and did not look back again.

 

Dair lay for a very long time sprawled upon the ground, lest a man change his mind and decide, on his way home, to kill a MacDonald. Perhaps three were not enough, two MacDonalds and one Stewart: three men dead for wanting Campbell cows.

Perhaps more than that; they had left two at the shieling and four with Cat. Perhaps nine dead. And no cows brought home to make the price worth it; but then he was not certain a handful of cows was worth a single man, unwilling as he was to count the others.

He thought of Killicrankie, of Dundee’s proud words and Dundee’s common death, killed by a musket ball that snooved beneath jacket skirts. He thought of the men he had killed in the name of King James; but as much in the name of MacDonald superiority, his ears filled with the skirling of pipes ranting “March of the MacDonalds.” War was war: men died on both sides, and whichever side claimed more alive at the end of the day, or whichever side did not run away by the end of the day, won the battle.

But this. This was not war. This was not battle. This was not done for king.

This was done for clan, but as much for young men too bound by day-to-day, seeking release in risk and activity from mundane concerns. When there was not war, there were raids to be made. It was done all over Scotland, above the Lowland line; to feed the clan, to increase the herds, to tend one’s responsibilities.

His now was to live, and to make his way home to Glencoe.

The trembling, the weakness, the gasping had lasted a long time. The Campbells were gone with their cattle. The dust had settled. Such sounds as were normal, bird and wind and vermin, had come back to the hilltop where a length of rope, gently waving, yet depended from the tree. Where MacIain’s second son, with blood in his mouth, at last made shift to rise up onto his knees, so he might view once more the world he had believed taken from him.

He rolled forward, then gathered legs beneath buttocks. A heave brought him up, lifting shoulders from the ground, raising a torso and balancing it firmly atop bent legs. He spat out blood and grit, aware of the cut he himself had made with teeth in the flesh of his mouth, wanting very badly not to cry out as Walter had and dishonor his clan.

From there to knees, buttocks brushing heels, sword-severed noose flapping against his chest, and then finally to feet, lurching awkwardly with no arms to balance, no flesh and bone counterweight. But upright at last, standing at last, and viewing at last the remains of Glen Lyon Campbells: a distant glint of steel, the dust raised of reclaimed cattle.

Dair blinked dry eyes. He was glad Cat had gone.

When he was certain his legs could be trusted, he walked down from the hill. The muscles of his thighs trembled. He took short steps at first, thinking through each one——
one, and one, and one
——and when the trembling at last lessened he lengthened his strides.—
one—two—three—

He stopped walking only when he reached the body on the rocks: Hugh MacDonald, a cousin, bled dry of life. It pooled sullenly in a mud-bloodied puddle, giving drink to thirsty grass.

He could not close the eyes. His hands were bound behind him.

“Fraoch Eilean
, ”he rasped as the wind blew down the moor.

Then he turned himself westward and began to walk home.

 

Emptiness. Empty house, empty heart. Chesthill was, in her father’s absence, more a travesty than when he was present, lost in whisky haze. Cat had often believed it empty even in his presence because there was so little of him save his desire for drink, but he had all of a sudden become another man, and one with more power than to which she had long been accustomed, weighing out her chances of escaping punishment.

He had struck her rarely; the last time she recalled such punishment had been before Breadalbane, when the earl had come to shout of her father’s folly in selling off Glen Lyon. This time, despite her hatred of it and the furious tears it would bring, she wished he
had
struck her. Then she could hate him for something identifiable, for his humiliation of
her,
instead of detesting him for what he had done to Dair MacDonald.

She had not been permitted to stay. She had not been allowed to explain to a dead man yet alive why she had told the truth of Robbie’s death after so many years, when she had feasted on it so long to give fuel to the hatred.

There were other reasons. There were always other reasons; she was Campbell, he MacDonald.

Cat stood in the front room of the house. The door behind was open, admitting sunlight, admitting air, while
she
admitted it was time she took up responsibility for such things as she owed to others, even as her father had ordered her to do.

He had said it plainly: ‘
’Tis time you learned what responsibility means. You canna use it this way and that, according to your whims.
’

But she
had
taken responsibility. For her brother’s death, and for Dair MacDonald’s life. And Glenlyon punished her for it.

“Damn you,” she said. “For that, if for naught else; you did it because I
embarrassed
you; me, a Campbell, pleading for a MacDonald.”

In that terrifying moment when she believed Dair would die, she too had died the little death that came to every daughter, every child, who was suddenly adult enough to see the child in the parent, to admit her father was no more wise for his age than she was ignorant for her youth. That death of innocence was multiplied one hundredfold by the other more painful deaths: love for her father, pride in her name, unwavering resolution that no matter what the reason, there was always justification in what a Campbell did in retribution for MacDonald crimes.

Dair MacDonald still lived. She supposed they would make songs of it, one day: the man Glenlyon hanged. But she and half a hundred others, and Dair, and Glenlyon, knew the truth: her father had cut the rope in punishment, not clemency; he wanted everyone to know at whose behest a MacDonald survived.

It was a strong man, and a brave one, who permitted his direst enemy to survive so that
in
that survival the enemy’s final courage was diminished by the greater courage of another. Robert Campbell, Laird of Glen Lyon, at whom others laughed, had restored much of his name, much of his reputation, with the single slice of a sword.

He has made himself a man again.
In his daughter’s name.

Campbell the laughingstock, Glenlyon the drukken man was no threat but to himself. Campbell the hero, Glenlyon the brave laird was a man others would praise, would follow, and such praise as they would offer would empower her father with the will and ability to commit such acts as he deemed necessary in the ordering of his life.

In the ordering of mine.
She wanted to grieve for the loss of her freedom, but all Cat could do was cry from relief, from the recollection that her father, for whatever reason, had seen fit to sever the rope.

Punishment, such as it was, was pain she could bear.

 

Dair did not at first credit the hand on him. One hand only; the other held the reins to a garron, though the man was afoot. “Dair—oh good
Christ—”
The hand stopped him with pressure, urging him to halt. He halted. The garron was freed; both hands grasped the noose and loosened it, then lifted it over his head.

Dair began to shake.

“Dinna fret, dinna greet—” Robbie Stewart dropped the rope, drew his dirk, cut through the bindings. Dair’s arms were freed at last, flopping to his sides. “Aye, I ken—I ken what you’re feeling . . . Wait. Wait.”

He turned abruptly and went away. Dair heard low-voiced murmurings as Stewart spoke to another man, then the sound of receding hooves.

“Better, then,” Robbie said. “Only me to see it; aye, Dair, I ken . . . there’s no shame in it.”

He knelt down suddenly because he could not stand, could not keep himself from shaking. Shoulders ached as he drew slack arms forward, crossing wrist over wrist as he pressed them against his belly. Stone bit into his knees. A spasm cramped his belly, then spread insidiously into thighs to rob the muscles of strength.

He bent over rigidly, biting deeply into his lip. He felt the blood rise, tasted it in his mouth; tasted the bitter tang of fear once repressed and now free of it, free in safety to make itself known, to govern the body of even the strongest man, and rob him of self-respect as he gave way to the knowledge that he had been
hanged—

To relief that he had survived, and was found by a friend.

“I ken,” Robbie said rustily. “Battle is fair, is clean . . . a man faces that death with fear, but he hears the pipes, and the war cries, and he kens he isna alone. He overcomes it in the rising of the blood. But this—
this
. . .” He let go a noisy breath. “This is not so fair, not so clean—and it doesna shame a man to be glad of it, and to weep . . .” Robbie’s hand was on his shoulder, pressing fingers into flesh as he gripped rigid muscle. “I think no less of you for doing what I’ve done,” Stewart said, “and of what I’ll do again, I dinna doubt; and what I
would
do, me, were I in your place.”

It was not the words so much as the tone. He was foal, pup, kitten, answering the voice of a man who understood what it was to be so afraid, to be so relieved, to comprehend the uncounted complexities of new life beginning on the death of the old.

He spat out blood. He pressed his palms against the ground and thrust himself upward, so he stood again as a man and looked upon the world Glenlyon had given him back.

Not Glenlyon. His daughter.

Dair looked at the garron. His body seized into stillness, into the abject inability to mount. It was too soon, too sudden, too like; it had been a horse that carried him willingly to death, though a sword had kept him from it.

“Aye,” Robbie said, and sent his garron westward with a slap on its rump. “I favor a walk myself on a day like this day.”

T
he Earl of Breadalbane never spent time in Kilchurn’s kitchens, but his eldest son did, and frequently, swilling ale with turnspits and trading gossip with the cooks.

It was a habit that displeased Breadalbane, but did not surprise him particularly in view of Duncan’s propensity for questionable companionships; at least the kitchen was his own, and the servants as well. It was better, he decided as he made his way to the kitchens, that Duncan waste time under his father’s roof than waste it in a tavern.

Breadalbane’s heir, sitting at the massive slab of wood used for preparing feasts, with ale at his elbow and meat pie half-consumed, was not pleased to see his father. The earl was equally displeased by Duncan’s malignant attitude as he overfilled his mouth with food: a certain sullenness in the sallow face and an enmity in the eyes that reminded the earl of his own father—
God rest his pawkie soul!
—who had rarely understood the needs of the world as his son did; now the grandson showed a remarkable aptitude for his grandfather’s lack of insight.

The cooks and kitchen staff were nonplussed by the earl’s presence. He sent them away, knowing dinner might suffer, but there were things he considered far more important than the flavor of his meat.

“She is here,” Breadalbane said without preamble. “She is currently in the chamber assigned to her; I wanted to make certain you would treat her as befits my heir before permitting you to meet.”

“Why?” Duncan asked around a mouthful of meat and crust. “Do you believe I might belittle her, or express my wish to wed another woman?”

“I do . . . and you would.”

Duncan’s swollen smile was neither amused nor friendly. “So I would.” He picked up his ale and drank lustily.

The earl knew very well his son sought to put him off; well, it would take more than poor manners. “Her father may be a man worth little respect, but she deserves something of the Breadalbane courtesy—”

Duncan smacked down his mug, slopping its contents over the rim. “Courtesy! From you?”

“From you.” The earl toured the kitchens, absently marking how much flour was used for bread; how substantial his salt supply; how the cooks hoarded spices. “I dinna ken what you may have promised Marjorie Campbell of Lawers, but you’d best
un
promise it; she is not whom you shall wed. I’ve my own reasons for it, good reasons, which you no doubt will decry, but ’tis done. And I believe it might be a good match, Duncan . . . I saw her but two years ago—or was it three?—when I went to Glen Lyon. She’s spirit of her own, so you will thank me for that. She isna a lump of suet.”

Duncan tore at his bread. “And is she fair? Or d’ye give me a plain woman to settle other debts, when I may have my own?”

“I’ve never lied to you, Duncan, and I’ll not begin now: no, she isna fair. No man would name her so.”

“Ah.” Duncan’s sallow face displayed its tendency to splotch as angry color fed flesh. “Why not marry her yourself, aye? You’ve your own reasons, you said; good reasons, you said. You’re not belike to die any day soon, I’ll warrant—why foist her off on me? And I daresay were John not wed already you’d marry
him
to her . . . or would you no’ give him a woman who isna fair? Does he deserve better?”

“He does,” the earl declared, continuing his inspection, “for his courtesy if naught else; have I raised you to speak so?”

“I learned it of necessity; I am your son, aye?—and not entirely witless. I ken when defense is needed.” Duncan tucked bread into his mouth, chewed vigorously, then shrugged. “Well, there’s naught I can say, is there? ’Tis decided. All that is left is for us to meet: Breadalbane’s heir, whom he would change for another, and the drukken man’s plain daughter.” He paused to swallow elaborately. “Have you told her of me, then? Have you warned her of my habits?”

Breadalbane sniffed at the bubbling contents of a pot hung over the hearth. “I havena seen her yet. I’ve business to attend; I’ll send her to you.”

“Without warning her first?” Duncan laughed, washing bread down with ale. “Shall we suit, then, the two of us?—both of us unloved?”

Breadalbane sighed. “She isna unloved, unless you intend to deny it to her.”

“To her? No.” Duncan’s mouth twisted. “Only to you.”

 

It was a craggy, upthrust heap of granite tall as a man, in breadth as wide as ten standing shoulder to shoulder. Uncounted crevices divided it vertically in rough precision, striations eaten into its flanks by time, by wind, by rain. In winter it was gray on gray, leavened only with a crop of sere, sienna-colored grass and ocherous lichen, but in spring it boasted a viridescent wealth of new life where fertile stone pockets caught soil and seed.

Legend claimed the huge rock in the center of the glen had been sacred to druids. Dair did not know. He knew only that it was a place of silence, of solitude, where a man might think without interruption as he perched upon rocky rib.

The flat-crowned, uppermost surface of the stone was heavily pitted, carved into large, jagged depressions which caught and held rain puddles and blown soil; other areas more dominant jutted sharply above the depressions, so that a man walking the spine of the rock must watch where he put his feet lest he be brought down. While the formation was not nearly so high as the Pap of Glencoe, overlooking the glen, nor so treacherous as the Devil’s Staircase between the glen and Rannoch Moor, its hard shoulders were nonetheless equally unforgiving.

He stood for a long time atop the rock, letting the wind blow in his face. He tasted the dampness of Loch Linnhe from the western end, and the nearby River Coe flowing the length of the fertile valley cradled amidst the mountains, smelled the earthy richness of spring, the thicker fug of peat-smoke, a drift of roasting venison. He welcomed the touch of the wind, glorying in its buffet until his memory likened its caress to Jean Stewart’s, and then he sat down all at once on the edge of the massy granite and let the pines surrounding it screen him from the wind.

When John came up from his house, Dair was unsurprised; his brother understood him better than most. He watched John stride up the glen by the drove-road, kilt hem swinging, Young Sandy in one arm; then he cut across to the rock itself. John did not climb up its back side but stood at its foot on the pebble-strewn verge below. The rock’s crown was not so high that John had to tip his skull back very far, nor to shout. “Jean is at the house.”

Silent, Dair watched the nephew named for him as he plucked at his father’s plaid brooch. Young Sandy would be MacIain himself one day, the fourteenth of the name; between him and the present laird lay John MacDonald.

“She said she’d come to speak wi’ Eiblin,” John explained, rescuing his brooch and the wool beneath the massive tang. “Eiblin elbowed and eyebrowed me to the door. Since ’tis not so often I’m thrown out of my own house, I thought I would ask you why.”

Dair sighed, using a twig to draw idle designs in the damp earth caught in a stony pocket. “Eiblin will tell you later. She tells you everything.”

“She is my wife; ’tis required. You would ken it if you were married.” John set down his son into the verdant grass and handed him a stick. “But why should I wait for my wife to tell me tonight, when my brother can do it now?”

“ ’Tis your house, John. You dinna need to let the woman direct you in it.”

“There
speaks a man who isna wed!”

Dair grimaced. Then he looked at his brother. One end of his mouth hooked wryly. “You’re nearly as white-headed as MacIain.”

“And like to be whiter before you tell me the truth.” John paused. “Is it Jean?”

“Christ.” Dair sighed. “You’d best come up, John. No sense in a man standing when he can sit.”

“Aye, well—I wouldna ask it of him if he wasna ready for company.”

“I said for you to come up.”

John bent over his son. “I’ll be up there”—he gestured at the crown—“so dinna set a course for the river, or I’ll fly down and scoop you up again.”

Young Sandy was at present much taken with his stick and the resultant excavations in grass and dark soil. He seemed disinclined to wander, so John walked around to the hindmost end of the rock and climbed up the series of sloping steps God had seen fit to shape. He picked his way across the uneven surface and stood beside Dair, looking across the verdant vista. “ ’Tis the best place in the glen for a signal fire. Every house can see it.”

“Could you see me?”

“I kent you’d be here. Didna need to see you.” John found a benevolent perch beside his brother and sat down, arranging the folds of his kilt. “ ’Tis woman’s talk, that. I’m better here.” He reached into his scrip and pulled out a flat, leather-wrapped flask. He pulled the stopper, raised it briefly:
“Slàinte.
”He drank, then held it out.

Dair accepted it.
“Slàinte.
”Whisky burned down his throat.

For a long time they shared a companionable silence, asking nothing of one another; theirs was a close relationship built on trust as well as affection, and neither saw sense in rushing the other before his time.

But my time will come, aye?
Dair picked pebbles from a depression near his knee and tossed them away one by one, aiming at a tree well beyond his nephew. “You said something to me at Killiecrankie, before the pipes began.”

John tipped back his head and squinted into the sky. “You recall it better than I, whatever it was I said. I was somewhat taken up by the wait before the battle.”

“You said battle makes a man think of his wife, think of bairns.”

“It takes most that way. But ’tisn’t a
rule.
”

Dair dug a thumbnail into a minute crevice in unforgiving stone. “When they put the rope over my head—”

He broke off; his throat tautened painfully. He felt the rope again on his neck, felt its touch, its bite; felt the saddle move beneath him, and the garron; felt the stirrups jerked free; the weightlessness of his fall; the jerk of the knot as it snapped past his ear, bringing blood from burned flesh; but the ear was nothing, nothing at all . . .

It was the rope—

—the noose—

—the tautness that shut off breath—

—shut off voice—

—shut off thought . . .

—save for the knowledge he left no one in the world to live beyond his generation.

For a long moment he said nothing more because he could not find the words, only the feelings, and those were too private, too powerful. He took comfort in John’s quiet presence, knowing his brother would never require him to speak of something he could not. And yet Dair knew he must, if he were to heal the inner wound even as the flesh of his neck restored itself.

“When they set the rope around my neck and Glenlyon raised his hand, I thought of MacIain, and you, and Glencoe, and my mother. I thought of the bairns I would never sire. But not once, not
once,
did I think of Jean.” The thumbnail snapped. He looked at John. “Should a man who survives wed a woman he doesna think of as he prepares to die?”

 

It had been years since Duncan stirred Breadalbane to anger, and he did not do so now. The earl dealt with him as he always dealt with him: he gave him orders, knowing very well Duncan would obey them because he always obeyed them. He was a contentious sort, but one lacking the initiative that might make him truly troublesome. He did not have the ballocks to defy his father in anything save words.

Words were a weapon the earl understood, and he was far better at wielding them than his heir would ever be. “Go out to the garden, Duncan—I’ll send Glenlyon’s lass to you there. You’d best be civil to her; she’ll be coming to Achallader with us.”

“Achallader! When?”

“A matter of weeks. We’ve business wi’ the clans.”

“Achallader’s naught but a ruin!”

“Aye, it is; we’ll sleep under plaids like Highlanders, with naught for our roof but the sky.” Breadalbane smiled. “You are a Highlander still, you ken, albeit you spend your time in taverns with Lowlanders and Sassenachs.”

“They are better company than what you might wish for me.”

“Only because you are
my
son. Have you no eyes, Duncan, nor ears? They promise you things because you will be Breadalbane one day; dinna put such trust in their mouths.”

“While you go to the clans?” Duncan shook his head and set down his ale. “You’re William’s man, Father—they’ll no’ listen to you.”

“They’ll listen. There is silver in it for them.”

But he did not speak of what else would be in the oath, for Duncan’s mouth was too loose. Breadalbane understood very well the choice left for the lairds. If they did not swear, no matter the reason, the weather, they would be dead within the year. William, at Stair’s behest, gave them only six months.

“They are Jacobites,” Duncan persevered. “They’ll no’ listen to
you.”

“One day they will. Today. Tomorrow . . . who can say?” Breadalbane smiled. “Come with me to Achallader and learn a thing or two. ’Twill be you who deals with them when I am in my grave.”

“And shall I reap what you sow?” Duncan picked up his meat-knife with economical purpose. “They would as lief dirk you as listen to your words. And they’ll take your silver first, so what need of listening at all?”

“Oh, no, no. They’ll listen to me first, then take my silver . . . or
agree
to take it; ’tis another thing entirely to have it sent up here from Edinburgh, or London.”

Duncan was astounded. “You dinna have it yet?”

“ ’Tis a fool who carries with him what Highlanders can lift.” Breadalbane shook his head. “You’ve been too much among the Lowlanders; ’tis time you recalled your blood.”

Duncan tossed down the meat-knife. It rattled on wood. “Recalled I am bred of cattle thieves, and worse?” He laughed harshly. “Black Duncan of the Cowl. My namesake. And he was no better than any thieving Highlander; worse than most! He didna buy what he could steal—”