Jennifer Roberson (48 page)

He stroked away from a blue-veined eyelid a strand of burnished hair. “He is dead, my lass . . . but you are alive, aye?—and we will find a way to make you forget this day.”

 

Dair was borne down by soldiers, buried beneath the soldiers, with cruel hands that used him brutally, throwing him down against cold stone with no shirt nor plaid to warm him, no pillow for his head but the knobbed and icy stone. They pinned him down and held him, disdaining his struggles with hissed invectives and commands to keep him still, condemning him to pain and futility. He fought them until in his struggles he bit into his lip, and blood ran down his chin.

They would put iron upon him again . . . they would set his wrists into iron and march him to Fort William—

“Alasdair—where is she?”

He murmured something, broken words of refusal.

“Alasdair—d’ye hear me? Where did you leave our mother?”

He recalled snow, so much snow, and the wailing of the wind, keening
ceol mor
as if it went to war.

“D’ye recall a landmark, Alasdair—something we might ken to find where you left her?”

They demanded information. He would give them none.

His lips skinned back from his teeth and he spat out the worst epithets Gaelic afforded him.

“—no water,” someone said.

And “—snow,” said another.

Then the voice that knew his name: “We’ve no fire with which to melt it . . . and we dare not set one had we the makings. The soldiers would see it.”

He twisted his head away from the hand, spitting out blood in a spray that dampened his chest. It was a warm spray, incredibly warm; his flesh was all of ice against the icy stone.

“I fear the bone is broken,” someone said.

“Oh, aye—I heard the crack . . . and the ball still in there—see it?” Someone else fingered his thigh, spreading torn trew. “—this wee lump here on the side, beneath the flesh . . .”

“—cut it out.”

“Aye, but when? We’ve others to tend . . . and he willna die just yet.” A hand clasped his arm. “Alasdair, we’ll tend you, I promise—but can you tell me where you left her?”

He shivered against the stone. The hands were less heavy, less cruel. There was no iron after all; he heard no ring, no chime. No scrape of key in lock.

A woman’s voice rose then, frightened and strained; fell away again.

Women were here . . . had they all been brought to Fort William?

Yet another voice, and urgent. “John—you had best come.”

“—Eiblin?” The voice faded as if a head were turned. “Oh Christ—the bairn . . .” The tone was raw as it came back to full strength. “Dinna stop asking him. We must ken where she is.”

“He canna hear us,” someone said.

“How d’ye ken that, Murdo? Has he told you so?” But the voice was hoarse and weary for all it attempted irony; it took itself away.

“MacIain,” someone murmured softly.

Around him there was silence. And then the shifting of bodies. “He hasna claimed it yet.”

“What claim? ’Tis his. He is Laird of Glencoe.”

Light came into his head along with memory. His eyes at last had opened; he stared up from his bed of stone to the low rock roof overhead, the knurled and jagged ribbing of the caves above Glencoe.

“Cat,” he said. And then, urgently, “—
Mother
—” He lunged up from the stone in brief, overwhelming panic, thrusting elbows beneath for shoring—

—and the pain, like a beast, took precedence, demanding submission of him.

He was down on his back already, his belly bared to the jaws. “—Mother—”

“Where?” someone asked sharply. “Where is Lady Glencoe?”

There was a woman’s voice crying out, and a man’s attempting to soothe her.

“—Lady Glencoe?”

Lady Glencoe. His mother. “—brae—” he gasped. “Below—”

“
Where
?”

“—rib . . . windbreak—” Jaws opened wide to swallow him whole. Elbows collapsed. He gave over to the beast as the flame in his head guttered out.

 

Cat roused to flame burning a hole into her flesh. The pain was intense, eating away her shoulder. Would it also eat her bones?

She struggled against it, struggled against the hands. Fire bloomed afresh and she screamed then, crying out against it. Hands were upon her, pressing her into softness, holding her in place so the fire might consume her.

“Aye, lass, I ken . . . och, Mary in Heaven—”

Tears spilled out of her eyes despite her self-contempt. Was she so weak—? Aye, in this she was, this excruciating fire.

They had set fire to Glencoe, and now they burned her.

She cried out a protest, struggling again against the hands, trying to escape the flame as well as her captors. She spoke of soldiery, and muskets, and bloody, pawkie Campbells . . . and of murder as well, and a father’s attempt to send her away so she might survive what MacDonalds could not.

“Catriona—och, Christ . . .” Something was thrust between her lips, rattling against her teeth. Another hand clamped roughly on her jaw, squeezing tightly. “Swallow—
swallow
—”

She swallowed. She choked.

“More.”

She spat out as much as she drank. Her neck was wet with it, reeking of liquor.

Whisky. Her father.

Cat opened her eyes. Above her hung a face, a ruin of a face curtained by lank, fading hair, and a pair of smoke-stained, weak blue eyes corroded by dampness and fear.

“—bastard . . .” she said, forcing it past clamped teeth. “D’ye think I will say naught of what you have done?”

“Orders,” he said helplessly.

“What man—”—
oh God, she hurt
—“—what man would order another to murder MacDonalds—?”

“The king,” her father answered.

Her shoulder was eaten away. He had poured fire through it. “—king?”

“The king.”

“I canna believe that!”

“Aye, Cat. ’Twas ordered. All of them to die.”

The room collapsed around her, became nothing but his face. “Where is Dair?”

He was mute.

Still he said nothing.

“I’ll not believe it. Where is—” The hand closed upon her jaws again and forced her mouth open as the flask again was pressed between her teeth. “I willna—” But he poured relentlessly until she had no choice but to swallow or to choke.

If she choked, she died, and there would be no one left to tell the truth of MacIain, shot through the spine and the back of his skull so that naught was left of his face.

“Drink,” he said.

She drank.

 

Like a horse annoyed by a deerfly fastened to his neck, Dair could not stay still. He twitched against the stone, scraped sore elbows, dug a heel into a hollow. He could not stay still. The deerfly burdened his thigh. He could not stay
still
—

“John,” someone said.

He heard murmuring; a woman’s anguished sobbing. Then the susurration of fabric against stone, and the settling of a body. He could feel its closeness so near his frenzied thigh. If only he could
move
to banish the deerfly—

“Alasdair—can you hear me?”

He heard. He twitched, rolled his head, felt stone beneath his skull, cold, hard stone, harsh pillow for a man. He moved his hand, freed it from numbness, and snooved fingers across his trews. He would slap the biting beastie—

“No, Alasdair . . .” A hand captured his and held it still. “Let be. Let be.”

He writhed from captivity, fighting to free his hand. If he could kill the deerfly—

Another hand touched him, parted the tartan trew. A palm touched his thigh. “Warm . . . och, dear God . . .” The hand moved from thigh to brow. A soft Gaelic curse hissed in the darkness.

“Usquabae,” someone said, “to burn away the wound fever.”

The hand left his brow. “Have you a flask, then? Has any of us a flask?” The voice was hard-pressed to remain steady. “We’ve naught, Murdo. Naught but what we wear. And until we are certain the soldiers are gone, we dare not leave this cave.”

A child wailed briefly; was comforted by a woman.

“Maclain—”

“—dead—” Dair murmured.

A hand touched his shoulder. “Are you awake, Alasdair?”

He was. He opened his eyes and saw the face of his brother, who refused their father’s title. “Mother—?”

The bones of John’s face might cut his flesh.

It was incomprehensible. “Where is—? I left her up the brae . . . below the caves—” But he was
in
a cave. “Below, then . . . near a rib—”

“Alasdair.” John’s expression was ghastly. “We found her, aye, earlier . . . and brought her here. But—she died, Alasdair.”

“John—” He caught a fold of John’s shirt and twisted it. “—she is dead?”

“She is dead, Alasdair.”

He tugged at the shirt. “But you found her!”

“We found her, aye . . . but she was too weak for the storm. Too much wind, and snow—and grief . . .” John’s hand closed over his. “You did try, Alasdair. You tried gey hard.”

“She was
alive—”

“Alasdair . . .” John freed his shirt. “She is gone.”

“—she was alive—” The hand flopped to the stone. “She needed blankets . . . I went down for blankets. . . .”

“Houd your gab,” John said gently. “There is no profit in railing at yourself. ’Twas the storm, Alasdair—’twas too difficult for her.”

“If I
had found
them . . . if I had found them and brought them to her—” And then memory came back again: snow and storm, a father’s sprawled body—and a pistol discharged in the darkness. “Och Christ—
Cat—”

“Let be, Alasdair—stay
still,
now, aye?—you’ve a musket ball in your leg, and the bone is broken.”

He did not care about himself. “She fell—John, she
fell—”
He remembered it so clearly, recalled his cry, the shot, the hindrance of his brother keeping him from running to her. “I thought she would be
safe
—she is a Campbell, not a MacDonald—”

A woman’s voice: Eiblin’s. Asking for her husband.

John clasped Dair’s shoulder briefly. “We can do naught yet, Alasdair, but when we can go down—when we are certain they have gone—we will go down and bury the dead.”

Bury the dead. His father. His mother. And Cat?

John left him to tend his wife. Despite the bite of the deerfly that was musket ball and broken bone, Dair turned his face to the wall and in silence wept for the dead.

 

After his daughter fell at last into a restless sleep that was whisky-whelped stupor as much as swoon, Glenlyon left Inverrigan’s house and went out into the dooryard. It was midmorning, the day as yet swathed by wreaths of thin clouds that might thicken again into blizzard, but the storm had died and Glencoe now was a field of pristine white, scarred incongruously by the still-burning rubble of razed dwellings, now naught but fallen timbers and heat-cracked stone, and snow-crusted, bloody puddles near slain MacDonalds. Timber beams yet blazed in dwellings still unconsumed, and smoke choked the glen.

Drummond was there, and Lieutenant Lindsay, who claimed he had killed MacIain. A few gathered, powder-soiled and bloodstained, while others as yet still searched for survivors to dispatch, or for oddments that might have escaped plundering.

Glenlyon frowned. “Where are the others?”

Drummond’s pocked face was very still. “Others, sir?”

“Duncanson’s troops. We were not to be at this alone.” In no way alone; there were to be more troops. And yet there were not enough now to make up so many. “Have so many of us died?”

“No, sir.” Drummond’s eyes were wary. “Only three, Captain.”

It was perplexing. “Then where are the others? They were to assist us. Duncanson’s men!”

“Sir.” Drummond drew himself up. “Sir, we are as you see us. No others have come.”

Alone. He was alone in this. In the midst of the killing frenzy he had forgotten all but the doing, all but the order; yet there had been promises that he would be assisted. Duncanson’s men.

But they were not here. They had not come. He was solely responsible.

“MacIain is dead,” he declared; that much he had accomplished.

Drummond nodded.

“And his sons?”

Now Drummond smiled. It was not a comforting smile. “No report, sir. The bodies are being inspected in hopes they may be found.”

No report. They might have survived.

It was abject failure. The orders had been explicit.

“Find them!” Glenlyon shouted, and the echo rang in the glen.

 

Drunk on whisky, drunk on pain, Cat lay slackly in the bed and tried to connect the pieces of memory, of knowledge and awareness. It was far more difficult than anticipated, for all was edged in a faint burnished glow, as if everything burned. She could account for no reason it should be so, but it was so, and even her murmurings of protest did not banish it.

In counterpoint to the shattered fragments was a faint, unflagging moaning, as if a piper played the drone without benefit of the chanter. There was no melody, no soaring
ceol mor,
only the endless drone, low-pitched and relentless.

A hand touched her brow, smoothing back hair that hurt her sensitive flesh. Another hand slipped beneath her skull and lifted it, balancing it so precariously; she drank then because she was to drink, and because if she did not, the liquid would be poured across her face and neck. She knew how to drink. She did not desire to be wet, to reek of usquabae.

She drank. As she drank the droning halted, and silence was a blessing. She had not realized how much the noise hurt her ears, filling her head with restlessness.