He turned to Sinann, who had settled onto that grass. “If you can do magic, how come you need me?”
Sinann’s face went dark, and he knew he’d said the completely wrong thing. For a few minutes he thought she wouldn’t answer, but she finally said, “There was a time when I wouldn’t have needed you. I wish I dinnae need you, for all the help you’re being.” She was silent for another minute or so, then she said, “Watch.”
She waved her hand, and a goat appeared in the middle of the enclosure. It stared around and bleated, then took a step and bleated again. Dylan said, “Okay, a goat.” He reached out to let the creature sniff his hand, then retrieved it when it nibbled him with soft, exploring lips.
“Now, watch me undo what I just did.” Another hand wave, and the goat collapsed onto the grass. At first it looked like the animal had simply fallen, but on second glance Dylan could see it was now a rotten carcass, stinking and fly-blown. He moved from the stone and backed away, and put his hand over his mouth and nose to keep out the stench. Sinann said, “Nothing ever goes back the way it was. Nothing done can be undone. I’ve lost that much of my power.”
Dylan’s gut tightened. “You can’t send me home.”
Sinann flew, then lit on a stone block to be at eye level with him. “It’s time you learned a few things, lad.” Another wave of her hand and the carcass became a dry skeleton. A final wave made it go away entirely.
Dylan was not in any mood for her tricks. “Like what?”
“First of all, you’ve got to learn Gaelic. You’ll never be a true clansman until you speak the language of your people. You’ve also to learn the Craft. It will give you the bit of power you’ll need—”
“Wait a minute. Craft . . . witchcraft?”
“Aye. If you know the power of everything around you, nae man—”
“Uh uh.” Dylan waved his hands in denial. “Nope, not gonna. No witchcraft for me.” He began to back away.
She flew to the steps, now above him. He turned to face her, and she said, “And why not?”
“I don’t believe in it.”
“It exists, whether you believe in it or nae. Since it’s there, it’s my opinion you should use it.”
“No.”
“If you’re going to save my people—”
Again with the “save my people” stuff! “Get a clue, Tink! I’m not going to save anyone! The Scots can’t be saved! History will call them beaten by the English, and they will become a subculture of the conquerors. There’s nothing you nor I can do about it. You’ve taken me from my time . . . from my life for nothing!”
He turned and started for the exit, but she said, “Such a braw face to be covered with great, bulging warts!”
Dylan stopped and turned back. She glared at him, and he glared in return. He wanted to go home, and wanted to strangle her for bringing him here. It was a long standoff.
Finally, he said, “What is it with you? Why can’t you just let destiny run its course?”
She unlocked her eyes from his and looked around at the ruined walls. After another long moment, she said in a voice much softened, “Donnchadh used to come here.” Her eyes misted up, and Dylan was surprised to learn she could cry. “He loved this place. So peaceful it was, hidden away from the English and those thieving MacDonells. Oh, how he hated the English! When he fought them, he fought as bravely as any man who ever walked the Highlands. And when he died . . .” For a moment she lost her voice, but she coughed and continued, “When he died, it was with my name on his lips.”
“Donnchadh was a faerie?”
She shook her head and stared at the ground. “He was a Matheson. Iain’s father. But he loved me, and I loved him in return. More than anything in my long, worthless life.”
“Iain and his brothers, are they—”
She raised her head, eyes flaming. “Get yer filthy mind out o’ yer groin!” She stood on the stone block, on her toes, looking like she might assault him. “Love of the heart and love of the body are entirely different things and not to be mistaken for each other.”
Dylan took a step back, shocked by her vehemence. “Okay, I’m sorry.”
She took a moment to calm down, muttering dark things to herself about perverted mortals, then sat on the stone and went on with her tale. “Donnchadh had two mortal wives, the first of which gave him Iain and promptly died. Then he remarried, and the other had many children who died, but eventually produced Artair and Coll. But I loved him more than I can say. More than a mortal, even Donnchadh himself, could ever comprehend. I loved him in ways that only a faerie can know, with a soul thousands of years old and a knowing deeper than eternity. And now I mourn him with that soul and that knowing. He made my whole sorry life worth the living.”
“How did it happen?”
She closed her eyes for a moment, then began to speak. “Donnchadh was a man people loved and feared, much like his son, Iain. He cared for his people, as his eldest son does, treated them fairly, and protected them from harm. I first revealed myself to him when he came to this broch asking for help. His lands had suffered drought for two seasons, and the people of the glen were dying. He came to the broch, desperate, hoping to find someone to help.”
“And he found you?” Dylan’s voice carried a touch of sarcasm, and Sinann threw him a quick frown before she continued.
“In the many centuries after the priests came, with their church buildings and their abhorrence of things natural, nobody had ever come to ask me for help. I was surprised, to say the least, to see the young Laird come asking after the Sidhe. He was a handsome lad, with strength and bearing as you have. His hair was the color of a new copper pot, and his eyes blue as the depths of yon loch, and as mysterious. He had an intelligence about him, and a sense of things around him he did not pass to his sons. He knew I was here, and came for help because his people would die without it.”
“Did you help him?”
“Of course I did. I made it rain.”
Dylan chuckled and poked at the fungus on the ground with the toe of his shoe. “Making it rain in Scotland. There’s a stretch. How many drowned?”
Her eyes narrowed at him. “Nobody drowned, ye goof. It was a good harvest that year, and the clan prospered. And just because the Laird had the good sense to use help where he could get it.”
“But he died.”
Her face darkened again. “He was killed by that red-coated bastard with the rod up his arse and his nose in the air. Bedford was but a Lieutenant then, and newly assigned to command the independent company of dragoons garrisoned across the way. The soldiers had appropriated some cattle that had been brought north from the Trossachs, which the clan would need to butcher and salt for winter. The English took fully half the cattle in the glen, and to feed but twenty men for the winter. The English eat like pigs, and what one soldier requires in a day could feed three sturdy Scottish men.”
“The Crown didn’t pay for the cattle?”
“Aye, they did. But a starving village cannae eat shillings. They needed food.”
“And Donnchadh died because—”
“He died because he tried to take back his property. He and his sons made a raid on the garrison to drive the cattle north.”
“Not to the castle, then?”
“Dinnae be an idiot. Donnchadh certainly was not. His plan was to take the spréidhe into Ross-Shire and there he would have traded it for less . . . identifiable provisions.”
“Would have? They didn’t make it?”
“Nae. Bedford was waiting for them, with five other men. He let the Mathesons herd the cattle out, then opened fire. Donnchadh was cut down straight away, but lay, dying, for a long spell. I heard the commotion from here and flew to him. Iain and Coll escaped without having been identified, but it was without the cattle and without the other men who were killed in the fray. There was nae sign of Artair, who had just shortly returned from fosterage up north. I think he wasnae on the creach.”
Dylan’s voice went low.
“Donnchadh didn’t die right off. You can’t heal people, can you? How come?”
Her face screwed up with grief. “I sorely wish I could. I wish I could have put right the injury, and he would yet live. But even when my power was strong the healing eluded me. I cannae put straight the inner workings of a man, no matter how I try.”
“So Donnchadh died.”
“As he died, he called for me. The English Lieutenant made jokes. He laughed with his men at Donnchadh’s ‘superstition’ and his ‘barbaric morality’. I tried to strike him down, but succeeded only in popping the buttons from his coat.”
Dylan had to stifle a laugh at the visual, and a smile did curl Sinann’s mouth. “Aye, it was a sight. They continued to fly off for several days, and kept his servant busy with a needle and thread, it’s true.” She grew serious again. “But it was death he deserved. The clan suffered that winter. They suffered horribly for the sake of feeding those English pigs. Children died. Donnchadh died for taking what was rightfully his, and Bedford should die a horrible, painful death. He and every other Sassunach that comes here to rule what is not his.”
“And that’s why you hate the English so much, because they killed Donnchadh?”
Fire flashed in her eyes again. “A true Scot wouldnae ask for a reason to hate the English. Our people have never been more than an infestation to them, on land they would have use of themselves. Poor as it is, they would turn us off it and have tried for centuries to do so. They have butchered children and raped young wives. Of our men, those they dinnae kill they send across the ocean.” Dylan knew she hadn’t seen anything yet for the numbers that would emigrate in another fifty years.
“The English must be fought, or they would see us all dead.”
“But now it’s personal between you and Bedford.”
She sighed. “Aye, now it’s personal.” As if that settled everything, she looked him in the eye and said, “So let us get down to the business of learning the Craft.”
“No. Not in the mood to be burned at the stake, thankyouverymuch.” Witch burnings had slacked off at the beginning of this century, but Dylan knew the last execution for witchcraft wouldn’t occur for another eight or nine years. He didn’t want to be next. “Besides, I don’t believe in it.”
“Ye believe in me.”
“I believe you’re a pain in the ass.”
Her eyes narrowed. “It’s that Yahweh, isn’t it? You think I’m the devil.”
Dylan had to think about that. He replied, “No, I don’t. I think you really are what you say you are.”
“And do you think witches deserve to be burned at the stake?”
That was an easy one. “No.”
“You attended Mass last Sunday, and you crossed yourself. Do you think you should be punished for being a superstitious Catholic?”
Even easier. He let go a nervous laugh. “No.”
“Then why—”
“No. I said no Craft, and I mean it.”
“But—”
“No.”
She glared at him, then yielded the argument far too suddenly for it to be more than a temporary retreat. “All right, then, you’ve nothing against your ancestral language, have you? Let’s start adding to the Gaelic you’ve learned since you came.”
“I’ve learned nothing.”
“You know more than you think, lad. Take, for instance, tigh.”
Dylan dug back through memory for the thing Sinann had called the castle. “House.”
“Tha mi a’ dol dhan tigh.”
His eyes narrowed in concentration. He’d heard those words before. A’ dol . . . going. House. “I am going to the house?”
“Aye! Very good! Gle` mhath! ”
“I don’t see why I need to learn this. Almost everyone in the castle speaks English.”
Sinann looked like she would say something cross, but her brow cleared instead and she said, “But just think, laddie, how pleased Herself will be when you talk to her in her native tongue.”
Putting it that way shed a whole new light on the language issue. Dylan sat on the grass and listened to the translations of Gaelic words he’d been hearing all month. For hours they talked, and in spite of himself he became fascinated by the language he’d never had the patience to learn before when nobody around him spoke it.
He discovered certain aspects of it were echoed in Tennessee dialect. For centuries American southerners had been ridiculed by Yankees for conjugating the verb “to be” as “I be, you be, he be, and she be,” but he found it was that way in Gaelic, which had been spoken by many of the original settlers of the American South: tha mi, tha thu, tha e, tha i. He also found that, just as in southern dialect, verbs tended to have an “a’” attached. A’ dol and a’ tighinn were the same as a southerner saying, “a-going and a-coming.” Learning this was an odd sensation, as if he’d known it all along and now merely realized it.
The sun was nearly set when Dylan found himself getting colder by the second. He needed to return to the castle. He pulled his plaid around his bare shoulders and let Sinann lead him back. His brain buzzed with Gaelic words, and emotions tugged him in several directions. He wasn’t eager to admit this place and time weren’t as strange as he’d at first thought.
He made it back to the barracks by the light of the rising moon, and found his shirts waiting on his bunk. Shivering now, he put them both on. He was climbing into his bunk when Malcolm entered the long, dark room.
“A Dhilein!” By now Dylan recognized the address form of his name in Gaelic.
He replied in kind for the hell of it, “A Chaluim! ”
Malcolm chuckled, then said in English, “Get your gear together. You’re leaving with us now.”
“Huh? Leaving for where?”
“You’ll find out on the way. Get ready, and meet us—”
“I’m ready now.” Gear? What gear?
“You’ll need your sgian dubh.”
Dylan felt for his knife under his arm. It and the sporran on his belt and the clothes on his back were all he owned. “Let’s go.” They went.
CHAPTER 7
Malcolm spoke in a low mutter as they clattered down the wooden stairs to the castle’s inner bailey. “A messenger from Killilan has arrived with news of the Laird’s sister-in-law, who is Deirdre MacKenzie. She’s in her confinement, and it looks . . . nae good.” Confinement? Dylan searched his vocabulary of archaic English and found nothing that made sense. Malcolm went on, “She’s in need of her sister and niece. We’re to escort them immediately.” Dylan guessed Mrs. MacKenzie was ill.
Dylan then saw the horses saddled in the bailey, with Caitrionagh and her mother, Una, already mounted. The sight of Caitrionagh took his breath away. She sat tall, her cloak secured around her shoulders and her chin set against the fear for her aunt. The look in her eyes was far away and filled with worry.
Out of nowhere, Sarah hurried up to him and took his hands. “Be careful,” she said.
Taken by surprise, Dylan stammered that he would try. Sarah smiled and squeezed his hands, then stepped away to let him by. He peered at her for a moment. Her gaze overflowed with emotion, and he was afraid of what it might be. Had Sinann been right about her? He shook off the thought. It was too strange. Too . . . creepy.
Malcolm swung aboard his horse, leaving Dylan to ride an animal he was sure would kill him at the first opportunity. Almost as tall as himself at the shoulders, it tensed and sidled as he approached. He’d never ridden before, unless one counted the pony photo his mother had made when he was small. The horse snorted, and Dylan decided his only choice was to go with a complete bluff. Caitrionagh was watching. With as much assurance as he could muster, he reached for the reins, grappled for purchase on the English-style saddle and managed to get a foot in the stirrup. He hauled himself aboard.
The horse skittered sideways, but he held on with his knees and it settled after a moment. Slung over the horse’s back in front of the saddle was a pair of leather saddlebags. Provisions,
he guessed. It appeared they would be gone awhile. Malcolm urged his horse forward to take the lead, then Una, Caitrionagh, and finally Dylan brought up the rear as they moved between the gatehouses and over the drawbridge. He figured that with any luck, his horse would simply follow the others.
At the drawbridge, where the horses’ hooves thudded and echoed on the wood, he made the mistake of looking back at the castle. Sarah stood beneath the stone arch and waved. He now had to wave back, and obliged before facing front again. This wasn’t right.
The ride was long, cold, slow, and often too dark to see as they passed through the occasional wood. The full moon rose behind jagged peaks, but was sometimes blocked by pines.
In the clear, though, Dylan noticed Caitrionagh looking around more than might be usual for someone who knew the terrain. She looked back at him often. No words, just looks. He didn’t know what to make of that, and the trail was too narrow and rocky for him to ride in tandem with her to talk. So he only smiled at her, not sure what it was she saw when she looked.
The horse beneath him had a habit of tossing its head and heaving great, snorting sighs that felt like a giant balloon inflating between Dylan’s knees. He thought he might be holding on too tight, but whenever he relaxed his thighs the horse sidled and tossed its head again. More than once, when Dylan lost his concentration, the horse slowed or tried to veer from the path. He figured keeping control of the animal’s head was all that kept him from being scraped off on a low branch or high rock. As the night wore on, though, the animal tired of its games. Dylan hoped it had figured out who was boss, for he was tiring of them, too. He wanted to wrap his plaid around himself because of the cold, but needed to keep his arms free.
The track rose and fell, and wound in so many directions Dylan could no longer tell which way was which, nor did he know what time it was. The moon moved, but it seemed to go several directions. He passed the time by mumbling his numbers to himself in Gaelic. Sinann had taught him as far as thirty-nine. “A seachd deug air fhichead . . . a h-ochd deug air fhichead . . . a naoi deug air fhichead.” Then back to one. “A h-aon . . . a dhà . . . a tri . . .”
Son of the Sword Page 10