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 were 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 acrid 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.
‘It was the boots,’ the man went on. ‘The Spanish boots, that’s what they call them. They make pulp of your feet, so I’ve heard. Well, he took one look at them, and shook his head, and said he wouldn’t be dragged to his own burning, he’d walk.’
‘Is that so?’ The first guard laughed gruffly.
‘Aye. He gave them a fine confession, and he laughed as he gave it, the black-hearted devil. I think the minister was a bit put out that he’d given in. The man from town certainly was. The longer they last, the more he earns.’
‘Still, the pay is good for a burning, too. And he’ll be well paid in the next few days.’
‘The strong one, he’s one of the last, I hear. It will be three days of waiting for him, so he’ll have plenty of time to repent of his arrogance. The others did not last so long anyway. Did you hear the Balchattan witch squeal?’
‘Aye, and serve her right. She was up to the same as the Sinclair crone: spoiled a man’s wedding night. Cast a spell on the ale, can you credit such wickedness? She tried to claim the groom had taken a dram too many and his bride was ugly enough to shrivel iron, never mind a male member.’ He laughed. ‘She’d a tongue like a knife, that woman, before they interrogated her. She wasn’t laughing after they’d finished. She confessed, like they all do.’
Thinking of Ma Sinclair, I felt sick, and not just with relief.
‘The devil’s-whore howled this afternoon when they lit the fire under her. She won’t like it too well in the other fire, and that goes on forever, the minister says.’ The other man gave a delicious shudder. ‘The warlock is not to be strangled first?’
‘None of them are. The priest says an example must be set. Besides, the people come from the clachans and the bailes. It’s a fine entertainment for them.’
‘And a fine warning. There won’t be many taking the Devil’s mark from now on.’
‘Ah!’ exclaimed the other, and sniggered at a memory. ‘Did you hear? They found one of those on that pretty girl from Balchattan.’
‘Th
e younger one?’
‘Aye. It took them a while, but then she was awful pretty. You’ll never guess where they found her mark. All I’ll say is this: they had to shave every inch of her.’
They collapsed into raucous, whisky-fuelled laughter. I watched them from only a few yards, and knew that I could have the dirk off one of them and he’d never know it. At least, he’d never know it till he was staring in shock at the blood gushing from his own throat.
I made myself think of Conal. I couldn’t take the risk, not just to indulge myself.
Later, maybe. Later.
18
Inside the keep I wouldn’t have got near Conal, I know that now. Even the Veil has its limits, with ruthless and professional guards who know what they’re doing. That was why I liked these two fools on the outside wall—at least, I liked their carelessness and their overconfidence and their taste for rough whisky. There were things I’d seen as I sat silent and watched the keep, and one of them was that both guards always made sure to empty their bladders in the same spot.
After the first guard had finally wandered off to his bed or his woman, I lay within yards of his replacement for an age without being seen. Partly it was down to my own fieldcraft; mostly it was the Veil. Kate must be mad wanting rid of it.
I waited till he’d taken his own long piss, chuckling to himself and calling out an obscenity, and then had sat down again with his back to the wall. The whisky was weighting his eyelids, and he’d rid himself of his bladder discomfort, and his head sagged from time to time, but he must have been more afraid of the priest and his mercenaries than I’d guessed. He forced himself to stay wakeful, getting up now and again to walk around and stamp his feet.
I knew he’d sleep in the end, but I’d been patient and canny long enough. Silent, I crawled towards him on my belly. One touch was all I needed, but close to his spine or his brain. I thought of taking his dirk, but it would still have been a self-indulgence, and the alarm would have been raised when he was found. Instead I took him with laughable ease, with the childhood strategy of a stone tossed to the far side of him. When he glanced aside at the noise, I sprang the last yard and caught hold of his neck, and held it till the sleep swamped him. It took less than two seconds, and he didn’t have time to object. He didn’t even know about me: when he woke he’d blame the long hours they made him work. He was a lucky bastard, I thought bitterly, that he was going to wake at all.
Firebrand (Rebel Angel Series) Page 14