by Lynne Jonell
“That’s right.” Will saw in his mind’s eye a thin, cruel face, a night sky bright with flame and filled with the sound of screaming. “Some people like to hurt, and destroy, and make everyone afraid of them. And others,” he added, “like to heal, and build, and keep people safe.”
It wasn’t that simple, he knew. Some people were just mixed up. Like those from the Copper Age, who wanted more light but didn’t understand it. Still, they had been trying to figure it out. Will smiled at his mother. “I’m glad you’re the kind who heals.”
A heavier footstep sounded at the threshold, and Will’s father entered with a sleeping Jamie on his shoulder. “When did you get so wise, son?”
Will grinned at his father. “When you made me responsible for Jamie.”
Andrew Menzies laughed and shifted the sleeping boy onto his other shoulder. “He’s a heavy load, I know. But thank you for taking such good care of him. I’m sure it wasn’t easy.”
Will gazed at Jamie’s small fist, still clutching the Highlander toy. “Not always,” he admitted.
His mother pointed out the window. “I’ve never noticed those letters before. What does that say, below the ‘in our time’? ‘Prysit be God—’”
“‘For evir,’” finished Will, squinting. “Oh—they must have meant ‘forever.’ What does prysit mean?”
His father said, “It must be an alternate spelling of praised. People used to say that word with two syllables, ‘prais-ed.’”
“Prysit be God for evir,” read Margaret Menzies slowly. “I like that. It goes perfectly with ‘in owr tyme.’”
“How so?” Will’s father boosted the sagging Jamie higher on his shoulder. “I don’t get it.”
“I do,” Will blurted without thinking.
His father looked at him, waiting.
Will hesitated. “I don’t know if I can say what I mean, exactly. But it’s like, in our own time, we can only see the one little piece—just the one thing we can do. We can … how did you put it, again?” he asked his mother.
“We can light a candle,” she murmured.
“Right. But it’s only a little candle, and there’s a lot of dark.”
“Sometimes there’s a great deal of dark,” his father said, very quietly.
“Right. In our time, there is.” Will looked out at the stone carving that had already lasted almost five hundred years. “And in their time, and maybe in the times to come, too. But the next line says that the dark isn’t going to win in the end. Not when you think about forever. Light wins.”
“Ah,” said his father. “Light wins. That’s good to know.”
AFTERWORD
This story takes place in the area surrounding Castle Menzies in Scotland, both in the present day and far into the past. Some of the people described really lived, and some of the events really happened; others could have happened, based on what we know about past ages.
Castle Menzies is a real place, and you can visit it if you take a trip to Weem, Scotland. You can go to the kitchen where Will worked, and stand inside the fireplace. You can run up the winding staircase to all the rooms Nan showed Jamie, and climb into a turret on the top floor. You can look for the joined coat of arms of Barbara Stewart and James Menzies over the ancient door, and if you stand in just the right spot, you can see the carved window pediment that reads “I OWR TYME.” If you are tired, you can have a fizzy drink and a biscuit in the tea room, and then you can go outside and explore until you find the iron gate and the walled garden. Oh, and don’t worry if you hear people calling it “Castle Mengis”—this is just the way Menzies is pronounced in Scotland. If you ask at the front desk, they will tell you the reason!
Just across the car park is the entrance to Weem Wood. Along the path, there are stones and trees carved with faces, dragons, and fanciful beasts. These are modern carvings, but they are still very fun to see, and I hope you find them all.
If you walk up the path to Saint David’s Well, you can look out over Aberfeldy and sit on the cup-marked stone just as Nan, Will, and Jamie did. There is a carved stone cross and a cave there, though the cave is full of rubble, and the carved cross is a replica. The real stone cross—very old, in two pieces, and said to be carved by St. Cuthbert himself—can be seen in the Old Kirk at Weem, now the Menzies Mausoleum. If the mausoleum is closed, you can peek through the window, as I did.
Across a wide river valley—a strath—is Drummond Hill. If you don’t mind a hike, you can walk up another trail to the site of an Iron Age hill fort. Be careful how you place your feet when you cross the small valley to climb up to the stony hilltop—hundreds of years of fallen branches and covering bracken have created foot-traps for the unwary. There is not much left of the hill fort except for a stone wall, but when you get to the very top, you will be able to see a long, long way across two river valleys. This is where Breet raced her chariot. Then, if you walk to the other end of Drummond Hill, you can stand at Black Rock Point and look out over Loch Tay.
On the southeast shore of Loch Tay is a crannog, built on stilts out over the water. This is the Crannog Centre, and you can run along the wooden walkway and go right in. You can see how the ancient peoples used to live, and even try making fire and operating a primitive lathe yourself. They won’t let you paddle the dugout canoes, but you can see them drawn up at the water’s edge, and sit in them, too, if you don’t mind getting a little wet.
The Battle of the Bloody Hands (history books call it the Battle of Mons Graupius) was a great Roman victory, and the Picts really did kill their own villagers near the battlefield rather than let them fall into Roman hands. After that, though, the Picts changed their tactics. They did not try to battle the Romans again in the open, but switched to night raids and surprise attacks, quickly disappearing into the folded glens and hills they knew so well.
The Romans called their fort Pinnata Castra, which means “Fortress on the Wing,” but the Picts called it Inchtuthil, which can be translated as “Island in the Flooded Stream.” If you visit, at first you may think it is only a few long ditches and low mounds. But if you look carefully, and compare it to diagrams of Roman encampments—they were all pretty much the same—you will be able to see just where the buildings were, and how big it all was. The Romans did mysteriously leave this fort even before it was fully completed, and never came back. They retreated far to the south, built a wall, and stayed behind it. This was called Hadrian’s Wall, after the Roman emperor, and you can still see parts of it today.
If you want to see Garth Castle, you will probably only see it from the outside, because at the time of this writing it is privately owned. But you can walk around it, look up, and see the high square parapet from which, legend has it, people who displeased the Stewart laird were thrown off. And you can walk by the stony burn beneath the castle, where Neil Gointe Stewart’s wife met her death when a rock was dropped on her head.
If you would like to hear “Flower of Scotland,” the song Nan taught to Jamie, you can find it online. It was written by Roy Williamson of the Scottish folk group The Corries. Since it was first performed in the 1960s, it has become an unofficial national anthem of Scotland.
Why did I write about Castle Menzies? Well, my grandfather was a Menzies (though in America he dropped the s at the end), and when I was a little girl he showed me a picture of Castle Menzies, and told me it was the castle of our clan. I wanted to go and live there!
Then one day, many years later, I saw a picture in my mind of an acorn rolling out of a stone wall. I didn’t know why the acorn was doing such a strange thing, but I had a feeling that the stone wall was a part of Castle Menzies. It was clear that a story was stirring in me somewhere. And so I wrote it. I hope you like it.
Here are some more detailed notes about the book, starting with the different ages the children visited:
COPPER AGE
The Copper Age was a narrow time period between the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age. In the Stone Age, people used s
tone for weapons and tools. In the Copper Age, people learned how to mine copper and make it into edged weapons, tools, and beautiful objects. In the Bronze Age, people learned how to mix copper and tin together to make bronze, a much harder and more durable metal. We know that copper was mined near Loch Tay in historic times, and it could have been mined there in prehistoric times, too.
AUROCHS: An aurochs was a huge wild ox, fast and aggressive, as tall as a grown man. They became extinct in Scotland during the Bronze Age, but they lasted longer in Europe. The very last aurochs died in a Polish forest in 1627.
LOCH: This is a long, narrow, often very deep lake in the Scottish Highlands. There are many stories about unusual creatures that swam in from the sea and might still live in lochs today.
CRANNOG: This is a man-made island in a loch. Some crannogs were made by piling up stones, with a narrow stone causeway leading to it that could be easily defended. Others were built on tall stilts over the water, with a wooden walkway. It is believed that they were used in the Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages. The Crannog Centre near Aberfeldy, Scotland, shows how archaeologists discovered timber and canoes from thousands of years ago, buried and amazingly preserved in the peaty mud of Loch Tay.
CUP-MARKED STONES: These are stones that have been marked with small, circular indentations, like little cups; some of the cups have rings around them, with one line leading out straight from the center. No one knows why the ancient peoples made them, but one theory is that they had something to do with worship of the sun. They are found all over Scotland, and there is one at Saint David’s Well in Weem Wood.
IRON AGE
The Iron Age came after the Bronze Age; this was when people learned to make things out of iron, which was the strongest metal anyone had yet known.
PICTS: These people were descendants of the very first people to come to Scotland (probably from Scandinavia), and so they called themselves Pecht, a word meaning “the ancestors” or “the people.” Later on, the Romans took that word and changed it to Picti, which means “painted people,” because of the blue painted tattoos on their skin. They loved bright colors; their chariots were painted, their shields were enameled, and they wove vivid checkered cloth for clothing.
The Picts lived in northern Scotland, in what we now call the Highlands. Though they were made up of many different tribes, with different names, they would band together to fight a common threat. They were tall, fair- or red-haired, pale-eyed, and very strong and hardy. When the Romans invaded Scotland, they were astonished at the Picts’ ability to run fast and long and hard, even uphill, and to fight in the cold without letting it slow them down.
The Picts did not have a written language and so there is much we do not know about them. But they left us clues, in ancient burial sites and in carvings on stones. The mysterious designs under each chapter title in this book are Pictish. What do they mean? Even experts are not sure. Historians and archaeologists are still finding things out about the picts—and arguing about them, too!
PICTISH BEAST: This is a strange, some say mythical animal that shows up over and over again in Pict carvings. No one knows what it is supposed to represent. Some think it might have been a real sea creature, since it does not have hooves or paws but rather curled-up appendages that could be flippers of a sort. If it was a real creature, why don’t we see it today? Maybe it is extinct, like the aurochs.
I liked the idea that the Pictish Beast was a realistic drawing of a sea creature that once existed, long ago. So I gave it a name— “Cray-tee”—and had it appear in the Copper Age, to bring good luck.
WOMEN: From what we can tell, Pictish women were strong forces within their community, farming, fishing, raising children, and sometimes fighting. Burial sites show that virtually all of the men and some of the women were warriors, for they were buried with their swords and spears.
CHARIOTS: Picts were using war chariots well before the Romans arrived. Their chariots were open, two-wheeled, made of painted wood, probably held together with root lashings; they were pulled by two horses side by side, with braided tails. The horses Picts used were smaller than modern horses, and shaggier—the Romans called them “ponies”—and Picts in war chariots charged up and down hills with great daring and speed as they raced to attack.
HIGHLANDS: The northern part of Scotland where the land is seamed with long lines of high steep hills and mountains, with rivers and lochs stretching out in the valleys between. It is difficult country to travel, and the Romans found it was difficult to conquer as well.
HILL FORT: Hill forts were small groupings of huts built on the tops of hills. The huts had stone walls and tall pointed thatched roofs like wizards’ hats. The little village was protected by an encircling wall, and there were often several terraced walls farther down the hill as well, which may have enclosed areas for farming and grazing.
ROMANS: The Roman Empire started in what we now call Italy, and grew and grew until it seemed the Romans were out to conquer the world. They managed to conquer a great deal of it, but when they got to Scotland they tried—and then they stopped. One reason was that the Roman Empire had its own troubles, back home. Another reason was that, although the Romans could beat the Picts in Scotland on an open battlefield, they had a lot more trouble fighting the Picts in their mountainous glens. The Picts’ method of fighting, then retreating into the hidden valleys and caves of their homeland, then coming out when the Romans least expected it to fight again, told the Romans that they would never truly conquer this last bit of land. In the end, they decided it wasn’t worth it, and went home.
FINDING TREASURE: All over Scotland, people find treasure every day. The freeze-thaw cycle of that climate makes sure that ancient metals keep thrusting up through the earth, and when a farmer plows a field, treasure-seekers with metal detectors often go prospecting. There are so many artifacts from ancient times to be found that there are very specific rules about who gets what share of the treasure!
MIDDLE AGES
The children visited Sir David Menzies and Sir Robert Menzies in 1470 and 1502. These years were at the very end of the Middle Ages in the Scottish Highlands.
BURN: The Scottish word for a small stream.
CASTLE MENZIES: This is not one of the big, grand, endless castles that take a whole day to tour, nor is it one of the small, ancient, crumbling castles. It’s a Z-plan castle, meant for defense but also for family living, and is a nice size for children to explore. It was built after the previous castle was burned by an enemy in 1502. In 1746, Bonnie Prince Charlie rested in it two nights on his way to the fateful Battle of Culloden.
FOSTERING: In the Middle Ages it was a common practice for nobles to send their sons to the castle of a relative, to be trained as a page, then a squire, and then a knight. The boys could have been trained at home, of course, but it was thought they would learn the necessary toughness better away from their own parents, who might tend to spoil them.
LAIRD: Scottish pronunciation of “lord.” The laird was the chief of his clan; he was the lawgiver, the fighting leader, the one to whom land was granted by his king.
NEIL GOINTE STEWART: This Stewart laird was a descendant of “The Wolf of Badenoch,” another wild Stewart laird who was famed for brutality, treachery, and murder. Neil seems to have been much like his ancestor. He was given the nickname “Gointe,” meaning “bitter and twisted,” by those who knew him. When Neil Gointe Stewart’s father died, Neil came into the lairdship as a young, angry man and he gathered lawless men around him who made a habit of stealing and murder. He burned Castle Menzies, kidnapped Sir Robert, and it is said that later on he killed (or paid someone to kill) his own wife by dropping a stone on her head from the ramparts of Garth Castle as she walked by the burn below.
SAINT CUTHBERT: Cuthbert was a Christian monk from Ireland who came to Scotland in the seventh century to preach and teach. He lived for a time in a cave on a hill near a natural well, and built a small church at the base of the hill, at “The Place of Weem
” (weem is a word that means “a cave”). The village there is called Weem to this day. It is said that Cuthbert carved a stone cross that stood near the well for many long years.
SAINT DAVID’S WELL: Originally this was called Saint Cuthbert’s Well, after Saint Cuthbert, who lived and taught there about eight hundred years before Sir David Menzies. When Sir David became a monk and lived at the well for a time, it began to be referred to as Saint David’s Well. If you walk up the path through Weem Wood, you can still see it today, a rectangular pool of water below the stone cliff.
SIR DAVID MENZIES: There really was a Sir David Menzies, a knight and laird who, in 1424, volunteered to go as a hostage to England for his king. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London, among other places. When he came back at last, he felt the need to live as a hermit in peace and holiness. He gave up the title and responsibilities of laird to his son, John, became a monk, and later an abbot. One of John’s sons was Robert, who eventually became the laird in turn.
SIR ROBERT MENZIES: There really was a Sir Robert Menzies, too, and he was laird at the time there was a bitter fight with the Stewarts. Neil Gointe Stewart was jealous of Sir Robert, and angry that the king had granted the Menzies some lands that Neil thought should be his own. Neil Stewart and his men came to the castle in the dead of night, set it afire, and took Sir Robert hostage. They held Sir Robert in the dungeon of Garth Castle for months, mistreating and starving him and demanding that he sign over the disputed lands. Sir Robert refused. Finally, when the Stewarts heard that the king himself was coming to set matters straight, Neil Stewart got nervous. He told Sir Robert that, if he would sign a “paper of forgiveness” promising not to take revenge on them, he would be set free. Sir Robert signed and was released. Within a few years he rebuilt the castle and the kirk (church) that had been burned. The Castle Menzies that you can visit today is the very one Sir Robert built.