by Jill Barnett
It was a long time before he placed the last rock on a stack of stones where Malcolm lay. Exhausted, he fell to his knees beside the graves, his brother’s golden cross in his hand, his face heavenward, his arms outward and his head thrown back, and he swore in his brother’s name, in his father’s name, he would right the wrongs done this day to the house of Robertson.
He picked up his bow and quiver and left; he never looked back, but walked slowly, deliberately. What he carried in his heart was heavy on him. What he carried in his soul and memory affected him through every inch of his blood and bone, down to the very meat of him, and he thought then that he understood the man who carried his own cross to Golgotha.
By the time he joined his mother and sister in the woods, his sister was sitting against the tree as he had been earlier that day, her head nodding forward, looking exhausted. He knew she was frightened. Today she had seen too much of life. He picked up the sack of fish, tying it to his belt as he studied his mother. Her clothing was burned, her face red and swollen, one cheek puckered with burned and blackened skin, one of her eyes unseeing, one hand holding the damp cloth he had torn from their clothing. She sat on a rock by the cool water of the stream as serene as if she were not scarred and half-blinded and mourning. Her lack of emotion said how truly broken she was.
His need for vengeance overcame him in almost uncontrollable waves. His body felt thick with anger. It ran hotly through his blood, firing the need in him to want to kill the men who did this. Keeping his control and his sanity was not easy, but he needed to be able to see his mother and sister who needed him, not the red heat of revenge.
He knelt down by his sister. “Mairi come. Climb onto my back. I will carry you.” He shifted her small, exhausted body, bow and quiver, and stood with her on his back. The silk of her fine hair brushed his face as she laid her sleepy head on his shoulder. Her shallow breaths quivered in her chest and her silent tears dripped onto his sore, fire-scorched neck.
That almost broke him; his own throat choked suddenly with the urge to cry, but he clearly understood his duty and walked over to stand by his mother.
She reached out for him and touched thin air, her good eye spilling with tears and the other naught but a blank stare in the burnt and puckered skin on one side of her once- breathtakingly beautiful face. “Lyall?
“I am here,” he said.
She turned to look at him from her good eye. “Where’s Mairi.”
“She is asleep. I have her here on my back. See?” He turned. “ Take my hand. ‘Tis time to go.“ He helped her to her feet and together they slowly walked away.
5
Glenna opened the weathered stable door barely enough for her to see down the narrow back lane, which was empty. The smell of smoke and the sound of distant voices carried back to her. Before she could close the door, the black suddenly came trotting ‘round the corner and down the back alley. He was riderless.
Montrose?
Oh God… She moved swiftly, throwing open the stable door and running down the shadowy lane toward his horse, which was skittish and looked as if he would bolt if there had been any sign of open road.
Cooing and talking softly, she approached him, watching his ears flicker and his eyes dart to hers, then she easily grasped the reins. “Come, my laddie,” she said to him. “Come…” In a half run, she led the horse back to the stable. Montrose was in trouble. If she went to help him, the mob would recognize and overtake her.
Her thoughts sped toward some kind of plan, and a moment later she pulled off her hat, unbraiding her hair as she walked with determined steps toward the stall and Skye. Inside her satchel was the package Alastair had given her and she touched it before she moved past it to take out the stolen gown, the only one she owned; this was her only chance. Surely the spicewife would be the only person to recognize it. She had filched it a long three summers before. She changed her shoes, from peasant boots to an expertly tanned and tooled pair of costly red leather lambskin shoes only a noblewoman could afford. She had stolen them near Invergowrie and knew they would show from the jagged edges of the gown as proof of what she was about to claim. But they were too big and slipped when she walked. She ran her fingers through her long hair, wavy and full after its tight braiding, and felt the relief from her scalp from no tight braids. She took a deep breath and glanced out the doors.
She did not dare abandon him when she needed him to get off the island so she could escape safely. Neither a woman nor a lad traveling alone was safe to ferry across the sound. Both El and Al made her swear on her life she would never try to do so.
So she told herself, she needed Montrose for her own safety.
Minutes later, black hair flowing down over her shoulders and back, his signet ring in one fist and her knee up near the pommel and she precariously rode the black back down the lane, praying for balance and courage as she headed for the main road, hoping she could pull off the guise.
What she saw ahead of her did little to ease her nerves. A crowd hovered to either side of Montrose, who was splayed unmoving on the ground and from the looks of the dirt trail, had been dragged over to the side of the road. A group of men were passing buckets of sea water to put out the hay fire and the burning cart. Smoke was everywhere and she could feel it burn her chest.
“Get away from him!” Glenna commanded, waving smoke away, and she rode straight into the middle of the mob. The crowd parted slightly. Montrose was almost unrecognizable. His skin was not burned or charred away--Glenna had unfortunately seen a burned man once and it was horrifically unforgettable--yet his whole face was black with ash and smoke, his clothing singed or burnt where it was covered with chips of ash and pieces of burnt hay. Even his golden hair was ash grey. There was a deep red-blue welt in the crucifix shape of a sword hilt across the skin of his palm, which lay limply next to his fallen weapon. He was so still her heart stopped.
Then he moaned loudly, which gave her great hope, and she released a breath she had not known she had been holding.
“’Tis my gown! I stitched it myself! Look at her! She is wearing my gown!”
Glenna turned and rode directly up to the spicewife, mere a hand’s breadth away from the stubborn woman, her chin high so she could look down at the woman when she waved an arm and said, “What is this? You worry over some measly piece of cloth and naught for the life of my lord, Baron Montrose.“ She paused meaningfully before adding, “You do not know that all you in Steering have grievously harmed the emissary of Himself the king.”
The woman stepped back, her eyes narrowed in disbelief, silent but looking pointedly at Glenna’s gown and then up to her face. She opened her mouth to speak, but the woman's husband, pulled her back again none too gently, speaking harshly in her ear. That Glenna had implied the whole village was responsible for Montrose’s condition was threat enough.
She turned and closed the small distance to Montrose, the crowd stepping away from the black as she eased him forward, and she stopped and dismounted. Montrose lay still as stone. She knelt down, searching for a sign of movement in his chest, a sign he was breathing, but she saw none. “My lord?”
Nothing. Panic raced through her. She leaned over him, her hair shielding them and pooling on his ash covered chest. “Montrose!” she whispered harshly into his black rimmed ear. “Can you hear me? Montrose! “
He groaned again and his words were lost and sounded deep and raspy as a wolf’s growl. She relaxed somewhat. The man was not dead. The sound made her wonder if his throat was burned, and that perhaps he was gravely injured. Her chest tightened and she touched his jaw and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
She turned to the men hovering around them. “Help him. Please.”
They looked at her dumbfounded, standing there as useless as ears on a stone.
“I am the Lady Montrose,” she lied easily and held out his signet ring as proof. “You must help my lord husband.”
Suddenly the men began to move swiftly, giving her helpful words of kindn
ess. The smithy and his laddie rushed back carrying a long wooden door, and four of the men lifted the baron onto it.
“Where can we take him?” She asked, looking up and down the crowded village road. “Is there an herbwife? There must be someone who can help me.”
“You! Laddie!” the smithy said to his young apprentice with a gentle swipe at his head. “Go fetch Old Gladdys.”
Someone gasped. The smithy ignored them and turned back to her. “We shall take him to the tavern, milady. The old woman will come and help ye care for him.”
A fearful muttering spread back over the crowd, “Old Gladdys? The witch? Not her, surely….”
Glenna faced the smith. “Why are they wary?”
“The old woman ferried across from the mainland one day,” he explained.
“’Twas the day of the summer solstice,” someone else said in the dire tone of a Greek chorus.
The smithy looked at Glenna, shaking his head with exasperation. “She is naught but an old crone claiming healing powers. Some are suspicious. A few call her a witch because of her potions and strange Welsh ways, and she herself claims to be some kind of Druid, as if they still exist.” He laughed at the idea.
An older woman standing nearby crossed herself and mumbled something dark about witches and witchcraft existing beyond time.
“For as many who believe she is a witch, or question her sense and words,” the smithy continued, “there are twice as many who have been saved by her potions and will argue she is truly an angel.”
“Aye, milady,” said another woman, elbowing her way to the front of the crowd. “Old Gladdys saved my husband when he was injured from a scythe and his arm festered.”
“She saved my babe!” said another.
“And my daughter in childbed.”
“I care not what she is called,” Glenna said. “Only that she is skilled.”
“Take solace, milady. She has yet to send a single soul to his grave.”
“Although looking at her could surely do the trick,” a young man said and some of the crowd laughed. “Hers is not the face of an angel.”
But the men were already lifting the board with Montrose to their shoulders and moving slowly and carefully toward the tavern. Glenna turned to follow, but a rough hand on her arm stopped her. The spice woman would not let things be.
“I would advise you to take your hand away, spicewife,“ Glenna said imperiously, and she faced the woman once again. Then she glanced over her shoulder where the men were carrying Montrose and realized the woman’s husband was one of the men helping him.
Her gaze met the woman’s briefly, and then she turned to the black’s saddle and reached into Montrose’s bags. With a handful of silver, enough to buy more fine gowns than she could ever imagine, she pressed the coins into the woman’s rough hands and then held them tightly in her own. “I say to you that my young brother gave me this gown as a gift. What say you, spice seller?”
The woman slightly opened her hands and glanced down, her reaction first shock as the coins caught the sunlight and shone in her palm like fish skin, then she looked up at Glenna and smiled as brightly as the sun when she said, “I say your brother has a fine eye, milady.”
* * *
Inside the Steering alehouse, the men carrying Montrose set him down atop two oak tavern tables shoved together and stood around arguing over what should be done first, all of them talking to Glenna at once. The scent of stale ale made her belly wallow and her head was spinning. She was greatly worried. Montrose was still out.
The whole of the village, curious and noisy, looked to be shoving their way into the small room to see the great lord felled and almost burnt to death in the middle of Steering. A tavern maid set down a tray with some pieces of linen, a wooden bowl, and a ewer of water on the table next to him. The girl called Glenna milady, so she was feeling less fearful of discovery and more afraid of what she would do if Montrose didn’t awaken.
While all were discussing remedies and cures encompassing everything from a poultice of mustard, goose blood, and cow spittle to a tisane of St John’s Wort, Glenna wrung out the cloth in the cool water and laid it on his filthy brow, thinking she should pour the water over his head like she did when El got drunk last year and fell off his horse and wouldn’t awaken. If that did not bring Montrose ‘round, at least it would clean his face, she thought with humor as black as his sooty skin.
From the doorway came a strange and sudden murmuring, and the crowd parted slightly as a small old woman elbowed and twisted her way through the thick throng of people gathering in the small back room of the tavern. She wore a long, dark woolen tunic, the side panels embroidered with colorful images of suns and crescent moons, animal-like figures in odd positions. A huge cat-like creature standing on hind legs and reaching upward toward a large silver moon was stitched entirely of a silvery thread. The tunic was belted to her thin waist with a hammered metal girdle that had strange and ancient looking markings engraved into it. In her right hand she carried a long willow staff strung with small brightly-colored, cloth herb bags, one with cattails sticking out of it. A long bladder pipe also hung down from the bend in the staff.
“Where is he? This nobleman who was hurt,” she was saying, her voice clear and as melodic as harp music, a sharp contrast to her hair and face. Using her staff, she shoved a young farmer aside and chided him for not moving swiftly enough.
“Old Gladdys,” she heard some of them whisper as the woman passed them.
“Stop yer gabbling and get ye out of my path. Is not a great lord all but dying?”
Glenna supposed if there were a Druid witch alive at that time she would have looked like Gladdys. The Welsh woman had wild and curly white hair, a face weathered by the sun (and perhaps the wind, a strong wind…a storm…a raging storm) skin like spotted sausage and the sharp black eyes and a nose like a beak of a peregrine falcon. As El would have said, ‘she has a cheese-face, one that could curdle milk.’
But then Glenna had noticed oft times men were all about the look and shape of a woman and cared not a whit for her mind, and even less for her tongue. Her brothers were no different. She preferred to believe that perhaps Gladdys might have been a handsome woman in her youth, which looked to be a long, long time ago.
Gladdys glanced down at Montrose, put her thin, knobby hand on his throat for a moment, then looked away. She unhooked her bladder pipe and blew a loud, discordant note that quieted the voices in the room and said, "Stand back ye!" Then she began to hum and twirl, spinning in a circle, her long white hair the color of morning mist flying outward as she turned, her arms out, the staff almost swiping at the heads of some of the crowd, who backed quickly away. Her humming quickly changed into a chant:
“Eena, meena, mona, mite,
Basca, tora, hora, bite
Hugga, bucca, bau ,
Eggs, butter, cheese, bread,
Stick, stock, stone dead.
O-u-t! Out!”
Within heartbeats the room had nearly cleared, most running from the old woman like their hair was afire. Even the believers’ eyes grew wide and they scurried away. Only two merchants and the smithy remained.
“Need ye help with your lord, milady?” the smithy said kindly. “We will stay.”
Glenna declined. “There is no need for you to stay. My thanks to you, all of you. My lord will be grateful,” she added as she pressed a piece of silver into each of their hands, and they shuffled to the door.
“If ye need help, send someone.” And the smithy left, but not before he glanced at Gladdys, then shook his head muttering about her tossing wood on the fire of fools.
With the room empty but for Montrose and the two of them, the old woman grew silent and slowly stopped spinning. For merely a heartbeat, Glenna thought that Gladdys could see her for who she was, and wasn’t, saw into her past and her future, saw her weaknesses and even her escape plan. It was unsettling to have someone look at you as if they could see not only what you hid from the world
, but also see inside to the darkest corners of your heart and your head.
The old woman tapped her staff three times and stared at Glenna from sharp and knowing black eyes. It took a trickster to know one.
“That was curious display,” Glenna said to her, skepticism in her tone and waving her hand casually at the old woman’s performance. “Tell me. What exactly does your chant heal?”
The old woman eyed her for a long moment, and then she smiled quite evilly and winked when she said, “An overcrowded room.”
Glenna laughed. But Gladdys was looking at her no more and instead had turned to Montrose. She leaned low over him and used the cloth to clean around his eyes and some of the soot from his face. At the sight of the old woman’s frown, Glenna smile fell away and she stepped closer. “He will wake up.”
Gladdys looked at her. “Ye be the wife?”
“Aye,” Glenna lied, trying to look down her nose as if daring the old woman to doubt her word.
“Hmrph,” was all Gladdys said, a word that carried a load of doubt, and she turned back to Montrose and slid open each of his eyelids with her thumb and peered closely into his eyes. “His eyes be red and swollen from the ash.” She lifted his head from the board and felt around underneath. “And he has a knot the size of me fist on the back of his head.”
She pulled her hand away and began to clean his face and brow and ‘round his closed eyes. As Glenna hovered closer, Gladdys waved her away and said in an irritated tone, “Go and make yerself useful. There, see?” She pointed to her staff leaning against a chair. “Bring me that brown bag, and the green one.” She used her unusually long-fingered hands to squeeze and press gently downward on his chest, and he moaned again.