On that thought his belly made known its temperament, growling impotently. They went hungry more often then not, depending on what small game Murdo might catch in crude snares, or the fish he managed to spear. Dair had accustomed himself to reduced rations, but no food for two days took its toll nonetheless. Murdo’s luck ran bad.
He healed steadily, but the leg yet ached despite his ministrations. Each day he worked the muscles with both hands, trying to keep them supple, but he had lost weight since the massacre and the strength in his tautly bound thigh had gone. The splints aided his bone but not the rest of him, and he feared to be a cripple if the muscle wasted away. That thought drove him more and more often to kneading his flesh, to wishing he might stand like a man again, unfettered by wood and wool.
Murdo had fashioned him a crude crutch out of a tree limb he stripped of bark so it would not bite into flesh. It was enough so that Dair might lever himself up and hobble to the mouth of the cave, or to a pocket in the back where he relieved himself. The cave now smelled of it, but he had no choice. Unlike Murdo, he could not go out and find a suitable place, but was limited by his leg to depend on the cave itself.
His mouth twisted in wry self-contempt. “I am made a beast, aye?—living in my own filth, bound to my den lest the soldiers find their prey.”
And so proud Glencoe was humbled, shattered in spirit by Campbell soldiers, by a Campbell laird. MacIain killed, his wife dead, so many MacDonalds dead. Even a Campbell-born woman.
Dinna think of Cat—He shifted, then shifted again, cursing inwardly. Made awkward by the splints, it was difficult to find a comfortable position. His body ached of it, muscles trembling in spasms as if to remind him once he was a man who walked on two legs, instead of a beast bidden to slide himself across the ground when it took too much effort to stand, to balance, to hobble from the dimness of the rocky cave into the light of a spring day.
Murdo has never been gone so long. His body thrummed with tension. He could not sit still. He itched, he twitched, he bit into his lip to stave off the urge to move, the need to answer in some way his body’s urgent demands.
Two days.
Murdo refused to be gone so long.
MacIain would not permit anything so puny as a broken leg to prevent him from doing whatever he wished to do.
No, not MacIain., John is now MacIain.
He could not be still, in mind or in body. Cursing, Dair reached out to the crutch and began the laborious process of rising from the floor.
Cat waited impatiently as Colin brought up two horses to the dooryard. She saw the expression on his face, the tension in his body, but gave in to neither unspoken plea. And when he stopped, she reached out swiftly and took the rein from his hand. “You need not come,” she said. “I ken the way, aye?”
His jaw hardened. “I’ll no’ let you go without me.”
“Will you not?” Cat set her teeth and placed a foot in the stirrup, then hoisted herself up. Her shoulder twinged, but save for a muttered curse she ignored it as she settled herself in the saddle, pulling folds of plaid out of the way. “Then if you mean to come, you’d best mount your horse. I willna stay here the longer so Jamie and Dougal may come out to fash me again.”
Colin’s expression was troubled. “What will this serve?”
Cat looked down on him. Had he believed she might reconsider, given time? Or merely hoped?
Grimly she said, “It serves me to see what has become of my home, and of the man I married.”
Colin still frowned even as he mounted his garron, though he said nothing.
“You’ve a wife yourself,” Cat told him, “and two bairns. Think of them as I do this. Think of not knowing if they lived, or if they died. For the rest of your life.”
Colin grimaced. “Not knowing might be easier.”
“It would not.” Cat turned her garron toward the track that wound through Rannoch Moor. And you would ken that, in my place.
No one could understand who had not been there. And until she went back she would never know the truth.
Cat needed to know. Until she knew the truth there could be no future, only the past. In Glencoe, she would know. If he lived. Or not. “Eraoch Eilean, ”Cat murmured, riding out of the dooryard.
Sweat poured from Dair’s body. He had not expected it to be so difficult, to be so painful . . . it took effort now to breathe, to suck air into his lungs and cling to it a moment before it whooped out on a gasp of exertion, of taut, tremendous effort that drained him with every step.
Step. He did not step. Could not.
He could not recall now what it had been like to be whole, to stride across the glen, to nimbly avoid a camanachd stick looping down to trap his ankle. He could not recall the simple act of walking unhindered, of the ability to leap and run, or even to crouch.
The terrain was unkind. High above the tree line there was little ease of movement; the wild, rugged corries dug into shoulders of the peaks. Loose stone shifted as he tried to pick his way down from the cave, fouling the crutch, the splints, spilling from beneath his bare left foot so that he planted the splints abruptly to catch his balance.
Pain kindled throughout his thigh. Dair gave in to it, too weak to do otherwise; he saved himself as much as he could by twisting to the left, by taking his weight onto his left leg, and so it gave as well and spilled him there, so that his left hip was driven deep against the stone.
He lay there drenched in sweat, breathing noisily through parched throat. He dared not cry out lest there be someone to hear him, to carry tales of a hidden MacDonald, easy prey for soldiers. Instead he balled his right hand into a fist and beat it against a boulder, beat it and beat it and beat it until he felt the pain of it, the split flesh upon his knuckles. If pain lodged there, it lessened its fury elsewhere.
He pressed his hand against his mouth and bit into the heel, the flesh hard as horn from an honest man’s honest work. And when at last the pain of his broken leg lessened to a point he could bear it, he swore very softly with great elaboration, recalling the crude vulgarity of the men at Killiecrankie who held fear at bay by harsh speech, who scorned the thought of falling beneath a Sassenach ball or bayonet.
“Murdo,” he murmured, exhausted.
Murdo will find me—
Wind rustled trees. There was no peat-smoke upon the air, no smell of cooking meat, no odor of fish frying upon flat stones set in the fire. There was no odor at all save of trees, and sap, and turf. Nothing at all of people.
It was Glencoe. It was not. The glen remained, girdled by cliffs and peaks, cut through by the river, but no one lived in it despite fertility. The valley was empty of habitation, save for its natural game. Empty of MacDonalds.
Cat rode unerringly to the house she and Dair had shared, ignoring the ruins of others. And there she found identical destruction as well as similar methods: charred timber and broken stone shattered by the heat, collapsed roof slates. Wind had scoured the ruins free of ash, so that only the stark timbers remained poking impudently skyward, fallen into a tangle like a handful of dropped sticks.
Nothing remained to mark human habitation. No scrap of cloth, no pewter plate, no perfume brought from France. Only the detritus of massacre, of fire and plunder, and the flowers of late spring breaking up through blackened soil.
She climbed down from the garron and left it to forage. She walked across what had been the dooryard—she saw it still—and through what had been the door—she saw it still—and into the room where the soldier had shot her, believing her a MacDonald.
Because I said I was.
There was no room. There was no house. But she saw it all regardless as she stood in the midst of wreckage.
Cat closed her eyes and conjured recollection. The house was whole again, with a peat-fire on the hearth, and the wailing of the wind as it buffeted the fieldstone, teasing at slate roof tiles. She recalled her cooling bed, empty of Dair, and the cracking noise of what she knew now was distant musketry.
She
let it come, piece by piece. Sound by sound. Fear by fear. Let it come, and build; let it engulf, and take; permitted herself in all the ways to relive it again: the emptiness, the fear, the growing apprehension; the shock of being shot. And going into the storm to find Dair lest he be harmed, and alone.
Remembered rage when she knew it was all her father’s doing.
She was dry of tears. She was drained of grief. Nothing lived in her spirit save hatred of Glenlyon.
“Alasdair Og,” she whispered. “Alasdair Og MacDonald.”
“Cat.”
She opened her eyes, astonished; saw her brother’s face instead. “There is a dead man by the river. I wouldna take you to him, save he might be a man ye ken.”
“Where?”
“By the river.” He gestured direction.
Heedless of her footing, Cat ran as swiftly as possible. She was absently grateful for trews in place of skirts, for brogues in place of bare feet . . . but when she saw the body she forgot such things as clothing.
“Dair?” She hurled herself to his side. He was tattered, graying, bearded . . . facedown, she could not see him to know him. “Dair?” Colin had said “dead man.” “Dinna be dead, Dair . . .” She caught great handfuls of his soiled plaid and shirt and tugged him over onto his back. “Dair—?” She stared blindly into his face, into the pale, bloodless face.
Colin came up beside her. “His neck is broken. Likely he fell here in the stones—see?” He paused as she made no answer. “Cat—d’ye ken him?”
She said nothing. She could not. She had no voice with which to speak.
“Cat—?”
At last the words came. “I ken him.”
“Is it . . . is it him?”
Tentativeness. Apprehension. For his sister’s sake, Colin wanted otherwise than what he feared.
That broke her. Now she could cry. Now she could grieve. “ ’Tis Murdo. He was MacIain’s man.” She gazed blindly up at her brother. “I thought I would ken . . . I thought coming here—” All of it new again, the scab stripped ruthlessly off the wound so it might bleed afresh. “Oh Christ, I dinna ken—I dinna ken, Colin—”
In sudden consternation he knelt down beside her. “Och, Cat—”
She rocked back and forth, wanting to keen aloud. “I thought I would ken, if I came . . . but I dinna. I dinna. ”
In painful comprehension, in careful compassion he reached out to her. She felt his hand touch her head, then gently cup her skull. He unweighted her, pulling her to him as he knelt there, as she did, until he pressed the side of her head against his shoulder.
Nothing now but grief, and very little breath. “I thought I would ken it—if he lived, or no’.” And it was worse, she realized now, unspeakably worse knowing nothing after all.
“Bide a wee,” he said gently, “and then I’ll find a place for him and stones for his cairn.”
When she could, Cat sat upright, withdrawing from Colin’s shoulder. She patted his arm in gratitude, gazing blindly at dead Murdo. “Aye,” she said quietly, “find stones. I’ll sit wi’ him here as you do it, so he need not be alone.”
The Earl of Breadalbane could not suppress his disdain as his unkempt cousin stood before him. “You are fou, ”he accused.
Glenlyon’s reddened eyes gleamed balefully. “What would you have me be? ’Tis bad enough hearing the whispers when I’m sober enough to understand them. Fou, they are no’ so loud.”
They faced one another across a writing table in the earl’s Edinburgh town house near Holyrood Palace. The earl set down the brimming cup he had poured and watched as Glenlyon immediately put out a trembling hand to take it.
Coolly he said, “You did as you were ordered to do.”
Glenlyon tossed back the liquor, licked his lips dry of it, blotted his mouth on the soiled sleeve of his greatcoat, then stared angrily at his kinsman. “Och, aye, so I did—but they must blame someone, aye? And I was there. My boots were soiled by MacDonald blood.” He looked into the empty glass, then smacked it down upon the desk top. “Did you call me here to complain I drink overmuch? Well, dinna. It has been tried before.”
“I would not trouble myself with an impossible task.” With economical movement, Breadalbane sat down behind his writing desk. He did not bother to point out another chair to his kinsman; let Glenlyon stand if he would. “The only hope of success we had was if all were killed. But they were not. And now the world knows.” He put his hand upon a folded paper. “This is a pamphlet written by Charles Leslie, an Irishman making coin off of Scotland’s private troubles. And there are broadsheets throughout the city, carried south to London.”
“What of it?” Glenlyon challenged, then pressed his hand against his pocket. “I’ve the order here. ’Tis plain what I was to do.”
“ ‘Plain,’ ” Breadalbane echoed. “And plainer still your failure.”
“Good Christ, I did what I could!” Glenlyon cried harshly. “I was promised aid from Hamilton, but no men arrived. I was promised aid from Duncanson, but no men arrived. Until it was too late!” His words slurred, but his anger burned away much of his drunkenness. “I was told five of the clock, and at such time did I give orders to fall upon the MacDonalds. And yet no aid came until half a day later!”
Softly Breadalbane said, “They were all of them to die.”
“We killed whom we could,” Glenlyon retorted. “Christ, man, the glen ran red wi’ their blood from the Devil’s Staircase to Loch Linnhe, and all the dwellings burned . . .” Overbright eyes glittered with sudden tears in a corpse-pale face. “You were not there to see what was done, aye?—to see those who died, the men and the women, and the bairns—”
“All of them were to die.”
“You were not there!” Glenlyon cried, smashing his fist down so hard on the desk top the empty glass bounced on wood. “How dare you rebuke me? How dare you question my competence—”
“Because I must. You failed.”
Glenlyon snatched up his drained glass and threw it against the panelled wall. It shattered and fell, leaving behind a sticky residue of redolent French brandy. “Pox on you!” he said harshly. “You asked the worst of me, and I gave you my best! ”
The earl drew in a calming breath; it would do no good if they both lost their tempers. “And that was my folly, to expect success of you.”
Glenlyon braced himself against the wood with both hands spread. His voice rasped in his throat. “You were not there, cousin. You canna declare it success or failure.”
“But I can. And I do. I declare it abject failure.” Breadalbane was not in the least intimidated by his kinsman’s truculent stance. “And I fear it will undo us all.”
“Undo. Undo?” Glenlyon was plainly baffled. “How d’ye mean, ‘undo’?”
He kens naught of politics, this bluidy fool of a Campbell! “Only a man such as a king may survive such debacle,” Breadalbane said. “There are questions already as to why this was undertaken.” He tapped the crisp pamphlet beneath his hand. “Even the highest may fall, saving the king himself.” Even Stair. Even himself. Especially himself, who was loved by no man.
Glenlyon grunted contempt. “Do I care?”
“You should.” Breadalbane shook his head. “You are a fool, Robin. A blind, drukken fool. Your incompetence may yet touch us all.”
“You would do better to ask Duncanson and Hamilton why they didna come to Glencoe until the killing was done,” Glenlyon retorted thickly. “In such weather as that, we needed the aid . . . and the passes were left open. Those who escaped did so because there were not enough soldiers to catch them.”
But Breadalbane did not answer. He had his own suspicions why Duncanson and Hamilton had not arrived in time. Far better to let one drunken gambler be blamed for failure than to assume any blame themselves.
It was possible that, in the bad weather, additional troops would not have made a difference. MacDonalds might have escaped regardless. As it was, only Glenlyon’s command was known to have failed its duty, a
nd only Glenlyon’s command could take the blame of the people who decried such tactics.
But Glenlyon had followed orders. Those who gave them, those who devised the plan, would be blamed in the final evaluation.
“There will be trouble of this,” Breadalbane said. “I have been to London. I have heard the talk. There will be trouble of this.”
Glenlyon’s expression was one of surly contempt.
“Bide a wee,” the earl said darkly. “Bide a wee, and see.”
High above the timber Dair lay sprawled in scree, drifting hazily into darkness. Hunger was but a distant goad now, hounded away by detachment, by dispassion, as if his body’s pain was too adamant a guard dog to permit anything else his attention. He had tried once to rise, tried once to lever himself upright, to plant the crutch and force himself to his feet, but he was too weak, too bruised, and the guard dog unrelenting.
—best wait for Murdo—Murdo would tame the hound.
Easier to sleep. Easier to let go. Easier to forget what had become of MacIain’s youngest son . . .
No. Of MacIain’s brother.
Three
The deerhound bitch, sitting beside the earl, thrust her sleek muzzle between his hands so he was forced to acknowledge her. And so he did, if absently, stroking the wiry hair while she rested her chin upon his thigh, all the weight of her body now transferred inexplicably into her skull so that he must hold her up, for surely she would collapse if he did not give her aid.
He took solace in the touch, eased himself in her presence. Dogs were, he knew, well cognizant of the temperament of their masters, recognized joy and sorrow, and this bitch knew him as well as he knew her.
But paces away his fine horse grazed, idly uprooting turf. Breadalbane sat upon the mound, unmindful of disrespect; despite the legend it was yet his land, and if he chose to sit upon a grave, it was his right to do so.
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