The sound came from behind him, in the distance. A low roar, quickly growing louder until it vibrated through the road beneath his feet and into his body itself. He could see it against the purple heather. A shining black monster with glowing eyes. It ran toward him faster than the fastest horse. MacLean threw himself into the bracken that grew in the dip by the road, and rolled down a slope and into a puddle.
The monster rushed past, the heat and the stink from it making him cough and choke. And then it was gone, vanishing into nothingness, and silence reigned again.
He picked himself up. He was trembling, but he stopped it and held himself proud. His kilt was damp and there was mud down one bare leg, but he was unhurt. He knew he needed to get home as soon as possible. Home to Castle Drumaird, where all would be familiar and safe. Where he could feel like himself again.
He might recall very little of his former life, but surely a mere two hundred and fifty years would not make a deal of difference? Scottish history stretched back, timeless and bloody, into the darkness of prehistory. What was two hundred and fifty years? he asked himself a little desperately. No time after all. He would return, the chief of his clan, and they would accept him as they had always done. Whatever it was the Fiosaiche had in mind for him could wait.
MacLean set off again, but now he walked beside the black road, and he kept his ears open.
Standing outside the cottage, Bella breathed deeply, drawing in the chill air and opening her mind to the lonely beauty about her. There was a sense of timeless-ness here. This part of the Highlands was particularly isolated, too far from tourist attractions for most holiday-makers and too difficult to reach for the weekenders. Even the climbers and the fishermen were all heading back to their lives in the more populated areas of the south. Brian had gone; she was alone. And yet—she closed her eyes—there was an air of expectation, a breathless sense of waiting, a feeling that anything was possible.
Bella had never felt she had a real home, not in the sense of truly belonging to a place. For her the pull of Loch Faisal was irresistible. Her heart had been captured from the day she arrived. She knew she could not stay in this place forever, but she could dream, couldn't she? Pretend she'd been transported back into the distant past. Of course, on a more practical level, there was still the need to buy food and the other necessaries of modern life. Gregor sold her milk and eggs and butter from his croft, and she had a small vegetable garden to one side of the cottage—what used to be called a kaleyard—but if she wanted anything else she had to drive the two hours to Ardloch.
She looked up in surprise.
There was a pony approaching by the path around the loch. With its shaggy golden coat, it looked used to being free. Certainly this was no child's pampered pet. Bella stood and watched as it came closer. The pony drew to a halt about thirty yards away and stood completely motionless, staring back at her.
Bella frowned. Was it really a horse? There was something odd about it. The shape of the nose, the elongated body… a wrongness that puzzled her. The way it was observing her was almost human. It trotted closer still and she realized its eyes were green. A clear bright green.
Deep inside her, in a place she had not known existed, fear stirred. A primitive superstitious dread passed down from her ancestors.
But even as she took a step backward, she found she didn't need to run. The pony had already turned about on its sturdy legs and galloped off with its tail streaming out behind it. Bella watched it go with a relief that seemed excessive under the circumstances. Was it Gregor's pony? Bella had not heard him speak of one, and this pony was so strange and wild. If she believed in myths like the water-horse, then she might almost think…
Beware especially of the each-uisge.
The dream returned to her; the hag's words rang clear in her head.
The door has been breached.
But Bella quashed them, refusing to take any of it seriously. This isolated place could make you begin to believe the unbelievable if you weren't careful. The each-uisge was a creature of Scottish folklore, like the hag, and it lived in lochs and deep pools, changing from a horse or a pony into a beautiful young man or woman. It lured its prey to the water and drowned the unlucky victims, before feasting on their flesh. Animal flesh, human flesh.
Bella stopped her thoughts right there. "You've seen a wild pony, that's all. Get a grip, girl." She started humming to herself, and then singing softly. It was something she did when she was emotionally charged, to calm herself down. This time she chose an old America number about a horse with no name—it seemed to do the trick.
Back in the cottage she went through her daily ritual of starting up the diesel generator in the shed out back. At least now she would have electricity. The central heating and the hot water ran on a separate oil-fueled system that was supposed to switch on automatically when the temperature dipped, but it rarely did. The hot water was supplemented by the Aga. When she and Brian first arrived, Gregor had told them that the services were unreliable, but it had been early days then and "unreliable" was part of the charm of the place.
At least she could still access modern technology; even in this isolated corner of the Scottish Highlands she wasn't entirely cut off. A telephone line gave her contact with the outside world, or she could search Google and check her e-mail. She opened her laptop and booted it up.
Bella's books were scholarly, full of carefully researched historical detail, each character painstakingly assembled. She liked to think she came to know her subjects so well that she could accurately guess what they would have ordered for breakfast. She slipped like a shadow into their lives, infusing dried-up old documents with new flesh and blood. She didn't just write about the past, she lived it.
Bella's current work-in-progress was Morven MacLean, an eighteenth century Highland chief also known as the Black MacLean. At a time when men began to question the existence of God and turn to science instead, when machines were being invented to take the place of men, in a century known for its growing enlightenment, MacLean seemed positively medieval. And, according to the legend, he was also blackhearted, vicious, unprincipled, and in league with the devil.
Not the sort of man you wanted to come knocking at your door.
In his last years, the Black MacLean ran headlong into one of the worst periods in Scottish history. The 1745 Rebellion—which dragged on into 1746—and its aftermath made grim reading. Simply put, the '45 was a brawl between Bonnie Prince Charlie, fronting a number of Scottish clans, and the Duke of Cumberland, fronting most of England as well as some of the Scots. For the losing clans it was devastating enough.
For Loch Fasail it was catastrophic.
One hundred and fifty souls were murdered, a body count that exceeded Glen Coe. Because the Loch Fasail massacre occurred as part of a larger tragedy and subsequent social upheaval, it was not famous, and since it had taken place in such an isolated spot, no one knew it had happened until some time afterward, and by then it was too late to investigate it properly. Even if the authorities had wanted to.
It was shortly after the massacre that the legend began to circulate, insinuating itself into the minds of the populace until now it could be recited by any school-child within a hundred miles of Loch Fasail. The Black MacLean, so the story went, had been too cowardly to fight at Culloden despite a request from Lord George Murray, one of the Scottish leaders, so when he got there he made a deal with the English to save his own skin. When he returned home to Loch Fasail he must have been in a bloody-minded mood, because he set off northward to raid his neighbors' lands. This was where the part about MacLean being in league with the devil came into it, because he had ridden upon a coal-black horse that breathed fire from its nostrils. His means of transport aside, MacLean had attacked his neighbors but had then been cut down in turn. That would have been the end of it, a bloody end to a bloody career, except the English dragoons, never good at keeping their promises, had arrived in Loch Fasail and massacred everyone as a warning to oth
ers not to take part in a rebellion against the Crown.
Extreme stuff even for those extreme times.
It could be true, of course. Some of it no doubt was, and there were similar stories in other parts of the country to back up the clan warfare and the English double-dealing. But the more Bella learned about MacLean, the more she wondered.
Black MacLean did rule his people with an iron fist, but that wasn't unusual. Living here at Loch Fasail, in this isolated area, she knew the lives of the people had not changed in the hundreds of years before MacLean was born, and neither had the chief of the MacLeans' absolute control over them. The Highlands lagged behind the rest of Scotland, and this northwest corner was particularly out of step. The folk here were superstitious and suspicious, clinging to the old ways. Life was uncertain, with disease and famine the main cause of death. The chief fed them when they were hungry, gave them drink when they thirsted, and when the neighboring clans declared war the chief called his clan to him with the fiery cross, and led them into battle.
In such circumstances the chief was more important than any distant king. His power over his people was absolute and if he was the sort of person MacLean was, he ruled by terror. Except that when she began her research, Bella discovered there was nothing in the scant historical records to back up the tale of Black MacLean being a bad chief, or even a mediocre chief, up until the '45 Rebellion. Quite the opposite. He gave his people prosperity, supported them in times of famine and disease, sought ways to increase their meager crops—no concern of theirs ever seemed too small for him to take an interest in it. He actually stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries, many of whom were unbelievably callous and careless with the lives of their tenants and tacksmen. But just because MacLean saw that his clansmen had food in their bellies did not make him a New Age guy.
Still, Bella found herself admiring him in a way she had never expected to when she began this project. He was a dominant male, yes, and a brutal man from a brutal time, certainly, but there was so much more to him than what had happened after Culloden, in those dark days at the end of his life. And as for the legend…
MacLean seemed better than that.
Bella knew she wasn't being objective. And it was the fault of the Edinburgh Portrait Gallery.
Eight months ago, when she'd gone on a visit to the gallery, Bella had never heard of the Black MacLean. She and Brian were staying in Edinburgh, and the gallery was somewhere quiet, away from Hamish and Georgiana and all their pretentious friends. She'd been dawdling through the rooms when suddenly there he was.
The Black MacLean.
She still shivered when she remembered. He was hidden away in a corner, yes, but he was so powerful. She hadn't known who he was, but it hadn't mattered then. Feeling strangely captivated and very alive, she had stood in front of his portrait for long minutes, her eyes caressing that face, that form. She'd been like a lovestruck teenager. Later she had begun searching for information on him in the major histories of the time, reading all she could find—which wasn't much. Who was he, what had he done? The more she delved, the more excited she became.
He might be a dark and tormented soul, but here was a man who deserved far more space than the official tellers of history had dealt him. Bella hoped to redress that with her new book, even though the records and accounts from those times were so very sketchy. Those from Loch Fasail had all been destroyed during the massacre, so she had to rely on mentions made by outside sources. She had been using the record repositories in Edinburgh, but on her last visit to Ardloch had discovered the little library there. Not expecting much, she had been astounded to discover it held a unique collection of histories from the local area.
Bella wanted to sit down there and then and read every piece of paper the Ardloch library held in its special history collection. Unfortunately, Brian had chosen that day to have one of his sulks.
"You're obsessed with that bloody man."
"I'm researching him for the book."
"He's a coward and a murderer, but you don't want to believe that, do you ?"
"It's not a proven fact."
"Not according to you. Not very professional of you, is it? I think you're suffering from some repressed psychosis, something with a long name, that makes you more interested in a man who is dead than one who is living."
"Don't be ridiculous!"
"Come on, admit it. You sit and stare at his picture as if he's your long-lost lover. What are you thinking about? Fucking him? You certainly pay him a lot more attention than you do me."
"Brian, please.…"
But despite her protests, Bella had felt a stab of guilt. Maybe she was obsessed with MacLean. He might be arrogant and brutal and dangerous, and a murderer to boot, but she couldn't get enough of him. Maybe Brian was right, and she would like to be made love to by him. Here she was, a well-educated, sensible woman living in the twenty-first century, and all she wanted was for the big bad MacLean to step out of his portrait and throw her over his shoulder and take her upstairs.
How sad was that?
Bella sighed and glanced down at her notes. She was wasting time again. Work, she needed to get to work. She had enough material to start writing the story of MacLean’s life.
She wrote down Chapter One and stared at the two words as if they would give her inspiration.
"Okay… I can lead into it gradually, begin with a brief retelling of Scottish history and MacLean’s place in it. Or… I can begin with a bang."
Bella began typing.
Morven MacLean, born in 1716, was destined to be the last chief of the MacLeans of Fasail. Dead at thirty, he must take responsibility for one of the worst civilian massacres in Scottish history.
With a sigh she backspaced and pressed the delete button.
Brian was right. Again. She didn't really believe it; or maybe she just didn't want to believe it. She didn't want to spoil her fantasy.
Bella shivered. She always felt attuned to the subjects of her books, she couldn't have written about them otherwise, but in the case of the Black MacLean the feeling was much stronger than normal. While she was appalled by the darker parts of the legend, his complexity as a man intrigued and fascinated her. She'd even hunted down a reasonable copy of the portrait of him that had first caught her attention, and now it glowered back at her from a spot above the bookshelf.
Bella's eyes drifted to it more often than she was willing to admit; it still had that spellbinding effect on her.
She looked at it now.
He was seated, a handsome man, clothed in tartan trews and a romantic white shirt with a fall of lace over his strong hands. A plaid was fastened over his left shoulder and a broad strap over his right shoulder held the broadsword—the claidheamh mor—in its scabbard, which rested at his hip. Dark hair was loose to his shoulders, framing a face that was rectangular and long and clean-shaven. His brows were dark, drawn in a slight frown over intense pale blue eyes.
He leaned forward toward the artist, as though something had caught his attention, his hands clasped on the arms of the chair. There was a sense that he was about to rise to his feet and stride out of the painting. Impatient, she thought, eager to get on with what he had to do. Arrogant, not willing to listen to the opinions of others. And passionate, yes, that, too. All the character traits that had worked against him and ensured his downfall, and that of his people.
The title of the portrait was: (Reputed to be) The Black MacLean, Chief of the MacLeans of Fasail, 1744. Artist unknown, in the style of Allan Ramsay.
Reputed to be… well, maybe. But Bella knew it was him. Knew it beyond doubt.
Once again she found herself mesmerized, her gaze held by his. There was a savage beauty in his face, a dangerous wildness. If she had been a maiden living around Loch Fasail in the eighteenth century, she would have known instinctively that this man was a risk to her virtue and her peace of mind.
He's coming…
Bella shivered again as the hag's words replayed
in her head. Yes, she knew she was obsessed by him, awake and dreaming. Despite the fact that two hundred and fifty years had passed and the Black MacLean was long dead and dust, he was beginning to seem more real to her than Brian.
And wasn't that just a little dangerous?
* * *
Chapter Two
MacLean reached a village. It was a mere two dwellings and he did not recognize it; he was certain it had not stood here two hundred and fifty years ago. Glass windows were small and rare and precious, and the big bright squares of glass set in the walls of this dwelling were something he had never seen before. Warily, he noted that there were more of the monsters in front, smaller creatures these, of different colors. Several had passed him on his journey and he knew now that there were people inside them, making them work. MacLean supposed he should have been shocked by these bizarre objects, but he wasn't. He was already assimilating them, accepting them as part of this new world he had been set free to roam. That did not mean he liked what he saw. The call of home was becoming even louder and more urgent in his head. He wanted to slam Castle Drumaird's thick doors and shut out all of this. He wanted the safety and security of home, his home. It was still his and if whoever occupied it now didn't like it, then too bad. He rested a big hand on the handle of his claidheamh mor.
MacLean would fight to reclaim what belonged to him.
He could see people behind the glass walls, seated at tables, eating and drinking. The smell of food was strong, but it was also unfamiliar. Strangely he felt no hunger. A man and woman strolled out of the door. They both wore trews, even the woman, and they were leading a dog. It wasn't like the dogs MacLean knew, neither a beast bred to hunt nor a catcher of rats and mice. He thought with a sneer that it was like something a namby-pamby gentleman might pet upon his lap.
They weren't looking at him, but he expected any moment that they would. He was a big man and he was standing by the red monster, and they were heading straight for it. The lapdog barked, showing its little fangs. The man turned and gave the animal a frown, while the woman cooed and spoke to it in a foolish voice. "Stop it, baby," she mock-scolded, lifting it into her arms.
Immortal Warriors 01 - Return of the Highlander Page 2