by David Hewson
Inverness was a citadel built on fear, not power or glory. A fortress that served to stave off death and despair and took on the traits of both for its pains. In Glamis, the lost babe had moved safe within her belly, a joyous discomfort, until, two months before he was due, Duncan had ordered them here. Not long after, she felt the small body grow sluggish inside her and came to dread the day of delivery. What followed was seared upon her memory: two desperate weeks in which she fought to feed the sickly child, pleading through her tears for it to suck the leaking milk from her breasts, reduced to desperate wails when finally the nurse took the tiny, frigid corpse away.
They said she’d held it to her, dead and cold, for a night and a day before relinquishing her grip, that she was, briefly, insane and lost to the world. Composure soon returned—and with it, a new vision of the harshness of this heartless northern world. She now detested every last gloomy bastion of this hideous fortress, amazed by how boundless her loathing of each stone of its dank, clammy walls had grown.
It was midnight when the messengers, Angus and Ross, arrived, looking smug and expectant of a warmer welcome later, doubtless in one of the whorehouses down by the port. Sleep had been impossible. She listened to their brief report and news of her husband’s coming return, then took the letter from them. It still bore Macbeth’s unbroken seal, and when she glanced at the first few lines, she was grateful.
“Gentlemen,” she greeted them, placing the document in the pocket of her long black gown. “The kitchen will make you food and drink, if you require it.”
She was a fetching woman and was not above using that. Skena had greeted them in the hall, fresh from bed. Her long hair hung loose around her bare shoulders, straight and lustrous, the color of barley the moment before harvest. Her round, bright eyes were the pale blue of the rare cerulean topaz they mined in Lochaber, as clear and all-seeing as a summer sky. Like most of her station, she felt no embarrassment about dress before servants and still had on the flimsy French-styled gown she’d worn beneath the sheets.
“Your husband survives, lady, on a day hundreds have perished,” the one called Angus said with a sly, appreciative smile. “Was there a messenger here before us? You seem so unsurprised.”
The question took her aback. “I have no need of runners to tell me my lord lives. Macbeth is as much a part of my body as my heart itself, sir. Do you think I wouldn’t feel the moment he ceased breathing? Or doubt that he possesses the same faculty for me?”
“Keep quiet on those talents,” the other one advised. “There are bishops around who’d call that sorcery.”
“What?” she demanded. “Love? I feel sorry for a man of the church who regards such close and dear affection as witchcraft. The bond between husband and wife is given to them by God, or so these selfsame priests would claim. Who is mortal man to question it? Particularly such chaste churchmen as we have these celibate days.”
The two of them chuckled at that, then, after turning down her offer to raise the kitchen staff, made their way out.
The night was vile, with squally showers of sleety snow making their way from the ocean, gathering force in the firth, then battering the walls of the castle like sword blows rained down upon a granite shield.
She clutched the letter to her, found the warmest coat she possessed, and rushed to the one place she felt secure from the prying, duplicitous eyes of the servants.
The keep that enclosed the thane’s household quarters stood on the land side of the squat black square of the fortress. At its summit, behind crenellated battlements a century or more old, she found some respite from the storms that raged within and without her febrile mind. Macbeth knew she loved this small place of escape and had ordered a cabin built on the summit, for shade in the summer and shelter in the freezing winter. On a clear day she could look west across the expanse of Beauly Firth to the rising foothills of the western Highlands, then south beyond Dochgarroch, where the waters of the river Ness broadened to become the long ribbon of loch that superstitious locals said was home to fiends and monsters. Somewhere along this stretch of lake Macbeth now surely rode, anxious through the dreadful night.
His letter was scribbled in a ragged, feverish hand, and not through hurry, either. In another man she’d have thought it madness.
Three strange creatures met me not long after the victory. Witches—one a crone, one a monster, one, the worst, a child. This sounds like madness. Perhaps it is. Yet thinking of it as I write I feel I saw a veil lifted upon myself, upon those joint ambitions we whisper about from time to time but dare not speak aloud. From what I saw in those few strange minutes I know there’s more than mortal knowledge here. These fiends offered a certainty, some guarantee of a future we merit should we rise to it. Yet when I challenged them, wishing to know more, they vanished into the air. I stood there amazed, arguing with Banquo, who wished away this meeting as if it were nothing, though it had news for him, too. And then came Angus and Ross who hailed me as “thane of Cawdor,” just as the weird sisters had saluted me not minutes earlier.
She looked up into the night, feeling her heart quicken.
Three weird sisters?
No. It couldn’t be. Yet his description left little doubt. The crone, the monster, and the child...
She began to read again, hungrily now.
How this is possible, I cannot guess. In truth, the more I try to understand it, the greater does my ignorance seem. How is this possible? Know only that you are now the lady of both Glamis and Cawdor, and if these spirits speak the truth, queen of Scotland to be. By what means...No. This letter is peril in itself and you shall burn the parchment and scatter the ashes once its contents lie safe within your head. Know this also: however great your future, by whatever title you shall be known, there is one above all that is dearest and most precious to me in that it came willingly, freely given that day we married in the kirk at Glamis. Lady, dame, or queen, you are my beloved wife, my finer, braver half, and that is why I tell you these things. These promises...For that is what they are, gifts held out to us, prizes daring us to take them and unmask the hidden nature within ourselves. Somehow...Enough until we meet. Bury our secrets in your heart and now farewell.
Skena sat and shivered in the cabin on the battlements, listening to the wind and the distant thunder capering beyond the snow squalls in the hills.
“Oh, Macbeth,” she murmured into the dark. “From Glamis to Cawdor in a single day, and a fine king you’d make, too. If only...”
A sudden sharp moment of self-knowledge stabbed at her. Love was honest, open, frank, or else it was not love at all but merely blind infatuation. She knew this man, for better, for worse. The milk of human kindness ran too much through his good and valiant veins. His nature might lead him to crave the prize he deserved. But that same duty and deference would bid him to avoid its seizure through any quick and necessary means. Greatness beckoned, but the humanity he was born with would hold him back, a lost figure in the shadows, too modest to meet its demands.
The Scottish crown never changed hands without bloodshed. Not in her lifetime. And the innocent and worthy were as likely to perish in the maelstrom as the guilty and the wicked.
A southern phrase from childhood entered her head: “You cannot have your cake and eat it too.” What must be done must be done, whatever the price, the cost, the pain. One day we all must walk through fire. Or he—they—would face the consequences of Duncan’s wrath, for Macbeth was so guileless that one thought of disloyalty within him would soon make its presence known upon his cheeks.
She thought of white-haired Duncan, a wily villain posing as a saint. Thought of their own exile in this bleak fortress prison at the king’s behest, the lost child dead and gray in the nurse’s arms, nothing warm about him except that last trickle of her milk running from his still, dry mouth.
“If I could pour my spirit into your ear, husband, there’d be no hesitation, not for a moment. You’d wake up king tomorrow, and Scotland ours to love and foster. T
he crown, the crown...”
There was a noise from the stairs. She braced herself. When witches walked the earth and saw inside men’s minds, there was no sanctuary for treachery, not even on a wild night high on the ramparts of Inverness.
It was the youngest servant, a boy of eight.
“One more messenger,” he said, and yawned. “He woke me, mistress, though I’m glad.”
“Why’s that, Ewan?”
Child of the yew. The same name they’d given the sickly babe she’d tried to suckle behind these black walls.
“I had a dreadful nightmare. There was this strange girl, all bare and...”
Skena put a hand to his slender shoulder.
“Don’t bore others with your nightmares, child. In times like these we’ve enough of our own to wrestle with. The messenger...”
He brightened.
“The king is coming from Forres tomorrow—in the afternoon, with his court and all the noble families he can rustle up. We’re to prepare food and make sure his tasters get a sample before he touches it.” He hitched up his britches. “Can I be a taster? Cook says she can get goose in from the firth. And salmon and lampreys and ptarmigan with fine spices.”
“I’ll see you get a plate,” she said. “Now go back to bed, Ewan. Tell all the servants to do the same. Leave me here on the tower for a while. I like the wild night. It thrills me.”
“Don’t you get lonely?”
An open, inquisitive child, cheeky at times. Had their own boy survived, he may have one day been like this.
“Macbeth is with me.”
He looked around, baffled.
“Here,” she said, and held a hand to her breast. “Go, Ewan. You heard me.”
She watched him leave, mind racing, full of possibilities.
The parchment burned in her pocket. She stood up and went to the western wall, by the crenellation, and stared down at the vast emptiness below, her tall, strong body buffeted by the gale. There she tore Macbeth’s letter into shreds and threw them into the mouth of the gale, watching the pieces scatter in the moonlight, out toward the water. That was an element, too, like fire and earth. Their secret would be kept.
Three weird sisters. No strangers, Skena thought, to me.
Across the river, clear in the moonlight, ran the winding stone path to the lonely wind-blasted moor of Culloden and the strange circle of cairns at Clava—three mound circles of carefully placed rocks surrounded by standing stones that grew from the earth like gigantic frozen thorns. The locals avoided them mostly as a place of sorcery and bewitchment. Except for one evening each year, the ancient feast called Samhain, when fear more than anything drew them back to pay a form of timorous homage.
She had visited this bare, uncanny place repeatedly in the past during the day and, while she felt and recognized its power, had never found herself afraid. This year had been different.
Samhain was three days ago. With Macbeth absent, she had taken her horse there, following at a distance the gathering of peasants who’d come, from coast and hills, to walk behind the gray-bearded followers of the old rites, singing strange melodies every step of the way.
Samhain.
Most Scots stood beneath the Roman cross these days, even if an older pagan spirit still lurked inside their hearts. The priests of the pope called the same feast All Hallows, but whatever the god, the meaning was the same. This was a night when dying summer took its final breath and bade the world farewell, giving way to darkness, the cold, hard winter, a black time with little promise of renewal. The new religion spoke of resurrection and the eventual dawn of spring—for some, at least. The old faith was brutal, more real. It talked of a moment when the milky cataract that kept apart the living and the dead became briefly clear and fragile. In such an instant, the dead and other terrible things might slip through into the waking world, malevolent spirits intent on mischief and worse.
Fairy tales to send children to their fearful beds, she thought.
But at Clava, on that strange evening, curious to watch the locals at their rites, the idea did not seem so preposterous. Skena watched as the elders shook their staffs of ash and mistletoe and recited a series of sonorous prayers and incantations in what she took to be the ancient language of the Picts. She lingered a little after the rest left. They said these places were the burial mounds of a lost race so distant none could remember its name or begin to imagine what its people looked like, how they lived, what beliefs they followed. Next to the windswept heath of Culloden it felt an eerie, unworldly spot. Macbeth was away in the west, in battle, risking his life for the loathsome Duncan yet again. These strange obelisks suited her mood.
She left the horse tethered by the path and went to sit alone on a boulder beneath a yew tree close by the northernmost circle. After a few moments, she become aware of a sound from beyond a gathering of standing stones, toward the woods. There was a flickering light and voices, low and old, singing. She walked to see and found herself facing a squat wall of uniform rocks with a single entrance, a door to nothing. In the center of the circle stood two stiff figures by a blazing fire, one huge, like a farmhand, the other crooked and bent, leaning on crutches. The words of their chants were as impenetrable as those of the pagan priests, though different somehow. Then the peculiar melody came to a climax and they drew back, with cries of wonder and fear, and she saw another.
This third apparition was so strange that Skena wondered whether she’d fallen into a waking nightmare. Little more than a skinny girl, she pranced about the fire naked as a bairn, moved by the spinning, manic energy of an acrobat, twisting and turning around the first two as if she owned them.
Skena Macbeth took a step forward to see more clearly. A branch broke beneath her feet. The noise stopped them immediately. Before she knew it the bent crone had turned and half crawled, half leapt across the circle, propelling herself on those black sticks. The big one was by her side, too, so swiftly it seemed impossible.
“What’s this? What’s this?” the tall figure cried. “A spy in the night. They hang spies hereabouts.”
“Pretty spy,” said the crone, grabbing at her cloak.
They stank of smoke and dirt. She pulled back from them, blue eyes flaring, furious, not afraid for a moment.
“I am Lady Macbeth, wife of the thane of Glamis,” she told them. “If there’s any hanging to be done in these parts, it’ll be at my behest, not that of some pack of beggars.”
“Beggars? Beggars?”
It was the young one now, with a bright-burning brand from the fire in her right hand, dancing in front of her as the others shrank back. Skena felt the air freeze in her lungs. So thin her ribs stuck out, dark eyes like gleaming coals, no pupils and fathomless, the girl stood tall and full of sinister confidence. A twisting ornate tattoo in flowing Celtic lines the blue color of the moonlit sky ran across her front, from groin to chin, three salmon interlinked. The thing seemed to be alive, to move both across and beneath the pale skin into which it was etched.
“Kill her,” the crooked hag spat.
“Kill her!” said the thuggish one. “Let me carve the bitch...”
The girl turned on them and they were silent in a moment without a single word of admonition.
Then she looked back at Skena, with a face that seemed both old and young, and asked, “Why call us beggars, lady? You’re the intruder here. We demanded nothing. Besides...Before this week is out I expect Lord Macbeth will be begging from me.”
She could only laugh. “And why would the thane of Glamis do that?”
“To help him find at home what he discovers so easily on the battlefield.”
The sight of this strange, wraithlike creature made her flesh crawl, yet Skena felt unable to leave.
“Which is?”
“His spine, lady. Why ask me when you know the answer?”
She thought of calling for the servants who’d followed her at a distance, dragging these three to the castle, having them whipped and thrown into the dee
p dungeons. Yet they had committed no crime except insolence. And somehow this strange child seemed to know of matters, of private, secret difficulties and doubts...
“You presume too much...”
“Do you fear to tell him?” the girl cut in, holding the burning torch closer.
“Tell him what?” Skena demanded.
“That Duncan plans to steal the throne for himself and all his line. That your faint, yet feverish ambitions that way—his and yours—will become as fanciful as the daydreams of sad wee bairns. And all will be denied you, save the black prison that is Inverness.”
“This is fresh rumor! It started after he’d left. Besides, my man’s above tittle-tattle.”
“More fool him, then. This is fact and soon you’ll know it. Macbeth’s been fighting. He has no idea. And still you’ll hesitate to tell him, won’t you? Why? Because you’re a woman? Is your destiny such a small thing, then? To keep your legs open and your mouth shut?”
“You will not speak to me thus!” Skena retorted and drew back her hand.
Something stopped the blow and it took a moment to realize what it was. The absence in the girl—complete, unquestioned—of fear.
“Poor lady,” the child said in a soft, strange, lilting voice. “Trapped behind your thick dark walls, mourning the only bairn you’ll ever have...”
She shivered, watching the skinny figure so still and certain in front of her.
“How can you know...?” she whispered.
“There are no secrets.” The thing smiled, showing a row of even, childlike teeth. “None worth keeping. Only the ones you hide from yourself, which are the most damaging and hurtful of all. Truth is truth, and lie is lie. Tell yourself one’s the other and all the world turns kilter.”
Sniffing the chill night air, she said, “This land has that smell about it now.” A scowl, a glare. “Soon it must choose. The old ways or the new. And when that fearful moment comes, you’ll blame us. You always do.”