Macbeth

by David Hewson

  Her head rose suddenly; her hands released the child. Two women swiftly, gently, worked their way toward her and slid him from her grasp.

  “The king?” she asked sharply. “What king? Of whom do you speak, sir?”

  “Of Duncan,” he replied, shaking his head in confusion. “Who else? Of...”

  A moment passed between them. A look rose in her eyes. He wondered what he saw there. Madness? Bewilderment? Even the faintest presentiment of guilt?

  “Your lord requires your company,” he repeated. “I’m sorry for the child, but there are matters here that go beyond a single life.” Banquo paused. “Beyond that even of a king, perhaps.”

  She got up from the floor, wiped her face with the long sleeve of her gown, stared at him. Banquo had thought he knew Skena Macbeth. Now he was not so sure.

  “I know my duty, lord,” she said. “Tell my husband I shall be there presently, when I have washed away these tears, for Duncan and this child.”

  “I’ll do that,” he murmured, and was glad to leave the room.

  One hour later, the two began to wash Duncan’s torn and bloody corpse in the chamber where he died. The water was holy, blessed by the priest, ladled from the leather pail used to fill the font.

  Birth to death, beginning to end.

  Skena wept throughout, not for the man whose body they now tended, but the boy. As she sponged away the blood from the old king’s pale flesh, her tears fell on his skin and she wiped them away with her hair. Macbeth said nothing, his eyes wide as he watched her stroking Duncan’s stiff cadaver, wider still when she began to hum the plaintive tune of a familiar lullaby.

  He tore away the bloodstained sheets that had crusted to the skin below, then sent them to be burned. She brushed the old man’s locks as if she thought him someone else. When they were done, she sat there, looking at the body with her head tipped slightly on one side, her thoughts strange and unreadable to him. Only when the dawn bell chimed did she come back to herself, starting and staring at the waxen corpse with sudden horror. She stared at her hands, which were stained with blood, and began furiously washing and rewashing them, scrubbing at her nails, smelling her fingers, and calling for more water, hotter each time. The last was so scalding he was afraid she would burn herself. But she held her hands in the steaming water, teeth set, eyes locked with pain, and when she took them out, they were a bright and painful pink almost to the elbows.

  When the sun was higher, they wrapped the white and scrawny carcass in a winding sheet. Duncan was so light of frame that Macbeth managed to take him down the steps slowly, thrown over his shoulder, as if the dead king were an infant being carried gently to bed. The servants watched teary-eyed, the thanes hung their heads and melted into the corners as he passed, and all the while the bells continued their mournful chime. Finally, they laid the frail, torn corpse on a table in front of the altar of the tiny chapel and anointed his neck and face with unguents that smelled of spice and rose petals.

  She stared at the pale flesh and whispered, “I need more water. I must wash my boy.”

  It was a flat, mundane comment, the kind a woman might utter at her work.

  He checked they were alone, then came to her and took her arms. “As you see fit,” he said. “The child was not your fault, Skena. Do not crucify yourself...”

  “Not my fault! Not my fault!”

  His hand was on her mouth. There was a bleak set to his face. “Fetch us both an ocean, then,” he said in a breathy, faint voice. “Fetch two. This is our joint endeavor, but we’ve embarked upon it, hand in bloody hand. We shall not fail each other now. Oh, love...”

  Eyes streaming, lovely face racked with sorrow, she looked just as she had when their own child died, still and cold in her loving arms.

  “Do not do this to yourself,” he whispered, holding her close in his arms.

  “We sought to rid the world of a fiend,” she murmured. “Not put two more in his place.” She pulled away from him.

  Macbeth gazed into her gleaming eyes. “Listen to me, wife. What we did, we did for good reason.”

  “Ewan...”

  “Was a sorry victim of these cruel times! His death shall be a reminder that we are sinners, too.”

  She pushed away from him and cried, “You think I need reminding...?”

  “We both do, Skena. And if we escape this perilous corner, let it make me a wiser king and you a more virtuous queen. If this nation knows justice alongside its strength, then none would blame us, even if they knew...”

  Her bloody hand went to her mouth. “Oh, husband. I have turned a gentle soul into a murderer...”

  He gazed at her and said, “And I’ve served you likewise. So we are equal. You my bulwark, I yours.” Macbeth placed his hands tenderly on her shoulders. “Nor would I have it any other way.”

  She looked him in the face. The tears had ended. Some sanity had returned. “The temperament in this place,” she said in a low and worried voice, “seems to me as uncertain as the quiet before the storm.”

  He laughed a little at that.

  “Aye, love. What do you expect? Think of our boldness. We’ve slain an avaricious tyrant. And now our fingers touch his vacant throne. This is not an idle moment in a drab hole like Inverness.”

  She reached out and stroked his cheek. “Then we play out this dumb show, husband. We act the grieving mourners until others see our sorrow and piety and let it fire a righteous anger of their own.”

  The dreamy sorrow came upon her in an instant.

  “And I shall bury Ewan, after this villain’s bones are gone from here for good.”

  “The sisters promised me—” he began.

  “The sisters aren’t here. Nor do they bear weapons or ambition.”

  Whole again, her grief confined, she held Duncan’s pale, cold hand up to him as if in greeting. The corpse was turning stiff. Time passed, always.

  “Let us not be strange to one another,” she said. “I need your—”

  The door opened. She let go of the bony fingers in her grip. The bishop entered. His eyebrows rose. Perhaps he’d heard something. The dead were meant to be buried, not argued over.

  Without another word, others followed behind him, bringing the ceremonial instruments of regal death, pennants and priests, choristers and bawling women. Macbeth, Banquo, MacDuff, and Lennox lifted the king onto the massive leather shield of a slain Norse warrior and replaced the body on the trestle before the altar. The chapel soon filled with standing warriors. The mood Macbeth recognized. It was as tense as the grim moment before the start of battle.

  Then the man with the crook and the cross began to sing in Latin, swinging the boat of incense as he chanted, filling the tiny, bleak room with the foreign fragrance of worship.

  And yet, Macbeth thought as they listened to the holy, unintelligible words, I smell him still.

  The sons were absent. All eyes now were on one man, the strongest, fiercest warrior recently in the field.

  Midway through the interminable rites, Ross came running in, sword in hand, fury in his face.

  “Gone! Gone! Malcolm and Donalbain!” he shouted, his voice shocking in the chapel stillness. “They’ve taken to horse and fled! The bastards!”

  An angry murmur rose and changed into a bellowed tumult.

  MacDuff, his face alive with fury, was the first to reach the altar. In front of the body on the shield, he raised his sword and bellowed like a charging beast. The bishop stood there frightened, lost for words.

  From God to vengeance in short order. This was the field now, a place Macbeth could call his own.

  He walked before them and stood in front of the roaring crowd, his hands high till they all fell into a murmuring silence. None called to give pursuit and they knew why. The game was on the table, and Scotland itself would be the prize.

  “The king had need of better sons,” Macbeth declared. “Let it not be said he deserved better thanes, too. With decorum and graciousness, I beg you, pay your due respects. A
fterward, there are matters to be decided. But first, let us treat with our noble dead.”

  A fleeting sense of shame came over them. He beckoned to the bishop to go on. Haltingly, the interminable service continued, then broke around midday for food. As darkness began to fall, the monks and nuns from monasteries and convents all around gathered to make up the party that would bear Duncan’s body across to the west and Iona, along the Great Glen, past Loch Ness and Ben Nevis and the place where the sisters had ambushed him and Banquo, setting in train the deed that now, he knew, would come to shape his life.

  Skena absented herself most of the day, dealing with the weeping women of the kitchen and the funeral of the child. The thanes gathered separately, whispering in small groups. Macbeth watched from his window as Fergus and Cullen quietly spread gold and silver among his troops to keep them loyal and alert, and more among those he knew less well, men whose allegiance was unsure. There was a council here, of a kind. Enough lords to decide the crown, if necessary.

  No firm word came of Malcolm and Donalbain, nor did Macbeth dispatch riders to follow their trail. They were two weak and hated princes, gone forever. The line of Duncan was at an end, whatever followed next.

  As he watched, a tall, strong figure crossed the courtyard, hand on beard, lost in thought, vast arm around the slender shoulders of his son, Fleance.

  Banquo...

  “Tragic in the present, yet glorious in the future. You shall beget kings, though never be one yourself.”

  The sisters’ words were burned upon his memory. Those in particular. It seemed ridiculous that a line of Scottish kings might flourish from that slender, innocuous child, Banquo’s only son.

  Perhaps, he thought, they joked. Or failed to read the runes they cast.

  As a pale, wan sun set behind the mountains, Duncan’s bier, wrapped in long white shrouds, began its final journey, heralded by the trumpets of his court.

  No thanes left Inverness; not a soldier quit the castle. Every one of Macbeth’s men stood quiet and ready for the fight.

  Then, an hour after the royal funeral party had departed, there was a knock at the door.

  Macbeth checked his sword, rubbed his reddened eyes, and bid them enter. MacDuff, Banquo, and Lennox, all armed, stood there grim-faced.

  “You have food enough to keep your guests another night, sir?” MacDuff asked immediately.

  “That I have. All men deserve a wake—kings more than most.”

  “Duncan’s dead and gone,” Lennox said, and spat into the fire. “Would that he’d fathered better sons—”

  “I doubt he’d argue with that,” MacDuff cut in. He looked across the room. “Though a man passes down something of himself in his offspring. So perhaps he should bear the blame. No matter. This hiatus is dangerous and must be brought to a swift close. We need another king. A better one. What power and unity this nation possesses at this moment it owes to you, Macbeth. You brought Duncan a traitor’s head on a pike and killed the man yourself. You bested that marauding Viking Sueno, and we’ll all be filling our treasuries with his ransom in the years to come.”

  He held out his mailed hand.

  “I would like to say we’d talked this over, long and hard. But truth be known, there wasn’t much to discuss. The crown of Scotland fits one head above all others at this moment. Meet us at Scone a month hence. Then we’ll crown you with all due pomp and glory, and swear our true allegiance for all the time we have.”

  Macbeth felt dizzy, lost for words. This went on too long.

  “Say something, man,” Lennox broke in, laughing. “We never confirmed Malcolm as the heir. Perhaps that was why he killed his father, after all. This cannot come as a surprise, sir.”

  “Surprise? Surprise!” Macbeth cried, suddenly furious. “You think I sought this? You think I somehow...ever in my strangest dreams believed...?”

  They withdrew a step, except for Banquo, who stood there, steadfast, his familiar face watchful.

  “You will be at Scone a month hence?” his friend asked mildly. “Or must we look for another? Though...” He scratched his mane of hair, his eyes not quitting Macbeth’s for one moment. “Quite who...”

  Composure, Macbeth told himself. We have done well today, but a few innocuous words might bring this fabric of lies down about us.

  “I apologize, my brothers,” he told them. “These strange and calamitous events have discomfited me. Duncan’s death in my care weighs heavily on my mind. If, in a month, you still wish to place me on the throne, it will be my life’s most cherished honor to accept. Should you find a better, I will happily swear my allegiance to him.”

  “There is none better!” Lennox cried. “Your good temper and equanimity have been the admiration of us all. Not just today, either. Though, you mourned Duncan more than his sons, and there’s no one here who didn’t notice.”

  Macbeth took a deep breath. “This is the judgment of you all?”

  “Everyone, and those who are absent do not matter,” MacDuff said. He shrugged. “Besides, this is your castle. We are in the arms of your men, have no great claim ourselves, and in all honesty, would rather spend this evening getting drunk and praising our new king than mourning the last one. The crown carries with it a burden of duty on its subjects, but that does not demand fondness on our part. We knew that man for what he was. Good and now—let’s say it—bad. Lord knows he had plenty of that about him.”

  He gave Macbeth a frank look.

  “Every last one of us loathed the way he let you fight his battles for him. Enough of this chatter. You start to sound like a wee girl trying to talk her way out of handing over her virginity. We all know what’s coming in the end. You lose it, man!”

  “Aye,” Banquo added, grinning. “You do.”

  “Very well,” Macbeth nodded, smiling. “Thank you. I will repay this generosity.”

  “That you will,” said Banquo, slapping him hard on the shoulder. Then, with a wink, he added in a whisper, “And soon. I’ll let you know.”

  As they all cheered and laughed, Macbeth caught Banquo’s eyes and saw in them something shrewd and thoughtful. It lasted only a moment, but for a while, it took the edge off Macbeth’s joy.

  A month was not enough to bury an old king or anoint the new. Winter saw to that, though there were other disturbances that set the world of Scotland on edge, almost from the moment Duncan’s bier departed for the west.

  Fair skies gave way to foul. Howling gales roared in from east and west, in turn. The snow became so deep that all the mountain passes, north and south, disappeared in drifts too treacherous even for the hill folk to move through them. No ships sailed down the Moray Firth for fear of blizzards and stray ice. The holy party for Iona was trapped for weeks on end beneath the gaunt shadow of Nevis, seeking respite from the season’s vicious breath.

  Curious events occurred that sent rumor and alarm skittering through the land, shared around hearths great and humble, producing the same anxious questions. At the foot of Inverness castle, beneath the frozen waters of the Ness, a pod of dolphins wandered, trapped and drowning below the cap of ice. A band of soldiers tried to free them, smashing the surface with their axes. The creatures, fond signs of life in the Moray Firth in summer, simply beached themselves upon the sharp shards, thrashing till their silver sides were shredded, moaning for one long day and half a night. The following morning, the bend of the river before the keep was awash with blood on snow, and the dolphins dead in their own gore, their carcasses sad, stinking meat.

  In the frozen mountains, horses turned on one another, biting and shrieking. Over the castle battlements, a barn owl fought with a golden eagle and, after repeated vicious sorties, downed the great bird, dispatching it to a bloody end upon the stones in the courtyard, the selfsame spot, the soldiers said, where Duncan’s body lay before the journey to Iona.

  Food ran short. In public, the miserable porter Fergus bewailed the paucity of ale and whiskey; in private, the lack of secret commissions from his newly e
levated master. Women grew fearful, men surly. Most blamed the disappeared sons, Malcolm and Donalbain. The world was out of sorts through the foulest murder of all, patricide compounded by regicide. What little news came through from beyond the Great Glen suggested the two brothers had fled to England, seeking refuge and support. They could stay there—two mean, untrustworthy villains, too sly even for the English to love. Besides, the weather was master now and affected all alike. No army could countenance movement in such conditions. No campaign could begin to contemplate assembly or provisions, let alone the distant sniff of victory.

  This small, white world became Macbeth’s kingdom, a dominion bounded by the visible limits of the firth. While those beneath his private apartments howled and cursed the season, for Macbeth, the weather proved a respite from the world beyond. This opportune exile saved him the earnest admiration of MacDuff and Lennox, and Banquo’s studied watchfulness. His friend had said nothing more than that bland remark about repaying their gratitude, but Macbeth sensed something coming, a request, perhaps, though for what, he could not guess. Nor did he know why the possibility of such a favor gnawed at him like regret. Banquo was his friend. Had Macbeth not yearned for the day when he could shower Scotland’s bounty on all who stood fast by him? What could Banquo ask that Macbeth would not grant?

  The sisters’ words had proven true. He was king of Scotland now in name and soon would own the throne through formal coronation. Yet the burden of the crown—its duties and responsibilities—were spared him by the blizzards. Safe behind the bleak black walls of Inverness, he was free to wrestle with his private doubts, his waking dreams, and bitter self-reproaches.

  Duncan was not forgotten, but in the artificial paradise of exclusion his memory, and that of the old king’s end, stabbed at his successor from a distance. A closer reminder would return. Of that Macbeth was sure. The inner voice that first spoke the night of Duncan’s death was still alive, loudest always in the dark, whispering that no happy days would follow. Yet, after a fashion, it lied. Skena wore a perpetual smile now, forced a little, he thought, and perhaps a shade strange. But the dead boy, Ewan, was buried and never mentioned out loud. And her delight was visible in the strange, bright state that now was theirs. Never had she been so kind or biddable. Even at night—especially then. The evening the old king’s corpse left their care, she warmed to him, demanded his close presence, spoke of how the antidote to death was and always would be the heat and fury of life itself.