by David Hewson
Trust no one. Not even those you think you love and who love you.
All kith and kin around the lands of Laggan he shunned from that moment on, hiding in the empty bothies left by shepherds, seeking shelter from the snow. He remembered how to snare mountain hare and rabbit, turned snow to water with the warmth of his own body. When kindle and a flint failed, he ate the flesh of game he caught, raw and bleeding, crying with each bite. But not for long. Within a few weeks he was as rough and dirty as any mountain savage, a grubby beast with half a beard, a wild eye, and little in the way of speech for any that he met.
Fleance, the son of Banquo, a great and noble thane, was now invisible, dead to all who sought him. And seek him they did. Of that he had no doubt.
He’d no idea what way he took through the vast white peaks and valleys that lay before him. Each day seemed the same: wait till sunlight, fix the east, then turn a half circle right from the point of the rising sun and aim for that direction. A week, two, a month, more, passed in this grim and freezing manner, taking food and drink when best he could, stealing from the hen coops that he passed, swallowing down the eggs raw and whole to keep alive.
A point came at which he thought, No more. Death was better than this miserable, lonely existence. And in death, at least he’d find his father.
Though what that fierce and bearded man might say...That thought spurred him on for one more day, until starving, thirsty, he lay down in an abandoned sheep pen somewhere close to the peak of another rolling, snowy crag. There was sufficient shelter for his skin to touch frozen heather as he lay, mind roving, fully expectant that, come the spring, a wandering shepherd would find his corpse here, ravaged by wolf and eagle, as he had taken sustenance from the lesser creatures his knife and snare had found.
Sometime later, he woke and found himself rolling, turning away from an unexpected sensation, one he fought to remember, and only found its name—warmth—with difficulty.
There was a fire melting the ice on the frozen heather, sticks and hay crackling with a busy glee. The bloody skinned corpse of a mountain hare hung above it on a blackened branch. Its winter fur, white and stained with gore, sat in a bundle by the doorway in front of three dark shapes, one young and slight, one muscular as a man, the last a crone on crutches.
Fleance shuffled upright, racked by sudden fear, grappling for the knife he kept tucked inside his belt.
They didn’t flinch.
“I kn...know you,” he stuttered, recalling that last conversation with his father.
“We’re your guardian angels,” the young one said with a smile, and offered him a flask with sweet water in it, a hunk of bread, some sausage, then a piece of hot and welcome meat.
He ate and they said nothing, merely watched.
“You’re the sisters,” he declared when he was done, glad he felt no fear at all. “The ones who spoke to Macbeth and my father after they defeated Sueno.” He hesitated. It had to be said. “The ones who started this. All of it.”
They laughed, each of them, one voice high and young, the second low and masculine, the third an ancient cackle.
“Yes,” said the crone, wiping her rheumy eyes. “Without us this land would be paradise. Unicorns and all.”
“How do you know of us?” the young girl asked, ignoring her.
With a little reluctance, he admitted, “I dream.” Fleance watched her as he spoke, then added, “Or perhaps you came into my head and showed yourselves—while I slept, that is.”
They stared at him.
“Who are you, really?” Fleance asked.
“I told you. Guardian angels,” the girl replied. “Our wings are elsewhere with our golden hair. Here...” She handed him a purse. There was more money there than he’d ever owned.
“You need a better knife than that,” the big one added, throwing him a vicious, curving blade.
“And names,” the hag said, passing across a paper full of writing. Places. People. Even a map that showed the path all the way down to the lowlands, then out to the coast by the Firth of Forth.
“Go south along the frozen burn,” the girl said. “Avoid Dunkeld and Perth. Aim for Fife. When you see the blue waters of Loch Leven by Kinross, you may speak to men and ask the way to Crail. Do not say your name to anyone, nor your business. Keep your counsel till you reach the gates of MacDuff.”
“And when I’m there?”
She smiled. Her teeth were white and even, like those of a bairn.
“Then consider yourself safe, for the time being. This weather lifts soon, Fleance,” she said, “and with the spring, men get hot and restless. This land will not be still and silent long. Now eat your food and be on your way.”
“You speak to me as if I’m a child!” he cried. “And you nothing but a wee girl in a cloak...”
She crept across the distance between them, and as she approached, he fell silent and a little scared. Close up, he’d no idea how old she was. Her skin was perfect; her black eyes gleamed. And yet there seemed something ancient in her features.
“Do as you’re told, boy,” she said, not unkindly. “Or the buzzards will be picking your bones clean before the sun sets on the morrow, and Macbeth, your father’s murderer, set firm on the throne of Scotland for years to come.”
“Why me?” he asked.
“What kind of question is this?” the girl asked.
“Why save my life when you let so many others fall?”
She reached out and touched his matted, greasy hair.
“You have something in here, child,” she said. “Just like us. We look after our ain folk. We see in them such things on occasion...”
“It was your words that set this tragedy in train.”
She shook her head, which was, he thought, as lovely as a strange, exotic flower.
“We plant no seed,” the girl whispered, smiling. “Only water what lies there already.” Her fingers played across his brow. “And the seed in you is growing now. You feel it, too.”
“A line of kings, you said...”
“Is some way distant if you do not quit these hills. Eat and take the things we give you. Then leave.”
He did, and one hour later, they stopped at a snowy bluff, pointing him down the path, then flitting across the sweeping white landscape like crippled crows.
Two weeks later, he was at the gates of MacDuff’s castle, overlooking the bright waters and white cliffs of a gentle bay. He had a beard now and better clothes bought along the journey. His mind was clear and firm—his manner, too—so earnest the thane gave him private audience without question, even though he’d never revealed his name.
“You have business with me?” the tall man with the black beard asked, perusing his visitor with a hand upon his chin.
“You know me, sir. I am called Fleance. My father was Banquo, a comrade, ally, and friend to you. Murdered by Macbeth for fear that all the world would know the treachery of the man who wears the crown of Scotland.”
MacDuff was on him in an instant, hand round his mouth, hustling him into the shadows.
“Quiet, you simple fool!” he hissed.
Fleance obeyed. The older man looked at him, ever more curious. He asked some questions, family matters, the geography of Laggan, the campaigns his father had fought. Fleance answered briskly, with straight answers. These were matters his father had drummed into him since he was a child. It was the simplest test.
“You are Banquo’s son, I see,” MacDuff said when they were done. “Much changed. They think you dead.”
“They’d have me so, sir.”
“And still would. I will find you a private room here in my quarters. You are a distant nephew from the west. Here on business. Say nothing more.”
“Aye,” Fleance said.
“And tonight, we dine alone, son of Banquo. There’s much I need to hear.”
It was more than a month before the royal party escaped the bewildering landscape of frozen peaks and glens. Snow had blanketed Scotland in never-endin
g blizzards that came roaring from the north with all the relentless ferocity of the Viking hordes. For five long weeks the train of horses and carriages had ploughed through vast drifts that were mountains in themselves, sometimes making barely a mile in the brief hours between dawn and a dismal gray sunset.
Macbeth’s new kingdom had turned into an endless icy hell in which men and horses alike died trying to gain a foothold through the treacherous passes.
Toward the end of January, they finally reached the sprawling private palace that Duncan favored in Forres. Perched high on an exposed hill overlooking the inlet of Findhorn Bay, the place was built for reclusive summer pleasure, not harsh winter and the government of the land. The low arcaded buildings, more monastery than castle, invited in the wind and snow. The small harbor by the sandy spit of Findhorn was closed through ice and driven sand. Few messengers made their way from east or west, and none by boat at all. Locked in deep and silent thought, aching from a constant sense of shame, Macbeth found himself monarch of a vast white emptiness, as unknown as it was unknowable. All the effort he’d made to cement his grip on the throne now felt like powdered snow sifting through his fingers. The many spies he’d placed in households from tip to toe of Scotland, Berwick to the distant Ness of Huna, were, for the most part, useless, silent burdens upon his treasury, and those who did report said nothing that might earn their keep.
Isolated thus, his mood was to seek for proof of treachery over loyalty, and of that there came none. The locals, trapped within his power, were vocal in their fidelity, bringing food and salted fish and vegetables, when beyond the palace walls, their own bairns starved. He sent it back with thanks and orders for the common distribution of what meager provisions might be found. Lord and lady, peasant and pauper, Moray lived on dry, bony herring and rotten carrots, praying for the storms to lift. And in the arcades of the palace, Macbeth, a solitary figure, strode in silence, lost in thought, sleepless most the night, a stranger both to wife and subjects.
The dread from meeting with the sisters refused to leave him. His resolve to deal with traitors, real or suspected, remained, even MacDuff, whose true offense was no more than a slight, a lack of politeness, leaving the coronation in Scone too soon. But even if he wished to act on his slim suspicions, he saw no easy way to do so. The only troops he possessed were those around him on the Moray Firth. To dispatch them to seek out his enemies would leave Forres dangerously unguarded and show his hand to any who may be nursing treacherous thoughts of their own. MacDuff, the most obvious target of his wrath, would prove a difficult adversary, living as he did in distant Crail, far south, overlooking the Firth of Forth.
Yet Forres was a royal palace and possessed all the trappings of monarchy. In his empty hours he’d used them, found himself staring at maps of places he had barely heard of, towns, regions, and castles he had dismissed as needless when he had only been the thane of Glamis. How long ago that seemed, those clearer days when he had been locked inside the black walls of Inverness, plotting against the relentless Norsemen.
Unrolled before him by the knowledgeable Cullen, he saw the shapes of nations that had hitherto been nothing more than names from children’s stories: Norway and Denmark, with their cruel and avaricious pirates; Ireland, just as bellicose; the vast spread of France and below it the Iberian Peninsula, where a strange race called the Arabs, followers of a different faith, now waged war against retreating Christian powers; and beyond that, Rome, the seat of the pope, God’s person made flesh, a place for penitence and mercy.
One day, he swore, when all was well, he’d take Skena there, and side by side, they’d crawl the dirty streets like beggars, praying for absolution, putting the black shame behind them, rising with a papal blessing, refreshed, anew. He didn’t care about the risk or the cost in alms. Blood dried in the end and would be washed away.
One day.
Till then...the cruel, hard season had emasculated him, as if it were an adversary itself. He had no choice but to wait and listen to nothing but the wind blowing in from across the gray expanse of sea. No news of treachery. No sign of Banquo’s boy, Fleance, now thought to be nothing more than a frozen corpse lost somewhere in the Grampians, food for wolves and ravens. Macbeth wanted to believe it, but his heart told him otherwise.
That line of kings he’d seen in the grim and feverish darkness of the sisters’ cave would not leave him. Nor, as some constant crumb of comfort, that other utterance: “None of woman born shall harm you.” What else could it mean but that he was invulnerable to his enemies? That did not lessen their treachery or his hunger to seek them out.
When he stared at the map, his focus did not stay long on the foreign regions. There was a nearer neighbor of more pressing concern—England, joined to Scotland by that long and porous border that ran from Berwick to the Solway in the west. Larger, greedier, crueler, and ever more ambitious, London harbored Scotland’s enemies, always. Now it clutched Malcolm and Donalbain close to its perfidious bosom, plotting to use them as puppets and bring mischief north before long. It mattered nothing to him that the monarch on the throne was the pious saint Edward. It was England’s destiny to spout peace until it found the forces and the reason for war. Edward might be tottering on the throne now. But the day his successor looked greedily north would come, and when it did, Scotland would be fighting for her future once more.
These ideas would not leave him, day or night. They came, he thought, with the crown, and he was amazed that he had been ignorant of such burdens before they fell so heavily on his shoulders.
Halfway through February, the sky began to lose its heaviness. One morning, the palace woke to a line of bright blue across the horizon, brilliant behind the distant peaks. Those shivering in Forres’s endless corridors remembered, finally, that summer might come again. That day, a scanty sense of hope ran through the palace, and on its back, Cullen, the head of the household guard, came to seek Macbeth, a smile on his rugged, clean-shaven face.
“We have a surprise, sir,” he announced, beaming. “A gift from the loyal local populace, a monument to your bravery that will stand here as proof to it for generations to come.”
“A gift?” Macbeth replied, lifting his head from the governmental papers he was fighting to comprehend.
“Rebuilding Scotland can wait a while,” Cullen, a forward man, told him. He nodded toward the blue expanse of water beyond Findhorn Bay. “When we’ve ships and horses and a means to travel, then you can pass laws and see them followed.”
Macbeth thrust aside the papers, ideas he had for courts and education, for churches and better use of money for the populace, and followed Cullen outside to a bluff beyond the palace walls.
The sun was fully out, the day glorious. A warming sense of pride rose within him as he saw the glittering expanse of the Moray Firth stretching in front of him and behind the Cairngorms, a massive range of snowy peaks, small patches of heather here and there, with the occasional smudge of red for wandering herds of deer.
This is mine, he thought, with not an ounce of selfishness. He belonged to this land, not the reverse. It was his now to cherish, to nurture and make good.
Cullen walked him out of the palace, a pack of guards always two strides behind. At the edge of the hill stood a pale stone slab seven yards high, round it a gathering of locals, a group of stonemasons, some peasants, a few local nobility. All smiling, pleased with themselves.
Macbeth walked up and gazed at the thing. The sides were carved with woven vines, after the manner of the Picts who came before. On the west was a long Celtic cross running almost the full length of the slab. On the reverse...Macbeth stepped round the perimeter and stared at the complex sculpted images carved deep into the rock. It was a panorama of warfare, like a memory plucked from his head of every battle he had ever fought now frozen in stone.
Men at war, a hundred figures or more, each scene laid upon another, cavalry and infantry, mass slaughter, individual combat, ax to ax, face to face.
And then
the victims. A line of corpses, soldiers poised above them wielding swords. This was the customary aftermath of battle. The victors triumphant, the defeated beheaded in long and patient rows. Here they lay, freshly slaughtered, their skulls rolling away like cropped corn.
“A brave man who was with you when you fought the traitor MacDonwald and the Viking Sueno assisted us, sir,” one of the stonemasons called, raising his hammer and chisel. “He told us how you fought the Vikings.” His strong arm gestured at the slab with a proud flourish. “Here we record the victory so all may see. We’ll call this Sueno’s Stone.”
Macbeth said nothing.
“With your permission, sire,” Cullen added.
“What man?” Macbeth asked.
Yet he knew the answer before he spoke. A small and wiry figure made its way to the front of the crowd. The steward had kept himself scarce since Banquo’s death. That was for the best, on both parts.
“Ah, Fergus,” the king said with a sigh. “Such a sharp and active memory. I see no sign of mekilwort or beer.”
The man shrugged and said, “For posterity’s sake, sir, it seemed more fit we mark the fighting. Winners, losers. That’s all the folk remember in the end.”
All the faces watched him at that moment. He was the king. His words, his mood, affected each and every one. So Macbeth found it within himself to say a few pleasant sentiments and told himself he’d never see this bloody thing again.
Afterward, he walked back to the palace, told Skena of it as she stitched in silence in their private quarters.
“We have a legacy, then,” she said without looking at him. “Where do we live next, husband? Forres is a palace for the summer. You cannot rule the kingdom from here.”
“South,” he said, hating the thought. “I need the lowland men. I want to know what the English have in mind. How much Malcolm’s poisoned them against me.”