Macbeth

by David Hewson

  An hour Macbeth spent, speaking to every last soldier, high and low, listening to their boasts and fears, promising the earth once victory was theirs. He heard tallies of provisions, found the victualers, and was convinced the castle would survive a siege so long that those outside would starve and die of sickness long before a man within found hunger aching in his belly. The enemy would know this, surely. Each camp had well-paid informers in its midst.

  When the counts of food and weapons, of water butts and horses, were done, he climbed onto the wooden battlements to survey the sweeping hills around them.

  Cullen followed and, scanning the bright horizon, pointed to the lush green valley ahead. In the soft morning light, the party with Skena’s body was visible close to the river, wending its way east toward Glamis, away from battle.

  The archer beside him was intent on something closer. He pointed and Macbeth saw for himself—a figure creeping furtively down the heather hill back toward Birnam and Dunkeld.

  “Every day we lose a traitor,” Cullen said, squinting. “My vision’s not so good. But his manner speaks volumes. I’ll send some troops to deal with it.”

  Macbeth’s keen eyesight followed the shape as it stole through the gorse seeking shelter. He knew that low and skinny form too well.

  “Fergus,” he murmured. “That man served me. If one like him should seek to flee...”

  Cullen stiffened. “A deserter’s a deserter. I loathe him. We’re well rid of the rogue. Let me hunt him.”

  “Your opinion’s to your credit,” Macbeth replied with a shrug. “Still, he’s one among many. If victory hangs on a single skinny traitor...”

  “There’s an army waiting here behind these walls who’ll die for you. Do not insult them.”

  He liked this fellow more with every passing day. Cullen was too honest to do anything but speak his mind. Ignored too often of late, and that was Macbeth’s own folly.“My words were thoughtless,” he said, looking into Cullen’s sallow, calm face. “I apologize. Yet...” He sighed. “Why would any of you wish to die for me? You, man, have a family back in Inverness. A life.” He nodded to the busy yard where troops worked on weapons, finishing arrows, checking bows. “They all have. Malcolm wants me, not you. Siege or no siege, I could surrender and spare you all. Why not...?”

  “That army,” Cullen said, in a stern and rising voice, “is English through and through. The only Scots are the turncoats who led them across our border. You’re our king, not Malcolm. As long as that crown sits upon your head, I follow you, along with every loyal man in Dunsinane.”

  “A fine speech,” Macbeth noted. “Will your widow thank you for it?”

  “If it stops some English bastard raping her in our bed, she will. Sir...” He pointed down the hill. Fergus was reaching open ground now, the line where gorse gave way to nothing but coarse grass and heather. He would be exposed for a little while until he dipped beneath the brow, then reached the straight run to the river. “That single rogue may tell MacDuff and Malcolm our dispositions. Our plans.” He hesitated. “Your frame of mind.”

  “He may, indeed,” Macbeth agreed.

  “Then let me send—”

  “No need.” This low creature had slaughtered Banquo in the mountains that lay on the northern skyline. Murdered MacDuff’s wife and children—a foul and unnecessary, unwanted deed that turned Skena’s mind for good. These acts lay heavily on Macbeth’s conscience, yet were nothing to the man who had performed them.

  Banquo was the first—and in some ways, the worst. His childhood days with that vigorous, bold warrior would never leave Macbeth. Swirling in coracles upon the river, seeking silver salmon. Stalking ruddy stags through the passes of the Cairngorms.

  “I was always the better marksman,” he murmured, and walked over to the nearest archer, took his bow without a word, and three long, well-flighted arrows.

  Not an easy shot. A man made a smaller target than a deer with its great antlers. And Fergus was small, too, in mind, in character, in body.

  His powerful arms drew back the bow, the string and arrow notched against his cheek. Ahead, sharp in focus like a hunted animal, Fergus rose from the last patch of green and spiky gorse and began to run across the heather.

  No fool, he knew this was the most dangerous section of his treacherous journey.

  His narrow, angular, vicious face turned to take one last look back. Macbeth caught that expression with his keen eye and thought for a moment Fergus saw him, too, a distant figure, taut and erect, longbow in hand, stationary on the wooden battlements of Dunsinane.

  The fool froze in fear, as quarry sometimes did. Macbeth let fly the arrow straight and true, then watched as it caught the fleeing man square in the neck.

  “Another,” he said, holding out his hand, not taking his focus once from the stricken figure below.

  Notched, string taut, the muscular spring of the longbow tight in his grip.

  Fergus wheeled and screeched and screamed, both hands to the wooden shaft that pierced his neck from side to side.

  The second shaft took him in the chest and that was that. One corpse upon the hillside. The first, Macbeth felt, of many.

  “You have a canny eye,” Cullen said, impressed. “I trust you’ll join us on these ramparts should the need arise.”

  Macbeth couldn’t take his eyes off the corpse stretched out on the heather ahead, arms and legs akimbo, as if pinned to the ground by the deadly arrows.

  It felt as if a part of him had died with that villainous, sly-eyed servant.

  “I am not Duncan,” he told the man beside him. “I fight by the side of my brave men. Perhaps...” and this thought chilled him, “it is my solitary skill.”

  A young and nervous sentry had climbed the ladder to join him.

  “Speak up, boy!” Macbeth ordered. “Or has an English cat somehow got your tongue?”

  “I come from the forward watch, sire,” he replied. “Stationed in the valley.”

  “Well...” Macbeth sighed, rolling his hand in impatience.

  “I don’t know how to say what I saw...”

  “Just say it, then.”

  “I swear, as I stood on my station, I saw the wood of Birnam move toward us. Walking as it were—”

  Macbeth stared, astonished. “What did you say?”

  “I swear my lord, the forest—”

  “Trees do not move, boy. Do not bring me lies,” the king hissed.

  The boy took a step back, trembling. “No, sir. You’ll see it soon yourself. Like a restless grove of trees that upped their roots—”

  “No...” Macbeth whispered.

  “Sire,” Cullen cut in quickly. “It is an English trick. They cut the branches for their troops and hope by approaching behind such camouflage we’ll fail to see their number.”

  The man smiled.

  “A good omen, I think. If they were so many, why hide it?”

  “To show us for the fools we are,” Macbeth replied. “By God...”

  “See!” the scout shouted. “See!”

  He looked, and Cullen with him. Across the valley, like a vast green monster, the branches moved in unison, down toward the sinuous line of the Tay.

  “Ring the alarm bell!” Cullen ordered. “Armor, men, and weapons. Stations all.”

  Macbeth was silent, watching the impossible become real in the lush and tranquil valley before him.

  “No man of woman born,” he whispered, not caring if they heard.

  Cullen was struggling with his scabbard. His eyes were gray and rheumy. The man was fifty or more.

  “I have a task for you,” Macbeth said, taking his arm.

  “Sire?”

  “Take a horse. Find my wife’s party. See them to Glamis, then go to Inverness to secure the castle. I will meet you there when this work is done.”

  The calm, dispassionate cast of Cullen’s face vanished. “I am a Scot! I fight my enemy!”

  “You are a servant and will do as I say,” Macbeth replied. “Now, ge
t you gone. I’ve work to do. And, Cullen?”

  “My lord?”

  “Godspeed.”

  For the next two hours they watched Malcolm’s army ford the river, then climb the beetling heights of Dunsinane. Horses and infantry stayed to the rear. At the front ran the green wood of Birnam, men with boughs of oak and fir over their heads, hiding themselves and whatever they brought with them.

  Macbeth followed the advance from the ramparts while men alongside him brought water, oil, and fouler substances to a rolling boil in vast cauldrons pinned to swiveling frames.

  Whatever those branches hid, they would be revealed once they were close enough to the high wooden ramparts of the castle.

  Closer, he saw the few Scots among them, bright figures in armor, high on horseback, impudently wearing on their tunics the white-on-blue diagonal cross of the saltire, riding to and fro among the English forces, making way up the steep slopes. MacDuff and Lennox and Ross were near the front, clear and visible. Malcolm and his brother Donalbain stayed nearer the baggage train behind.

  All those around in Dunsinane saw this, and catching their mood, Macbeth raised his sword and roared, “I see they are their father’s sons, then! Letting others fight their battles for them. Though, even King Duncan never called upon the English to stiffen his spine...”

  His voice was drowned in a deafening cheer. No one liked that family. Even the men who believed him guilty of Duncan’s murder—most of those in his pay, he imagined—saw little fault in his actions. Kings lived and died, and killed each other for the prize they craved. That was the way of the world.

  He began another speech, but then an arrow whistled pass his helmet and one of the archers was there swiftly, dragging him back from the rampart edge.

  “A siege,” the man said. “That will be their plan.”

  “Not if MacDuff’s their general,” he replied. “He’s a decent Scot. He won’t waste a moment. Let him come forward. The English might want to pitch their tents and starve us out. Not him. He thinks he has good reason.”

  Macbeth thought of the body they must have passed on the way—Fergus, an arrow in his throat, another through his chest.

  “Sire?” the archer said.

  “I was distracted, friend. We should thank God they have tied us to this stake. Since we have no choice, we can only fight like bears and wolves. And will. When they come close—”

  A cry went up nearby. And then a second.

  Macbeth rushed back to the wall. The boughs of Birnam were now close enough the men on the battlements could see what they concealed—shields, formed like the carapace of a tortoise, the way the Romans did.

  “Douse the English with the boiling oil,” he ordered. “Do not cease...”

  The words died in his throat. Something was rising from the line of hidden men below. Curling plumes of smoke and the distinct yellow flicker of flame.

  “Oh, Cullen, Cullen,” he murmured. “I am glad I let you go. These branches aren’t there to hide their numbers. They’re cover for their trickery. And for the fire that will bring down these wooden walls.” He turned and cried to the yard, “Water! Now!”

  As he watched, the line of branches opened. Behind them were great wooden engines—catapults and ballistae primed with blazing missiles. A smell rose from the ground below—oil and bitumen. Macbeth leaned over the parapet edge and was greeted by a sudden rush of sound. A great flaming ball was speeding toward them, trailing thick and greasy smoke.

  He ducked back but felt the terrible impact of the catapult shot against the walls. To his right there was a burst of orange light and then a belch of foul and noxious air. He twisted away, coughing, gagging.

  Still short of breath, he clung to the ramparts and watched the wall of shields below. A gap was opening in their midst, revealing archers and arrows tipped with flaming rags.

  “Fire,” he murmured. “And we are in a tinderbox. The English fight so many foreigners they must learn new tricks with every corpse they make.”

  The bows drew back, and the burning arrows flew and caught the timber walls of Dunsinane. Tongues of flame began to spread, feeding on the stinking oils they’d splashed upon the woodwork.

  “I told you, man,” Macbeth said, looking at the pale, shocked face of the archer beside him. Another flaming missile exploded against a corner turret and left it burning. “There’ll be no siege. We fight them now and seize the day. Find me a foe who’s not of woman born...”

  The man with the bow shook his head and murmured a few unintelligible words.

  “Find me him!” Macbeth bawled. “And then I’ll feel some fear.”

  MacDuff watched the siege equipment raining fire upon the hilltop fort. The walls were ablaze in several places, but more important was the effect the assault would have on the men inside. He could almost smell their terror and despair in the black and swirling smoke ahead. He felt the madness in himself, a deep and driving fury, at present but a smolder. Set Macbeth before him and it would leap into a cruel and deadly flame. And that moment would come.

  There were partial breaches already opening in the south wall, though the heat was too intense for entry. Even at this distance MacDuff could feel it on his face, smell the stench of fire and battle and the clouds of acrid, oily smoke. He wiped his streaming eyes and watched as four catapults disgorged their fury against the walls. Somewhere inside a man ran screaming along the parapet, his clothes ablaze. The wooden decking beneath him collapsed in an explosion of sparks and he vanished from view.

  All death had terrors. He had fought to keep from his mind all thought of how his wife and family had perished. Could seeing their bleeding corpses be worse than the horrors of his own imagination? He had a dread that, if he allowed them to rise in his head, their eyes would be open, would look at him accusingly.

  Yet he was the one who slew them. He had been wrong to leave Fife and he would bear that cross forever. But Malcolm, snake though he was, was right. It had been Macbeth’s doing, not his.

  “Direct the ballistae there,” shouted MacDuff, pointing.

  The great oversized crossbows shifted to new targets. Moments later, they sent their blazing, spear-length bolts into the walls where the man had fallen. The timbers split and fell away, and on the fourth strike a hole appeared, black around the edges but red and molten at the center. MacDuff stared at it and thought himself looking into his own fierce and burning heart.

  This was the way into Dunsinane, and he would be the first and most eager to take it.

  Macbeth paced the walls, sword in hand, his bow and shield forgotten. Around him, the battlements burned. His soldiers skulked and cried out. Some fled outright, some merely hid, but he walked tall, eager for the enemy’s next assault.

  That it would be final, he had no doubt.

  He was safe, the weird sisters had said, till Birnam wood came to Dunsinane, and now that strange prophecy had come true. This sudden turn of fortune had first filled him with dread. But then the slipperiness of the witches’ oracles had struck him and he found he could only laugh at himself darkly until even the men around had left him to his thoughts.

  Yet the sisters had been right before, and they said that no one born of woman could harm Macbeth.

  He teased at the problem in his mind. Was he supposed to be invincible to all the English rabble and those who held their leashes? Only a fool would think so. There was trickery in their language, if only he could find it. The sisters had tempted him with deceitful promises. No man was immortal, not even the fabled Greek Achilles. Dipped into the Styx, made invulnerable in every part of his body except his heel, he was prey to arrogance and cruelty. And when his nemesis came...

  “The heel,” Macbeth murmured, watching the English forces wheel around, screaming for another surge.

  In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat. The sisters’ words, so clear when he had first heard them, would turn out—again—to be a kind of riddle, a twisted half
-truth that would snatch his life away. But that no longer mattered, and a part of him was merely curious to see how this closing moment would arrive.

  So he strode the walls, the steel of his sword held out before him like a talisman, and when he reached the point where they had broken through, he jumped down into the breach, and slew them as they blundered through the smoke.

  One of them wore the rank of an English captain. A young man, but from a powerful family, if the crest on his shield was to be trusted. Macbeth confronted him in the midst of the acrid, choking fog.

  “I see the king of murder before me!” cried the Englishman.

  “A king all the same,” said Macbeth, gripping his sword with two hands. “One immune to such as you or any born of woman. Turn back, boy. No one will blame you for it. You can win honor with lesser men elsewhere.”

  “I am the son of Siward, earl of Northumbria, and I give ground to no man.”

  “Then you will die,” said Macbeth.

  Sons and fathers, he thought, with a stab of sorrow. Whatever else this day will leave me, that is one bond I will never know.

  He thought of Banquo as he parried, of Duncan, both angling for their sons. He cut young Siward’s shield, gashing the family crest with such force that the boy faltered before attacking again. Macbeth pushed the lunge aside and swept his long, keen blade at the Englishman’s legs. Siward leapt back, afraid now, stumbling on the charred and smoking timbers of the breach.

  “Leave,” said Macbeth.

  “Never,” cried the boy, charging wildly, his courage gone, replaced by desperation.

  Macbeth blocked and stabbed once, a deep and fatal wound. Young Siward fell against him, and for a moment, Macbeth held him in his arms, as Skena had the servant Ewan and their own dead son an age ago. Gently, as the battle raged around him, he lowered the dead Englishman to the ground, then turned to face the next man to come through.

  How long he kept the breach alone—or virtually, since there was still a handful of ragged old retainers armed with pikes and boat hooks in his shadow—he could not say. The flaming ballista spears had stopped as the English fought to consolidate the ground they’d taken. But soon they began again, screaming into the ruined fortress like lightning bolts in raging, murderous arcs.