Firebrand

by Gillian Philip

  Ma Sinclair was staring at me with a mixture of gratitude and awe; Mackinnon was soberly hypnotised and had forgotten all notion of a fight. I was getting into my stride, now, playing like a devil, like their Devil, their Anti-God. The full-mortals said he was the father and lord of all the Sithe: that’s what they really thought of us. We weren’t the People of Peace, we were the fallen ones; Hell’s angels, irredeemably evil. Turning my back on them, a sudden rage swept through my body and into the fiddle till it howled like a demon. Then I laughed out loud, and spun again to face my clumsy dancers. William Beag stepped back so fast he fell on his backside.

  We were all laughing now, even William. A chill swept my body, but I didn’t realise the inn door had opened till something colder lanced my mind.

  ~ Stop it.

  The fiddle shrieked into silence, leaving an absence of music like a frozen shroud. As Conal took the instrument from me, I gave him a surly triumphant smile.

  ‘Drawing attention to yourself?’ he murmured, and passed it into the hands of Calum the Crap Fiddler.

  ‘The lad’s good,’ muttered Calum, afraid to look at me.

  ‘Huh! The lad’s got skills he shouldna have.’ That was William Beag, but when Conal turned his stare on him, he looked away, shuffling.

  MacKinnon couldn’t let it go, now. ‘You’re a foulminded creature, William Beag, you and your ugly talk. There was you happy to move your fat backside just a moment ago—’

  It might have got worse, but right then a woman barged into the inn, skirts swishing in the dirt with her self-important urgency. Morag MacLeod, the clachan gossip: a sour frizzy woman who liked to be first with the news. It must be good news, or worthwhile at any rate. She’d never set foot in the inn otherwise; I’d overheard her views on those of us who did, and she disapproved noisily of the Sinclair woman and her whisky stills.

  As she hissed excited words to her bald husband, I watched his sullen eyes widen in shock. Words were passed round, men rose to their feet and drew crosses on themselves with their fingers, forgetting they weren’t meant to. They snatched their hands away and glanced guiltily at one another. A muttering became a murmur that became a rowdy, disbelieving rout.

  Conal had a hold of my arm. ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ I snatched up the whisky bottle. Hell, we needed our consolations.

  ‘Nothing good.’ Gripping my arm, he kept me beside him as he came out of the inn, slouching well back in the wake of the gathering crowd that swarmed towards the marketplace.

  I call it a marketplace but there was never a real market there, just a desultory bartering of meal and ale and tools and skills, and the annual negotiations for the best and sunniest rigs. It was no more than a beaten-earth space in front of the squat church, between a few mud-walled cottages and the mill. Still holding my arm, Conal stiffened and jerked me back.

  The priest lay sprawled on his back with his head against the rough dyke that encircled the church. He was still twitching and jerking as the crowd gathered round him. Moments after we arrived, the spasms stopped and he lay rigid and still.

  Conal swore under his breath. ‘Something’s wrong,’ he muttered. ‘Seth, this isn’t right. It’s like…’

  He was abruptly cut off as someone shoved him forward, and I was dragged with him. Conal glanced over his shoulder in shock, but there was no way of telling who had pushed us. A voice I didn’t recognise shouted, ‘Here’s the smith! He’s a healer.’

  ‘Aye, so he is! Let him through!’

  Conal let me go, pushing me back into the press of people so that he was alone beside the priest’s corpse.

  Morag MacLeod was somewhere near me; I could hear her. ‘Fell right over on his back, so he did. Like a tree. I never saw the like of it. Not even a moment to cry out, poor man. Put his hands to his face like he’d been struck, and over he went.’

  She was loving this, the auld bitch.

  ‘Something not natural about it,’ growled a voice behind me.

  ‘That’s no’ the first unnatural thing I’ve seen the day.’ William Beag slanted his eyes in my direction, a nasty little smirk on his face.

  ‘A seizure,’ someone suggested. ‘A fit.’

  The priest’s eyelids were wide open, but his eyes were empty of light, empty of everything. I saw Conal’s fingers shake slightly as he drew the man’s eyelids down, but it took him a couple of attempts; the lids wouldn’t close, as if the priest still couldn’t believe what had happened to him. The crowd behind me fell silent as they watched Conal. At last he held the lids down with his fingers, and they stayed shut. Hesitantly, he took his hands away.

  ‘Was there nothing you could do, then?’ That was the miller. Wolf-killer.

  Somebody was muttering on the far side of the crowd. I couldn’t hear what was said, but a voice agreed grimly, ‘Aye. Damn right.’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Conal redundantly, standing up. For a moment he hesitated, as if he thought he was missing something, then stepped back and pressed back into the first line of gawpers. Morag MacLeod had pushed her way through for a better view, and now she made that ostentatious crossing motion with her fingers against her breastbone. Others glanced at one another, then followed her example.

  Under his breath, Conal swore at himself.

  ‘Seizure?’ I asked him, as he hustled me away.

  Conal was silent for a second, glancing over his shoulder. Once again, no-one was watching us. Back to normal. I thought.

  ‘It could have been. Come on.’

  That wasn’t all it was, I could tell. I knew Conal better than that. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s trouble,’ said Conal, and spat. ‘Let’s go.’

  15

  FIFTEEN

  It’s all very well saying Let’s keep our heads down. There’s still business to be done, and bread and ale to be bought, and lots to be drawn. We couldn’t stay away from the clachan forever, but we spent as little time there as we could. I worried vaguely about Ma Sinclair, but I didn’t go near the inn for a while.

  It seemed the clachan couldn’t do without a god-botherer, so a new priest arrived when the old one was barely cold in the ground. We’d see this new one around the place: preaching his joyless gospel, frowning on the flirting girls, wringing his bony hands in prayer, but he didn’t go to the inn as the old priest had. He was a lot younger, though you’d think from the way he stood on his dignity and his moral high ground that he’d lived longer than a Sithe, and had loved nothing.

  We never went to the services in the small grim church, never had done and weren’t about to start. Besides, the priest’s arrival coincided with an epidemic of sickness in the clachan. When it first broke out, even Conal and I found ourselves nauseous and feverish, as if a miasma of disease lay over the whole glen and couldn’t be escaped. It wasn’t that we were vulnerable to plague, if plague it was; it’s just that we were unaccustomed to sickness and Conal seemed ever more unnerved. He muttered about the people of the glen thinking he was a healer, that he didn’t know what was wrong or what to do about it so there wasn’t any point sticking his neck out. And then under his breath I heard him say something about blame, and the laying of it, and that we’d better keep our mouths shut and keep our heads down.

  It wasn’t plague. After a few weeks the sickness ebbed, and glen life grew normal again. We swallowed our misgivings, and frequented the clachan, and did our best to ignore the priest proselytising in the muddy marketplace. We kept ourselves as much as we could to ourselves, and we trusted to the Veil. And I’d almost forgotten the priest, had almost learned not to worry about him preaching his god’s wrath and his own hate, when he walked up the glen and through the mossy birchwood one night and rapped his staff on our door.

  Conal was shocked, and suspicious, but he could hardly turn the man away. The priest sidled into the blackhouse with a look of contempt he couldn’t hide, his nostrils flaring in distaste. He was the boniest creature I’d ever seen, short of actual cadavers (of
which I’d now seen plenty), so at least he seemed to follow his own strictures of thrift and frugality. His pale eyes had a yellowish tinge, his skin a papery cast, his hair was lank and sparse. Gods knew—well, his god would—why he cast such a spell over the clachan and the glen.

  ‘Good evening, my brothers.’ He smiled. I could taste bile in my throat; I didn’t smile back, but Conal gripped his proffered hand, glanced down at it, then let it go like a viper.

  ‘I’m not your brother,’ I pointed out.

  He looked at me, silent just long enough to make me fidget with discomfort. His voice, when he wasn’t braying his hatred, was like the rustle of air through dead leaves. ‘You’re the simple one, aren’t you?’ He gave me a conspiratorial smile. ‘Well. Perhaps not, hm?’

  Conal had backed slightly against a wooden chair, and I knew why, but perhaps it was that movement that gave us away; perhaps it was just that Branndair could not repress his tiny growl of distrust. He got a nip for it from Liath, but it was too late. I glanced up at the priest, alarmed, but he only looked thoughtful as he stooped to look at the cubs beneath the chair, then straightened again.

  ‘What a quaint choice of…’ he hesitated, licking his upper lip ‘…pets.’

  I knew he’d been on the point of using another word. But he was choosing his words very, very carefully.

  ‘It’s kind of you to visit, Father,’ said Conal mechanically.

  ‘Please,’ he smiled. ‘Don’t call me Father. I am Pastor of my flock. I have no idolatrous pretensions.’

  ‘No.’ Conal flushed and glanced at me. I rolled my eyes. I’d known all along he was making a mistake: trying to understand these people and their mutating theologies, that god of theirs who couldn’t make up his mind. I told him so, silently, but he didn’t even snap back at me. He just looked miserable.

  ‘You haven’t been in church,’ said the priest. ‘You know attendance is compulsory?’

  ‘Yes, Fath…your gr…Pastor,’ Conal managed, lamely.

  ‘You are strangers here, of course, so we have to make allowances.’ Taking his time, he looked us up and down, examining our clothes. I’d refused to wear the coarse shirt and plaid of the peasants; I found them ugly and uncomfortable, though the peasants seemed to find them practical enough. Conal had given in too, in the end, and like me he’d gone back to his own shirt and trews made of leather or decent wool. He was worried we’d stick out like bogles, but the astonished stares hadn’t lasted more than a week. They’d got used to us. And I’d got used to the Veil. In fact I was getting to like it very much.

  This man had taken notice of us, though. This man didn’t look as if he was going to let it drop. I felt my upper lip curling, so quickly I made my face expressionless again.

  ‘The kirk session has decreed,’ he told us with a tight little smile, ‘that those who fail to worship on Sundays should be punished in the stocks.’

  We both just gaped at him.

  He looked keenly at Conal. ‘I believe you often kept company with my…predecessor.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Conal.

  The priest made a little sound with his tongue and teeth. ‘Reverend Douglas was not strict in his application of God’s will. I have had much work to do since I arrived.’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ I said. ‘You should relax. Come to Ma Sinclair’s place.’

  His gaze on me was suddenly unshielded, and I saw the loathing with crystal clarity. ‘Whisky,’ he hissed, ‘is an abomination. The people of this glen see their error and sin, and their mortal peril.’ His lips twitched. ‘I hope I will soon be able to say the same of both of you.’

  I must not spit. I made myself not spit on his feet. Conal nodded and muttered a few more niceties, and when he finally shut the door on the priest, he shut his eyes and exhaled as if he hadn’t breathed since the man had put his foot over our threshold.

  He turned to me. ‘You ever seen that man in the sunlight?’

  I frowned. ‘I suppose. It’s summer. And he’s over the glen like a rash, all the time.’

  ‘I mean, have you seen him in full sunlight?’

  I thought about it. ‘I don’t know. What are you thinking?’

  He shrugged. ‘Oh, probably something stupid. I can’t be sure. Don’t worry.’

  ~ Aye, right.

  He grinned at me suddenly. I liked that, I liked to see him looking himself again. It happened less and less often, but it reassured me when it did. Conal being afraid made me very, very afraid.

  I didn’t know how we were going to get out of the interminable, mind-numbing church services, but Conal was going to have to find a way. I swore to him that if I had to sit through the man’s brimstone-reeking opinions, I’d cut my own throat and put myself out of my misery. A long life was a long life, I told Conal, but it had to be worth living.

  Conal thought we would have to submit. I had never submitted in my life, unless it was to Conal’s damned educational ambitions. I loved him and I knew he had my best interests at heart but he didn’t own my conscience.

  I gnawed it over in my mind all week, till my head throbbed. I wanted the priest to forget we existed, I wanted us to slip from his mind the way we should, but it wasn’t happening. His pale gaze found me whenever I slunk into the clachan, and he’d smile.

  I was afraid of him.

  I wouldn’t submit to him, though. My life was not my own any more but my soul was, and I wouldn’t do this. I didn’t want to go in the stocks, I didn’t want a whipping, and more than anything I didn’t want to fight Conal. He was my Captain and he had the right to order me to go, and he was capable of knocking me senseless and dragging me to church. But if I capitulated to this priest I’d lose something indefinably precious to me and I’d never get it back. Standing my ground was worth a beating, from the priest or from Conal. I just didn’t know how far it would go, and yes, I was afraid.

  My last morning in the clachan was a Saturday. I remember that because I had gritted my teeth and wound myself up to face my Captain either that evening or, failing that, at dawn on Sunday. I was there alone; I’d gone to draw lots for the best rigs next year, to negotiate our turn of the community plough, to fix a price for the shoeing of a horse. I’d gone to buy some ale and whisky, and with it some courage.

  I was so anxious, wound so tight inside myself that I almost failed to hear the men. But one voice caught my attention, thank the gods: William Beag’s grievance-ridden one.

  ‘She’s a bloody cheat. Waters her ale and overcharges for that shite whisky of hers.’

  I stopped in my tracks, but they hadn’t seen me, so I dodged into the shadows. It was obvious who they were verbally ripping to shreds, but what made me most uneasy was their dark huddle, their quiet grumbling voices, their quick over-the-shoulder glances. These were not the empty complaints of men who’d go straight to the inn and be cheerfully cheated again.

  ‘Aye,’ said another. ‘And it is true what Roderick Mor told you, William. Such a woman is a peril to all good men. There are those who don’t want to hear, who don’t want to know the danger. That is all.’

  ‘Aye, the fools! When their own bairns fall sick, when their own milk sours, when their own parts fall to disease: that’s when they’ll take notice. They don’t care about other folks’ misfortunes: no, not till it happens to them, and then they are sorry. Well, I will not sit by and see my neighbours ill-used.’

  ‘You are a good man, William Beag. You’re right, it’s time for right-thinking men to take a stand. I am with you.’ The burly redhead clasped William’s fat arm. ‘We’ll go up and find the boys at Nether Baile. They will want in on this.’

  ‘I’ll watch the place.’ William Beag nodded gravely. ‘She must not have the chance to slink away, and she may have charms to warn her. There are other villages that would not thank us for letting her go to them, unshriven and unrepentant and unpunished.’

  ‘Will you get the minister?’

  ‘Later,’ a small man growled. ‘Let’s find the Nether Bai
le boys first. They would not be wanting such business to go ahead without them.’

  As I watched them go, bloated with bloodlust and self-importance, I leaned against a mud-and-wattle wall and made swift cold calculations. The three brothers at Nether Baile: the blackhouse they shared with their beasts lay not a mile further up the glen, but this crowd were in no hurry. They were basking in their moment and they’d want to stretch it out.

  Conal had said the witch-terror came in waves, like a tide. He said that for years it would subside, and grow calm, and then it would roar to life again like an Atlantic storm. Conal had hoped we’d be lucky with the tides, lucky in the timing of our exile.

  Always looking on the bright side, that was my brother.

  Ma Sinclair kept her sullen old pony in a hollow beneath a small cliff, separate from the drovers’ ponies, penned in only by steep slopes and grey rock and its own disinclination to make a bid for freedom. Through a ragged forelock it glared at me, jaws moving round a mouthful of tough grass, but it didn’t shy away when I seized a handful of its coarse mane. It just swallowed its grass and bit me, so I bit it back, and so we came to an understanding, and I led it through the narrow gap in the rocks and round the back of the cliff.

  Overlooking the clachan from the north, I stopped, rubbing the pony’s warm neck. The little settlement backed onto the rocks here, sheltered and shadowed, with the bere-rigs on the farther side. No-one ever glanced this way, except by chance, and I could see the back of the inn quite clearly, and William Beag skulking at its rear.

  I laughed, and the pony shook its neck and whickered in echo. Flicking one ear back, it gave me the evil pony-eye. Scratching between its ears, I shoved the grubby grey forelock out of its face. Deep down in the brown eyes I thought I saw a gleam of silver that wasn’t weak reflected sun.