Legend of the Celtic Stone

by Michael Phillips

  “Only for the present, I fear. But much of the fort is in flames.”

  “Then we must make haste from this place,” replied the son, who was now in command. “A full cohort will soon be sent after us.”

  The mission for which Foltlaig had gathered them was done.

  They were now in the region of the Votadini, and not far from that of the Selgovae.

  Once they were gathered together again and had taken stock of their casualties—few indeed apart from their commander—Maelchon told the leaders of the companies, “We will split up immediately. You may each return to your own tribes. But move stealthily as you go. Stay in hollows and among trees. Make the darkness of night your ally. Thus we will hope to confuse their attempt to pursue us.”

  With their Damnonii and Maeatae comrades, therefore, Maelchon and his Caledonii brethren, bearing their commander in one of the carts that had remained in the woods during the attack, took a westward heading along the shores of the Great River. They must make what speed they could, not only because of potential danger behind them, but to get Foltlaig as hastily as possible to more assistance than they were here able to provide him.

  Little could any of them know that this treachery of brother against brother by the collaborating Selgovae, in centuries to come—in a tiny glen only a short distance to the west of the Caledonii home across Rannoch Moor—would even more brutally doom the brotherhood that had brought victory against the Roman invaders.

  Sixteen

  The journey was arduous and slow, but at last, Maelchon neared the fortress of Rannoch. Beside him in the cart that had originally carried bricks of peat rode the broken form of his father and general, lying unconscious but clinging stubbornly to life. Behind him stretched a final remnant of the column the fallen commander had himself led southward three weeks earlier.

  They had been seen long before the shores of Loch Rannoch met their eyes. Their kinsmen poured out of the settlement to meet them, led by Chief Coel himself and followed minutes later by the Caledonians who had returned from Turenna’s command, and by Maelchon’s mother, who was that same night made a widow.

  Home and safely among his own, the spirit of the great man relaxed its fight to live. Whatever his thoughts as he lay, attended to by his wife and the faithful son he loved, no one ever knew. No more words passed his lips. An occasional tear rose in his eyes when Maelchon’s face came before his, the only evidence of the hope that was dying with him. Even his son, however, would never know the dream he had so long cherished and had sacrificed on the field of battle—of a long, shared life with his son.

  That night Foltlaig’s soul slipped away to that higher region the people of Caledonia yet knew little of. The smile on his face, however, as he lay surrounded by chief, weeping wife, and stoically tearful son, gave evidence that already the dying warrior was being privileged with glimpses of those greater Highlands to which he was bound.

  The month of October was nearly done.

  Snow would shortly cover the mountains.

  It would be a cold winter, coldest of all in the heart of Maelchon, son of Foltlaig—frozen from no bitterness at his fate, but by the loneliness of losing the best friend it was possible for a son to possess: a virile, smiling, energetic father who loved him and with whom he shared the best of life’s joys.

  The moment had arrived for the son of Foltlaig to step into his heritage, to take his place among the ranks of those sworn to pass along the story of his fathers. Upon him, at a youthful single score of years, now came to rest the ancient imperative that future generations should never forget the men who had won this land and preserved its freedom.

  That very night, Maelchon determined that neither would he let his father be forgotten. The next day, he sent out messengers calling together once more the ten leaders from the other Pict tribes.

  “We will journey northward,” he said when they had gathered together once more and he had explained his father’s wishes. “We will leave immediately, before the onslaught of winter. We will do as my father had planned.”

  His comrades listened intently, sensing by his voice the change that had come over their new leader.

  “We are only eleven now,” Maelchon went on. “My father gave his life in the battle to which he led us. It is our duty, as those who remain, to carry on what we were taught when we were twelve.

  “Let us journey northward to the stones.”

  Seventeen

  A frigid blast of wind met the face of the lone youth. Laced with specks of icy moisture, it was the kind of wind that boded ill for travelers without shelter, fire, or food.

  The young man leaned into the breeze, seemingly unmoved by its warnings.

  He was only days short of his twenty-first birthday, but his eyes revealed depths far in excess of his years. He had witnessed death, and its distress had matured him.

  He stood on the same hill where he and his father had stood when the air was warm, looking down upon the monument of stones to which his father had brought him and to the abandoned hill-fort across the valley in the distance. The storm in the air would wait a few more days, he hoped, before unleashing its fury. If it arrived sooner than he estimated, he would take shelter in the home of the ancient chief just as he and his companions had done for several previous nights. If a white blanket fell so thick as to prevent travel, he would no doubt die here before winter was out.

  His aim, however, was to finish his task here and then return southward, following the steps of the ten he had sent back to their homes yesterday.

  Turenna had been the last to go, for they had grown close on the journey north. “Let me stay and return with you,” she had urged.

  “This I must do alone,” Maelchon had replied. “I will come to you again in the spring.”

  Thus they parted. He had spent the night alone in the ancient stone dwellings from which his people had come. This morning he had walked back across the moor, a barren wasteland now, and climbed the slope of Beinn Donuill, there to make his final peace with the ancients, with his father . . . and with his duty as a son of both.

  His eyes rested upon the oblong pile of stones set off to one side from the monument of Cruithne, which would now become a shrine to two great men of Caldohnuill.

  He and his comrades had laid his father to rest beneath them three days ago. They had dug out a narrow tomb and set inside it the body which his mother had prepared for the journey as best she could, but which, according to the smell, was well past the time for burying. They then had carried out the ancient ritual themselves, in place of chief, or bard, or druid, covered the grave with turf, and finally marked the site with stones. The fallen warrior had thus been laid to rest within an easy stone’s throw of the place where the bones of Taran still lay and not many paces farther from him who, in more distant times, had brought their Celtic blood to this land with his father.

  Once the Caledonii general was laid to rest, his son and remaining ten had set about the task for which they had made such a long—and, in view of the season, dangerous journey—putting to use the implements and tools, mostly a variety of iron chisels and wooden mallets, they had carried with them to inscribe the three stones of Cruithne according to Foltlaig’s dream.

  Working together, they had taken three days to complete their task. The labor was not so backbreaking as that of their Caledonii ancestors to drag the stones to the site and raise the two pillars into their present positions, but it was nonetheless exacting and painstaking.

  On the three stones, they had completed the design of the stag.

  “To the carving we will add a representation of the ancient legend of Cruithne,” Foltlaig’s son explained to the others. “When that is completed, we will add the story of our recent assault upon the forts of the south.”

  “Is not the old tale of more importance?” asked one.

  “My father’s intent was indeed to preserve the ancient legend for posterity,” replied Maelchon. “But I would make certain that those who com
e after us and who chance to read these standing stones of Laoigh will know not only of ancient Cruithne of the Caledonii, and the story of the white stag and its meaning, but also of the bravery of Foltlaig, son of Gatheon, who united the seven tribes of Pictland against the Roman intruders.”

  The final carving upon the stones, however, Maelchon reserved for himself.

  This day he would spend in solitude with his father on the mount, alone with his memories. With his own two hands he would add to the original name of the monument as envisioned by the two ancient brothers. As a posthumous reminder of his father’s words and the example of his father’s deeds, Maelchon would inscribe the symbols to convey the additional message: ann an aonachd tha neart Caldohnuill—“In Unity Is the Strength of Caledonia.”

  The work was finally completed late in the day. Maelchon rose stiffly, straightened his back, and took one last glance about. He sighed, and rubbed at the tears seeking to rise in his eyes. His was that same grief that had been felt by all sons since Wanderer’s Son wept over him who had been slain by the mammoth’s tusk, as each young man for himself entered that manhood only the passing of a father brings.

  A moment more he stood, then began the slow walk down the hill called Donuill.

  He was ready to return to his home at Rannoch. There he would take his own place in the history of the people known thereafter by the retreating Romans—whose expanding empire had been halted in its tracks—as Caledonians.

  Eighteen

  The Romans did indeed retreat from the northland.

  After more than twenty years of attempting to subdue its native peoples, the invaders from the south finally gave up the effort. The united efforts of the Pict tribes against the Roman army, along with declining interest in the region on the part of the Caesars themselves, eventually led to a gradual and steady withdrawal of the Roman forces southward into lands they had been more successful at taming.

  After the burning of their forts at Newstead, Dalswinton, Glenlochar, and the other locations, the Romans kept their forces withdrawn below the Forth-Clyde line. Even at Milton, where Turenna’s company of seventy had been unsuccessful, before winter was out the troops had begun a systematic dismantling of the entire fortress in preparation for permanent departure. So complete was the evacuation that nails were clawed out of timbers and buried to keep them from use by the natives, pottery and glass were broken into tiny fragments, structural posts were dug out of the ground, flagstones were removed, and what remained was burned.

  Hadrian acceded as emperor of Rome in 117. Not long afterward, following a renewed outbreak of united Pict effort against his troops, led by Maelchon, son of Foltlaig, the new emperor ordered a fixed stone border to be erected from Carlisle across to Newcastle to mark the permanent northern frontier of Roman Britannia. Hadrian’s Wall, erected between the years 122 and 128, served a more defensive purpose than similar Roman walls erected elsewhere. Its purpose was to keep the mischievous Picts out, rather than providing Rome with a frontier outpost to keep its inhabitants in.

  Hadrian’s successor, Antoninus Pius, repented of Rome’s decision to abandon Caledonia and commissioned a new more northerly wall to be built between 139 and 144, signifying a fresh effort on his part to hold the Forth-Clyde isthmus. But in 154, in his late sixties, Maelchon—still a determined warrior and following in the footsteps of his father—mounted yet another Pict revolt against this northern encroachment. Again the Romans were forced south behind the wall of Hadrian.

  The great Caledonian commander was struck down in the effort, however, and died from the wounds. Representatives from every tribe of Pictland came to Rannoch to mourn with the Caledonii the loss of a mighty leader, whose reputation by this time exceeded even that of his father. The sons and daughters of Maelchon and Turenna, grandchildren of Foltlaig and the warrior-chieftainess Deargicca, were all mighty among their people, having inherited the best that these two Celtic strains of manhood and womanhood could give them.

  Fighting persisted on and off. But never could Roman forces subdue the Pict tribes. Maelchon had fitly inscribed the ancient stones, for indeed in their unity was found their strength against the empire. The Romans were driven out of the north for the final time in the early third century by the Maeatae, the Caledonii, and other tribes.

  By then, however, the various Pict clans no longer possessed Caledonia to themselves.

  From over the sea-channel to the west began to venture descendants of the Wanderer’s seafaring grandson, a people from northern Ireland, a land then known as Scotia, or Eirinn.

  Named for their homeland, these newcoming Scots voyaged freely across the north channel in the third and fourth centuries, into the nearly unpopulated west coast and islands of Britain’s northern mainland, and eventually built homes in the new region. By the late 400s, the various Scots settlements were well established. The Scots colony in Caledonia was called Dalriada.

  Nor were the Scottish descendants of Boatdweller the only people encroaching upon what had once been exclusively the domain of the Picts.

  When Rome’s worldwide empire crumbled at the end of the fourth century, its evacuating retreat suddenly made vast lands accessible for the occupation of yet more new peoples. Northern Britain was thus opened to the northward migration of another Celtic network of tribes from the southern west coast known as Britons.

  By this time, midway into the first millennium, the Pict tribes had gradually fused into one and become known by the name of their most powerful tribe—simply as Caledonians.

  All three tribal groups—the Caledonian Picts, the Scots from Eirinn, and the Britons from the south—were of Celtic blood, and spoke languages with common Celtic roots. All three now became the mutual inhabitants of the land north of Hadrian’s Roman wall, the land of Alba.

  By now the new religion of Christianity, which had become the dominant religion of Rome itself, was spreading into the islands of Roman Britannia. Unbelieving tribesmen provided a natural object for the sights of Christian missionaries. In the closing years of Roman rule, a Strathclyde native Briton called Ninian traveled to Rome, where he was consecrated a bishop in the Catholic church. Returning in the final years of the fourth century, he established a monastery at Whithorn, and from it he sent missionaries northward.

  It would remain, however, for the Scots from Ireland to bring a widespread evangelization to Caledonia. In the fifth century, St. Patrick brought the gospel to tribal Eirinn with remarkable success, and by the opening of the sixth century, Ireland had been predominantly converted to Catholicism. In the 540s, the first Christian missionaries journeyed from Ireland to the islands of Scottish Dalriada. Churches were established on Iona, Mull, and Tiree. Many of their monks and missionaries, however, died of a plague that swept the area in 548, before the missionary effort could be taken farther onshore.

  By the middle of the sixth century, memory of ancient Cruithne had nearly dropped away save for the most obscure of legends recalled by a few scattered bards. His name, however, survived in the Gaelic word for the Pict people, who were known as Cruithneach.

  The king of the northern Caledonians at that time, a certain Brude macMaelchon, rather than being called by the name of his blood father, chose to be known as “mac” or son of his second-century ancestor Maelchon, who was the son of Foltlaig, son of Gatheon, son by the generations of Cruithne, son of Taran, son by the generations of both Hunter and Mystic, sons of Wanderer’s Son . . . who was the only son of the Wanderer.

  10

  Springtime of Discovery

  One

  Andrew Trentham had been back in London a week or two.

  Spring had arrived. At least so the calendar indicated. Here and there could be seen hints confirming the fact. The ground in St. James’s and Regent’s Parks had thawed sufficiently to allow any number of early floral varieties to bloom. Many species of trees were budding out nicely. Kensington Gardens, though not yet approaching the glory it would display in May and June, was attracting more and mo
re birds and tourists daily.

  Andrew’s thoughts, however, were constantly of the north, and of the icy grip that, according to reports on the BBC and his telephone conversations with his parents, still held the land captive. At sight of the face of merry daffodil or delicate colorful crocus in Hyde Park, he immediately found himself wondering if any of the happy yellow heralds of spring or the tiny purple-and-white wonders on their slender juicy stalks had broken through the ground anywhere yet in the Scottish Highlands.

  Ever since his afternoon at Hadrian’s Wall, and with the tale of Foltlaig and Maelchon fresh in his consciousness, Andrew found himself thinking about leadership in new ways. How might their example, he wondered, enable him to step up more firmly to articulate a vision for leadership of his party?

  He located a small green-and-gold-embossed 1885 Routledge edition of Robert Burns in an antiquarian bookshop and had taken up the habit of going out for a long walk every morning with book in hand. Burns’ poetry gave him such a heightened appreciation for nature and the events of Scotland’s history.

  Many, varied, and rich were the discoveries made during those long, pleasurable hours before the day began—discoveries that took him at first to many of the small parks nearby in South Kensington and Chelsea, but eventually also to parks and lawns and wooded areas of London he never knew existed, and that carried him soaring on the words and songs and rhymes of the world’s poet-Bard.

  The day he returned from the north, refreshed and invigorated and feeling enthusiastic and equipped for the political battles at hand, he had begun arising earlier than had been his custom, usually between five o’clock and half past the hour, preparing a pot of tea—Mrs. Threlkeld did not arrive until seven o’clock—and then diving into his Burns or one of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels until the awakening of the day allowed him to bundle up and go outside.

  As the season advanced and the sun rose sooner and sooner, earlier became his walks, until they replaced the pot of tea as the morning’s first activity. He found himself easing into bed each night with anticipation already welling up for the morning’s excursion with Burns or Sir Walter—approaching each new place he might explore as an adventure.