Master of Shadows

by Neil Oliver

  ‘Of a sort,’ he had said. ‘Some of his people call him Righ Innse Gall – King of the Isles. Others – MacDonald himself, I think – prefer Dominus Insularum – which means Lord of the Isles in the language of the Romans.’

  Softly he began to sing a sweet dirge of a song:

  Do Mhac Domnhaill na ndearc mall

  Mo an tiodhlagudh na dtugam,

  An corn gemadh aisgidh oir,

  A n-aisgthir orm ’n-a onoir.

  Ce a-ta I n-aisgidh mar budh eadh

  Agam o onchoin Gaoidheal,

  Ni liom do-chuaidh an cornsa:

  Fuair da choinn mo chumonnsa.

  To MacDonald of the stately eyes

  Is the gift of what I am giving,

  Greater than the cup – though a gift of gold –

  In honour of what to me is given.

  Though I got this cup free, as it were,

  From the wolf of the Gaels,

  It does not seem that way to me:

  He received my love as payment.

  He smiled at her, reached out and patted her knee with his rough hand.

  ‘My love,’ he said.

  They were seated together, father and daughter, in a finely appointed room in a grey stone tower house three storeys tall. One wall was dominated by a great smoke-blackened fireplace in which a veritable forest of pine logs lay blazing and crackling. On the other three were large tapestries depicting scenes of hunting – men on horseback flanked by lean and shaggy long-legged dogs that looked to her like wolves. The window seat they sat upon was plump with horsehair, upholstered with soft fabrics that were blue like a summer sky and golden like the sun. For all the intensity of the flames, the room felt cold to her, and she shuddered.

  ‘If this lord is so important, why are there no battlements – no walls or stockades to protect him?’ she asked.

  It was true what she said. There were several fine buildings at Finlaggan, the work of skilled craftsmen, but none seemed constructed with defence in mind.

  ‘Alexander MacDonald has no need of such,’ said her father. ‘None threatens him here. He has more than one hundred warships at his command, and ten thousand fighting men. I’d say he might indeed call himself a king, if he so wished.’

  She nodded at the numbers, impressed. There was the sound of someone heavy-footed approaching along the hallway outside, and into the open doorway stepped Douglas, wrapped as always in a great bundle of woollen plaid belted at the waist. Though she had not said so, not even to her father, she thought he looked like an upended unmade bed.

  ‘It is time,’ he said. ‘The Dewar.’

  They stood and walked smartly out of the room, without another word spoken, behind the bulky figure of her father’s friend. The pair had fought side by side, this much she knew.

  They descended a tight corkscrew of triangular stone steps that made her dizzy, and emerged from a narrow doorway in the semicircular outer wall of a tower into a courtyard of grey flagstones. Smoke from many fires hung in the damp air. A few dogs, of the same sort she had seen pictured on the wall hangings, loped around the perimeter in search of scents and scraps. When one passed close enough to touch, she noticed it smelt damp and smoky too, like everything else. A gaggle of people, men and women, were milling about, or talking quietly in huddles, but as she stood breathing the cold air and waiting for the world to stop spinning, she felt all eyes turn towards her and silence fell.

  The man who came towards them then wore the plaid as well, but with more panache than big Douglas. His long hair had been black once but was now mostly silver-grey and worn loose to his shoulders. He was bearded and handsome, and not for the first time it occurred to her that he had the look of one of the wolfish hunting dogs that patrolled the place.

  He was Alexander MacDonald, Alexander of Islay, Lord of the Isles. She had seen her father talking to him more than once in the days that had passed since their arrival, judged that there was some history between them too, of the sort that was written in battle.

  ‘Let us see then what the Dewar makes of you,’ said MacDonald.

  He stopped a few paces in front of her and held out his arm. She reached for him uncertainly, as though to take his hand, but she had misunderstood his actions and he merely gestured towards the open door of a small building, a chapel on the far side of the courtyard. She looked at her father and he smiled and nodded, so that she felt it was safe to proceed.

  The interior of the little stone building was dark, lit only by two lamps upon a stone altar. The orange lights offered mere smudges of illumination, and she waited in the doorway while her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Kneeling before the altar, at prayer, was a stooped figure in a dark woollen robe. At the sound of her arrival, the figure stood, with some difficulty, and turned to face her.

  It was an elderly man, his long face thin and deeply creased, his blue eyes watery like melting ice and his arms and legs seeming no thicker than the rope tied around his waist. In his right hand he held a staff taller than himself and with a curved headpiece, like that of a shepherd but delicately gilded and decorated and gleaming darkly under the influence of the lamplight. His face was kindly, and as he stepped towards her he spoke to her in her own language.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Sit with me and let me look at you.’

  They crossed together to a wooden bench against one wall of the chapel, the only other furniture. She stood and waited for him to sit, before joining him, at what she considered a respectful distance. He looked at her for what seemed ages but his unblinking gaze did not make her uncomfortable.

  ‘They tell me you have spoken of angels,’ he said.

  She turned away from him, blushing.

  ‘That is no small thing,’ he said. ‘Is it true?’

  It broke her heart to think about what she had seen in her father’s garden back home, and her throat burned and tears formed at the corners of her eyes and began rolling down her cheeks. The emotion surprised her, embarrassed her, and she said nothing to the Dewar but only nodded, her hands neatly folded in her lap as her mother had taught her.

  ‘Why do you cry, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Because … I …’ Her voice cracked and broke, and she stopped.

  ‘Go on, child,’ he said.

  ‘I … do not think I will ever see them again,’ she said. ‘And I miss them.’

  She was suddenly afraid that he would ask her what everyone else had asked – what they looked like. She feared the question because in truth she had no recall of their appearance whatsoever. All she remembered, apart from their words, was light, and the smell of them, like clean air after a lightning storm. She raised her hands to her face as though she might find there a trace of the scent. Instead she smelled only woodsmoke and cold, and she rubbed her tears and her nose, which had started to run. She wished with all her heart that she had remembered to carry a handkerchief.

  She waited for more questions, the inevitable interrogation. The single most extraordinary event of her life and yet recalling the detail was like trying to remember the shape of light, or describing how it felt to be loved. He asked nothing more, however, just sat beside her looking at her profile as a salty tear ran down her nose to the tip, before dripping on to the back of her hand.

  ‘The Angel Michael told me I would fight for a prince and see him made king,’ she said.

  The thought had come unbidden to her lips and surprised her as much as it did the Dewar. She looked up into his face and he smiled, his head cocked to one side so that for a moment he reminded her of a curious old hound dog.

  He was the Dewar of the Coigreach – the keeper of the staff of St Fillan, who had come from Ireland seven centuries before and who had cured the sick. When a wolf killed the ox that was helping him build his church, Fillan had spoken to the beast and taught it the error of its ways, and had had it labour beside him as his beast of burden instead.

  The Dewar looked at the girl and wondered what she would say if she could read his thoughts at th
at moment. His faith was the elder faith, the first, older by lifetimes than that of the Romans and their Pope. He bore an ancient burden, and after many long years spent wandering among his flock he had learned many things. Now they brought this child before him and asked that he judge her. He and he alone would know if she was touched by grace or by madness.

  But he did not know and could not know. He prayed every day of his life to hear the word of God and never yet had. Not once. He had known hunger, cold and loneliness, and watched the road stretch ahead of him without end. He had sought blessings for newborns and heaven for the dead. He looked at the girl and saw only the tear-stained face of a child, and knew that he was tired and that he wanted to set aside his burden and sit by a fire. But he also felt the holy air above him and around him, filling the chapel and pressing down upon his head and shoulders, heavy with years.

  ‘How is it that you know how to fight?’ he asked. ‘Just a girl.’

  His question surprised her and she thought for a moment, sensing a trap. She found none, but remained cautious just the same.

  ‘My father leads the militia in our village,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘I have always been around men practising their drills, wielding swords.’

  The Dewar looked at her anew, noticed that her shoulders were broad for a girl and that she carried herself well, inhabiting her space with confidence and without a hint of shyness.

  ‘They say you are … especially skilful,’ he said.

  She shrugged again and was briefly aware that her actions might seem rehearsed.

  ‘It comes easily to me,’ she said. ‘Tools do the work for you, if you let them, my father says.’

  She closed her eyes and thought about that day in the garden when she had been pulling weeds from among the tomato plants. She had smelled that sweet, clean smell and breathed deep and looked around and there they were – Michael, Margaret and Catherine. They were lovely, she remembered that much, and when she had raised her arm in a greeting, the air between her and them had shimmered, or rather it had rippled as though the space had been made of water and she had disturbed its surface. She tried to remember the sounds of their voices but they were gone from her entirely.

  ‘All the way back to God,’ she said.

  She had not meant to give voice to the thought and she blushed and clapped her hands over her mouth.

  ‘There is no shame in it, child,’ said the Dewar, and he reached for her and lightly touched her arm.

  ‘Sit here with me a while,’ he said. ‘Just you and me – before I give you back to them.’

  When at last they stood and walked towards the damp, unwelcoming light of the world outside the chapel, he sent her ahead of him and walked reverently behind. When she emerged alone, there was a brief silence and then cheering.

  22

  The ground rose sharply and they had to dig their heels into their horses’ flanks to keep them moving forward. The air around and above them was thick and heavy, like blame, and Lẽna felt that even time was slowing, turning to treacle. Jamie, Shug and the other of the younger men – the silent one whose name she had still not deciphered – were quicker off the mark and put some distance between the other two in their bid to reach the high ground. Some hundreds of yards ahead, silhouetted by moonlight against a monstrous storm cloud, Lẽna made out the shape of a rocky outcrop. For an instant she mistook it for a ruined building, before realising it was a natural formation.

  A few spots of rain were falling now, plump outriders of a downpour to come, and the rocks on the hill’s summit offered the only obvious prospect of shelter. The leader cracked the long leads down on to her horse’s back from behind her, and the animal whinnied in protest and bolted forward.

  Lẽna was rocked backwards in her saddle but gripped tight with her knees and used her stomach muscles to pull herself upright. In his eagerness to reach the rocks before the storm proper, the leader beat his mount’s sides until it was first alongside Lẽna’s and then slightly ahead. He was still holding the reins and still nominally in control, but no longer watching her as closely as before.

  Lẽna had thought of little but her old war wound for the past two hours. The arrowhead had pierced her shoulder front and back, the shaft passing beneath her right collarbone. The surgeon had afterwards found it straightforward enough to snip through the wood of the shaft with a great pair of shears, before pulling it out of the wound. There had been bleeding and pain but nothing compared to the exquisite agony of having her dislocated shoulder reset. They had given her a leather strap to bite on, and when the bonesetter jerked her arm and popped the ball joint back into its socket, with a crack like a slammed drawer, she nipped the thing cleanly in two with her teeth.

  Her French countrymen called her the hero of Orleans ever after, and a portent of final victory over the invader.

  Fired by the sight of the banner borne by the maiden, they had pressed the English all the harder, until the squatters fled from their trenches and redoubts and the siege was lifted. She had been something clean – something honest. Into a war of sullied men and tainted politics she had arrived from nowhere like a blade freshly forged and mill-sharpened. That she knew the ways of the warrior had been beyond question. They had all of them, at one time or another, seen her stand and fight, cleaving the shield walls and harvesting her foes like wheat. But she came with more – with the strength of angels in her limbs and the very word of God upon her tongue.

  Hugh Moray had taken her on to his horse and galloped through the city gates. Within the walls of the relieved city her wounds had been dressed, the arm and shoulder strapped, and then time had done almost all else that was required. The joint, however, had been altered for ever, and while the muscles, tendons and ligaments had adjusted to their new positions, there was always a little … slack.

  The years spent working in the forest with axe and hammer had given her new strength, but still there was play around the joint. She found, by accident the first time, while trying to reposition a wagonload of logs, that what had been dislocated once was a little more inclined to dislocate again. Having learned the action required to free ball from socket – and the opposite move to put them back together – she had found it equally painful every time thereafter. But pain could be borne, while other indignities and sufferings could not.

  Jamie had applied the second binding himself, but while he had been careful to pull it tight, knot-tying was evidently a skill he lacked. As she rose and fell in the saddle, so her arms had applied rhythmic pressure to the ropes and to the knots holding them. She had been oblivious at first, her mind on Patrick Grant and Robert Jardine and the objectives of the nameless leader of their little company. But then an unmistakable sensation had captured her attention: the tightness around her arms and shoulders had lessened. It was not as though her bindings had come anything like loose enough that she might shake her arms free, but they had loosened nonetheless. It was beholden upon her now to take advantage of the situation.

  As her horse pressed on up the rise, she twisted her right shoulder, with all of her might, against the tension of the rope holding her arms in place across her back, and felt the always sickening pop of dislocation. As her arm flopped downwards, so too did the loops around her elbows. While the horses continued uphill, and the leader kept his attention on the way ahead, she shrugged the slackened bindings down her forearms and over her wrists and hands. Knowing only too well what had to happen next, she raised her left foot out of the stirrup and flung her leg over her horse’s back. With her right foot freed as well, she dropped to the ground. Landing on her feet, she allowed the momentum to throw her forward. She took the impact on her dislocated shoulder and grunted as the joint was forced back into place.

  Sensing chaotic movement behind him and then hearing the sound of a fall, Angus Armstrong looked back and saw the woman sprawled on the hillside. Her horse had continued to trot on without her and he pulled on its reins and those of his own to bring both to a halt. He
dismounted and ran back, momentarily disregarding any risk of approaching her unarmed, trussed as she was and now face down in the grass.

  He reached her and rolled her on to her back. Her eyes were open, but although she looked stunned, she seemed otherwise uninjured. He helped her rise to her knees, her arms still behind her back.

  They were both on their knees and facing the tor when a burst of sheet lightning turned the sky bright as day. On a ledge of granite high above them stood a fragile figure clad in a dazzling white shift. Her face was upturned to the heavens, her arms raised in an attitude of prayer.

  23

  Another cramp gripped Crista’s body, but not as strongly as before. As it eased, the fist in her gut unclenching, she felt a flow of warmth between her legs. The darkness that had enveloped her, shrouded her, was torn aside by a burst of blinding white light. It flickered and pulsed, its intensity rising and falling, so that it seemed to shimmer, as a third peal of thunder, the loudest yet, rolled over the world like the wrath of an angry God. She blinked, dazzled and momentarily blinded, and then, feeling a second rush of wetness, looked down to see that the front of her nightdress was dark with blood. It was pooling around her feet, and she craned her neck to check the backs of her thighs and saw more there.

  From her position on the slope below, Lẽna stared at the vision that seemed to glow as though lit from within. All in an instant she felt her heart flood with a love she thought had left her long ago, and for ever.

  The rain fell and her heart beat fast, and as she stared at the vision … the vision met her gaze. Filled with sudden ecstasy, she felt she was a girl once more, the girl she had been, the girl who had led an army to victory and who had stood with the dauphin, her hand in his, in the moments before he stepped forward and dropped to his knees and the crown was placed upon his head.