Montrose thought otherwise. With the help of Ian Lom who had come by the hill road of Glen Roy, and of stray cowherds, he was sure of finding a way across the mountains for his men, and even for the little bodyguard of horse under Lord Airlie, which carried the clarions to salute the King’s standard.
His men had been rested for two or three days and well fed, and so he told them, as he advised them to buckle in their belts and not hope for any food but the oatmeal they could carry, for that, mixed with water, was all the food they could have till they won back to Inverlochy – and no later, he promised them, than tomorrow evening. He himself had no more, nor had William Wallace three and a half centuries ago, when he and his handful of men had set out on their shaggy ponies to conquer the huge chivalry of England.
His way through the mountains was a rough one; it started in the river bed of the Tarff, which led them for some miles up into the hills. The winter’s morning was still black as they plunged into that icy shallow running water, and began to splash their way up among the rocks. The few horses had to be led.
Johnnie felt as though his feet were being sawn off, then all feeling left them, so that he did not know how he moved – he stumbled, slipped – shouted with laughter, as old Colkitto, his beard glimmering in the darkness, gripped him by the shoulder and saved him from falling full length in one of the pools that lay like black pits among the tumbling white foam.
The hills towered over them, grey monsters, scarcely to be distinguished from the sky; but that was every minute growing paler, and then came a shaft of red through the blackest clouds, and suddenly the whole vast scene took shape and colour round them. There they were, struggling out of the course of the stream in the growing light, to see the dawn come up behind the Monadhliath mountains.
The raw wind came down their sides, and cut at Johnnie’s wet legs, but little he cared with them roughened already to a surface like leather. Rawhide brogues, cut from the fresh untanned skin of cattle with all its hair on, bound with leather thongs and pierced with holes to let the water run through, those were the shoes for this journeying. He wore a kilted plaid like the meanest of Alasdair’s kerns, and a sheepskin coat with the wool turned inside for warmth and so protected by its natural grease that in the heaviest rain or snow his shoulders remained dry inside it. In no other clothes could one move so freely over mountains that any Lowlander would have called impassable.
He could not ride, for not only did the cold then strike more deadly, moving as slowly as all had to do, but it was the most difficult part of the work to get the horses over those precipitous slopes, all slippery with ice; and more than once it was thought they would have to be left behind. The springing ease of Alasdair’s great wolf-hound, leaping and trotting his happy way over the most difficult ground, was an insult to the clumsy, panting efforts of every other beast, with four legs or two.
The wide surfaces of rock were no harder nor smoother than the bare stretches of bent, shining white with frost. The alternative was generally to wade knee-deep through snow – and they were lucky it was not worse. A snowstorm or thick mist might have wiped out the little army altogether, driving it blindfold into some vast drift. But the hillside lay clear in the faint sunlight of the easterly wind that turned all colours pale and grey. Across a further slope went, in a long, lolloping trot, the dark shapes of some beasts that they knew to be wolves.
They could not stop to rest that night, nor could they make a fire that might warn some possible distant scout of their whereabouts.
Down by a frozen stream in a deep hollow, they passed through a strip of scrub and stunted trees; their topmost branches made a pattern like the hands of skeletons against the frosty evening sky; a few dead leaves still clung below, making a dry, rustling, hushing noise as they passed through – a noise so faint that it made Johnnie suddenly aware of the silence all round them.
One of the men killed a roe buck with an arrow from his long bow; in an instant, a hurried, hungry cluster of men had gathered round it, cut and colloped it asunder, and fallen on its raw flesh.
‘Here’s a juicy bit for my young Lord Graham.’ Johnnie tried to share his bleeding morsel with his father, who refused to lessen the rations; and the boy, sick at first taste of the warm tough flesh, without salt, soon devoured it all greedily.
The raw meat gave him new strength; he stumbled on through the growing darkness, saw the full moon swim out above the mountains, giving light enough to the tried mountainy men to distinguish among the varying blacknesses of the moor.
He heard the long howl of a wolf rise lamentably through the night at sight of such strangers as had never before ventured into these wastes. He saw the army before and behind him, streeling out in a black dotted line across the glistening icy slope of the mountain.
Each breath he drew was so cold that it hurt; he seemed to have no breath left; he staggered forward and would have fallen, but for his father’s hand.
‘The lad is nearly spent,’ Montrose said in a troubled voice to Alasdair as he came up to them; and for answer Alasdair hoisted Lord Graham upon his back, winding his plaid tight round and round them both, so as to warm him and hold him fast.
It was no use for Johnnie to protest that at fourteen he was a grown man, and ‘quite as tall as some of our men’. He was carried in turn by Alasdair’s biggest Highlanders, their warmth against him keeping him snug, where he would have frozen on horseback.
‘This is I, Johnnie Graham,’ he told himself incredulously, as the warmth stole into his numbed brain and made it for a few minutes unnaturally aware. Less than six months ago he had been doing lessons at Kinnaird and Old Montrose with his little brother under Master Forrett; and now he was riding on the backs of giants, to follow his father’s campaign through country where no armed men had ever dared pass before.
No one but his father could make them do it – he saw him moving, now forward, now back, among all that endlessly straggling column, walking beside them, cheering them on by telling them that in less than twenty-four hours now they would have reached their goal – and then they would smash the sons of Diarmaid once more, this time for ever. Johnnie could see the men stepping out with more pride and courage when his father had spoken to them.
And then Montrose came back to where his son rode on the back of one of Alasdair’s kerns, and put his hand on Johnnie’s arm, and told him that he had kept up with them magnificently, and that in less than two days he should be taking his ease in a castle. The boy looked sideways at him, his face, drawn with fatigue, pressed against the broad shoulder in front of him.
‘I don’t want to rest in a castle,’ he said, ‘I wish we could go on like this for ever.’
Montrose looked at him in anxiety; he thought his son’s eyes very bright in the moonlight – was that only the moonlight, or a touch of fever?
Cold and white as a corpse, the second dawn came over that desert place, and now it was the first of February. They were at Roy Bridge, not more than nine miles from Inverlochy, if they could have gone direct, but they had to keep hidden among the hills.
They were now on the slopes of the mountains round Ben Nevis, the highest in Britain. The Campbells had sent out no scouts over the wilderness they had been crossing, no commander could have thought that necessary – but now there was a constant danger that they might meet some advanced patrol. And so they did, not long after fording the Spean, a swollen, roaring torrent that reached their middles – when they clashed full into a foraying party of Argyll’s.
‘Be it so! From that foray they never returned!’ sang Ian Lorn Macdonald, as they proceeded on their way. For not one man of that band did they leave alive to run and tell Argyll that he had seen the whole of the King’s army in Scotland – a scattered column amounting to no more than fifteen hundred, struggling across the frozen mountains with the footsore, stumbling tread of desperately weary men – gaunt, shaggy, ‘raw-footed’ men in sheepskins and rough plaids that had been drenched in the Spean – their eyes raven
ous, and red with lack of sleep – a pack of hungry wolves in the stinking garb of wet sheep.
On they clambered their way among the hills, until, as the evening sky reddened in frost again, they came up over the lower slope of Ben Nevis that looks down upon Inverlochy, Montrose was in the advance guard; it was not till eight o’clock that the rest of his exhausted army had come up with him.
Down below lay the Castle of Inverlochy, and round about it the camp of the Campbells, three thousand strong. They must have seen some of the column come over the shoulder of the lower slope but they can have had no idea that it was anything more than a foraying party of raiders from some hostile clan, who would not dare attack the full force of the Clan Campbell.
Montrose knew that his men were finished for the time being; they must have sleep before they attacked. Supper they could not have, except the last few grains of their oatmeal, mixed with water into a paste, and eaten on the points of their knives for lack of spoons. This he too ate, walking among them as he did so, and telling them of the good red beef and wheaten bread that would break their fast tomorrow down in that plain below, when they had beaten their enemies.
They looked down on that plain, clear in the moonlight, and laughed at sight of the huge camp, as active and stirring as a disturbed ant-heap, with tiny black figures scurrying here and there.
Beyond the dark towers of the Castle, in the narrow strip of moonlit water that was Loch Linnhe, lay a galley, with lights on board, and now more lights were seen being carried by figures that came down from the Castle and went on board. The men above wondered and joked as to what this might be.
‘Is it the Galley of Lome?’ Johnnie hazarded. ‘It is well for Argyll he has it on his coat of arms – there he is sailing away from the battle again!’
Whatever it were, the enemy were evidently taking no chances but were busying themselves with preparations, whoever the rash intruders above might be.
‘They will know soon enough tomorrow morning,’ said Montrose, ‘when they hear the clarions salute the King’s Standard.’
A childish love of ceremony and vain show, so Montrose’s detractors argued, for starving men to plant that standard on a desert slope, and blow trumpets before it, as if on parade before a king.
‘Montrose’s whimsies’ – banners and clarions and blue bonnets and even wisps of oats flaunted as a panache – he had a boyish gusto in doing these things with a high, gallant air. He never lost all such instincts of a child; and there was a value in this youth and gay courage – and not only to such wild and simple men as he was leading. It had been well worth it to drag those trumpets across the mountains on the backs of his frightened horses, as they slid and stumbled across the slopes, and plunged and splashed through the torrents – worth it for the effect they would have, not only on his own men, but on his enemies.
He sent out pickets and gave the order for rest. The men fell in heaps on the frosted heather, lying as close as a litter of puppies, with their plaids wound tightly round them; and were asleep as they fell. He himself felt as yet no inclination to sleep. He had just achieved one of the most amazing flank marches in all history. He had led fifteen hundred men and a body of horse, without food and without rest, for thirty-six hours, and scaled the inaccessible mountains of Lochaber in midwinter.
No need now for rhymes to come into his head. At last he was living his poems, as even he had not dared dream them. There is a drunkenness of emptiness as well as of fulness. Exhaustion, cold, and extreme hunger, when mingled with achievement and hope, can go to the head like iced wine; and on this wine Montrose was drunk, as he stood on Ben Nevis, unconscious of the pain of his aching body.
Chapter Seventeen
Johnnie’s joke had been truth; the torches carried by men going towards the galley had flickered on a tall, stooping figure in the centre of a little group who hesitated now and then in his rather halting walk, as though uncertain of his course. Their ruddy light leaped from side to side while the light of the moon shone steadily down on the pale, doubtful face of the Marquis of Argyll. Sometimes he stopped altogether, and seemed about to turn back; but when he did this, his companions closed round him, arguing and urging him on, arid one or other would take his arm (the sound one, for the other was still in a sling) and almost drag him along with them.
These men were the present representatives of Argyll’s travelling committee from the Committee of Estates – Mr Mungo Law, an Edinburgh minister, an Edinburgh bailie, the Laird of Niddrie, and Sir James Rollock, his brother-in-law, who had once been that to Montrose. Said these men to their uncertain and unhappy chief:
‘There will be no battle – if anything, it will be only a skirmish with a horde of cattle raiders – and would you perhaps throw away your life in such a wretched business?’
‘Your lordship cannot fight with an arm in a sling.’
‘I can command,’ said a faint voice.
‘You can send Auchinbreck your commands from the galley. He is a tried soldier, and he is in command.’
‘Your lordship is the chief support of the Covenant. Your life is invaluable, we will not allow you to risk it.’
But something propelled him on board the Dubhlinnseach (the ‘Black-sailed’), stronger than all their words, stronger even than their blessedly comforting actions, which made him believe that he was being forced unwillingly to go, in spite of his resistance. And that was a prophecy made by the ‘old fox’, Alan Macildowie of Lochaber, the man most gifted with the second-sight in all the Clan Campbell, who had seen that a battle would be lost at Inverlochy ‘by them that came first to such battle’.
Argyll, for all his legal and theological training, had his natural share of Highland superstition. It had been for that reason that he had chosen a marquisate as his honour on the King’s last visit to Scotland, for it had been foretold that a squinting and red-haired Campbell would be the last Earl of Argyll – and here was a cunning way to circumvent the inexorable workings of fate. Now there was no way to circumvent them except by escape. If a battle were to be lost at Inverlochy by his clan, at least let it not include the loss of its chief.
They should never have chosen the black-sailed galley to bring him here up Loch Linnhe – he had thought she looked like a bird of ill-omen. They should never have risked stopping here at all; he had told Auchinbreck so, and now told him so again in half a dozen messages from his galley.
He must strike camp first thing in the morning, and push on north through the Great Glen, and join forces with Seaforth as soon as possible, and smash Montrose between them. And would he send back a written message in his own hand to tell what he had discovered of that mysterious force of men seen on the slopes of Ben Nevis?
Auchinbreck, pestered and inclined to be sullen, had discovered nothing of them. He had sent out scouts, and there had been some slight skirmishes with their outposts, in which his men were certain they had killed at least one of the intruders, but nothing more could be discovered of their nature but that they were Highlanders. It was impossible to attack in any large force up the sheer side of the mountain in the middle of the night, and they must wait till the morning.
So they waited till the dawn, and now it was Candlemas, February 2nd, the day for taking down one’s Christmas decorations. Argyll unwillingly remembered the heathenish old customs in his father’s house, as he came shivering up into the raw air on deck. He had not slept all night, so anxious had he been to see what the morning would disclose.
Loch Eil showed first that the morning had come – the glimmer and then the white gleam of the narrow water, lying like a drawn sword beneath the mountains. They gradually reared their black shapes among the black clouds. The white sword was drawn across the sky, followed by a bar of flame. The clouds rolled past in the wind of the upper air, catching the fury of the sunrise, and now showed the topmost peaks, turned to fire.
As the waters of the loch began to burn red, there rose from the side of Ben Nevis the ringing call of a clarion. This was
no battle music of raiding kerns, but the trumpets of the King’s army, saluting the King’s Standard. From the highest mountain in the three kingdoms, they pealed forth their royal salute into the white and scarlet air.
Sons of dogs, come, and I will give you flesh.
Not even that barbaric pibroch from the Cameron pipers on the mountain side, now tingling and dancing down the wind, could strike such terror into the hearts of their foes as did that formal blast of trumpets.
‘Montrose himself is up there—’
‘Montrose is upon us—’
Like flame through a cornfield, and as destructive, the word rushed through the camp in the plain.
Their chieftain, in his galley of the mourning sails, knew for certain at the first blast what he had dreaded all that night – his arch enemy was upon him.
How should he ever look his son in the face again, if he fled from this fight too? A bitter envy fell on him of Montrose, whose son fought by his side.
The certainty of his fears drove him beyond panic into despair; he besought his committee to let him go on shore again, and lead his clan to defeat and death – ‘since that is all that God will ever allow me to do.’
But his committee would not allow him to do any such thing. Instead, they ordered the seamen to stand by in readiness, and the moment they saw any signs of the battle going against them, they were instantly to haul up the anchor and the black sails of the Dubhlinnseach, and make down the loch for the sea.
‘We expect defeat, and therefore we get it,’ groaned Argyll.
Oh for one impulse as clear and burning as the peal of a clarion, that should call his tortured soul out of its prison and set it free to know what it wished, and to do it!
Chapter Eighteen
Inverlochy in Lochaber,
3 February 1645
The Proud Servant Page 39