by Adam Roberts
He started down the corridor. The Xflora statues that ornamented this passageway had clearly been there for some time, the aliens inside certainly dead. But he knew he would find living specimens to release elsewhere on the ship. He only hoped he could unlock enough of them to make the fight interesting. It was the year of Galactic Empire 1389, the eightieth year of the reign of the Committee of Seven, now Five, on the Battleship School of Velocity 32 in grav-acceleration orbit around the blue dwarf Rousseau.
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~ * ~
And tomorrow and
Act I
The castle had been abandoned by almost all of its inhabitants. Its population, having decided there was little point in staying only to be slaughtered by the English army, crept out by ones and twos throughout the night, and made what peace they could with the enemy. Some even begged to join Malcolm’s troop, so as to be on the winning side in the morrow’s inevitable English victory. When Macbeth awoke, with only Seyton in attendance, he found his halls deserted, his battlements unguarded. ‘Let them fly!’ he blustered, striding up the stone stairs to survey the scene from the top of his tallest tower. ‘I bear a charmed life. I don’t need them!’
He looked down upon the investing force: a mass of humanity stretching as far as the eye could see. They had thrown down the boughs and branches taken from Birnam Wood, and now stood in serried ranks, their armour and their weapons glittering in the morning sunlight.
‘It looks bad, sir,’ said Seyton, in a miserable voice.
‘Nonsense!’ boomed Macbeth. ‘We cannot be defeated.’
‘But the charm, sir,’ said Seyton, cringing a little as if expecting Macbeth to strike him in his furious frustration. ‘Surely it has tricked you? It said you would never vanquished be, ‘til Great Birnam Wood should come to high Dunsinane Hill.’
‘Indeed it did,’ said Macbeth, with enormous self-satisfaction.
‘And we need but look, sir!’ said Seyton, indicating the host that lay spread before them. ‘Malcolm’s army has brought Birnam Wood hither!’
‘Seyton, Seyton, Seyton,’ said Macbeth, genially. He clasped his servant about the shoulders and gave the top of his head a little rub with the knuckles of his right hand. ‘You’ve got to pay more attention. The one crucial thing about magical prophecies is that they are enormously and pedantically precise. So: Malcolm’s army cut down a few boughs and carried them along to Dunsinane? That’s hardly the same thing as the forest moving! Ask yourself this ... if you were a mapmaker—’
‘Mapmaker,’ repeated Seyton nodding uncertainly.
‘—yes, if you were making a map - for the sake of argument, you know - you were making a map of Scotland, where would you put Birnam Wood? Over there on the distant hill. . .’ he pointed to the horizon where the blue-green forest still lay like a cloud against the horizon ‘. . . the location of the trunks and roots and most of the foliage? Or here at Dunsinane, where a few thousand branches and leaves have been carried?’
‘Um,’ said Seyton, tentatively offering his answer like a schoolchild before a stern schoolmaster, ‘the first one?’
‘Exactly! Birnham Wood is still on the hill. The prophecy has not been fulfilled. I am, accordingly, unworried.’
From below came the sound of repeated thuds. Malcolm’s sappers, in the unusual position of being able to work without resistance from castle-defenders, were knocking down the main gate with a large battering-ram. ‘Right,’ said Macbeth. ‘Better put on some armour. Not that I need it. More for the show of it than anything.’
With a great crash the gate gave way.
By the time he got downstairs, armoured and besworded, Macbeth’s main courtyard was filled with hundreds of English soldiers. At the front of this fierce crowd were Macduff and young Siward. Siward made a rush at Macbeth, hurrying up the stone stairway to engage the Scottish king. Macbeth chopped his head off with a single stroke of his sword.
The crowd in the courtyard hissed their disapproval.
Rather relishing the theatricality of it, Macbeth cried out: ‘Begone Macduff! You cannot kill me!’
The general hissing turned into a general laughing.
‘Do you boast so?’ said Macduff, cockily, throwing his sword from hand to hand and starting up the stairs. ‘We outnumber you, fiendish tyrant! Outnumber you considerably.’
‘What you’ve got to keep in mind,’ said Macbeth, ‘is that I bear a charmed life, actually, that must not yield to one of woman born.’
‘Ha!’ cried Macduff. ‘Ah! Ha! Well!’ He seemed very pleased with himself. ‘Despair thy charm,’ he said. ‘And let the angel that thou still hast served tell thee, Macduff - that’s me - was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped!’ He stuck his chest out.
‘Still born of woman, though, eh?’ Macbeth said.
The courtyard had fallen silent.
‘You what?’ said Macduff.
‘Born of woman nevertheless. Born - you. Woman - your mother.’
‘Ah no, but Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped. . .’
‘Yes, yes, caesarean section, named after Julius Caesar the Roman Emperor who was born via a surgical incision into the wall of the abdomen rather than through the birth canal,’ said Macbeth. ‘Yes, we all know about that. But it’s still a form of birth, isn’t it? You’re still born, and of woman.’
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘Yes, you were,’
Macduff brandished his sword, and roared defiance. Then he let the sword drop, and said: ‘Wasn’t.’
‘What would you call it then? Are you really asserting that being born by caesarean section is not being born?’
‘Um,’ said Macduff, a little confusedly. ‘Untimely ripped . . .’
‘I tell you what,’ said Macbeth. ‘Let’s pop along to the castle library, and look it up in a dictionary. That’ll decide the matter.’
‘Alright,’ said Macduff, brightening.
So they made their way to the library, stacked floor to ceiling with dusty folios and quartos and octavos; Macbeth and Macduff, trailing a mob of soldiery behind them. Macbeth pulled the Dictionarius from its resting place, plonked it on a desk and turned its heavy pages.
‘Here you go,’ said Macbeth, with his finger on the relevant definition. ‘ Sectura Caesaris - “form of birth in which the infant is delivered through an incision in the mother’s uterus and abdominal wall rather than the more conventional birth canal.” There you are - “a form of birth”. In other words: you are still born of woman, regardless of whatever obstetric interventions happened to be used at the birth. You might as well say that the use of forceps meant that you were no longer “born of woman”!’
‘Well . . .’ said Macduff, scratching his chin. ‘I suppose you’re right . . .’
‘Have at you!’ said Macbeth, standing back and raising his sword.
Twenty people had followed the two of them to the Library; and so it was that twenty people watched Macbeth and Macduff fight for about a minute and a half, clanging their swords together vehemently and grunting, until Macbeth swung a blow that Macduff failed to intercept. The blade cleaved his helm and split his head open. Macduff dropped to the floor dead.
‘Right,’ said Macbeth, cheerily. ‘Who’s next?’
~ * ~
Act II
It took Macbeth less than five minutes to cut his way through the soldiers in the library. No matter how they swung or stabbed, their swords always slid away from Macbeth’s body. It was, as one of them observed (just prior to having his leg severed with a lunging sword stroke, such that he fell and bled rapidly to death), the weirdest thing.
Macbeth, his armour smeared with blood, strode along the corridor and out into the courtyard. With a cheer the crowd there surged towards him; but he was not dismayed. It was, from his point of view, a simple matter to stand his ground hacking and chopping targets as they presented themselves. His assailants soon discovered that swords aimed how
soever accurately and forcefully would glide from his armour as if they had been merely glancing blows wielded infirmly. When a hundred had fallen and Macbeth was still unscathed, the heart rather went out of the advance party. A few tried upping the general mood of heroic battle by yelling war cries and running at Macbeth. Many more retreated precipitously through the main gate.
Macbeth followed them.
The carnage that ensued passed rapidly through various stages, being by turns astonishing, distressing, and, ultimately, frankly, rather boring. Wherever Macbeth walked his sword brought death to dozens. When its blade was too chipped to cut effectively, he simply threw it aside and picked up a sword from one of the many corpses he had created.
At the beginning of this Macbethian counterattack, Malcolm ordered a general charge. But from his vantage point on horseback on the hill, he realised - though he could scarcely credit it - that not one of the swords, maces, arrows or spears aimed at Macbeth was able to pierce his skin. His casualties began to mount up. He changed tactics, ordering a phalanx of men to press forward in the hopes of trampling or crushing the singleton enemy. But that was equally ineffective, and after two score men or more had been slain, the phalanx as a whole broke up. Malcolm issued another order for a general crush, and the entire army - tens of thousands of men - surrounded Macbeth and tried to press in. There followed a quarter of an hour of uncertain alarum. But Malcolm realised soon enough that a great circular wall of his own dead soldiers was being piled around Macbeth.
By the end of the day Macbeth had single-handedly killed over eight hundred men. This slaughter had tired him out, and he made his way back into the castle (which was, of course, wholly over-run by Malcolm’s soldiers) mounted the stairs to his chamber and went to sleep in his bed. ‘Now!’ cried Malcolm, when this news was relayed to him. ‘Kill him in his bed! Stab him! Smother him while he snores!’
But no matter how they tried, none of the men under Malcolm’s command were able to force the life out of the supine body of Macbeth. Blades skittered harmlessly off his skin. The pillow placed over his face, and even partially stuffed into his mouth, prevented him from breathing; but the lack of air in no way incommoded the sleeping man. They piled great stones on him, but no matter how great the weight, Macbeth’s body was uncrushable.
Finally dawn came and Macbeth awoke, yawning and stretching. After a little light breakfast of poisoned bread and adulterated kippers, neither malign substance having any effect upon him, he resumed killing. He took it easier on this second day, careful not to wear himself out; and accordingly he worked longer and more efficiently: by dusk he had killed over a thousand men. Malcolm’s army, hugely discouraged, was starting to melt away; deserters slinking back to Birnam Wood and away to the south.
On the third day Macbeth killed another thousand, along with Malcolm himself. After that it was a simple matter to either kill off or else chase away the remnants of the army, and by dusk of this day the battle was his.
It fell to Macbeth himself to clear away all the corpses. He had, after all, no servants - Seyton had been hanged from a gibbet on the first day’s battle. So, over a period of a week or so, he dug a large pit at the rear of the castle and dragged the thousands of bodies into it.
~ * ~
Act III
Life settled down a bit after that. He found that he didn’t need to eat; although he was still aware of hunger, and still capable of deriving sensual pleasure from good food. So he scavenged the nearby countryside, and occupied himself with wandering about the empty castle, cooking himself food, heating himself bath water, thinking, sleeping.
He pondered the charms that protected him, meditating the precise limits the witches had established. They had not, for instance, said that ‘no man of woman born can harm Macbeth’ (which would have left open the chance that a woman, or child, of woman born could kill him) - they had specified none of woman born. That seemed safe enough. The other charm was even more heartening: Macbeth shall never vanquished be, they had said, until Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him. Vanquished meant killed by an enemy; but it also, he reasoned, meant poisoned, killed by sickness, laid low by old age, or any of the consequences of mortal existence. Until the wood actually uprooted itself and travelled wholesale to his castle, none of these fates could befall him. That was indeed a powerful charm.
After three months, a second army came to besiege his castle. This time it was led by the English King Edward in person; and he brought with him, in addition to many soldiers, a huge assemblage of holy men, wizards, magi and people otherwise magically inclined who had promised to undo the charm that preserved Macbeth’s life.
Macbeth rather welcomed the distraction. Life had settled into quite a tedious rut.
He made sure, this time, to do all his killing outside the castle walls, so as not to leave himself the awkward job of clearing dead bodies out of his corridors, rooms and stairwells afterwards. And he took particular pleasure in slaughtering the magicians, most of whom were armed with nothing more than wands, books of spells and crucifixes. Macbeth found and killed King Edward himself on day four, but it took a whole week for the army as a whole to become discouraged. Eventually the force broke up and fled away, apart from a few hardened types who threw themselves at Macbeth’s feet and pledged allegiance to him as the Witch King of the North. He swore them into his service.
~ * ~
Act IV
Every now and again, over the ensuing hundred years or so, Macbeth would gather around him a band of followers - men either in awe of his magic immunity, or else simply men prepared to follow any figure in authority if the financial inducements were strong enough. But these groupings never added up to an army, and since none of the people who followed him were gifted with his invulnerability, they tended to get slaughtered in battle. His initial plan - to reclaim the throne of Scotland by war and by the sword - was, he realised eventually, not tenable. People feared him, and some few would do his will; but most shunned him, would not follow him. He found himself thoroughly isolated.
Eventually he stopped accumulating bands of followers, and struck out by himself.
He roamed about for many years, searching Scotland for the Witches in the hope of extracting from them some useful magical fillip that would enhance his fortunes. But they seemed to have departed the land. His search was fruitless. He returned to Dunsinane Castle to find that it had been claimed, in his absence, by the Thane of Aberdeen and his retinue. It didn’t take Macbeth long to kill off, or chase away, those interlopers.
For several decades, after this, he sat in his castle alone. The people in the local villages established a mode of uneasy coexistence with him: they brought him offerings of food, wine, books and whatever else he asked for; but they otherwise left him alone and went about their own business. Macbeth grew accustomed to the solitude, and even came to relish it. He had learnt to despise ordinary humanity, with their ridiculous fleshly vulnerability, their habit of dropping dead at the slightest scratch. He felt a scorn almost entirely unleavened by pity at the inevitability of their physical aging, decay and death. Indeed, he wondered why it was he had ever wanted to rule over such starveling creatures. It seemed to him he was no more than a butcher sitting on a throne, gathering his swine around him as courtiers. Mortal glory was no longer of interest to him.
The castle began to decay around him. He was forced to undertake repairs himself, single-handed; for no amount of rampaging around the local villages like a fairy-story ogre - no amount of railing and yelling - could persuade the villagers to help him in this enterprise. None of them were prepared to come and work as his servants, at even the highest pay. Rather, they fled away and took refuge in the hills until he had departed.
Increasingly reclusive, Macbeth devoted himself to gathering together and reading the world’s many books. Word spread of this mysterious hermit-laird (though by now most people had forgotten his name) who paid handsomely in gold for any book of cur
ious lore or magical promise. Book traders made their way to the castle, pocketed their fees, and hurried away again glad to escape unscathed. When Macbeth’s gold was exhausted, he strode out into the larger world and ransacked and robbed and extorted until his fortune was restored. He hoped, by accumulating the world’s largest library of magical arcana, and by decades of dedicated study, to master the same supernatural skills that the witches themselves had possessed. Why should he track down those wild women and beg them for favours, when he could command the magic himself?
But no matter how much he studied and practised, he developed no magical talent.
More than this, he realised that the charm had changed him. He decided to found a dynasty, reasoning that even if his children grew old and died he could still live as patriarch over his own grandchild, great-grandchildren, more distant descendants yet, and on into the abyss of future time. He could persuade no woman to marry him of course, but it was a simple matter to abduct likely-looking individuals from the locality. Yet no matter how long he kept them, and no matter what he did, not one of them became pregnant with his offspring. He realised that whatever it was that was acting upon his body to preserve it from death and harm was also preventing him from fathering children.