This morning, however, she heard the yelling in the distance and was seized by a premonition of dread. She immediately began running toward her home. But the shouts and screams that continued were hideous, and before she was halfway back, she knew that something evil had come upon them. She dared not continue toward the village, but in her confusion, she knew not what else to do.
She stood for some minutes listening in horror, then took a few more tentative steps forward, tears already filling her eyes. She realized she was listening to the sounds of death. She thought she heard her mother’s voice.
All at once she seemed to come to herself. Genuine panic seized her. She glanced around.
The sentinels!
The image returned to her of Dallais and his father leaving the village together and talking quietly as they passed her and smiled. They had been going to the granite pillars.
All at once she was running toward the great stones as well, not realizing exactly why, but with an undefined sense of following the bard and his son, as if their memory would lead her to safety. She would hide there!
A minute later Breathran was scrambling down the incline beneath the shadow of the giant stones.
Eleven
Breathran crept into a tiny rock cave and lay still—for minutes . . . then hours.
Even after the screams of death had long faded, she heard occasional men’s voices in strange tongues and the tramping of many feet and evil-sounding laughter. Then time began to lose its meaning as sleep and wakefulness faded into a continuous dreamy blur.
A day passed—two days . . . four days. She grew weak, but dared not leave the tiny hole she had made for herself. Not even bird or rabbit or mouse came to comfort her.
The horrifying sounds she had heard paralyzed her into such shock that she became incapable of movement, incapable of thought. The only relief was sleep. But before many days had passed, even that sleep grew dangerous, for if she did not find sustenance soon, she would surely drift into that deeper sleep from which mortals never wake.
But suddenly Breathran did awake!
A sound had stirred her brain . . . closer than before. Footsteps!
Someone was near, right above her. She could tell from the sound that it was no beast.
A gasp escaped her parched throat. The murderers had returned. They were looking for her!
She could not help it . . . try as she might to keep silent. There in the darkness, Breathran began softly to whimper.
Twelve
Dallais, son of Donnchadh, and his cousin, Obtreidh, returned north to Steenbuaic with the northward advance of the Pict army some ten or twelve days after he had left the village.
Sensing a premonition of what he might find, Dallais left Eoganan’s force before daybreak of the final day’s journey. He ran the remaining twenty miles alone.
While he was yet far off, he knew that destruction had visited the settlement. He stopped on a hilltop to look down over the plateau sloping westward into the fertile valley of the Linn. No sounds of life rose anywhere. A sense of eerie desolation spread out before his gaze.
The King’s army was too late to save Steenbuaic from the sea pirates.
His father had known what was about to happen even as he set out. Dallais had been able to tell from the way he spoke.
Now tears filled his eyes as he gazed down toward the granite sentinels of the settlement. He knew it was vain to hope that human breath remained, for the Vikings’ methods of conquest were well known among his people. No longer would the giant stones signify life. Henceforth would these pillars mark the scene of butchery, rape, and murder.
He did not find his father among the bloated bodies that lay unburied in the village, nor did he search long. The corpses of mother and sisters lay outside their hut. His young brother’s body was inside. Dallais vomited at the sights and smells that assaulted his senses. He could not prevent hatred from rising within him.
Half the women of the settlement were rotting naked where they had been attacked. How shamefully had they been brutalized, then sliced apart as carrion for whatever prey might desire their remains. How long ago the slaughter had taken place he could not know exactly, probably three or four days.
Sobbing without shame, Dallais turned retching from the carnage. He ran some distance onto the plain and there threw himself on his face in mortal anguish. Never again would this place be home to any of the race of men. Innocent blood had spilled upon this ground . . . and loudly could the silent weeping of the heavens be heard.
An hour later—though he had lost all sense of time—Dallais forced himself to his feet. He walked back and climbed atop the highest of the giant boulders. He had played here as a child. Now he gazed southward into the distance to see whether his eyes could descry the approach of Eoganan’s host coming too late to save the settlement.
He saw nothing.
Suddenly a tiny sound came to his ear from below!
Could it be? . . . a human voice . . . the faintest whimper.
Dallais scampered from his high perch. Listening, he detected the sound again. It came from under the boulders!
He hurried down the sides of the ledge, squeezed through the narrow opening between the pillars and jumped the final several feet to the ground.
Another whimper sounded. Yes, there was a human form!
He rushed to it and stooped down in the darkened hideaway under the overhang of a granite slab. The huge rock leaned at an angle against the wall of rocky earth that created the depression in the plateau. Under it, hiding in the tiny cave only a short distance from where his father had buried the reliquary, lay the weak, terrified, dazed form of his cousin. Half dead from lack of water and nourishment, Breathran knew not whether it was day or night, or whether she was even still alive.
At his touch she started feebly, then turned a dreadful face toward him. She recognized her cousin and crawled, weeping with relief, into his arms. He lifted her off the ground.
He could tell that she was half dead. In other respects she seemed unharmed.
Dallais kissed her and stroked her hair, pressed her head gently against his chest, and whispered words of comfort into her ears to reawaken the will to live. Suddenly energized by the possibility of giving life in the midst of so much death, he set her down and fumbled for his skin of water. He initially gave her but a few sips. He could not hope to find much food. It was all his own stomach could endure to search for it among the ravaged homes and rotting bodies of the settlement. But the girl must have sustenance to live.
Within an hour he had put enough down her throat to begin the recuperation process. A few of her wits seemed to have returned. Still she had not spoken, but Dallais was confident she could hear and understand him.
“I must leave you,” he said tenderly.
Breathran’s face revealed no hint of response other than an imperceptible widening of the eyes.
“But I will return. I will not leave you for long.”
Again Dallais searched the distraught face for sign of comprehension.
“Do you understand?”
Breathran nodded feebly.
“You must remain in the protected hollow,” Dallais went on. “If you hear voices, you must creep back under the stone overhang and hide in the cave without a sound—do you understand?”
Again she nodded.
“When I come, I will call out your name.”
Breathran nodded.
“I will leave you food and water enough until I return. You must not leave the hollow.”
After a few more tender assurances, Dallais climbed back up the stones out of the hollow and onto the plateau.
By now was Eoganan’s approach visible. Dallais set out at a brisk run to meet the army, thinking what he should do. To tell the King of his niece might endanger her. Eoganan would bring her into the camp with the army. But if the battle which was surely coming went badly, Breathran would be left at the mercy of the same Viking marauders who had killed the rest of the vil
lage.
I must say nothing of her to the King, thought Dallais. She will be safer where she is.
If the battle went well, then he would tell the King of Breathran’s survival. Then she could return to the safety of Fortriu. For now he would report that the massacre at Steenbuaic had been complete and that the family of the King’s sister had all been killed. They must march straight to encounter the Vikings and come back to tend to their kinsmen later.
When he reached the army, Obtreidh greeted him warmly, but sensed the truth. The boy, younger by a year and a half, immediately set off in a run toward Steenbuaic, now only two or three miles away.
Dallais chased after him, overtook him quickly, and restrained him with a hand.
“No, Obtreidh,” he said, “you must not go.”
“I have to—I must find my father . . . my mother,” insisted his cousin.
“You must not.”
“I must see what I can do for them.”
Again he turned and ran off.
“Obtreidh!” cried Dallais after him. “Obtreidh . . . they are all dead!”
Thirteen
The army of Pict King Eoganan met the Viking force west of the mouth of the Linn.
The battle lasted but one day.
Pict scouts had vastly underestimated the number of longships that had come ashore in the short time since the children of Steenbuaic spotted the first two weeks earlier. A huge invading host of Danes had by now arrived. By the time the bloody confrontation was over, Eoganan, King of the Picts, would not have to worry about the worsening wound in his leg, for he lay dead along with almost five thousand of his ablest warriors.
The power of Pictland was broken.
Even before the fighting was over, Dallais, son of Donnchadh, had slipped into hiding in the thick forest which lay south of Linnmouth.
He was no coward. But what would his own death accomplish now, when there was another life to save? The King was dead. Most of the Pict army was dead. Those who remained were fleeing back to Fortriu.
As for Dallais, Fortriu was not his home. He had no family, no home left anywhere. There was but one glimmer of purpose that remained for him—and she lay vulnerable and alone where he had left her under the granite sentinels.
Dallais’s hand unconsciously went to his neck, where his fingers touched the silver chain his father had placed around it. He knew well enough what it meant—that this chain was the royal neckpiece of the ancient King of the Caledonii. He also knew that, with Eoganan now dead, he and Breathran were the only two remaining of that royal line. He knew to what claim his mother’s blood entitled him.
Yet none in Fortriu would know whether they were alive or dead, whether life yet breathed in them or whether their bodies were among the numberless slaughter.
Perhaps, he thought, fingering the ancient links, it is best that way.
Dallais knew this lush wood called Dorchadas, the place of mystery, like the back of his own hand. Many a day and night he had spent hunting in its shadowy depths. He would be protected here until today’s carnage was past. Tonight he would slip back to Steenbuaic to rescue Breathran. He would bring her here too, to the Dorchadas. Here they would be safe. Here he would nurse her back to strength.
When she was well and strong and thinking clearly, he would tell her what calamity had befallen Pictland—her own mother and father and two brothers, and her uncle the King. He would leave it to her whether she wanted him to take her to Fortriu to make known their royal claims.
Fourteen
843
Four years had now passed since the death of Alpin, King of the Scots. The year was 843.
Kenneth the Hardy, now known as the son of Alpin, or MacAlpin, had desired to take the life of the Pict King Eoganan by his own hand.
Unfortunately, that possibility never came. The Vikings had done it for him. So Kenneth intended to exact his revenge by taking his cousin’s throne instead.
The son of Alpin was now King over Dalriada. It had taken him two years to secure his hold on his father’s throne and another two to consolidate his power and raise an army. Kenneth was now confident he could overrun what was left of the Picts with little opposition.
The arrangements were complete. The army was assembled. And Kenneth, son of Alpin, was prepared to set off for Fortriu with the rising of tomorrow’s sun.
There were, to be sure, any number of his own Scots relations who might lay an equal claim to the Pict throne, not to mention dozens of Pict offspring who might squabble for a piece of it. Easily ten or a dozen Dalriadic earls had made noises about their connections to the Pict kingship.
Only when he had overrun Fortriu, therefore, and was in an unassailable position would he publicly lay claim to the Pict kingship.
The most important thing was to seize Fortriu while the Picts were without a King. Reports had come to Kenneth of several temporary leaders since Eoganan’s death, but no one had yet emerged to take the throne. If he waited too long, the Picts would no doubt install a pretender through some woman’s bloodline.
Now was the time to move. He must seize power quickly. There was word of a nephew or some such distant relation to the former King who had survived the Norse slaughter. Why he wasn’t already King, Kenneth didn’t know, but he wanted to take no chances. He would find the nephew and dispatch him later. At the same time, he would need to institute measures to insure that none of his own kinsmen ran him through with a sword to take the Scots throne he already held.
Morning came, and the army of Kenneth MacAlpin set out from the west. From Dunstaffnage in Argyll, where it had been taken in the century following Columba’s time, MacAlpin brought with him by cart the fabled Highland stone, hewn from one end of an ancient burial slab. Upon it a long line of Scots Kings had been crowned. Kenneth planned to use it soon for the first time in the coronation of a Pict King—MacAlpin himself.
The army of MacAlpin passed nearly unopposed through what remained of the territories formerly held by the Picts. A modest battle was fought at Fortriu. But the badly outnumbered Picts were not inclined to see what remained of their people wiped out, and soon surrendered.
The Scots force quickly occupied the settlement of Fortriu. Kenneth called a great assembly of his own conquering army and all the people of Fortriu. On the basis of being the great-grandson of King Eoganan’s great-grandmother Ealasaid, and thus by Pict matrilinear law the legal successor to the throne of his second cousin, Kenneth MacAlpin declared himself King of the Picts.
Few were inclined to contest MacAlpin’s claim. It was, after all, not without credibility. He was indisputably descended, through his mother Mor, his grandmother Moibeal, and his great-grandmother Ealasaid, of the Pict royal line.
Most of the Picts, furthermore, were weary of bloodshed. Since no strong chief had asserted himself from any of their own tribes since Eoganan’s death and the slaughter at the Linn, there was no stronger claim to the kingship.
MacAlpin therefore encountered little resistance to his claim.
The kingdoms of Dalriada and Fortriu now shared the same King.
Fifteen
The new joint King of the Picts and Scots summoned the important men from the kingdoms of Dalriada and Pictland to nearby Scone for a banquet.
He had taken control of the throne with a minimum of bloodshed. Now he must consolidate his power. What more fitting place to establish his new united kingship than here, at the center of the Pict kingdom?
Though only legends survived concerning the origins of the legendary Celtic stone he had brought from Dunstaffnage, the King of the Scots considered it sacred. Upon it for almost two centuries, since the enthronement of Aedan by Columba himself in 574, had the Dalriadic Kings been crowned and their dynasty perpetuated. Upon the same stone Kenneth now took his seat for coronation, symbolically uniting the kingdoms of the two Celtic strains that had grown long ago from the Wanderer’s seed.
The stone did not scream out as he sat down, as it was said to do for the rightfu
l ruler. Notwithstanding its silence, Kenneth declared himself King. Here at Scone the stone would remain to make Kings of his sons and grandsons after him.
Following the ceremony came a feast such as had never been held in Scone.
Word had gone out through Fortriu declaring an end of hostilities between the two peoples. The time had come, the edict said, for Picts and Scots to join and celebrate with one another their common heritage and their common King.
When great quantities of roasted boar had been consumed and the meal was well past, and when most of those present were more than half intoxicated with strong ale, MacAlpin stood to toast his own kingship and the future of a united land.
“Men of Dalriada and Fortriu,” he said, “many have been the struggles between our kingdoms. We have been enemies, but it is now time we look to the joining of our kingdoms in peace. We must together resist further onslaughts from the Norsemen—and the Angles and Britons from the south. Henceforth we shall be a single people. Caledonia of the Picts and Dalriada of the Scots shall henceforth be known as Alba—the kingdom of the north.”
He paused while his guests took in the information. The name was not new to any of those present—it had been used to refer to the northern territory for hundreds, if not thousands, of years—though the fact that MacAlpin had so unceremoniously done away with ancient Caledonia was of some concern to the older Pict men present. None spoke, however, for the King yet wore a huge double-edged sword at his side. Everyone knew well enough his skill in wielding it. And no one had forgotten that the former Pict King had killed MacAlpin’s own father. They would provide him no excuse to exact revenge.
In truth, Kenneth’s revenge was already nearly complete. The fact was, he was far less worried about a Pict challenge to his authority than about one from the Scots side. There had been grumblings and threats from many of his own kinsmen as he had prepared for the banquet, complaints about his bold move upon the throne. There were several, in fact, who considered their own claims to the Pict royal line as well founded as his. Most of these were present this afternoon, according to Kenneth’s cunning design.
An Ancient Strife Page 27