Bonnie Dundee (27 page)

Tam wiped the blood from his lips, as gently as any lassie could have done; and as gently laid him down.

There was a long, long stillness. Even the wind seemed to die away into the heather and the thin moorland grasses. It was Keppoch of all men, ‘Coll of the
Cows’ as Claverhouse had called him, who broke it, wiping his eyes and nose on the red-haired back of his hand. ‘
Iain Dhub Nan Cath
,’ he said, ‘Black John of the Battles; we’ll not be following his like again; and there’s something of ourselves that he’s taken with him, the night.’

LITTLE BY LITTLE
the sounds of the pursuit died into the night, and the Highlanders came trickling back, to be met by the sorest news that ever met men returning from battle with the hot sweet taste of victory in their mouths. Strangers there were in the torchlight, too; chiefs of the clans that had come in to the muster since we left Blair, and followed on, too late to draw sword in the battle.

Below on the slope, where the dead lay tumbled among the birken trees, men were using their broadswords for another purpose, hacking down saplings and whippy branches to make a rough litter for carrying Claverhouse back to Blair. The leaves were still on the branches; small bright spangles of leaves in the torchlight when they set it down and lifted him on to it. They had buckled on his breastplate again by then, to cover the hole in his side and make all decent, and folded a couple of plaids about him, laying the folds back from his face to leave it bare.

Six of us, of his own troop, lifted him on our shoulders, and the rest followed, leading our horses with their own. The Highlanders followed after, each clan or sept behind their chief, and Lochiel’s piper stalked ahead, playing as we went, ‘Lochaber no more – Lochaber no more…’

And so we set out to carry himself back to Blair; and the soft gusts through the heather bringing the first fine spattering of rain.

It was grey dawn with the whaups calling and the soft swathes of rain hushing in from the West when we came into the town. Runners had carried the news ahead, and the folk had turned out, townsfolk and garrison with spluttering torches that showed murky red as flame does when the daylight is coming. There was a sorrowful murmuring of voices, and the low keening of women, and always ahead of us, the crying of the pipes ‘Lochaber no more… Lochaber no more…’ until they ceased under the dripping yew trees at the door of the little kirk beyond the castle gates. St Bride’s, they call it.

The door stood open, waiting for us, letting out a glim of candlelight. And we carried him in and set the litter down before the altar, close behind the gash of darkness where the flagstones had already been raised and set aside, waiting too.

It was only when we set the litter down that I felt the hurt of my left arm, or at least that I became aware of it. And I looked down and saw the rent in the sleeve of my buff coat, and the dark stain about it, and felt my hand sticky and stiff, web-fingered with blood. But the bleeding seemed to have stopped; and that seemed important because I did not want to foul the kirk floor – always wipe your muddy boots on the house-place threshold, never bleed on a kirk floor. Did I not say that training was a wonderful thing?

They set candles at his head and feet; it was dark in the kirk; and the flames stirred in the soft wet gusts of air from the open doorway so that it seemed his face moved and he was on the point of waking. But it was only the stirring of the candle flames. We stood our guard round him, the men of his own troop. And the rain spattered against the windows and hushed among the branches of the yew trees outside; and other men
came in, the chiefs and their clansmen, as many as the narrow walls would hold, while the rest I could hear gathering outside.

Presently, men came in carrying a hurriedly made coffin-kist, and set it by in the shadows; and then the minister in his black gown with an open book in his hands took up his place, and the service began; the unfamiliar burial service of the Episcopalian kirk, ‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live… He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow…’

And the windows darkened to a new squall and the wind drove the rain whispering against the glass.

Four chiefs, Lochiel and Glengarry, Keppoch and young Clanranald lifted him into the kist. We had carried him back from Killiecrankie, but he was theirs too, and the clans must be allowed some part in him. But it was I that drew the fold of the plaid across his face. It was of the ancient MacDonald tartan, the colour of the bell heather that he would not see in full flower that year, nor any year.

The armourers hammered home the nails, and the ropes were slung into place, and we lowered him into his grave.

And when the last solemn prayers were said and the last responses spoken and the kirk was silent of men’s voices, and the flagstones laid back over the dark hole that had gaped like a wound in the floor, Philip of Amryclose, who had stood unmoving all that while, gave the royal standard into the hands of Lieutenant Barclay and turned to Lochiel’s piper, holding out his hand.

‘By your courtesy,’ he said, ‘I have that within me that must be given voice, and my own pipes are far away.’

I saw the other hesitate an instant. It is a great thing for a piper to lend his pipes to another man. Then with a deep and splendid courtesy, he set them in Amryclose’s hands.

And Amryclose stepped forward to the place where the crowbars had left a few scratches on the stones. There he stood a while as though deep in thought; no, as though listening to something that none of us could hear, then he settled the bag under his arm and the blow-tube in his mouth, and began to inflate it. And the narrow kirk filled with the deep strong voice of the bass and tenor drones as the great warpipe seemed to wake; and then the tune-voice of the chanter leapt up from under his moving fingers as he began to play.

He played slowly at first, a little uncertainly, feeling his way as though he were listening still and echoing what he heard. Then he grew more sure, finding his theme and then beginning to develop the variations that grew from it as the flower grows from the branch or spindrift from the breaking wave. For it was no mere gathering or marching tune he played; it was the true
Piobairaechd
, the
Ceol Mor
, the Great Music, wild and stately and fit to tear the heart out of the breast with its swoops and swirls of sound that rose and filled the kirk with its lament for
Iain Dhub Nan Cath
.

I had never heard Amryclose play like that before.

But I knew the theme. And as I listened the hair rose on the back of my neck, and I was back in Glenogilvie on Midsummer’s Eve, among the elder trees by the burn; and Darklis’s voice in my ears, ‘I have had the oddest tune running in my head ever since I came here…’

WE HAD LOST
a third of our men, and one of them was Alisdair Gordon. I had only known him three months, but I missed him sore. Even in the midst of my grief for Claverhouse I missed him sore. But of MacKay’s troops, only seven hundred got back to Stirling with him, and his stores and equipment and ammunition were all left in our hands.

But we had lost Dundee, and there was no one to make proper use of them. Colonel Cannon, being the most senior officer left to us, took over the command; but within days the clan chiefs were falling out among themselves, old feuds flaring up again. Lochiel and MacDonald of Sleet were on their way home again with their followers before ever we marched from Blair. It was not Cannon’s fault I daresay; no Lowlander could ever handle the Highland men save Dundee, and maybe Montrose before him.

Aye, we had had our victory for King James, but to build on it was one man’s task. It is always one man’s task. And the one man was gone from us.

The wound in my arm was only a deep gash that had barely nicked the bone. The Blair surgeon probed it for splinters and bound it tight to stop the bleeding that the probe had started up again; and when in a few days we marched out, I was judged fit to leave with the troop; what was left of it. I had a remount between my knees, a rawboned brute with a mouth of solid brass and the manners of a Leith fishwife; and Caspar was with me
still – the one good thing in a world that seemed very driech and drear.

I am not sure to this day where we were heading. MacKay was still at Stirling, frenziedly gathering fresh troops, and maybe it was against him that we marched. But I was not over clear about anything then, what with the fiery throbbing of my arm, which did not seem to be doing just what it should under the stained and grimy bandages, and the kind of buzzing haze that I had in my head.

And I am not at all clear, and never have been, as to how I came to lose the foraging party that I was out with next day. There was a sudden mist; the kind that seems to come just smoking up out of the ground, and that did not help. One moment the others were within sight and sound, and the next, they were gone…

The thing to do would be to get back to the main force, I thought; but with no sight of the sky or the surrounding country, my sense of direction was lost to me; and there was no coolness in the mist, no slaking for the thirst that had begun to burn me up.

I reined in my horse and sat listening, hoping for some sound that would give me my direction, maybe even a voice or a whinny or the jink of a bridle bit from the foraging party. I tried to shout in case they were within hearing, but my hot throat would only produce a kind of croak, and no answer came back; only a bird calling somewhere in the mist. But as I strained my ears to listen, I thought at last I caught the chime of water over a stony bed. There must be a burn close by; a guide down off the high moors – cold clear water to drink!

But mist plays strange tricks with sound; the burn was way further off than I had thought, and the sound
drew no nearer until when I found it at last I all but rode into it. And there it was, peat-brown and cool and bright, calling to the thirst in me, I slid to the ground, and holding to my horse’s bridle, scrambled down the bank, and went full length with my face in it, Caspar crouching beside me. My hat went bobbing away downstream, but I cared nothing for that. I cupped my hands and drank and drank, and dashed the blessed coldness of the water over my head and neck.

And in that instant a jack-snipe got up from the long burnside grass and came zigzagging along the bank almost under the horse’s nose.

The brute shied violently, squealing between fear and temper, and whipped free his bridle, which was lying carelessly looped over my wrist – it was the wrist of my sound arm at that, so I have no excuse – and bolted off into the mist.

I scrambled to my feet and started after him, hoping that when his panic died he would come to a halt. But the dull pounding of his hooves died into the distance, and he was gone as though the mist had swallowed him or the Hollow Hills opened to let him through, and my pistols and food wallet with him.

I was alone, save for Caspar, and lost and with a fog inside my head to match the fog that swathed the moors around me. And by the time I had given up hope of finding my horse again, I had lost the sound of the burn.

We passed that night in the lee of a peat hag, Caspar huddled in the crook of my sound arm, and next morning wandered on again. Maybe we went in circles at times, I would not be knowing. The mist had cleared from the hills, but not from my head, so that all places and all skylines looked strange, and my clemmed belly
did nothing to help. Caspar could have hunted for himself, he had learned the way of it in the past months, but he would not leave me, and stuck as close to my heels as my own shadow. Sometimes, more often as the day went by, I pitched over a hummock or a heather snarl, and lay where I fell for a while before dragging myself up and pushing on again. There seemed nothing to keep going for, anyway; but my body kept going, as a body does that does not want to die, even when its owner does not care much either way. And on the edge of the gloaming, I realised that I had left the open moors and was among trees.

And not long after that, at least I think it was not long, I saw through the crowding trunks of birch and hazel the glimmer of firelight. A vague idea gathered itself in my mind that I had found the camp. I lurched on towards the ruddy flicker, and began to catch the smell of food cooking. Dogs were barking, but there were often dogs about the camp. I stumbled out from among the trees into the firelit clearing, and saw a couple of dogs straining at the ends of the bits of rope that tied them to the wheels of covered carts, a few tethered ponies, the black domes of tents. I was in a Tinkler encampment.

I took another step or two, and my legs gave under me, as figures leapt up from beside the fire and came running.

I was heaved over on to my back, and they were bending above me. Caspar sprang valiantly to my defence, and I heard his warning snarl break into a string of agonised yelps as somebody kicked him aside. I tried to shout at them to leave my dog alone, but my tongue seemed made of wood. Ruthless hands were on me, turning out my pockets – it was little enough they
would find there except an empty purse and a pewter tinder-box – dragging my sword belt over my head. ‘There’s a good bit of steel there!’ someone said; someone else was tearing my shirt open. Everything seemed swimming away from me, but I made a last desperate effort to protect Darklis’s silver pin with the amethyst flower-sparks that I wore fastened inside it.

And there was a kind of check in time. ‘Yon’ll fetch a bonnie penny,’ a boy’s voice said.

And an older voice that seemed to have some authority over the others said, ‘Dinna be more of a gapwit than ye were when your mother spawned ye! We’d bet get word tae Captain Faa, I’m thinking.’

And a woman’s voice cut in, ‘And meanwhile let ye get him up to the vardo; I’ll see to him. An’ have a care tae that arm; canna ye see he’s wounded?’

The next thing I knew was lantern light, and a feeling of enclosed space all round me, and a close warm smell of an animal’s lair; and a man with agate eyes set in a face of gilded leather bending over me with a knife in his hand. I struggled to fend him off, but the searing pain in my arm held me back, and the man said in a soft sing-song voice, “Twould have been easier had he stayed out of his body a while longer,’ and then ‘A-a-ah now, that will let the evil humours out of the wound.’