Firebrand (15 page)

Brown Teeth’s nose and cheeks were suffused with blood. ‘Roderick Mor was cursed by witchcraft!’

‘There’s no such thing, you credulous numpty.’

Roars of fury, and William Beag got unsteadily to his feet. ‘Is that so, Mackinnon? And will you call me that to my face?’

‘He just did,’ snapped Ma Sinclair. ‘Now sit yourself down, William, or you’ll not be coming in here again.’

Grumbling, he subsided before he could fall. ‘It’s only servants of the devil that say there’s no witchcraft,’ he muttered.

It was Mackinnon’s turn to rise threateningly. ‘Will you say that again in a man’s voice?’

A few of the other men were glancing uneasily at one another; I doubt they fancied William Beag’s chances of staying on his feet long enough to get hit. I didn’t like the atmosphere in the place, and glancing at Ma Sinclair’s anxious face I’d lost the appetite for a scrap too. Nervously the fiddle-tormentor lifted his instrument and drew a funereal note out of its poor strings, and that was when I could bear it no longer. I slapped down my tumbler and went to him, holding out my hand. Startled, he lowered his bow.

‘Ach, don’t give it to him! That one’s feel. Stupid in the head. The smith’s brother, ken?’

‘
Feel
disnae mean he canna play,’ said another.

Ma Sinclair was eyeing me with misgiving, but I kept my inane smile on my face as I winked at her. She
shrugged, as if to say
On your own feel-head be it
.

‘Aye, give it to him, Calum,’ she called. ‘I don’t want more of your dirges. He can’t do worse.’

Reluctantly, resentfully, Calum passed me the fiddle and the bow. I drew an experimental and scratchy note from it, making William Beag guffaw and shower more spittle on his pals. Another dodgy note, then a better one, and it started to speak to me. Poor fiddle, it wasn’t its fault. I tightened a peg, tried another long note, and smiled. It liked my fingers on it. I turned on my heel, tucked it safely beneath my chin, and let rip.

I don’t think they’d heard the like of it before. They had their jigs and reels, lively enough, but their music hadn’t the thrashing wild beat of ours, the song that got inside your ribcage, made your heart hammer and your blood leap. I had my eyes open, grinning, and I saw their mouths hanging agape. But I saw their feet beat the floor, too, and their fingers drum the table whether they liked it or not. I wasn’t the best fiddler in my clann, not by a long way, and when the drunkest of them rose and lurched into a clumsy jig, I laughed, thinking how Righil could have made them dance till their feet bled.

Ma Sinclair was staring at me with a mixture of gratitude and awe; Mackinnon was soberly hypnotised and had forgotten all notion of a fight. I was getting into my stride, now, playing like a devil, like
their
Devil, their Anti-God. The full-mortals said he was the father and lord of all the Sithe: that’s what they really thought of us. We weren’t the People of Peace, we were the fallen ones; Hell’s angels, irredeemably evil. Turning
my back on them, a sudden rage swept through my body and into the fiddle till it howled like a demon. Then I laughed out loud, and spun again to face my clumsy dancers. William Beag stepped back so fast he fell on his backside.

We were all laughing now, even William. A chill swept my body, but I didn’t realise the inn door had opened till something colder lanced my mind.

~
Stop it
.

The fiddle shrieked into silence, leaving an absence of music like a frozen shroud. As Conal took the instrument from me, I gave him a surly triumphant smile.

‘Drawing attention to yourself?’ he murmured, and passed it into the hands of Calum the Crap Fiddler.

‘The lad’s good,’ muttered Calum, afraid to look at me.

‘Huh! The lad’s got skills he shouldna have.’ That was William Beag, but when Conal turned his stare on him, he looked away, shuffling.

MacKinnon couldn’t let it go, now. ‘You’re a foulminded creature, William Beag, you and your ugly talk. There was you happy to move your fat backside just a moment ago—’

It might have got worse, but right then a woman barged into the inn, skirts swishing in the dirt with her self-important urgency. Morag MacLeod, the clachan gossip: a sour frizzy woman who liked to be first with the news. It must be good news, or worthwhile at any rate. She’d never set foot in the inn otherwise; I’d overheard her views on those of us who did, and she disapproved noisily of the Sinclair woman and her
whisky stills.

As she hissed excited words to her bald husband, I watched his sullen eyes widen in shock. Words were passed round, men rose to their feet and drew crosses on themselves with their fingers, forgetting they weren’t meant to. They snatched their hands away and glanced guiltily at one another. A muttering became a murmur that became a rowdy, disbelieving rout.

Conal had a hold of my arm. ‘Let’s go.’

‘What’s happening?’ I snatched up the whisky bottle. Hell, we needed our consolations.

‘Nothing good.’ Gripping my arm, he kept me beside him as he came out of the inn, slouching well back in the wake of the gathering crowd that swarmed towards the marketplace.

I call it a marketplace but there was never a real market there, just a desultory bartering of meal and ale and tools and skills, and the annual negotiations for the best and sunniest rigs. It was no more than a beaten-earth space in front of the squat church, between a few mud-walled cottages and the mill. Still holding my arm, Conal stiffened and jerked me back.

The priest lay sprawled on his back with his head against the rough dyke that encircled the church. He was still twitching and jerking as the crowd gathered round him. Moments after we arrived, the spasms stopped and he lay rigid and still.

Conal swore under his breath. ‘Something’s wrong,’ he muttered. ‘Seth, this isn’t right. It’s like…’

He was abruptly cut off as someone shoved him forward, and I was dragged with him. Conal glanced over
his shoulder in shock, but there was no way of telling who had pushed us. A voice I didn’t recognise shouted, ‘Here’s the smith! He’s a healer.’

‘Aye, so he is! Let him through!’

Conal let me go, pushing me back into the press of people so that he was alone beside the priest’s corpse.

Morag MacLeod was somewhere near me; I could hear her. ‘Fell right over on his back, so he did. Like a tree. I never saw the like of it. Not even a moment to cry out, poor man. Put his hands to his face like he’d been struck, and over he went.’

She was loving this, the auld bitch.

‘Something not natural about it,’ growled a voice behind me.

‘That’s no’ the first unnatural thing I’ve seen the day.’ William Beag slanted his eyes in my direction, a nasty little smirk on his face.

‘A seizure,’ someone suggested. ‘A fit.’

The priest’s eyelids were wide open, but his eyes were empty of light, empty of everything. I saw Conal’s fingers shake slightly as he drew the man’s eyelids down, but it took him a couple of attempts; the lids wouldn’t close, as if the priest still couldn’t believe what had happened to him. The crowd behind me fell silent as they watched Conal. At last he held the lids down with his fingers, and they stayed shut. Hesitantly, he took his hands away.

‘Was there nothing you could do, then?’ That was the miller. Wolf-killer.

Somebody was muttering on the far side of the crowd. I couldn’t hear what was said, but a voice
agreed grimly, ‘Aye. Damn right.’

‘He’s dead,’ said Conal redundantly, standing up. For a moment he hesitated, as if he thought he was missing something, then stepped back and pressed back into the first line of gawpers. Morag MacLeod had pushed her way through for a better view, and now she made that ostentatious crossing motion with her fingers against her breastbone. Others glanced at one another, then followed her example.

Under his breath, Conal swore at himself.

‘Seizure?’ I asked him, as he hustled me away.

Conal was silent for a second, glancing over his shoulder. Once again, no-one was watching us. Back to normal. I thought.

‘It could have been. Come on.’

That wasn’t all it was, I could tell. I knew Conal better than that. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s trouble,’ said Conal, and spat. ‘Let’s go.’

It’s all very well saying
Let’s keep our heads down
. There’s still business to be done, and bread and ale to be bought, and lots to be drawn. We couldn’t stay away from the clachan forever, but we spent as little time there as we could. I worried vaguely about Ma Sinclair, but I didn’t go near the inn for a while.

It seemed the clachan couldn’t do without a god-botherer, so a new priest arrived when the old one was barely cold in the ground. We’d see this new one around the place: preaching his joyless gospel, frowning on the flirting girls, wringing his bony hands in prayer, but he didn’t go to the inn as the old priest had. He was a lot younger, though you’d think from the way he stood on his dignity and his moral high ground that he’d lived longer than a Sithe, and had loved nothing.

We never went to the services in the small grim church, never had done and weren’t about to start. Besides, the priest’s arrival coincided with an epidemic of sickness in the clachan. When it first broke out, even Conal and I found ourselves nauseous and feverish, as if a miasma of disease lay over the whole glen and couldn’t be escaped. It wasn’t that we were vulnerable to plague, if plague it was; it’s just that we were unaccustomed to sickness and Conal seemed ever more unnerved. He muttered about the people of the glen thinking he was a healer, that he didn’t know what
was wrong or what to do about it so there wasn’t any point sticking his neck out. And then under his breath I heard him say something about blame, and the laying of it, and that we’d better keep our mouths shut and
keep our heads down
.

It wasn’t plague. After a few weeks the sickness ebbed, and glen life grew normal again. We swallowed our misgivings, and frequented the clachan, and did our best to ignore the priest proselytising in the muddy marketplace. We kept ourselves as much as we could to ourselves, and we trusted to the Veil. And I’d almost forgotten the priest, had almost learned not to worry about him preaching his god’s wrath and his own hate, when he walked up the glen and through the mossy birchwood one night and rapped his staff on our door.

Conal was shocked, and suspicious, but he could hardly turn the man away. The priest sidled into the blackhouse with a look of contempt he couldn’t hide, his nostrils flaring in distaste. He was the boniest creature I’d ever seen, short of actual cadavers (of which I’d now seen plenty), so at least he seemed to follow his own strictures of thrift and frugality. His pale eyes had a yellowish tinge, his skin a papery cast, his hair was lank and sparse. Gods knew—well, his god would—why he cast such a spell over the clachan and the glen.

‘Good evening, my brothers.’ He smiled. I could taste bile in my throat; I didn’t smile back, but Conal gripped his proffered hand, glanced down at it, then let it go like a viper.

‘I’m not your brother,’ I pointed out.

He looked at me, silent just long enough to make
me fidget with discomfort. His voice, when he wasn’t braying his hatred, was like the rustle of air through dead leaves. ‘You’re the simple one, aren’t you?’ He gave me a conspiratorial smile. ‘Well. Perhaps not, hm?’

Conal had backed slightly against a wooden chair, and I knew why, but perhaps it was that movement that gave us away; perhaps it was just that Branndair could not repress his tiny growl of distrust. He got a nip for it from Liath, but it was too late. I glanced up at the priest, alarmed, but he only looked thoughtful as he stooped to look at the cubs beneath the chair, then straightened again.

‘What a quaint choice of…’ he hesitated, licking his upper lip ‘…pets.’

I knew he’d been on the point of using another word. But he was choosing his words very, very carefully.

‘It’s kind of you to visit, Father,’ said Conal mechanically.

‘Please,’ he smiled. ‘Don’t call me Father. I am Pastor of my flock. I have no idolatrous pretensions.’

‘No.’ Conal flushed and glanced at me. I rolled my eyes. I’d known all along he was making a mistake: trying to understand these people and their mutating theologies, that god of theirs who couldn’t make up his mind. I told him so, silently, but he didn’t even snap back at me. He just looked miserable.

‘You haven’t been in church,’ said the priest. ‘You know attendance is compulsory?’

‘Yes, Fath…your gr…Pastor,’ Conal managed, lamely.

‘You are strangers here, of course, so we have to make allowances.’ Taking his time, he looked us up and down, examining our clothes. I’d refused to wear the coarse shirt and plaid of the peasants; I found them ugly and uncomfortable, though the peasants seemed to find them practical enough. Conal had given in too, in the end, and like me he’d gone back to his own shirt and trews made of leather or decent wool. He was worried we’d stick out like bogles, but the astonished stares hadn’t lasted more than a week. They’d got used to us. And I’d got used to the Veil. In fact I was getting to like it very much.

This man had taken notice of us, though. This man didn’t look as if he was going to let it drop. I felt my upper lip curling, so quickly I made my face expressionless again.

‘The kirk session has decreed,’ he told us with a tight little smile, ‘that those who fail to worship on Sundays should be punished in the stocks.’

We both just gaped at him.

He looked keenly at Conal. ‘I believe you often kept company with my…predecessor.’

‘Yes,’ said Conal.

The priest made a little sound with his tongue and teeth. ‘Reverend Douglas was not strict in his application of God’s will. I have had much work to do since I arrived.’

‘That’s too bad,’ I said. ‘You should relax. Come to Ma Sinclair’s place.’

His gaze on me was suddenly unshielded, and I saw the loathing with crystal clarity. ‘Whisky,’ he hissed,
‘is an abomination. The people of this glen see their error and sin, and their mortal peril.’ His lips twitched. ‘I hope I will soon be able to say the same of both of you.’