Firebrand (16 page)

I must not spit. I made myself not spit on his feet. Conal nodded and muttered a few more niceties, and when he finally shut the door on the priest, he shut his eyes and exhaled as if he hadn’t breathed since the man had put his foot over our threshold.

He turned to me. ‘You ever seen that man in the sunlight?’

I frowned. ‘I suppose. It’s summer. And he’s over the glen like a rash, all the time.’

‘I mean, have you seen him in full sunlight?’

I thought about it. ‘I don’t know. What are you thinking?’

He shrugged. ‘Oh, probably something stupid. I can’t be sure. Don’t worry.’

~
Aye, right
.

He grinned at me suddenly. I liked that, I liked to see him looking himself again. It happened less and less often, but it reassured me when it did. Conal being afraid made me very, very afraid.

I didn’t know how we were going to get out of the interminable, mind-numbing church services, but Conal was going to have to find a way. I swore to him that if I had to sit through the man’s brimstone-reeking opinions, I’d cut my own throat and put myself out of my misery. A long life was a long life, I told Conal, but it had to be worth living.

Conal thought we would have to submit. I had never
submitted in my life, unless it was to Conal’s damned educational ambitions. I loved him and I knew he had my best interests at heart but he didn’t own my conscience.

I gnawed it over in my mind all week, till my head throbbed. I wanted the priest to forget we existed, I wanted us to slip from his mind the way we should, but it wasn’t happening. His pale gaze found me whenever I slunk into the clachan, and he’d smile.

I was afraid of him.

I wouldn’t submit to him, though. My life was not my own any more but my soul was, and I wouldn’t do this. I didn’t want to go in the stocks, I didn’t want a whipping, and more than anything I didn’t want to fight Conal. He was my Captain and he had the right to order me to go, and he was capable of knocking me senseless and dragging me to church. But if I capitulated to this priest I’d lose something indefinably precious to me and I’d never get it back. Standing my ground was worth a beating, from the priest or from Conal. I just didn’t know how far it would go, and yes, I was afraid.

My last morning in the clachan was a Saturday. I remember that because I had gritted my teeth and wound myself up to face my Captain either that evening or, failing that, at dawn on Sunday. I was there alone; I’d gone to draw lots for the best rigs next year, to negotiate our turn of the community plough, to fix a price for the shoeing of a horse. I’d gone to buy some ale and whisky, and with it some courage.

I was so anxious, wound so tight inside myself that
I almost failed to hear the men. But one voice caught my attention, thank the gods: William Beag’s grievance-ridden one.

‘She’s a bloody cheat. Waters her ale and overcharges for that shite whisky of hers.’

I stopped in my tracks, but they hadn’t seen me, so I dodged into the shadows. It was obvious who they were verbally ripping to shreds, but what made me most uneasy was their dark huddle, their quiet grumbling voices, their quick over-the-shoulder glances. These were not the empty complaints of men who’d go straight to the inn and be cheerfully cheated again.

‘Aye,’ said another. ‘And it is true what Roderick Mor told you, William. Such a woman is a peril to all good men. There are those who don’t want to hear, who don’t want to know the danger. That is all.’

‘Aye, the fools! When their own bairns fall sick, when their own milk sours, when their own parts fall to disease: that’s when they’ll take notice. They don’t care about other folks’ misfortunes: no, not till it happens to them, and then they are sorry. Well, I will not sit by and see my neighbours ill-used.’

‘You are a good man, William Beag. You’re right, it’s time for right-thinking men to take a stand. I am with you.’ The burly redhead clasped William’s fat arm. ‘We’ll go up and find the boys at Nether Baile. They will want in on this.’

‘I’ll watch the place.’ William Beag nodded gravely. ‘She must not have the chance to slink away, and she may have charms to warn her. There are other villages that would not thank us for letting her go to them,
unshriven and unrepentant and
unpunished
.’

‘Will you get the minister?’

‘Later,’ a small man growled. ‘Let’s find the Nether Baile boys first. They would not be wanting such business to go ahead without them.’

As I watched them go, bloated with bloodlust and self-importance, I leaned against a mud-and-wattle wall and made swift cold calculations. The three brothers at Nether Baile: the blackhouse they shared with their beasts lay not a mile further up the glen, but this crowd were in no hurry. They were basking in their moment and they’d want to stretch it out.

Conal had said the witch-terror came in waves, like a tide. He said that for years it would subside, and grow calm, and then it would roar to life again like an Atlantic storm. Conal had hoped we’d be lucky with the tides, lucky in the timing of our exile.

Always looking on the bright side, that was my brother.

Ma Sinclair kept her sullen old pony in a hollow beneath a small cliff, separate from the drovers’ ponies, penned in only by steep slopes and grey rock and its own disinclination to make a bid for freedom. Through a ragged forelock it glared at me, jaws moving round a mouthful of tough grass, but it didn’t shy away when I seized a handful of its coarse mane. It just swallowed its grass and bit me, so I bit it back, and so we came to an understanding, and I led it through the narrow gap in the rocks and round the back of the cliff.

Overlooking the clachan from the north, I stopped, rubbing the pony’s warm neck. The little settlement
backed onto the rocks here, sheltered and shadowed, with the bere-rigs on the farther side. No-one ever glanced this way, except by chance, and I could see the back of the inn quite clearly, and William Beag skulking at its rear.

I laughed, and the pony shook its neck and whickered in echo. Flicking one ear back, it gave me the evil pony-eye. Scratching between its ears, I shoved the grubby grey forelock out of its face. Deep down in the brown eyes I thought I saw a gleam of silver that wasn’t weak reflected sun.

I pulled back its eyelid with my thumb to make sure, and then I laughed again, and let the forelock fall untidily back.

‘Where did you come from?’ I scratched its neck. ‘The lover? Have you been thirty years with her? Or was it your dam or your sire he gave her?’

The pony ripped up more grass and ignored me.

‘You, I think.’

Sagging as if worked to exhaustion, the beast sighed and rested a hind leg. I looked out across the rough ground to the walls and the yard behind the inn, and the fool William Beag who thought he was hiding.

‘You’re not daft,’ I said to the pony. ‘You know what needs doing.’

* * *

‘Ma,’ I said, knocking on the counter. ‘You’re needed.’

Irritably she turned from a customer. ‘Now, lad, what is it? I’m busy, can you not see?’

‘You’re needed,’ I said again. ‘You’re needed to come now. It’s the pony. The pony’s needing you.’

A bearded wonder glowered at me. ‘Ach, you wee feel, can you not leave her alone?’ Impatiently he rapped his tumbler on the counter.

Ma Sinclair had turned to me. Her look was long and solemn, and broke at last into a smile. Her teeth glinted.

‘There now, Donal, the lad’s come to help. And you are to help yourself now, till I get back.’

‘I am to help myself?’ Bearded Wonder needed no further invitation, and he wasn’t bothered with me any more. I slid a pewter jug off the counter and led the old woman out the back.

At the end of the dank passageway that led out to the yard, I stretched my arm across Ma Sinclair’s way and she came to a halt. Lifting the bag of clothing and money and meal that I’d thrown together from the few possessions in her hovel, I thrust it into her arms.

‘Do you have anything else you need to take?’

Briefly she peered into the bag. ‘Nothing more than what’s here. You’re a good lad. Is it so bad?’

‘It’s so bad. Shush, there’s one of them out the back.’

‘Who?’

‘William Beag.’

‘Oh, laddie. Little William? Name or no name, he’s a good bit bigger than you.’

‘I’ve got help.’ Putting my fingers to my lips, I eased open the plank door.

Bang on time, I heard the dull clop of hooves, and the pony turned into the yard and shook its mane.
William Beag’s shadow, pressed back out of sight just to my left, detached itself from the wall and he took a step forward.

It wasn’t a water horse or anything like one, but maybe it had known one in a previous life. It certainly seemed to know the routine. Lifting its head, all shy and enticing, an uncertain whicker, the rap of a hoof on the stones when William Beag’s attention seemed to wander back to the inn door. Raddled old nag that it was, it arched its thick neck and plumed its scraggy tail and was, for an instant, beautiful.

‘Ah,’ crooned William Beag, ‘and where did you come from, my bonny boy?’

He stretched out a hand to the pony’s bridle, his fingers closing on its cheekpiece as mine tightened on the pewter jug. He did not look at its eye, and he did not look at the tilt of its head. He played true to form and forced its mouth open to look at its yellow teeth; and the pony, not liking his impudence, clamped them savagely on his fingers.

I hadn’t meant that to happen, and I hadn’t meant the fool to scream like a girl, but I cut off his noise fast enough with one strong blow of the jug. He buckled and his face hit the mud. Catching the pony before it could shy and bolt, I strapped the meagre bag of belongings to its saddle.

No untimely modesty from Ma Sinclair: she hitched up her skirts, and I caught a flash of her voluminous underwear as I gave her a leg up. I passed her a flask of water and one of whisky, and she stuffed them into the folds of her skirts.

‘Come on,’ I said, and I grabbed the pony’s bridle and dragged it into a shambling trot.

* * *

When I left her, the sun was low in the sky and we were high enough above the glen to see the curve of the ocean, shimmering silver at the horizon.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’ll never be seeing my whisky stores again, but I thank you. Will you be fine yourself?’

I turned to look back down the glen. ‘He never saw me.’

‘Donal did.’

‘Well, but I’m a fool. They’ll think you hit William yourself,’ I said with a shrug.

‘Aye. Well, it’s true that I could and it’s true that I would.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said again. ‘You’d best go. Go far away.’

She leaned down and I felt her dry lips kiss my cheek, her whisky breath on my skin. ‘And you go further, you and your brother. It’s time for you both to go, I’m thinking.’

‘Aye.’ I had a nasty feeling she was right. I squeezed her gnarled hand tighter on the pony’s rein. ‘Go, Ma.’

She turned once to look at me and smiled. ‘I told you,’ she called.

‘Told me what?’

‘I’d keep on your good side. I was right to be superstitious, aye?’

‘Aye,’ I muttered.

I watched her and her pony till they went over the brow of the hill, her skirts hitched up her raw bare legs, and the pony trudging stolidly down the whin-thick hillside, whisking midges with its ragged tail. She didn’t turn back again.

That was the last I saw of Ma Sinclair. I never found her alive anywhere, but nor did I see her in any stinking jail and I never saw her squeal in a fire, so I like to think she found another place to be. I hope she found some village that liked her whisky and didn’t mind her healing ways and her potions and her handsome crone-face. I like to think she survived that witch-terror, and all the others after, but I don’t know and I never will.

I turned back to the clachan, smoky and faint with distance, and I began to run.

I did not want to go through the clachan again, and I’d planned to give it a wide bodyswerve and take the long path home, but I couldn’t fail to see the knots of people hurrying towards it, surging into an already busy marketplace. Watching their urgency, hearing their voices high and drugged with the thrill of danger, I knew I had to take notice. I crept inside the low walls, slouched in the wake of the gossiping clusters, kept my head down.

Like always.

The priest was there, standing on a straw bale. He wasn’t waiting for the people to gather and fall silent, but berated them as they approached. His urgency made them hurry all the more, afraid to miss a word.

‘What are you waiting for?’ he cried, thumping his fist against his cracked old bible. ‘Are you waiting for them to come for your children in the night?’

I halted uneasily, edging under ratty overhanging heather-thatch. Just those few words had chilled my spine. Perhaps I knew what was coming.

‘Are you waiting for them to feed your babies to their wolf-familiars?’

A gasp of horror went round the crowd. ‘They have taken a baby already,’ shouted someone. ‘Isobel’s bairn!’

‘Aye! My poor sister! Her poor wean!’ The sobbing voice was Morag MacLeod’s. ‘Reverend Douglas it was who found her. He brought her for burial but she
could not go in the holy ground. The Lord have mercy on her.’

‘Found her?’ snapped the miller. ‘It may be he was in league with the warlocks!’

I had to put my hand over my mouth to stop my gasp escaping. They’d all adored the old priest. But this was madness I could smell in the air.

A male voice interrupted. ‘I heard she could not feed it. The last thing she needed was another wean. She only left it near the smith’s because of her conscience.’

‘That is a lie!’ screamed Morag MacLeod.

‘It was a cold night. The bairn was not well. You cannot blame the smith.’

‘We can blame him for killing it!’ shouted the miller. ‘A sacrifice to his Master!’

The priest was holding out his hands, pleading for calm. ‘If your old minister had allied himself with the Enemy, then he is answering for it before God, as we speak. Let us not concern ourselves with the dead.’ He paused, the wrinkles deepening on his pallid brow. ‘Though it’s true that his death was an unnatural one.’