Under the Same Sky (10 page)

Dusk settled over the drenched land as Andrew approached the outskirts of his family’s property. The trees seemed to draw closer together as daylight faded, their newly budded branches reaching toward him like desperate arms. He followed the paths he and his brothers had cut as children, dimly recognising the rocks that marked the way.

It had taken two weeks to walk from Culloden, and the cold rain had fallen almost every day, stirring the rivers brown with mud. He had hunted and trapped enough to keep him alive, but hadn’t seen one person the entire time.

Unease rippled through his belly when he didn’t see the cattle. They often grazed within these woods, seeking tender hidden shoots that drew their strength from rotted logs. Andrew and his brothers had spent many hours rounding up the foolish beasts when they went too far, herding them to the safety of the family’s field. But on this day he heard no familiar lowing, no crackle of underbrush
beneath heavy hooves. Perhaps even more disturbing was the fact that no dogs bounded into the trees to lick Andrew’s dirty face.

He stepped into the barley field, noting the spring shoots were untended and crowded by weeds. His mother would never allow the crop to fail. Not if she were able to do anything about it. His stomach clenched as he descended the slope toward his cottage.

The barn stood like an ancient castle at the side of the field, reduced to four stone walls. Its ashes had long since been pasted to the ground by rain. There was no more smokehouse. Even the privy had disappeared. Andrew sniffed, smelling the charred stink of the ruined building. He turned and hurried toward the cottage, passing wind-bleached skeletons of livestock left to rot in the yard.

“Mother,” he whispered, and began to run.

He was surprised to see most of the cottage still stood. The second room had burned away, the one he had shared with Ciaran and Dougal. He rounded the corner of the cottage, trailing his hand against the familiar stone wall. A blackened bundle in the threshold propped open the door, letting the wind push the rain inside.

Andrew stood by the wall, afraid to go into the cottage. He clutched the doorframe and leaned heavily into his hands, trying to steady himself. Then he sniffed and stood straight, determined to ignore his fear. He looked down as he started to wipe his feet from habit and his gaze went to the shapeless black bundle blocking the doorway. He froze.

A dull glint of silver caught his attention, a bit of something small trapped beneath the charred cloth. He crouched and reached for the piece of metal, holding it between thumb and forefinger before letting it roll into his palm.

“Holy God,” Andrew said, his voice catching.

It was a small ring, blackened by soot. His thumb caressed the silver, clearing away the dirt so he could see the tiny cuts in the metal
he knew he would see. The light was bad, but he could still make them out: the letters of his parents’ names, cut into his mother’s wedding ring so many years before. The small bit of metal had fallen from his mother’s skeleton, the blackened shape in the doorway. What remained was partially covered by a bit of soaked cloth the wind had caught and dropped.

There would be no welcoming embrace from his mother. There would be no glad tears of reunion. Her flesh was gone, burned off her bones, picked clean by wandering animals.

“Mother,” he whispered, and dropped to his knees. His throat felt tight, but no amount of swallowing eased it. He needed to speak out loud. He needed her to hear him. “I’m so sorry. Ye shouldna have been alone. We shouldna have left ye.” Tears cut dirty trails down his cheeks, and he let them roll down his neck. “Oh, Mother, could I give my life for yours this moment, I would do it. Wi’ all my soul I would do it.”

Ciaran’s dead eyes gazed at Andrew from somewhere deep inside. Dougal’s parting grin flashed in his memory; their father’s voice echoed with rage as he charged the battlefield.

Andrew’s head spun and he thought he might get sick. He leaned back against the rain-slickened wall of the cottage, sitting beside his mother, clenching her ring in his fist as if it was all he had left.

Everyone was gone.

Everyone except the girl from his dreams. He didn’t know if it was even possible for her to die. How he wished she were there. She made him feel safe. Comforted. But his mind was too full of torment to welcome dreams.

Where would he go now? He couldn’t live in the woods forever. Nor could he stay here, haunted by the cottage’s stone walls. Half-remembered conversations and laughter were part of the mortar, pounded into the floor. Neither could he go to his Uncle
Iain’s home at Invergarry Castle. In fact, Andrew would be surprised if the place was still standing. His Uncle Iain had hosted Prince Charles there before the war. The English would probably have destroyed the castle immediately after the battle, for spite if nothing else.

An icy gust jerked Andrew back to the present. He had to do something, else he would freeze right there. He heaved himself up onto his feet and stepped inside the cottage. Anything of any value was gone, furniture and dishes smashed and left in a heap. The cottage was as barren as he felt. Nothing but a shell.

Andrew crouched by the cold fireplace and let his finger follow the path to the darkest stone in the wall. As his father had so many years before, Andrew counted six stones from the left side and three up, then reached his fingers around the edges and pulled. The stone shifted slightly. He dug his fingers in harder and wiggled the stone loose, then reached into the hidden place in the wall: his family’s tiny vault. Their life’s savings. He pulled free a small leather sack and weighed it in his palm. His parents had hidden this money away in order to better their sons’ lives.

“For the future,”
his father’s ghost whispered.

Andrew slipped the little sack into his sporran and stepped back outside. The temperature was dropping and the wind picking up. It whipped past and between Andrew’s legs, waving his filthy kilt, screaming through the trees. He wrapped his plaid over his face to ease the wind on his cheeks.

The land was littered by rocks, though many were shoved to the side in an attempt to clear more land. Andrew collected as many as he could find, then began the heavy work of building a cairn for his mother. He would lay her by the barn. She had loved the animals and they her.

When he was ready, Andrew knelt in the wet grass beside her,
not wanting to touch the fragile bones, needing more than anything to hold her in his arms and weep. He gathered her remains to his chest, shuddering with horror and desolation, and walked to where he had set the stones. The wind shrieked past him again, biting his face and hands. He knelt again, laying her gently onto the ground.

“Beannachd leibh, a mhàthair. Gum bi Dia leibh. Tha gaol agam oirbh,”
he whispered in Gaelic. Good-bye, Mother. Go with God. I love you.

The stark contours of her skull faced skyward, and he tried to picture the soft pink skin that had once covered them. She should have a shroud, like a blanket beneath the stones. He needed to cover where her eyes had been, bring her some relief from the sights she had seen. He reached into his sporran for the sack of coins and poured the coins back in. He pressed the empty sack flat over his thighs, stretching it as wide as he could. Then he laid it gently over his mother’s face and began to cover her with stones.

When he had finished, he stood back, surveying the land with weary eyes, letting them settle on the cairn. The gray faces of his mother’s stones stared bleakly into Andrew’s own—lonely markers of the family that had once laughed and loved and dreamed of a future.

Andrew hiked through the Highlands for a month. He followed deer paths, hunted small game, and searched for signs of humanity, all the while avoiding burnt-out homes and other signs of English brutality. He wanted to find someone alive. Anyone.

He was filthy and emaciated, covered in grime and dried blood. His hair and beard grew out of control, so that when he saw his reflection in a pool, he was reminded of a bear. Seeing his image in the water made him feel strange. He looked much older than he remembered. The easy smile of boyhood had leveled into a tight, grim line. His brown eyes seemed darker. More direct, as if they didn’t trust what they saw.

At night he curled into his plaid, finding shelter wherever he could, and he dreamed. Most of the time the girl was there, and he could drift away with her, make believe the dreams were real, make believe he held her hand in his.

Almost two months passed before Andrew inhaled the musky essence of peat smoke. He followed the smoke to a small white cottage, huddled in the centre of a ring of trees. No sooner had Andrew stepped out of the trees than a bearded man appeared in the doorway, staying dry under the overhang of his roof. He was huge, imposing in both height and breadth, and one large hand rested on the hilt of his sword. His copper mane flamed almost gold against the white wall, but his beard was dark and wild. The man was a forbidding sight, but he was someone. Someone was better than no one at all.

Andrew moved warily toward the cottage. He didn’t blame the man for the suspicion in his eyes. There had been too much violence. Too much death. Trust was a difficult commodity to find. The sun was setting behind Andrew’s head, and the big man squinted, trying to see his visitor’s face.

Andrew raised his empty hands and slowed as he neared the cottage. When he was ten feet away, he stopped.

“
Dia duit.
Good day to ye, sir,” Andrew said.

The man lifted his eyebrows and nodded briefly. He cocked his head to one side, as if listening for warnings in the breeze. “And to ye as well. Ye’ve come quite a ways, then, ha’ ye?”

“Aye, I have,” Andrew said. It was a relief to use his voice after being alone for so long. “I’ve been afoot nigh on two months. Yours is the first place I’ve seen in a very long time,” he said.

After a moment of hard scrutiny, the big man stepped closer, chin lifted.
“Fàilte, a caraid,”
he said. Welcome, friend. His low, rumbling voice was noncommittal. “I’ve no’ seen ye afore. From where do ye come?”

“From Invergarry. My name’s Andrew. Andrew MacDonnell.”

The big man frowned. “MacDonnell?”

Andrew nodded. “Aye. My father was Duncan MacDonnell, an’ my Uncle Iain is—was chief. My brothers and I went with Captain
Scotus of MacDonnell to battle almos’ a year past. I—I’ve been on my own awhile now, lookin’ for others.”

The shoulders of the big man relaxed just a little and he nodded slowly. “A pleasure it is to meet ye, Andrew,” he said. He cleared his throat and seemed to come to a decision. “I’m Iain MacKenzie.” He gestured toward the door in invitation. “
Thig a-steach.
I’d share a dram wi’ ye. Been a while since I had company.”

Andrew swallowed reflexively, the thought of whisky already warming his throat. He followed Iain inside and sat, dripping, at a small wooden table, admiring the carefully painted white walls and the few framed pictures that hung at random. All around the room were small feminine touches: a piece of framed embroidery by the hearth, a chair upholstered in a delicate floral pattern. But there was no woman anywhere to be seen.

The men sat by the fire for an hour or so, getting to know each other while they sipped rough whisky and tore pieces from a hard loaf of bread. Iain had also fought at Culloden, although he didn’t remember much about the battle. Instead, he focused on the fact that he wasn’t at home during that time. He hadn’t kept his family safe in their little white house.

Once he began to tell his story, Iain seemed to forget he wasn’t alone. Words tumbled through his shaggy beard like a river undammed. He had struggled home after the battle, tearing through the forests, his head filled with terrifying images of both where he had been and where he was headed.

“It was like I already knew,” he said. His voice was tired, his eyes focused on nothing. “There were no way to get here any faster, but when I did, I saw there’d been no call for haste. My lass and the bairns was gone, the house bloodied and broke.”

Iain’s voice caught and he hid his face behind his cup. Andrew looked away, concentrating instead on the weathered wooden tabletop
before him. An ancient, meandering crack split the top of the table, threatening to extend from one end to the other. Iain’s calloused fingers caressed the chasm, as if he could close the gap with his touch.

The moment stretched. Rain clamoured on the cottage roof in a soothing, persistent din.

“I’m leaving Scotland,” Andrew declared, surprising himself. He’d considered the possibility over the past couple of months, but stating the words out loud felt final, and strangely satisfying. “If ye’ve naught to keep ye here, ye could come wi’ me.”

Iain stared at his big fingers where they fidgeted on the table, ragged nails dark with dirt. When he spoke, his words came from far away.

“Aye,” he said, nodding and stilling his hands with the decision. “I’ll go.”

The rain eased and eventually stopped, and the men stepped outside. Iain carried some dry wood from inside and they lit a fire. The evening was blanketed by a light fog that drifted around the fallen tree trunks where they sat. The men didn’t speak much, but the silence was comfortable. A large brown moth flickered past Iain’s face, attracted to the heat of the flames. Iain trapped the creature between his cupped palms and held perfectly still. After a moment he lifted one hand and the moth appeared, motionless save for its twitching antennae, and the slow lifting and lowering of its wings. Iain raised his palm to the level of his chin and breathed against the moth’s fragile body until it winged silently away.