“Aye. His chief, the MacIntyre of Glen Noe, had sent him with the MacColla tae help with the battle. The soldiers needed a piper, you ken? And he was the best, being half of MacLeod blood as well.” Jamesy cast a quick look at Taffy’s poorly concealed ears. “But when the Campbells retook the keep, all the MacDonnells were put tae the sword. The piper had his hands struck off with an axe for playing a warning to MacColla’s ship and sending him away from the trap they’d laid. But they had no bubbling pitch laid on and they couldna stop the bleeding. Very bad luck that is, killing a piper. Since then, he comes on stormy nights tae play his pipes upon the wall.”
Taffy shivered, in spite of the sun.
“My! What an extraordinary tale!”
“That it is, and you’ll see his mortal bones afore long,” Jamesy said enviously.
The trap lurched onto the narrow road leading to Duntrune, which was rather smoother than the track they had just abandoned. Closer now,
she could see that there was a pair of dignified elk guarding the entrance to the castle, which was itself a relatively small affair, perched upon the rock promontory of the north side of Loch Crinan on the Sound of Jura. Like many of the medieval keeps in Scotland and Ireland, Duntrune had a slightly wild look in spite of being inhabited and well-kept.
There was a curtain wall of what was called random rubble construction, a postern—though the seagate no longer seemed to be in use—and crow-stepped gables over the walls, which were made of peculiar green sandstone that gave the whole building an aspect of being underwater. It also had the feel of great age. The stones actually seemed weathered, like old brass verdigrised by the sea.
As they passed by one of the outside cottages made of smaller ashlars, Taffy noticed another set of stag horns embedded in the wall over the door, which had been painted a faded robin’s-egg blue that harmonized nicely with the green-and-gray stone from which the croft was built.
Taffy looked about in pleasurable anticipation. She had never been to Duntrune Castle and was thrilled to have the opportunity to photograph it, however odd the circumstances. She was gaining a nice collection of castle photos and secretly hoped to exhibit them one day—perhaps in America whose citizens had a great curiosity
about British castles and manors. The fact that this keep had a ghost as well was simply added fortune, as castles with ghosts were by far and away the most popular of attractions.
As they passed beneath the shadow of the battlements, feeling herself to be under friendly observation, Taffy looked up at the tower window with a warm smile of greeting. The impression of someone waiting for her there was so strong that she had actually lifted her hand to wave before noticing that the castle’s tall walls were, in fact, empty of life.
“A bheil thu tighinn?”
the wind whispered.
Are you coming?
Feeling suddenly fey, Taffy tried to shake off the notion that she and Jamesy were being carefully observed by hidden eyes. What an inopportune time for the legendary MacLeod second-sight to kick in!
Her father was waiting for her in the courtyard, but though accompanied by many workers, there was no sign of anyone who might be Bishop Mapleton. Taffy was keenly disappointed, but reflected—after seeing her father’s horrified glance rake over her from rough boots to combs—that perhaps this was not the ideal social situation in which to be making new acquaintances.
“Tafaline—”
“Taffy,” she corrected automatically. He usually
remembered her preference, but lapsed when he was angry or agitated.
“Bring that contraption of yours and let’s finish this task. A waste of time,” he muttered. “The bones aren’t more than two hundred—possibly three hundred years old. I don’t know why they summoned me.”
“Yes, but they are rather famous bones” she pointed out, accepting her equipment from a suddenly smiling Jamesy.
“Gaoth deas ort,
” he whispered.
A south wind on you.
“Tapadh leibh.” Thank you.
Feeling bold, she dropped one eyelid in a wink. She raised her voice. “They belonged to Colkitto’s piper. A MacIntyre by the name of—”
Malcolm.
“—Malcolm.”
Davis Lytton turned to stare at her.
“I didn’t realize that you were conversant with this legend, Tafaline.”
“Isn’t everyone? This was a rather pivotal moment in recent Scottish history.”
Jamesy coughed suddenly into a neckerchief.
“Very true,” Davis looked at her thoughtfully, approval beginning to form on his stern face. “I am glad that you have not completely abandoned your studies in favor of frivolous pursuits.”
“Certainly not. Where are the skeletal remains?”
The space was a small one, and the flagstone taken up an uneven one. The bones were resting on their side as though shoved carelessly into the hole.
The lower forearms and hands were indeed missing and the grossly foreshortened ulna and radii were terminated in shattered stubs.
Unable to help herself, Taffy knelt by the open grave and reached in to touch the mutilated bones. A tiny pinprick from a razor-tipped shard lanced the end of her index finger.
“Definitely an axe wound,” Davis said impersonally, apparently not feeling any of the horror—
and rage,
she realized with a shock—that she was experiencing while looking at the grave.
Feeling slightly lightheaded, Taffy rose to her feet. She quickly sucked away the single drop of welling blood.
Out of habit, she looked next at the feet. The toe bones that were in place suggested that all the digits had been of the same length rather than tapering from the big toe down. They were also long and narrow without the heavy growth of bone at the heel, which she’d seen usually anchored the ancient Saxons’ more pronounced heel tendon.
“Yes, I checked the feet. He was a Celt,” Davis admitted impatiently. “Let’s get this over with. Mapleton wants to move the bones as soon as possible.”
“But—”
It doesn’t matter. Let them be moved.
“As you wish,” she murmured in absent-minded agreement. Then louder: “I shall place the camera here. Perhaps later, I might climb up to the battlements and try for an overview.”
She took the measuring rod held out by Davis and placed it beside the grave. She was careful not to touch the shattered bones again.
“You are very thorough,” Davis said, grudgingly. “I’m glad that some of my training took.”
Taffy didn’t answer, but set about arranging her equipment.
“Step back, please, Father. Your shadow is in the way.”
Just as she squeezed the bladder to burn the plate, a stray sunbeam shifted to the flags and reflected directly into her eyes. Swallowing an unlady-like curse, Taffy unhurriedly loaded another plate into the camera. She would have to assume that the first had been ruined by the flash of blinding light.
Once prepared, she looked around to be certain that there was no one nearby who might be carrying a reflective object that would spoil her work with a redirected beam.
Taffy didn’t see anyone, but the feeling that she was being observed persisted, and she began to wonder if there was some disapproving prankster hanging about, waiting to play a trick on her.
Her second plate was exposed without difficulty, and her father kindly acted as guide and porter as they climbed up the sea wall so she could take an exposure from above. The feeling of being watched presently faded, but it might have been because she was growing accustomed to the sensation.
When her assigned task was done, Davis sent her away. Swallowing her annoyance at his cavalier dismissal, Taffy managed a polite farewell from the back of Jamesy’s pony trap. She promised to have the plates developed the following morning.
And she had every intention of delivering the photographs to Bishop Mapleton herself. She would wear her navy dress—
and gloves,
she decided with a guilty glance at her begrimed hands.
It would probably annoy her father, but she could claim to have misunderstood his intentions and point out the fact that he was always complaining about being taken away from his work by frivolous socializing with amateur historians.
“And what did you think of the piper, mistress?” Jamesy asked curiously.
“I think that King Charles needed more backbone,” she answered without thinking. “He could have won had he more resolution.”
Jamesy grinned.
“Aye, that he could have. Montrose would have
rid us o’ the Campbells forever, had he another four months.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered to Malcolm though, poor soul.”
Jamesy swiveled about in his seat and stared at her.
“Malcolm?”
“Yes, didn’t you say that was his name?”
“Nay, I did not know it. But whatever his name, he was surely past all care by then, poor laddie.” The man cleared his throat. “Mistress, your father, did he by any chance touch the MacIntyre’s bones?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps. Why do you ask?”
“ ’Tis nought of importance. Just an old legend.”
“Well, let’s have it,” she said encouragingly, squinting against the glare of the afternoon sun so that she might better see her carter’s face. “I enjoy hearing the old stories.”
“Aye, well. It is just a belief that when the spirit is in a state of betweenity, it happens that it might attach itself to the person who first lays his hands upon the bones.”
A slow, involuntary shiver worked its way down Taffy’s uncorseted spine.
“And what happens—” She swallowed and then tried again to ask the question sticking in her throat. “What happens to the person the ghost attaches itself to? They don’t die, do they?”
“Ach! No! ‘Tis not some cursed Irish banshee after all.”
“Oh.” She smiled, feeling both relieved and foolish for her momentary alarm. They were discussing a silly
legend!
“Then what happens? How does one know that the ghost is there?”
“They dream, mistress.”
“Dream?”
“Aye. The dream o’ the ghost’s death, over and over ‘til they die or go mad.” He smiled suddenly. “Unless they’re a MacLeod.”
Taffy cleared her throat, which had tightened again.
“What happens to MacLeods? Why are they not haunted like other folk?”
“Well, being that some of them are of faerie blood, they get called and go tae live wi’ the still-folk at
Caislean na Nor,
of course.”
“Well.” Taffy swallowed again, then said lightly: “I hope the workmen were careful. We wouldn’t want anyone getting ‘called.’ ”
“They were careful, no doubt.
They
would know better than tae touch the piper’s bones.”
Argyllshire, Scotland
Early summer, 1964
Malcolm stood quietly in the shadows of a tiny croft, disinclined to approach his chief,
Mac an t-Saoir
of Glen Noe. He was to be presented to their guest, MacColla of the Irish, son of the fanatical
Colla Ciotach
of the Isles, also known to the sassanach as Lieutenant General Sir Alistair MacDonald, and more commonly, as Colkitto.
The light was dim, but plainly the visitor was a large man, fully the tallest being he’d ever seen. Taller even than Malcolm himself was, which was towering enough to draw comment among the MacIntyres, the MacColla had a black presence
about him that spoke of great power. Such men influenced destinies, and Malcolm did not particularly want to be influenced just then.
The piper shrugged uneasily, trying to dislodge his brooding mood so that he might look upon this man fairly. He had an unexplainable feeling, so strong that it might be called foreknowledge, that though they had never met, his and Colkitto’s lives and fates were now somehow intertwined.
There remained to see in what manner they would mingle their mortality.
Some things about the future, he could guess. There was no escaping the fact that just as his father before him, this MacColla was a hard man, as the enemy Campbells had already discovered. There was a tale at large in the glen that the MacColla had herded together all the people of Argyll—excepting not even women or babes—and once they were secured in the town’s great barn, had set it ablaze.
The story might even be true, Malcolm admitted. The MacColla hadn’t been there in Argyll to pay social calls upon the Campbells, who had his father and brother held fast in some prison, and who were committing massive slaughters among his kin in Colonsay and Ireland.
Too, this Colkitto came from a long line of men who had never been inclined to let mercy season their justice. So it followed that in any meeting
with Colkitto there would likely be violence and bloodshed.
However, in these times of unrest there was much violence and bloodshed everywhere. That fact alone should not have caused Malcolm to be so greatly disturbed by the man’s presence.
He looked up at the smoked-stained rafters, as though the shadowed eaves might hold an answer to what troubled him. Unfortunately, none were there that evening. Perhaps they’d been banished by the great one’s presence. It seemed Malcolm had nowhere to look but inside himself for understanding, and he had not yet discovered any happy solutions waiting there.
The tangled politics of the highlands were but part of the larger concern of all the politics of humankind—there was certainly no escaping it in Scotland. Some covetous Englishman’s unremitting preoccupation with wealth and power was ever focused upon Scottish land, it seemed. Perhaps that would always be so. And the Scots who fought and died for their freedom, from Wallace on, would ever resist such occupation. Even when it meant killing other Scots.
The Lord of Heaven, avowedly all-merciful and forgiving, supposedly approved of such atrocities that had happened in this year past. However it didn’t seem to Malcolm to be the work of God, but rather of avaricious men.
Malcolm detested the Campbells, their brutality
and ever-shifting loyalties. But he was not certain that he liked this self-appointed
Hammer of the Lord
either, aiding the MacIntyres though he was by rebuilding that damage the ravagers had wrought in the Glen. Not even Colkitto’s service under the charismatic and just Earl of Montrose against the clearly evil Parliament—and murderous convenanters who were determined to unseat their lawful king—was enough to cause great liking or trust in Malcolm’s breast.
Of course, in all fairness, he had to admit that little did these days. Malcolm was a man marked by the spirit world and awaited events in a state of emotional betweenity.
Still, had it been Patrick
Ruadh
and the MacGregors who had come among them, he would have rejoiced, for though they were Catholics, they were also highlanders and true, fighting for the return of their stolen lands. They were not this uneasy mix of Catholics from Ireland and the isles, and English Episcopals united more in political hatred of Puritans and the Covenant’s Solemn League than they were because of the king or family affairs.
The king. Malcolm could only think on him unhappily. Though Charles was an Anglican now, he had not forgotten his Catholic subjects. In the decade before, he had given a charter to a vast track of land in the New World where Catholics could go and worship unhindered.
But now, his Catholic subjects—those still alive—were asked to be grateful for his past tolerance and possible future benevolence, and to go defend him against the covenanters.
The Irish and Scots served their king, as poor men always had—not with patriotic words, but by watering the fields with their blood. And as all the English kings before him, Charles had accepted this as his due and without any thought for the widows and orphans left behind to die by enemy swords or starvation.
And it was all a great bloody waste!
Of course, Malcolm never said so. His kinsmen already thought he was quite odd. Had he not been their piper, doubtless they would have driven him away long ago, for they truly feared him now that he was grown—as they had his mother and two elder brothers. MacLeods, all of them, and reputedly tainted by faerie blood. Even his body, in the matter of his pointed ears and ambidextrous hands, lent fuel to their superstitions.
It was a dangerous thing to provoke fear in one’s kinsmen. Death from without was always a danger, but one for which a man might prepare. That same danger was rather more difficult to avert when it wore a familiar face. Confronted with such growing hostility, Malcolm’s own parents and siblings had gladly gone to Mary’s land when the
Dove
sailed a half-score years ago, and
had he not been training to be the clan’s piper, he would have happily gone with them.
His father,
Calum mor,
was a simple man and did not believe all the talk of his wife’s second sight. Too, he thought that this habit of governments—and even chiefs—of forcing religious worship on its subjects by fire and sword raised a stink in God’s nostrils.
After the first atrocities done
“for God”
under the Act of Revocations, he had taken his family to live over the sea amongst the Quakers who did not compel uniformity of religion. In a letter sent home with the returning
Dove,
he had written to his son that the strange people of Mary’s land even believed in equality for women and allowed them to preach the Gospel there!
It had to be a wondrous place, Malcolm thought, that land where no one showed their love of God by slaughtering other men and where his mother could work as a healer. He would love to someday visit a place where the strength of one’s sword-arm and the ruthlessness of one’s nature were not the only measures of a man.
“Malcolm!” the chief called. “Hoots awa’ wi’ ye, lad. Come away now!”
Malcolm sighed and stepped out of his dark corner. Once again, distasteful duty called him from his thoughts before he was ready to leave them.
“Welcome, piper! You’ve the highest of gifts,”
MacColla praised him as he joined the two men seated by the fire. The Irishman nodded over his tankard but did not rise to his feet.
Malcolm looked calmly into his watchful gaze, appraising what he saw by the flickering firelight. The Irishman’s young face was stern, even when the lips tried to smile, and the eyes were cold and wary enough to disconcert even a man already marked by the spirits for some unearthly fate. If their illustrious guest was drinking whiskey from his cup, he was not plunging deep into it.
“I thank ye for yer praise. I had a good master in Black Anndra,” Malcolm replied formally, but made no effort to curb his accent as many of the lairds did in august company.
“That is so. I had the pleasure of hearing him play that very song some years past. He taught you well. Most men cannot manage so flawless a passage. Perhaps it is because their poor hands are too small and cannot be used interchangeably.”
“Mayhap.”
“Or perhaps it is because they are not of the MacLeods gifted with special talents. I have heard some astonishing tales of one particular line of MacLeods.”
Malcolm did not answer.
The MacIntyre cleared his throat and joined the conversation for the first time. The chief looked rather ill at ease. It could have been because
MacColla mentioned Malcolm’s mixed blood, but he suspected that there was some other, more sinister cause.
“Malcolm, a great honor has come tae ye. Ye’ve been asked tae go wi’ the MacDonnell and his men. They’ve need of a piper tae play them intae battle when they go tae take Duntrune.”
“We need some music to drown out the arrows whistling past our heads,” MacColla added with an unpleasant smile. “I’ve had a sudden vision of you playing upon the castle walls. With your presence, we shall be victorious, I have no doubt. And I always make every effort to ensure victory.”
So, too, did Malcolm have this very same vision every night when he dreamt, and it left him mightily uneased that Colkitto had chosen those particular words to express his expectations of victory. It suggested that there was some deeper purpose at work in this meeting. Deeper purposes could not be ignored.
“Malcolm, lad. Ye’ve been asked tae play the king’s men tae glory.”
“Aye. I heard.”
Asked,
the MacIntyre had said, not ordered. Still, he knew his chief well, knew what was required of him in this time of war. Such obedience was the backbone of a chief’s power and the safety of the clan.
Still, Malcolm hesitated to volunteer. What if
his fate was to overtake him on this journey to Duntrune and endangered the other men? What if he left the glen and Fate couldn’t find him?
“Malcolm,” the chief prompted again, likely fearing that his increasingly fey piper would seem to MacColla to have lost his nerve and turned coward.
That wasn’t the difficulty, Malcolm knew, but how to explain about the new portents he’d seen—the silvered reed left beside his pipes, and the wraith? He was nominally a Catholic, as was his chief. He knew the way such religions minds as Colkitto’s worked. They would not understand that he still kept some of the old ways and knew the customs. They would not discern what the reed signified. And if they did, they would likely seek his death for being bewitched.
But
he
knew. After all, he was partly a MacLeod, and though he had tried to reject that part of his nature and live as his father did, he had always been aware that there were other, older beings that lived among them in this world of men. Most people never saw the old ones—his father never had! But Malcolm did see them. They were in the sly shadows that crept about in the darkened corners of certain glades, and behind the careless shiver of leaves when there was no wind to stir them. These things also influenced men’s lives and had to be carefully considered and sometimes appeased.
If he hunted when it rained and killed a stag, he always left a portion of venison for the faeries. At other times, he left milk on the flags by the fire, but on rainy days, he knew that the still-folk ate venison.
And the still-folk were grateful. Where others might find magic barriers stretched across certain hidden ways in the woods, no bar to passage was ever raised against him. Malcolm always returned with game before other hunters. He could always find his way through the woods on even the darkest night.
And he owed his skilled playing not to Black Anndra, but to the blessing his mother’s kin had received in that long-ago cradle where the first half-human, half-faerie child was said to have been born.
And now, Malcolm had been left the silvered reed for his pipes. The gift of the moon-metal and the vision from the still-folk meant that he was chosen for some arcane task or sacrifice.
But this was not something that he could explain to others. Not ever. Nor could he tell them about the
knowing
that came now when he stood close to certain objects of power. Usually, it was a holy spring, or perhaps an ancient weapon, that brought forth his intuitions. This time, the object of power was a man: the MacColla. A man who, like Robert the Bruce—and himself—carried the trait of ambidexterity.
Yet now, when he needed the inner-guidance most, his instincts had gone quiet.
Aye or nay?
Should he embrace this man and swear his loyalty, or refuse, and finally so anger the chief that he would be broken and sent away? Malcolm would not regret leaving the glen, but neither answer was a desired one until the spirits gave him some definite sign of what was to come. Danger was near, but from this world, or the other?
“Are ye drunk, man?” the chief demanded, frowning in earnest. “Speak up!”
Putting his unease aside, Malcolm prepared to answer the men of war who waited impatiently for his reply.
Then, just as he parted his lips to say he knew not what to do, from the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of the wraith that had lately been haunting him. All unwilling, he turned his head to stare at her.
The apparition was a strange sight. Female, certainly, but dressed in a manner he had never seen on mortal women. She had honey-colored hair and eyes the deep shade of late blueberries with the bloom of dew upon them.
She was not, he felt certain, of the true
Daoine Shi
—the still-folk who lived under the ground in the turrets of
Shian.
Nor was she a terrible Irish banshee, nor a ghost, nor an elemental spirit. Yet something about her spoke of magic.
The coming of an apparition was always a sign of change—nearly always for the worse, and most often of imminent death. Yet, he could not believe that this shadowy girl he ofttimes saw from the corner of his eye was any portent of evil.
All she ever did was walk about, with a box mounted on sticks through which she peered from time to time before disappearing in a lightning flash. She had never spoken to him, never looked into his eyes, or given any sign that she knew he was there. Yet this time, when he needed to choose a path, she was staring in his direction, waving her arm in languid farewell.