Claverhouse drew his sword, and the light of the West ran along the blade like bright water as he brought it up in the signal to charge.
‘Forward in the King’s name! God be with the right!’
The cheering ran along the line from the MacLeans at one end into the shadow of Creag Eileich at the other, and was lost in the bright yelping of the bugle and the sudden wild crying of the pipes that seemed to leap up from the heather as the crying of the whaups leaps skyward.
And the line moved forward.
It was slow at first, so slow that as I drew my pistol I had a moment for a sideways glance through helmets and horses’ ears along the spread of our battle-line. The clansmen were loping forward, flinging off their plaids as they came – the Highland men like best to go into battle naked, or at the most in nothing but their saffron shirts – their muskets at the ready. The enemy musket fire ploughed into them, and from the first men began to fall; but their fellows leapt over them and held on at that purposeful lope. Dundee had ordered that no man was to fire until a man of MacKay’s was ‘at the end of his barrel’ and they carried out his order to the death. Then as the slope levelled out the pace grew quicker, gathering speed and momentum as a wave does before it breaks. The air was full of the slogans and war-cries of the clans. Away to the left, above our hoof-beats and the roar of the descending charge, I could make out the baying of Lochiel’s men, ‘Ye dogs of dogs, ye dogs of the breed, come here and eat flesh…’ And then all was drowned in the screaming of the pipes.
Ahead of us the Government battle-line, half lost in a murk of powder smoke, seemed rushing towards us, as I heeled Jock to a swifter pace. Beside me, somebody pitched from the saddle, but I had no time now to even wonder who it was. We were going full gallop now; at our head Dundee rose in his stirrups, sword up to sweep us forward. I heard his voice, the clarion voice that could carry from end to end of a battlefield, ‘Follow me! Follow on! Into them, lads – charge home!’
Something like a hot iron seared my bridle arm just above the elbow, but at the time I scarcely felt it. For the first and only time in my life, maybe because it was the only time in my life that ever I was part of a Highland charge, the smell of blood came into the back of my nose, and the terrible red mist of battle-drunkenness was upon me. Most other times I have just been cold afraid.
We were into them; and half blind with the drifting powder smoke, I fired my pistol into a yelling face. All along the line rolled and ricocheted the sudden deafening crackle of fresh musketry as the Highlanders fired their one point-blank volley, then flung aside their muskets and betook them to sword and dirk. The front rank of MacKay’s force was torn to red rags in that moment. Only for a few moments more, a man here and there stood struggling frenziedly to plug his bayonet into the muzzle of his discharged musket. Ahead of me, half lost in the murk, Dundee still rode with upswept sword, and we charged after him. My hand was just moving of its own accord for my second pistol when Jock screamed and reared up under me, then plunged forward like a mad thing, answering neither bit nor hand nor voice. I had one instant of knowing that we were going through the ranks of MacKay’s Lowlanders like a knife through cheese, and then we were over the ridge, sky and ground changed places as Jock pitched down, going forward over his own neck, and I was flung through the air.
I must have hit my head in falling, or maybe Jock had caught me with a hoof, for the next thing I knew the fiery sunset clouds were gone, and I was lying on my back looking up into a quiet night sky made milky by a faint thunder-wrack that blotted out the stars. Around me a little night wind came hushing up through the heather, bringing with it from the valley below the terrible sound of an army fighting for its life, fighting even for the right to run; and all about me were the ugly sounds of a spent battlefield, where most of the sprawled shapes are dead, but not all.
I rolled over on to my face, and felt the rough springy harshness of the heather under me, and dragged myself up on to my knees. My head ached, a leaden thumping, but that was all. Jock lay close by, and I crawled across to him. He was trying to get up. God knows how long he had been trying; with his belly ripped up and his guts spilled out of him in a stinking bloody pile among the heather.
I mind thinking dully that somebody must have got their bayonet fixed in time.
By Heaven’s Grace he had fallen on his right side, so that the left holster with my unfired pistol in it was uppermost and I did not need to leave him longer in his agony. I pulled out the pistol. I rubbed and fondled his sweating neck for the last time, talking to him – I do not know what I said. I put the muzzle to his forehead and pulled the trigger; and wished that we had not got him out of that boghole three months ago.
Then – training is a fine thing – I undid his girth, my hand slipping on the blood and filth as I freed the buckle, and pulled off his saddle, then his headgear, and bundled the lot on to my shoulder, and began to stumble back up the slope.
On the very lip of the lower ridge a group of men, one of them holding a makeshift torch, stood looking down at something – someone – lying in their midst.
The fitful light ran and flickered on the gold and crimson of the royal standard as it stirred in the night wind, and on the edge of the group someone was holding the bridle of a tall sorrel horse; and I began to know what I would see when I came up with them. But somehow it did not seem real.
Dunfermline was there, Philip of Amryclose holding the standard; Coll MacDonald of Keppoch, a few more, troopers and clansmen. I did not see who, I was looking down also, at Claverhouse, lying with his head on Tam Johnston’s knee.
They had unstrapped his breastplate and done what they could for him, but there was little enough that could be done. They had torn up a dead Highlander’s shirt and bound it tightly round him to staunch the bleeding, but all along under his ribs the bright scarlet stain was spreading through. I remembered my last sight of him, sword arm up to cheer us on. Just under the raised ridge of his breastplate the bullet must have taken him.
Someone began to greet. Maybe it was me; I am not sure; but I seemed too numb for greeting.
Dundee opened his eyes and looked up at us that stood about him, frowning as though he found it hard to see our faces. ‘How goes the fight?’ he asked, quite clear, though with not enough breath for the asking.
From far down the valley, growing fainter as it drove on into the pass, we could still hear the sounds of the pursuit; and after a moment Dunfermline answered him, ‘It goes well for the King – but I am grieved for your lordship.’
A quietness came over Dundee’s face. ‘It is the less matter for me if – the day goes well for – the King,’ he said.
The last few words we could scarcely hear.
Then a little blood came out of his mouth, and his head rolled sideways on Tam Johnston’s knee.
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.’
23
Lament for Iain Dhub
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…’
24
The Black Tents of the Tinkler Kind
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.