I was just six years when they laid my mother's body out, and threw the dead babe's corpse in the river that ran along my father's lands. They dressed me in dark clothes and my father complained that the boy died as well, my older brother had too many tendencies to fall ill.
People came, other Thanes and their families to pay respects. Father made me touch her, just two fingers on her opaque cheek, and a strong scent of lavender filling my nose as they lit the incense to cover the parts that must have been rotting in the summer heat. I imagined that if I pried open those crusted eyelids I would have found hollow holes. I touched her twice by the time it was all done. I hadn't wanted to at all, but my brother convinced me first. "You must touch her Iona, have you not heard that if you forget to, the soul of a departed love one will haunt you forever?" My thin fingers moved fast, and father had not seen so he made me do it again.
One young boy spoke to me, and whispered how terrible of a thing it must be to lose a mother. His eyes were a dark green. I hadn't needed to hear how horrid it must be. He rode away on a pony behind his father's war steed. The livery was of Glamis. One of those areas stuck without the shore, on the other side of Scotland's mainland, in the south. Perhaps his travels here had been the first time he smelt the sting of the ocean's salt, maybe before he only knew warmer waters and not the enthralling cold gusting waves that crashed on our shore. My mother's funeral was one of the few times any visitors came to Hebrides.
Mother's death gave me freedom to roam the island on which our castle sat, and it wasn't hard to make a serving boy row me out to my namesake isle, until I grew enough to do it myself. I was the first one to ever discover the ring of stones, or how the moon illuminated that circle when it was full. No other bothered to ask for me, so I made some of the village children come out with me and teach me the arts they learned from a mystic woman, all within my ring of stones.
At fourteen, I renounced those practices and decided never to go back to my stones. Time had made the islands feel even smaller, I knew I had learned all the villages could teach, and the simplicity bored me. I saw no future in the mystic arts, it was too easy. Father offered to send me to the King's court to foster, and suddenly there was an entire large world to be my playground.
I saw the boy there, and he was now seventeen, but his soft and kind tongue failed to fade away when mine had only become sharper, being left alone in my ring of stones for eight years. But that tongue did him well, and so did his quickness to jump to another's aid. Only weeks after I arrived I knew that Prince Duncan favored the Macbeth boy above the others.
And the Prince favored every other girl, but me. How I strove to be more like them, to capture the glance of each man they walked by and have such control over them. They knew how to paint their faces bright, yet the sun had no spoiled their skin in youth. Each person they spoke to in such a delicate manner leaned in to every word, and they were full of true talents, they made beautiful things.
One boy did watch me, the one with the green eyes and I started to feel myself speaking softer to him, using the oils serving maids recommended to remove sun blotches from my cheeks. I wanted him to never stop glancing, I wanted him to never stop touching me so softly and giving me hearty laughs with large smiles when I spoke.
At the beginning of my sixteenth year, he admitted to wanting to marry me. The parents were flimsy things, the father a gambler and the dowry of Hebrides was not enough. Glamis needed more then a sharp face with hair as dark as a moonless sky, they said.
It didn't matter; that summer I became an Heiress, and it broke my vow of two years prior. My father bade me home for some time, and I urged my brother to come to my island and see my ring of stones. Back in Hebrides, there was nowhere else I desired to be. He came, in the little rowboat and I sat in the middle, letting the wind whisk through my hair once more. The earth pulsed with my heart and a sharp pick stone I once used to draw marks in the dirt found its way to my hand as though it never left.
I didn't move as the wolf appeared, but I heard her growl and my brother shout for me to run. My breaths just slowed and deepened while his shouts changed from a warning to shrieks of terror, to flesh ripping and then silence before the soft fur brushed against my leg. I opened my eyes to found the wolf sleeping at my feet with a full meal in her stomach. I never looked at my brother's decapitated body.
I married Macbeth that autumn, and a babe was in my womb by spring. I found comfort in Glamis, Macbeth attentions enough to distract the yearnings for my island. Especially once I told him about the baby.
Then the plagues came and went, my father gone with them. The stiff dark gowns returned and my husband tried his comforting tongue to no avail for I felt no sadness. The earth of the island, the shadow of the stones, those were my real parents.
My fingertips only hovered over those fat cheeks, his jerking grasp remembered in my wrists. No, I wouldn't touch him. Not even in life I desired to near him, so why now? He had no soul to be frightened of. And I had grown used to fear, I was raised under the open sky with animals growling outside my circle in the dead of night, their yellow eyes my only light.
He first appeared the night his body was burned, when it was too late to feel the crackling skin. They hadn't bothered with lavender at the burning. That night, we all smelt rotten flesh roasting.
The shadow said nothing, just watched with a sneer as the midwife checked on the growing babe. We woke in blood that dawn, my husband and I. It moistened the sheets, and his immediate vomit mixed with the smell.
He never really leaves, but there is one moment each time when he steps from the shadows enough to really see his face. That face with hollow holes for eyes, with flesh dripping off onto the ground in rotten pieces. In these moments, he reaches out a hand of bones and just sneers. Winter. Summer. Sun. Rain. Noon. Midnight. When I feel a babe quicken in my womb, my father emerges. It is always in the last moment when he snatches away our child and leaves us to waken in a pool of my blood.
After one such morning, after a pregnancy I had not dared to utter in a letter to my husband on the war front, a piece of mail arrived from him and I read it eagerly, desperate for those kind words that took the shadows from my mind. Yet, the shadows only grew. Three witches he had met, and they hailed him "king that shalt be". Did he not ask more, of how this was to come about, or how we could protect such a title when his father-in-law took heirs from my womb?
I craved for a child, a strong boy like Macbeth, or a simple-minded daughter like the girls I had seen as a youth at court. Something for him to dote on, and for another man to love so kindly.
This he could not take on his own, he had too much softness in him, too much of a mother's sweet milk ran in his veins. Did I blame, did I condemn? Only something so soft, so pure could love something so wrongly raised as I. The innocence of my husband kept him blind to my faults.
I rose to the window, and glanced west, picturing my ring of stones as though I had only seen it an hour ago, all the way back in Hebrides. His letter still in my hand, I caught a line he had added on after the signature. A fate for our dear Banquo they did pronounce as well. They spoke of his sons as kings.
His sons. Then was it not all settled? Such a miscarriage of the night before was not my last. We would have no heir, so the line would pass. I had no need of the milk in my breasts, or the feminine parts of my flesh. What was I to a husband who so deserved a child, who so deserved to be the perfect father, so unlike mine that was graced with a living daughter he let run wild?
I would sacrifice it all, make my milk poison if that be what Macbeth needed to claim his throne. I could make him no King of a family, no master of children that ran about Inverness, but I could make him King of all Scotland. And myself Queen, when I could not be a mother to my own blood, I could be mother to a nation. Minstrels would write their songs of my angelic face, no more of Duncan's whiny thing. A new world could bloom.
The courage it took to love a girl like me, that courage could propel him forward, and when the door opened to reveal my husband I put my case at his feet. Kill Duncan, and we could change the fate we had. All we needed to do was except this new one. It was only fair that the foulness we had been dealt would finally pay to something better.
My conscious had not been clear since I heard the wolf, and it would not be more destroyed by another act of foul play. One murder, and the only thing my beloved had to do was to wield the knife.
How I wanted to offer to take it from him! To stab Duncan in the heart, to capture the attention in his last moments that I had so desired as a youth. For one moment, I wanted another man to prove to me I was as angelic as Macbeth made me believe I was. I cared not anymore if it was an angel of light or dark.
But I remembered the whispers of that time, when people saw Duncan and I side by side and remembered how much my father had once dotted upon his mother. Could it be true that he looked more like the dead Thane of Hebrides than he did the King before him? In sleep, without those eyes opened, I feared the similarity might be all too real and my father could appear from the shadows to stop my hand. No, only Macbeth could avoid that face in the air.
We would not fail; I could not listen to his ramblings on how we may. We would not, for he was not a child, I assured him. He was a man, and that was why I never would know the feeling of a babe sucking the milk from my breast, because I had no child. I had a husband, a worthy Thane to make me feel lovely. The servants would be drunk, I saw enough of my father on wine to know that they would not remember their evening activities in the morning.
Goddamn the owl! Such hooting could wake all of Inverness and found our plans spoiled. And the knocking that began when Macbeth stared at me in the moonlight, those daggers still in his hand!
My father followed me in the shadows, and for a moment I dared to dream. A son-in-law on the throne of Scotland. That was power to the family. Could it be enough to give him peace? Enough to allow me one single babe, even if it was sickly like his eldest son had been? A prince did not need to be strong enough to fight off wolves, that was what sons of Thanes were for.
I had been right; I saw that as I laid the dagger by Duncan's head. My half brother indeed he was. All the more reason to have him dead, I didn't need more reminders of my curse in the living world.
A little water, my love, a little water over our hands like when we drip it over the heads of our stillborn babes in the darkness to say that they were something, that they were loved. A little water, and we can bury all the memories of this night, like we buried the memoires of bloody nights before.
It was all too easy to release my body and fall to the floor when such action was needed as the men spoke, to change my husband's fear of our deed to fear for my health. My father shouldn't have been so visible to me, not when he had taken my latest child only two nights before. But the word on his lips was too easy to read. Duncan. Duncan. Duncan. A second brother that I killed.
What good really was the family of your childhood, when it stopped you from making one of your own? And when just trying to create the tender touch you never had as you slept under dark skies leads to you losing the semblance of it that you found? His eyes were too dark when he told me Banquo would die, and that lack of color stopped the words in my throat. Fleance, we needed Fleance. But how do you tell the one who loves you so much that in return, your own choices are why you can never give him something else to love, something worthy of his love, in return? How do you explain when you are the one who taught him to lose all that gentleness he possessed, the part that always loved you?
My conscious was far gone, but Macbeth's still had a chance and I had taught him how to destroy it. In turn, that would eventually destroy both of us.