Against the Owl
By NiDubhchair
The Thane of Ross, brother to Lady MacDuff, witnesses her murder from afar. Later, MacDuff visits his burnt-out castle and the graves of his family and contemplates the consequences of his actions. Rated PG for some intense scenes.
Gavan, the Thane of Ross, pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders as he rode through the barren hills and gnarled copses of the Fife Highlands. His sister's words to him when he had brought her news of her husband's flight chilled him. "Even the poor wren, the most diminutive of birds, will fight, her young ones in the nest, against the owl," she had said. Her eyes, like to the surface of a loch on a starry night, had flashed as if with heaven's fire. Ross knew his sister, knew the courage of her soul, which held him with a loyalty second only to the fealty he owed her husband, MacDuff, the Thane of Fife. "Only a woman could call such a man a coward…" he said aloud. Ross tried to explain away his uneasiness with words, remembrances of slaughter and glory at the side of his brave kinsman. He fled only to save himself for Scotland! For the succor of his country he was man enough to risk all!
. . . But to leave a woman, a wife, a sister…to leave 6 children and countless retainers, to the mercy of a madman, changeful as an autumn sea? Ross had been there, had watched the soul behind the Thane of Glamis' eyes die as he screamed of murder and blood to an empty chair at his last ill-begotten banquet. Ross had, with the Thanes of Lennox and Angus, looked upon Banquo as he lay bloodied and mangled in Sidhe Bruach's dry streambed. His eyes and open mouth and gaping wounds seemed to whisper with all the voices of the hills, "Macbeth…O, slave! Macbeth!" Yet, even one so reddened with unnatural murders as the King could not yet be so confident to murder openly, pleaded Ross with himself, not with Prince Malcolm and MacDuff and the entirety of their vassal thanes still living?
A strange sound interrupted his thoughts, a clamor and the rush of flames borne upon the Highland wind. The Thane of Ross urged his horse on to the crest of a lonely hill, crowned with Fay stones, and looked back towards his sister's castle. The picture that met his eyes burned thereafter in his mind until old age took it mercifully from him. Flames shot from the outbuildings of the castle, yet but a mile off, and on the strong north wind he could hear their screams, shrieks of child and of maidservant, of mother and of babe, rending the air, made, but marked by no man living but himself. Ross spurred his horse back in their direction, with mad thoughts of revenge and rescue pressing on his brain, then stopped, halted by horror at the sight of a flaming body thrown from an upper window. It would be too late. He was too late. The tyrant's murderers would only cut him down if he went back, and no one would be left to tell the story of this lost family to its lord. And yet, for all his sense of duty to MacDuff, he could not ride away.
He waited through the night, sitting within the ancient circle of stones on the hill-top, watching the glow of the fires die down, listening as the wretched kern of murderers galloped past on the road below. He did not stir until the first birdsong broke, just before the dawn. Then it was that he methodically mounted his horse and rode down again into the smoke-smothered valley. He stopped only once on his way, at the gate of the castle, to stare. The portcullis had not been dropped, the gates had not been touched or burned in any way. And yet he'd left them with strict instructions to lock and bar the castle's entrance secure behind him.
So, his sister and his kinsman's children had been betrayed, their lives torn open and flung away by the base hands of a treacherous servant, who, in the fee of the mad king, had opened the gates and let in the floods of death. Ross drew his sword, willing to kill anything that might still be lurking about, likewise looking for gain and plunder.
The castle was left a heap of ashy stone, its strong supports having cracked and fallen under the fire's fury. Only the northwest tower had escaped the collapse, a lonely, defeated sentinel. The courtyard-chapel's stone walls still stood, roofless and windowless, like dead hands lifted in a last appeal to heaven. They barely concealed the desperate tangle of bodies laying about the altar, peasants and retainers forced within and burned alive while the murderers turned their slaughter on the family.
Their bodies were not hard to find. MacDuff's three daughters had been playing in the yard, for Ross found their bodies lying together, still clutching the dolls and hoops of a girl's game. The charred body of his eldest son lay some yards from the castle wall, and from its posture Ross could now guess what child he had seen thrown from an upper window. Lady MacDuff and her second son were harder to uncover, as they still lay within the rubble of the castle; but Ross, though he scored and bloodied his hands with the removal of stones and was nearly faint with hunger by the end, discovered them as the sun set over Ben Araigdh, the dying light coloring their cold faces with carmine. The wooden sword crafted by the boy's father was still grasped in his hand. Lady MacDuff's arms were stretched out, the hands crushed beneath a large, unmovable,ceiling beam. Gavan guessed that if he could lift it, he would find the sixth child of MacDuff, an infant christened only the month previous. He extricated the lady's hands as well he could, and bore her and her son away.
Ross knew the correct forms of the burial service well enough, being a soldier well brought-up in war and all its trappings, but as he dug the six shallow graves, and laid the bodies gently down within as if tucking them in bed and wishing them a last good-night, his voice choked on the "Gloria Patriae," and his tongue, for all its training, could not pronounce "Amen." The only hymn heard was the weeping of a warrior as night descended, and the nightingale began his song.