Chapter Forty-Three
For Finlay, the dead Englishman’s food did not last nearly long enough, and the weather deteriorated around him.
He knew not where he was, and he avoided cottages with instinctive wariness just as he avoided towns.
His condition grew steadily worse as he moved north and westward, putting one foot in front of the other as he had for so many years on the road.
He chose his direction by the same instinct that impelled his feet, that kept him battling. As if there was something inside him that knew where he should be bound, even if he could not name that place.
Often, upon waking under some hedge or beside a wall, he had no idea who or where he was. When he was walking though, pieces of memories tended to come floating in.
They were akin, these memories, to the things he saw in his dreams, so much so he wondered if it was merely those dreams he recalled, and not actual memories at all. He saw most often the bonny, golden-haired girl standing outside the roundhouse in the sun, smiling. Smiling at him.
But there was, too, the tall girl with the deerhound at her side.
And the wild-eyed lass riding a brown pony, laughing and looking back over her shoulder at him.
And an older woman, aged, standing in the firelight, who stared into his eyes and said, “When you return to me, in the next life, let it not be as a warrior. Because I cannot endure this fear upon fear of losing you in battle. Even after all this time, I cannot.”
All these memories—if so they were—warmed even as they baffled him, brought a measure of comfort upon his dogged and terrible journey. When they faded, he was lost again, left with a single conviction: Four women. All the same woman.
His wounds healed, the cuts on his hands first, even though he had to use them most. The lump to the back of his head. The slash to his cheek healed badly, but covered by beard, it did not seem to matter.
From time to time, he glimpsed others who might be refugees from the battle, fleeing like himself.
A few called to him but he did could not be sure of them, friend from foe.
Was he still in England? The place of that terrible conflict.
He had no way to tell. He grew steadily weaker, the great vitality housed within beginning to flicker and wane.
A cold day it was when he followed a mere track of a road, barely a rut between the dying heather, through an area mostly empty of habitation. To his right, a stream flowed. To his left were the heights of five mountains, those of which it seemed he should know the names.
Ahead, a rare sight—a small hovel of a cottage, huddled stone on stone beside the track. He knew very well he should make his way up and around the brae to avoid it, but he lacked the strength.
He meant to trudge on by as swiftly as he could. But in quickening his pace he stumbled and went down beside the drystone wall that fronted the track, his fingers grasping for it. They missed, and he went down.
He felt the hard, cold ground coming up to meet him, and then no more until a voice sounded in his ear and a pair of determined arms urged him up again.
“Here, now. Here, now.”
He came to himself, at least bits of himself, and obeyed that strong urging. Someone helped him to his feet. Supported him as he struggled.
“Awa’ in wi’ ye now. A few steps more, only.”
The next he knew, he awoke in a dim room. A fire burned nearby, but it did little to lift the gloom cast by a low roof and no windows he could see. He felt warm but curiously wooden-headed, and so weak he had no words for it.
“So ye’ve come awake, ha’ ye?” A voice, the same surely that he had heard outside, along the track. A woman’s voice.
She appeared beside him and eased herself down with a small groan of discomfort. She was aged, with a crown of silver-white hair and a face full of weathering, her voice cracked by time.
“I was beginning to wonder if ye would wake at all, and me wi’ ye stretched out here beside my hearth. Wha’ to do wi’ ye?”
Finlay said nothing in reply, did nothing save stare at her.
“Fleeing yon battle, are ye?” she asked kindly. “The one awa’ in the south?”
“Aye.” His voice did not sound like his own.
“Aye, so I have had others moving through here, a few, and some hurt sore bad. I ha’ helped them as I may, being the loyal Scotswoman tha’ I am. But I am a widow on my own, ye ken, and ha’ no’ much to spare.”
“Wha’ is this place?”
“Kintail. Laird Campbell’s land. Where are ye bound, laddie?”
“Home.”
“And where might that be?”
“Cursed if I can recall.”
She pursed her lips and tutted at him. “Och, ye ha’ a great, terrible lump to the back o’ yer head. I reckon that’s knocked the sense out o’ ye, but I do no’ doubt all will come back in time.”
Finlay doubted it.
“Wha’ is yer name?”
“Ardahl. Ardahl MacCormac.” It came from nowhere.
“Aye, and does that no’ sound like a name fro’ Ireland? What ye be doing here, then?”
“I am no’ sure.”
“Well, ye sound like a Scotsman true, and no’ Irishman I ever met. When my husband, Ernie, was still alive we sometimes hired Irish lads for the harvest, ye understand. They did no’ sound like ye. But ye no’ be wearing a tartan. Just that gray kilt and nay plaidie at all.”
“The only name I recall is Ardahl.”
“Well, I canna help that, but mayhap ye’ll remember more as yer head heals. Wha’ I can help is the state o’ ye. Ye need feedin’. Ye are naught but bones, and I am no’ surprised ye went down outside my door.”
She was kind. “Ye be kind.”
“Tush, tush, ye let me do as I will. One thing for certain, ye canna be out in the cold or ye will lie down beneath a gorse bush and die. ’Tis snowing out there, ye ken.”
“Is it?”
“Aye, so, but ye be safe and warm here. My name be Molly, but ye can call me Mol, as everyone does.”
She bustled off and returned carrying a wooden bowl. With one arm, remarkably strong for an aged woman, she urged him up. “Drink o’ this. Broth, it is.”
He drank obediently. The broth was thin but warm and went down easy.
“There now. Ye rest and sleep as ye need, for ’tis the best healer, and we ha’ nay other to hand.”
And as she moved around the tiny place, leaving him to that rest, she began to sing in her ancient, cracked voice. An old song that surely he knew.
He slept and woke and slept again. Molly cared for him as if he were her own son, and a wonder that was, for it had been long and long since he’d known a mother’s care.
Sometimes when she knew he was awake, she chattered to him with soft Highland words. Mayhap she did that when he slept also; he could not say. He dreamed, but not anything he remembered upon waking.
She had little to give him beyond broth and care. For all he knew, she beggared herself to feed him. No one came to the door, and it made him think it must be a lonely life she lived most the time.
She had a few animals, a cow at the other end of the bothy and some hens outside, for once he grew stronger she fed him eggs. The cow, so she said, was nearly dry, she having sold the last calf earlier on.
“No’ but that her milk would be good for heartening ye.”
His strength returned, under her care. Frighteningly, his memory did not, save in those elusive pieces.
Thoughts of a woman who loved him. Of long journeys upon the land. Most of all, though, memory lay in the music, in the songs Molly sang. Those stirred something in his heart and in his mind.
“I ken that song,” he said one day as he sat combing fleeces for her. “I just canna remember the name o’ it.”
“‘The Lover Lost,’” she told him, and just like that the whole of it came flooding upon him, words and all.
“Aye, so.” Arrested, he stared at nothing, his fingers poised.
Molly came and sat beside him. “D’ye still no’ remember yer place or trade, Ardahl?”
“Nay.”
“For here’s a curious thing. Ye carry a sword like any warrior or clansman returning from yon battle. All right and proper. Yet—I had a wee peek in yer pack. I hope ye do no’ mind.”
“I do no’.” God knew, what was hers had been his, and what was his must be hers.
“Let me show ye wha’ I found.”
She went and fetched his pack from beside the wall. Tattered and filthy it was, but she opened it carefully and extracted—
Aye. A harp. The one he carried. The pieces of it.
For an instant, his senses swam. He went so dizzy he had to clutch the old woman’s arm.
“Wha’ is it, lad?”
He took the broken back of the instrument into his hands. It had not fractured cleanly. The pieces had come apart jagged.
Like his heart.
A name appeared in his mind. Bradana. But nay, that was not it. Brada.
“My harp. This is mine.”
Her face brightened. “But the sword?”
“Mine also.”
“A curious thing, that! Is there nay a song about it?”
“The minstrel boy to war is gone, in the ranks o’ death ye will find him.”
“Aye, that is it. What a lovely voice ye do ha’.”
He hadn’t realized that he’d sung the words. He felt odd. Unsteady. His fingers caressed the shattered wood in his hands.
Molly said, “Here is the rest o’ it here in yer pack. I do no’ think it can be repaired.”
“Nay. Och, nay.”
But the songs were still there. The songs remained with him.