Chapter 15 #2
A woman with her blue skirts tucked up into her girdle stood hoeing rows of turnips and onions, and another tossed feed to red-brown hens with feathers all-a-flutter as they pecked heartily at the ground near her wooden clogs.
Off in the distance, men tilled the grain fields and others were bailing up huge rolls of fresh golden-green hay, while large-bedded hay wagons lined up to be loaded.
Wagons stacked high with faggots cut from the forest for cook fires moved past the town’s perimeter ditches and disappeared into the bowels of Inverness.
Everywhere she looked was another teeming eyeful.
To see so many people caused a humming deep inside her. She was not so alone, and she smiled.
“Aye, ‘tis a sight, is it not?” Heckie said with admiration. “To see a holding where the lord and the sheriff don’t bleed all the wealth out of the land and its people. Even the likes of Munro the Horrible wouldn’t dare plant his greedy feet onto charter land of the king, Himself.”
Her smile disappeared. She didn’t know which name upset her more, Munro the Horrible or her father ‘Himself.’ She paused before speaking. “When the king Himself has been living in exile for so many years past?” The words spilled like toads from her mouth. “What king does not rule his land?”
She could feel Heckie’s look without a glance.
“I would expect a laddie from Ross-shire to know more of how the winds blow,” he said quietly and pulled on the reins.
She stared at her hands in her lap, knowing she could not tell him the truth, that she knew little of kings and politics living not in Ross-shire but in the isolation of the outer islands, where rare news was more of the Norse machinations than much of their own homeland. That she was not a lad.
What would he say were she to pull off her hat, let down her hair, and declare she was the daughter of Himself?
Did that make her Herself?
If Heckie of Drumashie knew he was sitting next to the daughter of the king she suspected the news might actually render the man speechless.
She searched for a lie and settled on the truth.
“I do not know much of the workings of politics and the rulings and rights of kings. I never dared ask why he is in exile, having lived with the belief that the king was so far from my place in the schemes of the world and therefore had nothing to do with me. I have only known that the king has been away for as many years as I have breathed this air.”
So Heckie explained the king’s exile, the great battle on the day she secretly knew she was born, and Heckie’s story made her understand betrayal on a grander scale than she would have ever thought she could fathom before the last few days.
“…. And later we heard that the great and lovely queen had died, with her newborn child, in a fire in the woods, while the king was taken prisoner, and none ever knew if it were the king’s enemies that got to her.”
From Heckie she heard of such tales of the treachery that for the first time she understood the thin thread of control and slim trust available to anyone with royal blood.
He told her of the king’s cousin, who challenged her father’s right to rule through his mother’s line and with coffers of gold and silver from his many ransoms bought easy rebellion from some lords who swore fealty to her father, but behind his back plotted to oust him.
“He came back to Scotland once, Himself did,” Heckie said.
“But a traitor was privy to the secret plans, and as the king and his men rowed ashore, the barons and their mercenaries attacked and he took an arrow deep in his side. On the ship was a man from Jerusalem who studied Eastern medicine, and he held the king together until they landed in Brittany. The French king’s chirurgeon brought him back from death throes, but his recovery was long and difficult.
‘Tis said he was betrayed by one of his closest friends…
the name bandied about was Sir Ewan Robertson.
For a brief moment she wondered if she had misjudged her father. She still ached from her own experience with betrayal.
“There is fresh rumor brewing about. First heard a fortnight ago.”
“What kind of rumor?”
“That Himself is coming home.”
She knew the rumor was no rumor but the truth. Her father was coming back. Would his enemies again try to kill him? How could he ever trust anyone?
Heckie was watching her quizzically.
“I do not know what to say except it would seem to be folly for him to risk his life again. Why would he?”
“Because his blood is that of kings,” he said simply.
He spoke with honest reverence about her father and his courage, and his tone was filled with pride. She felt suddenly small, and for the first time she wondered at her blood. What did she carry beneath her skin that drove her and made up her being? So many unanswered questions.
They drove past the deep defense ditches lined with stone and into Inverness proper, where buildings huddled close together like foot soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, as if there were only bare enough plots of land for the four corners of each one.
Up from the dirt street, a blanket of dust swirled around the ox team, dusting their black coats with a fine veil of red dirt.
That the thoroughfare was not muck-ridden was extremely rare.
From what Heckie said, drain gutters and cess channels were built behind the buildings, as they were in Edinburgh and London.
And though there were dogs and pigs and chickens occasionally roving in the streets, there were far more people moving to and from the market crossing; it stood ahead them, where the crowds thickened and one could hear the hawking of goods, pipe and drum music, and the buzzing voices of trade.
Heckie turned the wain down a side street and stopped in front of a narrow, stone based building with blood-red painted shutters.
A barber sign swung on an iron hook above the door, a thick oak timbered with red and white-lime painted trimwork.
He assured her he knew of a stable where she could safely board and care for her horse and hound while she explored the temptations of the market.
In exchange she would stay and watch the loaded wagon while Heckie took care of his tooth pain.
Glenna knew she could not stay in the town indefinitely—she would have to move onward—but the size and crowds of Inverness afforded her more anonymity than a village and she needed supplies. For a short time, perhaps a few days, she could lose herself here.
Lyall lost her trail again. He reined in and rubbed his brow, took a long deep breath before he glanced up through the trees at the sun to gauge how much time he’d already wasted.
Too long. For every movement of the sun across the broad blue sky, she was getting farther and farther away.
Frustrated, angry at himself for letting his guard down--and wanting to whack the little witch for being so quick-witted--he turned around for the third time and went back to the place where she had entered the stream.
He dismounted and carefully tracked her on foot, walking on the rocks and stopping to examine anything, until finally he found one deep hoof print between some rounded stones, not on the east side as he had expected, but on the west side of the stream.
West? He stared into the trees. He didn’t for a heartbeat believe she would go back toward the abbey.
He looked westward, then north, checked both directions for trees with broken twigs and branches, marks that proved she had ridden past, and then searched the areas for hound and horse dung, anything to give a clue of her direction. But he found nothing.
Back by the stream he kicked aside some fallen leaves, hunkered down. There, finally, he saw a trace of hoofmarks that had been brushed away. He shook his head, half admiring her.
The trail led in a wide circle back to the stream.
So it was no surprise when he found she had pulled the same trick again further upstream, only this time the hoofmarks were headed north, and again she had covered her tracks back to the stream--which meandered westward before turning into a rock falls down a hillside near the eastern edge of the woods.
He followed her trail, trusting his instincts, which had yet to lead him false. Only when he let down his guard did his plans go awry, he reminded himself. Something to keep in the forefront of his mind when it came to his thoughts and plans and feelings about Glenna.
Eventually he rode out of the woods to face the road to Inverness, the sun far behind him, and he spurred his mount forward, riding hard and fast--a wolf on the scent.
As she sat on the wagon seat waiting, a familiar panting sound came from overhead, and she leaned to the side and glanced upward to see Fergus, snout resting on his large furry paws atop the piles of corn, eager eyes wide and looking down at her.
She could hear his tail thumping on the husks.
He whimpered and crawled forward, so she stood and wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his fur then letting him freely lick her face.
“I swear I will never again spike a tankard of ale.” She gripped his wrinkled furry jowls and faced him nose to nose. “I am sorry, sweetling.”
From the barber’s open shutters, a loud, drawn-out shout of pain cracked through the air, and Fergus lifted his head, ears perked. Glenna winced, then shuddered slightly, thankful for every tooth in her head, even the crooked two on the bottom.
Time slogged by. She began to tap her feet.
The finally door opened and Heckie came out, a leather flask to his lips. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and climbed up into the wain, the overly pungent scent of usquebaugh tainting his breath.