Chapter 39 Anassa
With every forced step down this sombre staircase, dragged by these armoured goons with a lack of care that borders on sheer malice, my despair grows.
What a fool I’ve been – what an utter, vainglorious fool, thinking I could somehow reason with that sore excuse of a queen.
Gruoch is not me; she’s not even remotely like me.
And her husband … Her husband, with his rosy cheeks and ginger locks, looks absolutely nothing like my Lord Macbeth.
Will truly wrote himself as the main character in our tragic play, twisting the source material into something sinister, something filled with fog and cackle, with ghosts and witches.
Yet as the guards force us through that main floor towards another, narrower staircase, scything the bowels of the earth until we reach a foul-smelling basement, I only have myself to blame.
I’m the one, not Will, who wrote this sombre ending to my story, inked in deluded thinking and dour fortune.
And it’s my fault that Claret has to suffer that same fate.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I tell her as they march us along a corridor so filthy my words drown in dry heaves. Grime, human excrement and sweat wrestle each other for the most prominent odour, while the cries of men and women punctuate our every step …
A prison. They have brought us to the castle’s prison.
‘It’s not your fault,’ Claret mumbles as the guards take us to the last cell on the right, one that looks mercifully empty and silent, at least. Her face is thunderous, shaking with righteous anger, but I can tell it’s not directed at me – and for that, I’m grateful.
The guards unlock the door and throw us in, the clang of rusted steel bars singing our lament. And as they lock us in and leave without further explanation, a thin skylight the only thing that separates us from pitch blackness, I see him.
Curled up in a corner, face bruised and swollen.
‘You vile lady villains,’ Will says, voice cracking. More of an observation than an insult.
He tries to get up, but a cough consumes him. He spits blood.
Claret springs to action, searching Will’s stuff, his pouch, finding the cloth that once contained our meal and the rest of the aqua vitae. She dabs the liquid on the fabric, using it to clean Will’s face.
‘Ow. Ow! More gently, please,’ he hisses, flinching.
‘Ssh, stay still. I swear, you two are so alike. Children, the both of you.’ Claret spares a smile for me before continuing her ministrations.
The scene would be adorable, under different circumstances. As things stand now, I’m too preoccupied with pacing up and down the cell, trying to measure the exact degree of our misfortune – and failing.
What crime sent us to prison, really? I didn’t even have the chance to speak to Gruoch, to explain.
My reaction to Macbethad’s painting, and to the news of his demise, was all she needed to condemn us …
as if the moment we set foot inside the castle our fate was already decided, and she merely indulged us for a second.
But why? And did they make us wait so long so they could incapacitate Will first?
It would be easier to think without that stench, those wails from the adjoining cells.
‘That’s all I can do without clean water,’ Claret proclaims, handing the cloth to Will to keep next to his mouth, where a nasty cut runs deep.
‘You people really need a lesson on the virtues of fresh water, if we make it out of this. Now,’ she turns to me, ‘if you start screaming, really loud, do you think it will lure the guards back? They’re wrapped in metal, but their necks are flesh, and I would like to see what my knife can make of it. ’
‘It won’t work.’ Will coughs.
‘How do you know?’ Claret asks at the same time as I ask, ‘Why are you here?’
He tries to sigh his usual, oh-woe-is-me sigh, but it comes off more like wheezing. ‘A story, then. For all I know it could be my last.’
Claret tssks, but I urge him to go on.
‘We were done for at the gate, ever since I asked for King Macbethad. My calculations were a year off. This is the February of 1058, it seems, and the current King of Scotland is Lulach, Gruoch’s son from her first marriage.’
I blink. Queen Mother Gruoch …
‘Fine, so you got the king’s name wrong.’ Claret huffs. ‘It can happen. News often takes a long time to reach us. In Mycenae, with the war raging so far away for a decade, we had to rely on an elaborate system of bonfires –’
‘My dear, magnificent Claret,’ Will interrupts her, ‘on any other day I would sit rapt, listening to stories from your world. Oh, the plays I could concoct … But this world is different. King Lulach is young and paranoid; he’s given orders to arrest on sight anyone who seems suspicious, or mentions his father’s name, as if unaware of his passing.
I don’t know if it is grief or ambition, or a sorry snake of both, that have turned his mind so.
But he’s marching to war next month, to Rhynie, where he will die, mind you, according to Holinshed’s chronicles, and until then he thinks everyone a spy … or a witch.’
His words chill me. This is beginning to make sense now, but not quite. ‘Did the guards tell you all this?’
‘Oh no, no – ow!’ Will tries to shake his head but regrets it, the pain clearly overwhelming. ‘All the guards did was throw me in here, the good lads. His Majesty himself paid me a visit. He wears such fine, hefty rings on his hand.’
I look at him, assessing his injuries. A signet ring could do that damage on a face, it’s true. But a king hitting a prisoner … What kind of a monster has Gruoch given birth to?
‘Lulach hit you,’ I say. I resume my pacing, trying to fit this new information into a picture as coherent as –
And then I see the pages. Holinshed’s tome, torn to shreds on the cell’s floor, already soaking up grime and dark fluids.
‘He saw the book? The one that chronicles his whole life’s story?
’ A dormant fury rises in me. If Lulach had felt what I felt when Shepherd showed me that folio … ‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ I whisper.
‘Funny you should mention that. See, I thought I could help, even in the eleventh hour. I told him I had a book that prophesied how events would unfold. That if he read it, he could choose another path; stay alive.’
‘For such a clever man, you are a moron,’ Claret says, and I wholeheartedly agree.
‘People have always tried to fight their fate, they always will try. Give a man a prophecy and you have handed him his undoing. Every step we take against the path pre-weaved for us by the Moirai is a step backward. It only ties us up in knots, like struggling flies, bringing us closer to the spider’s mouth. ’
Her words hang between the three of us, heavy, foreboding.
‘Yes, well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?
Lulach called the book witchcraft. He tried to burn it but I stopped him, saying how nothing good ever comes from burning books, from silencing words of wisdom.
He thought I was casting a spell on him.
’ Will chuckles, but it’s all bitterness, not mirth.
‘We are to burn tomorrow, my dears. The three of us, as witches. I’m so very sorry. ’
I could scream, like Claret suggested earlier.
I could protest this nonsensical declaration.
Instead I slump to the cell’s hideous ground, not caring about all the kinds of filth that greet me there.
The iron bars cut into my back and I am forced to accept there’s nothing more to do; we’re out of moves.
Night falls slowly outside, the silver moonlight from the skylight giving us a ghostlike countenance – such fitting foreshadowing of what’s to come.
The guards do come, without me screaming.
And Claret, strangely, keeps her hands on her cloak instead of attacking them, her features twisted furiously.
The guards laugh at us, and make obscene jokes, and bring us weak ale and stale bread that we nevertheless devour; a last, shared supper for the two crownless queens and the scribbler trapped before his time.
We are nothing, in this Scotland of yore.
Nobodies. Will regales us with tales about how England gets a Scottish king in his time, and how he’s friends with him – then even he falls silent, perhaps thinking of all the people he will never see again, all the characters he won’t get to bring to life.
All because he came along, to keep me safe, out of some misplaced sense of responsibility. And look how quickly, how seamlessly, I’ve brought us all to ruin. I bang my head on the bars, the repetitive movement soothing. I ran out of strength to pace a while ago.
A hand cushions my head instead of cold iron. Clarets sits down beside me. ‘Don’t do that,’ she admonishes. ‘Our fight is never lost until it is. No need to give yourself a split skull, do our enemies’ job for them.’
‘Yet when the guards were here, that knife of yours remained well sheathed.’ I don’t mean to accuse her. She must be tired too.
‘I know,’ Claret mumbles, as if surprised by herself. ‘I was going to. I meant to. But when I tried to grab it from my cloak, I couldn’t. It was as if it was embedded in the fabric, wrapped tight. As if I wasn’t allowed access to it.’
I narrow my eyes. This feels important, somehow, but my mind is too exhausted to unravel it.
And what does it matter, anyway? Knife or no knife, we’ll still burn.
All I did fighting off that torch Thom threw at me was give us an extra day.
A few blessed hours, my heart reminds me as Claret huddles closer.
Hours filled with a whole new vocabulary for feelings, a new constellation of sensations.
Maybe that’s not so bad. I kiss her head.
Her hair smells like walnuts and war. ‘It’s all right.
We both did our best. And it was still worth it, to go up in flames with you.
’ My voice is low, yet the cell is small.
I know Will can hear us, but he pretends to slumber, to give us this last privacy.
Good man.
I am determined not to waste a single second.
‘You know,’ I whisper, bending my head to look at Claret’s copper eyes, ‘when Ophelia brought me to you, she was repeating something, a phrase. It didn’t make sense to me then, but it does now. I think that phrase was meant for your sister.’
‘What was the phrase?’ Claret asks.
I can tell Will is itching to recite his poetry, his words, as surely as he wrote them. He twitches in his corner of the cell, next to his torn pages, sniffles, but remains silent – and in that moment, he’s my dearest friend.
‘Doubt thou the stars are fire,’ I start, planting a kiss between Claret’s thick, dark brows. She shivers. ‘Doubt that the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar.’ A kiss on one cheek, then the next, tracing an errant tear. My Claret is crying. ‘But never doubt I love –’
Her lips find mine first, accepting my confession, and in that moment I don’t fear any flame, any death, as long as I die next to her.
Then she breaks our kiss, breathless and shaky but still with the fervour of someone not yet ready to give up.
‘Yes. To all of that. Yet you know what vexes me the most?’ I feel her hand rummaging through my cloak.
‘We did exactly as the Moirai told us. We found our guide, we reached Shepherd’s domain.
We both used our keys to save an innocent.
So why –’ She fishes out my key, gets up and slams it into our cell’s lock.
I hold my breath. Will half-opens his eyes, hopeful, as Claret tries to get my key to unlock our cell door. I can already tell it’s not working, but she keeps trying. ‘Why won’t that blasted thing get us out of here? Why have they abandoned us?’
She’s making too much noise. The other prisoners have risen from whatever shallow sleep they sought their solace in. The wailing resumes, the banging of the bars, the cries for help more frenetic than ever.
I take Claret’s hand in both of mine, giving it a gentle tug until she understands and gives up, relinquishing the key. ‘It won’t open,’ I tell her.
‘Perhaps I can help with that,’ whispers another voice, from outside the bars.
Claret and I take a surprised step back, as a woman dressed in black appears, seemingly out of nowhere.
Gruoch gives me the coldest look.