Authors: Rosemary Sutcliff
She took no more notice of our passing than if we had not been there at all. And we marched on, and I thought no more of the thing, for the time being.
When the slopes of the glen at last fell behind us, and we came out into the open rolling country of the Atholl moors, the two scouts whom Dundee had sent ahead met us with the news that Murray, taking fright, had raised the siege of his own house and left Blair standing open to us. Nought was left of the besiegers save the traces of their camp, and the empty pasture lands from which they had had the forethought to drive off all the cattle when they left.
So we marched into Blair unopposed in the summer gloaming, to be met by another scout with word that
MacKay and his troops were making camp for the night at Pitlochry, ten miles or so south-east of us, beyond the pass at Killiecrankie.
It looked as though, one way or another, we should have a busy day tomorrow.
We posted pickets in the usual way, with outlying vedettes to the south and east, and pitched our camp in the broad in-pasture from which the cattle had been driven. It must have been about the place where the third Earl of Atholl built his splendid timber palace filled with flowers and rich hangings for the entertaining of the fifth King James when he came there hunting with the Papal Legate and the Italian Ambassador in his train; and as the guests departed, burned all to the ground behind them, as men today break their glasses after drinking the loyal toast.
Ours was a very different camp, but a loyal one, too.
We watered and fed and tended the horses as best we could, and set up the cavalry lines, all as we had done so many times before. As soon as the campfires were making ragged flowers of brightness through the summer dark, and the smell of cooking began to rise and spread from fire to fire; a good gipsy smell, for like all armies on the march we laid claim to anything furred or feathered that came our way, to say nothing of the odd stirk that the Highlanders brought in on a lucky day. We ate round our own fires, the Highland men for the most part according to clan or sept, and Claverhouse’s Horse apart by our own horse lines; but after the food was gone the whole camp broke up, and went visiting as it often did, men drifting to and fro in search of friends at other fires, and the dark between the fires grew full of moving shadows. I mind the Gordons’ piper stalking through them, found and lost and found again in the
flame-light, stiff and fierce as a fighting cock, his pipes under his arm, and the music spieling out behind him like the coloured ribbons from the drones across his shoulder.
Isobel Gordon’s Fancy
was the tune; and at most times men would have sprung up to dance to it, weary as they were, but that night the Highland camp was not just its usual self; there was an odd uneasiness in the air. Every man about the fires knew what tomorrow had in store, and that by next fire-lighting time he might be lying stiff and cold on the braeside with no fire to warm him ever again, but that was an old familiar knowledge, and I had never known the bright shadow of tomorrow’s fighting to trouble the Highlanders before. Besides, that was a thing we all shared; this was something that hung about the clan fires, not around ours.
I felt it when I went up from the horse lines in search of Alisdair, saw it in men’s eyes in the firelight, heard it behind their voices speaking in their own tongue. Caspar felt it too, and whimpered at my heels. As I checked among the Atholl men, looking about me, he stood up with his forepaws against my knee, and I felt that he was shaking, and stooped down to reassure him. His paws had hardened so much over the months that he could march moorland mile for moorland mile with us now and never get footsore; but when I took his forepaws in my hand, he picked one up awkwardly, and I saw by the light of the nearest fire that he had left blood in my palm. I rolled him over on his back to look, and found a fresh gash in one pad – a camp is a fine place for finding sharp things lying about. Alisdair would have to wait. And truth to tell, I was not sorry to leave the clan gatherings with their vague sense of trouble behind me. ‘Come,’ I said, ‘cold water for that,
my wounded sojer,’ and scooped him up under my arm and made for the river.
Under the bank, a little spit of ground ran out into the current, and the light of the rising moon slanting under the low-hanging alder branches made a cobwebby paleness that was enough to see by. I squatted down with Caspar between my knees, and began to bathe his paw in the cold swift-running water. He was a good wee dog, and whimpered, but did not try to pull away, though it must have hurt him sore as I opened the cut between my thumbs to make sure that there was nothing left inside.
I was just about done when a shadow fell across me, and looking up, I saw a short squat figure blotted dark against the mingled light of moon and campfires. I could not see his face, but there could be but one such pair of bow legs in all the Highland army.
‘Alisdair,’ I said, ‘I was coming seeking ye, by and by.’
‘Ach well, ’tis I that am the honoured one,’ said he, ‘but I was seeing you coming down that way, and so I am come seeking you instead. What will be amiss with Skolawn, then?’
He always called Caspar by the name of Finn MacCool’s great hound of ancient legend, it being his idea of a joke.
‘Naught but a cut paw that needed bathing,’ I said, ‘’tis done now.’ And as he scrambled down the bank I got up and we settled ourselves comfortably along the alder roots, with the wee dog at our feet.
For a while we sat in companionable silence, the sounds of the camp behind us, and in front of the lapping of the Garry water under the bank and the occasional plop of a rising trout. But Alisdair, though
he sat so still, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, was not at ease, but had the same odd smell of trouble about him that I had caught among the Highland fires. Whatever it was, it began reaching out from him to me…
‘What’s amiss, Alisdair?’ I asked at last.
‘What should be amiss?’
‘I’d not be knowing. But something is. ’Tis up there –’ I jerked my head back towards the camp. ‘And ’tis on you, my mannie.’
‘Ye’ve the keen nose, I’m thinking,’ said he, ‘ye should ha’ been a Hielan’ man.’ And then after a few moments, almost as though he spoke against his will, ‘Did ye see anything – any
one,
by the cattle ford an hour’s march up-river, as we came by?’
‘An old woman doing her household wash,’ said I, when I had had a moment to remember.
He did not look round, and I only saw the side half of his face blotted dark against the white water. ‘Aye, and you a Lowlander, ye would not be knowing.’
‘Knowing what?’ I said.
‘The Woman of the Sidh – the Washer by the Ford.’
But I would be knowing; I who had listened to the wild tales of Philip of Amryclose. I had forgotten, but it came back to me all too clearly… The Washer by the Ford, and she was washing the blood-stained linen, who comes before the death of chiefs and heroes – aye, before the death of Cuchulain himself…
‘Och, away! Dinna be sae daft,’ said I, as much to myself as to Alisdair. ‘She was real enough; just an old hen-wife a wee thing late with her spring washing. Aye, she was real enough.’
‘She seemed real enough,’ he said, ‘she always does.’
And I wished that I had not suddenly remembered
the something dark-reddish brown among the bundle of linen; the shawl or whatever it was…
At first light, with the camp just beginning to stir, Claverhouse called a council of war.
In after years, I heard from this man and that what passed in the Great Hall of Blair Castle that dawn. How Dundee put the question to his chiefs and captains, should they wait for the rest of the clan muster to come in, which would likely be about three days, or go forward at once, with what we had, to meet MacKay as he came out from the Killiecrankie pass. All the regular officers, and the leaders who had been trained to command regular and Lowland troops, were for waiting. ‘Wait,’ said they, the hardheaded and sensible men. ‘We have gained the castle and can hold it until the muster is complete. To meet MacKay with the force that we have now, half-starved and dead-weary from forced marching, would be madness.’ Aye, it was good sense; but when did sense ever have a meaning for the Highland men, the likes of Keppoch? Glengarry spoke out for them, ‘What matters an empty belly and a forced march to the men of the clans?’
And Dunfermline followed at his back. ‘If we bide here until MacKay attacks, we shall lose the advantage of attacking first, and risk being pinned down here. And the men of the clans do not fight their best behind walls.’
And that was true as well, and nearly all the chiefs spoke up with the same voice.
But the final decision of course was for Dundee, and they sat about the table and looked to him to make it.
That must have been a stark moment for Dundee! Having followed him as I had, I’m thinking the man’s
own choice would lie with the Highlanders, but any man trying to drive two horses not broken to run as a pair in the same harness would know the difficulties he faced.
Och well, in the end he found a way out of the tangle; aye, and paid his debt of friendship to Sir Ewan Cameron at the same time.
‘So far, Lochiel has spoken no word on the matter,’ he said, ‘and his experience is greater than any of ours, so much so that he cannot fail in this to make a right judgement; therefore his judgement shall be mine. Choose, Lochiel.’
And Lochiel made gracefully light of his experience of ‘little sallies and skirmishes’. ‘But,’ said he, ‘since you ask for my word, it is that we fight now. I know the Highland heart. Delay, and the clansmen will grow uneasy, remembering that the odds are more than two to one against them. But take them forward to the attack now, hungry and tired as they are, but with their blood still hot within them, and they’ll gain you a victory that shall ring round Scotland, and fetch out every man who ever held a sword to King James’s cause.’
And so the thing was settled, and the decision to fight that day was made. But there was one more thing, and Lochiel put the words to it. It was the opinion of the council that Viscount Dundee, on whom depended not only the fate of the army but the fate of the King and of Scotland, should not engage personally in the coming battle, but direct matters from some vantage point, as was at most times the custom.
They must have known that it was hopeless; such customs were not for Claverhouse, nor ever had been.
He thanked them for their care, both for him and the cause, admitted that indeed his death might be some
loss to them. But what power would he ever have over the clans again, if he kept out of this battle? ‘Give me this one
Shear Darg,
this one Harvesting-day for the King. One chance to show to the clansmen that I can hazard my own hide in King James’s service as freely as the least of them, and I give you my word that I will follow the more common custom hereafter, for so long as I have the honour to command you.’
And they knew that he would not yield.
Nothing of this was known to us at the time of course; but we felt the sense of waiting that met us as we roused to the green soft gloaming of the summer dawn with the smell of thunder in the air. We – the General’s troop, that is, or His Majesty’s Regiment of Horse, whichever you like to call us (och, I know fine a troop is not a regiment, but what was left of one, and a proud one, and we thought of ourselves by the old name) – were seeing to the horses, ready for whatever the day might bring, when we heard the cheering from the castle; and Lochiel’s pipe came swaggering down through the gate, playing some wild crying
pibroch
that calls out the claymores. Word was running through the camp from fire to fire before ever the official orders came and I mind an enormous Highlander standing with legs apart waving a flask of the Water of Life that he had got from somewhere, and bellowing challenges to come and fight him personally or run while there was still time, until he stepped backwards into the watch-fire behind him and had to be hauled out by his friends and the sparks beaten from his plaid.
And in the ready-making for battle the old hen-wife washing by the ford was quite forgotten.
I did not see Alisdair again that morning. I have always been sorry for that, for I never saw him after.
THE CHEERING DIED
into the rattaplan-rattaplan of the drums and the quick clear notes of the bugles, and the wild crying of the pipes, and all the ordered chaos that is an army making ready for the march with fighting at the end of it. My own last piece of ready-making was to leave Caspar firmly shut up and in charge of the small garrison remaining at Blair.
And so, with our morning issue of oaten bannock and strong cheese barely eaten, we marched out and headed for Killiecrankie – not by the made track, och no; the road ahead and the road behind was MacKay’s way; we took to the hills as we had always done, as we had done at Deeside, three long months ago. We crossed the Tilt and came over the high moors. That made a six-mile march of it instead of the four it would have been by road; but we had the time for it, so long as we met MacKay in the broad valley where the pass opens out, and he looking up the made road for us. At the Lude Burn Dundee called a brief halt to rest and water the horses – it was past midday – and of all the times and times and times that we had done the same thing, I mind that one time; slipping from Jock’s back and leading him down the bank, and the water riffling about his muzzle as he drank. It was a hazy blue day, and the water was blue where it ran smooth enough to reflect the sky; peat-brown under the shadows of the bank. Most of all I mind the cold soft wetness of his muzzle when he turned his head to slobber on my shoulder.
We were still at it when one of the scouts that Dundee had sent on ahead came dropping down the braeside like a shadow, with word that MacKay was halfway through the pass; and we remounted as the Highlanders scrambled to their feet, and pushed on. We were going to meet MacKay and have our reckoning with him at last!
As we came down the final slope towards the Clune Burn, another scout came in with word that the Government army was just through the pass and debouching into the valley; and General MacKay with a small escort was riding forward to see was there any sign of us yet on the road from Blair.