Kirkpatrick could believe it; the Craignish men wore onion-dyed tunics in varying shades, from deep yellow to faded mustard, had bare legs like spurtles and bore burdens an ass would have scorned, forging over tussock and hill with corded muscle and the ease of having been born to it.
They bore the residue of what would not fit in the carts, a man-packed collection of iron hats, maille, spearheads and other items labouring down to meet Campbell galleys at Kilmory, which would sail them on to Largs. There, the angels would take the Lord’s share, a tithe that would mysteriously vanish, while every Craignish man would arrive at Stirling better accoutred than any man-at-arms.
Yet the journey down to Kilmory was fraught, a Satan twist of bad road and steepness through places with names like Black Crag and worse. When they entered the defile of Kilmartin Glen, the men fell silent, for this was a place of stone rings and underground kists, a land of the sidhean, the sheean, who could spirit you away in the night and not return you for a hundred years. Their great faerie hill of Dunadd dominated the area and the panting chatter and good-natured chaffering fell to silence.
Campbell of Craignish, though he preferred to be thought of as an enlightened Christian nobile, was as much worried about the sidhean as any of his men.
‘Pechs? Bogles?’ Kirkpatrick challenged, though gently, and Campbell, half-ashamed, waggled his head from side to side.
‘My folk believe it. Myself, though, I am after being more concerned about the time it is taking to get these carts to Kilmory. There are MacDougalls loose.’
Kirkpatrick’s head came up at that and he was sharp with Campbell when he spoke.
‘You kept that close to you – mark me, I can see why. Having your enemies stravaigin’ as they please through your lands is not a matter to trumpet.’
Campbell admitted it with a nod and no sign that he was put out.
‘They are like lice,’ he declared. ‘Ye think ye have combed them all out and suddenly they are back, annoying ye with their wee itch.’
He glanced at Kirkpatrick.
‘It is because I am taking so many of my own to join Sir Neil. There will be long hundreds of Campbell men standing with the King when he fights and little or none to protect our lands. My castle is safe, but these MacDougalls will plooter about for a while, causing trouble, then go home – bigod, most of them are fled to Ireland as it is but, mind you, if they see a chance at a lumbering great slorach of over-laden men and carts they will take it.’
Kirkpatrick acknowledged the commitment of the Campbells and fell silent, staring at the popping fire and knowing the lord of Craignish was right – if it hadn’t been for the arrival of Hal, Kirkpatrick and all this cargo, the Campbell men would already be in their galleys and sailing for the Ayrshire coast to join the army at Stirling.
A little way away, Duncan lay on one side of a fire and contemplated the sight of his lord in conversation with the dwarf-dark man called Kirkpatrick. The other, the brooding and wounded lord from the Lothians, sat apart even from that – even from himself, Duncan thought.
These southrons were different, right enough, and he had been away from the droving roads long enough to feel and see it almost for new. These men could not enjoy life as it moved through them; they wanted to take it and make something, as if they could shape it to their own way.
They did not talk of deer and cattle and hill, or let themselves soak in the weather; they spoke of crops and power and business and did not notice the different greens of leaves, or even the sun until its lack was enough to chill them.
Once, on the drove road, he had been sparking a southron woman at Carlisle and they had walked out beyond the gate, which he knew was a great daring for her in the first place, never mind to be doing it with a strange creature from beyond the Mounth.
He knew then, as now, that he could whisper filth in her ear in the True Tongue and she would wriggle and blush, for it was just a liquid trill to her ear, as seductive as it was strange. He recalled, as he spoke and slid an arm round her soft waist, that his free hand had found a winter-woken toad on the rock next to him.
It was sluggish and still cold, hoping for the sun on the rock to give it new life. It blinked its great gold-coin eyes, iridescently green throat pulsing and as beautiful as anything he had ever seen. So he was surprised when the woman, presented with the sheer jewel of it, screamed and ran away.
No woman of his own people would have done so, but the southrons were strange – even their names. But, then, names were dangerous matters and the knowing of a man’s true name gave you power over him, for he lay deep inside his name, underneath his talk and his acts, moving like everyone else, yet living in secret and alone. He wasn’t concerned that they knew his name was Duncan, for they did not know the whole of it, nor in the tongue of the True People.