Macbeth the King Read Online Free PDF Page B

care, Thorfinn says."
    "I care not what Thorfinn says. It is you that matters, not that loud-of-mouth."
    "I esteem your concern for me, Princess. Although I fear that it is concern for your future care and the safety of Lulach, which moves you."
    "Think that if you wish, MacBeth."
    "I have left orders, not only with my seneschal here but with the Thane of Affric, whom I leave behind, that you are to be cherished and given what you ask. If so be it that I do not come back, you will be safe. A secure house found for you. So fear nothing."
    "My fears are...otherwise, I tell you. But, I thank you."
    He eyed her levelly for moments on end, there beside the bobbing coracle. Then he nodded abruptly. "I go now. There is much to be done. God be with you."
    "God speed," she said quietly. And added, "My friend."
    * * *
    They marched southwards, 1200 armed men on the shaggy garrons of the Highland hills, under the great red-and-white banner of Ross, crossing the Glass River at Kilmorack and into Moray. At Inverness the folk hid, and peeped and watched from doorways and corners, for fear that this might be the men of Ross coming against them now that their own men were away—for the Moray contingents under Crinan had marched off three days before. But MacBeth pressed on, at the heavy lumbering garrons' trot—which, although it appeared slow, was remarkably deceptive and could cover sixty miles in a day. They climbed the long ascent of Drummossie Moor to the Passes of Moy and the Slochd and into Strathspey. Then on through Badenoch and over the great and grim Pass of Drumochdar, out of Moray and into Atholl. At Dunkeld they were at Crinan's chief seat—for as well as being Mormaor of Atholl he was hereditary Abbot of Dunkeld which, in the Celtic Church, carried with it the Primacy of All Scotland. He was absent, of course, being on ahead with his own levies; but his wife the Lady Bethoc nic Malcolm was in residence in the large rath above the Tay, and MacBeth felt bound to call upon his aunt. She was a tall, angular, stern woman, unbending, very different from her late sister, the gentle and other-worldly Donada, and she greeted her nephew without enthusiasm. The call was brief. But she was able to tell him that the King, her father, had moved on with his army from Scone, his capital, to Stirling, to halt Canute at the crossing of Forth. Which meant that he had meantime abandoned not only Teviotdale and the Merse to the invader, but Lothian also, even part of Lennox.
    It took the Rossmen another day and a half, through Fortrenn, Gowrie, Strathearn and Monteith, to reach Stirling, where the Forth narrowed sufficiently to be bridged. Or not exactly Stirling but the Haugh of Kildean and the causeway-head across the marshes, on the north side of the river, where the royal army waited. It was a bare mile but a barely passable mile, from the towering mighty rock on the other side of the flood-plain, crowned by the ancient Pictish fort of the Snow Dun, with its township of Stirling clustering round its flanks.
    The Forth and Teith Rivers, the dividing line between the Northern and Southern Picts, between Alba and Lothian, between Highlands and Lowlands, made the greatest flood-plain in Scotland, possibly in all the Isles of Britain, their meanderings forming a watery, swampy barrier five miles wide by over twenty miles long, a wilderness of mosses and meres, of lochans and bogs and scrub forest, all the way from the fierce mountains of the Lennox and Loch Lomondside to the Scottish
    Sea, impassable for man and beast save by one or two secret, tortuous routes known only to a few. Except here at Stirling, just before the combined rivers opened out to the estuary and salt water. Here the bog was but a mile wide, protruding rocky hills narrowing it, the soft ground being on the north side only. The Romans, it was said, had bridged the river at Kildean and built the mile-long narrow causeway of timber and stone across the moss beyond, to firm