“Wait till tonight!” he growled, laughing.
Laird Campbell,
Thank you for your apology and your invitation. Lady Lindsay and I will be delighted to attend.
Regards,
Laird Alexander Lindsay
Lockie and Lorna read the letter together. Lorna clapped her hands when she saw that the Lindsays were coming, and laughed merrily. “I cannot wait to see them again!” she cried, laughing. “Robina is so lovely—and she looks kind too.”
“She is indeed,” Lockie said neutrally. “But she no longer means anything to me.”
“I am so glad,” Lorna said in a heartfelt tone. “I used to wonder if you still loved her, but you have reassured me, darling husband.”
“I will never love anyone but you,” he said affectionately, kissing her cheek.
“I am so glad to hear it!” she breathed.
Alex had to go into Glengour the next day to order some wine from the shipment that had just arrived from France. It was a task he enjoyed doing, since he loved going into the village and seeing the faces of the ordinary people who greeted him so happily and gave him little gifts of whatever they had to spare. He knew he was well loved and took great pleasure in it.
He was on the main road into the village when he heard a storm of hoofbeats in the distance. He looked to his left and saw a number of riders coming towards him at a canter. Vaguely, he wondered where they were going, because it was unusual to see so many horsemen all riding together at one time, but he thought nothing of it for a moment. They were probably going to join the main road behind him.
Suddenly he realized that instead of slowing down as they approached him, they now furiously galloped, and it was obvious that they were not going to stop, but intended to ride straight over him.
Alex was a warrior, tested in the furnace of combat, but something about the way they rode convinced him that these men were not. They had speed and force because of their numbers but they were not expert riders, and their horses were a mixed bunch of all different shapes and sizes.
He reacted instinctively, urging his mount towards the middle of the line in which he had counted eight riders. He was close enough to see the panic on their faces as his horse Rusty gained on them, since Alex intended to break through the line in the exact center. Rusty was a battle-hardened war horse with nerves of steel. He intimidated other riders, especially inexperienced ones, with his sheer size, and these horses were novices in the practice of warfare.
Alex always carried his claymore with him; it was five feet long and weighed seven pounds, and only the mightiest of men could wield it, but Alex was assuredly one of that breed.
The sound that he made was deafening and almost inhuman, a great blood-curdling howl as he plowed into the middle of the line. The two closest to him tried to get away by steering their mounts sideways, but to no avail. Alex, gripping Rusty tightly with his thighs to free his hands, swept the claymore around almost in a full circle with all the might of his powerfully muscled shoulders and arms, completely beheading one rider and splitting the skull of another.
Then, propelled by his own momentum, he carried on, but he knew that he was outnumbered, and soon the bandits would regroup and begin to pursue him again. He had lost the element of surprise, and now all he could do was try to escape. He urged his mount faster. At a full gallop Rusty could outrun any other horse for a short while, but not for long.
Then, to his utter amazement, he saw more riders streaming into his vision from off to his right. His life flashed before him; he saw all the things he would never know in a future that would never be.
I will never see the birth of my son or daughter, hear their first cries, or guide them through the first years of their life. I will never see them grow into young men and women, or grow old with Robina, or see our grandchildren.
I will never look down on the River Tay and the kind green meadows around it from the turrets of Glengour Castle, and I will never spend the rest of my life in Scotland, the fierce little country of my birth.
But he could fight. If they were coming to kill him he could at least take a few with him. He sat straight up on his horse, waiting for their approach. He was praying silently and desperately for his soul to ascend to heaven, for he had taken lives in his career as a soldier and that would surely earn him a place in Purgatory, if not hell itself.
He was terrified, as he had been in all the other battles he had fought, and he had thought at first that he was a coward, till a grizzled one-eyed veteran had told him something he had never forgotten: “’Tis only stupid men that hae nae fear, lad. It taks a brave man tae face it an’ beat it.”
The drumming of the hoofbeats was so close now that they were deafening, and Alex took his claymore in both hands, preparing to swipe the nearest head from its body.
“Goodbye, Robina my love,” he said aloud.
Then a miracle happened, or so it seemed to Alex. The hooded and masked horsemen swept past him so fast that he felt the wind of their passage, and he watched them as they smashed into the riders who had been pursuing him.
He heard the wild screaming of horses, the shouts and cries of the wounded, and those possessed by bloodlust. He saw one rider from the group that had attacked him being dragged by a hysterical horse. He was still screaming hoarsely, but he was being flayed alive, and great chunks of his skin and flesh were being scraped off in the coarse soil.
The battle raged for only five minutes, but the newcomers were obviously used to conflict, and decimated their enemies, leaving limbs, heads, entrails, and corpses on the floor. Alex did not stay to see the final moments. He rushed back to the castle as fast as he could, and he and an exhausted Rusty limped back into the courtyard, where Alex took a few halting steps and then collapsed.
14
The Ceilidh
