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  MACBETH

  A NOVEL

  MACBETH

  A NOVEL

  by

  A. J. HARTLEY & DAVID HEWSON

  Based on the play by William Shakespeare

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2012 A. J. Hartley and David Hewson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612183015

  ISBN-10: 1612183018

  Table of Contents

  Macbeth—A Novel

  Authors’ Notes—The Play

  Shakespeare’s Sources

  The “Real” Macbeth

  Where We Diverge from Shakespeare and History

  The Scottish Locations

  About the Authors

  A Scottish autumn as bleak and bitter as the grave. Rain smears the gray sky. Lightning cracks, thunder shrieks over the drenched fells of the Great Glen.

  A skinny, tall shape, a girl, young, yet not young, crawls through the bracken, the gorse, the cruel, sharp heather, heedless of her bloody knees stabbed by thorns. She stops, lifts her head, sniffs the air, listens to the wind and the sounds beyond. Mingled with the gale come the bleating cries of men in their death agonies, the screams of the wounded, the high-pitched whinnying terrors of desperate horses hamstrung and floundering in the mud.

  She smiles and looks back at the other two. Sisters in name, though what they share is both more complex and more primitive than blood.

  They crawl behind her, low figures in the stiff brown ferns. The farthest, most biddable, is ancient, her narrow, bitter face wreathed in gray matted hair, hands like claws, nails as long as her bony fingers. Filthy as an Elgin beggar, stinking in her sackcloth cloak and breeches. Crippled, she moves crablike on ebony crutches, as quick as a spider lurching forward with a malign stare, grunting and cursing. She was once someone’s mother. Their own, perhaps.

  No matter.

  The second, flat on the turf, panting like an animal, is surly, six feet tall, broad, and muscular as any foot soldier. A shapeless habit, stolen from a long-dead monk, brown and filthy, covers her frame. Her face beneath its cowl is wide and heavy, a flat, stupid nose and dark, narrow eyes that peer constantly ahead. Her expression speaks of violence and a boundless anger searching for a cause. A break in the heavy sky sends a short shaft of sunlight to the ground. Caught in its wan rays, she seems for a moment like a cornered beast, ready to fight the unseen thing that hunts her. Younger than the crone by two decades or more, but as hideous, her black, stiff hair receding from her forehead to reveal white, bald skin, crisscrossed by a crimson blemish, a scar that runs across her temple like captured lightning.

  The youngest turns and laughs at them. Next to this pair she is a beauty. Closest to the carnage beyond, watching avidly, drawn to the shrieks below, she’s little more than some pretty child to the men she meets and taunts upon the road. Late at bleeding, though backward at nothing else. Special. Lithe and slender, as quick with her mind as with her knife. She wears a black wool cloak, quite clean, leather boots, a full, flowing dress that once was rich French velvet, the majestic gown of a noble lord’s wife, as she went into the peat.

  Too fine a robe for the dead, the girl said, and ordered them to dig deep and fast and hard once night had fallen and there was silence beyond the lych-gate.

  The cloak still smells of embalmment, myrtle, and the thick, sweet fragrance of pine. Her hair is not clean or matted. Her face shines, washed in the streams each morning. Sometimes she bathes naked in the mountain burns or the great lochs that run from coast to coast, watched by the others, who are envious but afraid to say so. When she does, she swims backward, face to the sky, showing to the heavens the tattoo that spans her bony chest: the magical triquetra of a race now lost to these lands, three interlinked leaping salmon, two scaly shapes with dark, taut nipples for eyes, the third’s depicted through her navel, their fins and tails reaching to her slender arms and down to the scant hair below. The form of the fish is indigo ink distilled from the Asp of Jerusalem, which the English call “woad,” stippled carefully, dot by dot, each treasured precious wound stabbed into the flesh by her own steady fingers holding tight the quill of a raven, measuring the progress in the glittering mirror of a knight’s cuirass. A year’s work or more. The three symbols of the goddess are there, earth and fire and water, amid the carefully denoted scales of the strong wild fish that sport and spawn along Spey and Tay, free and fearless until her strong fingers grip their slippery underbellies and lift the thrashing bodies out into the bright, deadly air.

  Sometimes men see this naked side of her, and a few—the lucky ones—run fast away.

  There is, briefly, more for the fools who stay. Her eyes are shining, swirling pools as black as jet, the color of the deep lochs in autumn, fathomless, yet opaque, without visible pupils, yet seeming to see everything. Her mouth has small, even white teeth, sharp and keen like milk ones never shed. Her thin, gray lips are too wide, too active, as if she feels some hunger that can never be sated. No man can look at her and not want to touch, to feel, to know. She has understood this fact since the moment she could comprehend anything, knows how to use it, relishes the power that it brings.

  “Move,” she cries, and waves them on. There’s a vantage point, a gap in the gorse and broom where she now sits, a happy spectator watching the savagery below, bare feet deep in the heather that is shedding its summer purple for the dry, dead copper of winter.

  Men at their games again. Thanes and crofters, lords and peasants. Killing and being killed, with spear and knife, ax and sword, arrow and dagger, and bare, cruel hands. Much of a muchness when they’re a bag of slaughtered flesh and bone bleeding out their little lives for the grateful worms in the peat.

  She points a long, clean finger toward the battle, down the line of the saltwater loch that leads on to Mull, and says, “They call us witches, crones, and hags. And there I was thinking myself a god next to these beasts, such grand and self-regarding vermin as they are.”

  Her words are too old for her face. Older than theirs, perhaps, and sometimes they notice.

  “Sister?” bleats a voice from her side as they lie there, crouched in the freezing heather, faces in the thorns, rapt, following the rank butchery on the field below.

  Two wraiths in rags, stinking acolytes, snag-toothed and vile. One strange half child, elated, ecstatic.

  “We will meet again?” asks the crone. “And soon?”

  “The heath,” says the giant. “When the fighting’s done. And...”

  She rubs her powerful hands with pleasure, her fingers writhe in anticipation. “Plunder. Men...the heath, I reckon...”

  “Beyond the heath,” the young one orders.

  The crone offers no objection. The big one stares at the turf.

  “We go east, the way they will eventually. Beneath the shadow of Ben Nevis, I’ll meet you there. Men with murder on their minds are best avoided. Best let the blood cool a little.”

  “When?” asks the second.

  “When the hurly-burly’s done and the battle lost and won,” the eldest murmurs as if this were some incantation from long ago, much used, much venerated.

  “Tomorrow. Before the sun sets,” the girl tells them. “Those left alive by then will be of one mind only. A grateful, fearful one. Fury spent. Time to repent and blub upon the sof
t and welcome breasts of female company.”

  She watches as they titter and caw like rooks over carrion.

  “They kill in anger, then weep for their sins,” says the giant. “Fools.”

  “Nevis’s shadow,” the young one repeats. “Tomorrow. To meet Macbeth. You shall do it.”

  Their filthy faces are stiff and stupid.

  The crone lifts her right hand from the black stick, leans hard on it, cocks her ugly head as if listening, then says, “I hear Graymalkin. He calls me there.”

  The thing she thinks of as her familiar is a sleek and noisome cat. Left behind now, in a far-off hillside cave.

  “I’m pleased he concurs,” the young one says, then stares at the second. “And you?”

  “Paddock sends me,” she answers, nodding sagely. “I hear him as loud and clear as the screams of those fools below. You too, sister?”

  The girl smiles, not kindly, and says, “It’s not my good fortune to converse with toads. Your talents surpass mine, mostly.”

  And they are silent until she speaks again.

  “Well...?” The young one unhooks the leather duffel from her shoulder, slung round there like a child’s sack. She takes out a flask and some food, gulps at mountain water, eats dry berries, picks at hard rye bread, then bites off a lump of dry salt pork, chewing hard with her small sharp teeth.

  They watch hungrily.

  When she’s done, impatient now for the dying of the day, she asks again, this time more curtly, “Well?”

  Together, the two sing the little song that came to her that morning when she swam naked in the bright, sharp water on the moor, vowing to teach them every word.

  “Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air.”

  Something itches at her thigh. She pulls up the velvet dress, high enough so they can see her thin, white haunches. The leech lies tight to her flesh, like a fat black slug, full and sated.

  “Feed on me, would you?” the girl mutters and rips the creature from her skin, holds the slowly wriggling form before her face, thinks, then places it between her teeth and bites hard. Blood runs over her chin. Severed in half, the worm’s black slime slobbers down her front. The rest is mangled in her mouth, then chewed and swallowed in a single gulp.

  The others stay stiff and silent, eyes upon her.

  “Each thing tends toward its fate unknowing,” she says, and wonders why. These drones do not understand and never will. “It would be impolite to refuse the call.”

  She leans forward and asks one last time. “Well?”

  The pair scatter separately through the mist and thickets like malevolent ghosts, the crone low and swift on her black sticks, the other a tall, hunched, muscular figure, that of a sullen thief out for booty.

  The young one stays there, hidden by the gorse and thistle, smelling the earth and the blood beyond, peering toward the battle and the tall, commanding figure in its midst.

  “That warrior is in heat,” she murmurs. “As am I. Macbeth. Macbeth.”

  “Macbeth.”

  The man didn’t turn. He was listening. Some far-off sound caught on the cold, wet air, at the very edge of hearing.

  “Macbeth!”

  “Speak,” he answered, wiping the blood and sweat from his face. Whatever it was, the words were gone, nothing more than one more fleeting illusion, a passing ghost in the midst of battle.

  “There’s a fleet landed down the loch,” said the sergeant, a heavy man who always looked as if he’d spent the night in a ditch. “Vikings. Came under cover of night from the west through the Sound of Mull.”

  A raiding party, an unwelcome, though not infrequent, visitation upon Scotland, like pestilence or fleas.

  “Where are they now?”

  “The first boats are docking at Inverlochy. The men in the castle have fled already. There were scarcely twenty soldiers anyway. The rest are with the king. On the far side, almost at Loch Ness.”

  The absent king. Why had it taken Duncan so long to cross the Highlands from his eastern base in Forres and join the fight against the rebels in the west? Now there were two fronts, two enemies. The Scottish traitors and the Norsemen. Macbeth could picture the new battleground, Inverlochy, a handsome village in the foothills of Ben Nevis, fifteen miles and a short loch crossing from the insurgent castle at Ballachulish they now besieged. Thanks to that brief stretch of water, which Macbeth’s boats commanded, they had a little time to spare between the present battle and the next.

  He nodded and looked back to the hill fort around which his men had hunkered down, their eyes on its smoking battlements, set on an expansive crag of gray slate. The Great Glen ran like a diagonal sword slash across the neck of Scotland, from Inverness in the northeast to Loch Linnhe in the south, past purple and dun heather hills beside ribbon splashes of jeweled water. Macbeth and his men had spent the best part of a month chasing and killing MacDonwald’s treacherous army the length of it. His soldiers were weary to be home and so was he. This fighting needed to be brought to a close.

  MacDonwald’s inside, thought Macbeth, his stomach clenching, jaw tightening. This is his final stand. Inside and peering through a slit window with his dogs at his heels.

  “The Vikings must wait or do their worst. I’ve no time to deal with bandits. Once the rebellion’s over—”

  “My lord,” said the sergeant.

  He turned and caught something behind the soldier’s eyes, a flicker of apprehension or dread.

  “These are no bandits. Sueno, the king of Norway himself, is with them. They mean to stay.” The man’s eyes flickered and dropped to the rain-sodden heather, his face reddening.

  “To stay? How do you know?” demanded Macbeth.

  “They sacked a village on Mull. Left a single survivor to make sure word got out. They seemed sure they could divide our force, either side of Inverlochy. How...?”

  Macbeth knew the beautiful island in the Hebrides and could imagine the devastation and death the Vikings would bring, as always. The ruined sheepcotes and shattered fishing boats, the smell of smoking thatches and chicken coops. Weeping women and spilled blood.

  He turned into the stiff breeze and blinked before letting his gaze return to the rough stone tower with its crumbling curtain wall set on the gray-slate scarp.

  “Then, first, we put MacDonwald to the sword, and after that, the Norsemen,” he said.

  A hasty, arrogant sentiment, one he regretted on the instant. The sergeant bowed and muttered as he left. He would soon be sowing panic and despair like barley. Wars turned on such moments, as did lives. Macbeth hurried after and stopped him with a hand on the shoulder.

  “Find Banquo,” he said. “Have him meet me here. In ten minutes, I want a report on the walls. We attack without delay.”

  “But...” The sergeant faltered, those shifty eyes flashing to and from Macbeth’s face again.

  “Yes?”

  “We have no ram. No siege towers. Not even ladders. Our troops have been fighting six days in a row. I thought we were to starve the bastards out.”

  “There isn’t time for that. Not now.”

  “We had word the thane of Cawdor would bring support from the south, through Glencoe. He will meet the Norsemen first...” said the sergeant, though even as he spoke his confidence stalled. “Can we not leave one fight to others? And...” He stared at the ground, refusing to meet the eyes of the man next to him. “And where in God’s name is the king?”

  Macbeth stilled his rising anger.

  “Duncan is where he chooses to be. And Cawdor, a politician of the court, is not a Highland general. You would leave him to face Sueno alone, while we sit about the hillside like Whitsun revelers? We’re men of the Great Glen. If there’s a fight, it’s our fight. Will you do my bidding or not? If you’re afeared, go back to your bothy and sit sewing with your woman. We need men here, not quaking children.”

  Silence first, then doubt, then finally, and grudgingly, shame.

  “Your orders,
sir?”

  Macbeth nodded toward a grove of windswept fir trees leaning over a tarn at the foot of the gray rocky hill. Patches of snow still lay in the shadows. Nevis, to the east, was cloaked entirely in white at the summit. “Have the men cut timber for ladders. Quickly. And find Banquo.”

  The wind had picked up, forcing the gray rain into gusty sleeting angles. The hills to the west behind the keep were purple, shading to brown, and streaked with ice and snow. The sky matched the color of the slate peak ahead of them. Below them, the narrow loch sat like a dark mirror, with Macbeth’s boat guarding the narrowest point. They had only four more hours of daylight. Perhaps less. There would be bodies in the water before nightfall.

  He watched a cluster of figures break away from the makeshift camp, unslinging their long axes as they trudged to the stand of pines. Moments later, the distant thud of their blades rang out across the valley like drums.

  “So Sueno’s come to join the entertainment?” said a familiar voice, deep as the ocean but suffused with warmth and grim humor. “A good time for looting, I imagine. He’s a canny man if he can hear the wails of rebellion all the way across the sea in Norway.”

  Banquo. The one warrior Macbeth would wish beside him on a day like this. The biggest man in the field, a giant in armor. He held his helmet in his massive hands. The gray wolf pelt that covered it, lower jaw removed, the upper with its fangs gripping the shining metal brow, followed him like a train.

  “He’s here for land, not looting,” said Macbeth. “How stand the walls?”

  “Old and poorly maintained.” Banquo was broad and muscular, with a long black beard, a weather-beaten Highlander’s face, and speech that seemed to come from the pit of his vast stomach. “A dozen underfed women could drag them down with grapplers if those damned kerns didn’t shower arrows and darts on anyone who went near. The Norsemen have come for something other than thieving?”