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Chapter One

THE BOND OF MANRENT

1.  

The castle grew from the rock. It was rooted and grounded in the rock, living and breathing from the rock itself, seeming ancient as the seas that lashed about its bed, its walls rearing upwards to the eternal skies. Mist swirled about those walls, eddying in gullies within the courtyard and uncovered passageways, moist and cold, clinging subtly to the rocky faces and the granite slabs.  In rock it had its being. The rock lapped up warmth by day and in steady summer heat and held it until the night came down. Rock was its nature and its heart was very old.

Iain MacIain lay face down, splay-legged across the rock within the curtain wall, heavy with the weight of his own exhaustion, in deep sleep. The ragged remnants of an old plaid were up round his back and his scarred legs and skinny buttocks were completely bare. He had once had a saffron shirt to wear beneath his plaid, but that had gone long since. His long-limbed frame was bony and hard, carrying not a mite of surplus flesh. His thick hair fell in unkempt wads across his shoulders, matted with dirt and blood.

MacAskill stood arms akimbo, grinning at the sight of the young stranger, nakedly, defencelessly displayed. He kicked him and turned him over, yelling

“Sorner!”

Iain MacIain drew up his legs, scrambled and stumbled to his feet, awake and shaking, eyes huge and dark with sleep. Sorner? I am no sorner, no sojourner of ill-repute to be kicked at and shouted at and mocked. He doubled his fists. But MacAskill laughed, flung an arm round his shoulders and called him by his proper name.

“I’m away to wash myself. You would do well to come with me, in case the Chief MacLeod sends for you later and finds you in this state.”

Iain pulled his torn plaid down, groped for his rawhide belt and fastened it and in silence went after the young man.

The way was down a long narrow flight of steps cut deep into the face of the rock, past a well which supplied drinking water from a strong clear spring, inside the rock itself, and down to the guarded sea gate that opened straight onto the boulders below the castle.

Waves beat high here in winter and great seas would pound immediately beyond the door. There was no other entrance to Dunvegan Castle, and because of the narrow and tortuous stairs within, it was said that a single armed man could defend the island stronghold against all comers.

There was a clansman on duty as cockman at the sea gate. He and MacAskill buffeted one another in seeming anger before he would allow the heavy bolts to be drawn back, for it was the Chief’s rule that the gates were not opened before sunrise.

In these days when King James’ men might descend at any time on the island castles in the Hebrides, and drag off a young chieftain, or a gentleman and his sons, or a few fighting men to be held hostage as an indication of the strength of the crown of Scotland, it was never safe to be without an armed watch on duty day and night.

“His Grace the King may say he is only patrolling the Isles to keep the Island clans from fighting one another,” MacLeod had said after one of these sorties. “But it seems to me it is no less than the spirit of the clans that he is really trying to tackle.” A man o’ war had run right up into the mouth of Loch Dunvegan and stayed there for a day, swinging at anchor menacingly across the fairway, so that all the household were on tenterhooks throughout the hours until she sailed away. “The King fears our independence. He hates our sovereign rights.”

“Or our wilfulness,” his son William answered, laughing with relief now the ship had gone. “He knows we shall have our own way in our lives, no matter what he wishes...if we can.  He will have a mighty task to subdue us, I’m thinking. How many years now since they declared the Hebrides to be part of the state of Scotland? I’m thinking it’s a long, long time since King James IV called the Lordship of the Isles forfeit to the Crown, in great-grandfather’s day. Yet here comes King James the sixth of his line still trying to bring us to heel like whipped puppies.”

“And still feeling our teeth in his backside once in a while, too!” William’s young brother Rory interjected cheerfully.

Tormod MacLeod chided his two sons for their levity. The matter was too serious. Too much blood had flowed, and would flow yet and too many lives be forfeit in this struggle. They are young and think with their hearts and not with their heads, as all youths do. As I did at their age. Time enough later for them to think with their heads as well, he supposed, dismissing them. He turned to his clerk, and made his mark on a document where the pointing finger indicated.

The mist was lifting and the lightening sky outlined the hills and the distant Cuillin mountain peaks, as MacAskill and MacIain ran barefoot over the boulders and the shingle to the water’s edge. In the foreground MacLeod’s Tables, two heather-crowned and flat-topped hills, loomed up across the width of the loch and the boggy pasture beyond. It was said that the old Chief, Alasdair the Hunchback, had once taken King James V up to the top of the higher one, to dine by the light of flaming torches held by tall clansmen, under the stars, to fulfil a rash boast made at Edinburgh that he had a finer table and bigger candlesticks than any at Holyrood.

Iain glanced down the curved length of the sea loch, with its scattered rocky islands, light-touched and empty, where only sea birds lived…and in Summer months, the grey seals which came south from the Arctic regions with the changing of the seasons, and settled within the mouth of the loch and within reach of the Western Sea.

An oyster catcher - the Page of St Bride, as the islanders called it - swooped and touched the rippling surface of the water, its long red beak extended, and rose with its shrill call that echoed in the morning silence back and forth from the end of the rocky inlet to the turfy cliffs and against the castle walls.

On windy days, up this long neck of water, under the high cliffs of Galtrigal and Borreraig, would come the galleys and the birlinns that bore the men of the Hebrides about their business in peace and war. But now in this early Spring morning, only a single small curragh of stretched hides, with two men in it, was visible far up the loch, turning quietly three times sun-wise, in accordance with custom, to bring the blessings of the day on the fishing.

The wet stones felt cold to the feet at this early hour, and the sharp tang of the morning caught at Iain’s lungs and made him sneeze. He leapt downward to the tide’s edge, and hesitated a moment at the thought of the shock of the water on thin limbs.

MacAskill took his plunge from a rocky ledge, yelling and spluttering with excitement and delight as the cold engulfed his well-fleshed body. “Come down with you! Come in! It’s fine.”

MacAskill’s father was Constable of the castle, and for generations his clan had held a position of some trust and privilege with the clan MacLeod of Dunvegan and Harris, serving him and his line here in Skye and throughout the island territories. He had not known, as Iain had, what it was to go hungry and homeless, cast adrift, his own clan broken in warfare, a known “broken man”, who must of necessity take shelter with one of the stronger clans for the sake of earning his bread and meat and a place to sleep at nights. The MacIains had lost their stronghold at Ardnamurchan on the mainland long since, and the ragged remnants of their tribe had been growing less year by year. Sorner, indeed! All manner of renegades, ruffians, outlaws were known by that title of “sojourner.”

But I have no regret for entering into a bond of manrent with MacLeod, thought Iain MacIain. No regret yet. I shall eat well, and if I defend myself as I did in the rough and tumble after last night’s feasting, I shall survive. Doubtless I shall survive.

He unfastened his belt and pulled off the worn and tattered breacan feile - the plaid - and waded naked into the water.

He was a tall, well-built, fair-skinned young man, with the blood of the Norsemen in him and the blue eyes and high cheekbones that declared his ancestry. But, his features were bony and angular, his mouth and chin mature and firm in their expression. His hair curled low on his neck and on his temples.

He would hack the long strands off with a dirk later, for they had grown long enough to be irksome, and trim his growing beard. The water struck chill to his bones, but he drew in his breath and took pleasure in the morning, striking out with a long dog-paddle stroke, then turning and kicking and splashing back into the shallows.

He stood up in water reaching to his thighs, and washed his face and body and unruly hair. There was blood on his temple and a long weal down one cheek where a gang of young toughs had set upon him outside MacLeod’s great hall last evening, when everyone was boisterous with wine or home-brewed bland, a potent drink made from long-fermented whey. The salt stung the wound, but hard-schooled to discomfort, he thought nothing of it, as he washed the dried blood away and kneaded his scalp to clean his head.

The sun rose above the distant uplands and touched his naked flesh with the benison of its rays as he stood dripping, drying, his wet hair curling and pulling, gilded with the weight of light-filled water drops.

MacAskill was pulling on his tunic over his yellow shirt. He called to MacIain that he was going off behind the boulders for a few minutes, and disappeared from view. Iain MacIain waded out. Ankle deep, with the water rippling across the stones, instinct made him pause and look about him sharply. A sound, a movement among the rocks, and someone appeared close at hand, stooping low, moving and gathering something at the tide’s edge. A girl from the castle. A young lady. Getting a handful of carrageen seaweed here and there, pulling it up wetly and dumping it in the basket she held in the crook of her arm. Carrageen for gruel for the chief’s children, he supposed.

Defenceless, his retreat cut off, he stood in the water agitatedly. She lifted her skirts, intent on her task, showing her bare thin legs. Her hair blew outwards in the wind, not held neatly in a maidenly snood, but wild, unkempt and free. Then when she stood up she saw his naked body. She stood still, expressionless. She raised her eyes to his, then looked away, and back again, and saw him cover himself with his hands, with an anxious look. Immediately she laughed, full and frankly, showing her teeth and tossing back her hair. Then gathering up her skirts she ran and leapt away from him towards the sea gate and the safety of the castle.

MacAskill, reappearing, forestalled her, making a grab at her hand and her waist and whirling her round towards him with a whoop and a smacking kiss as she tried to duck away.

She hit out at him with her basket, wrenching herself from his grasp with a sharp anger.

“Away with you, Master MacAskill! Let me go.”

“Well, lady, you do ask to be attacked. Look at you now, outside the curtain wall at dawn, alone, unshod, your hair undone, your laces all awry.” He pulled at her bodice with his fingers, loosening it. “What can MacLeod be thinking of to let his prettiest daughter run so free? And with the likes of me around, for you to deal with all unaided.” As he spoke he manoeuvred himself between her and young Iain, who seized his garment and pulled it round his damp limbs. “And a naked stranger making the very water boil with his own heat at the sight of you,” he said over his shoulder.

Iain burned with annoyance and shame as he fastened his belt, at the mocking note in MacAskill’s laughter and turned, then came back slowly over the rocks, watching his feet as though minding where he trod, and went to pass them by.

The girl looked after him curiously. Then called to him “You are the sorner who took the bond of manrent with my father?”

He stopped and nodded, looking at the ground.

“What brings you to Dunvegan, Sorner?”

He raised his eyes, hostile and proud.

“I must eat. I must earn my bread.”

She looked at him straightly, eyeing him up and down. “But why to Dunvegan? You come from a mainland clan? You are not an islander?”

“Since Sir Donald of MacAlsh sacked my father’s stronghold at Ardnamurchan and destroyed us, we MacIains must live as best we can,” he said. “I found myself in Skye, and so…”

“Your clan was always meddling in affairs too big for you,” she said quickly. Her face was thin and pointed and her wild hair blew across her cheek. She flicked it back. She had no great beauty of features, but such life, such colour in her cheeks, and her eyes were so deep a blue that one thought the waters of the loch on a May day had been poured in them. What mattered any imperfections, with such eyes as those, he thought, bewitched by her. “It was in the fighting when the Lewis rose, that your clan was broken, wasn’t it?” she asked. “I learn my history from the seanachie  and the children’s old nurse,” she said. “The men of the Lewis fought for Donald Dubh, the Pretender to the Lordship of the Isles, didn’t they? And the Earl of Argyll called your kinsmen out for the King. And Sir Donald of MacAlsh attacked and well nigh killed every man of you and destroyed your house.”

“The seanachie and the children’s nurse teach well. But it is an old tale now,” MacIain said. “I can’t remember the house of my family… what there is left of it, and I don’t expect I shall ever see it again. It all happened in my father’s young manhood.”

“There seems to have been more trouble over the Lordship of the Isles than over any matter in all history,” she said. “Now there is no Lord of the Isles, why can’t men let it be, and obey King James, and live in peace?”

MacAskill snorted.

“How like a girl, to put all history in the shell of a nut, and dismiss all matters of honour and chivalry and pride of clan and ownership of land and property…”

“Men will be always fighting. Men should not fight,” she answered seriously, “but live in peace as brothers as our Lord and Saviour bids…”

That is fine for you madam, MacIain thought. Your father’s house is safe enough. Here in Skye the strong clans were the MacDonalds of Duntulm, who held all the lands to the north by force of arms, and Sleat in the south by charter of the King. And MacLeod of Dunvegan and Harris, whose family had lived in the castle on the rock since their ancestor Leod the Norseman had landed there three hundred years before, and taken a Celtic bride, and made her lands his own.

You might think differently if you were such as I, he thought, sheltering wherever the day’s ending may happen to find you, in rocky corry or cave or ruined cottage or castle, knowing no softer bed than boggy turf, or at best the heather uplands. He had no memory of a better bed than the heather, and often in discomfort or cold, he had thought of warmer nights, plaid-wrapped, upheld among the springy stalks but always sleeping lightly with knife at hand in case of sudden danger. There were many lawless gangs and renegades roving the Highlands in these unsettled times, and there was no safety outside castle walls.

“So you have bound yourself in fealty to MacLeod?” the girl said, as they all three started upwards. “You are not a serving man, though, are you?”

“My father told me to take a bond of manrent with MacLeod or MacDonald. He said it before he died. He died of cold and lack of food and a knife wound in his foot that went bad last winter down in Strath. I promised him. He thought it for the best, and it eased his mind at the last, to make me swear to do it.”

“If all men listened to their fathers and all girls to their mothers, there would be little courage shown and few chances for adventuring,” MacAskill said.

“And the peats would never be cut, for warnings of wet weather, and the galleys never put to sea for fear of storms,” said the girl.

“And all good men would die safe in their beds, with the blessing of the priests…and at peace, as men should, madam,” MacIain answered. And added: “If they had beds to die in.”

“And why did you choose MacLeod?”

“Well, MacKinnon of Strath has little strength. And Duntulm has a black reputation, so men say. I was not drawn to MacDonald of Clanranald. A young man must fight to prove his strength and manhood,” he told her earnestly, “and if I must die in battle for another man’s causes, I would as soon it be MacLeod. There are strange tales told of MacLeod of Dunvegan and Harris. They say fairy blood flows in your veins and there is nobility and greatness in you. They say you are the clan of fire and music. They say you have a fairy banner that will save your clan in battle if the day goes against you. They say it was waved at Trumpan in the old chief’s time, and earlier at the battle of Bloody Bay. They say fairy forces came to your aid and drove the MacDonalds back into the sea.”

He glanced sideways at her to see how she looked as he spoke of the fairy flag and the tales he had heard told around the peats at night.   But she made no answer to him. “Even if it’s not true…I would as soon serve MacLeod of Dunvegan and Harris as serve any man,” he said.

As they went up the sea stairs a head appeared over the battlements and a voice called “Roddy MacAskill! Your father wants you up in the hall. The Chief has orders for you. The boats are to be got ready. We’re away to Rodel.”

“God save us, what for?” MacAskill said, and ran up with all speed. The girl went up after him, the basket of carrageen swinging from her hand and dripping water across the courtyard as she went.

Iain’s stomach was empty and he looked about him to see if anyone was eating. He supposed the fighting men and the castle servants did not normally eat with the chief and his family, though they had done so last night. There was a bearded, shaggy-headed little man sitting on a stone seat in the sun, and thinking he looked harmless, he went and stood near him.

“You’ll be wanting your victuals, then?” the little man said, not raising his eyes from the task which occupied his hands. An old pair of hand-made brogues lay beside him on the seat, the soles coming away from the uppers and holes where the big toe should be. He stuck out his tongue as he struggled to thread a long thin leather thong into the eye of a bone needle. “Oh-aah.  There,” he said squinting at it, and getting it through at last. He took up one of the roughly-made shoes and turned it and looked at it. “You’ll be hungry,” he said.

“I am that.”

“The cook will call out when the food is ready. Sit you down.”

The young stranger sat and looked about him. “Who was that girl?” he asked at last, wanting to talk about her.

“What girl?”

“Why, the one who came in with the carrageen.”

“Mistress Christiana. Don’t be losing your heart to her, young man. She is not for you.”

“I only wondered.”

The little man turned his head and looked at Iain, screwing up his eyes as he had screwed them up to thread the needle. “She will wed another man,” he said.

“How do you know? Is she betrothed, or given in handfasting?”

He gave a chortling cackle, shaking his shaggy head, and bent again to his task. Inexpertly, with difficulty, he thrust the needle into the soft shoe. The rawhide was sewn with the hair outward, and he fiddled ineffectually to find the needle's point and pulled it through and pushed it in again in another place. “Och ay, well. That will have to do, I reckon. At least they’ll keep the cold from my feet a while longer.”

He looked at his handiwork glumly.

“I’ll do it if you like,” Iain offered. He had made himself shoes this way, in his father’s days, but since then he had not bothered but had gone barefoot like many young men and boys. He took the shoe, thrust the needle back and forth strongly, and with big, cobbling stitches pulled it tight where sole and upper had parted and over the holes in the toes. He handed it back.

“Thank you,” the little fellow said. He pulled the one shoe back on to his horny foot, and sat with the other foot bare, gazing in front of him.

“Does the other one need doing?”

“Ah.” He handed it to Iain, and sat with hands on splayed knees, seeming lost in thought. “It’s a sad day,” he said, sighing and shaking his head. “A sad day when he who unfurled the fairy standard sees no longer the silken folds stream outwards on the hilltop, in the wind from the sea. Now he sees only the pit. Only the deep, dark pit where the bones of dead men lie. “Ah me, a sad, sad day.”

Iain stared at him. The little man seemed to be rambling, as MacIain’s father had done with the fever, when his wounded foot swelled up and turned purple and went bad. Before he fell asleep, and died. But as the young man looked wonderingly, the little fellow seemed to come back as though from a far place. He drew himself up, took the finished shoe and pulled it on and stamped his feet appreciatively.

“Thank you, lad. You’ve done me a good turn.” He looked at the mended brogues with pleasure. “They’ll bear me to the grave, he said.

As the serving wench was pouring porridge into the bowls on the long, rough table, word went round from one to another that Vic Mhurichie, the standard bearer to the clan, had died two days ago. Macleod had had news from Bracadale, where he had lived.

The chief and his family would all be going over to Harris for the burial in the monastery at Rodel which Macleod’s father, Alasdair the Hunchback, had built. And where he lived still in semi-retirement as self-appointed Abbot.

“That will be an outing worth going on,” Morag the round-faced serving maid said. “I wish I could go, but they won’t take us, I reckon.”

“I’ve never been to the Outer Isles,” said Iain “I’ve only seen Harris and the Lewis from the hilltops on a clear day.”

“Well, you might manage to go,” she said, giving him a thump on the back with her forearm, as she passed behind, handing out hunks of meat and small round loaves. “If you are quick and willing, and get down to the quay and help launch the boats, you never know. Have you heard of poor old Vic Mhurichie, then? And how he unfurled the standard down at Trumpan?”

“Why someone out in the yard spoke of it only this morning. A little man whose shoes I helped to mend.”

“That’ll be Dun Kenneth!” she laughed. “He told you, did he? He knows things before they happen, that one. He has the second sight.  He carries a black stone the fairies gave his mother for him, and with it he sees the future.”

“He is often right,” said the cook, wheezing as he sat down. “Why no one had heard the news this morning…only that MacLeod was going to Rodel. We did not hear why till this few minutes ago.”

“Does MacLeod really have a fairy flag?” Iain asked doubtfully. “And Dun Kenneth a fairy stone? On the mainland people think such tales are just the foolish chatter of ignorant men who know no better.”

“Do you say so?” roared a huge clansman, with a rough plaid of natural homespun over his shoulders. He leaned forward over the board, breathing noisily. “’Is that so?’ Do you say so indeed?” he looked fierce and strong, with beetle brows, though he was clearly aged.

“Now Big Finlay, eat up and don’t go picking a quarrel with a young stranger who does not know any better,” the serving girl said to him. “Here’s your brochan, now. Eat it, since you have no teeth left and can’t eat the meat.”

Big Finlay of the White Plaid took up his bowl and supped from it noisily, then banged it down on the table and ran the side of his fist across his mouth. “Well, I was there, boy, see? The Battle of the Broken Wall, men call it now. For at the end of the day we hurled MacDonald and his men along below the dyke at Trumpan and tumbled the stones from the wall down on top of them where they lay. Aye, we left them there to rot. We left their carcases to the ravens and the wind.”

Several men groaned and coughed and told the big chap to hold his tongue, for they had heard the story a thousand times before, growing better with the years. It was a long, long time ago, in the old chief’s time…when he was a warrior still, and before he became hunchbacked from a battle-axe wound between his shoulder blades. And before he took to living like a monk at Rodel.

“It was I who gave the warning that MacDonald was coming,” Big Finlay persisted. “I was right young then, a young, hearty lad with a fine pair of lungs in my chest. I was out fishing in my curragh, off Dunvegan Head when I spotted them coming out of the morning mist. A great fleet of galleys, with their sails flapping against the masts, and men rowing to give more speed until the wind should rise. I got ashore as quick as I could, and climbed the great cliff at Galtrigal and ran along the headland calling the chief. ‘MacLeod!’ I called. ‘MacLeod! MacDonald of Clanranald and all his men are coming to kill you sir!’ Aye, I shouted right enough. I called so loud they heard me a full seven miles away, so men said.”

There was a commotion on the stairs, and voices shouting orders and bare feet running down. Everyone got up from the table save Finlay White Plaid, too engrossed in his reminiscences of long ago to respond to any new adventures that the years might bring. “And when the day went against us, the chief ordered the flag to be brought. It could only be unfurled thrice in battle before it would lose its power, so they said. It had been unfurled once before, at the Battle of the Bloody Bay, and since then we’d had it afore us many a time, but always folded and furled with silken cords and kept safe by Vic Mhurichie and his family between whiles. It was their duty, see. Always had been. All that family were always the standard bearers for MacLeod and his line, just as MacCrimmon and his family are always the pipers. Well, no man ever thought to see it opened out, not in our time. But on that day…”

“Did it bring fairy help?” Iain asked.

“It brought help. It brought help right enough, as we knew it would,” he said. He nodded solemnly.

“Away with you, Sorner, if you want a chance to see the galleys sail at least,” said young Morag the serving wench, thumping him again and laughing.  “Never mind old Finlay. Time enough to hear his stories when there’s nothing better to do. He’s always here, and always talking, aren’t you, Grandad?”

Iain jumped up, and ran down the steps. It was an exciting sight down at the water’s edge, where two galleys and a birlinn tossed at the little quay, moving like restless horses on the rising tide. The men were settling at their oars, others scrambling in and out, tossing in bales and baggage, unfastening ropes, unfurling great speckled hempen sails and running them up against the masts, holding them fast there with shouts and cries, lest the wind bear them off before all was ready. There was a stiff breeze now, and the slap-slap of water against the boards. Much noise and bustle and confusion as though it were a festive day instead of a day of mourning.

Iain lent a hand, loading the foremost vessel with clothing for the chief’s family and food for all, for there would be little to be had in the monastery and the arid countryside surrounding Rodel. Crops did not grow well in the rocky soil at the southern tip of Harris. There would be little bread and meat to spare at the monastery.

When everything was ready, there was a pause and everyone looked back and up towards the castle, and down along the loch by turns, falling silent, waiting.

“The chief will not come down until the funeral vessel from Bracadale is sighted,” someone said. “It could be a while yet.”

“The messenger who came overland said she sailed on last night’s tide. We’ll see her soon, for sure.” The boatman shaded his eyes and looked again.

Because the Isle of Skye consists of long wings of land each jutting out into the sea in different directions, no part of its fifty miles in length is more than three or four miles from a long inlet of sea or the open coast. For some journeys the sea would be the quickest highway, while for others, a messenger in haste would do best to take one of the sturdy island ponies that went unshod through the heather and the corries, and ride overland. From Bracadale was a long way round by sea.

Suddenly the clear note of the bagpipes played by MacCrimmon sounded up above. All talking stopped and everyone was silent. From there on the battlements, the funeral boat had been sighted, and soon those down at the water’s edge saw it coming round Sheep Island and into the fairway and under the lea of the castle.

The sail was run down, and two pairs of oars alone were enough to bring the slender vessel into rest. Crowding round, the men of MacLeod, MacAskill and MacCrimmon, MacSweyn the warden’s wife and children and a few women and boys, all jostled and breathed heavily in silence, trying to look down into the open boat. Lying among rough heather-filled cushions on a simple bier, they saw the thin, tired, frail face of the man who had unfurled the fairy flag, his hands folded, his eyes closed, never to open again and look upon the well-loved island hills.

The women in the boat were keening softly. A child on the quayside gave a frightened sob, and one or two of the men rubbed their fists across their eyes and their noses, ashamed of tears that sprang up at the sight of the familiar face grown as yellow-white as the homespun shroud in which his form was wrapped.

Tormod, eleventh chief of the Clan MacLeod, was a big, heavily-built man with a shrewd eye and a confident dignity in his slow gait. There was a rustle of skirts and a clink of ceremonial swords as the mourning party came slowly down the steps. Men pressed back away from the boat to give him room. As he approached the water’s edge a light wind touched the funeral boat so that Vic Mhurichie rocked gently on his bier like a baby in its cradle. MacLeod looked down at him gravely, then crossed himself. Looking about him, he raised his hand in blessing to the women and the men of Vic Mhurichie’s family who huddled with upturned faces at either end of the bier.

Turning away slowly, he stepped across the boards into his own galley and settled down. His lady and the young chieftains William, Rory and little Alexander, the girls Margaret and Christiana, and MacSweyn the warden got into the boats, together with a number of others close to the chief by blood ties or by custom.

Men took the oars and made ready to pull away. Iain helped to loose the ropes. Almost at the last moment, the head boatman shouted “Where’s Pock-faced Tam then? We’re one man short.” Looking round for a likely substitute, he spotted Iain heaving away willingly on a rope, caught him by the arm and pointed “Jump in and take that oar there, lad. Look sharp now. Never mind arguing. If you don’t know how, pull away with the others and you’ll learn right enough.”

“Or take the skin off your hands finding out,” his partner at the oar muttered, giving him a grin and moving up.

With a shouted order, the sails were loosed and ballooned out vigorously in the wind. Those ashore still, pushed the vessels off one by one and the oarsmen took up the rhythm from the bagpipes that sounded loud and clear from the battlements.

The great galleys and the birlinn, like the Viking vessels that the islanders’ Norse ancestors had built, seemed large and high beside the slender funeral boat and the high prows rose and dipped gracefully into the cresting waves. They each had twenty-four or twenty-eight oarsmen, two to each heavy oar. The Song of Ossian and the Pride of Lochlann, guarding the slender Water Lily in which the dead man lay, moved outwards to the piper’s lament and headed towards the open Western sea.

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