Medieval Highlands 01 - Highland Vengeance (2 page)

In the next second he was in motion. By instinct alone, he picked up his rod and headed away from the sound of the charging men. Tall and lanky, his spindly legs churned as his long, narrow feet flew across the heath and into the cover of trees that lined the loch.

He’d barely entered the dark canopy and fallen down to his knees, when an army of naked men on horseback came charging over the rise, covered in the blue war paint of the ancient Highlanders. Their eyes shone like eery white marble orbs through the cerulean tint on their faces, and the gore of recent battle coated their bodies and their horses. Some of the men were brandishing their blood-drenched swords high above their heads while others were carrying the fire spikes they’d used to set the blazes.

The leader of the brigands swung a bloody spike with a human head attached to the end of it.
“Make haste. To the loch! We must wash off this woad and be on our way before the other MacLaurin soldiers return.”

Fearful tears gathered in Daniel’s eyes, blurring his vision, before he manfully swiped them away with the back of his hand. He must see the faces of the men who’d done this deed. But there was so much blood! More than he’d seen in his life. His innards twisted at the sight. Covering his mouth with both hands, he swallowed hard, nearly choking, in an effort to keep from spewing out the sour bile and recently consumed bannocks that now threatened to rise up from his churning insides. After a moment, his stomach settled a bit and his eyes were drawn once more to the leader, and then to the grotesque and mutilated head on the spike. The blue devils were still too far away for him to see which of his clansmen had come to such a vile end.

Without warning, his gut violently convulsed, causing him to lose the battle to keep his food down. It was all he could do to release the meal from its moorings and stay quiet enough to remain undiscovered by the men.

Fearing for his family, but driven to stay until he’d seen the faces of his enemies, Daniel remained hidden and carefully silent.

The men at last reached the banks of the loch, giving him a clear view of them for the first time. A chill shot up his spine as his mind interpreted what his eyes beheld. Several of the brigands were fully aroused. With bone-deep panic spurring his heart to hammer against his ribs, he tilted his head, straining to hear their boastful banter as they washed off the evidence of their violence. Tho’ they spoke in the tongue of the Highlands, their accents were unusual and their speech, stilted. ‘Twas clearly not their native tongue. As their visages were slowly revealed, they made crude comparisons of the women they had forced themselves upon, laughing and taunting each other as if it were some game of sport they’d been about. A shudder of pure loathing ran through Daniel.

He turned his gaze back to the leader, who was still on one knee at the edge of the loch, washing off the slaughter gore. The man was tall, standing head and shoulders above many of the men under his command, with a medium, muscular frame, and reddish-brown hair that was a bit long, even by Highlander standards. It hung in a blood-matted braid down his back, ending at the base of his spine. Daniel’s fists clenched.
Turn a bit more to the left, you merciless fiend so I can at last know my enemy!

As if Daniel’s thoughts were invisible hands gripping the leader’s shoulders, the man stood and turned, his face stripped of its disguise and its features clearly revealed. A dark brown beard covered most of the lower half of his narrow countenance, and heavy, dark brows sat like thunder clouds over light-colored eyes, bringing his long, aquiline nose into prominence. Three raised abrasions, red with blood, ran from his brow to his cheek. Marks? Left by someone’s nails?

The leader strode towards his friends, leaving Daniel with a clear view of the horror on the spike thrusting up from the ground. “Godamercy,” Daniel whispered as a buzzing sound filled his head and black spots danced in his vision. In the next instant, he was on his side in the soil, his sights riveted on the violent tableau at the edge of the loch. He sucked in two deep breaths to stave off the swoon that threatened as tears flooded his eyes once more. Blinking them away, he ignored them as they ran down his cheeks in dust-stained rivulets, for naught else mattered but the dreadful sight before him. ‘Twas his grandfather’s head the devil-leader had wielded so proudly—just as his young mind had dimly suspected, but his heart had refused to believe.

“What will you be doing with that?”
one of the soldiers called out to the man, pointing toward the skewered, blood-streaked butcher’s prize.

The leader shrugged. With a demon light in his eye, he turned back to the mass of human flesh and bone and, grasping it in both hands, released it from its stake and gleefully threw it into the loch. It floated a moment before sinking like a stone down below the water’s surface, leaving a few air bubbles in its wake. Over the roar of the men’s laughter, he said,
“Aye, that be a fit grave for you, old man!”
As he bent down and washed the blood from his hands once more, he called over his shoulder,
“Many a trout will have a fine feast this day, I trow!”
He threw his head back and howled with evil glee.

A lust for blood and a need to kill, the likes of which Daniel had never known, filled his heart in that dreadful moment, and the last vestige of innocence fell away. An image flashed through his mind then, as he knelt there in his family’s wood, of the murderers begging for mercy while he savagely tore each one of them apart with his bare hands. But directly on the heels of that vision of valor, cold reality set in. He had no weapon, nor the skill needed to satisfy his need for vengeance. Not yet. But this atrocity would not go unpunished, of that he would make certain. If not by his own hands, then by the hands of others—whether they be survivors of this blood-filled day or members of allied clans.

Resigned to the fact that retribution would not be gained this day, Daniel turned his thoughts to getting home. Purposefully, he made his way through the cover of trees skirting the men’s camp to the edge of the covering leading to the rise. Tho’ he was impatient to reach his home, he took a longer route to stay out of sight of the villains.

*

By the time Daniel reached the village, the fires were almost out. Embers still burned and there was a dense haze of smoke clinging like a shroud to the air, making it difficult to breathe. It burned his throat and made his eyes sting so painfully that tears gushed from them like water over a fall. The air was hot, so hot that he felt as if he were being roasted on a spit. Choking and gagging, he fell forward onto all fours at the base of the well. In desperation, he sat up and stripped his tunic and shirt from his overheated body. After dipping his shirt in the bucket of water that he found next to the well, he cooled his sizzling skin with the liquid. Afterward, as he struggled to his feet once more, he held the wet shirt over his nose and mouth, hoping it would help him breathe more easily. The maneuver worked, allowing him to survey the area as he continued down the main path that would lead him up the hillside to his family’s fortress. Every cottage and building, it seemed, had been set ablaze and now smoldered in charred heaps on either side of the dirt-and-pebble path he trod upon.

As he at last reached the outskirts of the village and began his journey toward his home, a new rush of dread crowded into him. Tho’ the keep was made mostly of mortar and stone, wood had been used for doors and framing, so there was some likelihood that it had succumbed to a great amount of damage from the fires that the devils had set. And this time, he knew, he would find death there as well. His most avid wish, however, was that the marauders had at least spared his mother’s and the other women’s lives.
“I beg you, Lord, please let me find my mother alive,”
he prayed aloud, but the dread would not be eased.

He began to run. With long, bounding strides he raced, his feet barely touching the ground as he rushed up the steep incline, across the open drawbridge, past the gatehouse, and into the outer bailey. He skidded to a halt a few feet from where he’d had his last words with his grandfather that morn. With lungs blowing and a face drenched in sweat, his eyes locked on the horrible destruction all around him. His grandfather’s lieutenant and several of the fortress guards lay slain, along with their horses, just inside the outer bailey. A flock of geese passed overhead, their flight formation sending a shadowed chevron across the macabre scene, their muted honks echoing, like the chimes at daybreak, in the hushed, grim quiet of the courtyard and startling him out of his shocked stupor. He stumbled forward and entered the inner bailey, the courtyard surrounding his family’s keep. There, in this place he’d always believed to be inviolable, he found even more death and destruction. The stables were a mass of char and the bodies of slain soldiers were all around him, providing ample proof of the valiant struggle they’d made to protect the keep from the marauders. The men were scattered upon the ground and hung from the curtain wall and towers, their bodies unnaturally contorted in death as their life’s blood seeped out of them.

Daniel picked his way over the fallen men, as well as their abandoned swords and targes, keeping his eyes fixed on the front of his family’s home. Heavy beams had fallen and blocked the entrance to its scorched front and parts of the mortar had given way under the heat, leaving immense stones exposed. But for the most part the structure still appeared sound.

He was forced to use a dead soldier’s gloves to clear the entrance of the smoldering debris. It took several minutes, but at last, he was able to move enough of it to get through the doorway. He walked down the three steps into the great hall, nimbly sidestepping rubble as he went. “Hail! ‘Tis me, Daniel!” he called out. “Speak, if you hear me!”
Please, please, please, please
, the word reverberated like the clanging of a bell in his mind.

An eery quiet permeated the hall as he took in the carnage. Blood was everywhere; it stained the floors, walls, furnishings—even the ceiling beams were blood-spattered—and still so fresh, that a heavy, sweet smell of copper pervaded the air. Gashed and mutilated bodies lay in grotesque relief, littering the floor and hanging over what was left of the railing that enclosed the upper landing. Like so much fallen chaff after a mighty storm.

Evidence of the carnal violence that the demons had bragged about came into his line of vision. His stomach lurched. Janice, his mother’s young maid, the shyly sweet lass he’d nearly humiliated himself in front of that morn, lay in the corner at an unnatural angle. Her neck broken, she was stripped naked and trussed. It was evident that she’d been taken by force by the blood that streaked her thighs and the bruises on her slender neck, shoulders, and arms. He turned his eyes away, unable to bear the sight another moment.

The cook, her gray hair twisted and tangled with blood, lay directly in his view then, not more than five feet away from Janice. In the same condition as the much younger lass, her timeworn face was beaten and bloody, and her bound limbs were scraped and bruised.
“…you need to be buildin’ your strength,”
she’d said to him that morn, he remembered. “I will,” he made the vow to her aloud. “And then I will avenge this atrocity, or die in the attempt.”

With blurred vision Daniel turned away, moving toward the spiral stone stairs leading to the upper level chambers. He halted at their base and gazed up, into the dark abyss. Pinpricks of fear danced across his nerve endings, causing a new flush of cold sweat to saturate his skin. He could not do this! He could
not
! Whirling around, he strode a few feet toward the entrance of the hall, but stopped short. His eyes clamped tightly shut and his hands clenched into fists, he fought the impulse to flee with all his might. Nay! Straightening his spine, he opened his eyes. Nay! He
must
. He must do this thing. With new purpose, he turned back toward the stairs and took them two at a time to the upper level. At the top, he stopped. Looking steadily down the passage, he saw that the doors to both his mother’s and his grandfather’s chambers stood ajar. Moving first to his mother’s door, he held his breath as he slowly pushed it open and peeked inside.

*

His mother was there, lying in a pool of her own blood with her throat slashed and a frozen look of horror on her face. The chamber was a shambles; her jewel caskets ransacked and looted. “Nay…nay,” he whispered, shaking his head in numb disbelief. His palms, slick with sweat, slid across the rough wood surface of the door as he pushed it wide and took two long strides inside to stand above his mother’s lifeless form. In shock, he gazed down at her. Her once warm, vibrant, brown eyes were now glassy and lifeless; her beautiful, long golden hair, now cropped off at her scalp and thrown into the hearth. She’d been stripped, bound and clearly taken by force multiple times, just as the women downstairs had been.

The air left his lungs as a wave of dizziness washed over him. His limbs no longer capable of holding his weight, he fell to his knees beside his mother. Her face swam before him as he swayed above her. Gazing at her through unshed tears, he said a silent prayer for her soul. Convinced now that he’d find no survivors, his only thought was to find his grandfather’s remains so that the laird of the MacLaurin clan could be given a proper burial.

But first, he must take care of its lady.

Reaching out, he closed his mother’s eyes and untied her bindings. He laid her out straight with her hands crossing her chest. As he did so, his sight snagged upon an oddly shaped wound below her collarbone, on the rise of her left breast. With trembling fingers, Daniel dabbed at the blood around the lesion with the sleeve of his shirt, bringing the aspect of the cut into clearer view. His stomach lurched.
“Damn them to hell!”
he yelled. The butchers had carved an emblem there. They’d branded her, he realized, as if she were a peddler’s oxen! Clenching his teeth, he growled low in his throat. “You’ll not have died in vain,” he said hoarsely. “By my vow, your murderers will be destroyed.” He rose to his feet and walked over to the bed to retrieve a blanket. ‘Twould suffice to cover her with for now. For, until he found his grandfather and completed this grizzly expedition, he could not begin the burial process.