XXXVI. The Siege & The Storm

10

Macbeth

Fife, Scotland

Aberdour Castle

December 31st, 2014

Time: 12:30 AM

_____________________________

What bloody man is that?

He can report, as seemeth by his plight,

of the revolt.

The newest state.

Chains.

He remembered being chained. Captive. Confined. The knives dragged across the skin, across the planes oʼ his bloodied skin. He remembered the screaming, the crying, that started out low and resonant. The men with the mad eyes, the scarred face, the cat-like reflexes. A djinn from Barbados; the ifrit from Versailles. He remembered the witches. Strange women, strange men. And then...the bodies. He remembered the bodies. 

This is the sergeant,

Who like a good and hardy soldier fought

'Gainst my captivity. Hail, brave friend!

Say to the king the knowledge of the broil

As thou didst leave it.

The dead. 

He remembered the dead as he was chained in Norwegian captivity. Pale shapes, hunched shadows, with flesh as pale as a motherʼs milk – corpses dressed in thick black, boneless beasts with sullen eyes and ghostly bodies. Blue Men of the Minch. Water spirits that haunted the Minch Strait, frozen by the cold of Scotland and the sands of time, soldiers that fell into the ruin of the infamous Battle of Glamis. And among them, Lulach burned.

His Marjorieʼs baby. 

Burned in-front of him as the dead danced around his collapsed, chewed out men. Master Shakespeare promised, promised him life.

And instead, he gave him death. In poetry, in squid ink, in the vile tongue of his quill as Duncan spoke to him in his dreams, in his nightmares:

Doubtful it stood,

As two spent swimmers that do cling together

And choke their art. The merciless Macdonwald–

Worthy to be a rebel, for to that

The multiplying villanies of nature

Do swarm upon him 

– from the Western Isles

Of kerns and gallowglasses is supplied,

And fortune, on his damnèd quarrel smiling,

Showed like a rebelʼs whore. But allʼs too weak,

For brave Macbeth  – well he deserves that name

 – Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel,

Which smoked with bloody execution,

Like valorʼs minion carved out his passage

Till he faced the slave;

Which neʼer shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,

Till he unseamed him from the nave to thʼ chops,

And fixed his head upon our battlements.

O valiant cousin! O worthy gentleman!

Damn him.

He burned with the fire. The fire. Sewn from the blood of Hell, and reposed from the finest of smoke – it howled, grand like a king's grandeur; his riches setting the rest of the town ablaze. He screamed, screamed for Lulach, for his bastard son,  tears of blood rolling down his face, and drying on his hands. His heart thudded in his chest listlessly, nearly stopping, coagulating like the blood that baptized his face. Bodies staggered before him as he stood. Decapitated, headless forms – their blood rippling passed curtains among curtains of organs. And as he moved along the room, the knives threading into his skin, stomping, sidestepping over the fatalities – he filled his lungs with fearful screams.  

His son was sick; sick with the devilʼs poison, with the bite of the dead strewn along his legs.

Bitten, taken.

The war made him see things. Imaginative things, hallucinatory things. Lulach was real, Marjorie was real, he was real.

He...he had to be.

As whence the sun 'gins his reflection

Shipwracking storms and direful thunders break,

So from that spring whence comfort seemed to come

Discomfort swells. Mark, King of Scotland, mark:

No sooner justice had, with valor armed,

Compelled these skipping kerns to trust their heels,

But the Norweyan lord, surveying vantage,

With furbished arms and new supplies of men,

Began a fresh assault...

Dismayed not this our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?

No, nothing scared Macbeth and Banquo.

Not Lulach, not the army of the undead, no the War, not the fire. Nothing.

Nothing...but what he remembered. 

The storm waging on. He remembered that. The duplicitous December snow falling in large, damning flakes – crystallized shards cascading towards them sharply like a desire to stave off all humankind. He remembered watching the snow as he hovered over her, listening to her screams in sync with Lulachʼs; biting through the burn of the winter with distaste, crushing her hand in his, his hands perfumed by endless blood, by deep and dark scars. He remembered the snap of bone against her cervix, the sobbing as the blood curled around her womb in decadent waves, the Juniper tree etched into her back, the knives in his skin. The blood smeared on his weary o-face, pressing to his forehead as he tenderly kissed her.  

Yes, it dismayed him, as sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion.

If I say sooth, I must report they were

As cannons overcharged with double cracks,

So they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.

Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,

Or memorize another Golgotha,

I cannot tell–

But I am faint, my gashes cry for help...

No more that thane of Cawdor shall deceive

Our bosom interest: go pronounce his present death,

And with his former title greet Macbeth.

He remembered no more crying. He remembered the slick of the soldiersʼ blood. The words of the King, Lennox, Ross, the Sergeant – all carried throughout the cold winter wind. He remembered no more crying, red in the snow. She was a small little thing – warm, soft, tiny fingers and toes like a doll wrapping around his fingers, the tuft of fine, silky hair on her head reminiscent of his own. He remembered holding her with exhaustion, the feeling of rubbing the undersides of his knuckles against her cheeks, taking in the sensations the soaking them in. He remembered The nightʼs terrors howling with the rising moon...and the way she kept the night at bay. The way his daughter kept him at bay. The way his son kept him at bay as he held her, before Gruoch ruined his family.

He remembered the knives in his back as the war waged on.

The chains.

Lulach.

The undead that were supposed to be dead.

The fire.

Macdonwaldʼs brutal knives.

The Juniper tree on Marjorieʼs back; the men she wrapped her arms around.

The lack of crying. 

The drums in the distance, the bannermenʼs

colors of Duncanʼs reign.

Her tiny hands wrapping around his pinky, faintly, before going limp.

Still-born. 

He remembered it all. He knew he couldnʼt have made it up.

Duncan, King of Scotland, Lucifer the Lightbringer and Cnut the Great, the Prophet, God made flesh, combining forces.

They did this. They are the reason I lost my Isobel, my Lulach. My babies, my children.

He remembered that, he knew he wasn't crazy, but most of all...

He remembered the anger. The stark, raw, anger that came to him as he cursed the Heavens and all their gods. He remembered the anger. And he remembered the threats that were made in the wake of that anger, threats that still held today. 

Five letters, echoing Ross, a Scottish nobleman, that splashed from his lips the way the Dunsinane ashes did: We will all burn, Macbeth.

A threat that turned into a promise: 

And when we do, you shall be Order and Chaos.

The master of the sea, the one that holds Hephaestatusʼ fire in his hands.

The true Dragon; the king that should be atop the Scottish throne.

We will all burn, Macbeth.

Three words that Shakespeare stole from Ross to motivate him were a divine wine on Shakespeareʼs lips: 

For you are the siege.

A foretelling of an apocalypse; the day to end all days.

And Lucifer is the storm.