Lady Macbeth

Twelve

Time passed sluggishly for Roscille, unnaturally so, which was her luck; her husband had not noticed her absence from their marriage bed. She removed her cloak and slid back into the sheets beside him. Every muscle and bone screamed in protest. It felt like returning to a different body, one trapped in a permanent state of pain—the still-healing scabs on the backs of her thighs, the tear between her legs. *Forget these little wounds,* she told herself, as if such a thing were possible. As much as she desired it, her mind could not exert total dominion over her flesh.

Macbeth woke strangely, unlike other men. He did not roll over, nestling into the sheets to protest the rising sun. Instead, he turned onto his back and sat up straight, as though yanked upward by an invisible chain. His torso remained perfectly erect, statue-like in its stiffness. His eyes opened without blinking away the bleariness of sleep. Roscille observed this in total silence as her fear of him resurrected itself. But then a furrow appeared between his brows, and he let out a huff of air through gritted teeth. Roscille remembered her husband's little wound, which had stained the sheets with a new kind of blood—black and oozing, dredged from somewhere deep within his body. It must hurt. She could not see how it would not.

"Wife," Macbeth said, turning to her.

"My lord husband." Her voice was meek, but this was for the best. He would want to know he had broken her. A good punishment; this was one that mixed pleasure for him with pain for her.

But Macbeth's look of satisfaction was brief. Without preamble, he said, "You will join me in my chamber from this day on."

Roscille watched herself nod from some distant, disembodied place.

"Banquho told me you brought a handmaiden to the castle."

"Yes." Roscille lowered her gaze. "Senga."

She prepared herself for a new punishment. She wondered if she would be struck, if he would parade her around to his men with a freshly pulsing bruise on her face—proof that Macbeth could indeed keep his wife in line, that he had corrected the error in himself which had placed her in charge of the castle to begin with.

But he merely said, "She may have this chamber, then. And she will attend to your bathing and dressing."

She was surprised by this, but perhaps she should not be. Macbeth was King now; he had forgotten these small indignities. He had stamped upon the virtue of honor, snuffing out its noble flame. Some minute defiance of custom on the part of his wife was not enough to chip the great shining armor of his power. And Roscille must not remark upon it, must not call it kindness nor mercy, because such things were below him, too.

So she replied only, "I will tell her."

"It may vex Banquho," said Macbeth. "Perhaps the other men. But that is below my regard."

Macbeth threw off the covers, and Roscille turned away so she would not have to see the nakedness of his body. She had already felt its strength in the dark. *Let it stay there,* she thought. *Let the dark swallow it whole.*

She heard the grunt of pain as he shifted the heavy weight of his body onto his injured leg. He robed himself in a new shirt and a clean tartan and said to Roscille, "Come. There is a war council waiting."

That she had been invited to the council table was a surprise, as well. Yet this time she did not sit at the table. She was instructed to take a seat several paces away, a chair shoved flush against the wall. What purpose did this serve? Surely Macbeth benefited more from hiding her away. Surely Scotland would only allow him so many errant witch-wives. But this, too, she realized, was another brusque show of his new kingly force. Her presence announced to his men: *I will marry whom I choose. To you, perhaps, she is a witch, but to me she is a wife. Whatever little power she might have is extinguished within the sheets of our marriage bed.*

Roscille felt, somehow, that they could tell—that Winter Fox and Weasel-cloak and Mountain Goat all could tell that her thighs had been newly bloodied. Perhaps it was the way she sat so shrunken in her seat, more emptiness than form, like a white gash in the world. He had succeeded at last, her lord husband, in misusing her the way a thousand, thousand women had been misused before. He crushed her in his fist, squeezing out all the witchcraft that was valuable to him, and then left her, a husk.

It was the cloak which proved this. Roscille might as well be invisible within its folds. She was Lady Macbeth, and finally she understood what that meant: a rung upon which to hang her husband's virtue. The cloak said, *I have conquered Alba; I wear its skin as proudly as my crown. It is my trophy, my treasure, mine, mine, mine.*

"I have left an army in charge of Moray, to quell any potential uprisings," Macbeth was saying. "But I do not think they will rise. I have slaughtered all of Duncane's most loyal allies—that dumb dog Macduff. His body has been strung up outside the castle walls. Any remaining loyalists will see it and choke on their noble treacheries."

If he had killed Macduff, then he had also killed Macduff's wife and sons, so there was no one left to someday take vengeance upon him. She imagined her husband tasting this man's blood. She wondered if, after the unicorn was skinned, he had butchered the animal and eaten it. She found she could envision this easily.

"Your power has been proven, my Lord," Banquho said. "No one in Alba will challenge you."

Banquho had not looked at her at all. It was Fléance who stole glances, again and again. There was such shame on his still-boyish face. His shame did not fill her as she expected it to. It was a tasteless meal, like water without wine. Fear was what she sought from him. And she would not be sated until she got it.

There was some shuffling of maps and papers, which Roscille could not see, tokens moving across the table. The low, rough voices of men who all had something to prove to one another. Macbeth murmured something she could not hear. The next words that reached her ears were Banquho's, again.

"Now there is the matter of merging households."

"Merging, why?" Her husband's voice. "I do not want Duncane's servants here. Let them grovel and burn in Moray."

"It would be a gesture of goodwill," said Banquho. "To prove you will be King of all Scotland, not merely King of Glammis."

Silence, as Macbeth considered this. Mountain Goat suppressed a cough.

"Fine," said Macbeth at last. "I will take a portion of his household staff, but only those whom I have looked in the eye, who kneel and swear their loyalty to me. There is enough reason to fear treachery already."

"Yes," Banquho agreed. "Which is why you must prove you can do more for these men than any other lord could. That their lives will be better beneath the rule of Macbeth than they were under Duncane, than they would be under Æthelstan or one of those half-Saxon brats."

Roscille's heart stuttered.

"On the subject of these brats," said Weasel-cloak, "we have had no success in finding Duncane's monstrous spawn."

A sort of relief filled her, but it was half pleasure, half poison. She hoped he was far away now, safe on English soil. And yet she knew she would dream of him every night, and wake in the cold sweat of a fever.

"That should not be our greatest concern now," said Banquho. "War is coming. Æthelstan's armies will breach the border soon."

"As soon as Æthelstan's army is in tatters and that arrogant *rex Anglorum* is kneeling at my feet, I will slay the dragon myself," Macbeth said. "Until then, let each man of Scotland hope he will be the one to find and kill it, and earn the prize of my unending favor."

It was like the myth of the sunken city, Ys: Give the people something to believe in, no matter if it is impossible. Let anyone with a sword and stupid courage think he may have a chance at slaying the beast. Hope was enough to keep a man clambering up the long, dingy rope of his life.

The men all gave wordless grunts of agreement. Barbarous as they seemed, they were not wholly without reason.

"I return to Moray soon," said Macbeth. "I must be certain no disloyalty lurks there. Æthelstan will try to seize the castle first. He is wise enough to know that Glammis is a fortress which cannot be trespassed. He will think to beat me back to my home and then lay siege there, to starve us to surrender. I will not give him the chance. I will defeat him at Moray."

More nods from his men. Banquho said, "I will be at your side, my Lord."

"No," Macbeth said. "You must remain here. I entrust you not to let this castle fall to treachery or ill management. You may prepare anyway for a siege. It will not come to that, but it is wise still to be ready."

This time, Banquho would take the task eagerly, because of all that was unspoken in Macbeth's words. *My wife failed in this endeavor. Now I trust it again to you—my right hand.* She should have known it. The clever wife who was not so clever in the end; she had been discarded. And the man who was perhaps too hastily dismissed, the man who had served his Lord loyally for so many years, he had been elevated again.

"Yes, my Lord," Banquho murmured.

"Then see to it," Macbeth said.

The men scattered, scraping their chairs against the stone floor, rolling up their maps, slouching out of the main hall. Their gazes did not stop to rest upon Roscille for even a moment. She was wife now, only. She was beneath their regard.

Fléance stayed at first, but he was banished by a quick look from his father. He, too, did not glance at Roscille as he left. He would go into the courtyard and practice swordplay. Or else he would find some other empty place to rage at this dismissal, at the fact that he had never wet his blade and tasted an enemy's blood. Good. Let each of these injustices wound like the sting of a whip.

With the three of them alone, Macbeth said, "Come with me."

"Where?" Banquho asked.

Roscille already knew.

Through the winding corridors, following the sound of the ocean. The iron key was back on its leather thong, looped around Macbeth's throat, beating against the hollow of his collarbone with each limping step. Roscille and Banquho were careful to slow their paces, to make sure they were never ahead of him. Yet even now Roscille saw the stain of blood on his stockings, a strange dark blooming, like a shape under ice. They stopped in front of the wood-rotted door.

"If you are to keep this castle in my absence," Macbeth said, "then there are things you must know."

Banquho's eyes flickered to Roscille. His unspoken question: *Does she already know?*

To answer, Macbeth said, "A husband and wife should keep no secrets from each other."

Banquho said nothing. Macbeth turned the key in the lock and the door opened.

The cold air that awaited them, the godless blackness—all of it was new to Banquho, and he gasped. Macbeth paid no mind to his shock. He stepped into the dark, his body cleaving the wall of air, clear and straight and unforgiving. He vanished, and for a moment there was no sound at all, not even his splashing through the water. Then the torchlight flared. Light caught on the crest of each ripple, giving the water that familiar texture of scales.

Banquho looked to Roscille and made a strangled noise of bewilderment. But she merely pushed past him and followed her husband into the dark. Her heart was pounding in her throat. She was close now. She hoped the witches did not forsake her.

Roscille stayed on the steps, but the water splashed up, dampening the hem of the cloak, which was so long that it dragged behind her like a wedding train. Banquho shuffled to her side. There was a sheen of sweat on his face, the dampness of terror.

The witches announced themselves with the rattling of chains. Their skin was obscenely white against the unforgiving darkness. Their blind fumbling, their visible bones, the clothes that hung off them in tatters: Banquho stumbled on the slick steps as he tried to shrink from them. They circled Macbeth, water rippling out from around them in overlapping circles.

Their voices were like stones scraping the hull of a ship.

"Macbeth, Thane of Glammis," the witch on the left intoned.

"Macbeth, Thane of Cawder," said the witch on the right.

Gruoch said, "Macbeth, King Hereafter."

Banquho, pressed against the wall, crossed himself, just as Roscille had done that first time. "My God—" he started.

"No," Macbeth said. "Listen. These are not mere epithets; they are prophecies. When they first spoke, I was Thane of Glammis only. I came here and they called me Thane of Cawder. I took Cawder within a week. Then I came and they called me King Hereafter. You know what happened next."

Slowly, understanding overtook Banquho's face, in an amalgam of revulsion and awe. He had known, of course, that Duncane died through Macbeth's machinations, but to know that his purpose was driven by witchcraft and sorcery was something else. Macbeth had revealed the truth that threatened to transform Banquho's world into something bizarre, unnatural, strange. It had already begun. His vision had been altered, made to see the dark, cold aberration that ran under everything.

"Come," Macbeth said, gesturing to him. "Hear their next prophecy. See what will guide our actions as we stand against Æthelstan."

Banquho exhaled. He looked at Roscille again. She was as still and silent as a nymph turned to stone. Yet under the surface, she was alive with feverish wrath.

Banquho took one step, then two. Foot in the water, circles spreading out from around him, his clumsy, too-human movements so obvious in the stillness of the cave. At last, he reached Macbeth's side. He put a hand on his Lord's shoulder to steady himself, forgetting his place for a moment, forgetting the injury that still pulsed behind his Lord's knee like a second beating heart.

Quietly, he said, "Speak of my fate, then."

The three women wrung out their clothes. They tossed the laundry over their shoulders so their hands could be free. With their arms outstretched, palms open to the obstructed sky, they spoke together, a chorus.

"Banquho. Banquho. Banquho. Thane of Lochquhaber."

"That is no prophecy," Banquho said uneasily.

"Banquho, Thane of Lochquhaber. Lesser than Macbeth, but greater," said the left witch.

"Not so happy, yet much happier," said the right witch.

Gruoch said, "Thou shalt beget kings, yet be none."

They joined hands and dipped them into the water. Where their skin touched, silver spread in shapes: Banquho reflected back at himself, and back again, and again, faces piled upon faces, and each one wearing a crown.

Banquho cried out and reached for Macbeth again, but his Lord was not there. His body was, but his mind and spirit were released. They were out like animals, chewing on the witches' words, tearing them apart with a fury.

"All hail Banquho! All hail Banquho! All hail Banquho!" the three witches chanted at once.

Their voices sizzled in the air, and the water burned green, like a cauldron with its oils. Macbeth turned away from *les Lavandières*, away from his first wife to face his second. He wore a mask of incandescent rage.

Banquho was already trudging through the water, panting, scrabbling. He clambered up the steps. He was a warrior and could scent blood before it was even spilled.

He shoved past her, hurtling from the dark into the light. Macbeth growled in wordless anger, limping up the steps after him, and the witches did not stop their chanting, and behind her veil, Roscille smiled.

The chase did not go on for long. Banquho's gait was blundering with terror, and Macbeth limped still, stopping occasionally to rest with his shoulder jammed against the wall. Roscille could see smoke rolling off him, from the pyre lit behind his eyes.

He did not even close the door, so the witches' voices leaked out, spilling through the corridors, suffusing the castle with the smell of salt water. Roscille followed in silence, her footsteps hushed against the floor.

Macbeth charged into the courtyard, sword already drawn. His head whipped back and forth, searching. Banquho had reached the barbican, but it would not open for him. He yanked at the bars like a prisoner in his cell. His face white, he cried out, "My Lord, please—"

"Lesser than Macbeth, but greater!" his Lord roared. "Not so happy, yet much happier. Thou shalt beget kings! All this time, the treachery in Glammis has been wearing the face of my most trusted friend!"

*Friend* was not quite right. He used a word that had no equivalent in Brezhoneg. It meant "ally, partner, brother-in-blood." It was a word forbidden to women, a word for warriors only. There was a closer term in Greek: *hetairos*.

This shouting drew out the castle's other inhabitants. Servants peeked from doorways and windows. Winter Fox and Mountain Goat and Weasel-cloak all emerged, hands on the pommels of their swords, ready always to draw. Even the old Druide shuffled out, Macbeth's Druide, the one who had joined her hand to her husband's on their wedding night.

And then there was Fléance. Pleasure surged through Roscille as she saw the blank horror on his face. *Whatever harm you have done me, it will be repaid now a thousandfold.*

"You believe the word of these creatures over the vows I have sworn to you, many times over?" Banquho asked desperately. "You are mad, Macbeth, to have taken counsel from them!"

Winter Fox blinked. "My Lord, what creatures does he speak of?"

Macbeth turned to him. Blood had spread all the way down his stockings, thick and ugly and black, and dripped into his boot.

He said, "A madness has overtaken the Thane of Lochquhaber."

The words muffled every sound in the courtyard, flattening even the wind, like iron beaten on an anvil. Even Banquho stopped rattling the bars and stood still as the wind swept through and ruffled beards and hair, and pressed Roscille's veil against her lips.

"No," Banquho said at last. "You are the mad one. Listen! He keeps these women in chains beneath the floors of his castle—no, I cannot even call them women! They are not inhabitants of the earth. They are withered, wild creatures. Witches! And he defers to them, has them speak false prophecies in his favor!"

"Do you see?" Macbeth gestured. "What demonic humors have corrupted our dear friend's mind? To say this, Macbeth harbors witches! He sees unearthly visions before his eyes."

"Lies!" Banquho howled. "I am no traitor, and I speak truly! Go down the longest, lowest corridor of the castle, and see these evil creatures for yourself!"

Winter Fox and Mountain Goat and Weasel-cloak all looked among one another, jaws and lips moving as though they were chewing food, but they produced no words. Roscille would never stop marveling at the stupidness of men when the order of their world was disrupted.

It was the Druide who spoke.

"Perhaps," he said, "we may release these humors from him. Banish the demons, and return our friend to his reasonable mind."

Another beat of silence.

"You do not mean—" Banquho started.

Two torches burned in Macbeth's eyes. His chest rose and fell with the exertion of the pursuit, but also with the imagination of violence. He was not an epicure, like the Duke. He was a glutton. He had been presented with a grotesque banquet, and he would feast and feast and feast.

"Yes," Macbeth rasped. "Yes, I think that is what we will do."

The struggle to pin down Banquho and drag him into the great hall was more fumbling than vicious. Macbeth allowed Winter Fox and Mountain Goat and Weasel-cloak to do this work in his stead. He limped after them, his face dewed with sweat. Fléance followed pleading, tears at the corners of his eyes.

Roscille was surprised that no one tried to pin him down, too. After all, she was sure to include this in her prophecy: *Thou shalt beget kings.* Damning father and son in the same breath.

But it was better this way, one final insult to Fléance's pride: They did not believe he could stop them, nor defend himself when blades were drawn against him. He was a boy who would not have the chance to grow into a man.

Roscille thought suddenly of that other man, Macduff, the dumb honorable dog whose line her husband had struck from the earth. The vision she had given Macbeth, of Banquho's sons and sons and sons, his face multiplied through generations, rolling like the tide. This was a man's first, last, and greatest fear: a world that existed empty of him. A world in which his name was never spoken. His blood dried up, his body dissolved into dirt, his grave grown over with weeds. An empty, seedless husk.

Had she adopted the justice of these barbarian Scots? But no, she did not delude herself that this was justice. It was vengeance. A harder, sharper, hotter blade. Driven between the shoulders and twisted.

Banquho was wrestled into a chair. Rope was procured. He was bound, and all the while he was crying out, "No, no, our Lord spouts lies," as if he could not tell that with each passing moment he seemed madder, and the acts against him all the more reasonable.

"Please!" Fléance said. "My father is no traitor. He has been your loyal companion all these years—"

"Years," Macbeth scoffed, "in which his treachery has grown like the rings of a tree."

"I will release him from this treachery, and from the madness that spawned it," the Druide said. "Tilt back his head."

Roscille had never witnessed it before: trepanation. The process of letting out bad humors. She had only heard the distant screams of men and women upon whom this act was performed. Adelaide's horrible, ecstatic wailing.

Banquho's screams were choppy and broken. He choked on his own fearful bile. The Druide had the trephine out, a curious little tool, which Roscille always imagined as a blade but was really more like an auger, something which drilled, not cut. She understood now how it created the distinctive circular scars that burned so bright on Adelaide's forehead. Now the rusted metal borer descended on Banquho.

There was the quick, wet, sucking sound as flesh was pared away from bone. A spurt of blood—it surprised her, how little there was; the Druide was precise in his work and had had many years of practice. Banquho howled.

Roscille could not imagine this pain, so perhaps it was not perfectly equivalent vengeance after all. And Banquho, in turn, would never know the agony of something torn open between his legs, rudely forced, degraded into silence. But this was close enough.

The next sound was truly terrible: the splintering of bone. Roscille had heard it many times, a too-slow servant clobbered about the face, skewing his nose gruesomely to the left, but the singularity of the noise now, in the otherwise empty silence of the chamber, made her want to clap her hands over her ears and squeeze her eyes shut.

She felt, suddenly, that she had erred: not in her intellect or her maneuvering, but erred as a Christian, as a soul promised, however obliquely, to heaven. As if she had not already lost her place there for Duncane's murder. As if men did not do worse every day, and still believe themselves virtuous. As if the Duke had not struck down that trembling, unarmed stable boy while Roscille cringed and spoke no words in his defense; surely that was the beginning of her sin, and from there her life had warped and narrowed into an inescapable, damnable blackness.

"Stop," Fléance pleaded. "Have mercy."

She should not wear a white garment ever again. At least a dark linen would better hide the blood she saw dripping from her hands, soaking the hem of her dress, and pooling on the floor around her feet.

"This is mercy," said Macbeth. "I am releasing him from his madness and treachery."

But there was no spilling of yellow pus from the wound. No pungent black smoke. Nothing but that first spurt of blood, because there was no treachery, no madness, except the lunacy that would be engendered in Banquho now forever, as he felt that scar on his forehead and thought of this injustice visited upon him. He would be as mad as Adelaide, confusing pleasure with pain.

Roscille had believed Banquho's death would be cruel but quick. A blade to the throat, opening a second red mouth screaming with blood. A sword through the heart—honor, at least, on his killer's end. She did not imagine this, not ever. Yet surely that was not enough to salvage her soul.

Banquho coughed and wrestled against his binds, his movements savage and jerking, like a man possessed. Perhaps—somehow, the Druide had truly released a long-dormant spirit of madness, one that inhabited every man, curled inside the structure of bones and warming itself against the pulse of his heart. Perhaps Macbeth would see this and say, *Enough.*

But there was only the trephine grinding deeper, and Banquho thrashing more furiously, and her husband looking on with black, pitiless eyes.

At last: Banquho gagged on his own blood and spat it up all over the front of his jerkin and then went limp in the chair. The Druide yanked the trephine free and stepped back, letting the tool clatter to the ground. He was saying, "I am so sorry, my Lord, I did not think, I have never, not once in my life," but these words were as distant as echoes to Roscille, as if she was underwater and hearing it all from the world above, separated by an impassable membrane.

Mountain Goat and Winter Fox and Weasel-cloak stood at a silent distance, waiting to be moved into place.

Fléance staggered forward and clutched his father's body. He howled. There was shame in such weeping and carrying on, but that was the least of anyone's concerns, now. *Thou shalt beget kings.* It was hard to imagine how anyone could be persuaded to believe that this sad shuddering boy would someday wear a crown.

Macbeth had his arms at his sides, fists clenched. He had not moved or even blinked for what seemed like an eternity. She could see the prophecy playing out in his mind.

*Lesser than Macbeth, but greater.* He had been lessened, reduced to a corpse.

*Not so happy, yet much happier.* No red smile on Banquho's face, or on his throat. His mouth was an open cavity, pooling with blood-flecked foam.

*Thou shalt beget kings, yet be none.* He was nothing now. A cold body. And there would be no cairn to mark his grave.