Chapter Twelve

Twelve

It is lucky for Roscille, that time has passed so sluggishly, so unnaturally, that her husband does not notice her absence from their marriage bed. She takes off her cloak and slides back into the sheets beside him. Every muscle and bone protests this. It is like returning to a different body, one that exists in this permanent state of pain, the still-healing scabs on the backs of her thighs, the tear between her legs, Forget these little wounds, as if such a thing were possible. As much as she desires it, her mind cannot have total dominion over her body.

Macbeth wakes strangely, unlike other men. He does not roll over, nestling into the sheets, as protest against the rising sun. He turns onto his back and sits up straight, as though yanked upward by an invisible chain. His torso, perfectly erect, is statue-like in its stiffness. His eyes open without blinking away the bleariness of sleep. Roscille observes this in total silence, as her fear of him resurrects itself. But then a furrow appears between his brows and he lets out a huff of air between his gritted teeth, and Roscille remembers her husband's little wound, which has stained the sheets with a new kind of blood. Black and oozing, dredged from somewhere deep within his body. It must hurt. She cannot see how it would not.

"Wife," Macbeth says, turning to her.

"My lord husband." Her voice is meek, but this is for the best. He will want to know he has broken her. A good punishment; this has been one which mixes pleasure for him with pain for her.

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

Roscille watches herself nod, from some distant, disembodied place.

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

"Yes." Roscille lowers her gaze. "Senga."

She prepares herself for a new punishment. She wonders if she will be struck, if he will parade her around to his men with a freshly pulsing bruise on her face, proof that Macbeth can indeed keep his wife in line, that he has corrected the error in himself which placed her in charge of the castle to begin with.

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

She is surprised by this, but perhaps she should not be. Macbeth is King now; he has forgotten these small indignities, he has stamped upon the virtue of honor, snuffing out its noble flame. Some minute defiance of custom on the part of his wife is 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 are below him, too.

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

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

Macbeth throws off the covers, and Roscille turns away, so she will not have to see the nakedness of his body. She has already felt its strength in the dark. Let it stay there, she thinks. Let the dark swallow it whole.

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

That she has been invited to the council table is a surprise, as well. Yet this time she does not sit at the table. She is instructed to take a seat several paces away, a chair shoved flush against the wall. What purpose does this serve? Surely Macbeth benefits more from hiding her away. Surely Scotland will only allow him so many errant witch-wives. But this, too, she realizes, is another brusque show of his new kingly force. Her presence announces 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 feels, somehow, that they can tell, that Winter Fox and Weasel-cloak and Mountain Goat all can tell that her thighs have been newly bloodied. Perhaps it is the way that she sits so shrunken in her seat, more emptiness than form, like a white gash in the world. He has succeeded at last, her lord husband, in misusing her the way a thousand, thousand women have 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 is the cloak which proves this. Roscille might as well be invisible within its folds. She is Lady Macbeth, and finally she understands what that means: a rung upon which to hang her husband's virtue. The cloak says, 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 is saying. "But I do not think they will uprise. 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 has killed Macduff then he has also killed Macduff's wife and sons, so there is no one who remains to someday take vengeance upon him. She imagines her husband tasting this man's blood. She wonders if, after the unicorn was skinned, he butchered the animal and ate it? She finds she can envision this easily.

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

Banquho has not looked at her at all. It is Fléance who steals glances, again and again. There is such shame, on his still-boyish face. His shame does not fill her as she expected it to. It is a tasteless meal, like water without wine. Fear is what she seeks from him. And she will not be sated until she gets it.

There is some shuffling of maps and papers, which Roscille cannot see, tokens moving across the table. The low, rough voices of men who all have something to prove to one another. Macbeth murmurs something she cannot hear. The next words that reach her ears are 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," says Banquho. "To prove you will be King of all Scotland, not merely King of Glammis."

Silence, as Macbeth considers this. Mountain Goat suppresses a cough.

"Fine," says 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 agrees. "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 ?thelstan or one of those half-Saxon brats."

Roscille's heart stutters.

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

A sort of relief fills her, but it is half pleasure, half poison. She hopes he is far away now, safe on English soil. And yet she knows she will dream of him every night, and wake in the cold sweat of a fever.

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

"As soon as ?thelstan's army is in tatters and that arrogant rex Anglorum is kneeling at my feet, I will slay the dragon myself," Macbeth says. "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 is 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 is enough to keep a man clambering up the long dingy rope of his life.

The men all give wordless grunts of agreement. Barbarous as they seem, they are not wholly without reason.

"I return to Moray soon," says Macbeth. "I must be certain no disloyalty lurks there. ?thelstan 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 says, "I will be at your side, my Lord."

"No," Macbeth says. "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 will take the task eagerly, because of all that is 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 has been discarded. And the man who was perhaps too hastily dismissed, the man who served his Lord loyally for so many years, he has been elevated again.

"Yes, my Lord," Banquho murmurs.

"Then see to it," Macbeth says.

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

Fléance stays at first, but he is banished by a quick look from his father. He, too, does not glance at Roscille as he leaves. He will go into the courtyard and practice swordplay. Or else he will find some other empty place to rage at this dismissal, at the fact that he has 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 says, "Come with me."

"Where?" Banquho asks.

Roscille already knows.

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

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

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

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

Banquho says nothing. Macbeth turns the key in the lock and the door opens.

The cold air that awaits them, the godless blackness—all of it is new to Banquho and he gasps. Macbeth pays no mind to his shock. He steps into the dark, his body cleaving the wall of air, clear and straight and unforgiving. He vanishes, and for a moment there is no sound at all, not even his splashing through the water. Then the torchlight flares. Light catches on the crest of each ripple, giving the water that familiar texture of scales.

Banquho looks to Roscille, and makes a strangled noise of bewilderment. But she merely pushes past him, and follows her husband into the dark. Her heart is pounding in her throat. She is close now. She hopes the witches do not forsake her.

Roscille stays on the steps, but the water splashes up, dampening the hem of the cloak, which is so long that it drags behind her like a wedding train. Banquho shuffles to her side. There is a sheen of sweat on his face, the dampness of terror.

The witches announce themselves with the rattling of chains. Their skin is obscenely white against the unforgiving darkness. Their blind fumbling, their visible bones, the clothes that hang off them in tatters: Banquho stumbles on the slick steps as he tries to shrink from them. They circle Macbeth, water rippling out from around them in overlapping circles.

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

Left Witch: Macbeth, Thane of Glammis.

Right Witch: Macbeth, Thane of Cawder.

Gruoch says, "Macbeth, King Hereafter."

Banquho, pressed against the wall, crosses himself, just as Roscille did that first time. "My God—" he starts.

"No," Macbeth says. "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 overtakes Banquho's face, in an amalgam of revulsion and awe. He has known, of course, that Duncane died through Macbeth's machinations, but to know that his purpose was driven by witchcraft and sorcery is something else. Macbeth has revealed the truth that threatens to transform Banquho's world into something bizarre, unnatural, strange. It has already begun. His vision has been altered, madeto see the dark, cold aberration that runs under everything.

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

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

Banquho takes one step, 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 reaches Macbeth's side. He puts a hand on his Lord's shoulder, to steady himself, forgetting his place for a moment, forgetting the injury that still pulses behind his Lord's knee like a second beating heart.

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

The three women wring out their clothes. They toss the laundry over their shoulders, so their hands can be free. With their arms outstretched, palms open to the obstructed sky, they speak together, a chorus.

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

"That is no prophecy," Banquho says uneasily.

Left Witch: Banquho, Thane of Lochquhaber. Lesser than Macbeth, but greater.

Right Witch: Not so happy, yet much happier.

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

They join hands, and dip them into the water. Where their skin touches, silver spreads in shapes: Banquho reflected back at himself, and back again, and again, faces piled upon faces, and each one wearing a crown.

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

Left Witch, Right Witch, and Gruoch all at once: "All hail Banquho! All hail Banquho! All hail Banquho!"

Their voices sizzle in the air, and the water burns green, like a cauldron with its oils. Macbeth turns away from les Lavandières, away from his first wife to face his second. He wears a mask of incandescent rage.

Banquho is already trudging through the water, panting, scrabbling. He clambers up the steps. He is a warrior and can scent blood before it is even spilled.

He shoves past her, hurtling from the dark into the light. Macbeth growls in wordless anger, limping up the steps after him, and the witches do not stop their chanting, and behind her veil, Roscille smiles.

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

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

Macbeth charges into the courtyard, sword already drawn. His head whips back and forth, searching. Banquho has reached the barbican, but it will not open for him. He yanks at the bars like a prisoner in his cell. His face white, he cries out, "My Lord, please—"

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

Friend is not quite right. He uses a word that has no equivalent in Brezhoneg. It means "ally, partner, brother-in-blood." It is a word forbidden to women, a word for warriors only. There is a closer term in Greek: hetairos.

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

And then there is Fléance. Pleasure surges through Roscille as she sees 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 asks desperately. "You are mad, Macbeth, to have taken counsel from them!"

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

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

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

The words muffle every sound in the courtyard, flattening even the wind, like iron beaten on an anvil. Even Banquho stops rattling the bars, and stands still as the wind sweeps through and ruffles beards and hair, and presses Roscille's veil against her lips.

"No," Banquho says 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 gestures. "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 howls. "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 look among one another, jaws and lips moving as though they are chewing food, but they produce no words. Roscille will never stop marveling at the stupidness of men when the order of their world is disrupted.

It is the Druide who speaks.

"Perhaps," he says, "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 starts.

Two torches burn in Macbeth's eyes. His chest rises and falls with the exertion of the pursuit, but also with the imagination of violence. He is not an epicure, like the Duke. He is a glutton. He has been presented with a grotesque banquet, and he will feast and feast and feast.

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

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

Roscille is surprised that no one tries 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 is better this way, one final insult to Fléance's pride: They do not believe he can stop them, nor defend himself when blades are drawn against him. He is a boy who will not have the chance to grow into a man.

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

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

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

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

"Years," Macbeth scoffs, "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 says. "Tilt back his head."

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

Banquho's screams are choppy and broken. He chokes on his own fearful bile. The Druide has the trephine out, a curious little tool, which Roscille always imagined as a blade but is really more like an auger, something which drills, not cuts. She understands now how it creates the distinctive circular scars that burned so bright on Adelaide's forehead. Now the rusted metal borer descends on Banquho.

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

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

The next sound is truly terrible: the splintering of bone. Roscille has 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, makes her want to clap her hands over her ears and squeeze her eyes shut.

She feels, suddenly, that she has erred: not in her intellect or her maneuvering, but erred as a Christian, as a soul promised, however obliquely, to heaven. As if she has not already lost her place there for Duncane's murder. As if men do not do worse every day, and still believe themselves virtuous. As if the Duke did not strike 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 has warped and narrowed into an inescapable, damnable blackness.

"Stop," Fléance pleads. "Have mercy."

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

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

But there is no spilling of yellow pus from the wound. No pungent black smoke. Nothing but that first spurt of blood, because there is no treachery, no madness, except the lunacy that will be engendered in Banquho now forever, as he feels that scar on his forehead and thinks of this injustice visited upon him. He will 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 is not enough to salvage her soul.

Banquho coughs and wrestles against his binds, his movements savage and jerking, like a man possessed. Perhaps—somehow, the Druide has truly released a long-dormant spirit of madness, one that inhabits every man, curled inside the structure of bones and warming itself against the pulse of his heart. Perhaps Macbeth will see this and say, Enough.

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

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

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

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

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

Lesser than Macbeth, but greater. He has 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 is an open cavity, pooling with blood-flecked foam.

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