Page 84 of A Constant Blaze
As the visions faded to mere flames, he realized his young granddaughter sat on the stool by his feet.
“Do you really see pictures in the fire, Grandfather?” she asked, without looking up.
He nodded without speech.
She swallowed. “So do I. Sometimes.”
“I know.”
“Are they real?”
“Real to you, though they might notbe. They might never have been.”
“Then some are the past?”
He nodded again. “For me.”
“Do you know the future? What will happen to us?”
Don’t look. Never look. If you have a choice…A wave of mighty emotion swept over him. He did not want this gift, this curse, for her. “It’s not written in stone, child. The future, like the present, is what you make of it.”
She leaned back against his legs, and he touched her hair, liking the frisson of prescience, no longer powerful enough to shock him.
You will have a good life. As mine was good.
Historical Note
The Chronicle of Holyrood tells us that in 1157 Malcolm MacHeth was reconciled with the King of Scots and it makes sense that this event is somehow related to the capture of Donald MacHeth at Whithorn the year before. Since there is no evidence as to what happened in this intervening year– we know that Donald was imprisoned at Roxburgh, but not for how long– I have compressed events to make a faster moving story that might just have happened.
Although we don’t actually know what became of Donald after his capture, we do know that Malcolm was released and that he was certainly Earl of Ross by 1162 at the latest, for the king addressed a document to him no later than that year, using the title, and he was certainly accorded it in his obituary in 1168.
I like to think the years following Malcolm’s release were happy and peaceful years for the MacHeths. They seem to have taken no part in subsequent uprisings in the 1160s involving Fergus of Galloway and Somerled of the Isles, which were both put down with relative ease by the King of Scots. I’ve hinted at Fergus’s fall from royal favor at the end of this book, a possible reason for his conflict with the king. Fergus was forcibly retired to Holyrood Abbey, where he died an unlikely monk in 1161. It’s tempting to imagine Malcolm MacHeth leading some of those forces against him, in the name of the king.
We also know that at some point in these years Malcolm’s daughter Gormflaith (or Hvarflod) did indeed marry Harald Maddadson, Earl of Orkney. I believe the marriage was a happy one for when the king demanded he repudiate her as a condition of peace between them– no doubt because the daughter of Malcolm MacHeth was still regarded as a symbol of opposition to the Kings of Scots– Harald refused.
Of later MacHeths, we know very little. One Adam, son of Donald, who was captured by the king in 1186 (and his followers brutally burned to death) may have been a MacHeth. And one Kenneth MacHeth, of whom more in the next book, led another rising in 1215.
Finally, Malcolm’s encounter with a minor member of the de Brus family is entirely fictional (as is the position I gave Bernard de Brus with the king’s soldiers), although it’s likely that as a nobleman of Scotland, Malcolm would have come to know the ambitious Norman Lords of Annandale whose descendant would become the great King Robert the Bruce.
Mary Lancaster
