filling with juice, he selected a rabbit pellet and pushed it in too, crushing it with his teeth. He couldn’t taste it under the flow of tobacco.
He began to gather the purls, dozens of them, into the pouch. The town was a mile or two away, out of sight, a thin straggle of houses stretched beside a loch, dominated by the old royal palace which had lain empty and unused for years and was beginning to fall into disrepair. The army was encamped in and around the town, and under the walls of the palace. The boy was only eight, and might have been fearful alone on the moor, but he was not. He was used to being alone. Nothing much made him anxious.
His uncle had come to Linlithgow because of the army, and when the army moved on so would he. He might take James with him but more likely he would return him to his mother in Falkirk. He sold goods to the soldiers: wee eating-irons, needles, cured and salted meat, eggs (if he could get them), anything not too bulky which a soldier might need or in his boredom might believe he wanted. But his main sales were of tobacco. The war had involved the movement of great numbers of troops throughout the country – not least when the Covenant had sent an army into England against the King the previous year – and demand for the weed had exploded. Some people in distant parts had never even seen tobacco, but they were quick to acquire a taste or a craving for it. Very few had much idea about the quality of what they were buying.
A whaup flew overhead making its plaintive cry and the boy looked up at the long thin curve of its beak. He stood with his pouch of shite and walked to the top of the hummock, to see where it landed.
On the other side, not twenty feet away, a man lay sleeping. The boy dropped onto his front and all the juice in his mouth burst out onto the grass with what seemed to him a horribly loud gurgle. For a minute he did not dare raise his head to take another look. When he did the man had not moved.
The boy saw the chest rise and fall. A dark-faced man, in ragged, filthy clothing; his hair and beard thick, black and matted. The boy breathed in, deep but silent, and caught a stench like that of a fox. The man’s hands lay half-clenched at his sides. The boy could not see a weapon of any kind lying nearby.
He was looking at an Irish. He had never seen one before but he kent that was what it was. One of the terrible Irishes from Montrose’s army, who had burned and murdered their way from Aberdeen to Dundee to Kilsyth. They ate bairns. If they couldn’t get enough Scots bairns to eat they boiled their own up in big pots and ate them. But the days of their terror were over. The Covenant had destroyed them a week past near a town called Selkirk, fifty miles away. Scotland was safe again and Montrose had fled back to the mountains of the north. Most of his men had been slaughtered in the battle; others had been caught and killed on the high ground between the border country and the Forth, the ground that stretched away south under the boy’s gaze.
He thought of the rabble of women and boys, the camp followers, wives and sons of the Irishes, who had been captured and brought to Linlithgow. They had spent the night huddled up against the old walls of the great palace, seventy or eighty of them, staring glumly at their guards and the curious townsfolk, or breaking into the strange mutterings of their incomprehensible language. Their clothes were rags, their bodies were smoored in dirt, reddened with cuts and sores. Most of them had no shoes. The boy had watched them for a long while. Some of the lads looked about the same age as himself. In the shadow of the crumbling palace, the light cast by the fires they were permitted seemed to make them more like small demons than real people.
That morning his uncle had warned him to keep away from the army camp and from the Irish prisoners. He was told he was too young to be among soldiers and see the things that they were sometimes obliged to do. Then he was packed off to the moor. But something special was happening in the camp, he could tell. The Irishes were being moved from the palace to the west port of the town, towards the river, where they were hidden from sight. The boy was desperate to go to the river but his uncle would have had him cutting and mixing wads of tobacco and rabbit shite all afternoon. Not now though. Not now that he had discovered the stray Irish.
He kent what he had to do. He slid back down the slope on his belly, then got to his feet and crept away. Only when he was well out of earshot did he start to run.
The Irish was a stranger in a strange land. He was weak, hungry and weaponless. He did not stand a chance.
They brought him in to the town around noon, his wrists tied by a rope to the saddle of a trooper’s horse, like a stirk that had wandered. His eyes were wide and panicky, dangerous too; he looked as though he would break and run if he got the chance. Somebody asked the soldiers why they had bothered to bring him back. Why had they not struck him down on the moor as they had any others they’d found in the last week? One of the soldiers laughed and said they were taking him to be with his own kind.
The boy ran beside them as they rode along the thick brown streak that was the town’s thoroughfare. The prisoner stumbled and the boy’s heart leapt. The Irish was his. His uncle would be proud of him.
Folk from the town were hurrying back from whatever had been going on at the river. Some were laughing and shouting; others looked grim and tight-faced, shocked, even. They seemed hardly to notice the group of riders and their prisoner.
The little procession went straight through the town, through the west port, towards the high bridge over the river. There were more people on the road, and many soldiers, armed with long pikes and swords. And here was a minister too, black among the buff leather and steel, holding out his hand to stop them. If anything made the boy anxious it was ministers. He knew they could be fierce as well as kindly; they were eloquent and decisive and when they spoke people listened. And he saw that they had something which other men, even if they carried swords and guns, did not necessarily have. They had power.
‘Where did ye find this ane?’ the minister asked.
‘Twa mile yonder, abune the toun,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘He was asleep when we took him.’
‘I fund him,’ said the boy. He could not bear to think that his part in it might not be mentioned.
The minister bent towards him. He had a grey beard and grey hair which fell to his shoulders from beneath a tight black cap. ‘Did ye?’ he said. ‘And how did ye come tae be there?’
The boy hesitated. He still clutched the pouch with its dubious contents. Some of the soldiers might be his uncle’s next customers.
The minister crooked a finger. ‘Come here, lad. Ye needna be feart frae me. Whit is yer name?’
‘James. James Mitchel.’
‘Are ye feart frae me, James Mitchel?’
‘Na, sir. Only … I am feart frae God, and he is wi ye.’
Somebody among the riders laughed, but the laugh was cut short by the minister’s swift glare. Even the horses stood quietly, heads bowed, in his presence.
‘The laddie’s richt,’ he said. ‘He is richt tae be feart frae God. See how God punishes them that resists him. Blessed is everyone that feareth the Lord. Tell me, James, were ye feart frae the Irish when ye fund him?’
‘Na, sir. I kent God wasna wi him. I ran, but I ran for help, no for I was feart.’
‘This is an uncommon bairn,’ said the minister. ‘Whase bairn is he?’
‘His faither’s deid,’ somebody said. ‘His uncle is Mitchel the packman.’
‘Mitchel the pauchler,’ said another. There was
