Page 71 of The Lone Wolf's Bride

Murray was acutely aware of the thud of arrows hitting the ground around him, punctuated now and then by a cry as one met its mark. The clang and scrape of sword on sword fought against the screams of wounded horses and dying men. The air was sulphurous with burnt gunpowder from musket volleys, the sky over the mountains lit with an eerie brightness.

The fight hadn’t gone to the river, it was at close quarters, in the mud and the grass and all around him was chaos. His face was wet and, when he wiped it, the back of his hand came away red. Was it his blood or that of his enemies, he could not be sure? The muscles along his back and arms were screaming with the effort of hacking at his enemies and ducking and weaving to avoid the relentless onslaught of man after man coming at him.

A Campbell clansmen fell down dead beside him, an arrow through the skull, mouth gaping in death. He’d known the man for years since he was a boy, and a terrible fury took hold of him. Murray swung his claymore wide and low and took the legs out from under a man rushing at him. Duff fell hard against his back and was immediately off again, swinging at his opponent, then as the man staggered back, skewering him in the throat with a piece of deer antler clenched between his fingers. He turned to give Murray a toothless grin, his face a bloody mask and then threw himself once more into the fray.

Murray ran as best he could through the sucking muck to attack one of the Grants who was still on horseback, hacking at those on foot. He wrenched him out of the saddle and despatched him with a slice of his blade against this throat.

All it took was a moment of bad luck.

A riderless horse hurtled toward him and fell, screaming, leg snared in a bog hole. Time seemed to slow as Murray watched its heaving flank come at him, and then it hit. An agonising crunch to the shoulder took his breath away and he was thrown face down, into a shallow ditch of foul mud, filling his nose, his mouth. Had there not been a depression in the earth he would have been instantly crushed by the desperate animal but still, he was in mortal danger.

There was a crushing pressure on his chest, choking off his breath. He struggled to rise, one arm now a useless agony as the horse thrashed and writhed above him, back and forth, back and forth, trying to free it’s ruined leg in a mindless panic. Any minute now it would roll and crush him completely. One second he had air, then none, only choking wet blackness that, if he took a breath, would be sucked into his lungs and drown him. Desperately he clawed with his good arm and managed to grab onto a tussock of dead grass. Mercifully it was strong-rooted enough not to tear away from the ground, and he used it to drag with all his might forwards. The slippery mud helped ease his passing as he managed to kick and wriggle to get clear of the panicked horse, just as he was about to pass out.

There was a ringing in his ears, a tearing feeling in his starved lungs, then the clamour of the fight rushed back in, much too loud and the pain of his shoulder, too great to bear, making him retch. Get up you fool, get up or die, he raged to himself.

Rory was suddenly before him, shouting into his face.

‘Murray, what’s amiss?’

‘My shoulder. It’s out.’ He sucked a breath in, hardly able to speak or breath through the pain.

‘Get clear then.’

‘I can fight on. My men…’

‘You’ve done enough and you can’t fight with one arm, you can barely move man.’ Rory jerked him to his feet and grabbed a riderless horse nearby. ‘Here,’ he shouted, forcing Murray up and into the saddle. ‘Get clear. We have this Duncan and I. Go.’ With that, he smacked the beast hard on the rump and the horse took off quickly, it’s every jolting step a fresh agony.

The beast had a strong instinct for survival, for it managed to pick its way through the melee of swinging swords, random arrows and belated musket fire and get clear. Murray tried to steer it towards the trees and shelter but it veered into the shallow river and pushed doggedly forward through the water, towards the mountains in the distance.

Murray could do little more than hold his seat, trying hard not to pass out. After a while he didn’t even care where it went, he just wanted the pain to stop and clung on, doubled over and cradling his arm, as the sound of fighting faded away. It seemed an eternity passed before the horse came to an abrupt halt and Murray raised his head and realised why they could not go any further. The horse had wandered into a gully which cut into the hills, ending abruptly in a rock fall. It was a dead end. Looking back, he saw the sky darkening behind him, black clouds skidding quickly across the tops of the trees in a brisk wind. Some soft, cold thing hit his face, then another spiralled down and another. He couldn’t go on like this, he had to find shelter.

Grasping the saddle hard to slow his fall, Murray slipped sideways off the horse. He staggered over to a massive boulder, steadying himself for what he must do. This would either work and relieve his suffering enough to give him hope of surviving the oncoming night, or it would not, and the pain would be such that death would be a mercy. It was a gamble he was willing to take. Angling his shoulder as best he could he took a very deep breath and threw himself hard against the face of the rock.

The scrape of bone on bone as the shoulder slipped back into its socket made him utter a scream which only ceased when he started to vomit. Swaying and light in the head, through the snow now whirling around him, a horse emerged. Oblivion took him and the world spun into darkness just as he realised that, on its back, was Aidan Grant.

Chapter Thirty-One

Many desperate days were to pass before Ilene saw her clansmen again. Wild snowstorms had buffeted the castle and cloaked it in deep drifts of white. On a day when the air turned so cold, it made your bones ache, her father rode in wearily at the head of a sad procession of his men, some living and some dead. The horses had to push hard and lift their legs high to get through the snow and reach the castle gates.

Ailsa burst into tears and threw herself into Duncan’s arms, sobbing with joy. ‘I am home now,’ Ilene heard him say, gently, as they clung to each other, ‘home and safe my love.’

Ilene did not intrude on their reunion, desperately hoping for one of her own as she scanned the faces in the yard for Murray’s. With dismay, she saw that there were far fewer men than had ridden out a week earlier. Heart thudding and scarce breathing she searched, running amongst the exhausted men looking for Murray’s face. Perhaps he had got thin and pale or he was dirty and hard to recognise. Perhaps he was following on. Anyone tall and blonde she grabbed them and spun them around, all the while refusing to look at the bodies shrouded in their plaids, slung over saddles. He had to be there, living, he had to be, she was sure of it.

Ilene felt a hand on her shoulder and her father was beside her. One look at his face and she knew.

‘Where is he?’ She couldn’t seem to get any air into her lungs.

Duncan shook his head. ‘I don’t know Ilene. He was in the thick of it, Rory said he got hurt and he sent him from the fight, but afterwards…’ His grip on her was awfully tight. ‘We looked all around, amongst the dead, the wounded, in the woods and the river, but we could not find him. If he fell, he might have gone into a bog or drowned or maybe he didn’t even make it away from the fight.’

‘But he must be somewhere.’

‘The weather was filthy Ilene. We barely survived the first night huddled together in the snow storm. There was little shelter to be had and the cold finished off many of the wounded. By morning it was everywhere, burying everything, and if Murray was out in the open and alone then… Ilene, we struggled just to get the horses and men home through it. All that can be done has been done, and so you must prepare yourself.’

Duncan caught her just as her legs went out from under her.

***

Ilene had hardly slept for days since her father’s return and she had not eaten, she felt weak and was so exhausted she could not even summon the energy to cry any more. At first, she had clung tightly to hope. Murray was strong and he was clever, he had promised to come home to her, so he would find a way wouldn’t he? But like the snow around Cailleach, hope had started to melt away, as the days without him dragged on.

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