The year was 1725, and the wind that whipped across the Caithness cliffs howled like a lament. The sea below beat itself against the black rock of Bruan, white spray rising like ghostly banners into the grey sky. Within a low, turf-roofed longhouse tucked into the slope of the moor, a woman screamed in labour, her cries mixing with the storm's voice.
Inside, the air was thick with the tang of peat smoke and sweat. The midwife, a bent woman with sharp eyes and hands scarred from a lifetime of herb-picking, moved with the surety of one who had delivered countless bairns. "Cùm ort, a ghràidh," she urged. "Hold fast, my dear."
The mother clutched at the wool blanket, knuckles white, dark hair plastered to her brow. The scent of boiled nettle and meadowsweet filled the room, meant to dull pain and steady the breath. In the corner, a carved wooden cross hung side by side with a crude stone charm etched with spirals — Christ and the Old Ways both called upon in this hour.
Outside the birthing room, in the great hall where fire crackled, Gunn men waited.
Donald Gunn, the father, stood apart, his great hands resting on the hilt of a claymore so broad it seemed more fit for a giant than a man. The sword's guard was worn smooth where generations of palms had held it, and its blade bore faint scars from feuds long past. Donald's dark eyes never left the fire. He was a man of few words, broad-shouldered, his plaid belted high. He had sharpened the claymore earlier, the long, slow rasp of stone on steel echoing like a promise.
Around him, kinsmen murmured, mugs of ale passing from hand to hand. A clan bard plucked at a harp in the shadows, singing softly of battles long ago, of Gunn valour and Keith treachery. The feud was older than memory, but no Gunn hearth could pass a winter without its retelling.
"Bàs no Beatha," one cousin muttered — death or life — as if it were a toast.
Donald said nothing. His son was being born, and the sea itself seemed to hold its breath.
The midwife's voice broke the silence: a thin, reedy wail pierced the storm. A bairn had entered the world.
Donald's boots thudded against the earthen floor as he strode into the chamber. His wife lay pale and exhausted, but alive, her chest rising and falling in shallow breaths. In her arms was a child, squalling, fists like knots of white oak.
Donald looked down upon the boy. "Strong lungs," he rumbled, his voice low as the sea.
The midwife spat three times on the floor, a custom to ward off the evil eye, then muttered in Gaelic: "Gun dèan e gaisge mar a shinnsirean." ("May he make valour like his ancestors.")
Donald reached into his plaid and brought forth the dirk he always carried — eighteen inches of steel, black hilt set with brass studs. With the flat of the blade he touched the bairn's brow. "Ye are Gunn-born," he said. "And Gunn-blood shall never yield."
The baby wailed louder, as if the words themselves stirred some ancient memory.
That night, while the storm raged outside, the longhouse filled with kin. They feasted on oat bannocks, smoked salmon, and drams of uisge beatha — whisky whose fire kept the cold at bay. The bard stood and sang, his voice rising above the wind:
He sang of the feud with the Keiths, how treachery at St. Tears had seen Gunn men cut down despite sworn oaths of peace. He sang of raids across the moor, of cattle driven under moonlight, of claymores flashing in torchlight. He sang of loyalty, and of blood paid for blood.
The newborn, wrapped in wool, slept in his mother's arms while his clan wove his future with words.
Later, when the hall quieted, an old woman — a Cailleach, known for her dreams — hobbled forward. Her eyes were cloudy with age, yet sharp with second sight. She peered at the child and muttered, "Fuil mhòr, ach pian mòr. Blood great, but sorrow greater."
The hall fell silent. Superstition ran deep in the Highlands.
Donald's jaw tightened. "Enough, old one. He is Gunn. That is all the fate he needs."
But the words hung in the smoky air like a curse.
The wind scoured the longhouse as if it meant to peel the turf from the roof and cast it into the black mouth of the sea. Smoke crawled along the rafters, searching for a seam to escape. A pan of barley porridge thickened on the hearth, hissing when a stray drop leapt onto iron. The firelight made pools on the earthen floor and struck copper into the braids of the women moving back and forth with hot water and folded linen. Behind a woollen curtain, the midwife hummed a thin, tireless tune, a ceòl cadail (sleep-song) meant not for the mother but for whatever watched in from the storm.
"Cùm ort, a ghràidh, cumaidh an t-anail thu," she said, pressing a damp cloth to the young woman's brow. Keep going, love, the breath will keep you.
The mother's fingers clutched at the blanket and the old charm-work stitched along its edge: knots for binding, spirals for turning away harm. Her breath came in pulls and hitches, each one counted by the midwife, who knew every kind of pain a body could make.
Out in the hall, men drew in on themselves the way cattle do when the sky tells of sleet. Boots were lined in a careful row by the door to keep out the worst of the wet. Their owners stood in thick stockings, steam lifting from their plaids. A boy was sent out twice to stamp the drifts from the threshold stones, and each time he stood a moment with the wind in his hair, pretending he was older and alone and the land itself was listening to him. Each time the door closed again, the sea found a new seam in the wind and poured its voice through, gaoth a' chuain—the breath of the ocean—bringing with it the iodine tang of weed and the cold iron of rain.
The bard's song braided the room together. His voice was not loud; it was thin and strong, like a strand of horsehair drawn taut. He sang of St. Tears, when Gunn men went unarmed to parley and the Keiths came with steel beneath their cloaks. He sang the names that must never be allowed to blow away like ash: Angus who died with a prayer on his lips; Ewan who took three men with him though he carried no blade; Roderick who staggered bleeding to the kirk door and lay there like a crossbar to keep the dead from shaming the house of God.
"B' fheàrr bàs na nàire," murmured an old man at the fire—better death than shame—and someone answered him with a cup of whisky, and someone else with a hand to the shoulder.
Donald Gunn did not sit. He stood with his palm heavy on the claymore's pommel, the sword's point resting against the packed earth as if it drunk from the house like a root. He had cut peat that morning and carried it home in a creel with the straps biting his shoulders, and he felt the ache still in him as a steady heat. He did not drink. He watched the doorway to the birthing room as a sentry watches a pass in snow. When the midwife spoke, he turned his head the way a stag turns to the rustle of brush.
When the child came, the midwife's "Mo leannan, a-nis, a-nis…" evaporated in a high, astonished cry. Not a mewling; a full-throated bellow, indignant at cold air and the world's rough welcome.
The clan shifted as one body. A man who had leaned in to warm his hands at the fire straightened without knowing it. A cousin set his mug down and never remembered he had done so. Even the boy at the door forgot the sly smile he'd been trying on and simply stared.
Donald went in.
The room was close, bright, and saturated with the ordinary miracles of sweat and blood. He saw his wife, hair stuck in tresses to her temples, eyes dark with exhaustion and wonder. He saw the midwife, sleeves rolled, chin lifted like a general's. And he saw the small red creature squirming in a nest of wool, the cords of his hands flexing against nothing as if he already wanted to grasp and hold.
"Strong," Donald said, and he laughed, brief as a cough. A tide unwound from him that no one else could measure. He laid the flat of the dirk to the child's brow. "Beannachd Dhè ort," he said. God's blessing on you. "Agus mo mhionn ort,"—and my oath upon you—"nach fàgaidh tu do dhaoine. You will not forsake your people."
The midwife spat thrice to the side—peuchpeuchpeuch—and drew an invisible circle around mother and child with the edge of her hand, a tiny, fierce consecration no minister would see.
In the hall, the bard found a new tune and sent it thin and silver into the rafters, a cradle of notes: Cadail gu sàmhach, mo luaidh—sleep softly, my love—cadail gun eagal, cadail gun àmhghar—sleep without fear, sleep without sorrow. Someone opened the door just then and let a string of the night into the room, and the lullaby whistled for a moment as if it had seen something outside it knew.
When the women had cleaned and bound and eased, and when the mother had drifted into the animal sleep that follows the animal triumph, the child lay on a pallet close to the fire. Donald and the midwife sat, and though they were a man and a woman and not kin, and though one wore a sword and the other a string of herbs at her belt, they sat like equals whose work is to rise when there is rising to be done.
"That one will howl at the wind," the midwife said, not unkindly. "You'd best raise him to shout back rather than hide."
Donald grunted assent. He looked to the door, and through it, past the swinging peat smoke and the beaded doorway beyond, he saw the old one, the Cailleach, hovering like a heron in the shallows of the hall.
She had come hours ago with a twist of dried plants for tea and a skin of water from the well that had never yet gone sour. She had sat in silence while the men talked around her and the bard's harp whispered and the wind tried the seams of the roof. When the bairn cried, she had risen without the slow fuss of the ancient and come forward as if her bones had been waiting for that sound to move.
Now she stood by the pallet. The baby's eyes were shut; his mouth had settled into the little rose of a well-fed infant's. Nevertheless the old woman looked at him the way a fisher sizing the tide looks at the line where dark water becomes darker.
"Fàilte, a laoigh," she said—welcome, little calf. She reached a finger like a knot of hawthorn and traced a cross on his forehead—not the priest's quick slice of a cross, but a deep slow drawing, as if she carved the air itself. She smelt of wool hung too long in damp and of crushed yarrow and of the cold outside.
"Mind your tongue," Donald said, but quietly, and without heat. He remembered men who stepped wide around her door even when winter wanted their feet to cut straight lines through drifts.
"Is it a name you bring?" asked the bard from the hall. He knew better than most that names can founder a life if you haul them wrong.
The Cailleach did not look at him. She looked at the child and seemed to be looking through him, to something that would wear his bones like a coat by and by. Her voice at first was no more than wind's talk in heather, but as the hall quieted, it became words.
"Fuil mhòr, ach pian mòr," she said again. Great blood, but great sorrow. The men in the hall did not move, but the room changed shape around those words the way a face changes upon hearing itself named.
"'Tis not much of a prophecy," someone said, with the bravado that comes after a third cup.
"Hush," his uncle snapped, and the word skittered under the benches like a rat.
The Cailleach's eyes were on the swell and sink of the baby's breath. "He will be known by iron," she said. "And by the noise iron makes when it speaks to bone. He will carry his name under another name, and the second will cut his mouth if he tries to swallow it."
Donald's hand tightened on his knee, knuckles white. "He is Gunn," he said. "Whatever else men call him."
The old woman nodded, slow. "Aye. Gunn is a root that drinks old water." She tilted her head, listening to a silence only she could hear. "Bheir an cuan dha fasgadh," she murmured—the sea will give him shelter. "He will find stone above him and black water below. He will sleep where gulls nest and keep counsel with caves that remember storms your fathers never saw."
The bard's fingers plucked a single string, then stopped, as if he had asked a question and did not like the answer.
Donald set his jaw. "Does he live?"
The Cailleach's mouth quirked, not in humour but in acknowledgment of a man who will drag a question to ground rather than let it hang snapping on its leash. "He lives long enough to choose his death," she said. "And long enough to flee it and camp upon the far side with a grin on him like a boy that's tricked his brother. He will think himself a ghost. He will call himself one and carry the name like a hot stone he dare not drop. But the water will cool it. Uisge beò," she said softly—living water. "What he thinks is ruin will be mending. But he will not know it until blood and ash have taught him his letters."
The midwife made the sign of the cross; the bard answered it with the old spiral, quick and furtive by his knee. Two men whispered together, and you could tell by the set of their shoulders that one believed and one did not. The boy by the door forgot to act like a man and shivered.
Donald had not touched the child since the first moment. He did not like to lay hands on what women and God had just worked so hard and long to pull out of the dark. But now he bent and slid one finger along the boy's cheek, and the child turned to the warmth as all newborns do. The father's voice, when it came, had none of his earlier laughter left in it.
"Will the Keiths take him?"
The old woman's eyes sharpened. "They will try," she said. "From the day he can walk. From the day he learns not to run. They will try with steel, with ink, with candlelight and with darkness. They will come by the road and by the law, and once by the skirt of a woman who smells of rue and roses, but not for love." A ripple passed through the room—some sound like all the men there had remembered one night or many when a skirt had meant comfort or trouble or both.
"The Keiths have long arms," said the cousin by the fire, whose father's brother's blood still stained a kirk threshold in song. "But not long enough to pluck a child from his mother's breast."
"No," the Cailleach said, almost tender. "Not then." She lifted her eyes at last and looked full at Donald. "He will not be taken from his mother's breast. He will be given by his father's word."
The silence that fell then was not the silence of men with nothing to say. It was the silence of men who hear the crack of a tree and know it will fall and also know they are standing under its shadow. Donald's hand moved from his knee to the claymore's hilt without quite touching it. He had the look of a man who had stepped forward into a blow so often he did not know how to step back.
"Prophecy is a shawl half-woven," the bard said, in a voice meant to be light and failing. "It can be warmed or worried into holes."
"Tha an dà shealladh," the cailleach said simply—the second sight. She did not ask pardon of them for speaking it. She lowered herself without help to the pallet, hands careful as a weaver's, and with a little twist of her wrist unpinned a sprig of dried lus nan laogh—calf's herb, the old women called it—from the strap of her bundle. She set it by the child's cheek. "For easy breath," she said. "For sweetness." And perhaps for courage, though she did not say.
The midwife took a bowl from the hearth where water steamed and threw a pinch of salt into it. She dipped her fingers and flicked three drops to the floor: one for those who had gone before; one for those who would come; one for the unknown that sits sometimes like a neighbour with its elbows on your table. Then she touched the child's lips. "Beul slàn," she said—a whole mouth, meaning an honest one, one that speaks truth and is fed by it.