From outside came a sound like a gull but not. Heads turned without command. The boy at the door, ashamed of his shiver, slid the latch aside and opened barely enough to look. The wind slapped him, tried to eat the heat from the room, and in that bite the boy saw the sky rip itself in two and a silver back break the line of the black sea. A seal. Two, perhaps. Their heads lifted, eyes round, shining with whatever it is that looks out of a seal that is not an animal alone. The boy swallowed and shut the door again. Seals were good luck or ill, depending on whether you had need of fish or mercy. He could not say which he had need of yet.
"Sìth dhuit," the Cailleach whispered, and at first Donald thought she spoke to him. Then he saw her gaze had fixed on the place above the hearth where the smoke thinned to a river and ran out through the roof. Peace to you. She was speaking to the house itself, or to the night, or to a something that was not a man but had come in with them to listen. She leaned forward and placed the barest kiss of air on the bairn's brow. "Mo bheannachd ort," she said—my blessing on you.
When she straightened, her knees clicked like flints. "Name him," she said.
Donald looked at his wife. She had come awake without any of them seeing it, and her hand had moved from the blanket to rest on the child's belly as if to teach the motion of breathing to him. She saw her husband, then the old woman, then the circle of faces beyond. She smiled—the small, exhausted, entirely unconquered smile of the newly-delivered.
"Seumas," she whispered. James. After a grandfather, after a king, after a prince who had not yet ridden in and might never. "Seumas mac Dhomhnaill Ghunn." James, son of Donald Gunn.
The bard bowed his head as if a priest had spoken. He let his fingers fall, and the harp answered with a bright small sound that ran along the hair of every arm in the room. "Fàilte ort, a Sheumais," he sang, the words like a cup offered: welcome, James. He set the name into a line, and the line into a tune, and the tune into the rafters where smoke would carry it out to the black where the seals' heads rode the heave of the sea.
The men came forward one by one and did what men do when there is a new life to acknowledge in a place that has seen too much finished. One laid a small round stone on the hearth with a hole worn through it by water and wind—clach-sùil, eye-stone, a warder of ill. Another unhooked a single crow feather from his cap and set it near the child's feet, a sly prayer for cunning and an eye that sees under and around. The boy by the door, unsure, tugged a bit of twine from his own wrist where he had tied it to measure his growth against a doorpost. He knotted it into a loop and put it into the midwife's hand without speaking. She surprised him by nodding solemnly and draping it over the peg near the pallet.
"Airson cuimhne," she said—for remembrance.
Only Donald did not step forward with a token. He stood and watched and kept silence, and that was also a gift.
The storm changed in its throat toward midnight. The longhouse breathed differently too. Sleep came in bands and ended in snatches. Outside, the lap of water against rock made its own measurement of time. When at last only four remained wakeful—the father, the midwife, the bard, and the Cailleach—the fire shifted and showed them each to each plain.
"Say what you did not say," Donald told the old woman. He did not soften it. He could not bear to carry a shadow that shifted.
The Cailleach waited long enough to prove she owed no man obedience. Then she said, "He will carry two loves. One will wear silk and pass through rooms like a candle in a draught. It will warm him and it will gutter and it will leave a smell of smoke. The other will wear kelp-smoke in her hair and salt on her sleeves. She will not call him to the city, but to wind. Both will fire pistols."
The bard's mouth opened—perhaps to laugh, perhaps to ask for a poet's clarity—but he shut it again, because this was not of his making.
Donald's eyes had gone far away. "And which is his death?" he said.
The old woman looked at the dying peat, where a tiny galaxy of red points spun and flared in the greater dark. "Neither," she said. "And both, a little." Then she seemed to come back into her body with a soft grunt. "I am tired," she said abruptly, and the midwife made a nest for her near the wall and covered her with a shawl. The Cailleach was asleep near as soon as the wool touched her.
The bard stood, hip clicking, and went to the door. He opened it only a hand's width. The world beyond had not changed its cold heart, but it had changed its song; the sledge-hammer sleet had gone to a steadier rain, the wind to a long moan. He stepped out, stood with the rain on his face, lifted his harp into the weather, and plucked three notes. The night took them and did not give them back. He closed the door and went to lie with his back to the warmest part of the wall.
The midwife tidied for the thousandth time. It was her way of praying.
Donald stayed where he was until the fire burned down to the colour of a fox's eye. Then he went to the pallet. He did not take up the child. He put his hand flat on the little rising and falling chest and the chest rose against it and fell away. The size of his hand made a cradle all by itself.
"Mo chridhe, mo mhac," he said, but its roughness had left it. My heart, my son. "When a prince calls, we will answer. If he does not, we will answer to the land. If the land fails us, we will answer to each other. And if all fail us, we will answer to our own name." His thumb moved once, an inch back and forth, feeling the echo of a heart under a sternum no bigger than a hen's egg.
He looked up at the midwife. "Will you stand godmother?" he asked, because sometimes you choose the person you want at your child's shoulder when the world leans hard. The midwife nodded, surprised to feel tears prick her eyes. "When the minister comes," Donald said, "we will do it right and properly. But I want the blessing of work."
She put her hand on the boy's head and said again, "Beannachd Dhè ort," and then, in a voice that was only for the tiny ear beneath her palm, "Agus beannachd nan tè is nam fear a chaidh romhainn, agus nam beann is nam bailtean, agus den chuan fhèin." And the blessing of the women and men who went before, and of the hills and the townships, and of the sea itself.
Beyond the wall, a seal barked—a sound like a laugh and like grief at once—and was quiet. The boy slept. The old one muttered once and fell deeper. The bard dreamt he had forgotten a verse and woke to find it whole. The midwife eased herself down and, despite herself, slept sitting up in a chair, chin to chest. And Donald sat the watch as men do, because there was nothing else he could possibly be doing.
When dawn came, it came sideways—first a smearing of white along the rim of the world, then the blacks going to greys, the greys admitting a few surprised browns and greens. The rain had turned to a soft wet that attached itself to everything and made it look newly made. The longhouse steamed like a horse after the plough. The boy by the door, who had slept where he leaned, opened his eyes to find his cheek printed with the grain of the timber and the print wet. He wiped it with the back of his hand and thought of nothing but bread.
The door opened and the day walked in uninvited as always. A woman from the next croft came in with a basket of eggs, a loaf still hot under a cloth, and a face bright with the news of the night; she stood and let the steam off the loaf and made a sound like a dove. "*Moire Mhàthair!—*Mother of God!" She set the basket down and went straight to the pallet and did what all women do: she put her finger under the baby's hand until it closed on her, and then she made a low sound from the very bottom of her throat that meant a house is safe for another day.
The Cailleach woke with a jerk and seemed for a second to not know whether she was in her own bed or on a ship or under a hill. Then she remembered, and her eyes softened, and the lines on her face swam and settled into a map a man could follow home if he wanted. She rose. She nodded to Donald. "Mind the boy's breath," she said. "Mind his belly. Do not let a doctor near him who likes leeches too much or the sight of his own hand." She paused, looking not at the child but at the arch of turf over him. "Keep him near water and near women who do not speak louder than the sea." It was either wisdom or mischief, or both. She wrapped her shawl, took up her bundle, and went out into the day.
When she had gone far enough that those inside could no longer see the set of her back, she stopped to cough. She had grown used to the roughness in her chest and did not wonder at it. A raven flung itself from the cliff-edge and rowed the air above her once, twice, three times. She listened. Then she spat into the gorse for luck and went on, a small moving knot in the enormous morning.
Inside, the bard drew the first line of a song on a scrap of birch-bark with a bit of charcoal. It was a workman's note only, not the finished thing. But in it were the bones of what men would sing in years to come when they needed to throw out a rope for a drowning soul: Seumas mac Dhomhnaill Ghunn, air a bhreith ri glaodhaich na mara, ceangailte ri iarann, air a shaoradh le uisge beò. James, son of Donald Gunn, born to the shouting of the sea, bound to iron, freed by living water.
Donald at last laid the claymore down. He ate. He slept an hour with his head on his arms and woke more tired but steadier. Then he walked out into the drizzle and stood on the lip of the world and looked down where the waves sucked and shouldered at the black rock. Far along the coast, kelp had come up in thick brown ropes and lay like hair. The wind lifted and brought him the smell of iodine and something like sweetness under it. He filled his lungs until the ache in his ribs stopped being an ache and became a recognition.
When he returned, his wife was awake and the child had found his fist and was determined to tell it who commanded whom. Donald laughed softly and bent to kiss his wife's hand, and she looked at him with the dry amusement of a woman who has crossed a wild river where he has merely stood on a bank and shouted advice to it. "A-nis," she said, faint and pleased—now.
"Aye," he said. He sat. The midwife put the baby into his arms without asking. He took him the way a man takes a plough-handle the first day of spring: awkward, reverent, in love with what will break and remake him.
In the doorway, the boy lingered. He had never seen his chief hold anything so small. He had never seen his chief look wary. He would dream of that a great many nights, until there came another night much later on when he would see the same man run with a sword and a pistol in his hands and murder in his step and think: it is the same look.
The prophecy lay in the room like a scent. It would fade. It would return, stronger, then be forgotten again, then found in some word a woman spoke years from now over a pan of boiling salt, in the way smoke traced the underside of a roof, in the pattern of gulls lifted sudden and all at once from a cliff. It would be argued over and denied and turned into a joke and into a prayer, as all prophecies are. But for now it was only the night's last gift, set among the simpler offerings: a loaf, a stone, a feather, a loop of twine.
The child yawned. It was enormous. It seemed to split his head in two and show, for an instant, the pink cave of a mouth in which words would one day be forged like iron on an anvil. He slept. The world did not. But for that hour, in that house, the world pretended. And the sea, which tells the truth whether men want it or not, laid its weight around the cliffs and breathed in and breathed out and said the thing it always says to those who can hear: I will take you; I will keep you; I will teach you to live at my edge.
The bard, eyes half-shut, sang under his breath to no one: "Cadail gu sàmhach, mo luaidh; cadail gun eagal, a ghràidh." And because men are weak and strong in all the same places, Donald found himself saying the same to the boy he had named, and the midwife said it too, and the woman with the eggs, and the boy at the door. It is a thing you say to a new life whether you believe in prophecies or not; whether you hate the Keiths or not; whether you carry a sword or a sprig of curing herb.
Outside, the seals rolled. The raven sailed home. The rain thinned until it was only a taste. Morning came with its work. And the prophecy, like all such things, folded itself small and slipped into the lining of the day, where it would ride unnoticed until someone thrust a hand into the seam and found it again, years later, when iron sang and the sea breathed and a man with two names remembered who he was.