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Rory spent the night covered in a blanket beside the fire with his arms wrapped around Siobhan. Her hair smelled of her flowers mixed with beech and rowan smoke. He held her tight as the morning light awoke him. She stayed asleep for a while.
They would be back at the Compound today.
And then what?
The cold of metal touched his right cheek. Rory remained immobile.
“What do you want?” he asked the tall, masculine shadow which hovered over him and Siobhan. She woke, eyes wide. He gave her a sharp squeeze, ordering her to stillness.
“I want you and all yoor people to wake up and stand over there.” The man whistled as he removed the gun from Rory’s face. “And do not make any sudden moves or I’ll ruin the face of the exceptionally beautiful woman you have been holding in your arms all night, laddie.”
Rory stood very slowly and indicated for Siobhan to do the same.
“I’ll just order my people before they get jumpy, aye?” Rory asked his quietly spoken, calm aggressor.
The older man nodded. He wore a long coat over brown-grey trousers and a homespun jumper. His tanned, weather beaten face had dirt ingrained in his wrinkles. His voice wasn’t one of the old man he appeared to be.
How had this man got past the night watch?
And it was daylight now. No, it wasn’t the fault of the one on watch. Rory himself had encouraged festivities. He’d only wanted to celebrate being alive. And being with Siobhan.
He’d let them drink...and drop their guard.
It was his fault, and his fault alone.
People materialised from behind the camp. They bore the marks of living rough in the wilds of Scotland with untidy clothes and unwashed bodies. They walked from the forest with purpose toward the camp. Each held a knife or carried a firearm pointed and ready. A group headed for the horses, others strode to the tents where his crew and Siobhan’s Government people emerged.
So many?
“Everyone stay calm now and do what these people ask, okay?” Rory used his commanding voice. In the entrance to his tent, Callum reached for his Barretta. “No, Callum.” Callum dropped it. Kendra placed something back in her tent.
They stepped to the line drawn in the pine-needle covered ground, which the man had made with the heel of his boot.
“Hmm. Interesting. You have captives.” The man tilted his head toward Antony and McPherson.
“Those people are under arrest and we will take them to be tried,” Rory explained.
The man raised his eyebrows and said nothing. He turned to his people.
“Horses, weapons and some food would be nice.”
Three of his men untied the horses’ reins from the line Rory’s crew had secured them to for the night. They whinnied and nickered nervously as the strangers led them toward the far end of the camp. Rory’s chest tightened as they led Boy past him. The tall black horse let out a neigh, reared, and pulled against the man leading him as he passed. Rory swallowed.
The women of the group rummaged through their food supplies, taking what they could hold in the empty cooking pans.
“There isn’t much o’ the roast rabbit left, Webster.” A salt-and-pepper grey-haired woman with dark eyeliner, wearing faded black clothing, walked toward the leader, her kohl-outlined gaze fixed on Rory. Webster stood near him.
“So, now we are all lined up. Who do we have here?” Webster turned and faced Rory and Siobhan, who stood in the middle of the line-up. They remained quiet.
“You know we have been following yoo since you made your way to Loch Ewe?”
Rory raised his head. He must have missed their tail on their forward journey. Too busy with McPherson’s clan.
“And we saw the trouble you and yours gave them.” Webster walked to McPherson and bent low to look into McPherson’s down-turned face. “Then we saw all the hoo ha around the submarine. And earlier today, a sonic boom!” His hands mimicked an explosion as he returned to Rory and Siobhan.
“So, who are you?” Webster’s face was inches from Rory’s. His foul breath wafted into Rory’s face.
“My name is Siobhan Kensington-Wallace and I am from the Scottish Government.”
Rory turned his head and glared at Siobhan for breaking the silence. She looked straight ahead.
“I’m Rory Campbell from the Invercharing Community and these are my people. We’re on our way home from dealing with the nuclear issue caused by the submarine.”
“Aye, nuclear issue. The sonic boom.” Webster did it again, his wide-open eyes accompanied the hand actions.
He then stepped closer to Siobhan.
“The Scottish Government. For an independent Scotland, I presume. A noble notion.” His voice held sarcasm. “Wouldn’t we Scots love that?” Webster nodded to his compatriots. They smiled back while McPherson lifted his head. “But the Government, and I use the term in quotation marks, has not been heard from for years.” Webster sounded educated and spoke with an Edinburgh accent.
“That will change.” Siobhan said with conviction. Her well-spoken English seemed devoid of any Scot’s accent at this moment. “We wish to have a meaningful dialogue with the people of Scotland.”
“Meaningful dialogue. Another grand notion, lassie. And how are you going to do that?”
“We will meet with the people who run communities ... and others.”
“Oh, and we are the others, aye?”
“Yes, sir. We’d be very glad to meet with yourself and any other leaders of the different groups who are—”
“Siobhan! Stop making promises we can’t keep!” Antony yelled from the far end of the line-up.
Siobhan tensed beside Rory. She sucked in air and turned to Antony.
“Would someone please gag that man? He does not speak for the Scottish Government!” Siobhan turned back to Webster, visibly calming herself. “I promise you, Mr Webster, if you wish a voice, we will grant you one. The Government is planning to exert its powers and fulfil its responsibilities to its people. Soon we will function as a government should, and we wish all those concerned citizens who want to be part of it, to join us in getting Scotland back on its feet.”
“Very noble and grand sentiments, Ms Siobhan Kensington-Wallace. But I’m sorry to admit, I have lost all faith in a government who runs into its rabbit hole at the first sign of real trouble and decides it’s time to pop out its wee bunny head forty years later. Sorry lassie, t’is nae good enough. And we dinnae want anything to do with it.” He grinned tightly at Siobhan.
Siobhan held her head higher.
Rory’s heart beat for her. Siobhan was a nuclear physicist, not a politician. She spoke well, but not well enough for the tough heart standing in front of her. The educated tough heart who lived with several people who, this incident aside, Rory was reluctant to call bandits.
“Who are you then, sir?” Rory looked the man straight in his grey eyes.
The man chewed his lip and squinted his stare back to Rory. “Let’s just say we are a group of people who don’t wish to be part of Community life and definitely want nothing to do with formal government. You could say we are nomads and scavengers.”
Rory would definitely call them scavengers.
“I ken you.” The woman with the greying hair and dark outlined eyes pointed at Rory. “Rory Campbell, did ye say?” Her accent was broad Highland.
Rory turned to her and nodded mutely.
“I kenned your faither, Scott Campbell. Och, he was a man.” She smiled to herself. “And ye have nae done too badly from his siring, either laddie.” Her eyes traced a journey from his head to his toe and back again as she spoke. She turned to Webster. “His faither was a good yin. He wiped ‘oot that mob o’ slavers near Fort William a few years back, ken? Well, a good few years back, aye.” She looked at Webster and tilted her head at him.
“What?”
She flicked her head toward Rory. “Give the lad back his horse. Fur the sake of his faither’s memory. The man died riddin’ us o’ them slavers, ken.”
Webster’s shoulder’s slumped. “Och!” He looked resigned. “Women!” He turned and lifted his chin in the direction of the man who held Boy.
Rory whistled, the horse broke free and trotted to him and he grabbed the reins.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Rory said to the strange woman.
She smiled and tilted her head in the direction they would head home. “Ye live in Invercharing, ye say?”
“Aye.”
“But yoor faither and his funny wee wifey lived in Glencoe, aye?”
“Aye.” Boy nudged Rory’s back. Rory wouldn’t say more in case he triggered her memory of himself in another time, looking exactly as he did today. Rory remembered her—the black market pharmacist.
“Ye ken that old farm hoose lines up with the stone over yonder?” She tilted her head toward the top end of the loch; the direction of the standing stone Siobhan had noticed yesterday.
Rory pushed his eyebrows together, wondering where she was going with her information.
“Well, they’re on a Ley line, ken? It’s the summer solstice tha day, aye. Be careful. Ye never ken what may happen.”
“That’s enough of your old druid talk, Deidra. Let them go if they must. Aye, on ye all go. The rest o’ your things are ours. Away with yoo.” Webster dismissed them with a flick of his hand.
Rory waved his people to start walking and helped Callum and Xian hitch the bodies onto Boy’s back. They marched away, empty-handed.
Not for long.
First thing he would do on his return, after seeing the Government off, would be a mission to retrieve their goods. He wouldn’t let wild people like this man, no matter how well spoken, have the horses and weapons he’d commandeered from them. And they had his father’s rifle.
