10
Macbeth
Fife, Scotland
Aberdour Castle
December 31st, 2014
Time: 12:30 AM
_____________________________
What bloody man is that?
He can report, as seemeth by his plight,
of the revolt.
The newest state.
Chains.
He remembered being chained. Captive. Confined. The knives dragged across the skin, across the planes oʼ his bloodied skin. He remembered the screaming, the crying, that started out low and resonant. The men with the mad eyes, the scarred face, the cat-like reflexes. A djinn from Barbados; the ifrit from Versailles. He remembered the witches. Strange women, strange men. And then...the bodies. He remembered the bodies.
This is the sergeant,
Who like a good and hardy soldier fought
'Gainst my captivity. Hail, brave friend!
Say to the king the knowledge of the broil
As thou didst leave it.
The dead.
He remembered the dead as he was chained in Norwegian captivity. Pale shapes, hunched shadows, with flesh as pale as a motherʼs milk – corpses dressed in thick black, boneless beasts with sullen eyes and ghostly bodies. Blue Men of the Minch. Water spirits that haunted the Minch Strait, frozen by the cold of Scotland and the sands of time, soldiers that fell into the ruin of the infamous Battle of Glamis. And among them, Lulach burned.
His Marjorieʼs baby.
Burned in-front of him as the dead danced around his collapsed, chewed out men. Master Shakespeare promised, promised him life.
And instead, he gave him death. In poetry, in squid ink, in the vile tongue of his quill as Duncan spoke to him in his dreams, in his nightmares:
Doubtful it stood,
As two spent swimmers that do cling together
And choke their art. The merciless Macdonwald –
Worthy to be a rebel, for to that
The multiplying villanies of nature
Do swarm upon him – from the Western Isles
Of kerns and gallowglasses is supplied,
And fortune, on his damnèd quarrel smiling,
Showed like a rebelʼs whore. But allʼs too weak,
For brave Macbeth – well he deserves that name –
Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel,
Which smoked with bloody execution,
Like valorʼs minion carved out his passage
Till he faced the slave;
Which neʼer shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseamed him from the nave to thʼ chops,
And fixed his head upon our battlements.
O valiant cousin! O worthy gentleman!
Damn him.
He burned with the fire. The fire. Sewn from the blood of Hell, and reposed from the finest of smoke – it howled, grand like a king's grandeur; his riches setting the rest of the town ablaze. He screamed, screamed for Lulach, for his bastard son, tears of blood rolling down his face, and drying on his hands. His heart thudded in his chest listlessly, nearly stopping, coagulating like the blood that baptized his face. Bodies staggered before him as he stood. Decapitated, headless forms – their blood rippling passed curtains among curtains of organs. And as he moved along the room, the knives threading into his skin, stomping, sidestepping over the fatalities – he filled his lungs with fearful screams.
His son was sick; sick with the devilʼs poison, with the bite of the dead strewn along his legs.
Bitten, taken.
The war made him see things. Imaginative things, hallucinatory things. Lulach was real, Marjorie was real, he was real.
He...he had to be.
ESTÁ A LER
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