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At home only on the battlefield, 'twixt the broken bodies of men you called brother, under the banner of the black carrion crow, there to lie down and hope that some kind foe would cleave you in twain with a fatal blow; but alas, fate had other plans.
Chance said; speak to these women, though what good ever came of speaking to women? There is a witch enough at home, her barren womb a shouted complaint that followed you from camp to camp, until blessed Norway came to drench the land in blood. An excuse, a flood of fighting, a reason to be among the captains.
Alongside one captain.
For him you hacked the oncoming tide, a man fighting the iron-grey waves of men til your body thrummed with blood spilled and at last, renewed, you pledged yourself once more to the service of this old agony. Oh, Banquo. Vanquished by the certainty that victory means defeat; you return to your wife, and he to his heir.
The hags prophecy glory, and no bloodline. His sons will be kings. Your sword will remain forever unsheathed. Is that a curse, then?
She says, I had a child, once.
The words follow you like her fists on your back. I had a child, once, I had a child, once, I had a child, once. I, she says, not we. That one illegitimacy dressed up as your own but too sickly to survive and thank God, for else you'd have looked into the eyes of some other man's bastard, emerged between thighs you'd never touched, and called him son with blood-bared lips. Anything to prevent the truth from leaking.
The stick drops; the carrot is raised. The King chooses his courtiers, says the witch. He asks for whatever he wishes.
Cawdor sticks in your throat and fills up your mouth with gall, but the bait is laid. The old man will never arise from the bed he is laid in. After all, it's not the first time you've murdered for convenience. Just the first time it was a face you knew.
The first time you've done it, and known Banquo to be there.
It is his perception you fear, you tell yourself, trying to find the blade. His lineage. Not the loss of his good report. Not the fall from this specific grace. Not the death of brotherhood. Not those thousand other murders that fall unnoticed in a deed of treachery, and God - or the Other One - you wish beyond wishing that this were the battlefield. Cold rain and small ration and the constant proximity of death are the gold and jewels of a man whose home is full up only with echoes.
This is a dagger. Good.
This is a dagger you know to be both absent connection to you, and to him. Better.
Duncan's face is fallen with sleep. He is old and his face is the face of time. Banquo, you think, may one day age in such a way, but you cannot imagine it. Nor see in these lines the reflection of your own longevity. In truth, the thought frights you - what unceasing torment must there be in decrepitude, what loneliness, removed from the necessary company of your men?
This is a dagger in Duncan's breast. It is not good. Perhaps God will avert his face.
The bedroom is not a battlefield. It is without the burning fires within and you have no stomach for this, no stomach at all - and the man who sired your bastard, the bare-man, the almost-child from the stables whom you hanged on a pretence, he thought, he thought he deserved it, at least. The King's face is grave and contorted with surprise, his hands too strong, his heart too valiant, his belly too thick, and there is blood--
There is more blood than any man ever had, there is more blood than a thousand rain-sodden bogs steeped in decaying men, there is more blood than the beaches awash with the unifying hand of death, Norwegian and Scots in indiscriminate scarlet heaps, there is more blood now than any ocean can contain.
Pull yourself together, she murmurs. There is blood at the birth of a child, too.
What a bloody joke.
You stand and shiver until there is no more blood upon your knuckles, and she scolds and soothes you like a child, as you circle your own body, a ghost roaming the room, begging to flee the scene.
She takes the daggers and stabs you to the heart with her tongue. One more insult. A coward, too.
You want to tell her, it's not just me that is unnatural, woman.
But she has gone, and there's nothing left but the memory of Duncan's startled, sleep-blacked eyes flying open with his mouth, and the promise of Banquo's sorrow writ large across a face that seldom smiles.
The throne is cold.
It is well you've become such a skilled dissembler, she says, her only word of praise. Do you suppose they all believe you?
You tell her you're a hero of war. You tell her of all the battlefronts left to conquer. You tell your courtiers all the enemies - Malcolm, now, Norway, the lands to the South - they must fight. You search for your armour. A king must lead from the front. Where is the sword upon which a hundred faces met their sorrowful end? Where is the leather strip that bound your wounds?
Do you suppose they believe you? She asks, and you see him lower his mouth to his son's ear, the ear of his heir, and whispering, his eyes meet yours.
Is that fear?
Once you rode beside Banquo over land that had seen not a shiver of friendly foot since God's son walked upon the desert sands. Spoke of Crusades. Imagine, had we lived then. Imagine, had we ridden in the Holy Lands to reclaim Antioch. Imagine, he said, with a sour snort, if it were not always raining.
Once, he held you dearer than any brother. He said so. Blood shed in battle is between soldiers the wax of a king's seal. Your life in his hands. His life in yours.
Fleance marks seven years upon his face since those words turned to ashes upon your tongue. If the child dies, he'll only get another; heirs are to those with land as wine is to grooms and servants. They crave, and once getting, only want more.
He makes my mind uneasy, you tell her. He makes my breast unwell.
You have a kingdom, she tells you. Forget him. And she presses upon her belly, and says, the future could be yours if only you'd conquer it.
The river cannot flow if the spring is stoppered, you tell her; we need not create a flood to divert a stream.
Your spring is stoppered alright, she mutters.
Within your mind the funeral pyre is already kindling.
The shadows grow longer and the echoes grow louder and the hags rise up to curse you once more: there will be no escaping fate now. Long life, Brave Macbeth. Long life and loneliness; an empty womb and an empty heart shall meet in imperfect matrimony for as long as either can stand it, and who shall be the first to look away?
If a wood can walk and a man can be born from the soil or the sky, perhaps there's freedom from memory. The castle is neither Antioch nor the moor on which the fabled fights were once picked over in holy companionship; it is ringing with fewer and fewer footsteps.
Let them go, then. Let them all go.
The face of a hanged man grows into the bloody rictus of a carved King, becomes the grey and blurred shadow of a lost friend, and the threefold man haunts the whispering witch--
The Thane of Fife has lost his descendants. It is weeding, you tell her. We pull up the insidious things by the roots. This is not war.
No man will match you. There is no war.
Her tears are hot as blood upon your wrists; it was easy to feel sorry for her until she started crying.
A coward, am I? you ask her. Each man kills what he loves. Each woman drives him to it.
I am not dead, she says, and she means I know.
No, you tell her. You are dead.
The castle is impregnable as your wife. The courtiers shit in pots in corners that there will be no entrance through the garderobe; the servants feed the shit to the hens; the hens lay only blood.
Omens no longer content themselves with awaiting interpretation. You lie upon the floor; the bed is too soft. In the shadows beneath the mattress, where the straw has shed an ill-fed mouse, and the skeleton crumbled into dust, you see him looking back at you.
It is another moor, strafed by knots of purple heather, clumps of bog grass clinging to granite like hairs upon the head of a balding man, and Banquo is face-down among the low bushes picking sheep ticks from between his fingers, and you can see the longboats, like arrows, flying across the distant ocean.
A drum beat in your breast.
On the flag stones the echo of hearts is singular. Banquo's beats no more. There can be no comradeship without comrades.
She wins the race.
The Queen, my Lord, is dead.
It's easy to be sorry for her when she isn't crying any more.
Tomorrow the sun will rise on a world short one women who might have married happily had she married Fife. Had she married any one but you.
There must be poison in your blood, you think; something black and thick and oily, like lampfat upon wine. Something unwholesome. Corrupted. Perhaps on one dark morning, sleeping between the flanks of the men, between the horses, some foul spider crept into your lungs and ate through to your breast and filled it with this desire, this yearning.
Droplets of sin, strung out like tears upon the spider's handiwork, like dew on dewtraps in the ghost of a dawn. All these wounds, like Christ's, stem from one simple kiss.
MacDuff is borne hence on the arms of walking trees, and it is good. There will, after all, be reckoning. Heaven has not forgot Macbeth, and hell neither.
You open your arms to greet Death as a friend.
A good executioner, he lists yours crimes, confirmed and suspected. He evades the most damning, and cares only for the title "murderer"; when he calls you "traitor" it is only to the land.
Reclaim me, you tell the stones as they drink your blood, I've fed you well.
There is nothing to fear in Hell. It has been your home these last twenty years. All the torments devised by Old Hobb can hardly hold a candle to the guttering flame of unacknowledged love, after all.