Lachlan Mor at Traigh Ghruinneart

A warning given by an enemy is still a warning, and the question of whether to heed it is older than any feud. A chief who has shipped a thousand men across the Sound for a piece of ground cannot easily turn for a red-haired man on a track above the strand. The cost of belief is the field; the cost of disbelief may be the throat. Between those two costs the great chiefs of the West have always reckoned, and reckoned quickly, because the tide does not wait on prophecy.

THE RINNS

Lachlan Mor MacLean, fourteenth chief of Duart, son of Hector Mor, husband to Margaret Cunningham of Glencairn, had inherited the Rinns of Islay in the right of his mother and meant to hold them. The western peninsula was good ground: pasture, shell-sand, a sheltered anchorage at Loch Gruinart, and the rents that came with it. The MacDonalds of Islay, under the young Sir James, held it by occupation and by the older claim of the Lordship of the Isles, broken these hundred years and not forgotten. Two charters, two memories, one peninsula. The feud had run since the marriage that was meant to settle it, his own to Lady Agnes MacDonald, had failed in the open way such marriages failed in the West. Edinburgh was distant and the Privy Council's letters did not cross the Sound of Mull in time to matter. The matter would be settled where it stood.

In the first days of August he gathered the galleys at Duart, took on the men of Mull and Tiree and the Treshnish Isles, and crossed in three days of fair wind to Bunnahabhain on the north-east coast of Islay. A thousand men, by the count of his own captains. He landed without opposition and marched west across the island towards the Rinns, the strand of Gruinart at his right hand and the long bay opening northward to the Atlantic.

THE RED-HAIRED MAN ON THE TRACK

On the morning of the fifth of August, in clear summer light with the wind off the Atlantic and the shell-sand white as bone below the dunes, a red-haired man came down to the column on the track above Bunnahabhain. He was small in stature, by the account Hector MacLean later set down for the Justiciary at Inverness, and he gave his name as one of the taibhsearan, the seers of the Isles, of a kind the western tradition had long credited with sight. He carried no weapon. He asked for the chief and was brought to him.

He told Lachlan Mor three things to avoid that day. He must not drink from the well at the head of the strand. He must not land at Loch Gruinart. He must not face, in the line opposite, the dwarf. He spoke in Gaelic, the language of both houses, and in the courtesy of the seer, which is to give the warning and not the reason. Then he turned and walked back up the track towards the Rinns, which is to say towards the MacDonald line.

Lachlan Mor had drunk from the well at the head of the strand an hour before. He had landed at Loch Gruinart the day before. As to the dwarf, the matter remained.

THE STRAND AT TWENTY PAST TWO

The MacDonald line stood on the high dune above the strand, six hundred men by the count of his scouts, with archers in the third rank and the wind at their backs. The strand at low tide was a quarter of a mile of soft shell-sand without cover, and the MacLean line would have to form on it and cross it at the run. Lachlan Mor walked out from the dune-grass with his captains and looked at the ground.

The seer, he reckoned, was in the pay of Sir James. A seer in the pay of the enemy is a herald, and the warning is the herald's instrument. To turn the column now, with a thousand men shipped over from Mull and the Rinns the matter they had come for, would be to forfeit on the word of the herald, which is to forfeit on the word of Sir James. He had drunk from the well already and the well had not killed him. He had landed at Gruinart already and Gruinart had not killed him. The third thing remained, and the third thing was a man with a bow in the third rank of a hostile line, which was the condition of every battle he had ever fought. He wore plate and mail under the plaid, of the German pattern, with a high bevor at the throat. The arrow that took a chief at three hundred yards was a thing the western captains spoke of and did not, in their own experience, see.

Yet in the moment of looking up at the dune line, with the wind moving in the long grass and the gulls turning above the loch, he saw the gap. The bevor closed at the upper neck under the helmet and the closure was a finger's width of mail only, on the right side where the strap drew. An arrow falling from the dune, with the wind behind it, would come down at that angle. The seer had not told him about the upper neck. The seer had told him about the dwarf, which was the same thing said in the older language. He understood it and did not turn.

He gave the order to advance at twenty past two.

THE ARROW

The MacLean line moved up the strand at the run. The MacDonald archers loosed at three hundred yards. Most of the arrows fell short or struck plate. One arrow, fired from the third rank by a red-haired bowman known in Islay as Du-Sith, the black peace, took Lachlan Mor in the gap between the bevor and the helmet on the right side of the upper neck and severed the carotid. He fell on the shell-sand within thirty seconds, before he had reached the foot of the dune. The MacLean line broke at the loss of the chief and was rolled back down the strand within the hour. Two hundred MacLean dead were left on the sand. Sir James MacDonald kept the field.

DU-SITH

Du-Sith, the black peace, walked down off the dune in the late afternoon and looked at the body on the strand. He was a small man, red-haired, of no rank in the MacDonald house, a retainer carried for his eye. The seer's warning and the bowman's shot were, by every tradition of Islay and Mull and Coll, the same act in two registers: the prophecy spoken in the morning and the arrow loosed in the afternoon, the herald and the instrument. Whether he was, in fact, of unusual stature is unrecorded by any contemporary. The taibhsear tradition rendered him as a dwarf because the tradition required the third thing to come round; in the West the prophecy and the event must close upon each other or the seer is no seer. He lived in Islay another twenty years and was not pursued by the MacLeans, who understood, after their fashion, that the man with the bow had been the last of three warnings and not the first of any vengeance.

THE COUNCIL AT EDINBURGH

The Privy Council, when the news reached Edinburgh in the last week of August, set the matter in the language of the burgh. Sir James MacDonald was summoned, charged, and in time imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle for the slaughter at Gruinart, though the Rinns remained in MacDonald hands for another decade. The Council's letters, which had not crossed the Sound in time to prevent the action, crossed it readily enough to record it. The Statutes of Iona were seven years off; the long policy of breaking the western chiefs by the pen rather than by the arrow was beginning, and Gruinart was one of the cases by which the Council learned the shape of what it meant to govern. The feud itself was not formally closed until the eighteenth century, by which time the Lordship was a memory, the galleys were gone, and the Rinns were held by neither house.

KILCHOMAN

Lachlan Mor's body was carried half a mile inland and buried at Kilchoman, in the south-west corner of the churchyard, under a flat slab of red Mull sandstone four feet long with his two-handed sword cut on the upper face. The slab is there yet. The men of Mull, who had come over in the longships and gone back without their chief, kept the memory of Gruinart in the way the West kept such memories: in the song of the strand, in the name of the well, in the line of the dune above the loch. Tradition holds, in Mull, that no MacLean chief has worn a helmet since without a high gorget closed at the upper neck.

A warning given by an enemy is still a warning, and the chief who weighs it weighs his own life against the field he has come for. Lachlan Mor weighed and chose, and the choice was the choice of his rank and his century: that a thousand men shipped over the Sound were not to be turned on the word of a herald. The arrow found the finger's width of mail he had seen and not closed. On the strand at Gruinart, in the long August light, the red sandstone slab at Kilchoman waits half a mile inland, the sword cut on its upper face, the wind off the Atlantic moving in the dune-grass above it.