Midnight Honor

MacDonald held a special terror for them; they knew the swords of these impassioned warriors cut deepest into Highlanders who wore the black cockade, and would show no mercy.
    “Why have ye stopped the column now?” demanded Ranald MacLeod. Like his father, he had square, blunt features and found it difficult to keep the mockery out of his voice when he spoke to the English officers. “Are ye seein' mair bogle-men in the bushes?”
    Some of the Scots laughed, though the notion of taunting ghosts and spirits did not sit comfortably with them. The moon was not yet up, and it was black as sin despite the crust of snow on the ground. The same sun that had warmed them through the day had melted the caps off the trees so that the forest crowding them on both sides looked like solid black walls—walls behind which things rustled and moved, where twigs snapped and the mist slithered from one branch to the next. The men leading the column carried hooded lanthorns, the glow restricted to a few feet on either side of the winding road; the men in the rear saw nothing but darkness, and had to trust that the men in front were not leading them straight off the edge of a cliff.
    “We should be nearing the fork that takes us down toward Loch Moy,” Blakeney said, his voice carrying over the heads of the soldiers. “I suggest we split into two columns and enter the glen on both sides, then converge on Moy Hall in force.”
    “Aye.” MacLeod tilted his head, listening to the echo of the colonel's words ripple from one end of the column to the other. “Start the drummers beatin' while ye're at it; there might be some as haveny heard us comin' yet.”
    Blakeney ignored the taunt. “Check your powder, gentlemen. Be sure your charges are dry and full.”
    The command was an unnecessary waste of noise, for there was not one man among the fifteen hundred who had not checked and rechecked his weapon already. Their palms may have been damp and their tongues stuck from lack of spit, but a soldier's weapon was his life and if he came to battle unprepared, that life was forfeit.
    Something—or someone—screamed up ahead. Any faint murmurs of conversation stopped and fifteen hundred pairs of eyes strained to see ahead in the darkness. The scream came again, this time identifiable as a voice.
    “Rebels! Rebels up ahead! They be in the trees, in the bushes!” A forward scout from one of the Highland regiments came stumbling out of the darkness, his bonnet gone, his hair flying wild around his face. “They be everywhere, sar, an' they're formin' up tae attack. It's an ambush! It's an ambush!”
    The news set the men buzzing and cringing tighter together, their muskets pointed into the black wall of trees.
    “Hold your positions,” Blakeney screamed. “How many, damn you! An advance guard? A company? A regiment? Speak up, Corporal, what did you see?”
    “I dinna ken how many, sar. They were all around us, that much I could tell just by listenin'. They were swarmin' through the trees, thick as bluidy flies in June, but all quiet-like. Settin' up f'ae an ambush, I'd say. They already killed Jacobs—cut his t'roat like it were a gob o' lard—an' would hae done f'ae me, too, if I'd been a hair slower.”
    Two hundred yards ahead, Robbie Farquharson took his cue from the distraught “corporal,” and discharged his pistol into the air. The smithy and his two apprentices did likewise, followed by the rest of the men scattered along the verge of bushes. They fired and reloaded as they ran, darting from bush to bush in the hopes of giving the impression of more men, all the while hollering and shouting the names of the clans, giving battle orders, screaming at invisible gunners to ready the artillery.
    “Christ a'mighty!” screamed “Corporal” Jamie Farquharson, clutching the reins of Blakeney's horse. “That's Lochiel himsel'! They were waitin' on us! The bluidy bastards were waitin' on us!”
    “They were waitin' on us!” MacLeod echoed the cry, his voice infected by Jamie's fear. He drew his broadsword and cursed in Gaelic. “Waitin' tae take us in our own trap!”
    Blakeney's horse reared—no surprise, thanks to the point of the dirk Jamie jabbed in his withers. A musket ball whizzed by the colonel's leg and struck one of the infantrymen in the throat. The man staggered back, spraying his comrades with blood, his scream reduced to a liquid gurgle. The column started to split and men began to shrink back. More shots began