Nyx in the House of Night

the same time that what we were seeing were the ruins of an imposing edifice situated at the top of a sheer cliff overlooking the ocean. We knew it had to be Sgiach’s Castle. Later that night back at the B&B we found out we’d been correct, but only after the four of us had spent the day clambering all over the amazing ruin.
    Come on! Imagine it with me! It was raining and cold, as I already said, but you need to add wind. Lots of wind, which got crazier and even more blustery after we’d waded through the field and climbed up to the grass and rock mound that was what remained of the great Taker of Heads’ Castle.
    Alan’s art at the beginning of this essay has eerily reconstructed what it could have looked like. That bridgelike entrance he brings alive in the sketch—well, today it has almost no floor. To get to the rest of the castle ruin you have to cross it by scaling the edge on your tiptoes, clutching the crumbly wall and trying not to look down at the more than twenty-foot drop that opens behind and below you.
    Well, of course I had to get across it. It was research! Alan went first. Seoras went last, handing Denise and then me off from his strong grip to Alan’s before he followed us. Alan was wearing a kilt, and there were what seemed like gale-force gusts whipping up from the huge hole where the floor should have been. Do you have a mental picture yet? Let’s just say I can report with authority what Scottish men wear under their kilts. In Oklahoma we call it “a whole lot of nuthin’,” which is yet another little research tidbit I added to Burned .
    So after Denise and I stopped giggling like preteens, we all explored the ruins of Sgiach’s mighty fortress. The sky was like slate. The wind made my eyes tear. It was even hard to stand sometimes because of the force of it, and it was freezing ! I began to wonder why the hell anyone would live up here, and then Seoras bumped my shoulder and said, “Look about ye, wumman.” It was almost as though Sgiach reached down through the centuries and opened my eyes. From the ruins of her castle I could literally see the vast expanse of the North Atlantic. No one could have snuck up on this queen. Longboats? Viking invasions? Ha! She’d have had her archers in line to kick butt before the enemy could even get close enough to be pummeled on the rocks below. And that’s when the character of the Sgiach started to form in my imagination. From walking in her steps I understood the military tactician she must have been, and the wise, protective queen began to emerge.
    Though the water at the bottom of the sheer drop was easily more than a hundred feet below us, I swear I could taste the salt in the air, and while I listened to Alan’s story it was like Sgiach herself whispered words to me through the Cruithne . . .
I suppose the ultimate honour the people bestowed upon Sgiach was that they named this magnificent island after her. (Or maybe she took her name from it?) As you can see, the landscape of Skye is probably the most jagged in all of Scotland. Its peaks that stab through mists remind me of the qualification required of all students who wanted to learn from Sgiach’s school of martial arts. They had to walk barefoot over the two Cuillen mountain ranges before they were considered to be allowed entrance to DunScaichis, or Sgiach’s Castle, to become warriors.
My understanding is that the prospective warriors came from all over Europe. Even now in modern Scotland if you are from Skye you are known as a Skianniach. I was speaking with a native Skye woman and asked her about Sgiach and she told me when a young person is called a Sgiach it is often derogatory, a put-down, referring to a troublemaker, a rouge!
A conversation I had recently with another native Skye man who grew up in and around DunScaichis told me of his memories of climbing and camping around Sgiach’s Castle. He called it “an intimidating place,” and said “bad things have happened there.” This may have something to do with the rumor from which she got her name “The Head Taker”; she chopped off the heads of her enemies.
Irish monks who came over to Scotland in the sixth and seventh centuries documented details of how the natives were expected to start training to be warriors at the age of eleven and continued until the age of eighteen. This applied to both young men and women. The monks were obviously intimidated by this tradition, so they proposed a law banning women from