The Last Highlander Read Online Free

tradition-bearer, in the clan. In him the history of Scotland, England, Europe and the clan, actual and mythic, resided; he wove them together like a plaid, surrounding the Beaufort Fraser children with a solid sense of history, their duty to the living and to the dead. Their ancestors had served kings and country. So would they. This intoxicating blend of the literal and legendary fired their imaginations. Some of the oldest Gaelic songs, and even lullabies sung by wet nurses, rioted with bloody narratives of the honour their ancestors defended, and the outrages they avenged. Through such tales the children understood the Fraser loyalty to the doomed Stuart King Charles I.
    At ceilidhs 3 there would be folk tales, poems, theology, history, politics, agriculture, meteorology, games, riddles, repartee, music and medicine, and gossip – all in the Gaelic they liked to speak at home. Great arguments raged over international and local news. In the martial society of the clans, Simon learned, the chief must loom larger than everyone else, keeping his enemies at bay, whilst earning the respect of close friends and allies.
    If ceilidh debates grew too heated and threatened to turn bitter or to violence, someone might intervene and call for music, dance or a song – sometimes bawdy. Risqué verse was acceptable at any gathering – though satirising someone’s good name could land you in a duel or a feud. One piece of bawdy by the bravura baronet Sir Duncan Campbell of Glenorchy entitled Bod brighmhor ata ag Donncha (‘Duncan has a Potent Prick’) extended to thirty-two lines of self-praise. Typically Gaelic in spirit, the gist of it was this:
     
    Grizzled Duncan’s organ
    I guess is no great beauty,
    Adamantine, wrathful,
    ever ready to do his duty …
    A rheum-eyed hooded giant,
    sinuous, out-thrust face, spurty,
    A cubit out from its bag,
    ravaging, mighty knob-kerry.
    Titillation was not the point (though it amused one clergyman enough to copy it into his personal poetry anthology); what this poem conveyed was the nature of a leader, of leadership. Its outrageousness merely educated by entertainment. The hero was a beast of eye-watering proportions and energy; the thought of him made women swoon. The part standing for the whole, the poem described a proper clan chief. The Viking culture of the rampaging warrior hero contributed features to the Celtic idea of an ideal chief. ‘Victorious in battle and conflict’, ‘fearsome’, ‘violent’, ‘wrathful’, with his ‘stately-purple … broad back’, it was the heroic duty of the ‘potent prick chief’ to generate and protect his own. He repelled rivals with the baleful glare of his single ‘canny’ eye, and with his stunning virility ensured the continuance of the natural order.
    Laced with humour, verses like this carried a moral to the Beaufort boys, as they sat on the floor fireside in the main room at Tomich, taking it all in. There was no space in this world for a ‘sweet’ and ‘affable’ Fraser chief. Rather, the ceann cinnidh , the head of the kin, must be King Arthur, the Irish Diarmid, the Viking Beowulf, and Scots Wallace and his companion, Sir Simon Fraser, all rolled into one. The boys practised their swordsmanship imagining they were these great heroes, Simon taking the part of his namesake: Sir Simon the ‘Patriot’ Fraser – the ‘talk and admiration of all Europe’ – who was hung, drawn and quartered for his country’s freedom on 8 September 1306, a year after his leader, Wallace.
    The Beaufort boys were raised to regard their homeland as the heart of the Highland world, connected to all the exotic parts of Europe the Reverend James visited and described to them. But Alexander, Simon, and John would need more than clan stories to perform their duties as future leading men in the modern world. They would need the experience, erudition and confidence that a broad-based education offered. So the boys were put on ponies and sent to school