Page 52 of Lady Macbeth

“You do not mean—” Banquho starts.

Two torches burn in Macbeth’s eyes. His chest rises and falls with the exertion of the pursuit, but also with the imagination of violence. He is not an epicure, like the Duke. He is a glutton. He has been presented with a grotesque banquet, and he will feast and feast and feast.

“Yes,” Macbeth rasps. “Yes, I think that is what we will do.”

The struggle to pin down Banquho and drag him into the great hall is more fumbling than vicious. Macbeth allows Winter Fox and Mountain Goat and Weasel-cloak to do this work in his stead. He limps after them, his face dewed with sweat. Fléance follows pleading, tears at the corners of his eyes.

Roscille is surprised that no one tries to pin him down, too. After all, she was sure to include this in her prophecy: Thou shalt beget kings. Damning father and son in the same breath.

But it is better this way, one final insult to Fléance’s pride: They do not believe he can stop them, nor defend himself when blades are drawn against him. He is a boy who will not have the chance to grow into a man.

Roscille thinks suddenly of that other man, Macduff, the dumb honorable dog whose line her husband struck from the earth. The vision she gave Macbeth, of Banquho’s sons and sons and sons, his face multiplied through generations, rolling like the tide. This is a man’s first, last, and greatest fear: a world that exists empty of him. A world in which his name is never spoken. His blood dried up, his body dissolved into dirt, his grave grown over with weeds. An empty, seedless husk.

Has she adopted the justice of these barbarian Scots? But no, she does not delude herself that this is justice. It is vengeance. A harder, sharper, hotter blade. Driven between the shoulders and twisted.

Banquho is wrestled into a chair. Rope is procured. He is bound, and all the while he is crying out, “No, no, our Lord spouts lies,” as if he cannot tell that with each passing moment he seems madder, and the acts against him all the more reasonable.

“Please!” Fléance says. “My father is no traitor. He has been your loyal companion all these years—”

“Years,” Macbeth scoffs, “in which his treachery has grown like the rings of a tree.”

“I will release him from this treachery, and from the madness that spawned it,” the Druide says. “Tilt back his head.”

Roscille has never witnessed it before: trepanation. The process of letting out bad humors. She has only heard the distant screams of men and women upon whom this act is performed. Adelaide’s horrible, ecstatic wailing.

Banquho’s screams are choppy and broken. He chokes on his own fearful bile. The Druide has the trephine out, a curious little tool, which Roscille always imagined as a blade but is really more like an auger, something which drills, not cuts. She understands now how it creates the distinctive circular scars that burned so bright on Adelaide’s forehead. Now the rusted metal borer descends on Banquho.

There is the quick, wet, sucking sound as flesh is pared away from bone. A spurt of blood—it surprises her, how little there is; the Druide is precise in his work and has had many years of practice. Banquho howls.

Roscille cannot imagine this pain, so perhaps it is not perfectly equivalent vengeance after all. And Banquho, in turn, will never know the agony of something torn open between his legs, rudely forced, degraded into silence. But this is close enough.

The next sound is truly terrible: the splintering of bone. Roscille has heard it many times, a too-slow servant clobbered about the face, skewing his nose gruesomely to the left, but the singularity of the noise now, in the otherwise empty silence of the chamber, makes her want to clap her hands over her ears and squeeze her eyes shut.

She feels, suddenly, that she has erred: not in her intellect or her maneuvering, but erred as a Christian, as a soul promised, however obliquely, to heaven. As if she has not already lost her place there for Duncane’s murder. As if men do not do worse every day, and still believe themselves virtuous. As if the Duke did not strike down that trembling, unarmed stable boy while Roscille cringed and spoke no words in his defense; surely that was the beginning of her sin, and from there her life has warped and narrowed into an inescapable, damnable blackness.

“Stop,” Fléance pleads. “Have mercy.”

She should not wear a white garment ever again. At least a dark linen will better hide the blood she sees dripping from her hands, soaking the hem of her dress, and pooling on the floor around her feet.

“This is mercy,” says Macbeth. “I am releasing him from his madness and treachery.”

But there is no spilling of yellow pus from the wound. No pungent black smoke. Nothing but that first spurt of blood, because there is no treachery, no madness, except the lunacy that will be engendered in Banquho now forever, as he feels that scar on his forehead and thinks of this injustice visited upon him. He will be as mad as Adelaide, confusing pleasure with pain.

Roscille had believed Banquho’s death would be cruel but quick. A blade to the throat, opening a second red mouth screaming with blood. A sword through the heart—honor, at least, on his killer’s end. She did not imagine this, not ever. Yet surely that is not enough to salvage her soul.

Banquho coughs and wrestles against his binds, his movements savage and jerking, like a man possessed. Perhaps—somehow, the Druide has truly released a long-dormant spirit of madness, one that inhabits every man, curled inside the structure of bones and warming itself against the pulse of his heart. Perhaps Macbeth will see this and say, Enough.

But there is only the trephine grinding deeper, and Banquho thrashing more furiously, and her husband looking on with black, pitiless eyes.

At last: Banquho gags on his own blood and spits it up all over the front of his jerkin and then goes limp in the chair. The Druide yanks the trephine free and steps back, letting the tool clatter to the ground. He is saying, “I am so sorry, my Lord, I did not think, I have never, not once in my life,” but these words are as distant as echoes to Roscille, as if she is underwater and hearing it all from the world above, separated by an impassable membrane.

Mountain Goat and Winter Fox and Weasel-cloak stand at a silent distance, waiting to be moved into place.

Fléance staggers forward and clutches his father’s body. He howls. There is shame in such weeping and carrying on, but that is the least of anyone’s concerns, now. Thou shalt beget kings. It is hard to imagine how anyone could be persuaded to believe that this sad shuddering boy would someday wear a crown.

Macbeth has his arms at his sides, fists clenched. He has not moved or even blinked for what seems like an eternity. She can see the prophecy playing out in his mind.

Lesser than Macbeth, but greater. He has been lessened, reduced to a corpse.