Mythology Abroad

by Jody Lynn Nye

  He wormed his way into the park as the young men settled themselves into concealment about twenty yards from the park gate. There was nothing he could do to hear better. Was the pickup tonight? He’d have to search the young bloke’s room later, after he’d gone to sleep. Michaels fervently hoped O’Day had had enough to drink to gag him soundly. Sleeping gas was another thing the James Bonds of the American service could get, practically delivered by the pint bottle on their doorsteps every morning like milk. If he bagged O’Day, they’d allot a good deal more money to the department, and about time, too. Uncomfortably, he eased himself behind a clump of bushes and aimed his microphone.

  Later, he would tell the Chief that this stakeout had all been a great waste of time. “There was no acceptance or delivery, sir,” Michaels assured him wearily. “They might have been setting something up, but it sounded like code to me. Nothing I’ve ever heard before. I couldn’t get much of it on that bloody Stone Age mike, but they all seemed to understand one another. It was a great big joke between them. We still don’t know what the hell’s up.”

  O O O

  “Did you see that?” Matthew hissed into Keith’s ear, pulling his arm and pointing down the field toward a clump of tall flowers and a pond which reflected the city lights in its depths.

  “See what?” Keith demanded, trying to follow Matthew’s gaze in the dark. He parted the bushes, spitting out leaves and twigs that brushed his face. His invisible whiskers didn’t protect him from the waving shrubbery.

  “There goes another one!” Martin poked him in the side. “And another. Oh, you’d better look quicker than that!”

  “Wait,” Matthew said, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Now wait for it, here comes one. Yes! Look there, Keith!”

  “Where?” Keith wailed desperately. “What? What are we looking for?”

  Matthew stopped and gawked at Keith. He rolled to one side to regard him with mock amazement. “Do you mean to tell me quite seriously and with no deception whatever,” his voice started to crack as a broad grin forced its way past his teeth and plastered itself across his face, “that a great big investigator like you has never heard about there being fairies at the bottom of the garden?” He collapsed to the ground giggling. Martin threw himself onto the ground and howled hysterically, flapping limply at Matthew’s legs with one hand.

  “Ha, ha,” Keith retorted sarcastically, glowing beet red in the dark. He glared at Holl, who was doubled up, too. “And what are you laughing at?”

  The little man wiped his eyes on the back of his hand and swallowed his hilarity enough to speak. “You have to admit, Keith Doyle, you left yourself open to it. Conan Doyle couldn’t have made his own trap and fallen into it any neater than you did yourself. Led straight up the garden path by the hand, in fact, just like he was in the great fairy hoax.”

  Caught off guard, Keith rubbed his lip, beginning to get the joke. He grinned and threw up his arms. “All right! All right, I’ve been had. Royally. What can I say? I guess it just goes with the name.”

  ***

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Miss Anderson’s word was good: Educatours kept them occupied. She guided the tour group out on short trips throughout the Inverness region every day until Sunday morning, when the coach was loaded for its final destination, on the Isle of Lewis, northwest of the coast of Scotland.

  If the Scottish landscape had been dramatic before, it had become breathtaking. North of Inverness, the land rolled away from the road in curving valleys and fields, and changed gradually to sweeping glens and expanses of forest cradled between mountain ridges shaded in distant blue, dark green and gold. The road followed river valleys cut deep into the heart of the land, or broad and shining like strips of silver painted on the green earth. Few habitations lay beyond Garve, thirty miles northwest of Inverness, but the highlands were far from lonesome. Instead, they radiated an ancient, eternal patience that was soothing and awesome.

  “‘My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here,’” murmured Holl, gazing wonderingly out of the coach window and drinking in the feeling that beauty was a palpable thing. “‘My heart’s in the highlands, a-chasing the deer.’”

  “Isn’t that William Saroyan?” Keith asked, squinting through his viewfinder at a photogenic ridge.

  Holl’s mood was broken, and he felt suddenly as if he had lost something precious. “‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’ is by Robert Burns,” he said long-sufferingly. “Don’t you read any poetry that’s not on the syllabus, you cultural infant?”

  “That’s what we keep a Maven like you around for,” Keith pointed out unquenchably, ratcheting the film noisily forward in his camera. “Isn’t it great up here? I love it. I could stay up here forever just staring at the scenery. The mountains and clouds are sort of unreal, like someone’s paintings. Look, stuffed animals.”

  To the right of the road, a herd was grazing calmly. Except for pairs of wickedly pointed long horns bobbing close to the ground, the broad, short animals were undifferentiated mounds of ochre hair. One lifted up its nose at the passing coach and revealed huge, mild brown eyes under the yellow thatch.

  “They’re cows!”

  “Highland cattle,” Miss Anderson corrected Keith.

  “I thought they might be woolly mammoths without trunks. I should yell ‘moo’ out the window at them,” Keith pondered playfully. “My dad always does. They’re cute, but I bet they could stomp their weight in cattle rustlers.”

  “You’re perfectly safe if you come upon a herd,” Miss Anderson said conversationally, beaming at them one by one. “The bull is peaceful except when one of his cows is threatened. If you come upon a bull alone, keep moving.”

  “Move?” asked Martin, astonished. “I’d fly! How long until we get to the ferry port, Miss Anderson?”

  “Another hour or so to Ullapool,” the teacher replied, checking her wristwatch. “Should we have a song to pass the time? Who would like to start?”

  “How about the intrepid fairy hunter here?” Martin asked mischievously, glancing sideways at Keith. The American student turned red, remembering the garden episode. Once his hobby had been revealed, they seemed to recall and repeat every detail of the things he’d said offhandedly throughout the trip. He wished the novelty would wear off already. The ladies and the coach driver had already heard the story and dismissed it, but the boys continued to remind Keith mercilessly whenever it occurred to them. “Bring-’em-back-alive Frank Puck here must know something.”

  “Such a hobby for a grown man,” Matthew appealed to Holl. “Have you ever heard such foolishness?”

  “No,” he replied calmly. “And the widdy’s always going on about it. It’s an obsession with him.”

  Keith turned to Holl, an acid retort half formed on his tongue. Then with a shock, he noticed that Holl’s cap was off, and the short blond hair was neatly brushed. The elf’s ears were still rounded like a human’s. In fact, the more that he thought about it, he realized they had been ever since Holl got out of the hospital. What was going on with him? He couldn’t draw attention to the aberration now. He would have to wait and tackle Holl privately. “Okay,” he said weakly, feeling betrayed, “I can take a joke. Urn, does anyone know ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’?”

  The ferry was scheduled to depart at 5:00 A.M. The group spent the night at a small hotel in the port of Ullapool. In the morning half-light, under a homogenous sky of light gray stratus clouds, they sat aboard the coach, waiting their turn on the pier to drive into the hold of the ferry. The ship bobbed gently at the pier’s end, a massive inverted wedge of black and white.

  Once on board, the passengers left their vehicles and ascended to the upper decks for the 3-1/2 hour passage. Shivering with fatigue from their short night and early rising, Keith and the others scrambled down from the coach in the narrow space left between two small cars and a dust-covered minivan on which someone had scrawled with a fingertip “Also available in clean.” Following a herd of sile
nt fellow passengers, the group found a small lounge at the rear of the ship’s restaurant, and settled down on the leather-covered couches with hot drinks to try and wake up. Other passengers slipped through the glass-walled lounge and into the cafeteria beyond it like bats: silent, avoiding their chairs and the laden tables with weary expertise.

  “The Outer Hebrides have yielded up the oldest samples of rock in the British Isles. Some of them have been dated at 2,800 million years,” Miss Anderson stated, as the ferry’s engines thrummed to life beneath them, awaiting departure time.

  “Or two point eight billion years in American,” Keith calculated, yawning, and wrapped his hands around his cup of tea. A British billion was one million million. “That’s only two hundred million years or so younger than some of the upthrust they’ve found in the Rocky Mountains. Old.”

  “Not as old as I feel,” Matthew said, peering into the depths of his coffee as if he expected the steam rising from it to revive him. The two English ladies sat nearby, huddled over folded arms and blinking owlishly at the others. “You remember the chap we unearthed on top of the hill in Renfrewshire?” he asked Keith, who nodded. “My grandson.”

  The others chuckled. A huge grinding noise interrupted them, and the ferry lurched suddenly to the right. The land visible out of the broad windows lining the lounge began to move, and the noise moderated to a hum. They were under way.

  Tired though they were, the group was already in better spirits than they had been in Inverness. Keith taught them and the rest of the passengers in the lounge how to play Buzz-Fizz. “It’s a counting game. Buzz is five, and seven is fizz. You keep going until you make a mistake, and the next person takes over where you left off. Don’t forget about multiples. I’ll start. One, two, three, four, buzz, six, fizz, eight, nine, buzz-buzz, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fizz-fizz, fifteen …”

  “You mean buzz-buzz-buzz,” Edwin triumphantly corrected him. Keith grinned sheepishly and made an over-to-you gesture in the large youth’s direction. Edwin started, counting carefully with his eyes on the ceiling, a broad smile on his lips as he tried to remember what was a multiple of what. When he got tangled up amidst the z’s, Max took a turn. They played until no one could shout out the right buzzes and fizzes for a high number over the laughter from the rest of the crowd.

  “Thank you, dear,” Mrs. Green complimented Keith, as he brought her a fresh pot of tea when the game broke up. “You’re good at traveling with a group.”

  “I’m one of five kids. My father taught us these games as a matter of self-defense on long trips. Otherwise, we would’ve driven him crazy asking ‘are we there yet?’”

  “My two sons liked to ask us that,” Mrs. Green acknowledged with the corners of her mouth turned up. “Somehow we managed to stave off the question until we actually were there. And Holl is your elder sister’s son?”

  Keith gulped, trying to remember what he’d told whom. Mrs. Green was stirring sugar into her cup, head bent over her task. She didn’t seem to notice any hesitation. “Right. You can see the family resemblance.”

  “Yes, I can. It’s very strong, especially in the jaw and ears. Your foreheads and noses are very different, though.”

  “That’s heredity, I guess,” Keith said lightly, wondering what the older woman would say if he speculated on how far back in history the resemblance would have to reach. He stood up. “Excuse me, please. Hey, Holl, let’s go up on deck and watch the scenery.”

  “A fine idea.” The Little One extracted himself from a group having a discussion around one of the small cocktail tables. He gathered up a sketch he had been making, and followed Keith. “I’ll be happy to get out of this big metal room. How do you stand it?”

  They made their way up the stairs, and together forced open a door on the uppermost deck of the ferry. The wind was still whistling up a gale, but the dull, leaden grey of the sky was brightening steadily as they sailed westward. Keith could feel his invisible whiskers whipping sharply against his cheeks. He concentrated on making them lie flat, and then gave up. The coast of Scotland had dwindled to a dark, irregular line nestled on the horizon far to the east, indistinguishable from the dark sea and the waves of clouds overhead.

  “Look how murky the water is,” Holl shouted, pointing over the rail. “It must be icy cold.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to get out and swim,” Keith admitted. He decided to bite the bullet, and find out the answer to the ear question as long as they were alone. “Hey, Holl …” he began, but cut off his sentence as a gaggle of tourists came out of the stairwell and passed within earshot. The elf looked at him questioningly, but he waved a dismissive hand. “Never mind. I’ll remember later what I wanted to say.”

  Holl nodded. “There’s nothing in sight to the west. The Isle of Lewis must be more than seventeen miles away. That’s the distance you are able to see at sea level before the curvature of the Earth drops the edge out of eyeshot. I’ve never been anywhere I could test the hypothesis.”

  “Are you doing okay?” Keith asked with sudden solicitousness, remembering how little traveling Holl had actually done. “I mean, I know you’ve never been on a boat before, and lots of people do get seasick.”

  “I thank you for your concern, but I don’t feel a thing out of the ordinary,” Holl replied, leaning comfortably on the rail and squinting at the horizon. So long as he kept his jacket sleeves between his arms and the metal, he was all right. “I’m having a very good time, as well. From what the old ones told me, I thought sailing would be terrifying. I don’t find it so. It’s no worse than riding in a car on bumpy roads.”

  “Smoother,” Keith said, after a moment. “I’ve got to get new shocks.” He thrust a hand out across the sea, and waved a finger. “Hey, look at that.”

  At the edge of the expanse of smooth, silver ripples lay a low mound, growing gradually larger. “Land ho!”

  “Seventeen miles, and a small bit more, of course, allowing for the extra elevation of the ship,” Holl said, satisfied. “My ears are freezing in this wind.”

  “Mine, too,” Keith agreed, wondering if that was an opening for a discussion. No, the elf’s face showed only curiosity and excitement as he stared out over the water at the island. Keith shrugged, and folded his elbows on the rail to watch Lewis growing nearer. He yawned. “I wonder if anyone there besides us is awake at this hour.”

  Michaels sat at the rear of the lounge with his coat buttoned up to the chin and watched the two smugglers go above deck. O’Day must suspect that he was under surveillance. Why else would he go to the far end of nowhere with the tour group? Unless the Isle of Lewis was it, the pickup site where his contact was waiting. It seemed like a mucking great lot of trouble to waste four weeks—four weeks!—hoiking about Scotland to establish his bona fides as a tourist. The research boys suggested that there was a major scientific discovery for sale. If he kept his eyes open, he should be able to bag O’Day just as the information changed hands.

  After Glasgow and Inverness, Stornoway was a small town. Before Keith and the others on the coach had had more than a quick glance at the city, they were out of it, and following a narrow road into the countryside. A thin curtain of trees parted suddenly, revealing a rough, torn landscape. Outside of the capital city and the tree farms, the Isle of Lewis seemed to be little more than rock and peat with grass and heather growing on it. At first glance, it looked almost like a war zone. The shelves of banded metamorphic rock which made up the island were highly friable, and left fantastic splinters piercing through the undergrowth and tumbling down the slopes. Miss Anderson described the mineral development to her open-mouthed group as Lewisian gneiss, unique to this part of the world. Rocks turned up all over the dark-hued ground as if careless giants, rummaging through geologic drawers, found what they wanted at the bottom and then departed without cleaning up after themselves.

  Thousands of sheep, some sheared and recognizable, and the un-sheared looking like shaggy hassocks with tiny pipe-stem legs sticking out fro
m underneath, grazed calmly on the backs of the hills. Half-grown lambs galloped crazily up and down, venturing out from the ewes long enough to get a look at the world, and hurrying back every time something surprised them. Their placid elders cropped the greenery or stared off into the distance with nobly thoughtful expressions.

  Rounded valleys between the hills were filled partway with water, as if the island was porous to the sea. Every so often, the coach would pass a small farmhouse or newsagent shop, but between them was the endless sea of peat under an almost peat-colored sky.

  “My God,” said Matthew despairingly, looking out the window at the scenery. “It’s a desert island. I haven’t seen a single pub for the last twenty miles!”

  Keith shrugged. “It’s just like middle Illinois in winter,” he said. “A thousand miles of open, uninterrupted countryside. No pubs. You’d just pick up a six-pack if there’s no place to go.”

  “There, I knew the colonies were backward,” Matthew crowed. “Bottled beer! But what do they do for fun here?”

  “We’ll be in Stornoway for supper every night,” Miss Anderson pointed out imperturbably. “There are plenty of public houses and shops there. We’re here to learn, not carouse.”

  “I’d rather carouse,” Martin muttered defiantly under his breath. “Have you ever seen such desolation?”

  The wild ruggedness of the island did take some getting used to. After driving through Illinois wheat fields, Keith was accustomed to long stretches of nothingness, but the dramatically sharp rise and fall of the dark land was new to him. As they drove west, the wind whipped up more fiercely, soughing among the fences and shrubs, and causing the hanging fleece on the sheeps’ backs to sway like wash on a line.