by Joan Lennon
‘—day, Mayday, can you hear me? C-can you hear me? There’s been an accident – seal br-broken – repeat, seal broken – can you hear me?’
And suddenly Cait was standing beside him, crying out loudly, ‘Listen, all of you! That’s it – that’s the language the selkie used when it first came ashore to us. It sounds like gibberish, except for a word here and there – there! Did you hear it? It said “seal”. And there – again! “Seal” …’
‘Rab? Rab?’
Everyone heard that.
‘It calls him by name!’
‘It must be his skin – a real selkie skin!’
‘A real selkie!’
Voy stepped forward and dug her claw-like hand into Rab’s shoulder.
‘That’s right, a real selkie,’ she said. ‘And he’s mine.’
Cait: The Ring of Stones
What now? What would they do to him now? She hadn’t thought beyond keeping him from being killed. It was like the first day in the fog, on the shore, all over again.
‘Take that gag off him,’ Voy ordered, pivoting Rab round and propelling him towards Cait. She did as she was told. No one tried to stop her.
How does Voy do that? The thought came into Cait’s mind unexpectedly and the envy that came with it was just as unbidden. Where does she get the power? Tron felt it – they all felt it – she could see it in the way they stood back, the way the focus of them all was on Voy. All the things Tron had been doing to Rab were things she was letting him do. She was in control.
And then Voy began to smile. She took the silver skin from Rab’s reluctant fingers. She turned and began to walk towards the standing stones.
‘What are you doing?’ Cait left Rab and scuttled after her, even took hold of her sleeve. ‘Where are you going?’ She lowered her voice so no one around them could hear her. ‘Look, maybe he’s not really a selkie – I didn’t tell you – he didn’t come from the sea – he fell out of the sky! I didn’t tell you because I wasn’t sure … it didn’t make sense … I thought I must have got it wrong …’ You’re lying, a voice in her head said. You didn’t tell because you wanted her to know less than you did – because what you knew gave you power, over her, over the Old Woman …
But Voy didn’t answer. She wasn’t listening.
Voy: The Ring of Stones
Voy looked around, suddenly suspicious that these momentous, startling, huge thoughts had taken too much time to form in her mind, and the others would be staring at her, wondering what had frozen her so long. But no. It had happened in a split second. Her mind didn’t just feel as if it was racing – it was racing.
She detached the girl’s hands from her sleeve and pushed her away absently. Everything had been leading to this. This was the moment when she would make everything change. She’d been following the wrong ideas and in spite of that they had led her to the perfect place, the only time. Her thoughts were shouting now, so that she could only hear the voices of other people as a buzz in the background, irritating and unimportant as the whirring of insects.
She strode towards the stones.
Rab: The Ring of Stones
There was an appalled gasp from the crowd as Voy reached the ring of stones, turned and began to move around the circle. For a moment Rab couldn’t think why they seemed to feel such sudden horror. It wasn’t that long ago they’d all been doing the same …
Not the same! Not the same!
Voy: The Ring of Stones
She walked the Ring from left to right, widdershins, against the pull of the deosil direction. She spoke words of greeting to each of the great stones – greeting and challenge too, making sure her voice was loud and clear, that however strangely the Ring affected the sound, her words would be heard by the crowd clustered at the centre. She called out to the Sun to listen to her, Voy, to listen and to bring back the Greater Days.
She held the selkie’s silver skin in her hands, lifting it high overhead at each stone.
Partway round, she paused and looked back at the people. Their faces were palely visible, there by the great square stone hearth. They seemed far away and insignificant. Voy felt power running through her, making her ruined hands tingle and her old hair stand out from her head. This is the way it should be. This is the way I am. She raised the silver skin again and looked up to where the stone met the sky …
Rab: The Ring of Stones
Rab ached. It hurt to breathe. He didn’t understand what was happening, what Voy was doing, what they were going to do to him, and then, to add to the misery, it started to snow, fat white flakes that landed on him and clung, leeching any tiny remaining warmth from his flesh. He hunched his shoulders, hugging himself. Something in the sky flickered, then rumbled, a low-pitched roar that grew and died away and grew again. He felt it in his bones.
Thunder? In a snowstorm?
It made as much sense as anything. He was too tired now to think. Wearily, he closed his eyes …
He might have left them wide open for all the difference it made. When the flash came, the light bored through his eyelids, blinding him. He heard Cait cry out, then the roar came again, pressing down on him, making it hard to think. He couldn’t put two and two together – he couldn’t draw a conclusion from the evidence and plan ahead, but Be small! Be unnoticed! something ancient yammered at him. Rab threw himself to the ground and, with a whimper, covered his head with his arms. For a moment that seemed to last forever, all of his senses fused, overloaded by too much light, too much noise.
The sky has exploded, screamed his mind, and then it shut down.
It wasn’t the sky that had exploded – it was the top of the standing stone. The lightning strike split the megalith, so that a slice of rock taller than a man detached and fell, but before it hit the ground the lightning leapt, so quickly it was almost simultaneous, attracted to the next tallest thing. To the Silver Skin, held aloft in the Old Woman’s hands.
Voy: The Ring of Stones
Cold. So cold, it burned. She felt her muscles spasm, snapping her spine back in an arc of pain and gripping her chest so she couldn’t draw breath. Some force lifted her up into the air, flinging her backwards, awkward and ugly.
No! This wasn’t what flying was supposed to be. Hesta had said … No …
She hit the ground so hard she felt her teeth break. There was a roaring inside her head and it was growing louder. As the noise swelled and beat, she looked up into the night sky and saw, suddenly, to her amazement, that it was snowing. Out of the black, drifting down. No wind, she thought. No wind inside the Ring. She found herself focusing on one snowflake, just one out of the growing crowd. She marvelled at the alien beauty of its construction, tiny and perfect and cold, and at the same time the thought came to her – beyond a shadow of a doubt – that what she was seeing, was death.
If it touches me, I will die.
And then … I’ll know …
And then her peace exploded.
Not yet – not yet – it’s not time yet –
Something below her control was having none of it – it was screaming against her life ending – it fought for command over her body, tried to roll it out of the path of the tiny white instrument of death. But as she cried silently to her muscles, there was no answer.
She couldn’t move.
Delicately the snowflake drifted down, closer, closer, till with a sigh it settled on her cheek.
Cait: The Ring of Stones
The lightning had split like fingers, one hitting the stone, one striking the hearth at the centre of the Ring. The heat was so great it ignited the huge pile of fuel and offerings, the fire blazing up with a roar, vaporizing the falling snow above with a hiss of steam and lighting the inner faces of the standing stones with a hard white glare. Cait’s nostrils were bombarded with the hot reek of seared meat and hide and clay as the offerings were incinerated. But she barely registered any of this. All she saw was the body of the Old Woman, crumpled on the ground.
Rab: The Ring of Stones
It was as if no one could hear him.
Rab had dragged himself to his knees, waiting for someone to rush forward, take command, start resuscitation, bring Voy back … But no one moved. Seconds passed. Then, as one, they all turned their backs and started to walk away, away from the body on the cold ground, back to the causeway out of the Ring.
They weren’t going to do anything to save her. They’d given her up for dead, without even going near her. Even Cait wasn’t doing anything more than standing there, holding her snatched-up torch in the hissing snow, her eyes and mouth three black helpless Os in her face.
He didn’t know what to do … It couldn’t be up to him …
Come on, Rab, remember what you studied – what do you do first?
His heart clenched in his chest – Com? Is that you? – but it was just a memory. The suit was silent and dead, there in the frosted heather where the lightning strike had flung it, glittering like fish scales in the torch-light. But now he remembered – all those First Aid classes – What Would You Do If No Com Were Nearby. Everybody’d thought they were just a waste of time, just a joke – in what possible situation would there not be a Com nearby? They’d called it Anachronism 101, but it was still compulsory …
Not me – it can’t be up to me!
They were going to let her die.
‘NO!’
Rab scrambled through the heather and dropped awkwardly to his knees by Voy’s twisted body. Her eyes were wide open but there was no recognition in them. A single snowflake lay on her cheek and it wasn’t melting.
‘Voy? VOY!’ She wasn’t breathing …
He started pulling at her body, trying to straighten her out. She was limp and unresisting, and he was horrified at the thought that he was manhandling a corpse.
No, I’m not! he told himself fiercely and he tilted her head back and began.
Her mouth was clammy and cold. In the training they’d used porous membranes – there had been no actual mouth-to-mouth contact – it had all been a laugh – he stopped blowing into the Old Woman and pushed on her chest – again – again – again – back to blowing – compressions – blowing – the whole world had shrunk to each action – all time had dwindled into pressures and exhalations and the ragged drawing of the air into his lungs and the pushing of it into hers –
She groaned, rolled over onto her side and vomited.
He heard Cait make a strangled noise and suddenly she was there beside him. She thrust the torch into Rab’s hands. She began to feel Voy’s arms and legs, wipe her face. It was only then that Rab realised the snow had stopped. He looked up at the sky. The wind was blowing the storm clouds away and there, on the edge of the Ring of Hills, was the setting moon.
It looked so far away, all white and empty and untouched. Unpopulated. Clean.
‘What have you done?’ murmured Cait.
It was no more than a whisper, but it seemed to Rab to fill the great circle and echo from the stones. What have you done?
What have you done?
Cait: The Ring of Stones
The storm passed as quickly as it had come. To the great joy, confusion and, in some cases, fury of the Living, the Road to the Sun opened exactly with the dawn. The spirit stones were emptied, the Dead – the Old Chert of Skara Brae among them – passed on, giving back what they had received.
But who were they to thank?
Tron’s Tears? Or the silver skin? Neither of them had been in the inferno of the offering fire. Voy’s selkie boy, then? The one who brought her back from death – a road no one had ever walked before? Or had she only slept? Was his Fey skin the thing that had called down fire from the sky? Had they really seen that happen? Already the memories were getting jumbled. The fire from the sky had struck her down, but hadn’t killed her. The Stone was split too – there was no doubt about it – but what did that mean?
So many questions. The other Old Women pursed their lips, looked solemn and said nothing. They didn’t know any more than anyone else, of course. They just weren’t letting on.
But Cait had no time for any of that. All her attention was concentrated on dealing with Voy’s injuries. Her twisted hands were scorched and blistered. The soles of her feet were burned where the lightning had passed through them as it entered the ground, making small, deep pits in her flesh. And Cait had no way of knowing how much damage it had done inside the Old Woman’s body.
At first Voy kept up a low moaning, muttering incomprehensible, frantic sounds, staring wildly about with her bird of prey eyes. The other Old Women shook their heads and didn’t understand, but Cait guessed what she wanted. The silver skin lay on the cold ground where it had been flung free. No one wanted to go near it but Cait went and gathered it up. She looked to Rab for permission. He shrugged. He seemed too battered to care.
When she put the skin into Voy’s searching hand, the horrible moaning stopped. She clutched it tight to her chest with one arm and was still.
‘What was she trying to do out there?’ Rab asked Cait, his voice hoarse and weary, but she didn’t answer.
Rab: The Ring of Stones
‘What was she trying to do?’ he’d asked Cait, but the question closest to his heart was, What has she done? That was the thing that hammered at his mind and would not give him peace, clawing over and over like a nail in a wound. What has she done to my Skin?
He couldn’t begin to guess how much damage the suit might have sustained this time. The lightning had passed through Voy’s body as well as the Skin – would that mean anything? Would it have provided any kind of buffer or protection? Was his Com online when it happened? If not, where would it have been? How many volts did lightning have? Had the suit and his Com and his only chance of getting a message home been fried, in a second, all of them together, or was there still any hint of hope remaining?
Was this going to be it for him now? Was this, inescapably now, where his life was going to unfold?
He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything.
Except for one thing. If his chance of getting home had been small before, now it had become microscopic.
PART FOUR
Cait: Return to Skara Brae
The journey back to Skara Brae was silent and slow, beset by sleety winter rain and cruel winds. As Cait watched the villagers through dripping hair, she saw closed faces and bent shoulders.
The men took turns to carry Voy on their backs. She weighed almost nothing, Cait knew – just skin and bones – but each man seemed more than willing to pass the burden on to the next. She saw them wiping their hands surreptitiously on the wet grass afterwards. Some made the sign against evil with their fingers behind their backs.
They’d always feared Voy – of course they had – but this was different.
Rab ventured up to her as they trudged along. ‘Has she said anything yet?’ he asked.
Cait shook her head fiercely, and he backed away at once.
She was too unsettled to talk.
She’d never seen anyone ill in this way before, which wasn’t surprising, since she’d never seen anyone come back from the dead before either. It was as if Voy had become split down the middle into two people, one of which was still dead, while the other was alive. One side of her face was waxy and grey, all the wrinkles strangely flattened away, and yet the other side scowled and glared, with all the malevolent glitter in the depth of the eye that there had ever been. One arm flopped, limp and uncontrolled – one foot would not bear her weight when they tried to stand her on the ground – and yet the other hand and foot were as they’d been before.
What does it mean? What should I do?
There was nothing to do, except keep walking through the rain. Get her back to Skara Brae. Get her warm, and dry, and then …
Wait and see.
But the other thing that made her mind feel like a cornered rabbit, twitchy and unsure, leaping first in one direction and then just as wildly in an
other, was what had happened at the Ring.
She didn’t understand it. None of it.
Voy will have to explain it, she thought. Voy’s the one who’ll know.
But Voy was saying nothing.
At no point on the journey had Voy let the silver skin go. Back in her own house, it was the same. When Cait laid the Old Woman’s flaccid body down onto the heather and hide of her bed and covered her with fleeces, the suit lay with her like a desiccated twin.
Even in the few days they’d been away, the house had grown cold and damp. Cait lit the fire, building it up with dung and dried seaweed until it was strong enough to heat water. She put herbs on to brew – fennel for strengthening, garlic for internal healing, bog myrtle to call back Voy’s mind, crowberry to cast out the chill … She was just guessing, but there was no one to ask. She raised Voy and held the cup for her to drink, though even then, half the liquid dribbled out of the dead side of her mouth. She heated stones in the fire and wrapped them carefully in soft hide and put them at the Old Woman’s feet. She chafed her hands with her own warm ones, trying to bring the life back into them.
It was like chafing the hands of a corpse.
A night and a day passed, and still Voy did not speak.
Rab had been staying out of the way, sleeping she didn’t know where, but now he ducked into the house. He hunkered down on the other side of the hearth and looked at her, his brown eyes wide and enquiring.
‘Is she …?’ he asked.
Cait snapped, ‘Is she better? Is she worse? Is she the same? I can’t tell. I’ve done everything I can think of, but this isn’t a sickness I know.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Sorry.’ He was just asking, but it felt like one burden more than she could bear.
