by Joan Lennon
‘Com? As soon as the message is sent, I have to go back to the village. Are you listening? I have to go back to the village and warn them that this is a really serious storm …’ He found his words trailing off.
His Com wasn’t listening.
‘A storm – yes – perfect – that’s our marker – that’s how they’ll find us—’
‘Com?’
‘We need to be higher. There’s too much vertical discrepancy.’
‘All right – higher – but we’ll have to hurry so I can … Com? Talk to me!’
‘Not – now – Rab—’
Rab took a ragged breath, trapped between doubt and the crushing sky and the swelling sea and that wall of clouds blooming up like a great black rose on the horizon. Then he started to run. He pounded along the curve of the bay, splashing through searching fingers of white foam, towards the north headland where the chambered cairn clung at the edge of the cliff. There wasn’t time to go back to where the path started the incline. He’d have to cut up, straight from the beach.
The Silver Skin buzzed in the charged air. His feet thwapping into the wet sand sounded unnaturally loud. It felt wrong to be making so much noise. It felt wrong to be drawing attention …
Rab reached the first spray-wet rock. The seaweed splayed across it glowed, a lurid unnatural green, like something noxious.
Higher – must get higher –
He didn’t dare look behind him now. Placing his feet with all the care he could manage, he scrambled from one sharp boulder to the next. If he could just get to the top of the headland … He could feel the deep roaring of the storm now, vibrating in the rock before it even reached his ears. Wicked little gusts of wind tried to knock him sideways, but he kept low and climbed on.
‘It’s working … is it working? … Mayday! Mayday? …’ his Com whittered.
Rab’s breath was coming in sobs – there wasn’t enough air – it was wrong – everything was wrong –
There was slick grass under his hands now. He looked up and saw the domed shape of the cairn above him, showing dark against the grey sky. It crouched on the end of the headland like a sullen watchdog.
Higher … higher …
Each scrambling step was becoming harder to take. The flattened top of the headland came so suddenly he found himself still crawling forward when he could now stand. His Com was urging him on, and all he knew for sure was that he was going away from what he wanted, from what meant the most to him, away from -
And then it happened. Suddenly he knew he was no longer alone.
‘NO! – WAIT!—’
Unseen hands grasped his arms.
He struggled wildly. ‘I only wanted to send a message – I have to go back – you don’t understand – wait! – I can’t leave them now – I can’t leave her now – I have to go back—’ For a brief moment he managed to break free from the invisible rescuers from the future and scrabbled sideways, back towards the edge of the headland. He slid on the wetness of the grass, almost fell down the steep drop, down onto the rocks. With a huge effort, he dragged himself upright.
‘No more damage!’ his Com was wailing. ‘No more damage!’
And the storm hit, a wall of black, screaming wind and cloud, slashed through with lightning, battering at the sea, throwing it into the air, devouring the land. Rab struggled to keep his feet as he stared desperately towards the village and Cait.
It was gone. She was gone. The wind had hit the sand of the shore and was peeling it away in swathes – walls of grit, flung inland with terrifying force.
‘Cait.’ Rab’s voice was less than a whisper as the unseen hands caught hold of him again, sealing the rends in the Silver Skin, drawing a helmet over his head, over his face, blinding him. ‘Cait …’
And then there was no one, and nothing, but the wind.
Mrs Trevelyan: mid Victorian Age, Bay of Skaill, Orkney
‘Quite a storm,’ said Mr Trevelyan.
Mrs Trevelyan nodded calmly. Her husband disliked fuss. He would be displeased to learn his new young wife had spent so much of the night awake. And he would certainly disapprove if she mentioned that she’d heard the shrieking of lost souls in the howls of the wind or that the hiss of blown sand against his house had made her skin crawl.
So she did not mention these things, and Mr Trevelyan went on speaking, his voice measured and, as always, slightly too loud.
‘The inclement weather was the result of what is referred to as a neap tide, made more extreme by the phase of the moon, which is at the full, combined with a particularly strong westerly wind off the Atlantic. There is, as I may have mentioned to you before, no land mass between our beach and the Americas that might alleviate the force of storm fronts.’
She nodded again. She could picture it easily in her mind. The clouds whipping past the wide white face of the moon like torn rags. The winter storm surging across all those miles, hungry, furious, growing in strength until it came crashing into her shore like a hammer. Or, more aptly, a knife. For this storm had cut away the tough, razor-edged marram grass, dragging it out by its tenacious roots and flinging it far inland before starting in on the layers of dune below, stripping them away, flinging great sheets of sand into the sky, against her house, forcing the grit through every crack and into every cranny. Pity any living thing caught out in a storm like that, for it would surely have been the death of them!
And now, the morning after, she had more than enough to be doing, directing the men trying to get the water supply cleared – the tea will taste brackish for weeks! – keeping the servants at the cleaning, dealing with the thankfully minor injuries the weather-canny locals had sustained. She really hadn’t time to be going out into the tail-end of the tempest and getting upset by damage she couldn’t mend.
But Mr Trevelyan insisted.
So here they were, trudging through the last gusts of the storm, down to the poor battered shore to see … what? She hoped it wasn’t something stranded, dead or dying. Like a whale. Or a squid. They’d had one of those washed up the very first week she’d come to live in her new home – ghastly, yet pathetic at the same time. The stink of it had lingered long after the gulls and skuas finished tearing it to pieces.
I don’t WANT to see something horrible, she was thinking, and so she wasn’t looking ahead but focusing instead on where she was putting her feet and noticing how the blown sand that hissed round the bottom of her skirt sounded like spiteful snakes and wondering whether or not the leftover mutton would be enough for the cook to make a curry out of – Mr Trevelyan liked curry – when suddenly, they were there. At the shore.
But the shore had changed.
For a long moment she stood there staring, gaping the way a lady never should. It was as if she’d walked down to a different beach entirely. The green mound – the one the servants said belonged to the fairy folk – where was it?
‘The Howe of the Trows – it’s gone!’
And there were holes, there, where the mound had been. She stepped forward, struggling to keep hold of her hat in the gusts of sea wind, looked down and saw …
Houses! Little houses in the ground!
She had a sudden flashback to when she was a tiny girl, when she and her brothers had built a den in the woods, at her grandparents’ place in the country, with bent branch walls and bracken thatch and wonky half-size beds. They’d stocked it with cracked teacups and mismatched plates and stolen biscuits from the kitchen and never, ever, quite had the nerve to sleep in it overnight …
‘What do you think of that, then!’ said her husband.
She turned to him in amazement, unable to think of anything coherent to say.
‘Well? Don’t wool-gather, my dear.’ Mr Trevelyan sounded impatient.
‘But what … who …?’
‘Mr Trevelyan! Mrs Trevelyan! Isn’t it marvellous?!’
A head appeared, followed by a dishevelled young man, rising up out of one of the holes in a shower of sand and excitement.
> ‘Mr Lawrence?’
It was the new curate. Mr Trevelyan didn’t rate his Sunday homilies very highly but she quite liked him. He reminded her of a large, ungainly, good-natured puppy. The young man reached up to doff his hat, realised he wasn’t wearing one, and sketched a bow instead.
‘Your servant, madam.’ He managed a decorous expression for less than a second before the boyish exhilaration burst out again. ‘Isn’t this the most amazing thing?!’
‘It is, I’m sure – but what is it?’
His amiably ugly face was split by a wide grin. ‘I think – no, I’m certain – that what we see before us is a miraculously preserved Neolithic village! Sir, Madam, I’d bet my best hat, which I appear to have lost, that this site – these houses – may very well date from the same time as the Ring of Brodgar, the stone circle at Stenness – perhaps Maeshowe itself! We have been given a glimpse – a window! – into that distant age, and not just the big gestures, the ritual sites – life wearing its Sunday best, so to speak – but ordinary people, living ordinary lives. A frozen moment, caught forever, hidden under the sand for thousands of years and now—’ He did a little dance of excitement and came close to sliding back into the hole. ‘Forgive my enthusiasm, but I believe that this is the closest to real time travel a human being can ever hope to come!’
Mr Trevelyan tutted scornfully, but Mrs Trevelyan warmed to the young man’s exuberance.
‘Then you feel this discovery is of importance, Mr Lawrence?’ she asked him gently.
‘Importance?! This is without doubt the most important archaeological discovery of the century! Of any century! It’s huge – it’s gigantic – it’s …’ He waved his hands, momentarily lost for words. He looked into Mrs Trevelyan’s attentive face and went on, ‘But even more than that – it’s the intimacy, the closeness, the … Madam, I feel as if the owners have only just stepped out a moment ago – I can sense them … I’m sure you understand me!’
‘No, sir. My wife is not a fanciful person,’ said Mr Trevelyan disapprovingly.
The curate blushed, but before she could say anything to soften the reproof, her husband caught sight of some of the farm boys, come to gawk at the holes.
‘Hey!’ he shouted, hurrying off to chivvy them with his stick. ‘You there – get back to your work!’
Mr Lawrence turned to her. ‘May I show you, madam? I have a ladder down into this first house that I’m sure you could manage …?’ He was so eager, it would be impolite to disappoint him. And yet, just as she was about to step forward, she stopped with a shudder.
‘I’m sorry – are you cold, Mrs Trevelyan?’
‘No … thank you …’ It wasn’t the cold. But what was it? She shivered again. It was the strangest sensation, as if someone were standing behind her but when she turned, there was no one there. She smiled apologetically. ‘It’s nothing. Just a silly feeling. My nurse would have said it was someone walking over my grave.’
‘A goose.’ He smiled back at her. ‘My nurse said it was a goose walking over my grave, but why a goose and not, say, a cow or a ferret, I never dared ask.’ He really had the most engaging face.
Still she felt unsettled, anxious – afraid to go down the ladder and into the little house. She couldn’t help looking over her shoulder again. Mr Lawrence must be wondering what I’m dithering about. She needed to give him some explanation, but she didn’t understand herself …
And then she remembered something she thought he would understand.
‘Mrs Trevelyan?’ He sounded sincerely concerned.
So, as lightly as she could, she said, ‘We are not long returned from a visit to the Continent in which we visited the archaeological site at Pompeii. I imagine my reluctance may arise from that.’ She certainly wished never again to experience the sensations that had swept her at the sight of those poor, twisted bodies, the feeling of horror that blanketed the place as surely as the ash had done.
The curate’s face cleared.
‘Ah. I understand. Don’t worry, madam. No skeletal remains have been found. There is nothing here you can’t see.’
Her spine prickled again – she swung round, but of course there was no one there – and yet she was sure that this time she had heard something. A sound that was almost like a sigh … a sigh of relief …?
That is quite enough of that!
Mrs Trevelyan smiled firmly at the young man. ‘Thank you – I would very much like to see what you have discovered,’ she said as she took his hand to descend.
It was a fascinating tour, and Mr Lawrence promised to keep her apprised of all his discoveries as he continued the work of the wind in digging out the sand. Her husband returned to hand her back up the ladder and together they stood for a moment, looking down into the curate’s upturned face.
‘What happened here, Mr Lawrence?’ asked Mr Trevelyan in a voice quieter than usual.
The young man shook his head. ‘I expect we’ll never know, sir. There is only so much we can learn about these people from what they left behind. Even modern science cannot answer every question.’
Again that feeling of someone standing near, someone she couldn’t see. Was that a laugh she heard? Just on the edge of hearing?
Mrs Trevelyan smiled to herself and shook her head.
I am not a fanciful woman, she told the listening air, and picking up her skirts, she headed for home.
Epilogue
In fact, young Mr Lawrence was not completely accurate when he said that there were no bodies found at Skara Brae. Later excavations revealed two human skeletons, both women, buried in a stone cist under the floor of what is now known as House 7.
To date, archaeologists don’t know why the women are there.
Note to Readers
So much of what we think we know about the time when the Stone Age was bleeding into the Bronze Age is based on bewildering artefacts and guesswork. What we do know, however, is that during this time, the climate worsened. There are many scientific, anthropological, archaeological theories about the effect climate change might have had on the civilisation of Orkney, and I have cherry-picked indiscriminately among them. This story is just that – a story. It is driven by the interactions of fictional characters in a setting that has sparked my own imagination for years. I have researched and visited museums and sites and taken photographs and talked and listened, but if you are looking in the result for a historical document, you will be disappointed.
