Sun Dance

by Iain R. Thomson

  Weakness was taking over. My arms ached. A fast rising tide. Another immersion? I counted the surges, the next big one? Drowning was close.

  Sound of an outboard. Round the headland, The Hilda, heaving and bursting spray.

  Eachan brought her nose near to the shelf. He stood in her stern, calm and unflustered. For a moment he left the helm. A coil of rope snaked out. I floundered, grabbing at it, mouth full of water. Got it! “Tie it round your waist,” I thought him almost laughing. “Tie a bowline.”

  I fumbled with the knot, “Let off the pulley. Hector.” The Hilda surged in, he backed off, a wave passed under her. Eachan came ahead again, two yards off, a yard,

  “Now boy!” I launched myself at the bow, half aboard, a hand grabbed my collar, hauled me the rest. He stepped swiftly back to the stern. Her bow dipped, a wave was taking her stern. Lying on the bottom boards, I waited for the splintering crash. It would tell the drowning of two men.

  The engine revved, she hung, stern in the air. I heard the propeller spinning clear of the water. Forward she went, the prop dug. Slowly she pulled astern. I clung to the gunnels, looked to Eachan. He watched the next curling top, swung her off into the trough. Boat and judgment.

  The headland of Sandray, close and perilous, reared above us. I looked fearfully from its merciless grandeur to Eachan. His face spoke his thoughts. Hilda, his lost daughter… it was on his face, the vision, her broken body lying, the self same shelf, the same forsaken place…. it was in his eyes. Such the sadness in his expression, were we to be lost, swept and drowned from a splintered boat which bore her name, so be it.

  It could claim us yet. Jagged rocks ahead, breaking, black teeth fallen from the chimney shaft. We clawed off, running the troughs. Eachan nursed his boat, daren’t force her. Waves climbed the headland, burst and fell back into jostling white foam. Slowly we pulled clear.

  I lurched down to the centre thwart. Stern seas, the worst, swept us to the point. He ran out, swung beam to the swell, before taking it head on to make the rounding. Spray lashed us until gradually, the wind off the land, we were into the shelter of the bay. Eachan grinned at me, “Hoch, hoch, boy, you’ve had a close one.”

  Ten minutes brought us alongside the Sandray jetty. True to Highland good manners, no comment, no questions, his only observation, “Well, Hector boy, you’ll be needing a dram.”

  I sank down on the stones. A thermos cup was put in my hand, warm coffee and whisky. Sip at a time, before the pain of returning warmth. I staggered up to the house. Eachan busied about, the kitchen, tea, another dram. “It’ll be about five o’clock, I said I would wave a torch at five o’clock, Ella will be watching and she’ll know we’re fine.” He took the torch and went out.

  Warmth from the calor stove, an inner glow from Eachan’s bottle of cure all and I wakened to find my head down on the table and the room in darkness. Regaining a vague awareness and believing Eilidh through in her bedroom, I spoke quietly, “Eilidh, are you alright?” No reply, and more urgently, “Eilidh.” For a second in the darkness she stood over me. I reached out to her hand, the vision faded. Only then I realised she wasn’t physically in the house, yet the feeling she was beside me remained.

  Gradually the recent events reshaped themselves and for the first time I ran fingers warily over the side of my head, now smarting unpleasantly. A warm oozing smeared my hand. Blood. The realisation, neither a shock nor relief, just more disorientated thinking. The crack of a pistol shot, real enough, a bullet through the brain, instead, alive by a fraction of an inch. The unexplained appearance of Eachan, impossible he’d have come across on chance, not on such a day.

  Never more strongly did I feel a pawn in some torturously predetermined sequence of events. In truth I could offer no rationale for my chosen direction. Why these uncanny circumstances, these apparitions, this harking back to Viking days, ancestral graves, drownings, were they real? The explosion ---was it real? It had to be. I remembered Eilidh’s eyes, the flash, the screams.

  Perhaps I was no more than a vegetable in a wheelchair viewing some incredible phantasm being played inside my brain, a conscious mind existing only at the mercy of its imagination; a brain oblivious to physical incapacity, being fed a holographic image by some external force? I dreaded slipping back into spasms of mental anguish, struggling to separate the threads of sanity and insanity. Sensory perceptions objectively presented, their cause physical or psychological, a game play of virtual reality beyond my control?

  A stirring across the table, I could make out Eachan coming awake from the opposite chair, “Madainn mhath,” he yawned and stretching, “Ah Dia, I’ve slept on softer chairs.” Immediately alert, I got up and lit the camping light. An empty bottle stood on the table. Half dry clothes, my back needing a dry shirt, our stomachs, solid food. It must be the early hours. The impact of the ordeal still so numbing I couldn’t speak, instead I went to the cooker and got busy.

  Porridge with honey on it, two plates steamed under the hanging lamp. Eachan made no comment about my departure from his customary salt. Looking over the last spoonful, “I heard you calling to Eilidh when I wakened,” and in a serious tone, “you were calling to the right person. If she hadn’t phoned yesterday morning with a message you were in some sort of trouble, I wouldn’t be eating sweet porridge,” adding a great deal more seriously, “and neither would you.”

  “Eilidh phoned?” “Yes she did and she was in some state of upset.” “She phoned?” I stammered, staring at her bedroom door, incredulous, “From London?” “Yes and I came across straight away.” “How could she know?” my words trailed off. On the cliff, never before had I thought of her so passionately. I faced falling to my death and she filled every corner of my mind. “What time did she phone?” “It was quite sharp, I was down the village, maybe half ten, eleven o’clock time.”

  Middle morning, the man at the door, my first unease and Eilidh phoned. The theme of the poem that wrote itself in my mind, I must catch it, write it down. Bit by bit I gave Eachan my story. I described the speedboat, “Aye, that’s a character who arrived in Halasay a year or two back, you hear him before you see him, that’s the way his kind tend to be.”

  Listening to my account of the happenings he showed no surprise, only a thoughtful face, angular and shrewd. “Are you coming back to Halasay with me?” Obviously he’d the police station in his mind, though reporting the matter wasn’t mentioned. “No, I don’t think so. I’ll stay here, if that’s OK with you. The evidence is in the Atlantic. I’ll come over, maybe on the slack water late this afternoon.” Understanding as always, “Aye, whatever you think, no problem, it’ll be time enough.”

  A hint of light showed through the little glass panes of the kitchen window. Dawn cut into our conversation. We went outside and stood at the end of the house. Across the Sound the peaks of Halasay, dark and lonesome were emerging on an eastern sky washed to rosy pink. Below us, the mauve waters of a November bay. The wind had lost its chill, and yesterday’s storm was barely a memory on the surface of the sea.

  “That’s the weather passing east before the sun. Now it’s on the mend I’ll head over, it’s about the bottom of the tide,” and pulling on his oilskins, “Take care if you come across later. Don’t worry if you aren’t wanting to go back to the cliff, just now, but if you get a chance, I left that long rope and pulleys.”

  Whatever he thought of the whole episode remained unsaid. I saw him off at the jetty and climbing to a point behind the house, watched the tiny dot of the ‘Hilda’ until it vanished into the bay which lay below the croft of Ach na Mara. There would be another time to thank Eachan, “Please phone Eilidh,” had been my last words to him.

  The isles of the ocean have ways of making amends, the morning breeze came round to the south, mild and relaxing. The sun, no longer bleak and green, warmed the stones. At middle day, after much perplexing thought, I walked slowly towards the headland. The grass, lank and ungrazed these many, many years lay matted, russet and wasted, the soil
upon which it grew might be superfluous to present man’s requirements, yet not to that of the little yellow tormentil. Oncoming winter had still to deter its miniature bloom. Independent plant, it grew, not in clumps, but singly, here and there. Open to the sun, amidst the dying sedges, their tiny petals dotted my path, the last of summer’s profusion.

  I stopped to look down on a single plant, unprotected and vulnerable, one tiny bloom in a vast landscape and still bright and eager, keen to live. That few moments pause answered all the morning’s reflections. The who, the why, the nausea of contemplating death, it all left me. The island soil was as important to that tiny flower’s survival as it was to me. I walked on, my spirit regained, as a folk singer might strum, with the sun on my shoulder. Out onto the headland and the Viking grave, its stones in place a thousand years, cleaned by salt and gale.

  A large stone symbolised the longboat’s prow. Narrow but uncarved, it leant forward, and firmly round its base Eachan had wound a strop of rope, an anchor for the pulley block. The long rope stretched out, disappeared over the edge of the cliff. Hand over hand, I hauled, hearing the clank, clank of the lower pulley hitting rock. Up it came, yard by yard. The coil at my feet grew. It stuck, I pulled. Pulled harder. Still stuck.

  Had I courage to go the edge and look over? It took force of will. Crawling to the edge, I squinted down. Twenty feet, and more, the ledge, narrow, spattered with bird droppings. Air wafted up to me, acid and putrid. Away below, the shelf, wave washed, devoid of life and utterly mournful.

  Giddy with vertigo, the cliff seemed to be tilting. In terror of slipping, I gripped the sparse tufts of grass. My head swam. My depth of thought for Eilidh returned. The passion that dwarfed my contemplation of falling, came again, replaced all fear. The poem and its baffling relevance to Eilidh’s phone call spoke through my head. Words and theme presented themselves, still fresh. Are there paths by which some great emotion may communicate? I lay on the turf edge staring down at a pattern of ripples on the waves. They seemed as ripples in space and my grip relaxed.

  Steady now, keep focused. I flicked the rope to one side, crawled back from the cliff and stood up. Flicking the rope again and hauling, with a jerk, it came. The last few yards dragged the pulley over the edge to my feet. Carefully I coiled the rope, as thought it were a mooring line.

  With marked respect I unwound the rope belay from around the grave ship’s prow stone. Perhaps early settlers gathered it from the taking in of the land. The grave pointed north. Symbol of a Viking’s returning voyage. Island headland, oceans wide, no pilot marks, into space unknown, beyond the speckled heavens; from death into life, as it had held me.

  November sun made shadows of the stones, my back was to the prow stone. The people of the graves were at my side, I saw them at fireside homes bound in winter snows and evening tales. And with them, I gloried in the daring voyage of imagination

  The lichen stones were without a sun, it crept into northern night and a flake filled gale caked the leaning birch. Aurora’s torch shone red and green on drifted snow and I heard frost bound steps crunched to neighbour’s tread. In the dancing blue the firelight flames spun tales of daring late into each wide eyed night. Song and verse, a winter passed until sunshine spring brought blackbird song to a catkined river edge and plovers called and whimbrel probed worm casts on the shore. Then was the time and shoulders heaved, stout lines were rove and milk-blue melt from snow capped hills put longboats back to sea.

  Tapestry days of shape and colour, when perspectives long in a mid-night loom were latitudes play on light and hue. Images came, the hollow wave a cave of green, in the curling storm they saw a sailor’s grave, wind twisted branches, the waving arms that plucked knowledge from the stars. Ideas alive, fresh as the gleam of new turned soil, clear as the air that set their voyage, wide as minds that journeyed the realms of fantasy, roved the seas of uncertainty and sailed beyond this universe, plunderers of imagination’s seam.

  The massless photon, energy’s fastest source, outpaces speed of thought but are there paths on which insight and great emotions may exist, may communicate on wavelength within dimensions which defy the speed of light, perhaps become a force within the bubble of this universe? Does imagination’s boundaries grow, or is consciousness a hollow tunnel? Does the universe exist to pander to our thoughts? What may still emerge, evolve beyond this brain, or atomic functions grow without a carbon base? Amalgams yet may blossom just as the stars are born to spin the Hole of Death, the fruits of quasi- particles which swirl its stellar tomb.

  Atoms perhaps are not as real, float only in a mystery of possibilities without end, where potential and uncertainty alone exist, in dimensions beyond the myth of science. Are all things possible on uncertainty’s endless path? Within the framework of our brain, we struggle to break the synapse’ trap, It’s a snail like pace of sodium ions, the neuron’s organic grasp.

  Unleash electro-magnet’s bending force, accelerate ideas beyond the photon’s cosmic hold, forget the Gods which we conceive, become the ghost of energy’s vast turmoil. Join the particles of space and be at one, in the mystery of ‘Entanglement.’

  We are but what the heavens made us and in the arc of curving space, every particle therein is our kith and kin.

  Completely unaware of my surroundings, I’d strained excitedly to catch the fresh ideas which hovered within my grasp before they flitted into some unknown vacuum. Finding a set of words to define elusive concepts imposed total absorption. When my spate of thoughts finally settled the weather had cleared from the west. Sauntering back to the house, I came round by the bay to find the south wind had died to nothing and left behind a pocket of warmth.

  The air had all saltiness of the tangle of the isles, the scent of dream and song. I laughed, for where the rocks on the far side of the bay formed a wee cove of their own, the sea had heaped tons of fertiliser and tomorrow, romantic scent or no, I would gather my seaweed harvest clear of the tide. Ocean’s bounty for the ‘lazy beds’ I’d dig next spring. Gulls circled the beach, returned from a day’s searching. Perhaps they’d followed a fishing boat, ranging their world of chance. I blessed the game of chance and stood beside the jetty watching them until they, like my ideas, became floating concepts, vague shapes in the last rays of a sunset which bounced off the dying Atlantic swell. Gone November’s rawness, the terrors of yesterday; in their place the peacefulness of the island gathered about me, tangible and livable. The old house indeed a haven.

  The camping light on the table threw a small circle of warmth. Pushing aside my dishes, I made a fair copy of the poem. After its title I wrote, ‘Headlands’ and sat thinking. Ella would have phoned Eilidh, for certain. How much of the drama had she been told? None I hoped. Tomorrow, I must phone, maybe head for London. Nothing except meeting her again could ever drag me back to London. First it had to be the police station. I fingered the furrow of dried blood on my skull.

  How to make anybody believe such a wild story? Police questioning, “What were you doing staying alone these past weeks on an uninhabited island? Explain that one, Mr.MacKenzie. Were you perhaps, hiding?” From most people’s stand point, it looked suspicious, or at the very kindest analysis, the behaviour of an eccentric. Maybe the body had floated ashore, been identified by the speedboat guy. He’d have been expecting a return trip to pick up this supposed archaeologist, or as chance would have it, a failed murderer. Certainly I’d acted in self defense. I’m not guilty of murder, surely not even manslaughter. Or was I? Would I face arrest? Who was this madman anyway, and why his fascination with my damned briefcase? Long since I’d forgotten the vague threat I sensed during that London interview. An assassination attempt, surely not?

  Strangely, during these weeks alone I hadn’t bothered the bottle, it remained a yellow glint up on the shelf. I poured a ‘night cap’. Before it could even wet my lips, out of the evenings stillness there arose a sound, a strange wailing, a chorus of high pitched notes. Putting down the glass, I went to the door. The cries of some
hideous plight quivered on the thinness of the November air, some creatures or some persons? Where, down at the bay?

  A waxing moon newly risen, crater pocked and ice white, cast long shadows as I walked slowly towards the shore. It seemed there were many voices, a beseeching, primal sound, beyond any human grief. My breath rose, tiny coils in the sharp light, the hair on the nape of my neck, stiff and tingling. I stepped towards the shore, tense and alert. Stones rattled with staccato clicks.

  Breasting the last of the dunes the bay spread below me in a great sheet of reflected light. The moon floated, a disc of brightness on the water. No human voices could create such piteous music, know such melancholy. A lone voice rose above the rest, psalm- like in private grief. I stood, an intruder on sorrow, the calling of unearthly spirits. Out on the distant ledges silhouetted against a moon green sea, dark bodies swayed, slender heads raised vibrant throats. The seal folk sang before their goddess of the tide.

  I walked quietly round to the jetty and sat listening. Little by little their voices died to a soft keening. Deep from the pores of night the People of the Sea unlocked sepulchral caves, offered a last coronach to those who’d perished by the ocean’s call. In the sadness of their departing notes remained the lost souls of those who dwelt within the chrysalis of their sealskin tombs. Did they cry to me, who cheated the hungry sea?

  A faintest breeze came off the wide Atlantic bringing with it a balm from the warmth which remains in a winter sea. I stirred myself, unwilling to leave, for the mystery of the supernatural still clung to the silence. At last, rising to leave for home, I stopped in utter disbelief, in quick dismay. Outlined on the glitter of moonlit water, mast and sail set, a boat appeared from behind the black mass of the headland. The ‘Hilda’, I knew her lines. Eachan, it had to be, only he would sail her at night.