Isle of Man

by Ryan Winfield

  And the chase is on.

  The men swing back into their saddles and gallop off after the chasing hounds. It takes me a few tries to mount my horse, and thankfully Jimmy hangs back until we can set off together after the riders. I expect the hounds to bark, but they don’t. The chase is silent and must be followed by sight. Our horses seem to have done this before, following Finn’s lead on their own, and with no effort from me besides holding on for sweet life with my knees. We quickly rejoin the group.

  We gallop across glades, leap over rocky knolls, climb steep bluffs, and stop to scan the horizon for the dogs. When Finn or one of the men spots them again, usually scrambling over some distant hill, we kick the horses into pursuit and race on, trying to keep them in sight by keeping to high ground. All afternoon we chase them through the highlands with hardly a moment’s rest, save the briefest of pauses to pass a canteen and look again for the lost dogs. A few times I catch a rust-colored streak amidst the bounding deerhounds, telling me Junior is keeping up pretty well.

  After riding hard for thirty minutes or so in the direction of our last sighting of the dogs, Finn halts the group and cocks his head, listening. A distant baying carries to us on the breeze.

  “He’s gone at bay,” Finn says, flashing the group a grin.

  “No rush now,” one of the others says. “Those hounds’ll keep him bailed up for a week if we leave them to it.”

  “Quite right,” Finn says. “But we’d starve to death and so would they. Besides, we’ve got a feast to prepare for.”

  He starts us moving at a quick canter toward a distant river gulch and the sound of the baying hounds.

  “What’s he mean by bailed up?” I ask Jimmy.

  “Hell if I know,” he says. “But I’d guess by the sound of it those dogs got ’em pinned down somewheres.”

  We follow the ridgeline down as far as we can and search for a path to descend into the gulch. It doesn’t look possible to me, but before I know what’s happening, Finn guides his horse over the edge and the rest follow, including mine. The descent is frightening, the ground steep and rocky. I close my eyes, lean back, and squeeze with my knees, trying not to imagine how far I’d fall or how many rocks I’d bounce off of before I stopped. But I don’t fall, and the horses all make it safely to the bottom of the gulch, and we take off following a widening brook down toward the ever-increasing howling of the hounds.

  As we follow the gulch lower, tiny streams and trickling waterfalls join the brook until it widens into a shallow river, forcing us into a single-file line along its bank. Then we come upon a blind bend with a steep cliff ahead, and when we reach it and turn, the gulch opens into a kind of valley where the river spills into a shallow lake. Five meters off shore, the stag stands in water to its chest, using its antlers to defend against the dogs swimming circles around it. Several of the deerhounds stand in shallower water, catching their breath. Junior lies on the shore, soaking wet and panting. Jimmy dismounts to check on him.

  Finn removes a rope from his saddle and drives his horse out into the lake and lassos the stag, catching it around the base of its antlers. Then he ties the rope off to his saddle horn and backs his horse from the lake and drags the stag, head-bent and bucking, into shallower water. The deerhounds leap all around it, yowling. The stag shakes its lassoed head and bellows.

  Another rider drives his horse into the water from the side and slips another noose over the stag’s antlers and backs out farther up the shore, pulling the stag’s thrashing points still, locked now between the two opposing ropes.

  “Aubrey,” Finn calls. “Come here.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you.”

  I kick my horse in its side like I’ve seen the others do, but it doesn’t budge.

  Finn laughs.

  “I meant on foot, kid.”

  I dismount my horse and wade into the water and look up at Finn in his saddle. He unsheathes a long knife and hands it down to me.

  “Guests do the honors.”

  The stag stands trembling just a few meters away, pulling against the ropes, lungs heaving, eyes wide, nostrils dilated.

  “Don’t worry,” Finn says. “He knows it’s already done. If he does come at you, we’ll pull his points there to the side.”

  I wade out to the stag, holding the heavy knife in front of me. The blade wobbles as my hands shake. When I get close, the stag rears back against the taught ropes and bleats with fear, its sweat-drenched muscles quivering with panic. The rider on the shore tightens his rope, pulling the stag’s head to the side and exposing its muscular neck for the knife.

  I look back. All the men sit on their horses watching me, waiting. Jimmy stands on the shore watching, too. I turn back to the stag and bring the knife point to its neck and prepare to thrust it in. The stag turns its amber eye to me, and I can see my face clearly reflected on its glassy surface. Its pupil dilates, the lens focusing on its final vision. Its golden lashes flicker.

  No one says a word as I trudge back to shore. Jimmy takes the knife from my trembling hand, wades out past me, and slashes the stag’s throat. I hear its gurgling bellow and turn to see blood gushing from the gash. The stag lurches left and right against the ropes, then slumps forward, its head dropping as its neck goes limp, its antlers clacking against the shallow bottom, its open mouth hanging in the water for a moment, giving it the appearance of bowing for one final drink. Then its amber eyes go blank, and it falls over sideways with a splash.

  I sit alone on a rock and watch them field-dress it. Within minutes, they’ve strung it up by its horns in the only tree beside the lake. The tree is small and not very healthy, and the branch bows heavily with its weight. They slit the stag open, tie off its rectum, remove its organs, and pull the intestines free. They let the tired deerhounds eat the castaway parts, with the exception of the bladder, which Jimmy pinches closed and carries several meters away and tosses into a bush. When they finish gutting it, the deer hangs considerably lighter from the limb.

  Next, they cut a ring around its neck and legs and loosen the hide. One of the men bunches the hide at its neck and ties it to a rope. Then he ties the other end of the rope to his saddle horn and backs his horse from the stag. The rope goes taut, the hide stretches, the branch bends, and with a wet, ripping sound that makes me want to puke, the entire hide peels off until the stag is hanging free of its skin, swaying pink and naked like a giant newborn fawn from the tree. The man loops in the bloody hide, unties it, and stuffs it into a saddle bag. The other men let down the stag and quarter the body and load the pieces into meat bags that they hang over the backs of their saddles. Only the head remains un-mutilated.

  Jimmy comes over and sits beside me.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. They’re laughing at me, aren’t they?”

  “No, they ain’t.”

  “Yes, they are.”

  “Maybe a little. But it ain’t no big deal. It’s a hard thin’ to do when you ain’t done it before.”

  “But I killed rabbits. And other things.”

  “It’s different though, ain’t it? When they’s big.”

  “Yeah. It looked at me and it knew.”

  “Whataya mean it looked at you?”

  “Like it knew what I was about to do. In an intelligent way. Like it was judging me or something.”

  “Let’s jus’ forget it and get on back.”

  We mount up with the others and ride back up the gulch and out onto the highlands, heading into the long light of late afternoon, back the way we came, although in a more direct route. The deerhounds trudge along beside us, their energy long spent. One of them has a bloody gash in its side, presumably from the stag’s horns. Junior is too tired to keep up, and Jimmy scoops him into his saddle and carries him in his arms. I lag behind and feel less part of the group than when we left. Which is kind of hard to imagine.

  The stag’s severed head is tied to the rear of Finn’s saddle, antlers up and facing back. And the
entire way home it seems to stare at me with lifeless eyes, its frozen expression mocking me for foolishly thinking it makes any difference whose hand it is that moves the knife when the deed is already done.

  “Dead is dead,” it seems to say. “Your day will come.”

  CHAPTER 14

  The Feast

  The boiled human skull is the guest of honor.

  It grins at us from the table’s head in the great hall.

  It’s hard to believe I helped carry her corpse out just this morning. But despite death joining us for dinner, the mood is jovial as the guests laugh and tell stories, drinking wine poured from jugs and passing great platters heaped with food.

  When the venison comes my way, I pass it on to Jimmy without taking any for my plate. Not because I have any trouble eating meat now, and not because I suddenly think hunting is cruel, but because I don’t feel worthy of consuming the stag’s flesh when I was too weak to take its life.

  Finn sits at the head of the long table next to the skull. I notice that every time he takes food for himself, he places some on her plate, too. It’s strange to see that lipless and bony grin disappearing behind a mound of uneaten food. But Finn seems remarkably celebratory, recounting the story of our stag hunt for those at the table who weren’t present. Kindly, he leaves the part about my failure completely out in the retelling. As I watch the guests hang on his every word, it’s clear that they really love him. I think I’m beginning to also. He has a cool kind of calm, as if nothing were ever any big deal to him, and his wide smile is an almost constant counterweight to his blue, twinkling eyes.

  “Tell us a poem!” someone shouts.

  “Yes,” another chimes in. “Time for a poem.”

  The guests fall quiet by ones and twos until the only sound left is the splash of pouring wine as Riley refills glasses. Finn sighs unconvincingly, putting on a show of reluctance when his eyes clearly give away his pride in being asked. He stands and pushes his chair in, leaning against its high back. Then he reaches down and places a hand gently on the skull.

  “I’d like to dedicate this to Lady Awen, my dearly departed daughter.”

  His daughter? Did I hear him right? There’s no way. That woman was twice Finn’s age if she was a day. At least she was twice his apparent age. Then it hits me—what if Finn’s like Radcliffe? What if he’s had the serum? Could he be hundreds of years old too? Was he installed here to guard the encryption key hidden in the David? My head swirls with questions, but before I can even begin to sort through them, Finn sweeps his arms out theatrically and bursts into song:

  “In the dawn of Earth’s distant past, the gods gave birth to a lowly beast. Naked and cold in darkness vast, one grew bold and joined the feast.

  “It’s fair to say she raised a stir—how dare a lowly woman dine with gods. Fierce they fought over who would eat her, but not before one fell in love.

  “Concealed in his cloak they snuck away, he pledged her his heart and began to weep. While in his arms she begged to stay, and on an island he made safe her keep.”

  Here Finn pauses to gulp his wine, grinning mischievously. The crowd sits riveted, looking on and waiting, even though I get the feeling they’ve heard this many times. He continues:

  “On the island god and woman together lay, safely hidden beneath his cloak of fog. Then there came at last a fateful day, when shame sent away the god.

  “For inside the woman a child grew, from the seed of Mannan an immortal son. Half god, half man, a deadly duo—a gift of love by a woman’s courage won.

  “But the jealous gods had other plans, they opened hell above and sent beasts to kill. But preserved by sacrifices made of man, Mannan’s cloak of fog protects the island still.”

  Finn finishes the song with a bow. The guests leap to their feet with wild applause. Jimmy glares a silent warning at me not to challenge anything in Finn’s story, but he doesn’t need to worry because I learned my lesson with the pig people. Besides, I’m still too hung up on the old woman being Finn’s daughter to think much about the poetic mythology he just delivered.

  Now that the poem is over, everyone reclaims their seats and commences another course of drinking and eating, this one more conversational than the last, either due to the elevated mood after Finn’s performance or to the wine.

  A woman turns to me: “Finn tells us you two are here for the games?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” I nod.

  “Did you travel far?” she asks. “I haven’t seen you before. Wait. Let me guess. You must have come from Ayre in the north. You have that look.”

  “Yes,” I say. “You guessed right.”

  “Does the heather still bloom purple there in the spring?”

  I nod and smile, looking for a way out of the conversation. Fortunately, Jimmy jumps in.

  “Tell us about the games?” he asks. “If you dun’ mind.”

  “Have you never been?” She looks surprised.

  “No,” we say in unison.

  “Well,” she leans in closer, her tone conspiratorial, “I’ll give you a tip then. But you mustn’t tell, or they’ll give away my seat. The one to watch out for this year is Bree.”

  “And why should we watch out for him?”

  “Not him,” she says. “Her. She was last year’s runner-up, and I’ve heard talk around that she’s been training ever since. Someone said they saw her running the eastern hills, carrying a goat on her back. But I happen to think that’s exaggerated.”

  I want to ask her more about these games, but at the same time I don’t want to give away the fact that we don’t know anything at all.

  “Why would running hills help?”

  “Stamina, of course,” she says. “That and everyone knows she has a ball tied to a post in her uncle’s pen that she swats at in between doing chores. Strictly forbidden, but she does.”

  “A ball on a post?”

  “Yes. To toughen up her hands.”

  Before I can get more out of her about these games, we’re interrupted by Riley ringing his bell. Finn is standing at the head of the table, holding his daughter’s skull in his hand and an auger drill in the other. He looks at his guests and speaks.

  “It would please me greatly if you would be so kind as to observe a moment of silence while I formally install Lady Awen in her place of honor among the Clan of MacFinn.”

  He lays the skull sideways on the table. Riley appears at his side and holds the skull in place while Finn sets the auger at its temple and rotates the handle, drilling a hole into the bone. When the drill is clean through, he backs it out and turns the skull and performs the same operation on the other side. Then he holds the skull up to the massive starlit window in the far wall and closes one eye and sights a line through the skull, as if he were some ancient astronomer contemplating the heavens through a telescope made of bone. He nods to Riley, apparently satisfied with their work. Riley steps over to the wall and pulls a gold, braided rope, and the tapestries covering the walls of the long hall part like curtains, revealing many hundreds of hanging skulls grinning down from recessed racks. Adult skulls, child skulls, baby skulls, even a few deerhound skulls. My skin crawls to think that they’ve been hiding there all during dinner, silently waiting behind their curtains.

  Riley sets a stepladder against a corner of the wall, and Finn gracefully climbs up it, carrying his daughter’s skull. He pauses to look down on the guests and speaks.

  “As you can see, we’re quickly running out of space here. And as I have no intentions of remodeling again anytime soon, you Clan MacFinn folks had better just slow down with your dying already.”

  The guests break their silence with a laugh.

  Finn reaches to the highest row, slides out the wooden dowel that holds the skulls, and slips his daughter’s skull onto the rack. When she’s tucked away with the others, he climbs down, dusts his hands together, places them on his hips, and looks up at the wall.

  “Not a bad-looking family, if you ask me,” he says. �
�I just look forward to the day when we’re all together again.” Then he nods to Riley, and Riley pulls the rope and the tapestries slide closed, covering the wall of skulls.

  The guests raise up their glasses to toast.

  “Today for Lady Awen,” one of them calls. “Tomorrow for us!”

  Jimmy and I raise our glasses, too, although the wine is beginning to go to my head. I’ve tried to take only sips during dinner, mostly because it tastes horrid, but they seem to drink no other liquid here with dinner. Even so, I’m afraid I’ve had more than I should already, because the designs woven into the wall tapestries begin to swirl together in fantastic images of living color, and I can almost hear the chattering of all those grinning skulls hiding behind them.

  The guests leave the tables now and spill into the center of the hall, carrying their goblets and jugs, and the party takes on a less formal feel. Candles are blown out, the lamps lowered. Several men grab the tables and slide them against the far wall. Angus wheels in a cart filled with wood and builds up the fire. Riley drags in deerskin bean bags, and people begin to sprawl on them in pairs. Finn disappears and comes back carrying a grand harp that he sits down with beside the fire and begins to play. The music is beautiful in the open acoustics of the great hall and even more beautiful yet when he begins to sing again. Jimmy flops on a beanbag and closes his eyes, either entranced by the music or feeling the wine himself. Taking advantage of the distraction, I wander off by myself to explore.

  The laughing and music fades in the hall behind me as I enter the dark statue room. No candles or lamps burn here, and it takes a long time for my eyes to adjust to the small amount of moonlight coming in through the tall windows. I dance my way nimbly betwixt the shadowy figures, as if trespassing into the distant past. Silent warriors stretch to strike me down; frozen mothers nurse their cradled infant sons; ivory angels rise up on outspread wings; busts follow me with shadowy stares.