by Morris West
I was surprised at first by the tales that were told. They were all of faerie and of magic. But then I understood that killing is a magical act and that it demands a ritual: the chanting priest, the axeman, all in black with his face covered, the processional afterwards, with the maidens dishevelled and the old women tearing their milkless breasts, the men solemn and swaying as if in drunken ecstasy.
One of the lads told the story of the two young men of Rodel who built a ship so beautiful that the sea grew envious and would not let it ever come back to the land. He quoted the old saying: ‘The sea likes company, but it covets what it likes.’ Which led to another fable – or was it fable, being so deeply rooted in the folk memory? – that a sailor should always be buried on the beach, else the jealous sea would come back at night and swamp the land to have him back. Only those who were buried on the sacred isle of Iona would come dry to the judgment day, for in the last great flood Iona would float upon the waves so that God might recognize his saints.
Then there was lost Atlantis, so beautiful a legend from so rude a mouth. There were still old men living who had seen or been shown, not far from the shore, streets and temples and living men and cattle grazing among the grasses under the sea. And if there were no Atlantis, how come the woodcock tried to find it every year, flying as far west as they could and then returning, exhausted, to the Isles? How come the blue-eyed grass grew only in two places in the world: Bermuda and Ireland? The Atlantic was too wide for any bird to fly with a seed in his beak. Once upon a time there must have been a land in between.
I was the day’s hero, so I weighed in with my bestiary of New Guinea: the sorcerer who could change himself into a cassowary and be in two places at once, a bird in one, a man in the other, the man talking like a bird, the bird like a man; the pig-god who demanded a sacrifice of the firstborn, so that the woman killed her babe and suckled a piglet instead.
After that Ruarri told his fairy tale and – God rot him for the poetry that contradicted the bloody rest of him – I could not tell how much of it was fact and how much fabulous nonsense. He talked of the place of the Stones, where Kathleen and I had first begun to know each other. Whatever the experts wrote, said Ruarri, the truth of it was far different. The great stones were not hewn in the Lews at all. They came from a far place, brought by priests in feathered robes, with black servants in attendance and wrens, a whole flock of them, flying around their heads. In the west country of England and in Wales, the wren was called the druid bird, and they used to kill it on St Stephen’s Day to celebrate the death of the old religion.
But the old religion wasn’t dead yet. Not by a long chalkmark. Ask the old folk in the Lews and they would tell you, in a whisper, that there were still families who ‘belonged to the Stones’. Ask them again, gently and believingly, they would tell you that the Shining One still came on midsummer morning and stood by the great stone, and if you were there when the cuckoo called you would see him, plain as day. If you plighted troth among the Stones, the marriage would come to pass. If you had your first loving there, damp in the mist, the marriage would be happy and wholesome ever after. Had he seen the Shining One? Well, he thought he had, but he couldn’t be sure. The way he told it, I couldn’t be quite sure either, and I’m a storyteller, who knows the tricks of the trade. True or false, the magic worked, so that when we carried the stag away, two and two, resting each other every half mile, it was just a carcass, ready to be hung and gutted and skinned and smoked for eating.
On the way back, when we were walking loose and unburdened, Ruarri asked me, ‘What did that do to you, seannachie?’
‘What?’
‘The killing.’
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re a liar.’
‘So don’t ask me damn fool questions.’
‘Did you get a thrill out of it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’
‘I always want a woman. There and then. No waiting.’
‘I want to puke.’
‘I wonder what makes the difference?’
‘Who knows? Let’s drop it.’
We were both too tired for teasing, so we dropped it, amicably enough. None the less a damage was done. I was reminded of Kathleen McNeil and that strange moment when we hung, a foot from dying, on the cliff road. I remembered what she said: ‘There’s no fear, no regret. Just a kind of wonder.’ Twist the words a little, give the phrase a male gender, and you had Ruarri’s thought exactly. Twist the knife a little and you could have me jealous enough to kill Ruarri more happily than the stag – and take my woman afterwards.
True to form always, Ruarri leaned on the hilt and gave the blade just that little extra torque. He didn’t do it immediately; he was much too shrewd for that. But later, at the croft, while the boys were in the outhouse dressing the meat and we were sitting over a drink, he began to quiz me.
‘This trip we’re taking, seannachie. We could be away ten days or more.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Hell no! Why should I?’
‘I just wondered.’
‘About what?’
‘You and Kathleen. Have you told her yet?’
‘I’ve mentioned it.’
‘She doesn’t mind?’
‘She hasn’t said so.’
‘Dangerous, laddie! Dangerous!’
‘Why?’
‘Well, let’s face it, big brother. You and I are free to cut ourselves a slice of shortbread any time any place we want. In Trondheim, for instance, there’s the sweetest little woman you ever saw, recently widowed, just crying to be comforted, and she has a house all of her own, clean, private, and never a tear afterwards. On the other hand – and this is brothers’ talk, mind you – a woman just fallen in love, and getting what I know you have to give her, does have the right to complain if the comfort’s snatched away. As it will be. Have you thought of that?’
I had, but my conclusions were none of his business. I had thought that a few days at sea would give me the purge I needed, a purge of liver and lights and brain box, so that I might enjoy the good things I had without this perpetual itch to analyse and this haunting of melancholy that came upon me unawares. I had thought that my absence might make Kathleen need me more and be more ready to trot off with me at the summer’s end and get married. Also – and this, I thought, was a sign of healing – I wanted something new and simple to write about, to work my hand back into the trade. The answer I gave to Ruarri was a little different.
‘Kathleen won’t complain. She’s working most days and more than half the nights of the week. Besides, we’ll be going off together after the summer.’
‘Getting married?’
‘That’s the general idea.’
‘Good for you, seannachie. Good for you. Have you given her the ring yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Playing it loose, eh?’
‘Not too loose. Just easy.’
‘How does she feel about that?’
‘She likes it.’
Then because he was getting too close to the bone, and I was beginning to feel some pain, I decided to do a little probing on my own account. So I told him of my meeting with Duggie Donald in Tarbert and gave him a carefully edited version of our talk. He frowned over it for a while, then got up to pour a new round of drinks. When he was settled again, he said:
‘They’re leaning on me, seannachie. I don’t like that. This goddamned British bureaucracy is a pain in the arse.’
‘What do they have against you?’
‘Nothing yet. Just rumour and loose talk.’
‘Like I heard in Stornoway the other night?’
He gave me a wary grin and nodded. ‘Things like that, yes.’
‘Any substance to them?’
‘Some. But nothing they can build a case on.’
‘There’s something I want to say, Ruarri.’
‘Say it.’
‘I don’t want to know your business, but I’m making a run with you. If questions are asked of me, I want to have answers ready – true ones, if not whole ones. I don’t want to be caught on the wrong foot, as I was that first day. I don’t always think so quickly. Also, if there’s trouble, I don’t want it believed or hinted that it came from me. Clear?’
‘Clear as a bell, brother. Let me think how I can put it to you.’
He thought about it a long time and it gave me a secret pleasure to watch him. The more worries he had of his own, the less he was likely to push that red beard into my soup. Finally, with a great show of frankness, he spread his thoughts before me.
‘I’m a fisherman, seannachie. The two Helens are registered as trawlers. They’re not licensed or insured – and my crews aren’t insured, either – for the carrying of freight or passengers. Board of Trade regulations and all that. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘But you can’t run a trawler profitably, any more than you can run a taxi, on dead miles. By dead miles I mean a run with no fish in the hold, nothing to sell when you tie up. That happens. It happens more and more, with the Russians and the Danes and the Norwegians and the Germans and the Portuguese, and the boys from Hull and Grimsby, all trying to haul a living out of the same sea. So one way or another we have to trade. Bollison, for example, whom we met in the Minch, he’ll run into Stornoway to buy the fish he can’t catch for himself, just because the market’s undersupplied in the canneries he serves. We all do that and it’s legal. Sometimes I’ll get a radio call that there’s a glut of whitefish in Orkney and none here. I’ll make a run up and buy, just to pay wages on the profit. I’m getting rather good at this communications business…But there are still dead miles. Too many. And in a bad season I could go broke, which I have no intention of doing just to keep the Board of Trade happy. So from time to time I do what a tramp skipper does, I carry freight: special freight for special customers, from ports where I’m known to ports where they’re known, or the other way round.’
‘What sort of freight?’
‘That varies and you don’t have to know about it. The hold stinks of fish and you can’t bear the smell, so you’ve never seen inside it. And you won’t be round for loading or unloading because you’ll be off in a bar drinking with a girl. You’ll know where we’ve been, but why we were there will be the skipper’s business, written in the log for all to see, including Duggie Donald. You don’t have seaman’s papers; you have a passport. You’re a passenger – non-paying – come along for the ride, because you like the sea and you’re writing a story about it. Simple? Complete?’
‘Except for one thing. Do you carry drugs?’
‘Good question, seannachie. And the answer is, never. Satisfied?’
‘Satisfied.’
‘Of course, if you’re not, or you’re scared of involvement, you could call it off. I’d have no hard feelings about it.’
‘I’m not worried and I’m looking forward to it. When do we leave?’
‘Any time this week. Half a day’s notice. That suit you?’
‘Fine. I hope I can be useful.’
‘You can split helm watch with me. There’s not much to do on deck until the nets come in. You can lend a hand then if you feel like it.’
And there we left it, with a lot of questions still unanswered, but none urgent enough to trouble us yet. I thanked him for the good day, took my leave and headed south to see Kathleen.
She was tired and inclined to be fretful. She had been called out twice during the night, and the day had brought a larger than normal crop of elderly bladders and rheumatoid joints and silted arteries. The house was closing in on her. The housekeeper was in a bad humour and the village folk were distant, but damned demanding the moment they got a bellyache or a cough. She needed some cherishing and she got it. Then she wanted to go out; but, as I was still in my climbing clothes and no fit company for the fashionable tourists of Tarbert, we decided to stroll down to Rodel, drink with the locals in the pub and dine there afterwards.
Rodel is a strange little place, almost uncanny in the stillness of a summer evening, with its ruinous dock, the old Church of St Clement perched on the hilltop, the bay beyond, where, if the tide is right, you may see another circle of stones like those of Callanish, drowned in the deep water. Whether this is fact or fancy I do not know even now. However, with Kathleen on my arm and heads turning and faces pressed against windowpanes to watch the doctor and her gentleman friend, fact and fancy were the same thing: wholly pleasant and wholly believable.
There was an hour yet to sundown and the white cottages were bathed in a warm, soft light. There was still movement on the road: a group of little girls skipping and telling a rhyme, over and over in the Gaelic; a small boy racing a dog along the verge; a crofter, home-coming, with his cap jaunty on his head and a mattock over his shoulder, his coat dangling from the haft like a banner; an old, bowed woman in a shawl, carrying a basket of groceries.
The peace of it was a blessing for bruised spirits. By the time we came to Rodel, we were back in the love country, hand in hand and singing with the joy of it.
The monks who founded the Church of St Clement are all dead and gone centuries ago; the Free Kirk wants no part of its ancient imagery, so the Ministry of Works has taken it over as an ancient monument, and, if you want to look inside, you must get the key at the hotel. You can make a commentary on that if you have the heart for it. We did not, because the wonder was on us; and when we pushed open the creaking gate and stepped into the churchyard, grown high with nettles and grasses, we were outside of time. When we kissed, as we did, even the loveless ghosts were glad of us: the MacLeods of MacLeod; the MacCrimmons, who were pipers to the MacLeod; the MacVurrichs, who were their bards, son following son, and the Bearers of the Fairy Flag, whose bones lie, all together, forgotten in the churchyard.
But there are ghosts here older than the MacLeod. High up in the tower, which sailors once used for a marker to guide them home, there are stones carved with strange symbols which came from the drowned circle in the bay; and sometimes at night the Little People visit the hill which used to be their place, before they were driven underground by the Saints of Iona. From this monastic house came the Great Clerk of Rodel, who journeyed to France and was befriended by Charlemagne and gave the Franks their first grammar school. Of course the French will quarrel with that. They quarrel with everything and everybody. But the best liquor always comes out of small bottles, and there was learning in the Isles long before the French ever heard of it. That may not be history, but if you stand under the square tower of St Clement an hour before sunset, with your arms around a beautiful woman who wants the comfort, then you’ll accept the truth of it.
With the comfort given and taken and the ghosts left quiet again, we walked down to the pub and found a place for ourselves among the gaggle of crofters and fishermen in the old-fashioned bar. We were strangers and they left us alone, until one recognized Kathleen for the new doctor and introduced her to the company. The Herries men were different from those of the Lews, less noisy, more shy and sidling, slower to strike up a talk. Even the musicman was a fellow so wispy a breeze could have blown him away; but he coaxed thin, sweet melodies out of an old sailor’s accordion, and we could still hear him when we sat at dinner in a room hung with lace curtains and bobbled velvet drapes.
The food was simple, but the service was rendered with a smile and we were very content with our own company. Kathleen’s megrims were chased away, and mine were locked out of sight in a distant closet of the brain. So our talk was light, drifting and changeable, like mist floating over dark, still water.
‘You’re good for me, mo gradh.’
‘And you for me, young Kathleen.’
‘I’m not really young, you know.’
‘Then I’m older than God.’
‘I think you’ve got younger since we met.’
‘Fresh air and exercise, ma
lt whisky and the loving of Kathleen McNeil – a recipe for the elixir of youth.’
‘I missed you today. I wanted to play truant and come climbing with you.’
‘Thank your stars you didn’t. I’m going to have knots in every muscle tomorrow.’
‘But you bagged your first royal.’
‘My last too.’
‘You’re not proud of it?’
‘The stag was beautiful and complete. The man was a less noble animal.’
‘You’re hard on yourself, but I can understand.’
‘I’m glad you can.’
‘It’s a problem, though. You respect life. You love it. But you can’t cherish everything and everybody. Every ecology depends on death. The world’s so small. So crowded.’
‘Not here, thank God.’
‘Even here, darling. When the land is cropped out, the people die…How was Ruarri?’
‘Fine. He’s the best company in the world when the good mood is on him. He ran me ragged at the beginning of the climb, just to see how I’d take it. After that, no problems. He’s good at everything he does – even the telling of tall stories.’
‘Did you find out anything more about that Maeve O’Donnell?’
‘Nothing much. Except they had some kind of a love affair that died a natural death. Ruarri says she’s too intelligent for his taste. Which probably means she’s one woman who wouldn’t stand any nonsense from him.’
‘I’d say she’s still in love with him.’
‘Probably.’
‘I wonder what a love affair with Ruarri would be like?’
‘Stormy, I should think. Depending on what the woman wanted out of it.’
‘He’s enormously attractive.’
‘To you?’
‘To most women, I’d say.’
‘Could you take him on? And handle him?’
‘I could be tempted. If I didn’t have you.’
‘He talks about you every time we meet.’
‘And you?’
‘I don’t talk about you. There’s a big, red “no sale” sign that goes up every time your name is mentioned. But I think about you all the time. There’s not a moment of the day or night when you’re out of my mind.’
