But that day – that so-called “All Saints” – they named each water drop after one of the twelve ponies on Hirta and watched them compete – two at a time – in heats – in race-offs – in the final race for the Festival Championship. They roared themselves so hoarse, cheering on their ponies, that when it came to the singing, the Keeper of Music led a chorus of frogs and sheepdogs croaking, coughing and growling their way through hymns, cradle-songs and ballads.
Quill tried to sing Murdina’s song: The water is wide… But the net holding his memory had frayed, and holes had opened up that let the words wriggle free and swim away.
The littler boys had to do the dancing. The others were too tall to stand upright in the Bothy. Some whose heads had not reached the ceiling when they arrived now had to bend their knees to avoid cracking their skulls. (Quill’s shoulder was glad of the excuse not to dance.)
There was no feast. There was no bonfire. But they made John Queen of the Stac, and using greasy ash from a burned-out petrel, drew a spiky crown on the cave wall over her sleeping place. When she sat up, with her back to the wall, the sketch rested just above her hair.
“Tomorrow, can we have Easter?” asked Davie.
“Sheep brain,” said Kenneth. “Easter’s not after All Saints.”
“No, Christmas comes first, Davie,” John explained more gently.
“Who’s Keeper of Days?” Kenneth snapped at her. “Christmas is when I say.”
Domhnall Don shifted his haunches and moved a stone from behind him as if it had been pressing into his back. Then he turned onto his stomach to peer into the crevice he had uncovered. He swept out, from behind it, a heap of decaying litter, like leaves blown into the angle of a wall. They were feet – the feet of puffins. Every day since Euan’s vision, Don had been pulling one foot from each puffin he ate – one each day – and poking it into the hole: keeping a record of time passing. A secretive pastime since others were supposedly keeping a calendar. But then Don was a cautious man, who trusted himself sooner than other folk.
“Suppose we began to…fret around the turn from summer to autumn…” he said, and counted out the wizened, tiny feet like a man counting his savings. Ten mouths counted with him, silently. Ten pairs of eyes watched the riches pile up: the currency of Time. Kenneth counted the days on his calendar, ready to challenge this rival Keeper of Days.
“December. Advent,” said Euan as the last webbed foot fell onto the pile. “The Time of Coming. They will come for us now.”
But Don had not started his puffin-calendar until the day of Euan’s vision – weeks after their arrival on the Stac. “By my reckoning the year has turned already. Some nights this arm keeps me from sleeping. The days dawned earlier this week than last. The year has turned already.”
The news was greeted with disbelief. The older boys (who had a fair grasp of time-passing) saw it as a sign that the winter was half gone and they might yet live to see spring and the return of the birds. The younger ones saw only the ice of January and February floating towards them, ready to congeal the blood in their veins.
“Sevenfold blessings to our friends,” murmured Farriss. “Is it 1728, then?”
Was it? When Time itself has ended, can one year give way to another and still have a number? Was God’s abacus still totting up the years? Or had God himself lost count – of the years, of the days, of the number of souls awaiting collection at the End of All Things?
Parliament convened, but not to decide anything. Truly, Farriss and Don were just struggling after some kind of normality, trying to give the days some shape and purpose. The truth was, the birds were gone from the Stac. The Dead time had come. And though it was not a thing you could say to boys, the fowling party had run out of time. Very soon now, they would starve.
“The thing we should do,” said Euan brightly, “is to search for omens.”
It was true they had let the practice slide. Back on Hirta they had done it routinely every day. Back when they were expecting angels at any moment, they had watched avidly for signs in the sky, hints among the stars, soul birds hovering or monsters erupting from the sea. When had they stopped looking?
Kenneth said, surly as ever, “I’ll look out the door and see a few, shall I? Dunna need to freeze our tails off outside.”
Lachlan agreed with him, but it was Euan’s idea that carried the vote. Domhnall Don (a man who favoured practical solutions) nodded his approval. “Provided you boys promise to check every cleit you pass on your quest; there may be still one or two that we’ve missed.” He added under his breath, “Birds fill a belly fuller than any omen.”
“We could go down to the water and the blue-green men would maybe tell us things to come!” suggested Niall.
“Aye, and while you’re there, fill your pockets with crabs and limpets,” Don agreed, enthusiastic for the idea of fish soup.
But Farriss said no: “None’s to go down by the water in this wind. The swell will be massive.”
“I hate crabs,” said Lachlan.
“Then you can eat air pie, or find us some birds!” roared Don, and the hand he flexed incessantly (to prove it still had movement) looked very like a crab squirming on its back.
Though Quill’s shoulder did not much relish a climb to Upper Bothy, the rest of him thought it the surest route to finding an omen. “Sure to be a page or two o’ Cane’s Bible caught in some cranny.”
Murdo said: “Omens aren’t omens if you know where to look for ’em.” But Quill did not agree: it was no more than common sense to look for them where they were likely to be. Murdo was not convinced.
As the fowlers spread out across the face of the first precipice, heading their separate ways, Murdo saw a cloud the shape of an anvil – “the exact same shape as an anvil, man!” – and decided he should report back to Mr Don with the omen. Quill suggested Murdo just wanted to get back quick and be out of the wind. They argued.
Increasingly, the two lacked the energy for conversation, for jokes. On a diet of oily soup and ice-fringed, sleepless nights, their goodwill was failing and falling back inside their bodies, unable to reach their eyes to look out, or their mouths to smile, or their throats to speak.
“Do as you like,” said Murdo. “I’m going back.”
Davie, though, was quick to catch what Murdo let fall. “I’ll come with you, Quilliam!” he said. “Where are we going?”
Quill rubbed his shoulder, preoccupied – worried that he might not manage the climb after all. But seeing the eagerness on Davie’s face, he could not bring himself to forfeit the boy’s admiration.
“We could go fishing down there!” suggested Davie. “I have the Iron Finger safe here, look, and it would maybe beckon in a fish and inside the fish’d be an omen, like in the story.”
Quill wondered which story: there had been so many. These days, all he could think, before he fell asleep, was of the hardness of the stone floor under his bad shoulder and the hunger in his stomach. “Tomorrow, maybe, Davie,” he said. “Mr Farriss said the swell’s too big.”
So it was. The sea was flexing its back as though the sea floor was too strewn with rocks to let it rest peacefully. Each unbreaking wave surged many fathoms up the rock face. Still, they should have gone fishing.
Instead, they climbed towards the summit, the wind coming in fits and starts, slapping them in the face, punching them in the kidneys, whipping their long hair into their eyes. Davie looked like a girl, his hair had grown so far below his cap. Quill supposed he looked much the same himself. (Only John had taken the sharp knife to hers, and chopped it short, sooner than encourage Kenneth, Murdo or Calum.)
They passed Mr Farriss standing within an alcove of rock, like a statue in a church wall. Since the business at the Overhang, the Keeper of the Watch had taken his duties in deadly earnest, subjecting himself to hours out-of-doors, watching for omens or whales… They greeted him as they climbed by him, but he was concentrating too hard to acknowledge them.
Only minutes later, the man’
s voice came from below them: “Ship! A light! Light a light! A signal!”
Farriss was hidden from sight by the ragged bulging precipices of the Stac, but they could just catch his bawling over the sound of the wind. Two boys climbing the steep “chest” of the Stac cannot readily turn round to look, cannot turn their backs on the cliff whose ledges and handholds are all that keep them from falling. So not until they reached a broader terrace could Quill and Davie peer out to sea. “Where? Which direction?” Quill called, but Farriss was no longer close enough to be heard.
Had there been a light? And if there had, was it a ship’s light or wishful thinking? Angel chariots or a knot of white birds? One thing was sure: it was not a signal-fire, because who lights a fire onboard a ship? Then it struck Quill just what Farriss had said: he was to light a signal fire that the ship would see.
“Is it an omen, Quill?” asked Davie.
“Not an omen. It’s a ship. We are to signal it!”
Quill lay down on his stomach and yelled over the ledge’s rim: “I’ll light a fire! I’ll light a bonfire!” Then, unwilling to leave Davie on his own, he told the boy to follow behind him.
“But the omen…” said Davie, pointing out to sea.
“Stop your noise and climb, will you.”
From deep in his memory had risen up the memory of feathers and egg baskets piled in a heap, like an unlit bonfire: the bed where Cane and John had slept back-to-back.
“Come on, Davie!”
“Where to?”
“To Upper Bothy, course!”
In the cave the feathers were gone, but the crushed egg baskets still lay where they had served Cane as a mattress. Wind had pulled at the heap, but the straw bits still hung together and seemed to be dry. Davie danced about in the cave-mouth, scanning the ocean for any glimpse of a ship.
“Will it be angels, Quill? Will it be angels in that ship?”
Quill dragged all the chaff together into a mound. Then he began striking his own knifeblade against the floor – the wall – trying to strike a spark. He tore off a fish-skin patch that John had lovingly used to quilt his jacket, and pinched out tufts of feathers from inside.
“Quick, Quilliam! It’ll be gone!” called Davie.
A spark. Two cries of triumph. Another disappointment. A fire needs a draught if it is to catch light. Quill pushed at the barricade of rocks in the cave-mouth, intended to keep out the wind. The wall gave way one rock at a time – then suddenly, unbalancing him onto his shoulder. His collarbone screamed. The heap of straw-chaff heaved and stirred, and a gust of cold barged its way into the Bothy, as though it had simply been waiting its chance. On and on Quill slashed with his knife, in time with the throbbing pain in his shoulder, not even noticing when a spark finally fell on the wheaten tangle of straw and blackened it. Then suddenly his face filled up with smoke. Another blast of wind lifted the entire mattress clear of the floor. When the gust left the cave, it took with it all the air, and Quill began to cough.
The mattress was scorching, blackening, without a glimmer of fire. It needed air. It needed the wind to blow it into life. As Quill crawled outside on all fours, dragging the mattress behind him, billows of dirty smoke escorted him to the door before swirling back inside again, loth to face the weather. He let go of it in the cave entrance, where it could not help but catch the full force of the wind, and he stumbled away from the choking smoke.
Quill and Davie, standing on the gentle gradient outside the Bothy, hugging each other to keep their balance, were shoved and shouldered by the wind into a clumsy shuffling dance. The shadows behind them danced too…because the mouth of the Bothy had finally filled up with jumping flame. The combustion set the air spinning, so that hundreds of wispy fragments of straw began to swirl round and round and round and round. Here and there, clumps broke free – firebirds soaring into the night.
Night?
It was not night! They had left Midway Bothy immediately after Parliament, and climbed for two, maybe three hours. It was not much past midday. And yet the sky was as dark as late evening. The Stac was roofed over with solid, slate-coloured cloud, as though the citadel of Heaven itself had descended to hover over St Kilda and they were seeing the underside of its foundations.
“We did it, we did it, we did it!” cried Davie, dizzied and entranced by the swirling vortex of straw. They had made a lighthouse of Warrior Stac, casting a beam of light to one quarter of the compass and far out to sea.
Moments. It must have been moments before the puny remains of the egg baskets were all burned and the fire was out. Fearing to walk over the cinders in the cave-mouth, they went to plunder the nearest cleit for food. A puffin, perhaps. They deserved a bite of puffin in return for lighting a signal-fire! Battered harder and harder by the wind, though, they were obliged to crouch down on the leeside of the little storage tower. Quill realized they would not be able to climb down again until the wind dropped. Climb down? They could not so much as get back to the cave, the blast was so powerful.
“Storm coming,” said Davie above the noise of the blast.
“You could say,” shouted Quill. Their heads were not a hand-span apart, and yet they needed to shout. They had to take off their caps sooner than lose them to the wind. It was then that Quill noticed how Davie’s hair was bushed out, every strand separate, as though, like an animal, he could bristle his fur. Putting a hand to his own, he felt the crackle: the air was so charged with electricity that their hair was lousy with it.
Momentarily he wondered: was it they who had done it? Rather than attract the attention of a handful of fishermen or a passing frigate, had their bonfire summoned up the storm instead? The sweat seemed to be freezing to a crust on his skin, the wind to be reaching round the cleit, snatching at him, trying to tug him into the open for a fist-fight. The stones of the cleit shifted against one another – but it held its ground, shielding these descendants of the fowlers who had built it years before.
And several saints, too, seemingly.
Because when the boys turned round to set their backs to the tower, they were confronted with a dozen pairs of eyes. Storm petrels were huddling close to the ground: birds who never normally came ashore during the winter. Those little saints who had suffered a fiery death as winged candles in Midway Bothy. “Mother-Mary’s-chickens”, who hovered over the souls of drowned sailors; “soul birds”, who seized on the souls of harsh ships’ captains, and ran with them over the wave-tops.
Storm petrels, which sheltered in the lee of ships when storms were coming.
More joined the twelve, shuffling forward across the boys’ legs, even standing in their laps. Neither boy moved, except that Davie tilted his head up against Quill’s so that they could hear each other.
“What do they want?” he asked.
“Shelter, same as us.”
“Are they an omen, d’you know?”
“’Course. Holy Mary sent them. For supper.”
“But I have nothing for them to eat!”
“Davie,” said Quill, “you are surely the brightest star in your mother’s sky, and I love you dearly, but…our supper, not theirs.” And he realized how long it had been since he laughed.
They grabbed the birds two at a time, with a fowler’s quickness of hand that would have put a card-sharp to shame. In trying to wring their necks, Quill’s shoulder betrayed him, so he slid the heads under one hip and rolled his weight on to each fragile skull. He felt the blood through his trews, warmer than the rain. They had barely noticed when the rain began, but did not resent it; it only made the birds slower to take off, easier to catch. Within two minutes the two of them had secured supper for all hands, and broth for days to come.
Reasoning that more petrels would be sheltering in the lee of other cleits, they posted the limp bodies into the little stone tower and headed for the next, a little farther from the Bothy.
They were rewarded with the sight of forty more storm-petrels standing like worshippers before an altar, heads drawn down into
their bodies.
“Look, Quill! Look!” called Davie and showed the fish-hook held between his knuckles, the quicker to catch hold on the birds and kill them.
A light at sea. A spark. A bonfire spiralling into the sky. And now storm petrels sent like a gift out of the heart of the sea! It was as if omens were falling as heavily as the rain, filling the boys’ eye-sockets and shouting in at their ears: All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well…!
… Except that the storm petrels had taken shelter from something more terrifying than rain or winter’s cold, or old wives’ tales. They too could read omens – in the cloud, in the sea’s unease, in the seething menace out there in the deep Atlantic. Instinct told them a storm was coming that would spin the world like a weathercock.
It broke cover now, snapping the rope horizon that separated sky from sea, plunging and lunging towards St Kilda as if to sink each island and stac to the bed of the ocean. The sea itself, its hide made scaly by the hammering rain, writhed and rose: a dragon – the World-Eater which myth said lay on the seabed with a belly full of fire. Trident lightning jabbed and stabbed at it, but seemed only to goad the dragon to an even greater fury. Though the rain flattened the far wave-tops out at sea, when those waves broke against the Stac, their spray rose hundreds of feet into the air, with a noise like cannon fire. Over on Hirta, the storm would be flaying away the white sand beach, the thatch from the houses, the turf from the mountainsides. There were no longer spaces between lightning and thunderclaps, but one single, incessant concatenation.
On the peak of Warrior Stac, it drowned the rock slopes under cataracts of icy water, washing dead petrels away into the darkness, washing lime-streaked rocks back to blackness. Only when lightning ripped open the sky could Quill and Davie see each other, or where to set foot, to set hand. They dared not attempt to reach the shelter of Upper Bothy, for all it was only a twenty-minute clamber away. They remained crouching behind the cleit, Quill cradling Davie between his knees, Davie cradling the last of the petrels, like tiny wizened babies, in the crook of each arm.
Where the World Ends Page 13
