The Way to Babylon (Different Kingdoms)

by Paul Kearney

  ‘Aye,’ Riven answered him.

  Calum wore an old tweed coat with more than its fair share of patches, and his cap, as always, perched on his head. There was a lean cast to his face; the grey eyes looked out from a network of wrinkles and laughter lines, and the mouth had a good-humoured quirk to the corner of it that was seldom absent. It was there now, as he considered giving his daughter away to this Irish soldier who had literally fallen into their lives one winter evening, and had been appearing regularly ever since.

  ‘Will you leave the army?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, as soon as I can.’

  ‘In some parts they’d say it was old-fashioned, these days, to be asking a father for his daughter’s hand,’ Calum said, and the grey eyes twinkled.

  ‘Maybe, but you’re all the family Jenny has, and it’s important.’

  Calum nodded approvingly. His eyes shifted to take in the flight of a curlew across the bay, the long curved bill clear in the light of the evening, silhouetted against a darkening sky.

  ‘Her mother was a marvellous woman,’ he said at last, and the eyes lost their focus, seeking somewhere else. ‘Jenny is made from the same mould. Her like doesn’t come round too often.’

  ‘I know,’ Riven said softly.

  Calum puffed smoke again. ‘Aye, you do. I know that, Mike.’ And then a smile etched its way across his face. ‘What about a dowry?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Since you’re being so old-fashioned about it, we may as well go the whole way.’

  ‘No, Calum. There’s no need—’

  ‘You love Camasunary, the bothy; the pair of you.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘It’s rough, and it would need some work, but it would keep you out of the clutches of the bank and such.’

  Riven smiled. For the first time, Calum looked him in the eye, and the quirk at the corner of his mouth twitched into a grin. ‘How about a wee dram to wet the head of the evening?’

  ‘Why not?’

  And they walked back up the glen, to where the light shone out of the open door, and Jenny had the supper waiting for them.

  CHILLED AND ACHING, he woke at dawn, eyes fully open in an instant. The cramp in his limbs filled his head with fire. He sat up and saw the wreck of the bed, mudstained and wet, sheets awry.

  ‘Oh, Christ.’

  He rubbed his face groggily, and when his hand dropped away his eyes were empty.

  So I’m here, after all.

  He stood up, swaying. Around him the familiar jetsam of two lives stared at him from the dressing table, the wardrobe, the shelves and the walls. His breath steamed. The bothy was as cold as stone.

  He stopped to touch a photograph of them both, face expressionless, then moved into the main room. His rucksack squatted forlornly in a puddle by the door, the staff lying beside it. He picked up the hazel and fingered its smoothness. It was comforting, somehow. To possess something which had nothing to do with this past.

  He looked about. A haven, this place had been. But not again.

  He felt like putting it to the torch. She’d like that. He settled for cleaning out the hearth. Gazing at the remnants of the last fire there, he was reluctant to sweep them away. They were a relic. But a reminder, also. He got rid of them, and in a little while had a defiant blaze going. His clothes curled with steam, but he hardly noticed. So much, in here, to remember. He shook his head as though a fly buzzed at it.

  He prepared coffee, heating water in the kettle and skirting the thought of the whisky-filled hip flask. Time enough for that, later. Outside, the morning was dull, windy still. A sun was fleeting through the clouds with a mizzle at its throat. He could hear the sea.

  The kettle whistled loudly, and he drank black coffee. All the perishables had perished long ago. Idly he scanned what he had been writing, flipped through a few pages which had pencilled criticism, suggestion and ribaldry scrawled in them from Jenny. She had often done that.

  He turned away hurriedly. Too close, too near. Not yet.

  He rescued his rucksack and spread out his belongings to dry before the fire. The flames mesmerised him, as they always did. He gulped the scalding coffee down, mustering courage.

  And so, to work.

  He began in the bedroom, collecting her things; their things. He made a pile of them: photographs, a teddy bear, clothes, shoes, a brush with raven hairs clinging to it. Like drift after a storm it mounted, as he methodically checked the drawers, cupboards, under their bed. Then he did the same for the other rooms. Their picture came down also, leaving a gap on the mantelpiece. He refused to look at it as he put it with the rest.

  And when he had gathered up the memories, he placed them in the wardrobe and locked the door, turning the key with a creak, and putting it on the mantelpiece. The fire cracked at him, spitting sparks on to the stone floor. He changed his still-damp clothes before it, hanging them with his other things. For a moment, he examined his naked legs. They were pale, thin and scarred. He thought bitterly of past running and climbing, then dressed, lacing up his hiking boots grimly.

  Feeling better for the dry clothes and the fire, he unpacked the provisions from his rucksack. The sugar was wet, so he set it on the hearthstone. He propped the hazel by the fireplace, drew up a settle, and sat down.

  And now... what?

  A glance towards the typewriter. He cursed. Those sheets were still there. Well, maybe he’d burn them sometime. Maybe.

  He looked around the room. Nothing to show, now, that she had ever existed. Except the grave in Portree, and perhaps the remnant of a splash of blood up on Sgurr Dearg: the Red Mountain. But that would be long gone, washed away by rain off the sea.

  No—nothing.

  It wasn’t fair. It just was not fair.

  He went out, taking the hazel, found a day of iron sea and sky waiting for him, and the waves hissing at the shingle.

  He began collecting drift, partly through habit, partly to wall off his mind. There was a good selection in the wake of the storm the night before. The inevitable fish boxes were prominent, along with remnants of rope, a plastic bottle, some rounded fragments of wood and a dead seal. A grey seal, it was, and half its head had been sheared cleanly away, so the still-moist brown eye stared at him on one side, and a grinning skull on the other. Propeller, probably. He kicked it, and the body quivered from top to bottom.

  He piled the drift before the house, as was his wont. There were no windows on that side, the seaward side. The wind tugged gently at his beard, and he rubbed his chin.

  HE CLEANED THE bothy out thoroughly, washing the stone floor and airing the bedclothes in moments of rainless weather. He had more than enough peat to see him through the winter, the bothy having been deserted until mid-January. The nearby burn supplied water, if he trudged far enough upstream so that it left the salt behind. Food was his only problem, as it had always been a problem at Camasunary. There had been a good store set by in the freezer which chugged quietly along on the generator, but the months of neglect had left it all to spoil. Riven had an unpleasant time cleaning it out and scraping the sea rust from the generator engine until it would burble happily to itself.

  Stags bellowed across the glen at night and in the early morning. The call was old, primeval. Staring into the flames of his fire, he listened to them and could have been a caveman at the world’s dawning, waiting out winter and turning his back to the darkness outside.

  The coast around the bothy was steep and rocky; the way round to Loch Coruisk and Glenbrittle was hair-raising in winter, especially at the Bad Step which was a rock climb at the best of times. Riven began to reacquaint himself with the place by scaling the cliffs and boulders that overhung the foaming sea to the west, looking up at the heart of the Cuillins as they frowned darkly over the coast. He followed deer tracks for the most part, often on all fours, scrambling for heather-choked ledges. He watched an eagle sail out from the heights of the cliffs above, wings feathered like fingers.

  Then he stopped, u
tterly spent, and clung to a wet boulder until the fire in his limbs subsided and he was able to continue. He was trying to make himself fit brutally, with no time for his weakness. And there was the added bonus that his exhaustion threw oblivion round him as soon as his head hit the pillow that night. So he decided to persevere, push himself with savage satisfaction, pick the difficult routes around the coast and the lower slopes of the mountains.

  The following day he saw an otter, off the coast leading to Coruisk. It bobbed dark-headed on the water and at first he mistook it for a seal; but then he saw the prehensile hands holding a fishing float and stopped to stare. The float was yanked underwater and then released so that it shot up into the air. Again and again the otter repeated the game, mere yards away from a rocky smash of coast. Entranced, Riven only left when hunger drove him home. The otter continued playing, totally absorbed.

  To help the food situation, he resurrected the .22 rifle from the closet and went out to kill some of his neighbours. It was only a matter of time before his progress down the glen raised some grouse. He shot two brace, and a hare, before turning back as the weather drove in. Once at the bothy, he set about the task of plucking, skinning and gutting them almost with relish. It was a skill he had not been called upon to use in a long time. He remembered dripping bivouacs on Dartmoor, and trying to boil a skinny rabbit over an inadequate fire. Survival training, it was called. Everyone hated it, but, as usual with most military experiences, was glad he had done it later, over a beer in the mess.

  He stopped his gory work at the sink momentarily, feeling a small pang of loneliness. Not just because of Jenny, but missing the mad horseplay of his youth. Then he chuckled aloud. Youth! I’m not exactly pensionable yet, no matter how old I feel. He packed most of his prey in the freezer, and then set to work making a broth out of the odds and ends. He whistled noiselessly as he worked, but raised his head as he noticed the wind drop. It was no longer rattling down the glen. Now there was only the quiet sighing of the sea: his favourite lullaby. That, and the chugging of the little diesel generator. He listened to the almost-silence for a few moments, and then the hairs on the back of his neck and on the crown of his head rose, for no reason. He turned around quickly, hands red, but there was only the bothy and the hissing of the fire. The generator continued its subdued monologue; the sea sighed on.

  But something had made him turn.

  He walked away from the sink and took the staff from the corner, still listening. Nothing but the normal night noises. A late curlew shrilled its way across the glen, and was gone.

  Then the sound of the generator died.

  His breath caught in his throat as the light of the kitchen went down into darkness. The only radiance was the saffron glow of the fire. There was no sound save the waves on the shore and the drubbing of his heart.

  He went out into a calm night of clear sky and new moon. Shingle crunched under his feet. He could see the black shape of the dead seal off along the shore. Not a breeze stirred.

  But the night was empty, tranquil. His grip on the hazel relaxed. Bloody generator. He turned, thinking he had caught a movement over by the burn, and stood a moment, irresolute. Then he swore. Hill mist in your hair, boyo.

  He set the generator going again, though he could find no reason for its failure, and when he went back into the bothy, the kitchen light was bright and defiant. There was a peculiar half-smell in the house. He wrinkled up his nose; but as soon as he caught it, it seemed, his sense became used to it and it faded. Musky, like an animal. Must have been the game he had killed.

  He returned to his work at the sink.

  FIVE

  WRITING: MAKING PATTERNS on paper, like squeezing blood out of aching fingertips and watching it mark the whiteness.

  They were becoming clearer around him again, his characters. They refused to allow themselves to be printed on paper, but their shadows fell over his shoulder as he sat at his barren desk and tapped the keys of the typewriter aimlessly.

  He plotted the rise and fall of lords and ladies, struggles for power in the wide, green land of his stories, battles and sieges, and forlorn love liaisons which he could never quite bring himself to visualise fully.

  No, it’s no good. It’s gone.

  His world was flat and lifeless, the characters like puppets across a badly painted backdrop. The picture he was creating darkened, grew colder. His imagination drifted into an icy gloom without stars. Battles became ugly, desperate affairs and corpses piled in the snow. Wolves worried at the bodies, and the stench of burning hurt the air. His fingers clicked the keys into a glittering immobility. He ploughed to a halt.

  I have become a season, he thought. I am winter, waiting out the long night before spring.

  Sullen days broke and set as he sat there, staring out of the window at the glen beyond and the vast intruding bulk of the mountains. He watched the gulls squabble over the corpse of the seal, and wished he had buried it or burned it or something. Then he bent his head and the keys clicked slowly again. Like the seal’s body, his story quivered with life; but only through the blows he dealt it. He was heavy-handed as a crab, and the words he made lay on the page as though rigid with ice.

  He went out, looking for release in the watery sun and the fresh wind. Taking the staff, he limped down to where the burn became brackish and sat at the edge of the rust-coloured water, swigging his hip flask defiantly.

  He stared absently at a huddle of boulders across the burn, tracing with his eyes the patterns of the lichen, the pale shades of drier rock, the dark recesses where moss clung. The whisky warmed him, made his head swim. His empty stomach began to glow and he rubbed his knees thoughtfully. The gulls had left their noisy argument and had gone swooping around the sea cliffs in figures of eight.

  He stared again at the rocks. The patterns had changed; they shifted even as he watched. He squinted, making shapes and silhouettes. Now a horse, then a tower, a crown, a face... A thin, dark, pointed brown face with black eyes as bright as beads, and a sharp beard split by a grin.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’

  He jumped up, the flask falling aside with a hollow thud. His swaying eyes shrilled out on to the rock—but there was only lichen there, and goosepimpled granite. He knuckled his eye sockets.

  Shouldn’t drink in the afternoon.

  That evening he sat before a high fire and cleaned the rifle. He took more time than usual about the task, both because the weapon had not been cleaned for a time, and because it was comforting to feel its wooden smoothness in his hands, to sight on imaginary targets along the beach in the dusk. He had always liked guns, liked dismantling and cleaning them; except when cleaning them became a drudge, as it often had in the army. It was an arcane skill, concrete and satisfying.

  He worked the bolt back and forth until he was sure it was free of rust and carbon, and then loaded the rifle methodically. He still could not readily admit to himself that what he had seen that afternoon had been only imagination...

  Night came. He dozed, lulled by the fire and the sea. The rifle lay by his side on the floor, the oil on it glistening in the firelight. He had not switched on the electric lighting, and the flames threw his lean, bearded face into sharp relief, accentuating the scars on the forehead, the lines that marked the eyes and mouth even in sleep.

  The warmth soothed the long ache of his legs and the sound of the waves soothed his habitual frown. He breathed deeply. A turf in the fire collapsed with a tinselly rustle and the rafters creaked in a wind off the sea.

  His eyes slitted at a small sound.

  There was someone else sitting at his hearth, gazing into the fire.

  His breathing stopped. The chair cracked under him. Pent-up air became a quiet thunder in his temples. He dared open his eyes a little farther, forcing himself to take an unhurried breath into his lungs. His heartbeat rose to drown the quiet sea wind, and leap like a fish in his throat.

  One hand reached out to bask in the heat, the fingers wriggling with pleasure. There
was what sounded like a sigh, and the shape on the hearth—half shadow and half firelight—moved closer to the warmth. Riven saw a dark-eyed face framed by raven hair; and then the tears gathered in his eyes and spilled over, sparkling in the firelight, and he knew he must be dreaming.

  The face looked up at him suddenly, and he saw its beggar-thinness, the dirt on the cheekbones, the tangle of the hair; and at the same time, he smelled the musky body smell which faded almost as soon as it was identified. But the eyes—the eyes. They looked at him from across an abyss of loss and nightmare, stared out at him from a hundred photographs and a thousand memories. They met his own from under brows that met above them, and he almost gagged in disbelief.

  For a second or a century, they looked at each other, as once upon a time they had been wont to do here, on clear nights when the fire was high and the wind had soughed down the glen beyond. She had sat by the hearthstone so that her face had lifted up to his with a laugh in the eyes. And then the hearthstone had gone cold, and her place was empty.

  There was nothing in the eyes... Almost nothing. He could see no recognition there. It was as though she were a husk, a beautiful filigree empty of life.

  But it was her. Here, in his dream.

  ‘Jenny—’ he croaked—and she bolted, ran across the room with a spatter of bare feet, clashed the latch, and was off into the night.

  He was after her, lurching and cursing. The night met him like a black wall and threw rain at him as he went through the door. ‘Come back! Come back, damn it!’

  But the beach was empty, the waves tumbled undisturbed on the shingle, and the wind caressed his beard.

  Come back.

  Away over the bay the dead seal lolled. He thought he saw another splashing into the shallows, but he could not be sure. The sky was huge and starlit, the air cold as sea water and his limbs as weak as a pup’s. He leaned on the doorframe and closed his eyes.

  THE STARS WHEELED, the Plough revolving about the Pole; and midnight crept round.