The Crow Road

by Iain Banks

  "Said what, uncle?" I said, hand on the door knob.

  "That you were closer to me; that I'd won you, saved you from his heathen faith!" Uncle Hamish's eyes stared at me from a shaking, ash-grey face.

  I nodded and smiled at him. "Oh well," I said. The door opened and I got out of the way of Aunt Tone, bearing pills and a glass of water. "See you tomorrow, Prentice," she whispered to me. She patted my arm. "Thank you."

  "It's all right. See you tomorrow, Aunt Tone."

  Outside, on the landing, I looked down the stairs to where my mother was standing by the front door, putting on her jacket. I leant back against the closed bedroom door for just a second, and — looking at nothing in particular — said very quietly to myself, "See?"

  * * *

  I went to the land-side edge of the concrete cube, and faced back at the remains of the sunset, trying to work out how I was going to feel seeing Lewis and Verity again, after the way I'd behaved at New Year. But search as I tried, I could find no trace of dread or jealousy; I was even looking forward to seeing them again. Something of the coldness that had settled over me in the last few days seemed to have spread to the way I felt about Verity. It felt like all my jealous passion had dissipated like the clouds overhead.

  I thought about jumping down onto the beach, but that might have been asking for another family tragedy, so I climbed down, walked to the end of the shallow scoop of bay and set off through the grass by the side of the burn, heading back to Gallanach through the calm summer gloaming.

  * * *

  …He told us about the plants on the islands, too; how the open, glorious machair, between the dunes and the farmed land, was so dizzily sumptuous with flowers because it was the place where the acidic peat and the alkali sands produced a neutral ground where more plants could flourish in the sunlight. And just the names of those plants were a delight, almost a litany; marsh samphire, procumbent pearlwort, sand-spurrey, autumnal hawkbit, cathartic flax, kidney vetch, germander speedwell, hastate orache, sea spleenwort; eyebright.

  We learned about the people who had made Scotland their home: the hunter-gatherers of eight or nine thousand years ago, nomads wandering the single great wood and stalking deer, or camping by the edge of the sea and leaving only piles of shells for us to find; the first farmers, just beginning to clear the land of the blanket of thick forest a few millennia later; the neolithic people who had built the tomb of Maes Howe before the pyramids were constructed, and the stone circle at Callanish before Stonehenge, in the thousand-year summer of the third millenium; then came the Bronze Age and Iron Age people, the Vikings and Picts, Romans and Celts and Scots and Angles and Saxons who had all found their way to this oceanically marginal little corner of northern Europe, and left on the place their own marks; the treeless slopes themselves, the roads and walls, cairns and forts, tombs, standing stones, souterrains, crannogs and farms and houses and churches; and the oil refineries, nuclear power stations and missile ranges, too.

  He made up stories, about the secret mountain, and the sand-drowned forest, the flood that turned to wood, the zombie peat, and the stone-beings that drilled for air. Sometimes the location for, or the subject of, a story would have some basis in fact; the secret mountain was a real hill on which grew a flower that grew nowhere else in the world. There had indeed been great storms that had moved whole ranges of sand dunes inland, drowning forests, and villages… And peat was un-dead, the surrounding rocks" acidity, the chill Atlantic airs and ever-likely rain conspiring to prevent the corpses of the dead plants from decomposing.

  Other stories were pure fantasy, the result of a kind of child-like quality in him, I think. If you looked at certain stands of trees from a distance, especially in a glen, and when in full leaf, they did look like great bulging torrents of green water, bursting from the depths of the earth and somehow frozen. There was a sort of visual naivety at work there that verged on the hallucinogenic, but it did, I'd argue, make a warped sort of visual sense. Magmites — the people who lived in the mantle of the earth, beneath the crust, and who were drilling up for air the way we were drilling down for oil — must just have appealed to that part of him that loved turning things around. Opposites and images fascinated him, excited him; magicked inspired absurdity from him.

  I think Uncle Rory would have given almost anything to have tapped the lush gravidity of that source as well.

  Telling us straight or through his stories, my father taught us that there was, generally, a fire at the core of things, and that change was the only constant, and that we — like everybody else — were both the most important people in the universe, and utterly without significance, depending, and that individuals mattered before their institutions, and that people were people, much the same everywhere, and when they appeared to do things that were stupid or evil, often you hadn't been told the whole story, but that sometimes people did behave badly, usually because some idea had taken hold of them and given them an excuse to regard other people as expendable (or bad), and that was part of who we were too, as a species, and it wasn't always possible to know that you were right and they were wrong, but the important thing was to keep trying to find out, and always to face the truth. Because truth mattered.

  I suppose we all want to pass on our beliefs; they seem even more our own than the genes we transmit… but maybe they are largely inherited too, even if sometimes what you inherit is the exact opposite — the reversed image of what was intended.

  Sometimes I felt he was trying to brain-wash us; that he wanted us to be images of himself, thinking the way he thought, doing what he would have done, as if that would help him cheat death, make him less mortal somehow. Then all his parables and laws seemed like megalomania, and his reasoned certainties like dogma.

  Other times he seemed genuinely altruistic, and on occasion I thought I could sense something like desperation in him, trying so hard to equip us as best he could for the vicissitudes of life, while the world changed all around us so fast that some of his ideas and theories — which had seemed so important to him in his life, and so crucial for us to know in turn — became irrelevant; were proved wrong, or just shown to be not so important after all.

  My mother was different, and always had been. I don't think she ever really laid down the law like that, not even once; she just got on with things. We knew we were loved, and we knew when something we'd done was disapproved of, but she trained us by example, and let us make mistakes. The only idea I think she could ever be accused of trying to put into our heads was the welcome realisation that whatever happened to us, she'd be there.

  I'm not sure that it wasn't the more effective method in the end, and — in its own way — more confident, too.

  * * *

  Half an hour after I'd left Darren's post-post-modernist concrete block I stood in the dusk light beneath the dun on the hill of Bac Chrom, within sight of the track at last, the lights of Slockavullin village beneath me, the eastern edge of Gallanach a thin grid of orange sparks to my right, the main road to Oban and the north busy with lights of white and orange and red, and the dark landscape below full of soft undulations, littered with chambered cairns, cup and ring marked rocks, standing stones, tumuli and ancient forts.

  All the gods are false, I thought. Faith itself is idolatry.

  I looked into that ancient, cluttered darkness, wondering.

  CHAPTER 14

  So anyway, bro, how are things?" Lewis shook his head slowly and deliberately. He held up his whisky glass and studied it from close range, focusing with explicit care, one eye at a time. I formed the impression he was attempting to fix the tumbler's image in his memory so he'd know the identity of the receptacle to blame come the following morning. I was so drunk at the time this actually seemed like quite a smart idea, and I would probably have attempted to do the same thing myself if I'd thought I was remotely capable of coordinating my hand, eyes and brain to that degree. The only reason I could get my drinking hand and my mouth in roughly the same place at approx
imately the same time at this stage in the evening was because I'd had so much recent practice at it. And even that comparatively simple system wasn't a hundred per cent any more; I'd missed my mouth twice already and spilled small amounts of whisky onto my chin and shirt. I'd carried it off with dignity, though.

  Lewis looked like he was going to sleep. Either that or the superior intellect of the whisky glass had hypnotised him. I knew the problem.

  "Lewis?" I said.

  "Wha — what?" he looked at me, confused.

  "I was saying," I said. "How are things?"

  "Oh," he said, and sighed. "I don't know." He frowned. "Verity said to me just yesterday… she said, 'Lewis, I don't think we understand each other any more.»

  "What did you say?" I sipped my whisky carefully.

  "I said, 'Whadaya mean?" Lewis snarled.

  Then he burst out laughing. It must have been infectious laughter because I started laughing too, and then we were both laughing, but we couldn't have been that drunk because we didn't over-do it. Five minutes later — well, maybe ten, absolute max — we'd stopped laughing almost entirely.

  "Really?" I said, wiping my eyes.

  Lewis shook his head. "Na, course not. Everything's… was pure dead brilliant, actually."

  "Good," I said, and drank. I meant it too, but even as I realised that I meant it, I thought: ah, it's just the drink. I'll be worse in the morning. Still, I looked up at Lewis and said, "I think I'm better."

  "Better…?" Lewis began, giggling.

  "Better than… yesterday, Mr Creosote?" I started to laugh.

  "Better get a bucket — " Lewis howled, but couldn't manage the rest of the line, because by then we were on the floor. I laughed until my ears hurt.

  * * *

  I stood beneath the larches in the rain, holding an umbrella, wearing a kilt and feeling a little self-conscious. The stand of dripping trees had gone yellow and dropped their needles during the last few weeks, turning the ground beneath them a dully shining blond that seemed like a tinted mirror to the ash-bright expanse of overcast sky. I touched the plain black obelisk, slick and cold in the chill October rain. Behind me, the noise from the marquee — an increasing choir of chattering voices — was slowly drowning the patter of the drizzle as it fell through the twigs and branches above onto the sodden ground; a busy, buzzy, shared excitement displacing what the solitary soul perceived as a sort of tranquil gloom.

  What guy? I thought. What is Ash going to show me; who? (And already thought I might have guessed.) Shit, I didn't like the sound of this.

  The rain came on harder and I listened to it drumming on the taut black skin of the umbrella, remembering remembering.

  * * *

  "Remember the River Game?"

  "Remember the Black River Game?"

  "Ha!"

  We were digging dad's grave, waist deep in the rich black earth of Lochgair, partially shielded from the house by the dense mass of rhodie bushes and tall tangles of wild roses. Jimmy Turrock, the council workman sent from the municipal cemetery to dig the grave officially, and who'd been in the same class as Lewis at school, was sitting against the wheel of his miniature earth-mover, arms folded, head back, mouth open, snoring. That morning over breakfast, Lewis and I had decided we'd dig the hole ourselves. If nothing else, it would take our minds off our hangovers, which were industrial strength.

  The River Game was something dad made up himself. He did it for Lewis and me. The first version was roughed out in a big sketch book, while he tinkered with the rules. When he was happy with it all, he got a big bit of white cardboard from a display company in Glasgow, drew out the playing surface, painted it, sprayed it with lacquer and edged the board with black tape. He'd bought various Lego packs and made the ships and the cargoes out of those. The rules were typed, the cards were printed on labels and they were stuck onto the back of ordinary playing cards. We were presented with the result as a sort of extra present to be shared between Lewis and me for Christmas 1981. James was still a bit young; he'd only have chewed the ships and choked on the cargoes.

  Lewis — who had asked for and got a television for his room, and a new Walkman — had the good grace to express gratitude. I was still celebrating having finally worn down dad's resistance to having a computer in the house, and was therefore far too busy kicking pixel and re-staging the attack of the Imperial AT-ATs on the rebel snow trenches to be bothered sparing more than the most cursory glance at what was, when all was said and done, a lump of amateurishly painted cardboard, a handful of non-motorised and very basic Lego bits, a few adulterated cards and what looked suspiciously like an exam paper. "Yeah; great, dad. Got any more PP9 batteries for this wee car? The one out your calculator didn't last long," was about as enthusiastic as I got about the game for most of the festive period.

  Later, I deigned to play.

  The River Game was based on trade; dad had wanted something that would distract us from all the war games Lewis and I played: soldiers, with our friends in the woods, battles with our toys, wars on friends" computers. He really wanted something non-capitalistic as well as non-military, but the River Game was going to be just his first effort; he would — he told us — be working on something much more right-on, once he had the time to spare. He'd see if we liked the River Game first.

  You had two or three ships; you sailed them from a port on one side of the board to a port on the other side through what was either a big loch or lake choked with islands, or a piece of territory with an awful lot of waterways snaking through it, depending how you chose to look at it. You picked up cargo at the second port and sailed back. The cargo was worth a certain amount when you got back to your home port, and with the money you could buy more ships, configured for speed or capacity. There were at least half a dozen major routes from one port to the other, and basically, the shorter the route you took, the more hazardous it was; there were whirlpools, channels prone to rock falls, stretches of river where the sand-banks changed all the time, and so on. The weather had a chance to change every few moves, and how much the different types of cargo were worth depended on… Oh, what your opponents had chosen to carry, what the weather was, whether the month had an «r» in it; I can't remember it all.

  It was quite a fun game, mildly addictive, with a reasonable balance of skill and luck, and Lewis and I eventually got quite a few of our friends playing it, but the truth is it improved dramatically when Lewis — with my help — drew up an extra set of rules which let you build warships!

  We played that game for weeks before dad caught us at it in the conservatory, one rainy May day, and asked how come there were all these ships with funny-coloured cargoes clustered so close together and surrounded by wrecks where there were no hazards.

  Oops.

  We called it the Black River Game (Dad even objected to the title). He had been working on a new improved version of the original game that involved using some of the money to build railways across the board; you laid track, you built bridges, dug tunnels, coped with rock falls and marshes and recalcitrant land owners, and the first one to finish his or her railway was, in effect, the winner. But he stopped work on this sophistication when he found us acting out furiously destructive naval engagements on his painstakingly crafted board. He didn't take it away, though. I think for a while he was trying to develop another non-combative game that he'd defy us to turn martial, but it stayed at the development stage and never did see the light of day.

  I stopped digging for a moment, wiped some sweat from my brow with the hem of my T-shirt, which was lying on the ground at the head of the grave. I leant on my shovel, looking at Jimmy Turrock's up-ended face while he snored. Lewis stopped digging for a moment too, breathing hard.

  I said, "We disappointed him, though, didn't we?" Lewis shrugged. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face. "Oh, Prentice, come on; boys will be boys. Dad knew that."

  "Yeah, but he expected better of us."

  "Dads always do, it's traditi
onal. We turned out not too bad."

  "Neither of us did as well as he expected at Uni," I said. I'd told Lewis — though not my mother — that I was fairly certain I'd failed my finals.

  "Well, for a start, he didn't know about you," Lewis said, scraping some earth off the blade of his spade. "And he was smart enough to know degrees aren't everything. Come on, we're not in prison, we're not junkies and we're not Young Tories." He waggled his eyebrows. "It's no small achievement."

  "I suppose," I said, and started digging again. (Pity he'd mentioned prison; another thing I hadn't told Lewis about was that I'd been nicked for shop-lifting. Not that I'd be going to prison, but it's the thought that counts.)

  Lewis kept on digging. "We could have done worse," he insisted.

  "We could have done better," I said, shovelling another load of earth out of the pit.

  Lewis was silent for a while, then said, quietly, "Better than… yesterday?"

  I laughed in spite of myself (and in spite of the grave, and my aching head and still bruised heart). "Shut up," I said, "please."

  Lewis shut up. I encountered another rhodie root and attacked it with the hacksaw, then took up the spade again, blinking sweat out of my eyes and waving a couple of flies away.

  Lewis muttered almost inaudibly as he dug; "It's only waffer thin…»

  We snorted and guffawed for a while, then took a break for yet more Irn-Bru, sitting at the edge of the grave, legs dangling into it, with Jimmy Turrock still blissfully — and vocally — in the land of nod across the grave in front of us.

  I drank deeply from the bottle, passed it to Lewis. He finished it, grimaced, looked at the bottle. "You know, I've finally realised what this stuff reminds me of," he said, and belched heavily. I followed suit, trumping his sonorous burp with one that disturbed a few drowsy crows from nearby trees and even had Jimmy Turrock stir in his sleep.

  "What?" I said.

  "Chewing gum," Lewis said, screwing the cap back on the bottle and chucking it into the grass near the council earth-digger.