Copyright

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2018962798

ISBNs: 978-0-316-44945-8 (hardcover), 978-0-316-44947-2 (ebook)

E3-20190308-JV-NF-ORI
 Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A note on spoilers
Epigraph

Chapter 1: The end

Chapter 2: The traveller
Chapter 3: Who are you?
Chapter 4: Traveller’s tales
Chapter 5: Marmalade
Chapter 6: The theft
Chapter 7: Running before the wind
Chapter 8: The bay at the back of the ocean
Chapter 9: I own her
Chapter 10: Paddling blind
Chapter 11: Tilting at giants
Chapter 12: Landfall
Chapter 13: The tower
Chapter 14: A glimmer of light
Chapter 15: The fever
Chapter 16: Shooting the albatross
Chapter 17: Woe
Chapter 18: John Dark
Chapter 19: A bond
Chapter 20: Kel Kun Demal
Chapter 21: Key ay voo
Chapter 22: Loo garoo
Chapter 23: Freemen
Chapter 24: An itch between the shoulder blades
Chapter 25: The Homely House
Chapter 26: Tannhäuser
Chapter 27: False start…or there and back again
Chapter 28: Onwards, alone
Chapter 29: First sight
Chapter 30: Be careful what you ask for…
Chapter 31: Quarantine
Chapter 32: Visitors
Chapter 33: The truth will set you free (and other lies)
Chapter 34: Liars lie
Chapter 35: A choice made
Chapter 36: A reunion betrayed
Chapter 37: The now
Chapter 38: The then
Chapter 39: True north

Acknowledgments
Discover More C. A. Fletcher
For the midnight swimmers—and all past and present members of the Two
O’clock Tea Club.

Especially Jack, Ari, Molly and Hannah.

May your beaches always have fires, dogs and laughter on them, whatever
the weather.
 A note on spoilers

It’d be a kindness to other readers—not to say this author—if the

discoveries made as you follow Griz’s journey into the ruins of our world
remained a bit of a secret between us…
C.A.F.
A man stole my dog.
I went after him.
Bad things happened.
I can never go home.
 Chapter 1

The end

Dogs were with us from the very beginning.

When we were hunters and gatherers and walked out of Africa and
began to spread across the world, they came with us. They guarded our fires
as we slept and they helped us bring down prey in the long dawn when we
chased our meals instead of growing them. And later, when we did become
farmers, they guarded our fields and watched over our herds. They looked
after us, and we looked after them. Later still, they shared our homes and
our families when we built towns and cities and suburbs. Of all the animals
that travelled the long road through the ages with us, dogs always walked
closest.
And those that remain are still with us now, here at the end of the world.
And there may be no law left except what you make it, but if you steal my
dog, you can at least expect me to come after you. If we’re not loyal to the
things we love, what’s the point? That’s like not having a memory. That’s
when we stop being human.
That’s a kind of death, even if you keep breathing.

So. About that. Turns out the world didn’t end with a bang. Or much of a
whimper. Don’t get me wrong: there were bangs, some big, some little, but
that was early on, before people got the drift of what was happening.
But bangs are not really how it ended. They were symptoms, not cause.
How it ended was the Gelding, though what caused that never got sorted
out, or if it did it was when it was too late to do anything about it. There
were as many theories as there were suddenly childless people—a burst of
cosmic rays, a chemical weapon gone astray, bio-terror, pollution (you lot
did make a mess of your world), some kind of genetic mutation passed by a
space virus or even angry gods in pick-your-own-flavour for those who had
a religion. The “how” and the “why” slowly became less important as
people got used to the “what”, and realised the big final “when” was
heading towards them like a storm front that not even the fastest, the
richest, the cleverest or the most powerful were going to be able to outrun.
The world—the human part of it—had been gelded or maybe turned
barren—perhaps both—and people just stopped having kids. That’s all it
took. The Lastborn generation—the Baby Bust as they called themselves,
proving that irony was one of the last things to perish—they just carried on
getting older and older until they died like people always had done.
And when they were all gone, that was it. No bang, no whimper even.
More of a tired sigh.
It was a soft apocalypse. And though it probably felt pretty hard for
those it happened to, it did happen. And now we few—we vanishingly few
—are all alone, stuck here on the other side of it.

How can I tell you this and not be dead? I’m one of the exceptions that
proves the rule. They estimated maybe 0.0001 per cent of the world
population somehow escaped the Gelding. They were known as outliers.
That means if there were 7,000,000,000 people before the Gelding, less
than 7000 of them could have kids. One in a million. Give or take, though
since it takes two to make a baby, more like one in two million.
You want to know how much of an outlier I am? You, in the old picture I
have of you, are wearing a shirt with the name of an even older football
club on it. You look really happy. In my whole life, I haven’t met enough
people to make up two teams for a game of football. The world is that
empty.
Maybe if this were a proper story it would start calm and lead up to a
cataclysm, and then maybe a hero or a bunch of heroes would deal with it.
I’ve read plenty of stories like that. I like them. Especially the ones where a
big group of people get together, since the idea of a big group of people is
an interesting thing for me all by itself, because though I’ve seen a lot, I’ve
never seen that.
But this isn’t that kind of story. It’s not made up. This is just me writing
down the real, telling what I know, saying what actually took place. And
everything that I know, even my being born, happened long, long after that
apocalypse had already softly wheezed its way out.

I should start with who I am. I’m Griz. Not my real name. I have a fancier
one, but it’s the one I’ve been called for ever. They said I used to whine and
grizzle when I was a baby. So I became the Little Grizzler and then as I got
taller my name got shorter, and now I’m just Griz. I don’t whine any more.
Dad says I’m stoical, and he says it like that’s a good thing. Stoical means
doesn’t complain much. He says I seemed to get all my complaining out of
the way before I could talk and now, though I do ask too many questions,
mostly I just get on with things. Says that like it’s good too. Which it is.
Complaining doesn’t get anything done.
And we always have plenty to do, here at the end of the world.
Here is home, and home is an island, and we are my family. My parents,
my brother and sister, Ferg and Bar. And the dogs of course. My two are Jip
and Jess. Jip’s a long-legged terrier, brown and black, with a rough coat and
eyes that miss nothing. Jess is as tall as he is but smooth-coated, narrower
in the shoulders and she has a splash of white on her chest. Mongrels they
are, brother and sister, same but different. Jess is a rarity, because dog litters
seem to be all male nowadays. Maybe that’s to do with the Gelding too.
Perhaps whatever hit us, hit them too, but in a lesser way. Very few bitches
are born now. Maybe that’s a downside for the dogs, punishment for their
loyalty, some cosmically unfair collateral damage for walking alongside us
all those centuries.
We’re the only people on the island, which is fine, because it’s a small
island and it fits the five of us, though sometimes I think it fit us better and
was less claustrophobic when there were six. It’s called Mingulay. That’s
what its name was when you were alive. It’s off the Atlantic coast of what
used to be Scotland. There’s nothing to the west of it but ocean and then
America and we’re pretty sure that’s gone.
To the north there’s Pabbay and Sandray, low islands where we graze
our sheep and pasture the horses. North of them is the larger island called
Barra but we don’t land there, which is a shame as it has lots of large
houses and things, but we never set foot on it because something happened
and it’s bad land. It’s a strangeness to sail past a place so big that it even has
a small castle in the middle of its harbour for your whole life, and yet never
walk on it. Like an itch you can’t quite reach round and scratch. But Dad
says if you set foot on Barra now you get something much worse than an
itch, and because it’s what killed his parents, we don’t go. It’s an unlucky
island and the only things living there these days are rabbits. Even birds
don’t seem to like it, not even the gulls who we never see landing above the
wet sand below the tideline.
North-east of us are a long low string of islands called the Uists, and
Eriskay, which are luckier places, and we go there a lot, and though there
are no people on them now, there’s plenty of wildlife and lazy-beds for wild
potatoes. Once a year we go and camp on them for a week or so while we
gather the barley and the oats from the old fields on the sea lawn. And then
sometimes we go there to do some viking. “Going a-viking” is what Dad
calls it when we sail more than a day and sleep over on a trip, going
pillaging like the really ancient seafarers in the books, with the longships
and the heroic deeds. We’re no heroes though; we’re just scavenging to
survive, looking for useful things from the old world, spares or materials we
can strip out from the derelict houses. And books of course. Books turn out
to be pretty durable if they’re kept away from damp and rats. They can last
hundreds of years, easy. Reading is another way we survive. It helps to
know where we came from, how we got here. And most of all, for me, even
though these low and empty islands are all I have ever known, when I open
the front cover of a new book, it’s like a door, and I can travel far away in
place and time.
Even the wide sea and the open sky can be claustrophobic if you never
get away from them.
So that’s who I am, which just leaves you. In some way you know who
you are, or at least, you knew who you were. Because you’re dead of
course, like almost every single human who ever walked the planet, and
long dead too.
And why am I talking to a dead person? We’ll get back to that. But first
we should get on with the story. I’ve read enough to know that I should do
the explaining as we go.
 Chapter 2

The traveller

If he hadn’t had red sails, I think we’d have trusted him less.
The boat was visible from a long way off, much further than white sails
would have been against the pale haze to the north-west. Those red sails
were a jolt of colour that caught the eye and grabbed your attention like a
sudden shout breaks a long silence. They weren’t the sails of someone
trying to sneak up on you. They had the honest brightness of a poppy.
Maybe that was why we trusted him. That and his smile, and his stories.
Never trust someone who tells good stories, not until you know why
they’re doing it.
I was high up on Sandray when I saw the sails. I was tired and more than
a little angry. I’d spent the morning rescuing an anchor that had parted from
Ferg’s boat the previous week, hard work that I felt he should have done for
himself, though he claimed his ears wouldn’t let him dive as deep as I
could, and that anchors didn’t grow on trees. Having done that, I was now
busy trying to rescue a ram that had fallen and wedged itself in a narrow
crack in the rocks above the grazing. It wasn’t badly injured but it was
stubborn and ungrateful in the way of most sheep, and it wasn’t letting me
get a rope round it. It had butted me twice, the first time catching me under
the chin sharply enough that I had chipped a tooth halfway back on the
lower right-hand side. I had sworn at it and then tried again. My knuckles
were badly grazed from where it had then butted my hand against the scrape
of the stone, and I was standing back licking my fist and swearing at it in
earnest when I saw the boat.
The suddenness of the colour stopped me in my tracks.
 I was too shocked to link the taste of blood in my mouth with the
redness of the sails, but then I have little of that kind of foresight, none at
all really compared with my other sister Joy, who always seemed to know
when people were about to return home just before they did, or be able to
smell an incoming storm on a bright day. I don’t much believe in that kind
of thing now, though I did when I was smaller and thought less, when I ran
free with her across the island, happy and without a care beyond when it
would be supper time. In those days I took her seeming foresight as
something as everyday and real as cold water from the spring behind the
house. Later, as I grew and began to think more, I decided it was mostly just
luck, and since she disappeared for ever over the black cliff at the top of the
island, not reliable luck at all.
If she’d really had foresight, she would never have tried to rescue her
kite and fallen out of life in that one sharp and lonely moment. If she’d had
foresight, she’d have waited until we returned to the island to help her. I
saw the kite where it was pinned in a cleft afterwards, and know we could
have reached it with the long hoe and no harm need have come to anyone.
As it was, she must have tried to reach it by herself and slipped into the gulf
of air more than seven hundred feet above the place where waves that have
had two thousand sea miles to build up momentum slam into the first
immoveable object they’ve ever met: the dark cliff wall that guards the back
of our home. She wouldn’t have waited for us to help though. She was
always impatient, a tough little thing always in a hurry to catch up with
Ferg and Bar and do what they did even though she was much younger. Bar
later said it was almost like she was in such a hurry because she sensed she
had had less time ahead of her than the rest of us.
We never found her body. And with her gone, so was my childhood,
though I was eight at the time and she only a year more. Two birthdays
later, by then a year older than she would ever be, I was in my mind what I
now am: fully grown. Although even now, many years after that, Bar and
Ferg still call me a kid. But they are six and seven years older than us. So
Joy and I were always the babies. Our mother called us that to distinguish
us from the other two.
Though after Joy fell, Mum never called any of us anything ever again.
Never spoke at all. We found her halfway down the hill from the cliff edge,
and we nearly lost her too. Far as we could make out she must have been
careering down the slope, running helter-skelter, maybe mad with grief,
maybe sprinting for the dory with some desperate doomed hope that she
could get it launched and all the way round the island against the tide to
rescue a child who in truth could not have survived such a fall. She never
spoke because she all but dashed her brains out when she stumbled forward,
smacking her head into a rock as she fell, temple gashed and watery blood
coming from her ears.
That was the worst day ever, though the ones that followed were barely
lighter. She didn’t die but she wasn’t there any more, her brain too wounded
or too scarred for her to get out of herself again. In the Before she’d have
been taken to a hospital and they would have operated on her brain to
relieve the pressure, Dad said. But this is the After, so he decided to do it
himself with a hand drill: he would have done it too, if he had been able to
find the drill, but it wasn’t where it should have been, and then the bleeding
stopped and she just slept for a long, long time and no more fluid leaked out
of her ears, so maybe it was best that he didn’t try and drill a hole into her
skull to save her.
I hope so, because I know Ferg hid the drill. He saw me see him, but
we’ve never, ever spoken of it. If we did, I’d tell him I admire him for doing
it, because Dad would have killed Mum and then would have had to live
with the horror of that on top of everything else. And, even though she’s
locked away inside her head, you can sit and hold her hand and sometimes
she squeezes it and almost smiles, and it’s a comforting thing, the tiny ghost
bit of her that remains, the warmth of her hand, the skin on skin. Dad said
that day was the darkest thing that ever happened to us, and that we’re past
it, and that now we have to get on and live, just like in a bigger way the
worst thing happened to the world and it just goes on.
He holds her hand sometimes, in the dark by the fire, when he thinks
none of us notice him doing it. He does it privately because he thinks we
would see it as a sign of weakness, a grown man needing that moment of
warmth. Maybe it is. Or maybe the weakness is hiding the need, which is
something Bar said to Ferg one evening when she was upset and no one
knew I was listening.

I’d had enough time to leave the ram, whistle in my dogs from their rabbit
hunting and sail the narrow sea mile back home to warn the others long
before the traveller came ashore. I could have taken my time, because
sharp-eyed Bar had seen the red sails too and they were ready and waiting,
which meant that she and Dad were at the shoreline and Ferg was nowhere
to be seen. Bar was not sure it was necessary for him to be hiding and
watching over us with the long gun because she thought the boat under the
red sails looked like the boat the Lewismen used, and that maybe they had
just found new sails. The Lewismen were a six-person family who lived
five islands north, the closest people we knew, and we knew them well. Bar
wore her hair in a long plait that now reached down her back and she
would, in time, pair up with one of the boys. This was what she had
decided, though being Bar and thus contrary in all things, said she did not
see why she should be in any hurry making a choice as to which of the four
it was to be. It was not as if they were going anywhere, or as if there were
four other girls they might pair up with instead. They were a practical
family, and we sometimes joined together to do things that needed more
than four pairs of hands, but we never took up their suggestion that we
move to be closer to them, and they never thought of moving south. Or if
they did think of it, they did not think well of the idea. But they were our
neighbours and the only other people within a hundred miles. They were
just the Lewismen to us, though they had a family name which was Little.
And when the red sails got closer we all saw Bar had been wrong, that it
was a different boat beneath them altogether. It was bigger and the man at
the tiller had hair that streamed behind him like a banner in the wind. All
the Lewismen cropped their hair close to the skull for cleanliness, even
Mary the mother did so, though she was in fact more mannish than woman,
for all that she’d borne four boys.
The long-haired traveller proved to be the only person on the boat,
though at first sight it seemed too big for one person alone to sail. He neatly
drew into the shallower water in the lee of the small headland that topped
our beach, showing a good eye for a sound anchorage, and hailed us as he
dropped anchor. His voice was hoarse but strong, and he said he was alone
and wished to come ashore if we would have him. He had things to trade
and indeed had been told of our whereabouts by the Lewismen, who he had
left two days before. He bore a letter from them, which he waved in the air,
the paper white against the darkening sea behind him.
 Dad beckoned him in, and he dropped a small dinghy over the side and
rowed in to the beach. I helped him ashore, and we pulled the boat above
the tideline together.
I felt Dad’s hand like a warning on my shoulder, as if I’d been too
enthusiastic and unguarded, but then he ruffled the short hairs on the back
of my head which he only does when he’s feeling kind.
I’m Abraham, said Dad, nodding at the stranger. Call me Abe. And this
is my boy, Griz.
Hello, Griz, he said with an answering grin that I liked the moment it
split his thick red beard in a flash of white.
And then the dogs barrelled down to surround him before I could ask his
name. They barked and snarled and arrived in a great tangle of teeth and
tails and then, as he knelt to greet them, the tails started thumping and the
snarling turned to whines as each dog seemed to want to be patted and
petted by this stranger from the sea. He had the way of dogs, and he told us
he had lost his own one only weeks ago, over the side in a storm around the
North Cape and he missed him like an arm. She was a half Husky
crossbreed called Saga, clever like a man he said, white, black and brown
with a brown eye to match her ears and a blue one to match the sky. He’d
had her safely kept below in the small cabin, but when he fell and hurt
himself as the boat slammed into the trough of an unusually big wave, Saga
heard him cry out in pain and—being a clever dog—pawed the latch and
came to help him. The next wave took her over the side and he never saw
her again, not even a head bobbing on the face of the mountainous seas
piling up behind the stern as the wind blew him beyond any chance of
finding her. He showed us the scar on his head, and we could see in the
gentle way he ruffled the fur of our dogs as he spoke that the hurt was
deeper than the healed skin.
Like I said, it was a good story. And—as I found out later—some of it
was even true. The dog with one brown eye and one blue being clever as a
man, that was true as death itself.

Looking at a new person is not something you would have found as

interesting as we do, I expect. You lived in a world full of new people all
the time. If you lived in a city, they must have flowed round you like a great
mackerel shoal and you’d be just one of thousands or millions, still yourself
alone in your own head no doubt, but part of something much bigger too.
Here, every fresh face is an event, almost a shock, every new person rare
enough to seem like an entirely new species. The traveller looked like no
one I had ever met. His long hair, for a start, was thick and wavy and the
colour of flames. A redhead. Something I’d read about and seen in faded
pictures but never met in real life. The hair was a startling colour, as alien
and abrupt as the explosions of orange flowers we found on the other
islands, always close to old gardens, flowers my mother called crocoz,
when she still spoke. She knew all the flowers and plants. Bar told me she
said crocoz weren’t native to the islands, but were tough survivors, like us.
And he was not just a redhead, but a redbeard too, a slab of a thing that
jutted as far down in front of his face as his hair hung behind it. His skin
was pale but weather-beaten and his eyes, which peered out at the world
from beneath the high cliff of his forehead, were dangerous blue. I don’t
know why I thought the blue was dangerous, but that was the word that
jumped into my head as I saw them. Maybe it was because they turned on
me in the same instant and just for a moment, as he caught me looking at
him, I saw them without the smile that followed, and I do know I thought it
then and that this is not something I added later, after things happened: I
definitely thought dangerous blue, but then I thought better and discounted
it.
Maybe you, swimming in a world full of difference and choice, were
better tuned to believing your gut when it came to people. I had—still have
—little to compare people with. So I dismissed the dangerous blue in his
eyes when he smiled at me an instant later, and decided it was just different,
the blueness, only having seen brown or green eyes before. And when he
smiled it was hard to think of those eyes as cold, but maybe that was part of
why he was hard to keep a hold of in the mind, juggling the two things at
once, the fire in his hair and the shiver of ice in his eyes. The face that was
hard as a hammer when it was not smiling and the smile that seemed to
warm the world when it found you.
You look like a Viking, were the first words I said to him. And he did. I
had seen him, or faces like him, in history books and old pictures, men in
horned hats carrying axes and plunder.
And the second words he said to me, this man who had sailed out of the
north, were:
What’s a Viking?
Which shows that even a question can be a lie if asked in the right way.
 Chapter 3

Who are you?

It was one summer while we were a-viking ourselves that I found you.
When Ferg began to tease me for wanting to write things down because
who in the whole empty world was going to read it, Dad said that it was a
natural result of reading so much. He said if you read a lot you start to think
like a writer, the same way as if you grow up with a fiddle player in the
house you start whistling and learning the tunes without thinking, like Ferg
had. I read a lot. I’ll get to that. Dad plays the fiddle. I told him Ferg maybe
had a bit of a point, since I didn’t know who I would be writing for as
everyone I knew already knew my story because they’re a part of it. But I
wanted to maybe keep a diary sort of thing, and so he said then just write
like you talk, don’t be fancy, and I said but when you talk you do talk to
someone, at least most of the time, and he said then just use your
imagination: he said imagine a someone and keep them in mind as you
write and I thought of you, the boy with my face.
So. You.
You’re in a photograph I found in a house up in North Uist one summer.
This time we were looking for parts to scavenge for the windmill that gives
us electricity, and Dad knew there were windmills of the same type up near
where North Uist is joined to Berneray by the old causeway. We’d sailed
the lugger up there and he and Ferg were gutting the turbine off an old
fallen mill while I went on the scrounge through the big house on the
skyline. We’d decided to camp in the house overnight. It was somewhere
we had visited before, solid, stone-built with a roof that still held out most
of the weather. Better than that, it had a lot of full bookshelves in it, and a
thing called a snooker table.
It was one of the old buildings, a large farmhouse that had been added to
over the years, so it sprawled expansively when compared with the other
island houses. The walls had once been whitewashed but now little of that
remained, so it was a grey house with a dark slate roof and intact glass
windows that seemed to watch me approach up the old drive. A car had
rotted to the axles and stood amid the long grass by the back door as if
waiting to pounce. The door was not as easy to open as it had been when we
visited three years before, but I was bigger now and managed to kick it
open carefully enough that it would sort of close after us when we left. I left
it open as I waited for the dogs to scramble ahead of me and put any
waiting rats to flight.
Jip and Jess tore into the house, feet scrabbling on cracked plastic
flooring as they went, whining and barking as they always did when
excited, but there was no sound of rat murder close or distant, and they soon
stopped their noise and trotted back to meet me, looking disappointed and a
little bit hurt as is their way, as if I had promised them fun which had not
quite materialised.
Something had changed in the house since we had last been there. I
couldn’t say what it was, and I couldn’t see or smell anything that put me
on edge, but there was a difference. Before, it had been like many of the
houses we went into, damp and mouldering, full of things you could see as
poignant or pointless according to your way of viewing the world. Dad, for
example, would turn photographs of people to the wall as he passed through
derelict houses. I don’t know why he did that. He said it was to give the
spirits rest, but then he doesn’t really believe in spirits, or he says he
doesn’t. Bar, my sister, has the habit too, and she says it’s to stop all the
dead eyes watching us.
I don’t think she believes that.
I think it’s just to try and scare me, because she does like jokes and
teasing when she’s in a good mood. Apart from the books, it’s little
collections of things that people used to put on shelves that fascinate me in
the empty houses. It’s not just the photographs, a lot of which are faded so
badly they just look like water-damaged paper now, unless the rooms are
dark, but the little china people and the mugs and jugs and bits of glass and
wood and stuff. Ornaments. Trophies. Mementoes. Things that meant
something to people once, meant enough that they’d make a space for them
and display them, something to see every day. We don’t really have
ornaments, or the time for mementoes. Everything we do is about surviving,
moving forward, keeping going. No time for relics or souvenirs, Dad says
when we go a-viking, only take the useful stuff. Maybe that’s why I decided
to write this. A souvenir I can carry in a pocket. Anyway.
The picture of you.
The picture of you was definitely a memento. You meant something to
someone, even if it was just yourself. I found you under the snooker table.
And the way I found you was strange and secret, and because a photo is a
small thing, I took you and no one knew and now you live between the
pages of the notebook I write all this in, and until someone reads this, I
suppose you’re still a secret.
I’d been in the snooker room before, the last time we were in the house.
The room was almost filled by the table, which was covered by a dustsheet
that had begun to deteriorate into rags at the corners, where maybe a
hundred years of just carrying its own weight had worn holes. We’d taken
the cover off and rolled the bright balls around the pale green playing
surface, trying to bounce them into the pockets. Once there had been poles
to hit the balls with, but now the racks that had held them were empty. I had
liked the smooth motion of the balls and the healthy smack and clack as
they bounced off each other. Not much runs so true in our day-to-day world,
patched together as things are. There was a big wall of books to the left
side, and a shuttered window at right angles to it. I’d already been through
them, but now I was older I went back to see if the grown me would find
books I might not have liked the look of last time.
The shutters were stuck shut, and though I could have wrenched them
ajar I didn’t. Light not getting into the room was helping keep the books
safe, and I knew I’d break the shutters opening them which would make
closing them harder. Hinges rust, and where they don’t screws do, rotting
out of old wood that no longer holds them. So I got out my fire steel and lit
my oil lantern and used that instead. Then I dropped the fire steel and it
rolled under the skirts of the snooker table.
We hadn’t found you the other times we were in the house because of
the boxes. Someone had stacked boxes of cork tiles under the table, filling
the space. They were the same cork tiles peeling off the floor in the kitchen
down the hall. What we’d missed was the fact that the boxes were arranged
around the edge of the table, and that the centre of the space beneath was
empty, like a square cavern, a room hidden within a room. My fire steel had
rolled into the narrow crack between two boxes, and I only discovered the
secret when I moved one to get at it.
Fish oil lanterns throw more smell than light, but even by the soft glow
mine gave off I could see someone had once used the space as a concealed
den. It was the reflection of my flame in the glass jars on the opposite side
that caught my eye, jars with candle stubs in them. Old candles burn better
than the ones Bar makes, so my first thought was to scavenge the stubs, and
see if there were any unburned ones left too. So I crawled in, and that’s how
I found the chamber of secrets.
Someone had slept here, what must have been long, long ago. There was
an unrolled sleeping bag and blankets and pillows, and there were books
and tins and medicine packs lining the inner wall made by the boxes. A
string of tiny little lights was taped all round the edge underneath the table-
top, the kind of things you used to put on Christmas trees in old pictures
I’ve seen. But of course they weren’t lit and never would be again. It made
me think what the hidden space must have looked like when they had been
—cosy, cheerful, maybe a bit magical even. On the bottom of the table,
which was slate, someone had glued a few of the cork tiles to make a
decorated roof to the den, a roof and a pinboard. The board was covered in
photographs and drawings.
Maybe it was because of the string of lights that would never be lit
again, but I found I wanted to see what the space looked like when it was
illuminated by more than my smoky fish oil lamp, which is why I lit some
of the candle stubs, and why I lay back on the crinkly sleeping bag. I felt
the synthetic filling crumble to dust under my weight, and that’s when I saw
you. You were the picture right above the pillows. You must have been the
last thing whoever slept here saw before they put out the lights, and you
would have been the first thing they saw when they woke in the morning.
Or maybe that sleeper was you. Maybe this was your den. Either way, you
were important to someone. Loved. Mourned maybe. Or celebrated. Or
both.
In the picture, you’re doing a star jump on the beach, and next to you is
a girl who must be your sister. It’s a bright sunny day. You look very alike.
She’s smaller. The picture has caught you both at the top of your jumps,
frozen for ever between sand and sky, your arms and legs wide, laughing,
eyes flashing with glee. You’re looking right into the lens. She’s looking at
you with a wild and happy look that’s so fierce it hurts me to see it. And
beside you on the other side is a short-legged terrier also jumping and
looking at your face, mouth wide in a smile or a bark. And just as I
sometimes think you look a lot like me, the girl looks familiar too. If I
squint and imagine, then she looks like Joy might have been. Maybe that’s
why I took the picture. Because of course I have no picture of my once
bigger—but now forever little—sister. Maybe I thought it would help me
remember when I get older and more memories jostle in and fill the space
that used to be just the two of us. Or maybe the slight likeness is just the
reason why I’m writing this to you. All I know for sure is that I’ve never
seen a picture that made me so happy and so sad at the same time. And even
without the girl—which is what the picture looks like when it’s folded to fit
in my notebook, it’s you and your dog—like the last happy people at the
end of the world, before the afterwards began.
Or maybe I’m writing my life to you because the people I could talk to
about things are gone, or can’t talk back to me any more. Dad says I think
too much. Says I ask too many questions. Says he thinks the lack of
answers always makes me unhappy. Don’t know if that’s true. Do know he
hates the asking. As if it takes something away from him, not knowing how
to reply. It’s just information I’m after, not responsibility for something that
is far too big to be down to him anyway. And why does he spend all the
time when he’s not working or playing the fiddle with his head in a book of
facts if he’s not looking for answers too?
And that was the other thing I took from the chamber of secrets. The
books. Whoever had made the den had a line of books all along one side,
and after I’d lain on my back looking at the photographs, I turned sideways
and looked at them. I scanned up and down the row of spines several times,
and then began picking them out at random, reading the descriptions on the
covers. They weren’t practical books, the histories or technical things Dad
insisted we read so that important knowledge wasn’t lost, something I later
began to call Leibowitzing: they were fiction, made-up things. It took me a
couple of minutes to work out what these ones all had in common, but when
I did so it gave me another jolt, a kind of shock that was close to
excitement, though I don’t know why it should have thrilled me as it did.
All the books were about imaginary futures in which your world, the
Before, had broken down. They were all stories about my now, the After,
written by people with no real knowledge of what it would be like.
I stuffed my rucksack with the book hoard and found another bag in the
attic which I filled with the rest. Dad and Ferg tried to make me leave them
behind, but they were in a good mood having found two working spare
parts from the old windmills, and they also liked the three and a half boxes
of old candles that I found under the table. I didn’t tell them about the
hidden chamber though, and I slid the box back in place after I came out, so
if it was your secret place, it’s secret still. As far as I know.
That autumn I read all those books, some of them twice (that’s when I
started calling Dad’s obsession with technical manuals and science books
“Leibowitzing”, after one called A Canticle for Leibowitz about monks in a
devastated far future trying to reconstruct your whole world from an
electrical manual found in the desert). I read the books hoping to find some
good ideas, but what I got was nightmares and a kind of sadness that stained
my mind for weeks.
I know you can’t be nostalgic for something you never actually knew,
but it was that kind of longing the books often woke in me. Dad hated me
reading them. Thought they were the most pointless things there could ever
be, out-of-date prophecies that had turned out wrong anyway. I liked them.
Still do. They may not be accurate about life after the end, but if you sort of
look sideways with your mind while you read them, you find they say lots
about what things were like before. They’re like answers to questions you
didn’t know enough to ask. Though saying something like that to Dad
would only make him even angrier. The past’s gone. We only have the now
he says, and the only answers that are useful are the ones that will help us
survive into the future.
 Chapter 4

Traveller’s tales

The red-sailed stranger told us his name was Brand.

He had a bag with him. It was heavy enough to pull down a shoulder as
he walked up the slope past the drying racks that were thick with fish. There
was rain in the air, but it had not yet started to fall, and we paused and took
the last of the evening sun on the bench outside the main house. He put the
bag carefully at his feet as he gratefully accepted a mug of water from the
burn.
Good water, he said. Clean and cold.
He looked at the cod and mackerel on the drying racks.
If you’ve fish to spare, I’ve something to trade with you, he said.
We have everything we need, said Dad.
You don’t have a voltage converter for the windmill, grinned the
traveller. But we’ll get to that tomorrow maybe. Your friends in Lewis told
me you have been having problems.
Dad looked as if the traveller had already got the better of him in a trade
he hadn’t even said he was interested in. But it was true enough. The
windmill was eccentric in its performance, and Dad felt it was the converter
and had been grumbling for a year or so about making a voyage to try and
find another one.
Hmm, he said. Eat with us tonight. Trade tomorrow. We have time.
There are two questions that Dad, in my limited experience, always asks
the few travellers who we meet: is there anyone else? And: are they
coming? I never know if the questions are about hope or fear, though the
fact we never go looking for ourselves makes me think that it might be the
latter.
Before I was born, Mum and Dad did go to the mainland, way down the
chain of islands and into the river called the Clyde. They went in one boat
and came back in four, each piloting their own craft and towing a smaller
one, all loaded with many of the things I have grown up with. My own boat
in fact was the one my mum had towed. I always thought she had chosen it
from the other ones because of the name, the Sweethope. Dad told me later
it was because of all the yachts they had cannibalised in the tilted mess of
the long abandoned marina it had smelled the least bad when they opened
the hatch.
They had made two scavenging trips into the empty city that was once
Glasgow, and then never went back. Ferg asked why, once, and Dad just
said there was something there that neither could quite explain, but it
sapped them and made them very low, so much so that neither could face a
third trip, no matter how rich the pickings still were. One of my memories
of Mum when she still spoke was her telling me about the huge library she
had found there, miles of shelves and doors wide open. They’d slept there
for several nights, camped out safely in a fortress of books. She closed the
doors to keep the cats and foxes out when they left, and said if there was
one thing that might tempt her back it was that. She loved books when she
could read, especially stories, and I expect she gave that to me too.
So Dad asked his first questions, and Brand said yes but not many and
seemingly less every year, and no, they weren’t coming.
And then, without much prompting from us, he began to tell his story.
He was a good talker. His deep voice and easy smile drew you in slowly
and gently, so smoothly that you didn’t know you’d been hooked until his
sharp eyes caught yours, and even then it felt like he was sharing something
merry with you, like a joke. It never felt like bait.
What did feel like a lure were the temptations he freely unloaded from
his bag and laid out on the grass at our feet as he talked, seemingly without
any other intention than getting them out of the way until he found what he
was searching for at the bottom of the thing. Soon he was surrounded by a
fan of interesting stuff, like knives and binoculars and first aid kits—
military-looking—and a pair of hand cranked walkie-talkies as well as
various tins and bottles whose contents would doubtless be revealed if we
should choose to ask.
 I know it’s in here somewhere, he said, as he carelessly laid another
treasure on the ground and rummaged his hand deeper inside the bottomless
bag.
We all exchanged glances over his bowed head, but none of them
betrayed anything other than interest. Dad’s look contained no hint of a
warning and the closest to a reservation about our new guest was the
wrinkled nose Bar pantomimed at me.
I knew what she meant. He smelled different. Not bad, just not us.
When the world was full, did everyone smell the same? Or were you all
distinct from one another? I can see from the old pictures what a crowd
looked like, but I don’t know what it smelled like. Or sounded like even.
That’s something I often wonder about. Did all the voices become one big
sound, the way the individual clink of pebbles on a stony beach adds up to a
roar and a thump in the waves? That’s what I imagine it was like, otherwise
all those millions of voices being heard and distinct from one another at the
same time would have run you mad. Maybe they did. Anyway. Brand
eventually found what he was looking for and pulled it from the depths of
the bag with a satisfied grunt. It was a long, clear glass bottle, and he
handed it to Dad with a grin.
A guest-gift, he said.
But it came with a warning. We should be careful. It was strong stuff
and it would make you woozy if you drank too much of it. Dad laughed and
explained we knew all about alcohol since we made both heather ale and
mead. But this bottle was from the Before and it was still sealed. It was
clearish, like peaty water, and though the paper label was long gone there
were embossed letters standing proud around the neck of the bottle that read
“AKVAVIT”.
An unopened bottle from the deep past is a rare thing. The Baby Bust
had a lot of sorrows to drown, after all. But Brand made little of the gift. He
had more, he said. He had found a military ship grounded and tilting on a
tidal flat in the far north, maybe Norwegian. It had unopened crates full of
tinned food—all age tainted—and medical supplies. And the Akvavit. Lots
of Akvavit. It was good, he said, but tasted of a herb. Dill maybe.
Unexpected but not bad once you were used to it.
We moved inside as the sky began to spit, helping him bring in the
contents of his bag and laying them anew across the hearth mat. Then Dad
opened the bottle as Bar and I got the supper together, making a stew from
salt cod and potatoes. We all had a drink, except for Mum who just sat by
the chimney as she always did. Her eyes never left the redhead’s face.
Understandable, because he was a new thing and she saw few enough of
those, though she looked less interested than horrified. Dad explained she
had injured herself a long time ago, and Brand bowed his head at her and
smiled, raising his glass.
To the lady of the house, he said. Skol.
The alcohol made me choke. It felt like flames going down and my first
thought was that Brand had poisoned us, but then he drank his glass in one
gulp and grinned at me.
Firewater, he said.
That’s what it felt like, warming me from the inside. I coughed and
nodded.
Better than that, Dad said, looking round at us all. It’s time travel.
There was a long pause. I didn’t know what he meant.
We’re tasting the past, said Bar.
Exactly, said Brand. That’s what I always think when I drink it. This is
what they liked to drink. This is what the Before tasted like.
Bitter. Harsh. And not a bit sweet, I thought, not like the honey mead we
make.
But time travel was not the only magic gift he gave us the night of that
uneven trade. He had another trick, which was sweeter and being so was of
course the one that snared us. And as with everything Brand did, it came so
well wrapped in a story that you couldn’t quite see where the danger was.
He came from a family down south on the other side of the mainland, he
said. But his family had taken ill and died, two sisters and a father, a long
time ago. He had been on the move ever since. This was a surprise to us as
we took it as a fact that the mainland was empty. He said that it was now, as
far as he knew, but that he and his kin had grown up in a forgotten wildness
of reeds and water on the south-east coast called the Broad or the Broads, a
place so empty and unvisited that everything had seemed safe until it
wasn’t. They’d lived in a big house on a flat island in an estuary, a place
that was close enough to dry land on both sides that you could swim back
and forth, not live like us perched on the wave-torn edge of things.
His father had been what he called a tinkerer, a man who understood the
old machines, and who knew how to make and mend the mechanical ones.
He was good at Frankensteining, said Brand, who then explained that a
Frankenstein was a monster in the ancient stories made from bits and pieces
of human beings. I didn’t tell him he was wrong, or that I’d read the book
and knew that Frankenstein was the mad doctor who created the monster.
He just meant his dad was good at cobbling together old machines that were
meant to do one thing and joining them to other ones so that they did
something new, like rigging a waterwheel scavenged from the mainland to
make a tide-driven pump to bring clean water from a deep borehole on the
island. I saw Dad’s eyes light up when he told us about that. We’re all
Frankensteins now that nothing new is getting made and we have to stitch
together our tech from the old, unrotted bits of what’s left behind. Brand
learned from his dad, but he didn’t stay once everyone died. He left the
Broads and took to the sea, looking, he said, for others.
He was, he explained, a mapper of people, a wanderer and a trader,
though since his meetings with others were so rare, he did not live by trade
but by fishing and gleaning. But it was trade he wanted with us, and though
he talked of salted cod and vegetables and whatever food we could spare, I
saw his eyes were on the dogs. And especially my dogs. He was very taken
by Jip and Jess, I could see that from the first, though in truth he was open
and made no secret of it. He crouched down and stroked them while pulling
back their lips to see their mouths. They look small enough at first sight, but
they’ve got long jaws and fierce teeth under that fur. He nodded in
approval.
Good hunters your dogs, I’ll bet, he said, looking at Dad. Dad nodded at
me.
Griz’s dogs, he said. And you’re right. They’re the very death of rabbits,
those two.
Indeed if Jip and Jess had a fault it was that they took rabbits as a special
challenge and would hunt them all day, given half a chance. There were
none on the home island, nor had there ever been in my lifetime but there
were some warrens on Sandray, and the Uists—now that people had gone—
were heaving with them. It was an obsession they must have inherited from
their parents: their mother Freya went rabbiting in the dunes one day and
never came back, though we searched and searched. Their father Wode is so
old that he now moves even less than Mum, at whose feet he sleeps most of
the day, but once he too was a gleeful rabbit-slayer. Jip and Jess would start
whining half a mile out whenever we went to the big islands, and were
always first over the gunwales when we landed, tearing across the dunes
and onto the machair where the rabbits sunned themselves. The only things
they hunted more obsessively than rabbits were rats, and there were plenty
of them in the abandoned houses. Rabbits they seemed to hunt for a game,
chasing and doubling back and forth across the sand and grass in a kind of
murderously happy abandon, but rats they took personally, as a kind of grim
affront, and their assault on them was definitely war, not sport at all.
Whenever we entered an abandoned house, we’d send them in first to clear
any rats.
As he stroked the dogs, Brand told us he had spent thirteen years on his
travels, looking for people and seeing the world. He had sailed the Baltic
and up into the fjords of Scandinavia, and he had then hugged the deserted
coast of Europe all the long way down to Gibraltar and then the Atlantic
coast of Africa. He had not entered the Mediterranean, though he had gone
quite far up some of the navigable rivers that penetrated the mainland. We
all leaned forward as he spoke of what he had seen and what he had not,
like the three families living together in a big ancient house in the
Stockholm Archipelago, a scrabble of tiny islands around the old capital of
Sweden.
When I first spotted them I thought they were ghosts, he said. They were
like copies of each other—pale-eyed and pale-skinned with flyaway white-
blond hair like bog cotton.
He said the women were very beautiful, but he had found them
unnerving, and not just because of the strong physical resemblance that now
spread across three families. He said they smiled just a little too much and
left it at that. He had not minded leaving them, or that all he had taken from
them were strange memories and their habit of saying skol when they
toasted.
He told us of an eerie sailing ship suddenly seen on a windless, murky
day on the North Sea that had sheered away as soon as he hailed it and then
disappeared into a fog bank and never been seen again, something that had
happened so fast he almost put it down to hallucination until minutes later
when his becalmed boat had been rocked by the bow wave of the
mysterious craft which seemed—even more mysteriously—to have been
moving silently under its own power since there was no wind for the sails to
catch.
He had sailed down into the Channel and then gone down the Seine
where he found not only burnt Paris but before that, on the estuary, the
nearest thing to a village he had ever seen, five or six families living like us,
fishermen and farmers.
I liked them a lot, he said. I thought one day, when I’d travelled enough,
I would go back and learn their language and live with them.
Only when he sailed back two years later, coming north from his great
voyage to Spain and then Africa, they were gone.
Not a sign of them, he said. And their fields were so overgrown they
might never have been there at all. They might as well have been something
I dreamed.
And for a moment, as he spoke, his eyes seemed to be seeing something
a great deal further away than the fire he was looking at.
Africa, said Bar. Was it hot?
All the time, he said.
I’d love to travel, said Bar, ignoring the look Dad threw her. Just to
know what somewhere else was like.
And then Brand stood and said he must go outside for a piss, and I
stumbled over the things laid on the floor as I hurried to show him the shed
where the earth closet was. In truth I was just trying to stop him exiting
first, in case he surprised Ferg who I knew had been leaning close to the
open door so he could hear what was being said.
I saw him slip out of sight as I paused in the door and pretended to
sneeze to buy him time, and then I stepped into the fading light of the
evening and pointed to the outside toilet. The squall had passed and the rain
had stopped spitting.
There, I said.
Brand looked at the tall upright shack. Of course it stood out like a sore
thumb when compared with the other low-built stone outbuildings.
Well, he grinned. Good job you came to show me. I’d never have found
it on my own.
I wondered if I’d made him suspicious, but his smile took the edge off
his words. I watched him walk over the low heather to the toilet, and
noticed how his eyes never stopped scanning the island as he went. At the
time I thought he knew he was being watched.
After what happened, the way it happened, I’m not so sure. But the end
result was just as bad.
 Chapter 5

Marmalade

The stew smelled good and the talking around the table was better, and the
excitement of having someone new to talk to gave the whole meal a holiday
air. We still have holidays, because Dad says you need to mark the passing
of time and the seasons, so we have birthdays and Midsummer and
Christmas Feast, though we don’t have a religion to go with it. I felt bad for
Ferg, outside, hidden and on guard. I kept looking at Dad, expecting him to
relent and announce his other son was due back any minute, which would
be the signal for Ferg to wait a while and then come in, all innocence, and
join the five of us round the fire. But he didn’t.
I saw Bar also looking the question at Dad and saw him give the
smallest shake of his head. A few minutes later, she got up and went behind
Brand to get the pot, saying she hadn’t got enough cod in her helping, only
potato. I was deep in conversation with him, but I saw her open the small
window in the wall beside the fire and slip a bowl out into the darkness.
Sorry, she said as Brand turned, feeling the cool draught on his neck. It
gets a little fuggy in here.
Nothing wrong with clean air and a breeze at your back, he said. I’ve
been at sea so long I get a fit of the get-me-outs if I’m stuck inside a house
too long. I can’t sleep ashore at all now. I need the sea to rock me until I
drop off.
Dad sat next to Mum and fed her alternate spoonfuls, one for her then
one for him, as he always did. Bar sat on the other side and wiped Mum’s
chin whenever she dribbled. It was a routine so normal to me that I hadn’t
until then thought others might find it strange or uncomfortable to watch.
Though I had of course spent very little of my life wondering what
strangers might think of us and our way of living, there being so few of
them.
Brand, though, seemed uncomfortable with the sight of a grown woman
being fed like a child. He looked away and saw a pile of books against the
wall. He caught me watching him and asked what they were for, and then
we began talking about them as a way to allow him to give Mum a kind of
privacy he clearly felt she needed. When I told him they were my books and
just stories, not anything anyone else thought was useful, he began to quiz
me about what I liked and why. It was a new sensation to have someone ask
me about myself, and I suppose that was why I opened up and told him.
I said I especially like the ones about apocalypses and dystopias because
it’s always interesting to see what the Before thought the After would be
like. He said he didn’t know what the word dystopia meant and I told him.
Then he asked me what the worst one was, and without having to think
about it I told him about this one called The Road about a dad and his son
travelling across what I think is America. From the very beginning, I knew
it wasn’t going to end well and it didn’t. I told him about it and he nodded
as if I’d said something very wise instead of just given a quick outline about
a story I’d read.
Maybe that’s what happened in America, at the very end, he said. Maybe
after the Exchange there were enough vigorous old bastards to bother to
make that kind of horror happen.
I hope not, I said. And I meant it because that was a future no one
should have to live in. Even people crazy enough to be part of the Limited
Exchange.
Talk of the Exchange brought Dad back into the conversation, and
because of that and the fact Mum had had enough to eat, the talk widened
across the table as Brand asked what stories had been handed down to us
about all that. Dad said no one knew who began it and that everyone
involved, the ones that survived said it was the other lot. That was when the
world was still talking to itself, about the last time nations worried about
what other nations thought about them, before they all turned inward. Five
to ten years later he said they just stopped talking. Brand nodded. That was
very much like what he had been told by his father and mother.
This was about seventy years from the Gelding—threescore years and
ten. A full lifetime, Bible style. I know that because one of the Busters
sprayed it on the wall of the old church on South Uist and the weather
hasn’t quite undone it, though every year we pass it and it looks more
faded:

THE DAYS OF OUR YEARS ARE THREESCORE YEARS

AND TEN; AND IF BY REASON OF STRENGTH THEY BE
FOURSCORE YEARS, YET IS THEIR STRENGTH LABOUR
AND SORROW; FOR IT IS SOON CUT OFF, AND WE FLY
AWAY. PSALMS 90.10.

I think whoever sprayed it was deep in the labour-and-sorrow phase of

their life, because the lettering looks both shaky and angry at the same time.
Bar says it’s like a howl from the Lastborn generation.
By that time, the world’s population had dropped dramatically. Dad set
me the problem as a maths test, so I know the figures. At the Gelding it was
about 7.7 billion. Like I said, threescore and ten years out from that it had
dwindled to less than ten thousand people. I get vertigo trying to think
about such large numbers, and how the size of our species just dropped off
a cliff as sheer as the one at the back of our island. In seventy years, we
were down to precisely eight and a half thousand in fact. Except of course
the mortality rate must have been worse because there was plenty of other
stuff going bad.
We know less of those more recent events like the Exchange, or the
Convulsion or the Hunger for that matter, than we know about what came
long before that, because all the reliable history we know comes from
books, and we have no shortage of them. But after the Gelding, the supply
of books became scarcer and then petered out, just like the world’s
population did, as if people lost the point of writing for the future when
there wasn’t going to be one. Or else they were writing on the internet,
which was a spiderweb of electric networks that no longer survive. So the
real stories of the last years are the ones told by mouth, and though they are
closer in time, they seem more like myths and legends than the things that
happened before them, because those earlier things were written down as
history. This is why when strangers meet, the talk is always about those last
days of the Before—the Long Goodbye—as people compare their versions
of what they have been told, hoping the newcomer might hold a fresh piece
of a jigsaw that in truth will now never be fully completed.
And the stories that come down through our family don’t have a bird’s-
eye view of events because of course they only saw the edges of things, or
heard of them at a distance, and for some of that time they were kept away
from the world anyway, not quite in camps but not quite free, until the
Busters decided that there was no use in studying them to reverse the
Gelding, or trying to repopulate the world with them because they were so
few. That’s when Dad’s parents came here, on the margin of everything,
keeping out of the way of the world until it departed. I think they did that as
much out of manners as anything, because Dad said he remembered his
mother saying how the Busters, who by then were all well north of fifty and
heading for the exit door, used to look at them with their youth and
unwrinkled skin with something strange in their eyes, something that
flickered between grief and jealousy and a usually—but not always—
controlled anger.
They opened the gates and let us go, she had said. And though they
emphasised we had of course always been free to leave, the fact they took
the trouble to say so told us the opposite was true. So we went, and we kept
on going until we’d put land and sea between us, and then we sat it out.
Sitting it out on an island isn’t so strange a thing, nor was it crazy, said
Dad.
Brand nodded, and of course we all knew the sense of it: travelling by
land became less and less reliable and then more and more unsafe in the
final throes of the Before.
But the sea is a road everywhere, said Brand. There was a kind of pride
in his voice as he said it, as if the seaways were his own particular kingdom.
But then he had by his own telling sailed halfway round the world, so
maybe he had a right to the pleasure in it.
These islands were not so remote before the land was tamed by the
roads, said Dad. Once they were like a great thoroughfare for the really
ancient world.
He often told us this. That’s why one of the early Christian god-people
came and built his home on what now looks like the most remote place in
the world, south of here on an island called Iona that I had heard of but
never visited. He didn’t do it to get away from it all: he was planting
himself in the middle of a busy waterway. That’s true. That’s history, and I
know it not just because it was one of Dad’s favourite stories, but because I
read it, not once, but in many of the books we have.
The talk turned to all the strange belief systems and sects and crazes that
grew up in the Long Goodbye. First off, Dad said the crazies got crazier,
and the ones with the biggest sticks got the most impatient and that led to
things like the Exchange. The Exchange meant goodbye to oil from the
Middle East, from the hot dry countries that were now hotter and drier.
Then there were, maybe later, the Neatfreaks who wanted to leave their
affairs in good order in case it could help any that remained. Or any life that
happened upon our planet after we were all gone, if that was the way the
story ends. They left things like a big seed vault in Svalbard, and various
gene safes they called Arks scattered about the world, but they also started
collecting things like the car piles.
And they did at least try to make the ageing nuke plants safe, said
Brand.
That didn’t go so well, not everywhere, I said, though I did not yet know
what that meant in reality. When I was little, and before I read much, when
they said “nuclear” I thought they were saying “new clear” and couldn’t
understand why they were worried about something that sounded so fresh
and clean. Then I learned nuclear meant something old and dirty. Very dirty.
And very, very long lived.
Those Neatfreaks were the opposite of the Bingers, from what I heard,
said Brand. Damn Bingers just decided to use everything up because who
the hell was going to need it when they were gone?
They ate all the pies, said Dad. Which is an old way of saying they were
out-of-control greedy.
They’re probably the ones who ate the dogs in the end, said Bar.
That’s a horrible part of the Before story I don’t quite believe, though
Ferg swears Mum told him her mother had seen it happening, and that was
why dogs were almost as rare as we are. Though it doesn’t explain why
bitches are even rarer.
I was told they got poisoned as the cities became emptier and people got
scared of them running in packs and turning wild again, said Brand. I don’t
know which story is true.
 Neither is good, I said.
The talk kept on down this darker path as Dad and Brand compared their
families’ versions of the past. What both agreed was that some people took
their own lives, gently mostly, often together, to avoid the pain and
helplessness when they got too old and there were no able-bodied younger
people to care for them.
Or maybe they left early just to avoid the rush? I said, which is a joke I
had found in an old book. It wasn’t a joke that quite made sense to me,
because I’d never seen a crowd, but I knew from the context how it was
meant to be funny, and I suppose I was trying to seem clever to this new
addition to my world.
Brand and Dad looked at me and neither smiled. I shrugged at Bar. She
rolled her eyes as if I was a child that shouldn’t have been trying to join in
the elders’ conversation.
And then others just clung on, tough as limpets, said Brand. Waiting to
at least see what Armageddon looked like before going into the long dark.
And now they are all gone, I thought, and then found Brand looking at
me as though he was reading my thoughts. He nodded.
The last wave, the Busters, broke, he said. And this is the New Dark
Age. Maybe, probably, the Last Dark Age. Then he smiled broadly, as if to
break the solemnness that had taken over from the holiday mood.
You wanted to know what a hot country’s like? he said to Bar. I can
show you.
He reached into the bag again, and this time didn’t have to rummage too
much. He came out with a squat glass jar of something as tawny and red as
his hair. I could see it was a jelly and not another liquid, like the Akvavit,
because as he tilted it the darker strips of whatever was suspended in it
didn’t move. It reminded me of the single amber bead Mum has round her
neck, the one with a bit of insect trapped in it. Backlit by the flames in the
grate, it looked like someone had reached into the sky and taken a lump out
of a setting sun and bottled it.
Is it jam? said Bar.
Sort of—but not, he said. It’s marmalade.
Like the cat? said Bar, looking at me. Like the one in the book?
Bar used to read us a picture book about a marmalade cat. It was Joy’s
favourite when we were small—that and a book called D’Aulaires’ Book of
Greek Myths—and it was so loved it fell to bits and had to be held together
by an old bulldog clip. I don’t know what happened to it. Maybe someone
hid it so as not to be reminded of Joy. I hadn’t thought about it for years.
The memory of it tugged something inside me and made my eyes sting.
Bet you never tasted it, said Brand. Marmalade.
It’s made of oranges, said Bar, chin tilting up, keen to show she knew
stuff.
Ever tasted an orange? he said, looking round at us all.
We shook our heads.
Warmer up here than it used to be, said Dad, but still not warm enough
for citrus.
Citrus. Dad didn’t like people thinking he didn’t know stuff either.
Brand unsnapped the lid and held it out.
This is what a hot country is like, he said. Fill your noses first.
We all leaned in and inhaled. It was something I’d never smelled before:
clean yet spicy. It had a tang, a cut to it, and yet it was also, in some way I
then thought was a miracle, sunny.
You have bread and butter, he said. We will have marmalade sandwiches
as a dessert. A treat. As thanks for your hospitality.
And then he smiled, wide and white in the dense red of his beard, and
waggled his eyebrows as if the whole world was a fine joke and we all
lucky to be in on it together.
And to sweeten you up, because tomorrow I will take you to my boat
and show you the converter and then try and make you give me much too
much fish and food in trade for it. I may even see if you’ll let me have that
fine bitch there.
Bar snorted.
Over Griz’s dead body, she said, matching his smile.
Oh, it won’t come to that, he said. Was just a thought. She is a very
fetching dog though.
We’ll find something to trade it for—if it is the right converter, said Dad,
and it came to me that the edge in his voice was because he was not quite
liking the fact they were smiling at each other.
Your friends on Lewis said it was, Brand said. But you will see for
yourself. Tomorrow.
The bread was cut, a smear of butter laid on each piece, and then Brand
spread a thick layer of orange jelly on them.
What are the bits? said Bar.
The peel, he said. I cut it myself. I made it according to an old recipe
book. I made it when I was in Spain, where there were no people but too
many oranges. I found sugar in a ruined hotel and used that. It’s sweet and
yet sour. Even if you don’t like it, you’ll know what the south is like when
you taste it.
The taste was shockingly intense, rich and more complicated than
anything I had ever eaten. As he had said, it was sharp and yet sweet, but
not sweet in the way of honey: it was an intensity that seemed to fill the
whole mouth, but I could not taste the sun in it because the sweetness
caught on the tooth the ram had chipped, and sent a lance of pain into my
jaw.
It felt like the mouthful had bitten me, and though I winced no one saw
me because they were all enjoying this new treat in their own ways. Bar
was laughing; Dad had his eyes closed as if shutting out the world was
making the experience all the more powerful. Brand was looking at my
mother.
I folded the bread over on itself and palmed the sandwich.
Amazing, said Bar. It’s like a mouthful of summer.
Tastes like it smells, said Dad. Thank you. It’s wonderful.
Better than the firewater, I said because everyone seemed to be expected
to say something.
More, have more, said Brand, reaching for the bread. Once you have
opened the jar the taste goes very quickly. It will taste of slop tomorrow. We
must enjoy it while the magic is still in it!
I excused myself, saying now I too needed a piss. Ferg was in the
darkness outside, where he had been listening, and before he could ask I
handed him the sandwich. He grinned and punched me on the arm, which
was his way of showing affection.
Then we walked behind the house and he ate it. I watched his face as he
did so, and saw the happiness it gave him.
It does taste of sunlight, he whispered. It’s wonderful.
It hurts my tooth, I said. I’ll sneak you more when I can, or hide it till he
goes to sleep. He says he always sleeps on his boat.
Hope he’s tired, said Ferg, pulling his coat tight round himself. Because
I’m getting cold out here.
Don’t know if Dad trusts him yet, I said.
That’s Dad being Dad, he said. But that’s okay. You go back in before he
wonders where you’ve gone.
When I returned, Brand was talking to Dad about the converter, and Dad
was smiling and yawning and saying tomorrow was soon enough to talk
trade. Bar was chewing her way through her second sandwich, and Mum
had fallen asleep.
Bar and I cleared the table and I pocketed the sandwich they had left me.
Bar saw and silently nodded. She knew I was saving it for Ferg. She did not
know I had not eaten mine because of the tooth pain.
Dad yawned again and said it was time to sleep, and began to take Mum
to their bedroom, shaking her awake and leading her ahead of him. He told
Brand he was welcome to sleep ashore, but Brand said he’d stay and chat
with Bar and me and then sleep on his boat, as was his habit.
Bar was also yawning by this time, and as Brand and I talked further
about the books I liked and the ones he had read, her head dropped and she
went to sleep at the table beside me. I carried on talking, and now I know
one of the reasons was because I was enjoying this new friendship, a new
friend being something every bit as exotic to me as the marmalade was for
the others.
As we talked, Brand ruffled Jess’s hair, scratching behind her ears. She
leant into him as he did so. I felt another tug inside me, but dogs are open-
hearted and it doesn’t do to be jealous of an animal’s affections, so I pushed
the feeling away and started laying out the bowls for breakfast. I can’t
remember exactly which books we talked about, and the talking went on for
a while, almost as if we were each waiting for the other to admit they were
tired, but neither wanting to be the first to say it. I do remember talking
about a line in another book called The Death of Grass that perturbed me. It
wasn’t in the later part of the story where society fell apart and people
began killing and raping and turning back into something feral. It was in the
early bit of the story, before the grass and the wheat and the crops started
dying and the famine began. It was a simple line, something like “the
children came home from half term and they drove to the sea for a holiday”.
It was so different from my After world, that Before world where children
were sent away from their home to go to a school. All the learning I had,
and there was a lot because Dad’s Leibowitzing meant he insisted we filled
our minds with what might be useful and shouldn’t be lost, happened in or
in sight of my home. And going to the sea for a holiday? I’ve never been
out of sight of the sea, not for a whole day. I don’t know what that would be
like. Sea’s in my blood. Brand nodded and reached over and bumped fists
with me. I told him I didn’t know how easy I’d breathe if there was not at
least some water glinting on the horizon.
Amen to that, he said.
That’s the last thing I remember either of us saying because then I must
have yawned and fallen asleep right there and then, foolishly warm in the
fire and the sense that I had made a new friend.
I didn’t know I was wrong. Or how soon I would find out exactly how
easily I’d breathe away from the safety of the sea.
 Chapter 6

The theft

I knew something was badly awry the moment I woke. My head was
hurting and, as I staggered up to my feet in front of the cold fire, it was as if
my legs had forgotten how to walk in time with each other. The house was
silent and there was no one else awake. But outside there was a noise that
drew me stumbling to the door and out into the thin slant of rain.
The red-sailed boat was not at the mooring.
It was just rounding the headland at the south of the bay, so nearly gone
from sight that its bows were already obscured by the rocks. Brand was at
the tiller and he saw me in the instant I saw him and, just before he too was
swallowed by the jagged bulk of land, he smiled, his teeth flashing
unmistakably white in the red of his beard, and he half shrugged and half
waved and then was gone.
Two things stopped me in my tracks, beyond the fact that he was leaving
without a farewell or any attempt to trade for the much-boasted converter.
First was that he was wearing my father’s rain jacket, the good yellow one
with the peaked hood, which made no sense. Second was a delayed
recognition of what his smile and shrug and half-wave had meant: it had
been a farewell and a strange and almost good-natured admission of guilt.
Honesty ran one way through the gesture, while dishonesty crossed it at
right angles, like the warp and weft of Ferg’s weaving. Brand was in that
moment two things at once. But only one thing mattered.
He had stolen my dog.
I knew that with cold certainty the moment I saw Jip alone in the water,
barking and swimming far out in the bay, so far out that he must have fallen
or been thrown off the boat in whose wake he was struggling. I saw his
head bobbing and heard the shrillness in his bark and knew that Brand had
taken Jess, who was nowhere to be seen.
And then I was shouting to wake the others and running for the dory. He
had not cut our boats loose, but he had thrown the oars into the water and
the tide was slowly dragging them out to sea.
As I ran, I noticed without stopping that the racks that had been thick
with drying fish were now empty. He had stolen our food too.
The chill in the water bit at me as I dived out to get the oars, and then I
splashed back into the dory and was about to unshackle it to get to my boat
—which was moored in the lee of the rocks behind which Brand had
disappeared—but as I took a breath I saw Jip was going to make it ashore
under his own power. I had a second thought: what was I going to do when
I chased Brand down? I had not had to think at all about setting off to get
Jess back: that had been a natural reflex. My first thought had been to scoop
Jip out of the water and then get the Sweethope under sail and start the
chase without waiting a moment longer, knowing every moment of delay
was putting more sea room between me and my quarry.
Then I realised I might need a weapon, so I left the dory shackled and
ran back to the house, intending to get my bow and a long gun. As I ran, I
was gripped by a sudden dread that the others were dead because I could
not see anyone moving or responding to my shouts or Jip’s barking.
They weren’t dead. They were drugged and—once shaken awake—
vomitous and disorientated. Brand had poisoned them to sleep by putting
something in the marmalade. That stubborn ram that had chipped my tooth
the day before had actually saved me, because without the pain from the
sugar I too would have eaten enough marmalade to be as drugged and
useless as they were. Brand would have got clean away and we would never
even have known in which direction he had gone, or how to begin chasing
him down.
There would be days ahead when I realised that might not have been the
worst option.
But right then, in the moment, full of adrenaline and anger and betrayal,
all I could think of was getting after him as soon as possible. I tried to
explain to Bar who was the least affected by what had happened, and as I
did so I grabbed food and stuffed it into a bag. Then I kissed Mum, who
looked at me blankly but seemed to squeeze my hand back as I said I was
going but would be back with Jess, and I took Ferg’s gun, and made sure he
was lying on his side so that he would not drown in his own vomit before
waking. Then I grabbed arrows and my bow from the hook by the door and
ran for the dory where Jip was waiting, barking at me to hurry up.
Dad tried to stop me, stumbling after me and mumbling that he would
come, that I should wait until he could get his head straight, and then he
bent over and threw up what looked like everything he had ever eaten and I
said I could not wait and he may or may not have heard me because he
stayed doubled over, retching as Bar came out and held him upright, and
then I just turned and left them, sprinting for Jip and the dory, and within
four minutes I had got to the Sweethope, tumbled the dog aboard, followed
him into the cockpit and slung my kit over the companionway down into
the small cabin space—and two minutes later I had unloosed from the
mooring buoy and tacked out into open sea, my eyes scanning for the tell-
tale, treacherous red.
I was so intent on finding the small scrap of colour now halfway to the
horizon that when I finally did and risked a fast look back to wave, I had
cleared the headland and could no longer see my home or my family.
I had left without farewell.
Or blessing.
Or knowing if they would recover properly.
You can fall out of your own safe life that quickly, and nothing you
thought you knew will ever be the same again.
Those thoughts came to me later.
In that moment, in the wide empty world, all that mattered to me and
Jip, who was quivering on point at the prow of the boat, was the tiny shard
of red in the sea ahead of us.
That was how the hunt began.
That was when things were simple.
That was when we thought we were just chasing a dog thief. That was
before we went into the empty mainland and found we were chasing
something else entirely, something we didn’t even know we had lost.
That was how I ended up going where I’ve been. Into the ruins of your
abandoned world. Seeing what I’ve seen. Doing what I’ve done.
And doing what I have done is how I ended up here. Alone. No one to
talk to but a photograph of a long dead boy with his dog and his sister.
Nothing to do but write this down for people who will never read it.
Solitude is its own kind of madness.
Like hope itself.
 Chapter 7

Running before the wind

I couldn’t see red sails. The wind was blowing out of the north-east, and
Brand had got out of the wind shadow of the great cliff at the back of our
island a good quarter of an hour before I was able to get the Sweethope
loose from its mooring. She was a small enough boat, though you might
have called her a yacht. One person could manage her if you were lively
about it and knew how to do it, but in truth it always went a bit smoother
with two, and the pair of bunks below always reminded me she was not
quite designed for one sailor. But I was used to sailing her on my own. By
the time I’d got out of the bay and rounded the rocks to the south, he’d been
able to put on every scrap of sail he had and must have been running at full
speed ahead of the wind, putting more and more sea between my dog and
me as I struggled to get out into the faster air.
And struggle was the right word. It felt like the boat was dragging
herself through a peatbog. It was my frustration, I knew, but the sea around
us seemed sticky, like it was trying to suck at the hull to slow us down. I
think Jip sensed something similar. He stood on the forepeak and barked his
own frustration into the sea-waste ahead of us, looking back at me every
now and then, as if our slow progress was something I could do more to fix.
Visibility was good, and I should have been able to see him as I cast
around the empty sea in front of the boat, but I couldn’t. Given the strength
and direction of the wind, it only made sense that he would be running
south, and so I concentrated on getting up our speed and making sure I had
as much sail spread as the boat would bear, and then, when I finally felt the
kick of the strong air catch the canvas and heard the water begin to really
fizz past on either side of the cutwater, I ducked below to grab the
binoculars.
Jip must have seen Brand before I did, because he’d stopped barking and
was just standing stiffly on the bow, still on point, back legs shivering with
what Dad called terrier-shake, which I always took to be a controlled
excitement. I found the dark sails a minute or so later, far ahead of us and
racing for the horizon.
Something happened in my stomach when I finally saw them, a sort of
flip and a dropping sensation. I think if I had not seen the sails again then
Brand and his theft would have become a nightmare that would have
haunted me for the rest of my life. Though maybe that life would have been
longer than the one I’m now facing. I would have begun to think his
disappearance was too sudden, too impossible to be real and perhaps even
begun to wonder if he had been something supernatural. That was half of
what was behind the flip and drop I felt inside—relief that the careful walls
I had built around my sense of the world had held. Maybe in your busier
world with more distractions like the internet and football matches and
other people, you never felt the tug of the uncanny the way that I did. Now I
am alone and stuck here with little to do other than write all this down and
think, I realise how much time I used to spend with my head in a book,
filling the emptiness of my world and letting the pages distract from the
darkness in the shadows behind me. I put a lot of effort into not letting
myself believe in the supernatural. I think we all did. Of all the stories we
used to take turns reading out loud around the fireplace, none were ever
ghost stories. I know that was no mistake. Every empty house we passed
might easily have been full of ghosts, if we chose to see them that way. But
Brand disappearing into thin salt air would have been just the kind of thing
to put a fatal chink in that protective wall.
The other thing in my belly was fear, not so much fear of Brand himself,
for my blood was still up and against him, but a fear of what I now had to
do. The truth was I had no plan. I had an aim, which was to get my dog
back. My eye caught the long gun and the bow I had thrown down into the
cabin. The fear was not for myself. I was young and angry enough not to
feel that, though this wasn’t courage: young and angry is not the same as
brave. I was not scared of Brand at that moment, and that was a further
stupidity. The fear was fear of myself. Of how far I would go.
 You, in the picture I found, have nothing but sunshine and laughter in
your face. Your eyes shine with it as you hang there caught in your star
jump, forever lighter than air, caught between grass and sky between a
sister and a dog who love you. Your thoughts can never have borne the
sudden dark burden I felt when I looked at the gun.

A sea chase with the wind at your back is a long thing, and there was plenty
of time for thinking as the miles flew past. In the open water that stretched
between the last of home and the southern islands and mainland proper, it
was also cold. I had a long sleeveless coat in the cabin, made from three
sheepskins stitched together, with the wool on the outside. I got it and
cinched my belt around the middle to hold it close around me. The smell of
the wool reminded me of home. So did the cap I pulled over my ears, a
stretchy knitted thing Bar had sewn for me made from an old jersey we had
found preserved in a plastic bag at the back of a tall cupboard in a low
house on Eriskay the summer before. The yarn was more than a century old,
and Bar had overstitched it so many times to keep it together that it was
easily as much stitch as sweater, but there was something of her in each of
those tacks, so I felt a little less alone when I wore it. I’d watched her
painstakingly working on it over a winter month and had come to secretly
covet it as she did so. Then she unexpectedly and casually gave it to me, as
if it were nothing.
You need a hat, she said. And that was that. Except that for a moment,
and in truth a long time after that, it was everything. Bar didn’t talk much,
but she did a lot. It was in doing that she showed what she thought. That
kept me as warm as the hat itself.
Thinking of Bar made me duck back into the cabin and get the mackerel
line. There was no telling how long this might go on, and Bar would say
there was no sense in going hungry. I could do more than one thing at a
time.
Not well, as it turned out, because in grabbing the line I felt a sharp stab
as one of the hooks went deep into the side of my finger.
There was no choice other than to grit my teeth and get out my
Leatherman. The Leatherman goes everywhere with me, same as the dogs.
It’s my prized find, a long small and still stainless steel rectangle that
unfolds into a pair of pliers and a wire cutter with knives and saws and
screwdrivers and all sorts of useful tools that are tucked away in the
handles. I found it in the rotted glove box of a car on Eriskay. It’s a
wonderfully useful thing. Swearing at myself for the stupidity, I pushed the
hook all the way out of the pad of flesh on the side of my finger until the
barb was clear, and then snapped it off with the wire-cutters. Then I was
able to pull the hook back out without tearing myself up with the barb.
The long mass of the next two islands ahead was looming when I was
done with my de-hooking, and I put the mackerel line overboard. I had to
keep half an eye on the distant red sails which suddenly became camouflage
as the land ahead became background. By the time the gap between the
islands had revealed itself, cutting the long mass in two, I had thirteen
gutted fish in the bucket at my feet and my hands were bloody with the
work.
There’s an old lighthouse on the shore and as I passed it I realised that I
was now as far south as I had ever been in my life. The island on the other
side was another like Barra, to be seen and not landed on. When we had
come this far south before, we were looking for turbine parts in the fallen
thicket of windmills on the north end of the island. But the sea was
suddenly humped with bobbing corpses of seals, maybe thirty or so. We had
smelled them before we saw them, and when we did see them Dad had
simply turned the boat for home, saying the sea was sour here. And the sour
sea was why we never came down this way again.
I had been small when that happened, and excited to be going on an
expedition. I had thought I would return home with some exotic find of my
own, maybe viked from the little harbour township said to be on the eastern
side of the island. Instead I took home something equally unfamiliar—the
memory of the fear I saw flash across my father’s face before he
remembered to hide it.
The sea didn’t look sour, nor were there now any sea-bloated seal bellies
to be seen. The air was fresh and the wind kept its strength up. Only the
light was beginning to fade as I made what was really the choice that
changed everything. It seemed small enough at the time, a matter of
navigation, just the best way to sail through the sound ahead without going
aground. Because I’d never crossed that southern limit of my world.
Somewhere in the back of my head, a voice told me that this threshold
was a place to turn back. I looked at Jip and thought of Jess. She was every
bit as tough as he was, but where Jip always kept the tiniest bit of himself
reserved, even when allowing himself to be scratched or when choosing to
sleep tucked in close to me in the winter months, Jess gave herself without
keeping anything back. Her tail wagged that bit faster, and she was always a
step ahead of him when running to greet us when we returned home. The
voice in my head wondered if it was maybe that less guarded nature that
allowed Brand to grab her. But thinking of her sweetness was not doing
anything other than making the tears prick behind my eyes, so I pushed the
voice away, far out of hearing, and watched the unknown passage ahead for
shoals or skerries. And so, by concentrating on the job on hand, I sailed past
the known boundaries of my world without noticing the exact moment
when it happened.
Through the sound between Coll and Tiree, everything changed. The sky
darkened and the wind, which had been constant at my back, now shifted
and became difficult. As if he too sensed that some invisible boundary had
been crossed, Jip finally dropped his head and curled up on the bench next
to me. He didn’t close his eyes, just rested his head on his paws, sighed and
then stared fatalistically into the blank wall of the cockpit in front of him.
His look was a little dispiriting, but the companionable warmth against my
leg was welcome.
The Sweethope had been cutting smoothly through the powerful heave
of the regular Atlantic swell, but passing within the protection of the barrier
islands, the boat’s motion changed and began to toil as the water around us
changed to a queasy wind-blown chop. Visibility had been good for most of
the day, but now it was as if several squalls of rain had been pinballing back
and forth on the other side of the islands, waiting for our arrival. Within five
minutes, one blew across the gap between us and the red sails in the
distance, and then we were lashed with a short but vicious hail of rain that
hit so quickly it seemed to have materialised out of thin air. There was so
little warning that I barely had time to get my oilskin coat on over my
sheepskin. Jip dropped off the bench and slid and skittered his way into the
better shelter of the cockpit where he lay nose to tail on a slab of fishnet,
positioning himself so that his eyes remained fixed on me through the
narrow hatch.
On the other side of the squall, the visibility cleared enough for me to
see that the red sails had been swallowed by a larger bank of rain ahead of
us. I pushed back the dripping hood of the oilskin and stared into the
weather, for the first time in the long day unable to see what we were
chasing. I knew it had to be there—I had been unsighted for a short amount
of time but not nearly long enough for Brand to have got away—so its
absence unsettled me.
Looking back on it, I can’t really believe how stupid anger had made
me. Other than arguments with my family, which were as natural to us as
water is to the fish that swim in it, I had no experience with a serious
confrontation with a stranger who wished me ill. Bringing the gun meant I
had some unconscious awareness that there was danger ahead, but the bow
and arrows always went where I did, much as you would have carried a
telephone wherever you went in your more crowded world. It’s quicker to
shoot a rabbit than it is to lay a snare for it if you’re caught foodless away
from home, and shooting for the pot was second nature to all of us both on
and off the island.
Not having the red sails in sight was alarming, but also jolted me out of
my one-track mind. I had to think of other possible tracks that my future
might be about to go down. Although the last glimpse I had had of Brand
had been that infuriating smile, I had to think that he might hurt me. But I
didn’t think he would. If he had been that kind of monster, the kind I had
read so many stories about, he would just as easily have killed us in our
sleep and pillaged our home at his leisure. But he had just stolen from us
and tried to slink away before we woke. So a thief. But not a killer. But a
thief when confronted might turn violent.
Setting out on a chase without a good plan is a very stupid thing to do,
as it turns out. Almost as stupid as thinking you’re clever. If I had been
clever, I would have either turned back for home, or sailed after him until
we were close enough to talk. And then shot him. I was not someone to give
up easily. But I was not a killer.
I’m still not one of those things.
My clever plan was to fight fire with fire. I had no confidence in being
able to talk him out of his thievery. And I would not be able to best him if it
came to violence. So fire with fire meant stealing from the thief. Which
meant stealth and cleverness. I knew I had one: I thought I had the other.
And ideally it meant not being seen. Which is not an easy thing on the open
sea. But as I looked around me, I realised that we were no longer on the
ocean, but within the inner islands. The sun was dropping behind me, and
would be directly in Brand’s eyes. Better still, the dark loom of Coll and
Tiree were also at my back as the sun set behind the low hills. I would be
hard to see. And having seen the last fingernail sliver of waning moon over
the familiar crags above my home yesterday, I knew the coming night
would be moonless and dark.
Looking ahead, I could make out the long hummock of the next island
and the mainland beyond stretching away on either side of the squall in
which I knew Brand was hidden. Seeing both ends of the island, I was
confident that I could see if he went to the right or left of the land, and this
knowledge made me try something I thought at the time was the cleverest
thing.
I took down my sails and threw out the drift anchor. Now, as the cone of
material filled with water and the line went tight behind me, I could keep
the boat stable against tide and wind, and hopefully pause and watch,
camouflaged by the dropping sun and the land astern. Brand would think
I’d lost him, or maybe been too scared to follow him between the two
islands.
My plan, clever as it was, was based on the fact that no one would sail at
night, especially where we now were. I knew Brand was a liar and a thief,
but I also knew he was not a fool. These inner waters were rock-strewn and
skerry-toothed, and sailing in the dark would turn into drowning in the dark
before you knew it.
The Sweethope lay low in the water, and even though my bare mast
stuck high into the air above me, I found I was crouching down with a knee
on the companionway, as if that would help me hide. Jip saw something
was up and got up off the bed he’d made on the nets to come and stand next
to me.
I kept the rudder hard against my thigh, feeling the way it pushed
against the twin forces of wind and tide, keeping us steady. And then, as the
sun dipped and the world instantly seemed to get colder, the squall worried
off to the right and the visibility cleared enough to reveal Brand’s sails
moving round a headland I had not seen against the larger mass of the
island behind it. I thought, in my cleverness, that he was running to lay up
in a hidden bay for the night, maybe even trying to hide from me as he did
so. I stood up. Jip whimpered. I put a hand on his head and asked him to be
quiet. Sound can travel far over the water.
I was excited. What was happening was of course just an accident of
timing, but in my cleverness, in my hubris, I thought he was falling into a
trap I had set him. You probably already know what hubris means. I had to
look it up in a dictionary the first time I came across it in a book. But if you
don’t, it means getting such a big head that you miss the bad thing creeping
up behind you.
I was so excited that the moment the red sails disappeared I hauled mine
back up and forgot the sea anchor and nearly got knocked off the boat as the
scurry of evening wind that always comes in the moment after the sun goes
down hit the sail and caught me unprepared. The boat tilted and the boom
swung and smacked so many stars into my head that I thought my skull had
been cracked.
I swore and Jip did bark and I let him as I struggled back to my feet and
got busy sorting out the mess I’d made of the boat. Three minutes later the
dog was quiet, the sea anchor was aboard and I was underway, heading for
the small island ahead.
I made it across the water before it became too dangerous in the dark,
but in truth it was not a great spot to drop an anchor. It was on the weather
side of the land, and there were skerries all around, hungry reefs waiting to
snag the boat and take the bottom out of it. In the end I decided to drop two
anchors to hold the boat a little further out than I might have done if the
light had been better. I decided I would unstrap the kayak and paddle
across. I would leave Jip, which he would not like, but the stealthiness I was
anticipating was not one that would be helped if he were to bark.
I thought this was a thing I would do better on my own.
So. Cleverness. Hubris. And the sketchiest of plans.
What could go wrong?
 Chapter 8

The bay at the back of the ocean

Later I found the name of the bay I had anchored in on some old charts, but
from the water it didn’t look significant enough for anyone to have bothered
giving it one. I could hear Jip’s reproachful growling behind the cockpit
door as I slipped the kayak over the stern and held it there in the darkening
water while I carefully got aboard and pushed off. I’d decided to leave the
gun because there was no guarantee that even if I was forced to pull the
trigger the bullet would fire. The ammunition we have was made long ago,
and about half of it hangs fire and just goes click. I decided that if I took the
gun I would be risking going click at someone who might well then take it
amiss and retaliate with something more than clicking.
I was not interested in violence. The worst stories I read were the ones
that ended in violence. When I was little I had a stash of old illustrated
magazines about superheroes. I loved them for a bit, because they were so
bright and drawn with a real joy for movement and design, some so vividly
that the people seemed to be about to burst out of the page and into my
world. They tended to walk around in really tight clothes and however
much the writers tried to hide the fact, and however much they appeared to
fret about what to do, all the stories ended up in a huge fight. Dad said they
were written for younger boys really. I liked them despite that, until I didn’t.
And when I realised I didn’t, I also knew that it was because everything was
always a set-up for a punch-up. As if the only way you could solve a
problem was by hitting it. Maybe your world liked fighting so much that it
thought it had to prepare kids for that by telling them those kind of stories.
Or maybe it was the other way round and your world liked fighting because
those were the stories you were given when your minds were young. I
didn’t want this story to end with a fight. I just wanted my dog.
I didn’t feel much like a hero, super or otherwise, as I pushed off from
the flat stern of the Sweethope and began to paddle around the rocks lining
the curve of land. My mouth felt sticky and my heart was thumping so
loudly it almost drowned out the noise of the wind in my left ear as I
paddled. My bow, which normally hung across my shoulders so naturally
that I never noticed it, now seemed to be digging into my back with every
stroke, like a sharp-boned elbow trying to remind me of something I’d
forgotten.
My eyes are good in the dark, better than Bar or Ferg’s ever were, but
the light was failing fast. I could see the obvious things to avoid, but I
scraped the kayak on a rock lying in wait just below the surface as I
cautiously rounded the low headland. The tides had luckily worn it smooth
enough that there were no sharp jags of stone to tear the bottom out of the
boat and end my plan before it had begun. I paddled on for a few more
strokes and then let the incoming tide take me round into the channel
without doing anything more with the paddle than keep myself upright. I
didn’t want any splashing to alert Brand to my presence if he was on the
lookout over the small bay that was revealing itself to me as I quietly
drifted into it.
He wasn’t, and the bay turned out not to be there either. Instead I saw a
deckled channel of water separating the smaller island from the larger
landmass that loomed on my right. I could see no sign of his boat in the
water. My first thought came from a fear, and it was that he had fooled me
by sailing straight through the channel and then turned back up the other
side of this smaller island. I had a moment of panicked clarity in which I
knew he was aboard the Sweethope right now, laughing at me and stealing
Jip too, and my muscles had begun to turn the kayak before my mind
kicked in and told them to stop, because my eyes had seen something.
If Brand had not gone ashore, I would have never seen the boat in the
darkness. As it was, I caught a strange splash of light from within a building
as he explored, and the light was strange because of the window that framed
it. It was big and old, old not in a hundred years or just before the Gelding
way but old in the way of many centuries past. It looked like a castle
window I’d seen in books, not just because of the tall arched shape of it,
stark against the night, but because of the stone walls and high-beamed roof
I saw for a brief instant as Brand splashed the light of his lantern over it. It
wasn’t a castle of course. It was a church. An abbey even. But right then it
was more than that. It was an opportunity. Because the other thing that this
moment of light appearing like a shape cut out of the darkness with a pair of
sharp scissors did was silhouette the mast of his ship on the foreshore. He’d
sailed in beside a stone jetty and made fast to it, tucked in so tight that I
could easily have paddled past in the blackness and never seen it.
But now I felt my spirits rise. I could see he was off the boat, and all I
had to do was paddle across, tie off to his taffrail and get aboard quickly
enough to get Jess out of the cabin where I was sure she must be locked up,
then get back to the Sweethope without him knowing what had happened.
I moved fast, not needing to think much. The kayak moved easy and
quiet across the water. Truth is the thing was so much a part of me that I
didn’t really think about how to make it go where I wanted any more than
you would have thought how to swim or run.
I slipped in beside his boat and held myself there, soft and quiet,
balancing the tug of the tide with my hand flat against the hull. No sound
other than wave-lap and wind riffling through the rigging above. I put my
ear to the hull, but could hear nothing below decks either.
I carefully walked the kayak hand over hand to the stern of the boat.
Making sure not to have it bang noisily against the hull. And then I tied it
off with a knot I could release with one quick tug.
Walking onto his boat was strange. It felt wrong. Uninvited.
Unwelcome. Even though he had stolen from us, this was his home. I
pushed the feeling as far away from the front of my mind as I could, crept
across the cockpit towards the companionway and put my ear to the hatch,
which was closed. There was no noise inside. Not a man’s, not—and this
was what I had been hoping for—a dog’s. My fear had been that Jess should
get a smell of me and start whining or—worse—barking. I popped my head
back up and looked over the cabin towards the island, just in case Brand
was silently on his way back, but the light in the church window was still
there, and so, I figured, was he.
I risked a low whistle through the door. There was no answering noise
from Jess. Which was not surprising, because once I had eased open the
hatch and ventured a look inside, there was no dog, no Brand—but plenty
of everything else. The cabin was jammed with things—boxes, bottles,
lumps of machinery and sacks that, from the smell and size of them,
contained our dried fish. There were bags hanging from the ceiling. The
only clear space was a chart table. I would not have liked to be stuck in this
cabin on a frisky sea. I ducked below the bags and made my way to the
fore-cabin, behind a small door in the bulkhead. The thought came to me
that if I was going to pen up a stolen dog while I went exploring on the
island, that was exactly where I’d do it. On the other side of that thin wood
door with its slatted metal grill.
I whistled again but there was no noise or movement on the other side.
He must have taken Jess ashore with him. My fingers found a padlock with
a key in it but it was unlocked, and when I lifted it clear of the hasp the door
swung open into more darkness and a worse stink. I could see nothing at all,
and something in that deeper stench made me unwilling to blunder in and
feel my way around. I dropped the padlock back in the hasp and crouched
in the darkness, feeling the soft rise and fall of the sea beneath me, trying to
ride out my disappointment. My easy plan was sunk. I couldn’t yet see what
to do next. In fact I couldn’t see anything much, deep in this unfamiliar,
crowded cabin with a moonless night outside. Could have been the smell of
the sacks of stolen fish, but I felt like what’s-his-name in the belly of the
whale. Did you know that story? Not the Bible one—the better one. He was
a toymaker, and his little boy wasn’t what everyone thought he was. He was
a wooden puppet. Pinocchio. That’s what the boy’s name was—not the old
guy’s in the whale’s guts. He was a liar and his nose got longer every time
he told one. He wasn’t bad though, the boy-not-quite-a-boy. Not mean. Just
not grown enough to have a heart yet. I liked that story when I was little.
Bar said it sort of fit me, especially after Joy was gone and we did what we
had to do to adjust.
Anyway, what with the fish stink and the darkness, I got an attack of
what Brand had called the get-me-outs, and had to un-panic myself for a
moment by concentrating on calming my breathing right down. Bar taught
me that. She also taught me the difference between fear and panic. Fear’s
not a bad thing. It’s quite a useful thing in the right circumstances, where
it’s a good response to something dangerous. Panic’s not useful for anything
at all except thrashing around and—likely as not—running smack into the
very thing you’re scared of.
 I really couldn’t make anything out in the cabin. I felt my way back
towards the cockpit, barking my shins on something sharp-edged. Then I
tripped on something else and went sprawling across the map table as one
of the hanging bags clouted me on the side of the head on the way. The map
was clipped to the table with magnets and it shifted and tore a little as I hit
it. I steadied myself on the cabin wall and then I put my other hand out to
brace myself, felt a pain like a bee sting and found I’d jabbed the needle
end of a pair of those things you use for making circles on paper into the
fleshy part of my thumb. I yanked them out with a bad word and sucked the
tiny but painful hole they’d made.
As I stood there, I had time to think. The paper that had moved under
my hand gave me an idea. The map was important to him. It was how he
found his way around. So I would take it. I carefully stood and folded it,
shoving it inside my jerkin, and went back out into the cockpit. I thought it
might be good to use the knife which I seemed to have drawn from the
sheath on my belt and start cutting all the rigging around me, maybe even
slash the sails. But breaking things does not come natural to me. Too much
of my life, of our lives, has been spent making and mending and trying to
rescue broken things and make them useful again. And a good boat that
works, even the boat of a bad man, is still a thing I could not feel right
about damaging. That’s what’s called a scruple. But there were other ways
to slow him down.
I ducked carefully back into the cabin and picked my way back to the
fore-cabin door, taking the padlock. Keeping a close eye on the still-
illuminated window on the shore, I crept along the side of the boat until I
came to the anchor chain, which I pulled on until I got enough slack to
padlock it to a ringbolt set in the deck. If things got to the state where he
was chasing me and tried to get underway quickly, he’d have a lot of
trouble doing so with an anchor that wouldn’t lift. I smiled as I thought
about it. And though I didn’t damage the boat, I did allow myself the small
pleasure of dropping the key into the dark water on the other side of the
grab rail.
I thought about taking more time to ransack his lair, maybe to take
things to bargain with him for the dog, if it came to that. But I felt unclean
being on board. I know that’s a funny word. It makes no sense at all, but
that was how I felt. Not because I was trespassing. More because of
something about the boat itself. That smell in the fore-cabin wasn’t just a
smell you sensed with your nose. There was a story in it, and though I did
not know what that story was, I did know it was sad as much as it was bad.
As I said, I didn’t believe in ghosts or made-up things like that. But I do
believe in atmospheres. And the atmosphere on that boat—on that night, in
the deep dark with no one else aboard and no friendly moon in the sky—
that atmosphere did feel more alive than it should have. It felt like it was
watching me, waiting for me to do something wrong. It was just an
atmosphere, a feeling maybe—but it had better night eyes than I did.
I got off that boat before it made me feel any colder in my bones, though
the night was mild for the time of year. The mooring knot didn’t come loose
with the single jerk I had planned for it, and I took longer than I was happy
with sorting out the mess I’d made, and then I was floating free, and with
relief powering my arms I paddled to dry land—which was actually wet and
slippy with treacherous bladderwrack and strands of kelp covering the rocks
below. Solid ground came as a huge relief, even though I now had to stalk
Brand in the dark, with no clear plan as to how to confront him or—better
—steal Jess back before he noticed.
I pulled the kayak into the grass above the tideline. Looking around, I
wasn’t able to see where Brand had put his dinghy, but there were so many
humps and hummocks in the darkness that I could have wasted a lot of time
looking, so I dismissed a half-formed plan to cut it loose and headed for the
church.
Moving quietly was easy as the grass was soft under my feet. But even if
I had been louder, I still would have heard the noise that stopped me in my
tracks.
I knew it was music, but it was not the kind of music we made when we
sang around the fire, and it was not the kind of music that Bar made when
she played the tin whistle she had found still wrapped to the instruction
book it had come with in the old art centre shop on Uist. It didn’t sound like
Ferg’s strumming on any of the guitars he’d salvaged.
It sounded like angels crying.
I know angels don’t exist any more than ghosts do, but if they did and
they were mourning something big—like the passing of the world perhaps
—that’s what it would sound like. Because angels are meant to be pure, and
this noise, this music was lots of things I had never heard before but most of
all it was pure. The tune was high and sharp and it rose and swooped back
and forth above everything, and then all the bright notes that had been
gathered up so high to dance with each other tumbled down with a kind of
desperate and inevitable sadness that made a hole high in my chest, a void
like a lump I couldn’t swallow no matter how hard I tried. It made my eyes
wet. And as I blinked I thought of Joy. I had felt that heavy hole in my chest
once before and that was after she fell out of our world. Hearing the clean,
terrible grief echoing in the stone cavern of the church didn’t just bring her
back to me. It made me feel treacherous because I had let time dull the
sharpness of her loss. Forgetting is a kind of betrayal, even if it’s what
happens to all grief. Time wears everything smoother as it grinds past, I
suppose.
I was too short to look in the high window and see what was making the
beautiful sound, so I snuck round the corner to the door, which was cracked
open, letting a lance of light spill across the grass beyond. I kept close to the
wall, feeling the old stonework as I edged round and looked in.
The noise was, of course, Brand. He had a lantern at his feet and he’d lit
a small fire on the paving stones at the centre of the cavernous space. I’d
never seen a ceiling as high. It was so high, it kept disappearing as the
firelight below flickered and threw shadows across it.
Brand was wearing my father’s coat and had a violin tucked under the
long flame-coloured spade of his beard, and he was half turned away from
me as he played it with a long bow, sawing slowly back and forth across the
strings. His eyes were closed and he swayed as he played, his long hair
falling forwards and backwards as his head moved in its own separate
dance. It was like the music was a dream he was both making and getting
lost within.
Because his eyes were closed, I let myself watch him longer than I
meant. Because the music was so beautiful, so unexpected, so something I
had never heard before, I stopped—for a moment—thinking about Jess and
getting her back.
Lost in music. That’s what they used to call it. On Eriskay there was a
house with a shelf that was not full of books, but these thin brightly printed
cardboard envelopes with big black plastic discs inside them. Dad said they
were records with music trapped on them, but the playing machine stood on
a table by a broken window on the weatherward side of the house. It was
cracked and the mechanism had rusted out, so we could never free the
music on those discs. Instead I spent a day pulling them out and looking at
all the covers. One was called Lost in Music and I remember it because
there were four people on the front and they looked like me, or at least I
thought they did. I mean, not like me exactly, but they had normal-coloured
skin like us. Not pale and cold like Brand, whose skin and sea-coloured
eyes always seemed at odds with the warmth of his hair.
Music—even that wonderstruck violin music—is just as bad a place to
be lost in as anywhere as it turns out, because if I had kept my bearings I
might have heard the thing that crept up behind me before it snarled and
barked and hit me between the shoulder blades, knocking me forwards into
the immoveable end of the open church door, sledgehammering me into
darkness before I could do more than grunt in surprise.
 Chapter 9

I own her

The world came back, and it was on its side and it hurt. There was a great
weight pressing my hip and my knee to the stone floor, and it was this pain
as much as anything else that hooked me back out of the dark and laid me
sideways, staring into the firelight, my cheek flat on the paving stones. I
had a throbbing tightness in my forehead where it had hit the edge of the
door, in just the same place that the boom had smacked it earlier. It felt as if
my skull had cracked.
When I tried to feel it and see if there was any blood, I discovered my
hands were stuck behind my back and I couldn’t move them. That’s when I
did panic, and I thrashed around trying to get up and free them, and then the
great weight—which was of course Brand—finished tying my wrists to
each other and stood up.
The relief to the side of my knee and my hip was good, but the look he
gave me as he stepped sideways wasn’t, not a bit. It was cold and fierce and
as dangerous as the knife he picked up off the chair by the fire. I knew it
was razor-sharp because it was mine and I sharpened it every time I used it.
Where are they? he said.
Who? I said. Before I could think better of it.
The others, he said. Your father. Your brother. The rest of you. You
wouldn’t have come alone.
The fire crackled. My blood thumped in my ears. My head felt like it
was going to split open.
They’re outside, I said, now having had that time to think better.
He looked at me.
 You stole my dog, I said.
How many came? he said. And don’t lie and don’t call out or I’ll cut out
your tongue.
Given that choice, it seemed like a good idea to do neither of those
things. So that’s what I did.
How many? he said.
You shouldn’t have taken my dog, I said.
He looked at me some more, but his head was cocked and I could tell he
was listening for something outside.
About then was when my head cleared enough for me to remember what
had happened on the other side of the blackness I’d just been hooked out of
and I began to wonder about who exactly had hit me from behind while I
was watching Brand play all the sad magic into the night air. The Brand in
front of me now seemed like a completely different person from the self-
contained musician lost in the dream of his own creation. This Brand was
on edge, all his nerves raw on the outside of himself, listening with more
than his ears.
He suddenly put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Loud. Shrill.
Twice.
There was an answering noise from out of the darkness beyond the
doors. A bark. But not Jess or Jip. Not a bark like a terrier barks, sharp and
hoarse at the same time. A deep bark, as much rumble as woof. The noise a
big thing makes.
Something big enough to hit a person in the back and knock them hard
into the edge of a door.
Brand looked at me.
You stay. You don’t move. You don’t shout. Do that? Maybe you keep
your tongue, he said. And then he slipped out of the church in a low
ducking kind of run and left me staring up at the fire shadows dancing
across the great vaulted ceiling overhead.
Liar, I thought. Thief and liar.
His dog was not dead at all. But where was Jess?
It didn’t make sense. He’d stolen her. But she wasn’t on the boat. And
she wasn’t here. She’d have barked if she smelled me. I wondered if they’d
done something terrible to her. Or had she jumped overboard and tried to
swim home and drowned? Had I been so set on following the distant red
sails all day that I’d missed a small and loyal dog’s head in the waves as I
passed it? Had she barked in relief as I got closer to her and then watched
the Sweethope sail past, leaving her alone and bewildered on the wave
waste as the cold took her?
All of those thoughts kept repeating in my head, images that got worse
and more detailed every time they came around. And the more I tried not to
think of her last moments, the closer I seemed to get to them. I could easily
have missed a dog’s barking in the sound of the wind. Jip could have
missed her scent. As my head whirled round and round on it, I became
more and more convinced. We had betrayed her. But me most of all.
It hurt like losing Joy all those years ago, worse really because that loss
had not been my fault, and by the time Brand came back after what felt an
hour or more I had persuaded myself that she was dead and had died in the
terrible way I had imagined.
He walked in taller than he had left somehow. Slower, calmer—not
ducking any more. A big dog padded in at his heels, a dog with thick grey
and black fur and a white face and the least doglike eyes I have ever seen.
They were blue as Brand’s own eyes, but not then nor ever after did I see
them go warm in the way his could; they were always cold, and would
never look away from you. Dogs don’t like holding your gaze. Saga was
different. Saga could outstare a rock.
Good dog, Saga, Brand said. Sit.
The dog sat in front of me and watched. Brand had made his fire out of
chairs. He had a good supply of this firewood. There were lots of them in
rows behind him, waiting for a crowd of believers who would never come
again. He picked the nearest one up, stomped it to kindling and used it to
feed the fire that had gone to embers and ash in his absence. There were lots
of matching red books stacked on a shelf on the wall and he tore the pages
out of one and fed the coals with them, using the empty cover to fan the fire
back into crackling life. Then he kicked another chair to bits and added that
to the new flames.
He took a chair and brought it close to the fire so he could sit over it and
warm his hands and watch me at the same time.
You came alone, he said. Didn’t expect that.
I kept quiet.
Don’t need you to tell me I’m right, he said, nodding at the dog. Saga
and I criss-crossed the island. It’s not big. And she’d have smelled them if
they were there. The others.
I don’t know if you ever had your wrists tied together when you were
alive. It’s a horrible feeling, especially when they’re trapped behind you.
You’ve lost your hands and everything about you is open and exposed. It
makes it hard to breathe normally. Brand looked at me and did the
unnerving thing he could sometimes do, which was seem to hear what your
head was saying to you. He smiled. Not a nasty smile, one of his good ones.
You can talk, he said. He took my knife from his belt and stabbed it into
the seat of the chair beside the one he was sitting on so that it stood there,
stuck in the wood, reflecting the firelight at me.
Not going to cut your tongue out, he said. That’d be a horrible thing to
do to a person. Just said it to get your attention. Needed you to keep quiet.
I stayed that way. Like I said, hands tied behind you makes you feel
powerless and the only thing I did have control of was my words, so I
looked away and clenched my teeth to stop them getting out.
Was just a threat, he said. Don’t take it bad. It’s like when you tell a lie,
it’s always better to put a grain of truth in it to make it stick, eh? Thing with
a threat is you have to put a little picture in it, something specific so that it
catches in the head. You add that little picture, the person you’re threatening
has more to chew on in their imagination, and chewing makes them digest
the threat properly and then before they know it it’s a part of them and they
believe it much more than if it’s just words outside them, you see?
I didn’t. But I did wonder who in the whole wide empty world he had
learned this from. Or done this to. Maybe it was something he read.
My silence unsettled him, I think.
Say something, he said. Are they coming after you?
Saga barked at me and the shock of the deep noise and her teeth so close
to my face sort of jumped the words out of my mouth without me meaning
to let it happen.
Where’s Jess? I said.
Who? he said.
My dog, I said. The dog you stole.
Jess, he said. And he leant back, smiling a little, scratching Saga’s ears,
rewarding her for frightening the words out of me.
I didn’t know her old name, he said. I was going to call her Freya.
 What have you done to her? I said.
She needed discipline, he said. She bit Saga.
Good, I thought. Good dog, Jess.
Locked her in a shed over there, he said, pointing into the dark. Small
room, no food, hard floor. She’ll be better behaved come light, or she’ll stay
hungry.
That was a relief. It flooded through me like warm water, washing away
the images I’d made of her lonely death in the waves.
This was a holy place, he said looking around. That table up there was
the altar. Where they made their sacrifices and such. There’s a metal board
with writing on it out there by the shed. It explains it all. If you can read.
Not just the church. The whole island.
I didn’t want to listen to him talk. Especially in the way he’d started to,
all easy and friendly, like he hadn’t recently threatened to cut my tongue
out.
Just give me my dog, I said.
I own her, he said.
No, I said. You stole her.
He looked at me oddly. And then he grinned and threw back his head
and chopped out a short laugh.
No, he said. The name of the island.
And he grinned some more and spelled it out.
I-O-N-A, he said. Iona. Not I-own-her.
And then his eyes got cold and serious again.
Though I do that too, he said. That’s just a fact you need to get used to.
I want my dog, I said. You stole her.
You keep saying stole, he said.
I do, I said. You’re a thief.
It sounds like I was being brave, writing down what I said then, in that
dark echoey place by the fire. That’s not true. I was angry and scared and
felt very unprotected with my hands tied behind me. All I had for a shield
was words.
A thief now, is it? he said. And he said it as if this was a word he had
never heard before. A thief? Well now. That sounds bad.
Don’t mind what it sounds like, I said. Give me my dog. And the fish.
And my dad’s coat.
 He smiled then, looking down at the yellow oilskin.
It’s a good coat, he said. But it’s mine. I traded for it. Same as the dog
that was yours and is now mine.
You did not, I said.
And how would you know? he said. Seeing as you were asleep at the
time.
His eyes were level. Open, even. There was no real accusation in them.
Maybe a bit of disappointment.
Ah, Griz, he said. I thought we were friends. Your father is a man who
understands the nature of a proposition. There’s more to a trade than like for
like. He really wanted that windmill part. And while you were sleeping, we
came to an agreement.
Just for a moment I let the warm smile and the soft words make me
doubt myself. Had I rushed off before anyone could tell me I had grabbed
the wrong end of the stick? Had I missed the turbine offloaded and waiting
on the shore? Had everyone been too sick to stop me with the truth?
And a liar, I said. Thief and liar.
Ah, Griz, he said again. Words like that can poison a friendship, you
know?
I know you’re lying because if you had made a deal, you wouldn’t have
run off so scared, asking if the others were there, I said. An honest man
wouldn’t have done that.
To his credit, he didn’t drop the smile much.
Well, he said. Well. No one likes to be badly thought of.
They are coming, I said. They were right behind me. So you better let
me go.
He shook his head.
Two liars now, he said. And us in a church. Double the poison, don’t you
think?
I didn’t answer. None of the replies bubbling up in my throat made sense
enough to be let out anyway. He stretched and then prodded a chair leg
deeper into the fire.
They poisoned the dogs, you know? he said. At the end. They gave them
something harsh and vicious to their wellbeing. That’s why there aren’t
more of them. Why they’re rare.
I kept quiet. He didn’t like quiet. If he had a weakness—and I still don’t
know if it was really a weakness—it was not liking quiet when there was
company to be had. He liked to talk. He liked being the centre of any
attention that was going. Maybe because he was on his own so much. I had
lived with four—once five—others. I had no need to be heard. If I wanted
to know what I sounded like, I had Dad and Ferg and Bar to listen to. They
sounded just like me.
Brand carried on. The old bastards were frightened of dogs turning into
dangerous packs, he said. So they dosed them.
I could have asked him how he knew that. Because of course it can only
have been a story he had heard from long before either of us were alive. A
traveller’s tale. A rumour. A lie. A story. I didn’t say anything.
Whatever they gave the dogs did for the bitches more than the males, he
said. Way I see it, what bitches remain have litters with fewer females in
them than they used to. So, fewer females, fewer dogs in the long run.
Males on their own don’t breed. Males in a pack with no breeding to be
done? Well, Griz, you can see how they’d get mean. You’re tall enough for
a person to think your body’d be telling you what I’m talking about, but
then you haven’t started with the hairs on your chin yet, so maybe it hasn’t
come on you yet, the wanting and the not having. But when it comes on
you, you remember what I say. Men with no breeding to be done are the
meanest creatures in the world.
I didn’t like the look he gave me then, but it passed quickly, like he was
as surprised by it as I was uncomfortable, and he just shrugged it back into
whatever box it came out of.
So anyway, he said, scratching away at Saga’s ears again. What dogs
there still are may be thinner on the ground, but they’re more dangerous.
It’s like as if in trying to cure the problem they boiled it down and made it
thicker and darker. Like a bone broth.
I’d never heard that term before, but I knew what it meant. We always
had a stockpot on the go by the range, and the thought of it came hard, like I
could smell it, and like a smell it took me on a short cut right back to a
place where I had been safe and happy enough. A place exactly the opposite
of where I was: in deepest danger with spirits low enough to match it.
And maybe dosing the dogs was not a story. Maybe it was true. Maybe
not. Mucking up how a poor creature can or can’t have a normal litter
seems awfully like what happened to humankind. If I’d been of a mind to
talk to him I’d have said that the Gelding was a much more likely cause of
there being less dogs than there should be. I didn’t think old dying mankind
—the Baby Bust—would have had time or inclination to go about
poisoning dogs just for the meanness of it.
I didn’t know then exactly how mean some Baby Busters found time to
be. I just thought, who would want to poison dogs? It didn’t make any kind
of sense. But then I’d grown up on an island. I hadn’t seen what a bunch of
dogs or wolves could do when they were hungry and their blood was up.
That came later.
He reached behind him and pulled a pack close enough to yank a
sleeping bag from it.
I’m sleeping now, he said. You do too. A night sleeping on the stones
here by the fire won’t do you much harm. And if you get cold, you’ve only
yourself to blame. You keep to your side of the fire and don’t try anything
because while I might not be a person who could cut another person’s
tongue out, Saga here would take your throat out in a heartbeat. Seen her do
it. And that’s not a lie.
And simple as that, he laid down on the bedroll and closed his eyes, and
the dog lay down between us and kept hers open and looking straight at me.
I knew I was too uncomfortable to sleep, so I concentrated on calming
my breathing and watching right back.
An hour later I was more uncomfortable than I had ever been in my life,
and my hands seemed to be going numb.
I thought about waking him and telling him, but then just when I knew
I’d never sleep again, I did.
 Chapter 10

Paddling blind

Waking wasn’t a bit good. I was so cold and stiff I heard my joints crack as
I tried to sit up. I ached everywhere. And the pain in my head was worse.
My eye had swollen half shut and was so gummy it took a lot of scrunching
and stretching to get it open at all. But there was thin warming light coming
through the arched windows even though the fire was now grey ash. And
Saga was gone.
Brand sat on a chair, packing up his bedroll.
So here’s what’s going to happen, he said, and I stopped breathing for a
couple of heartbeats as he pulled the knife out of the chair. I must be on my
way, and just in case you’re telling the truth about the others being behind
you, I’d best be going soon. Dawn’s up and there’s light enough to see the
rocks in the water.
He used the knife to quickly gut a couple more of the red books and put
them on the embers. Then he kicked another chair to bits and put it on the
fire.
You blow on that, you’ll get it going again, he said.
I could see he was in too much of a hurry to fan it back into life for me.
I’m not a monster, he said. But I cut my own way through this life, Griz,
and that is a truth. I don’t want you or yours following me. You all stay up
here, away from the world. You’ve got a safe enough thing going. Just sit
tight. World might come by and take a few things from you every now and
then, but mostly you’ll be fine. You know what a tax is?
I did, but I shook my head.
Well, it was a thing people used to pay, like a money sacrifice. They
paid it to be left alone and helped to live easier, I was told, he said. So when
I come by, or someone else does, what we take’s like a tax.
That made no sense to me at all. I was much more interested in the way
he was weighing the knife in his hands.
I see you moving about before I go, I will take it badly, he said.
You can’t leave me tied up, I said.
It’s just rope, he said. And I’ll not even take your knife. There’s a
graveyard you maybe came through on the way up? There’s one stone
unlike the others. I’ll leave the knife there. You won’t find it till it’s full
daylight, but you will find it. Stone catches your eye because it’s different.
I’m not a monster.
Saga clinked into view behind him. She clinked because she had Jess
joined to her with a length of rusty chain, neck to neck, just enough play in
it to let the bigger dog bite the littler one if she wanted, just enough to allow
Jess to run hobbled alongside Saga, two steps to the one. Jess wouldn’t be
able to bite back because she was wearing something on her snout that kept
her mouth covered.
It wasn’t tight enough to stop her whining excitedly when she saw me,
and her tail began wagging so hard her whole back end waggled from side
to side and buffeted Saga. Saga snarled and bit her, not once, but twice. The
muzzle didn’t muffle Jess’s yelp of pain. She tried to bite back, because
being a terrier that was what she had to do, not having an inch of back-away
in her, but all she could do was punch her muzzled nose into the side of the
dog towering over her, and all that did was get another snarl and a single
precise bite in the same place as the other ones.
Shackle the new dog to the old dog, said Brand. Teaches them how to
be. Won’t take long till she’s broken to our ways.
Seeing the pain and confusion in Jess’s eyes was worse than the image
I’d created in my head, the one of her drowning alone. She stared right at
me and the question in her look—why aren’t you helping me?—could only
be answered one way and my body was answering before my brain knew
what it was going to do. I lunged to my feet and tried to get to her and then
Brand stepped forward between us and straight-armed me in the chest with
the open palm of his hand which hurt bad and winded me worse. It knocked
me back so that I stumbled wildly to keep my balance, suddenly aware that
without my hands to help me I could easily dash my brains out on the hard
church floor.
As if he realised this, Brand jumped forwards and caught hold of my
sheepskin. For an instant, we were eye to eye and I thought about hitting
him in the face with my forehead, but then Jess yelp-snarled and tried to
lunge at him, defending me, and Saga bit her again and then turned and ran,
dragging Jess out of the building.
Again, Jess’s instincts were better than mine, and again it was the worst
thing I’d seen, Saga just yanking her alongside her like a broken limb.
Brand sat me on one of the chairs. Then he shouldered his pack and
picked up a long case that I guess held the violin and his other self.
Breaking her doesn’t mean she’ll be damaged permanently, he said. Just
means getting her head right, knowing who to be loyal to now. And don’t
fret. I’ll be good to her while I keep her. She’s full of piss and vinegar, same
as you. I like that in a dog.
The cloud came back over his face.
Doesn’t mean I want to see it in you. In fact I don’t want to see you at
all. Ever again. Because if I do, young Griz, if I do, things will go badly and
there may be some dying to be done. So you stay in here until the sun’s full
up and I’m over the horizon.
He pointed with his chin.
You just find your way home and stay there. World’s not what you think
it is, but that needn’t bother you out there on the edge of it. It is empty
enough though, so don’t you go looking for me. Once I’m gone, I’m gone.
You stole my dog, I said.
That all you can say? he sighed. Doesn’t get better the more you say it.
And with a half-wave and the ghost of his earlier smile he turned and
walked out of the room, leaving me alone with the chairs, the mouldering
pile of books and a fire I could not be bothered to work on. Instead I got up
and walked around the church looking for something to get the rope cut.
There was a glint of metal behind the altar table, but it was just a cross
on a stand and the metal had no edge sharp enough to help. I tried rubbing
the rope against the corner of the altar but the stone was too dull and the
rope too tough to get it done.
And then I got angry again and found I was standing in the door looking
towards where the boat had been moored and looking at nothing but water. I
decided there and then that if I couldn’t see him then he couldn’t see me
and so I went out of the church and looked for the graveyard. It wasn’t as
overgrown as I thought it might be, and the reason was obvious, though it
gave me a shock when I first saw the sheep move out of the corner of my
eye and thought it was Saga. There were wild sheep on the island and three
ewes and a ram watched me suspiciously as I walked carefully into the
garden of gravestones. It was a smaller graveyard than I expected, but then
it was a small island and what buildings remained intact apart from the
church wouldn’t have supported a big population.
The stones were all rectangular and weathered and I didn’t bother to
read names as I usually did when walking past grave-markers on the Uists. I
just made my way to the one different grave which was a round boulder, not
shaped by anyone.
There was writing carved into it, writing that told me I was standing on
the grave of someone who had been called Smith. My knife was in the grass
in the shadow of the boulder, and I used Mr. Smith’s stone to carefully sit
on, and slid down so my hands could find the knife behind me. Then I used
it again to lever myself upright. I said a silent thank you because even
though ghosts aren’t real and when you’re dead you stay that way, it seemed
the polite thing to do.
I returned to the church and very carefully backed up to its thick wooden
door, pressing the tip of the knife into the grain as hard as I could. Then I
carefully put my wrists on either side of the blade and began to saw.
The knife fell out twice and I had to awkwardly pick it up and stick it
back in before I got my hands free. And when they were my own again I
gave a yelp and ran to the top of the slope that crested the island to check on
the Sweethope.
It was gone.
He hadn’t taken it in tow, because I could see his red sails in the
distance, but he must have cut the anchors loose. Maybe in retaliation for
my locking up his anchor chain. I saw the Sweethope closer in, but still too
far to swim for. And it was moving away on the drift of the tide.
My heart began to hammer again, but I was not too worried as I ran back
down the slope to the other side of the island where the kayak was. I could
move fast when I paddled, faster than the tide, and though it would be a
long pull I knew I could reach the boat.
And I had to. Not just because it was my boat. But because Jip was
locked below. If the boat got away from me, he would slowly starve and die
of thirst. Alone. And believing he had been forgotten.
That thought made me run faster, which was a mistake because I fell and
twisted my ankle and then had to hobble the last hundred yards.
Brand had found my kayak. And he’d been annoyed by it. The paddle
lay snapped on the shoreline, as if he’d thrown it in the water which had
then floated the parts back to shore. He’d also stamped through the kayak,
putting a foot-sized hole in the top covering about where my knees were.
I cursed and turned the kayak over to look at the hull. And then I
breathed a deep sigh of relief. You could see where his foot had smashed
the bottom of the boat against the rocks, but it had not made a hole.
My heart was thumping badly and my hands were trying to move too
fast and I fumbled and dropped the bow as I slid it out of the kayak. I left it
on the ground and retrieved the broken paddle. Again I was moving too fast
and nearly sliced my thumb open as I cut the mooring rope that was coiled
in the bottom of the boat and used it to start lashing my bow as a splint
between the two broken parts. My fingers seemed to have forgotten how to
tie the right knots as the anchor knot kept slipping loose and making the
whole lashing come loose. I closed my eyes and made myself count twenty
very slow elephants. Then I cinched the beginning of the lashing so tight it
hurt my hands as I kept the tension on, and wrapped the bow into the
paddle. I took extra care with the finishing knot, and then tested the repaired
paddle. It felt clunky in my hands but solid.
I didn’t waste time looking back at that church; I just gritted my teeth,
told myself I was fine and not hungry or thirsty or hurting in all the wrong
places, and dug in.
I paddled around the point and scanned the sea ahead of me. No sign of
the red sails, which was not such a bad thing, but also no sign of the
Sweethope. Which was. I began to feel that rising panic again and looked
around to get my bearings, trying to work out where I’d stood on the hillock
that divided the island, and then remember the rough direction the boat had
been drifting.
As I did so, I realised that one reason I maybe couldn’t see the
Sweethope was that I had been looking from a higher angle on land,
whereas now I was sitting at sea level. And then again the sails were down
which made it harder still to spot.
 It’s almost impossible to stand up in a kayak, but I did. Very, very
carefully. And then I saw the mast, and then the hull, and then as I sat down
I realised I could still see them both. It was as if the panic had blinded me.
Like I thought I’d lost them, so I did lose them.
The wind was getting stronger and blowing with the tide, which I didn’t
like. I fixed my eye on the Sweethope and began the chase into the choppier
waters between the bigger island and the mainland beyond. I kept an eye on
the hills in the far distance and made a point of keeping track of the
direction the Sweethope was drifting by using them as markers. I decided if
the gap between us lengthened because of wind or my arms tiring I should
still be able to find the boat by keeping on its bearing.
When I made the plan, I felt it was one of the ones you make for luck
but you’re never going to need. Maybe an hour later I seemed no closer and
my arms were shaking and my shoulder sockets seemed to have grit in
them.
Then a sudden squall blew in from over my shoulder and I took my eye
off the boat to look at the hole in the kayak top, wondering if the rain would
fill the hull. I decided maybe I should take off my sheepskin and stuff it
down there to prevent water getting in, and then when I looked up I
couldn’t see either the Sweethope or the mountains beyond.
I decided once more not to panic.
But I did want to.
Instead I closed my eyes and concentrated on feeling the kayak and the
current.
If you paddle in open water, there’s always a tension between you, the
sea and the boat. You want to go to A, the sea’s pulling you towards B and
your body feels the tension between those two destinations with every
stroke as it fights B and angles the kayak towards A. I’d been paddling hard
for more than an hour, maybe two even, and without noticing it my body
had got into a habit and a feeling. I concentrated on getting that tension
back—recreating the pull of the water and the balancing pressure as I
pushed the kayak where I wanted it to go.
I was literally paddling blind.
It was like a game I used to play on the big wide beaches on Uist: close
your eyes and see how far you could walk before you opened them. On the
hard-packed sand, it was a matter of counting steps and feeling the slope of
the beach so you didn’t veer into the shallows. It was always easy to start
with and then you began to wonder if there was some treacherous loop of
seaweed or piece of drift-garbage that was going to trip you at your next
step. Eventually, a kind of horizontal vertigo would grip me and I’d open
my eyes to find the beach clear ahead and all the snares only in my mind.
I counted to a hundred, then another and then halfway to the next
hundred I felt the rain stop and I opened my eyes and there was the
Sweethope, almost dead ahead. I grinned and felt good. Then I realised it
was much closer than I’d expected and felt even better. And then I heard a
distant barking, and felt worse as my thinking brain caught up with my
excitement.
The Sweethope was turning slowly, and the reason it was closer than I
had expected was that it was caught on a skerry. Shallow banks of sharp-
toothed rocks are common around the islands, lurking just below the water,
ready to rip the bottom out of any boat too blind to see them. As the
Sweethope continued to yaw around, it revealed a lick of white in the water
behind it where one of the treacherous outcrops was just breaking the
surface.
Fear surged through my shaking arms and gave a boost of energy I
didn’t know was still in me. The barking got high-pitched and urgent as I
approached, and that helped too.
When I was about a hundred yards out—and just beginning to think
everything was going to be all right—there was a cracking noise and the
boat slewed drunkenly in the opposite direction to the one it had been
going. The current had twisted it off one rock and snagged it on the next
one. I had visions of the scene inside the cabin if the hull were holed and
that noise meant water was now gushing in, and I started shouting and
whistling so that Jip would know help was on the way.
Brand had been in a hurry to get going, and so had only cut the anchor
ropes in order to set my boat adrift. They were whipping the side of the hull
in the freshening breeze, and I snapped my hand out and caught the flailing
end of one and used it to pull myself alongside. I shouted to Jip and banged
the boat and as his barks mounted in excitement I threw my paddle into the
cockpit and awkwardly scrambled aboard, almost losing the kayak as I did
so, and then as I sprawled to keep hold, I nearly fell back into the water
myself.
 It’s okay, Jip! I shouted. It’s okay.
But it wasn’t. Even as I manhandled the kayak over the taffrail, I could
feel the keel grinding on the rocks below. I wondered whether I should lash
the kayak down as I always did, or if I should leave it ready for a quick exit
if the boat was holed and started to sink. Habit won and I tied it off with a
quick-release knot, jumped down into the cockpit and tore open the cabin
hatch. Jip hit me like a furry cannonball, jumping up, tail thumping away as
his paws scrabbled at me, yelping and barking happily. Like all terriers, he
wasn’t usually a soppy dog but he had clearly been scared by his
confinement and the absence of a familiar person as the boat had swept
away on its own.
Sorry, boy, sorry, I said and hugged him to me.
I allowed myself to bury my face in his fur while he licked away at my
neck for a long moment. I think we both needed the physical contact with
something familiar, something that loved us.
Then the boat lurched and I pushed him away and ducked into the cabin.
I really needed to see if we were taking on water. A quick check seemed to
show the hull was intact. The floor was dry all the way to the bow
compartment. That was good news. But the grinding noise was worse below
deck, where it had an added resonance that came through the soles of my
boots. This close to, there was an ominous creaking undertone below it, like
something was bending under the boat. I thought it was the keel and that it
might be jammed in a crack in the rocks. It seemed to me there was every
chance it might snap off or rip straight out of the bottom of the boat. Jip was
standing in the hatchway looking at me, panting.
I grabbed the old saucepan we used as bailer and dog bowl and filled it
from the canteen. He scrabbled down the steps and lapped the clean water
greedily. I told him I’d feed him later and stepped up into the cockpit,
ducking below the boom and looking over the side opposite the tide, trying
to see exactly what we were stuck on.
It wasn’t rocks. I think if it had been rocks then maybe the waves would
have smashed the Sweethope more than they did. What the boat was stuck
on was a moveable object, itself drifting with the tide. At first I thought it
was a boat, half sunk and drifting below the surface, but its sides and angles
were all flat and right-angled. Then I realised it was a big metal shipping
box, the size of a small house. There was one of them on Eriskay, mostly
rusted out, on a wheeled trailer by the causeway. The majority of the paint
on this one had gone and it had a thick beard of barnacles and seaweed
dangling off its wrapping, which was a tangle of nylon fishing net. I crossed
to the other side of the cockpit and saw the net was snarled round a second
metal box floating end-on, nose down in the water. The first box must have
had air trapped in it, making it more buoyant. It seemed like the keel of the
boat was wedged in the gap between them. Because the boat was above
water, the wind was trying to make it move faster than the current that was
moving the boxes below, and that was what was twisting the keel.
I was going to have to cut the netting. And there was a lot of it. And the
wind was getting up. So I was actually going to have to get it done before
the keel snapped off. If the keel went, the bottom could rip out of the boat,
or the boat could just capsize.
With the boathook and my knife, I set to work. I hooked the tangle of
netting and pulled it to the surface and just started sawing at it. I didn’t have
a plan of attack to begin with, but as I worked the twist of the current and
the movement of the boat kept it taut and I was able to cut down the same
row, strand after strand. The plastic your people made was strong stuff. We
find so much of it now—I wonder if it will outlast us entirely. The netting
bit back as I cut it. Sharp strands parted suddenly and scratched at the back
of my hands as I worked the knife, and the palm of my right hand got
blisters which then burst and stung in the salt water.
I don’t remember much from that afternoon, because it was gruelling,
repetitive work and my side hurt from lying on the deck and leaning out
over the water, and my back hurt from being bent over the gunwale all the
time. I do remember stopping for water and making a lanyard for the knife
because my grip was so painful I was worried about dropping it into the sea,
and I do remember doing exactly that several times as the light began to
dim all around, each time yanking it back up out of the depths and carrying
on sawing away at the hard plastic strands. I also remember how the net
suddenly untwisted at one point, slashing the side of my arm with a garland
of sharp-edged shellfish that had colonised it. I’ve still got those two scars.
And then—maybe because the part of the net that had been closest to the
sunlight had rotted more than the strands I had started on—the thing
suddenly came apart, and the heavier, nose-down cargo box dropped into
the depths. Because it was already underwater, there was no noise and it
was a strangely final but undramatic moment as it disappeared. The other
one was more lively—freed of the counterweight, the air trapped in it
bounced it higher in the water and though I moved fast, it still took skin off
the back of my forearm as the rough tidemark of barnacles rasped across it.
I swore and pulled back onto the boat.
The floating container rolled slowly on the surface like a lazy whale
showing its belly to the sky, and then began to drift away as if it had never
meant us any harm at all.
Cut loose, the Sweethope immediately felt different under my back. It
bucked more in the chop—suddenly frisky—as if it really wanted to get
moving again. And though I wanted to lie there and sleep for a while, I
knew the boat was right and I had to get sails up and find somewhere to
moor for the night.
Again, I have little memory of the rest of the afternoon, except I know I
got the sails up and caught the wind and that Jip reminded me to feed him.
And I know that the boat steered a bit differently to the way it always had,
but I put that to the back of my mind. And most of all I remember that
though I had the strongest heart-tug to turn her north and head home, I
headed south-east, for the mainland. At the time I thought it was because it
was close now, and so provided the best chance of a safe anchorage. Now I
think I always knew I wasn’t going to give up on getting Jess back. And
then again, I had never once set foot on the mainland itself. Curiosity, you
see. It doesn’t just kill cats.
 Chapter 11

Tilting at giants

I didn’t find a great place to moor, but the thin scrape of cove I did find was
protected enough for a mild night. It was just luck that I still had Ferg’s
anchor on board that I’d spent the day rescuing before Brand sailed into our
lives, because without it I’d have been in trouble, the others still being on
the sea bed to the west of Iona. I took that as a good omen and felt a little
better as I made sure of my knots and dropped it over the side and waited
anxiously until I was sure it had bitten into the bottom and was holding us
steady. Then I went below and lit the lamp and did the two things I had
been wanting to do all day. I ate some of the oatcakes and wind-dried
mutton I’d grabbed from the kitchen at home, and I reached into my jerkin
and took out the map I’d stolen from Brand’s boat and spread it out on the
table.
Jip jumped up on the bench next to me and curled up with his chin on
my thigh as I examined it. When he did that back at home, Jess would often
take up a similar position on my other side, so that I was bookended by my
dogs as I read. As I scratched his ears, my other hand automatically reached
for hers before my brain told it she wasn’t there. It gave me a bit of a lurch,
and so I concentrated on what was in front of me instead: it was a map of
the mainland. It was printed on both sides, the top half on one, the bottom
on the other. The land bits were crowded with place names and printed lines
showing roads in different colours. The clear sea around it was covered in
handwritten notes and numbers, none of which made much sense to me.
What I only noticed when I flipped it over was that the lamplight winked
through lots of tiny holes pricked all over it. The holes seemed to be
random until I flipped the map back over and saw the pattern that made
sense of it: the pinpricks matched places on the coast on each side, which of
course meant that half of them appeared to be scattered randomly across dry
land if you looked at them on the wrong side of the paper. I thought of the
sharp set of dividers I’d jagged myself with in the dark. This was a map of
where he’d been or where he was going—or both.
Most interesting of all, there was a multiple speckling of holes in one
specific area. It was in the middle of the sea on one side of the map, but on
the other it nestled right above what I had as a child—when I thought the
mainland looked a bit like someone sitting down, seen from the side—
thought of as the country’s bottom. There was nowhere else with that
concentration of holes, and nowhere else with so many different coloured
pencil lines radiating from it. When I looked closer and read the word
Norfolk printed across the land next to it I felt a little jump of excitement.
He had said he’d been raised on the Norfolk Broads.
I remembered his words when he was trying to apologise for saying he
was going to cut out my tongue. He’d said when you tell a lie it’s always
better to put a grain of truth in it to make it stick. I decided he’d salted the
lie of his life story with a grain of truth. And Norfolk was that grain. The lie
was about having left it and never gone back there. Maybe I wanted to
believe something to make sense of trying to find him, maybe I needed that
excuse to go exploring. I’ve had time to wonder about that, and I think
that’s true. But then I just knew—again maybe because I had to know
something to stop me drifting off anchorless and rudderless—that those
holes were his home. The place where he was taking my dog.
I fell asleep on the bench with Jip at my side, and I slept well despite
everything. My body was exhausted but my mind—having made a decision
—was calm enough to let me sleep long and deep.
The nearest hole in the map—the first a pencil line went to—was a city
a long way south of where I was. Blackpool. When I woke, I again had that
tug to go home, but the wind was from the north and Jip was on the prow
with his back to it, as if he knew where Jess was going, and so we followed.
That journey is a blur to me now. I knew little of navigating by a map,
because all my life I had sailed a small chain of islands by sight, never
venturing beyond a seascape I knew. But I could read a compass and knew
where the sun rose and set and with the map now pinned to the table in the
cabin I thought I could feel my way down the coast, and feel is what I did,
in more ways than one.
I still hadn’t set foot on the mainland, remember, but the further I got
from home the more it crowded in on my left shoulder, like a presence that
was watching us, waiting for me to look squarely at it and notice how
irresistibly it was beckoning me. It was like the dark pull of a magnet,
always there. Always invisible. Impossible to ignore.
If I’d had sea charts and not a map of the roads criss-crossing the once
crowded land, I probably would have kept my bearings better. Two days of
fast running slipped past. I spent a night at the tip of a wide firth that cut
back north around a big island and led beyond that, I think, to the river that
Mum and Dad had gone up a lifetime ago to collect the Sweethope, the one
where they had slept in the library and closed up the doors as they left to
save the books. Again, I felt a tug to go and see that, and I nearly did but Jip
was on the bow looking south again and so we followed his nose instead.
Passing houses and small villages on the shore was odder than doing the
same thing on the familiar islands. There I knew every house was empty. I
found myself less sure of it the more houses I saw. Some of the buildings
still had unbroken glass in the windows, even after all these years of
neglect, and they would wink the thin sunlight back at us as we passed.
Every time that happened, I had the strangest feeling that they were trying
to get my attention. I could often feel the hairs going up on the back of my
neck as we went on, as if they were doing something behind me. Like
laughing. Like they knew I was making a big mistake.
On your own it’s easy to let unsettling thoughts like that get under your
skin. Did you—in your crowded world—have those kind of quiet moments
where your own mind had room enough to stalk you and play games? Or
were there too many other people to let you hear the songs it wanted to sing
to you—the bad ones as well as the good ones? I still had no idea how full
of others your world was at this stage, not having begun to walk the remains
of it, but I felt the loneliness it now radiated sharply enough to take the
picture of you out of my rucksack—where it lived as a bookmark in
whatever book went with me—and pinned it to the map, maybe so I had
some company other than Jip. I had no pictures of my family, so you had to
do the job for them, I suppose. Just having another human face to look at
helped.
 Because some of the sailing was monotonous and the mind likes to drift,
I found myself jolting out of a daydream on more than one occasion
convinced that I’d dropped my guard and that the feeling of being watched
was more than real, that it was some sixth sense telling me that Brand was
out there. He was hidden against the dark land mass, stalking me, instead of
the other way around. When that happened, I’d scan wildly about me,
raking the sea and the mainland shore for a sign of him. But he was never
really there, not where I could see him. He was only in my mind.
Jip’s day was always the same. Wake, stand on the bow until we got
underway, then sit in the cockpit by me, with breaks for eating and shitting
and pissing. He was suitably embarrassed about these last two things, which
he normally disliked doing while anyone was watching, but we made a deal
where I pretended not to notice while he was doing it and then he pretended
he couldn’t see me sluicing the piss away with seawater or flipping the
turds over the side with the rusty trowel I kept on the boat for just such
embarrassing moments. I went over the side, taking care to keep the wind
behind me, pissing or crapping, and Jip studiously ignored my contortions
in his turn.
The cuts and scrapes on my arm from the shellfish weren’t healing as
fast as I would have liked, which I put down to the salt in the seawater and
the constant spray off the waves. When I covered them with sleeves it was
worse, so I kept them bare and hoped the air would eventually dry them out
and let them scab over. I thought the clean seawater would at least stop
them getting infected. It certainly stung like it was doing something.
Halfway between a big island that I thought might be the Isle of Man
and the mainland, I found a strange sight. There was a tilted forest of
broken windmills like the ones on the islands back home, except these ones
were in the middle of the sea. When I first saw them I couldn’t think what
they were. I remembered that story about the old Spanish man who thought
he was a knight in armour and that windmills were giants and went off to
fight them on an equally old and bony horse. Except these weather-bleached
windmills looked more like the bony horse. Maybe like giants’ skeletons—
with the occasional unbroken propeller blade jutting into the air like a
sword.
I sailed close to this forest of metal tubes and slackened sail so I could
drift past it and look up at them towering above me. It was a strange, quiet
moment as the sun bounced off them while we passed through the tiger-
stripe shadows they cast across the sea all around us.
Jip barked at some of them. They didn’t seem to mind.
Whatever they might have been defending, if they really had been the
giants of my imagination, was long gone, but in my mind now they still
stand as gatekeepers, because after I had passed them a whole new world of
wonders began to unfold.
When I turned away from them to look at the mainland, I saw something
that made me tighten the sails and tack towards it. A huge tower jutted
above the biggest scrabble of houses and buildings I had ever seen. A city, I
thought. This is what a city looks like.
As I got closer, the sun was already dipping low in the west and the light
did that thing of reddening everything it fell on, giving the world a golden
glow. The tower was made of metal and looked a bit like the one I’d seen
pictures of in Paris. But the one in Paris did not rise out of the roof of a
brick palace like this one did. As soon as I saw it, I knew I was going to
climb it, just to see what the world looked like from up there. Just to see
what a bird sees.
You probably wouldn’t have been so excited by a tower. You had
aeroplanes after all. And helicopters. For me, it was the closest I would ever
get to flying. You also would have known that this wasn’t a city either. Just
a town.
It was high tide. A long metal fence stretched away in front of the
buildings sticking out of the water, and lamp posts and flagpoles jagged into
the air all the way along behind it, their feet in the water too, some of them
leaning drunkenly like the windmills behind me, but most of them more or
less upright.
A big jetty stuck out into the sea and I thought I would sail there and tie
up to it. When I got closer in, I realised it had once had buildings on top and
a deck that had all been gutted by a fire. There was some kind of giant
metal wheel that hung bent and melted off the side of the jetty half
underwater. I took real care drifting in beside it in case there was debris just
below the surface, but there wasn’t, and I tied off to a stanchion that seemed
to have enough metal in it beneath the flakes of rust to hold.
And then, after all my excitement about finally putting my feet on the
mysterious mainland—I didn’t.
 I sat on the side of the boat with Jip and looked at it all and tried to make
sense of it.
The sea lapped the front of the buildings behind the sunken fence rails.
That wasn’t too surprising. I knew the sea level had been rising for years.
Maybe if the Gelding hadn’t happened they’d have built a wall to protect
the city, I thought. Now the buildings on the front were themselves that
wall. I let my eyes travel along it, wondering what it had looked like when
those doors let in all sorts of different people instead of just the sea. Some
of the frontages had had letters on them, but they were mostly gone or
illegible, and those that remained made up nonsense sentences—
_ALLROOM _UNHOUSE! COM_DY __USE_EN__! _OAT _RIPS
_AS_NO __ACH _OURS I__ _REAM _INGO! _ROUPS WE_COME.
I read them out loud to Jip. He didn’t seem to be able to make sense of
them either.
About half a mile down the front was another crazily melted assembly
of criss-crossed metal that seemed a bit like the giant wheel beside me. It
ran round the perimeter of a group of other structures that I could make no
sense of, dipping and swooping and loop-the-looping as it went. It wasn’t as
high as the tower, but it was very tall at the top. I wondered what kind of
thing needed a giant fence like that. The wind that always comes off the sea
as the sun dips whickered at my neck. I pulled the sheepskin tighter around
me. Away in the distance something screeched. It might have been a bird.
Tomorrow, Jip, I said. We’ll go ashore tomorrow. In the light.
 Chapter 12

Landfall

I didn’t remember and the bowstring didn’t care.

The arrow took the big rabbit just forward of where I was aiming at the
shoulder and smashed through the neck bone, killing it instantly. It was a
good shot but I wasn’t congratulating myself. I’d forgotten that the cuts and
grazes on my forearm still weren’t healing properly so instead I was
swearing and holding my arm where the loosed string had ripped at the
scabs and salt blisters as it passed, raking it raw and painful again.
Later I’d skin the rabbit before cooking it, but right then it felt like I was
the one having a taste of being flayed.
The big rabbit wasn’t a rabbit when I got to it. I think it was a hare, and
if I’m wrong about it, it’s the kind of rabbit I’ve been calling a hare ever
since—longer ears and much more powerful legs. I’ve only managed to
shoot a couple other than that first one as they’re harder to catch unawares
than normal rabbits. Maybe longer ears hear better. Jip has run his heart to
bursting trying to catch a lot of them but never managed to kill one for
himself, which he takes as a personal affront. Every time he’s gaining on a
hare, it notices and boosts for the horizon, or maybe they like teasing
terriers, because they have an extra kick of speed that they can turn on
whenever they like.
I now knew the structure that I’d seen the night before was not a giant
fence but a rollercoaster because when I got into the shadow of it there was
an old sign saying what it was, and though it was blistered and corroded it
was still readable. And I knew what a rollercoaster was because I had seen
them in a book about American holidays. They had carriages you sat in
which whizzed you up and down and people put their hands in the air on the
down bits and screamed. I mean, in the picture they were smiling and
shouting, but the words said everybody screamed in excitement.
Nobody was screaming now. The place was quiet apart from the creaks
and clanks the wind teased out of the old metalwork and the rotting
buildings beneath.
I had thought we would climb the tower first, once we came ashore, but
when the sun came up the tide had gone back out to sea and the
Sweethope’s keel was scraping the sand below. Worried that if the tide went
further out it might snap, I threw out the anchor and loosened the lines
attaching it to the jetty so it could float a little freer. Then I took my
rucksack and my bow and arrows and climbed carefully along the side of
the jetty towards the shore. I had the map folded into the pack too, because I
thought if I climbed the tower it would help me get my bearings if I
compared what I saw with it. Taking the pack wasn’t anything special,
though as it turned out it was a lifesaver. It’s just how we were. We carried
our own water, packed our own food and always kept the basics to light a
fire or tend a wound close by. No one else was going to help us if we got
into trouble. It was just second nature. I also had two of the big plastic
water bottles looped round my neck to fill up at the first opportunity.
Fresh water and food, those were always the priorities on any trip, but
on this day I had thought to break habit and celebrate my first steps on the
mainland by climbing the tower and looking out over it. Jip had other ideas,
and wouldn’t be carried easily. Negotiating the skeleton of the jetty was
tricky enough with pack and bow and two water bowsers clunking round
my neck, so I dropped him in the water and he swam happily to shore under
his own power.
The retreating sea had left the strip of ground in front of the houses
standing a few feet above the waterline. Wet sand spilled into the open
doors and windows, and the half-buried hulks of old cars were scattered
along the whole length of the sea front. Some were just humped roofs,
lurking like giant beetles; others had been tossed by the storms and were
showing rotted wheels and rusting axles to the sky. Jip walked out of the
water, shook himself, looked back at me, wagged his tail and turned to sniff
his way into this whole new world of unfamiliar and exciting smells.
I followed him ashore with a little more difficulty. The jetty had been
gutted by fire and I had to test my footing every step of the way to dry land.
When I took the last—or maybe that’s the first—step onto it, I dropped the
water bowsers and looked about me. The tower dominated the skyline to
my left. The palace it grew out of was not golden in the morning light but
red-bricked. It seemed vast. Until then the biggest building I had been in
was that church where Brand had played the violin. This palace building
was many churches big. Jip had, however, followed his nose to the right,
down the sea front, towards the rollercoaster. Though at that point in my
mind it was of course still a mysteriously giant fence. I took out an arrow
and fitted it to the bowstring in case we startled a rabbit, again out of habit,
and followed. It wasn’t really a hunt because I couldn’t keep my mind on it.
There was too much distraction. The place had a funny smell, not a bad one,
but a bonfire, charred smell. I decided it must be the jetty, though the smell
stayed all the way down the front as I looked into the broken windows and
up at the bits of old signs that hinted cryptically at what the different
buildings had been for. On closer inspection OAT RIPS were offering boat
trips and the suggestion to USE EN was actually amusements—the big
sand-floored room with the low ceiling bellying ominously down over it
didn’t look that amusing, though the rows of corroding, burst machine
cabinets jammed in beneath had wild cartoony drawings on them that had
once clearly been brighter and more colourful than they now were.
There were no footprints on the sand other than mine behind me, only
paw prints that Jip had made ahead, and I followed him towards the
looming jumble of structures surrounded by the rollercoaster.
We both stopped by the open doors of the _AS_NO which other smaller
signs explained was a casino. I knew what that was too, and wanted to see
what a place where people had come to be glamorous and lose their money
looked like, but there was a smell of something powerfully dead in the
lobby. Jip turned away from it and again, I followed him back out into the
clean air. Things die and things rot. And you don’t always have to go
poking at them.
The enclosure that the rollercoaster ran around was a Pleasure Beach,
and there was more sand on the ground to prove it. There was also a wall
with a huge skull wearing a Viking helmet three times the height of me
snarling a warning at us as we approached. It was probably funny to your
people. And I knew that. But to me it seemed a grim snaggle-toothed
presence, full of real malice. The Pleasure Beach was a strange village full
of grotesque things like that skull. There were oozy-looking gingerbread
houses built purposely askew to loom alarmingly over you. There were all
manner of metal cages and decaying machines—most with once bright but
now weather-bleached plastic seats hanging off the end of them, things
presumably meant to hurl people around, though that looked like it’d be
torture and not pleasure at all. There was a lot of broken glass and so I trod
carefully. Moving so slowly let me creep up on an animal I hadn’t seen
before, and I nearly put an arrow through it until I realised it was a half-
buried teddy bear.
I saw a pair of giant birds like ostriches standing very still among some
greenery and though I quickly realised they were made of plastic I still
nearly jumped clean out of my skin when I looked slightly to my right and
saw a giant lizard the size of a horse crouching amongst some ratty shrubs,
watching me with an evil look on its face, showing just enough teeth to
promise a nasty end if it leapt for me. I instantly went very cold and still.
Jip walked up to it and cocked his leg on its tail. It was only then I saw that
it was just another statue, made of concrete. The look Jip gave me seemed
to say “so much for dinosaurs”.
It hadn’t been real. Of course not. Dinosaurs are even deader than you
are. But the shock it had given me was. I walked over to the base of the
giant tangled-looking fence where there was more light, and that was where
I found the sign that explained that it was a rollercoaster, and it was while I
was reading it that I felt Jip go hunting-still beside me, and that was when
we saw the hare lollop out of the bushes and pause to twitch its nose
towards the sea.
Once I’d shot it and hung it off my pack, Jip got very interested in
following its scent trail back into the undergrowth that had invaded this
corner of the Pleasure Beach, while I climbed the rollercoaster. To start
with, I only meant to go a few feet above ground to see if I could watch his
progress, but it was sturdy and didn’t move at all as I went higher, so I kept
going. I climbed onto the track and walked very carefully up the thin
footplates that made a flight of steps alongside it. Probably not the most
sensible thing I could have done, but I always kept a hand on the rail.
Things built sturdily in the old world have had a long time to start coming
to pieces again in the After, and I did not want to end my adventure by
falling through something broken. And yes, it was an adventure. I was still
determined to get Jess back, but even though that fierceness was in me, I
was also excited to finally be putting my hands and my feet and my eyes on
a world I had only read or heard old unreliable stories about. And the higher
I climbed, the more I felt that streak in me begin to open up and breathe
better in the newer, cleaner air. It came to me that I hadn’t known I had
been being less than I could have been until then, when I saw there was so
much more of the world for me to be myself within.
There was a carriage parked on the very top of the rollercoaster. If there
hadn’t been, I might have turned back before I got there. I don’t think that
would have made a difference, but it might have. As it was, I looked up at it
and thought it would be good to get to it and sit there and rest a moment,
looking out at the view opening up before me.
Jip was back at the base of the rollercoaster, barking up at me, eager I
should see the rabbit he had lying on the sand in front of him. I waved and
told him I’d be down in a minute. The wind had picked up again, and the
sky was darkening, but I was really concentrating on looking at the step in
front of me and then the next one. I didn’t need to look at the clouds
gathering behind me; I could feel there was a good chance of rain coming,
smell it even. I’d just sit at the top and rest a moment, then come down
before it started. Mainly I was trying not to look down, because then my
balance wavered a bit and I felt queasy. Like being seasick on solid ground.
I got to the top and that’s where I found him. Slumped on the floor of the
carriage, a rattle of old bones themselves weathering away to powder in the
rags of what had once been his clothes, strands of long grey hair coiled like
a nest by the skull. There was one rubber boot, cracked and perished with a
leg bone still in it, and a backpack. The pack was thick plastic, black and
with a roll top. The straps were gone but the pack itself had been designed
to be very waterproof. Maybe because it had been stuffed under the seat and
was protected from the worst of the weather it seemed to have survived
with its contents inside.
There was also a gun on the floor among the bones.
The weather had rusted it into a useless lump, but it was there. So were
the holes in the skull. Small one in the bottom of the brain pan where the
muzzle would have pressed against the top of the mouth, and a big chunk
blasted through the scalp. It told a sad but clear story. He’d climbed up here
for a last view of the world and then blown himself out of it.
I told the bones I was sorry, and then opened the pack. It cracked stiffly
as I did so, and then I saw I was wrong. It was full of photographs, a
lifetime of pictures—but on top of them was a lipstick and pots of make-up
and a small mirror and a hairbrush. There was also a sort of metal urn,
which I thought might have something interesting in. I opened it and found
it didn’t. It just had ashes inside, grey and gritty. I could understand why
this woman would have decided to die with her best face on, looking good
for whatever came next. There was a sort of defiance in it that I could
admire. But I didn’t know why she would have climbed all this way
carrying something as meaningless as an urn full of ashes. I hefted the
canister. It wasn’t light. And she must have been old, from the grey hairs
she’d left behind. I don’t think I’d have made better sense of it if I’d had
time to sit there and think about it, but I didn’t even have that luxury.
Something made me look behind myself, back up the mile of beachfront
to the tower. Even at this distance and from this height you could see how
much taller it was than the rollercoaster. It seemed to be almost touching the
grey clouds closing in above it. It was only dwarfed by the black cloud
rising off the sea below it.
Except it wasn’t a black cloud. It was smoke. And at its base was a fire,
and the fire was the Sweethope.
I should have run down the steps, except I could see that in the time it
took me to run the mile back to the jetty it would be too late, way too late. I
sat down and stared at the disaster.
Because that feeling I’d had about being watched? Maybe some of it
was imagination. But one part of it had been real. I’d come looking for
Brand. But he’d found me.
I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see his boat. I couldn’t even see where on
the wide, exposed stretch of coast sweeping north to the point it might be.
There was nowhere for him to hide it. Unless there was an inlet behind the
point. I couldn’t see his damned dog Saga, and I couldn’t see Jess.
All I could hear was Jip’s bark getting more urgent as if he sensed what
he could not possibly—from where he stood—see.
Scratched in the sand by the jetty end was a message. Big enough for me
to read even a mile away, clear beneath the smoke pluming off the funeral
pyre of my boat.
I TOLD YOU, GRIZ. GO HOME.
 Chapter 13

The tower

Six words in the sand proved that Brand could write. But I don’t think he’d
read the same books as me. If he had, he still might well have stolen my
dog, but he wouldn’t have burned my boat.
That’s what I think now, after all that’s happened. Then, sitting in shock
at the top of the rollercoaster, watching the Sweethope burn, I just felt
numb. And guilty. And scared too, of course. I had done a stupid thing—a
chain of stupid things—and this was the result. I hadn’t thought it out. I’d
rushed off without preparation, on my own, despite my dad trying to stop
me. I hadn’t listened to him. I hadn’t listened to anything but my heart and
my anger and I hadn’t used my head. Most of all I was stupid because I
hadn’t used my head. And now Bar and Ferg and Dad would think I was
dead for a long time because a long time is what it would take me to get
back home without my boat. Even Mum would notice I was not beside her
in the evenings. I was sure about that. At some level she would notice I was
gone. And what if they came looking for me? How would they find me?
How could we not miss each other in this huge world? They might come to
harm just searching for me. Home might just fall apart. It was all my fault.
Dad had been right, all the times he called me wilful and headstrong. Brand
had just stolen a dog and some fish. Brand was just one of those bad things
that life throws at you, like a storm or a sickness. A Brand was just
something you toughened up and coped with. You couldn’t argue with a
storm or a fever. It didn’t know any better. It just was.
Me? I knew better. And I’d betrayed everything.
If there was ever a moment to cry, that was it. And I wanted to. I felt the
sharp spike of tears wanting to come. My throat was tight with the sobs
waiting to be set free. No one would ever know. The old lady on the floor
beside me wouldn’t. She wouldn’t hear. She wouldn’t see. She was just
bones, eyes and ears long gone. But I didn’t cry. Maybe because I would
have known. Maybe because Dad was right and I am too stubborn for sense.
But mainly I think because it wouldn’t have done any good. The milk was
already spilt.
I took less care clattering down the steps of the rollercoaster than I had
going up, but still enough not to run and risk tripping and injuring myself.
When I got to the bottom, Jip pretended he was more interested in eating
the rabbit he’d caught until I hoisted my pack and picked up my bow, and
then he picked it up and ran with me as I headed back to the jetty. Maybe I
should have been more careful. Maybe I should have worried that Brand
might have set the fire to lure me back so he could ambush me or
something. But the thing about maybes is that you can get lost in them and
end up going nowhere. I needed to be doing.
And I knew, though I don’t know how, that he was gone. If he’d been
setting a trap, he wouldn’t have needed to write the words he had left for me
to find. Still, I kept scanning the scene ahead for a glimpse of his red hair as
I thumped my way up the mile of hardpack back towards the jetty. But he
was long gone. He’d left the message. He didn’t need to stick around to tell
it to me himself.
He’d also left my kayak.
That surprised me. That stopped me short when I got up to it. That
almost undid the whole not crying thing. That kayak was as much part of
me and home as the Sweethope had been. It was lying on the sand below the
words he’d written, and the mended paddle was leaning across it.
It was another message. He was saying he wasn’t a monster. That always
seemed important to him. And maybe in his own mind he wasn’t. I guess no
one’s the monster in their own story. Monsters are just a matter of
perspective.
The Sweethope was burned to the waterline but still belching black
smoke, a dead boat still floating. Sails torched, rigging gone.
Unsalvageable. The fire had burned the ropes mooring it to the jetty but it
had swung in and got snarled up in the great melted tangle of the fallen
wheel. He must have used something to set the fire in the cabin and then
just walked away. From the burned rubber smell and the persistent black
smoke, maybe a tyre. We burned brittle old rubber tyres to send smoke
signals in emergencies. The thought made me doubly homesick.
I sat and stared at the dead boat for a long time. I don’t know how long,
and I don’t remember what I thought of, not precisely. I do remember what
I felt, which was hollowed out and rubber-legged. I felt like I’d better stay
sitting and watching in case I stood up and the wind just blew me over.
Jip sat on the ground and looked at me, the remains of his rabbit still in
his mouth. He always loved rabbits after he’d killed them and would carry
them around for ages as if he was as proud of them as he was for having
caught them. He’d lick them, like he was grooming them. Sometimes it
could get a bit macabre.
Eventually he whined at me. Or maybe he’d been whining, trying to get
my attention for a while. Shock had put me in a sort of stunned cone of
temporary deafness. He wagged his tail and nudged the rabbit with his nose.
Good dog, I said. We’re going to have to do a lot of hunting from now
on.
Something had eaten the day without me noticing the passing of time.
The threatened rain had never arrived and the sun had swung across the sky
and was dropping into some new ominous looking clouds towards the
horizon.
All my dried meat and fish and oatmeal was burned away with the rest
of the boat. I had enough food for a couple of days in my pack, and of
course I had the hare.
Watching Jip with his rabbit reminded me of this, and that made me get
up on legs that were no longer rubbery but now stiff and unhappy to be
moving after such a long time spent sitting still. I made myself go across to
the smooth roof of one of the buried cars and use it as a table to spread out
the contents of my rucksack so I could take stock of what provisions and
tools we had for whatever was ahead of us.
I had the map and my notebook—the one I’m writing in right now. And
I had the picture of you, of course. And I had more food than I’d expected
as there were some oatcakes at the bottom I’d forgotten about. I had a
waterproof and a folding knife, fire steel, binoculars, extra socks and a
sweater. I didn’t have my bedroll and I would definitely miss that. I would
also miss the big compass on the boat, but I had the small brass walking-
compass that was always pinned to the flap of the pack instead, so that was
fine. North is north, no matter what size your compass is. And I had my
first aid kit. So I had the map, a compass, provisions, tools, dry clothes and,
with you and Jip, a couple of friendly faces. I told myself things could be
worse.
Things could be worse, I repeated for Jip’s benefit. He thumped his tail
on the sand and kept licking away at the rabbit.
I looked around. The new incoming rain clouds. Still no sign of Brand.
No sign of a red-sailed boat. I looked up at the tower.
Come on, boy, I said. Let’s get some perspective.
Before we went into the red-brick palace to try and find the way up the
tower, I thought I should pull the kayak further up the beach in case the tide
took it while we were exploring.
That’s when I discovered the bedroll. He’d taken the trouble to stuff it
inside the kayak before torching the boat. I was glad to see it, but also
strangely put out that he thought I was so soft that I couldn’t do without it
or so useless that I wouldn’t have been able to vike the materials to make
myself a new one if I wanted.
Patronised. That’s the word for how I felt. Like I was an annoyance and
not a threat.
Still a monster, I said as I hauled the kayak higher up the beach, above
the tideline. Still a monster.
The doors to the palace were warped and stuck, so they didn’t open until
I’d taken a lot of my frustration out on them with my boots. Jip watched me
patiently as I hacked at them, and then trotted inside with his dead rabbit
friend, without waiting for me to lead the way.
The floors were covered in debris from the bits of ceiling that had fallen
down, but it still was a magical, cavernous space. The lobby was pillared
and big enough, and then when we followed a faded sign into the ballroom
it was huge beyond anything I’d imagined. It had two layers of curvy
balconies all around the sides, no straight lines, all scrolls and waves, some
fragments of the original gold paint still picking out the details, though most
of it was mottled and grey. The floor was buckled wood where it wasn’t
rotted, and where it was rotted a few hopeful saplings had taken root, thin
scraggly things reaching up out of the gloom towards the broken hole in the
roof and the light beyond. Something had fallen through the skylight, and
now the weather was getting in I saw that sadly the whole building would
go before long. Dad used to say that all you needed to do to the old houses
on Uist was make a fist-sized hole in the roof and they’d be down in two
years.
It was the first time I’d been in a building like that, like something in a
kid’s fairy-tale book. There was a stage at the far end with tall pillars on
either side which framed it and supported an elaborately and even more
curvy top. When I got close to it and my eyes adjusted, I saw there was a
woman standing on it looking down at me.
Again, that was my first proper statue, so the cold chill that went down
my back and froze me is understandable. Once I’d seen she was made of
flaking gold plaster and was missing half an arm on one side and was
holding hands with another arm that had broken off what I imagined had
been a fallen sister on her other, I relaxed.
I still said hi.
Which got Jip’s attention, but not hers. He trotted over for a look and a
sniff. There was enough of the lettering that had been carved below her for
me to read “I WIL_ ENCHANT”. And for a moment she had cast a spell
that had frozen me, so it wasn’t a lie. I felt her eyes on me as I picked my
way back to the doors, through the debris of broken glass chandeliers that
had fallen all around the saplings, as if put there to protect the fragile new
growth.
I went back to the lobby and rubbed away at the signs until I found one
pointing me to the right door for the tower. It took me halfway outdoors and
we began to climb the steps that switched back and forth up the inside of
the latticed metal body.
When things had worked, there had been a room on cables that must
have lifted people up to the top, but without electricity it was leg-ache to the
top, or nothing. And by the time I’d got halfway up the thing, my legs were
definitely adding their complaints to the list which included the large cuts
on my arm (not healing), my head (bruised, now throbbing all the way
round to my ear) and my tooth (still aching in twinges). Even though I was
inside the rusting cage of the tower, it still felt exposed and dangerous. And
the higher I climbed, the more the cool breeze became a cold wind. I paused
and listened to it whining through the metalwork around me. Jip had
gamely climbed this far, but when I started back up the steps he just looked
at me and went back to grooming his dead rabbit friend.
I was sweating and breathing hard when I got to the door at the top. It
had a glass window claiming to be the “tower eye” through which I could
see a big enclosed room with more glass windows all around. It was also
locked, or if it wasn’t the catch had corroded and wasn’t moving a bit. It
had been a bad enough day already. I wasn’t in any kind of mood to have a
stupid door make it worse, not after pushing myself up all those steps. I
braced myself on the handrail and kicked the handle, hoping the impact
would unjam it. I kicked it really hard, several times. Then I tried it, giving
it a really aggressive jiggle.
The lock held. The hinges didn’t. The door fell awkwardly out of the
wrong side of the frame, twisting as it came down. I managed to get my arm
up and protected myself as best I could, but it was a heavy door and it
slammed me into the side railings, whacking my head as it fell past, going
end over end and smashing down into the angle of the landing below.
I shouted all the worst words I knew. But when I got myself to my feet
and checked for any permanent damage, I found it wasn’t as bad as it felt. I
now had a bang on the other side of my head to balance the black eye, and
when I put my fingers there to touch it they came back with enough blood
on them for me to know I’d got a graze to match. But again my pride had
taken a bigger hit than my body, and I made a mental note that I was just
going to have to be more careful from now on. Whatever happened next, I
was definitely going on a long journey and nobody else was going to be
around to stop me doing stupid things to myself.
I then immediately betrayed all that sensible thinking by walking up the
last steps and stepping into the room above, looking out at the huge view
beyond the wall of glass. If I had ever seen a bird’s-eye view before, I’d
have paid more attention to the floor.
I had both feet standing over thin air before I knew it and when I looked
down there was nothing between me and five hundred feet of air, straight
down to the hard sand on the seafront. My survival instinct kicked in and
my legs flexed and I stamped down, throwing myself backwards with a yelp
of horror. I landed hard on my tailbone, scrabbling with my feet until my
back hit the door-frame and then I stopped. And only then did my mind
click in and start to flail around, trying to understand the miracle of how I
had pushed hard against nothing but thin air and yet still managed to power
myself back to safety.
I crawled forwards and looked down. The outer strip of floor was glass.
Just like the windows, except where the windows had taken decades of
weather head-on, not to mention the streaks of seagull shit that striped
them, the floor—protected and pointing straight down—was relatively
clear. I reached forward and tapped it. It was really thick and rock-solid.
Looking straight down through it gave me my first real experience of
vertigo, much stronger than the queasiness I’d felt on top of the
rollercoaster. I decided not to tread on the middle of it again. Although the
glass was obviously designed to be trodden on, I had just seen how
treacherous the metalwork of the frames holding it in place might be.
I walked round the room and found the other side of the central block.
Someone had once camped out here. There was a pile of blankets, a couple
of chairs and even a table with a camping lamp and an old music player
with speakers. There were empty green bottles, neatly lined up along the
glass wall. The lamp had corroded into uselessness, but there was also a
plastic box. The catch snapped and the hinges cracked off when I opened it,
because most old plastic gets brittle and shards really easily, but inside there
were four candles. They and the blankets had survived so long because the
room at the top was basically a sealed glass and metal box and no rats or
mice had been able to get to them. Candles were a real rarity. There was
also a pair of crutches, which I thought was odd. The climb was tough
enough without needing to crutch your way up there. I decided at the time
that whoever had come here must have really wanted to see the view. I was
strangely cheered by the fact that people had once camped out here in the
sky, listening to music and drinking. It seemed a life-enhancing thing to
have done, presumably as the world was dying around them. I pocketed the
box of candles and hoped they’d had the time of their lives. It didn’t occur
to me until much later that the reason they hadn’t needed to take the
crutches with them when they left is that they wouldn’t have needed them if
they’d taken the short way down after the wine was gone and the music
stopped.
There was a last flight of steps up to an open viewing platform above the
room, and the door to that was stiff but scraped open enough for me to slip
through it and out into the wind. Once there had been high metal railings all
around the walkway, metal bars that rose above my head and then curved
back on themselves, but now almost a whole side—the one facing north—
was missing. From the condition of the other metalwork, which was burst
and shaling flakes as if the rust consuming it was a fungus, it had probably
rotted off and fallen into the ballroom below. Maybe that was the thing that
had broken the hole in the roof, and had let the saplings in.
There was also another thing that made me feel sad in the same way the
bundle of rags and bones on the rollercoaster did, though this pile of clothes
was not especially ragged and there were no bones at all. There was a pile
of surprisingly well-preserved clothes that had been neatly folded and
placed under a pair of boots wedged beneath the bottom of the railings,
right next to the gap above the distant hole in the roof. It may have been
nothing more than a pile of clothes and a pair of old boots, but my
imagination created a man—I think it was a man from the size of those
boots and the red hooded jacket beneath them—stripping off like a
swimmer and standing naked in the wind before taking a long final dive
through the ballroom roof far below. I have that kind of mind, the one that
makes fantasies from scraps of evidence. When we were little, Bar used to
put us to bed, and after she had read or told us a bedtime story she would
give us three things to weave our own stories about as we went to sleep.
She always chose odd, unconnected things, like a seal, a mountain and an
umbrella for example, and I would begin making a story that soon turned
into a dream and a good night’s sleep.
Something moved in the breeze on the edge of the railing where it had
broken off. It was a chain, like a necklace, made from lots of silver steel
balls linked together. There was a pendant hanging from it and it was this,
twisting in the wind and reflecting the light that had caught my eye. I
unhooked it and looked at the pendant. It was a small rectangle with
rounded edges, with a stubby tube jutting down off the bottom end of it.
The tube was solid, but stippled with random holes of different sizes which
dented its surface like tiny craters that caught the light. It must have been
stainless steel to have lasted this long without tarnishing. It was an odd
thing, and although I immediately added it to the story I had made of the
final moments of my imagined naked diver—as he took it off and left it
hanging there with the clothes he left behind—it did not feel like a sad or a
bad thing. In fact I took it as a good luck sign, because the symbol pressed
into the centre of the rectangle was my lucky number, 8. And the 8 was
surrounded by a circle from which arrows radiated outwards to all the
points of the compass. The little story I made up for myself about the
pendant was that it was lucky, meant for me and as it seemed to be my
special number inside a symbol that meant “you can go anywhere”, I should
definitely take it and wear it. Not least because if I was to find Brand and
Jess in this whole unknown world I was marooned in, I would need every
scrap of good luck I could lay my hands on. So I took it, looped it over my
head and put it under my shirt.
Of course I know it’s foolish to be superstitious, and that in this world
you have to work hard to make your own luck, but I was on my own then
and in low spirits and was looking for something, anything to stiffen my
courage. Even as I did it, the sensible part of me knew I was clutching at
straws, but when you’re in danger of drowning you will grab at anything
that might just keep you afloat.
Behind the palace there had once been a town and that was where the
burned smell that had been competing with the sea breeze all day was
coming from. The sprawl of buildings and the vegetation which had re-
colonised the streets between had caught fire, and done so quite recently,
since there was no new green in the grey-black scar that stretched away
inland. Sometimes, back on the islands, a lightning strike will set a fire
among the heather, and then the wind will take the flames and blow them
across the slopes, leaving dark wounds which green over the following
spring and in a couple of years grow right back into the landscape, leaving a
patchwork that time fades and adjusts and—after a while—erases. This had
the same wind-fashioned shape and was new burn, definitely this season’s
fire if not quite this week’s or this month’s. The blaze had stripped away the
green covering that still blurred the outlines of the unburned streets which
remained to the north-east, and it had revealed the pattern of the old roads
and buildings that lay beneath the softening leaves and grasses like a hard
skeleton. The long lines of houses marched up the slope away from the sea,
following the billow of the low hills behind and snaking up the valleys
between them. The procession of burned-out shells were too regular and
straight for nature. And they also seemed determined to hold hands in a
long chain. Like there was an extra strength in companionship as they
hugged the land for comfort. That’s what I thought then, anyway. I had,
after all, just taken a bang to the head.
 The streets had burned too. It must have been an inferno. Last year and
the year before had been drier than ever, though Dad always said every year
got hotter, which was the reason the old jetties on the islands were mostly
underwater, whatever the tides. The rains came less often, he thought, but
when they did they were harder. So on the one hand they were more violent,
and on the other more or less the same amount of water landed on the
islands every year. The burns ran and the springs sprung and the small
lochans that laced the island were still there. And though the heather and
the grass might get drier sooner in the summer, the islands were almost as
watery ashore as the sea they were surrounded by.
Lack of water wasn’t going to be an immediate problem on the top of
the tower either, because as I was looking out over the burn scar, trying to
make sense of the landscape beyond, a matching dark cloud slid over us and
began to spit and then pelt with rain.
I retreated inside and listened to the shower lashing the windows. The
sea below was beginning to stack up with long incoming white-topped
rollers. I was pleased to be under cover. I had wondered if I could see all the
way back up the coast towards home, but I couldn’t: it was too far and the
shape of the coast and the islands didn’t correspond with what I
remembered of them at sea level.
A big gust of wind blew the door shut above and I got a shock from that,
but as I sat there and felt the walls and the floor around me I was reassured
by how solid it all felt. I’d begun to wonder if the tower might fall down
because someone was moving around on it after all these years of rust and
wind, but strangely the storm reassured me. The viewing room was
waterproof and there was no hint of shake inside. If it had stayed up for all
these years, more than a century since anyone painted it, I thought the
likelihood of it falling down on this night of all the thirty-six and a half
thousand nights in between was so tiny that it wasn’t worth thinking about.
Also: tree houses. I had read a couple of books that had other kids
having houses in trees to play in. I used to dream of sleeping in a tree, with
the leaves moving around me in the wind, like waves. The problem with the
islands is that there are no trees on them. Not really. The wind scours
everything down to heather height, and those that do find purchase are
seldom much taller than a person. And certainly not tall enough to climb, let
alone build a house in. The viewing room seemed like the best tree house in
the world.
The people who had left me their candles had stayed up here for fun
when things must have looked terrible for the world as it aged and died all
around them. Looking back, it does seem a bit crazy of me to also have
been thinking about doing something because it was fun then, at the very
moment when everything else had just got as un-fun as anything had ever
been in my life.
I heard Jip bark from below and went to tell him I was okay and I
thought we might spend the night up here. There were blankets enough for
both of us to be comfortable. When the storm cleared, I intended to spread
Brand’s map on the floor and see if I could match what I could see of the
landscape with the shapes on the paper. So, I told myself, there was also a
practical, sensible reason for my night in the sky.
I’d dumped my rucksack on the landing halfway down, not wanting the
bother of carrying it all the way, so I went back to get it and to lead Jip
reluctantly upwards.
He spotted the glass floor immediately and really didn’t like it. He kept
to the inner section where it was solid and lay there looking at me like I was
the biggest fool in the world for bringing him there.
The storm arrived full force about then and was quite a thing. It dimmed
the sky and then got darker still as the air filled with grey curtains of rain. I
could see them distinctly as they swept in across the water beyond the lines
of white tops marching towards the shore.
I wish I’d been alive when you could go in a plane. Not just to look
down on land and sea, but to soar around the clouds and look down on them
too. Did you do that? Go on a plane. See what the top of a cloud looks like?
I made a pad of blankets and waited until Jip settled in next to me, and
then wrapped another two round us, and sat and stared at the lightning
forking down over the sea in the far distance. Jip never liked thunder, and
barked back at it from under the protection of the blankets, pressing closer
to my leg as he did so. I put my hand on his neck, into the familiar wiry
hair, and told him it was all right, and that everything was going to be fine
in the morning.
That calmed him enough to turn the barks into growls. I just wished I
believed it. I thought I’d probably feel better if I ate something, but then
exhaustion took me and I fell asleep alongside him.
 The thunder was still rumbling when I woke, but the rain had stopped
and the noise was now coming from far in the distance. The gaps between
the lightning flashes and the noise were long enough for me to know the
storm was now worrying away at the landscape more than ten to twelve
miles away. Jip shifted in his sleep. I took care not to wake him as I moved
to get more comfortable and looked down at the jetty.
The sea was still heaving, but the clouds had lifted enough to let the
sliver of moon throw enough light to reflect off the surface. I thought I
could see the remains of the Sweethope still tangled in the great melted
wheel, but maybe I was imagining it. It wasn’t there when the sun came up.
But by then I’d made my choice and seeing it wouldn’t have done more
than confirm me in it. The sea had also washed away the words of warning
Brand had written in the sand. Seeing them wouldn’t have changed
anything either. As I said, all they did was prove he could write. Not that
he’d read the right books or learned the right lessons. Maybe if he had done
so he wouldn’t have burned the boat and told me to go home.
You burn boats so your troops stay and fight, because they can’t run
away home. Aeneas did that when he brought those who had survived the
fall of Troy to Italy and founded another empire in Rome. And the Spanish
explorer whose name I can’t remember did that when he arrived in South
America with his troops. He ended up taking the whole continent and all its
silver and gold with a handful of violent men with guns who couldn’t go
home. I’m not violent, and I’m not a man and I didn’t have a gun. But
Brand had burned my boat. And in doing so had made my choice for me, no
matter what he thought the message he was sending was.
I wasn’t going home. Not then, not yet, or not to my home anyway. I was
going to go to his home. I was going to get my dog. I was going to take his
boat. And then, when and only if I did that, I would go home.
Like I said.
Bang on the head.
 Chapter 14

A glimmer of light

That wasn’t the whole story. There was another reason. And in fact maybe
the whole burning the boats thing is something I made up for myself
afterwards on the journey as we walked. I certainly had plenty of time to
think as I did so. And enough reason, as things got more complicated, to
knit myself a nice excuse for all the harm in whose way I had put myself.
Ever bang your thumb with a hammer? Hurts worse than a normal knock
because you did it to yourself.
Before it got light, but after the storm had gone and the distant thunder
had rolled away, taking the lightning out of sight beyond the hills to the
north, I woke again, needing to pee. I went up the stairs and out on to the
rain-slick platform where I added to the wetness on the ground, taking care
to allow for the wind direction. It was when I was straightening up that I
saw it and stopped everything.
There was a light in the darkness. A tiny pinprick on the horizon to the
south-east, so small it could have been a star on the point of setting. Except
it was orange and I’d never seen an orange star and the clouds were
battened down overhead, so that no other stars were visible to compare it
with. I clattered down the steps to get my binoculars and the compass,
which woke Jip. I made him stay because I didn’t want him falling off the
open side of the viewing platform, and then I went back up.
The light was still there. But it was a long, long way off. The binoculars
couldn’t pull it closer, not enough to have any idea what it was anyway. The
compass was useless in the blackness of the night. Dad gave it to me when I
went off on my own for the first time. It had been his as a child and he said
the markings once used to glow in the dark, but now they had worn out. I
went back down and got a couple of the green bottles. Back out in the
darkness, I sighted them carefully with my eye, so that the tops lined up
with the distant orange spark. I then went back down and slept surprisingly
well, knowing that when the sun came up I could look along my homemade
sight line and see what was at the end of it.
I dreamed too, gentle happy dreams of walking into a village, which in
those dreams looked like the one that always featured on the last page in a
series of comic books I had loved as a child, an ancient thing with a
stockade of wooden spikes and happy villagers sitting around a big fire
having a feast while the village musician was always tied up somewhere in
the picture, looking very annoyed because they didn’t like his music. What
these villagers really liked was having punch-ups with Roman soldiers and
eating roast boar. Except in my dreams the village was not just full of
strangers, but Bar and Ferg and Dad and even Mum was there, laughing and
handing out food, and there was a small girl with a kite running round and
round the fire until she saw me and dropped the kite and sprinted towards
me with her arms wide open and then I woke up.
At least that’s what I think I dreamed. Remembering dreams is like
picking up small jellyfish—they slip through your fingers—and you never
know if it’s a dream you had or if you added to the dream in the
remembering. Sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re remembering a dream
at all, or just a dream about remembering a dream. And if that doesn’t make
sense, well, neither do dreams.
There was nothing at the end of the sight line. I was bitterly
disappointed when I looked again in the light of day. But there was no
unexpected settlement full of welcoming villagers waiting to help me. I
wasn’t, of course, really expecting Mum or the girl with the kite, but I had
gone to sleep wondering if there were people living in the empty landscape,
people we had not been told about. But there weren’t, or if there were there
was no sign of them and, since the one thing that hasn’t changed since the
end of the world is that everyone still needs breakfast, the absence of smoke
from a cooking fire seemed to seal the end of the hopeful delusion I had
gone to sleep beneath.
There was just a slightly raised bump on the horizon, too far away to see
if there was any building on it. I unfolded my map and used my compass to
orientate it. Then I took a bearing on the line I had marked with the bottle
tops, and then I used the straight edge of one of the crutches to draw a line
from the tower, right across the map.
And then—since the orange light had been broadly on the way to where
I had decided Brand was based—I knew where I was headed. I could check
it out, and keep right on going until I got to the other side of the land where
I was sure he really had his home.
Jip was happy to get back to ground level. I pulled the kayak inside the
hall of the palace. The building might be on its way to falling down now
that the weather and the saplings had found a way in to the ballroom, but I
reckoned it would take time, and the kayak would be safe enough for a
while. Certainly until I walked back to get it on my way home.
I wonder if it’s still there.
We set off inland. I wanted to look back, but I didn’t because I knew if I
did I’d start having doubts, and I had made my mind up. And there was
quite enough to fill my eyes and my head as we walked through the charred
skeleton of the town, Jip running ahead, quartering back and forth, nose to
the ground on the hunt for new and interesting smells.
The shells of the broken houses leaned against each other as the road
rose away from the seafront. The fire had burned the vegetation that had
overgrown them right back so the old cracked tarmac had been revealed
again, broken and buckled both by time and the bushes and small trees that
had pushed through and which now survived as flame-stripped trunks and
branches. The place smelled of fire char, but not a clean woodsmoke smell.
More of a greasy, oil smell. Walking into your world, thinking of how many
people had lived in this one street and then thinking how many other streets
just like it must lie ahead did give me a strange feeling. But the blank
window sockets didn’t look at me in the same way the empty houses on the
islands did. Maybe the fire had burned out the last residue of whoever had
once lived there.
Where the burn stopped and the houses continued, some still roofed and
more or less intact, it was different. Just as empty but more alive again.
Going was slower because the snarl of small trees and bushes got in the
way, but it was still easy walking, though I would lose sight of Jip for
minutes at a time. When glass survived, it winked the thin sunlight back at
me as I passed. I remember one house had GONE sprayed across the front
in yellow paint in letters that were higher than me. Birds flew in and out of
the upper windows where I imagined they had been building their nests
now for generations. It was a cheerful thing to see, as were the squirrels that
loped freely along the roofs and tree branches. Life was making use of what
you had left behind.
I’d never seen a squirrel except in a book, but the moment I saw the long
bushy tails, I knew they weren’t rats. The speed and deftness with which
they ran and kept their footing so high above the ground was exhilarating.
At least to me it was. To Jip it was another affront, and he barked excitedly
and tried to get at them, jumping up and even at one point trying to climb a
tree. He didn’t have much time for books, so maybe for him they really
were just rats with fluffier tails. Either way, they immediately got added to
the list of things he knew he was born to hunt. I wonder what they made of
us as we passed beneath them. They can’t have seen people before. It
seemed like they were studiously oblivious to us as they hurtled smoothly
from branch to branch—occasionally making wild and gravity-defying
leaps from tree to tree, landing and carrying on as if they had not just
performed a miracle of balance and surefootedness. I could have stood there
and watched them all day. I decided I liked squirrels just as much as Jip did,
but in a completely different way.
Once we left the edge of the town, the countryside sort of closed in, just
when I would have imagined it would open up. The reason was, again, the
trees. They got bigger and crowded in over the old road which was fully
grown over, covered in moss and grass. As I said, at home on the islands
there were no trees to speak of, and those very few that did survive were
wind-shorn and stunted things, cowering behind whatever windbreak had
allowed them to survive. There was one plantation of dwarfish pine on a
hillside on North Uist, but it was a tangled and dark place into which I did
not go.
Walking beneath real broad-leafed trees was something I had never
done. And on this first day it was exhilarating. After an outdoor life spent
under grey or blue skies, it was a novelty to find myself beneath a roof of
green, and not just the one green, but so many different kinds of green. It
wasn’t just the variety of trees that led to the medley of shades and
intensities of colour—it was the sunlight beyond that turned some of the
leaves into bright tongues of emerald that outlined the darker mass of the
shadowed leaves beneath. They were tall, the trees on that first stretch of
road, broad-trunked and ancient. The spread of their branches supported a
thick canopy which must have kept down the younger generation that was
trying to burst through the old tarmac road beneath the moss and grass. As
if to prove this, after a couple of klicks I came to a place where two huge
trees had blown down across the road and, where they let the light in, a new
tree had already grown taller than the shaded saplings around it. The roots
of the fallen trees had ripped great discs of earth out of the ground when
they went down, and examining them made me realise that there was a huge
system of roots beneath the surface to match the spread of branches high
above it.
It’s a marvellous thing, a tree.
Rabbits had dug homes into the newly exposed earth, and Jip caught two
before I could persuade him to come along with me. I was keen to get as
many klicks behind us as we could before nightfall, and so I gutted them
and hung them on my pack to skin later.
Good dog, I said. That’s our supper taken care of.
Many of the houses we passed were roofless shells, overgrown with
brambles or cracked apart by the vegetation that had taken root in them
decades earlier, but there were others that seemed less affected by time and
neglect, at least until I got a closer look. Stone-built houses seemed to stand
up better than brick, and brick better than houses made of frames covered in
plaster. The walls of these houses had burst with damp long ago and here
and there the remnants of the plastic sheeting they had been lined with
fluttered like white flags. I remember coming out of the trees for a section
of road, and found myself reflected in the long glass wall of a building that
was, I think, a place for buying petrol or charging a car. It was an odd thing
to see myself so small in a landscape, Jip at my side. Of course I’d seen
myself reflected in mirrors and house windows before, but this was by far
the biggest window I’d seen, and it made me look very small against the
landscape stretching away all around me. Just me, my pack and my bow
and then trees that towered above and a patchwork of brambles and hedges
and scrubland beyond. The world looked very big. I looked tiny. Jip looked
even smaller, but he also looked like he belonged in the wildness more than
I did. The scale of me was somehow wrong, too big and too little at the
same time. I looked like something not quite myself, like a character in a
story. As I walked on, I wondered if that was what it was like seeing a
movie or a television—a small person in a giant frame. Dad said that’s what
people used to do, sit in the dark with lots of other people and watch a huge
story take place on the screen hung in front of them. You’ll have seen
movies. I wonder what you’d have made of Jip and me.
The other thing I could see in the glass, plain as day, is that one of my
arms was considerably redder than the other.
That made sense, since one arm was also itching more. The scraping I
had given it on the netting had never really had time to heal, and the salt
sores that had developed had not gone away. I wanted to keep going, but I
knew I should take time to take care of it before it got worse so I walked up
to the petrol station and found the rotted carcass of a vehicle that had rusted
to the chassis. Just like many of the dead cars on the island, the axles and
the wheels and the engine blocks had survived longest. I put the rucksack
down and got my first aid kit out, using the engine block as a table to lay it
out on.
You had what Dad called the “’cillins” in your time: antibiotic medicines
that miraculously stopped things going infected and septic. Any ’cillins that
survived had been manufactured long before the world died, and even the
ones that were packed away in foil packs to keep out the moisture couldn’t
escape time. We found old pills every now and then when we were a-
viking, but they had little effect. Luckily Dad had the way of other
medicines from his ma, who he said was a wonder at healing, and so we all
carried kits in our packs that could help us if we got hurt by ourselves.
Unpacking my kit made me a little homesick, because of course everything
in it had been made by Dad or Ferg or Bar. I remembered Joy boiling the
cotton sheet we had found in an old house to make strips for the bandages,
and I myself had gathered the honey in the small airtight metal canister.
Ferg had made the ointment in the tin that had once contained a brown boot
polish, but I had helped him gather the woundwort that went into it, stuffing
bags made from old pillow cases full of the violet-flowered plant. Bar read
in a herbal book that it was also called “heal-all” and “heart-of-the-earth”. I
opened the tin and smelled it and thought how far I was from the heart of
my earth. Then I recapped it and washed my arm with some of the drinking
water from my bottle. I let the wind dry it, and then I smeared the most livid
patch of sores and scratches with the honey. As I did it, I felt the heat in my
arm like a fire beneath the skin and knew I should have done this two days
ago, and told myself I was a whole different kind of fool to the one I
already knew myself to be.
I wrapped Bar’s bandage over the honey, and tied it off. Then we set off
again. Of course, now that I had taken notice of it and done the right thing,
my arm kept intruding into my thoughts, itching and throbbing. Among the
other things I had in the kit—like knitbone paste and staunchgrass—was
some powdered red pepper from the plants Bar grew under glass. If the
sores and the scratches were no better at nightfall, I told myself I would
make a paste with that and put it in the wounds. The pepper paste burned
badly, but it always seemed to make infection go away, especially if mixed
with the garlic she also grew, but I had none of that with me. One of the
family on Lewis had jumped off a rock onto the yellow sand at Luskentyre
and impaled her foot on a razor clam. It had killed her in pieces, and the
going was ugly and brutal as the infection had spread up her foot to the
point where they had thought about cutting it off to save her, but because
cutting a foot off your daughter is a terrible thing to do they had left it too
late and the infection had spidered up her calf. When they did take her leg
off below the knee they thought they had caught it, but she never woke up.
Before the end of the world you had conquered infection, but it turns out all
it had to do was outwait you. It waited until the medicine factories closed
because no one was young enough to work in them, and then back it came.
I knew I was strong, and I wasn’t too worried about my arm in the long
run, but I was just worried enough to walk along with a niggle at the back
of my head. At the time it wasn’t a big thing, but it was annoying. Like a
tiny stone in your boot.
Before I set off, I picked up a few small pebbles and put them in my
right-hand pocket, and then as I walked I tried to count my paces. This was
a trick Dad had taught us on the long beaches on South Uist. A klick is a
kilometre and once you’ve calculated how many of your steps that is, if you
count paces you can see how far you can walk in a day. Or you can look at a
map and if you know what direction you’re going and how far you’ve
travelled, you’ll always know where you are. That’s the theory. I wasn’t yet
aware I was in the process of testing that theory until it broke. I was just
trying to count to one thousand, three hundred and fifty, which is my count
for a klick. There were a lot of new things to see as I walked and I had to
concentrate on not losing count. To help with that, every time I reached one
thousand, three hundred and fifty I put a pebble from my right hand pocket
into my left, in case I lost count.
I walked twenty-five pebbles that first day. I remember that. It was a
round number. I walked them along the grown-over road because it went
almost exactly in the bearing I had taken from the tower, with my glass
bottles and the orange light. Because I had known that once I was on the
ground the ridge where I had seen the fire would not be visible to me, I had
marked the nearest landmark that I could see along that line. It was a sharp
needle that had looked small when I saw it, but as I got closer I could see
that in fact it towered over the surrounding landscape. It was a church
steeple. I supposed they were called that because they were steep, but of the
ones I have since walked past, it still seems the tallest and the sharpest,
scratching the sky with a tiny bent cross at the very tip of it. What became
apparent as I got closer was that it was in the middle of what must once
have been a city. As I write this I realise I don’t really know the difference
between a city and a town, except one is a lot bigger than the other. I
suppose if I had a dictionary I could look it up. But I don’t have any book
other than the one I’m writing this in. If it wasn’t an official city, it was
certainly bigger than the town I’d left in the morning, and fire had not
destroyed much of it. Or if it had, the fire had visited a long time ago and
the living green had grown right over the char and ash it may have left
behind. That doesn’t mean the city was intact. It was definitely well on the
way to turning back into landscape. Like I said, nature will take a building
down if you give it enough time. The rain gets in, the cold turns water to ice
in the winter, the ice swells the building cracks and then seeds sprout in the
cracks in the spring and all you have to do is wait for the roots to push the
walls and the roofs further apart to let in more seeds and rain and ice and
eventually things fall apart just as surely here on the mainland as out on the
islands.
I wonder if it would be sad for you to think that the wild is well on the
way to winning back the world you and your ancestors took and tamed. I
can imagine it might be, especially when I see the amazing stuff you all
built. I have seen things I could not have imagined, not even from the
pictures I used to pore over in the old faded books back home. I have
walked in the shells of buildings that I cannot believe were possible to
build. I don’t know how someone could have got so much stone up into the
air and left it so well made that it stayed there. And it’s not just the
buildings—it’s the bridges and the tunnels. I am still awed by the power and
the cleverness that went into building them, power and cleverness that must
have been an everyday thing to you. But buildings are no different to trees
really. Or people. Eventually they fall over and die.
I walked into the city and the ruins of the buildings seemed to rise and
close in around me the nearer I got to the steeple. It took me two pebbles to
get there from the edge of the countryside. Animals had worn tracks which
wove along through the grass and bushes that filled the gap between them,
the gap that had once been streets. In the mud and the leaf mould I saw the
tracks of pads—like rabbits, but some bigger, and I saw hoof marks, which
surprised me. I shouldn’t have, because we keep ponies on the islands, but
somehow I hadn’t thought there might be ponies on the mainland. I turned a
corner and found myself face to face with a fox. He was big, the same size
as Jip, and his fur was a deep orange, except for the flash of white on his
chest and at the tip of his tail. He looked at me without surprise but with
that great stillness that comes over an animal preparing to run the moment
they think it’s safe to turn their back on you.
He was standing at the foot of a great slope, which was the top floor of a
building that had collapsed. All the floors had been concrete and there had
been no walls. I think it had been made to put cars in. Anyway, the floors
had fallen in and were stacked on top of each other like a tilted spill of
oatcakes. The grey of the concrete was cut up into car-sized boxes by faded
yellow lines which immediately looked like a giant ladder the moment the
fox turned tail and ran for it, loping up the slope as Jip gave chase. The fox
disappeared into a door faintly marked EXIT at the top of the slope, and Jip
would have followed him had he not heard the sharp whistle I gave, and
stopped dead. He gave me a reproachful look, pissed on the side of the exit
door and then trotted back down to the road beside me.
I was itching to go a-viking in the huge buildings I was passing but I had
everything I needed in my pack or on my belt, and I didn’t want to distract
myself from my plan. Or rather, I did desperately want to distract myself
and go hunting through the lost bits of this new territory opening up all
around me, but I wanted to get my dog back even more. I had worked out
how far I would have to walk to get from the tower to the place on the other
coast where I was sure—from the marks on the map—that Brand called
home. If I could walk thirty klicks a day, I could be there in ten or twelve
days. Twelve days was not so long. But I could do my viking on the way
back, was what I told myself. Once I had Jess. I hoped that Brand was
sailing straight home, and I believed he might well be as his boat had been
loaded to the gunwales with things he had picked up on his travels. Of
course I had no idea as to how I might rescue her, but I was sure that I
would come up with one once I saw the lay of the land. There were a
thousand things wrong with this plan, not least that I was basing everything
on the map I’d stolen, and hanging every hope I had on the web of pencil
lines that radiated from that single spot on the east coast.
So. No viking. And if I was to be true to the plan, I should have walked
past the steeple and gone another five pebbles before making camp. But I
was tired and the day of trees and then the mass of overgrown buildings was
so new to me that I felt somewhere between stunned and dizzy with the
novelty of it all. So I decided I could make up the distance tomorrow. I
sweetened the decision by telling myself I should try and climb the tower
that supported the steeple and check out the next landmark on the compass
line. The church was easy enough to find, though I did have to lace my way
to it through a maze of smaller streets where red-brick buildings were
tumbling into the dense thickets of brambles choking the roadways
between. When I got there, I found it stood on a sort of point, above what
looked like a river of trees that forked away on either side of it. I could see
a real river sparkling in the sunlight beyond that. What I didn’t know then,
but now do know, having seen a lot of country, is that the river of trees was
actually the old railway lines, and the reason the tops were level with me
was that they were in a groove that had been cut down into the land for
them to run along. Railways fill with trees faster than roadways, perhaps
because the rails were laid on loose stones, instead of the hard skin of a
tarmac road. What I have found is that if you try and follow a railway on an
old map, you make better time walking beside it in the clearer fields than
you do trying to wind your way through the undergrowth that has
enthusiastically recolonised the tracks. They’re more like greenways than
railways now.
The church doors were locked, or corroded in place. They were made of
heavy wood that had seemed to have hardened instead of rotting. The iron
railings around the church had corroded into an uneven and unwelcoming
barricade, and the stone forecourt was buckling with weeds and saplings.
But the windows were all intact, at least all the ones I might have reached
were. There was a big round window at one end, like a giant stone flower
with coloured glass panels radiating out from the centre. There were broken
panes there, but no use to me in getting in.
I would have given up, but Jip chased something fast and sleek under
the arch supporting the tower, and when I followed his excited barking I
found he had chased the rat inside the building, through a door I had
missed. The door was actually locked, but a gutter above had failed, so that
water had striped down the side of the church in a years-long stain and
pooled in a depression under the tower. That had rotted the bottom of the
door, making a dog-sized hole that he had pushed in through. I pulled away
at the wood until it was Griz-sized, and crawled in after him.
Inside was wonderful and awful. The windows that had looked drab
from the outside radiated light and colour over the high-ceilinged interior.
The glass showed bright pictures of bearded men in robes doing things and
women with scarves over their heads looking up into the sky and holding
babies. The ceiling was a complicated structure of wooden supports
stepping up to the peak, and on every possible perch there were more
statues of men in beards. When I was small, I read a children’s Bible that
told all the important stories, so I’m pretty sure most of the painted women
were the Mary because their faces were the same, only the colours of their
scarves and robes and the things they carried were different. Some carried
babies, some odder things like wheels and flames. All of the beards can’t
have been the Jesus, but I know the naked ones nailed to the crosses were.
The statues weren’t just up on the roof supports. They were everywhere, big
and small, free standing or hanging from the walls. The church in Iona had
had one or two, but this—this was what a crowd felt like. It was the most
crowded empty space I’d ever been in, and I had the nastiest feeling that
they had all been waiting for me, or someone, to disturb their peace and
quiet.
Although one end of the church was pretty untouched by time, at the
other end there was a jumble of long metal pipes where something that I
think was a musical organ had fallen down. In the books I read, people
came to church for peace, or to talk to a god, or just to be with all their
neighbours. I didn’t think this was a comfortable place to talk to a god.
There was too much pain in the statues, too much relish in the way they
were made. I think relish is the right word, if it means a delight in
something. It felt like the sculptors had made the statues with a real liking
for the hurt of being nailed to that cross. Maybe that’s my ignorance rather
than their fault. Maybe loving the pain was a thing that made sense if you
believed in invisible things like this god. I just felt… disconnected from the
meaning of all that enjoyment. Like someone was giving the punchline to a
joke I hadn’t heard the beginning of. Maybe I should have read a grown-up
Bible to see what the point of it all was, but we had no time for gods where
I grew up. It had passed, they had passed, just like you all had passed. Gods
are just stories now. Bar said that’s all they really were anyway: stories to
make sense of lives of those who wanted someone else to take charge of
them, rather than cut their own way.
Bar read different books to the ones I did. Books of ideas, not stories,
and practical books about how to do things or make things grow. They
never interested me as much as a made-up book about people. But I liked
the way her mind worked.
I found a small door that led up to the tower. The confined space made
me a bit breathless, tightness rising in my throat as I ascended. I had the
strange feeling of walking up into a dead end. I began wondering how I
would get out of this narrow twisting stone spiral if the door at the bottom
slammed shut and the one at the top wouldn’t open. I would be stuck like a
bug in a bottle. My calm mind knew the door at the bottom would not slam
shut as the wind couldn’t get at it even if there was a wind, which there
wasn’t, and there was no one else who would push it shut as the world was
empty. My fear-mind had other thoughts. The door at the top did open,
though I broke one of the hinges tugging and kicking at it. I stepped out
onto a stone platform that ran round the base of the steeple. Looking up, I
saw the height of it and the bent cross on the tip, and I felt the huge weight
of stone balanced overhead like a threat. Did you ever go to the edge of a
cliff and feel a kind of pull, something sinister but exhilarating making you
want to jump? The mass of all those stone blocks seemed to hang there with
a similar kind of tug.
Stay there, it seemed to be saying. Don’t move. And we’ll be down to
squash you any time now.
 I took a bearing on my compass. I could see a notch in the high ground
looming in the distance, with a paler hill rising beyond it. If I kept the peak
of the paler hill just to the right-hand side of the notch—like a gunsight—I
would be on target. I took out the map and drew the shape on a blank bit of
sea so that I wouldn’t forget it. Then I went back down into the church. I
had thought of sleeping in there, but there were too many eyes that would
have stayed watching me as I slept. They weren’t human eyes, and though
the statues stared there was nothing in the way they’d been carved that
reached out to you. Not like the woman in the yellow dress. But I’m getting
ahead of myself. I did sit on the altar and share some dried meat and
oatcake with Jip before we left, and as I sat there looking back into the body
of the church, I realised I was probably getting the same view the god’s
priest had had when the rows of empty benches had been full of living
people. I tried to imagine what kind of noise all those metal pipes now
splayed like a giant’s game of jackstraws at the other end of the room might
have made. I couldn’t, and when I left the building, the strongest memory
wasn’t the statues and the cruel torture they seemed to take such a grim
delight in, but the glory colours of the glass windows all around them. They
stayed in my mind like jewels.
The woman in the yellow dress lived in a Greek temple in the middle of
the town, squatting ominously on one side of a stone-flagged square. Of
course it wasn’t a proper Greek temple, but it looked like a darker version
of the white one in the book of myths Joy and I had pored over by the
fireside a lifetime ago, where Zeus or maybe it was Athene lived. It had the
same pillars in front, supporting a big triangle of stone, making a big porch,
behind which were doors and windows. The windows had been shuttered
with board, maybe to protect the glass. I spent a long time trying to work
out what the letters carved in stone on the front of the building said. I think
it was “TO LITERATURE, ARTS AND SCIENCES”.
The doors were cracked open just enough for me to slide in after Jip.
Inside were more doors, glass this time. These inner doors were what had
kept the weather and the animals out. I pushed them open with some
difficulty, and went in. The upper windows weren’t boarded, so I climbed
the stairs. It had been a museum. That’s what I discovered when I read the
labels on the walls. But everything in it had gone. Everything except in one
room in the middle. It was another big and empty space, and in it was a
chair and opposite the chair was a lady in a yellow dress, staring right at
me. I say she was a lady because a lady is a fancier kind of woman, and the
dress was as fancy as you could imagine, long and luxurious and the
liveliest yellow with black bits on the edges. It wasn’t a dress you could
have done anything useful in. It was a dress made to get in the way. It was,
however, a very good dress for lounging in and looking at people. And her
eyes were doing a very intense job of looking. She was only one painting,
but there was more life in her two eyes than in all of the blank Jesuses and
Marys in the church put together. She looked right at me and I knew she
was seeing me, just as intently as the artist must have seen her. She looked
at you and you felt… connected. Maybe not connected with her directly, but
with life. Because that’s what the painter had caught, that’s what the painter
had liked. Her life. Maybe just life itself. I sat in the chair and looked back
at her.
Hi, I said, I’m Griz.
And then I laughed at myself for talking to a painting and her look
seemed to share the joke she had not been able to make. I hadn’t been able
to bear the idea of going to sleep with all the sculptures looking at me, but I
decided that sleeping in this room with just her looking over me would be a
very different thing altogether.
I think someone else had found it restful sharing a room and a look with
her, and that’s why the chair had been placed right in front of the painting. I
expect one of the last of the Baby Bust had come here to see a young face
after all the young faces had gone, dead or just grown old around him or
her. It must have been so sad without a younger generation growing up
behind them. I think they came to sit in that chair to touch that bit of life
once again. I left my bedroll and went down to deal with the rabbits.
On the way, I got distracted by a room on the ground floor. The sign said
“MUSEUM SHOP” and though from the mess and the dust overlaying it all
it was clear someone—maybe many people—had gone a-viking through it a
long time ago, there were interesting things left. It was mostly books, but
also some pencils which I took and a little brass pencil sharpener with a
steel blade that had not rusted. The books were mainly old picture books
about art, too big to carry, but there was a tilted shelf of small books, about
the right size for a pocket; they were guides to stuff like flowers and birds
and rocks and things you might see on a walk and want to identify. I
decided I could afford to add two of them to my pack without overloading
myself. The obvious one to take was called Food for Free; it had a picture
of blackberries and raspberries on the front. A quick look through showed it
was a guide to eating things you found rather than things you had grown. It
had lots of really good pictures to help identify the food that wouldn’t
poison you. If I was going to forage my way across the mainland, a book
that told me what not to eat among the new plants I was encountering was
nothing but a gift. The less obviously useful one was called Trees which I
took because I liked it, having only really just discovered a world with
proper big trees in it. Looking back, I suppose both books helped me
survive. But only one of them saved my life. And it wasn’t the obvious one.
I took a pile of the less portable books out with me to look at after I had
made a fire on the porch between the heavy columns. I sat with Jip and
paged through the larger books as the rabbits cooked, feasting my eyes on
the colourful pictures that were still bright on the page after more than a
century. I ate my rabbit while it was still hot, and Jip waited until his was
just warm and then took it out onto the steps to eat slowly in the privacy he
always favoured. Jess was different. She always ate fast, but kept looking
up at you and wagging her tail, as if including you in the fun. I felt a pang at
the thought of her and hoped Brand was feeding her properly and that she
was safe, wherever she was. And then I remembered her chained to Saga
and knew she wasn’t.
As Jip ate, I carefully unbandaged my arm and inspected it while the
light was still good. I decided it looked a little better. I put some more
honey on it and equally carefully rebandaged it. If it didn’t actually look
better, I told myself, it didn’t look worse. That was something. In the
morning I would refill the two water bottles from the river I had seen, so I
drank most of what I had left, pissed as I watched the sunset from the top of
the steps and then went inside for the night.
You would have thought it was a very early time to go to sleep, but then
you had electric lights to keep the rhythm of your day as you liked it, not as
the sun dictated. And it had been a long walk, as far as I had ever walked in
one day and my feet were sore, my arm was still throbbing and the pack
straps had rubbed a blister on one shoulder. I closed all the doors behind me
and laid out my bedroll in front of the lady in the yellow dress, and lay
down. Jip patrolled the edges of the room, ever hopeful for a rat, and then
came and went to sleep beside me. I looked into the eyes in the painting and
tried to think what her life had been like. There was kindness and
intelligence and even a sense of humour in her face, but I wondered if she
could ever have imagined while the painting was being made what would
come of it, what would become of her. I didn’t think she would have
dreamed that her strong gaze would go on to outlive her many-greats-
grandchildren, and end up looking at Jip and me as we slept on the other
side of the end of the world.
And sleep I did. Long and deep, right into the heart of the night.
And then I was awake, and very still, listening to the low growl coming
from Jip.
It was the kind of noise you definitely don’t want to wake up to. It put a
cold chill right down my spine.
It was pitch-dark, but when I put my hand out I felt he was standing
rigid, hackles raised, quivering.
I sat up and found my knife.
I let my other hand stay on his back, telling him we were okay by touch
and not sound. I wanted to listen for whatever it was that had roused him.
He stopped growling, but he stayed on his feet and the bristle of fur at his
shoulders remained erect.
There was something moving outside the windows, down on the ground.
I could hear a kind of rubbing and moving noise—nothing specific like
footfalls or breathing, just the noise of movement, faint and almost
inaudible, more like a disturbance in the air than an actual sound. But it was
definitely there and it was the noise something larger than a rat or a squirrel
would make. I edged to the window and tried to look down and get a sight
of whatever it was, but the angle was too steep and I couldn’t have seen
what was there, even if there had been more light. All I could do was sense
that the noise seemed to be travelling towards the front of the building. The
front of the building with the unlocked door.
I went and got my bow and arrows as quietly as I could and took Jip
with me out on to the stairhead. I told him to stay close, which is one of the
suggestions he knows to follow from our time hunting on the island. He sat
next to me as I knelt in the dark, facing the main door below. I nocked an
arrow without thinking and laid the others where I could grab the next ones
without looking, and then we both did a very good job of mimicking the
stillness of all those statues and reached out into the night with our ears.
The thing (or the person—Brand even, because I was half thinking he
had tracked me) scuffed its way up the steps and on to the portico. I swear I
heard sniffing, and immediately knew they were examining our campfire
and discarded rabbit carcass. There was a horrible sound of bones
crunching and then silence, after which came more of the general sound of
something moving, this time closer to the front doors. Then there was more
silence, so long that I had to switch knees to stop getting cramp, and longer
still until I began to wonder if we had imagined it all and relaxed enough to
rest both knees by sitting on the top step of the stairs instead of kneeling.
Then there was a loud bump and a creak as something barged the front
door and Jip took a step forward, fur bristling again, his warning growl
rumbling low and unmistakable and I had the bow drawn and ready for
whatever was coming in.
And then nothing did.
Just nothing and more nothing and then the sound of some bird hooting
in the distance, a noise I knew was an owl, a noise so perfectly recognisable
that even though I had never heard an actual tuwit-tuwoo there could be no
mistake. And then more silence.
I don’t remember relaxing, though I do know that Jip sat down after a
very long time. And I certainly don’t remember going to sleep in such an
awkward position.
I woke with sun in my eyes and a bad crick in my neck from where I had
slumped against the wall and slept half sitting, all crooked and folded in on
myself.
I thought I would go and see that it was safe before I let Jip out, but the
moment I opened the inner glass door he bolted through my legs and darted
out onto the porch, casting left and right.
I felt strangely foolish peering out of the half-open door, bow held ready
as I scanned the square for the night visitor, trying to see if he was lying in
wait for us.
Jip had no such qualms as he raced back and forth, furiously intense as
he tried to get the scent of it. He disappeared round the corner, and was
gone for several minutes, then he came back looking much happier than
when he’d left. He cocked his leg on the corner of the museum where we
had heard the thing rubbing along, and then he trotted to the centre of the
square, nose down, until he discovered a large pile of fresh shit. It wasn’t
recognisable as human, which I felt relieved by, but I had also never seen its
like. Jip didn’t seem to mind what kind of new and unseen animal it had
been. He just cocked his leg and put his scent on it too.
He seemed pleased with his work, and I too felt cheered up by his
attitude. With that and the sunlight, the night’s fears seemed to disperse. If
my arm hadn’t been so itchy and tight it would have been the perfect
beginning to the day.
 Chapter 15

The fever

I said goodbye to the lady in the yellow dress, taking care to close all the
doors behind me so weather and animals wouldn’t get in to bring the
museum down before its time. When I was far enough away to look back
and see more of the building, I did notice that there was already a pair of
saplings sprouting from one side of the roof, so that time was coming. If I’d
had the Sweethope, I think I might have taken the lady with me. I would
have liked Bar and Ferg to see her looking at them. Dad would have
thought it fanciful nonsense. Mum might have liked her smile for company.
I didn’t have to find my way to the river to fill my water bottles because
we crossed a stream running down the middle of a street, and the water
there was fast and clear. Sometimes when it has been hot and dry for a long
time and then it rains, the water slides right off the land and doesn’t have
time to soak in as fully as it would do if it was landing on damp earth. I was
bottling the rainfall from the thunderstorm I’d seen from the top of the
tower.
We walked up out of the city, back into the countryside, heading for the
distant notch in the hills. The land here rolled gently up and down. We were
walking cross-country now, not following an old road, though we did share
direction with a railway line for a few pebbles, marching alongside it.
Sometimes I lost sight of the notch as we dropped into a low valley, but
it was always there when we climbed the other side. I gave myself
landmarks that were closer but still in line with it as we went, so we stayed
on course throughout the morning. The landscape was lightly wooded with
broadleaf trees. The open spaces between them which had likely once been
farm fields had become heathland, criss-crossed with wide strips of thicket
that had begun their life as hedgerows. My new trees book told me they
were mainly hawthorn, beech or hazel. And where they weren’t, they were
mainly bramble. Enough bramble for me to put my boots on. Though it was
easy enough to negotiate the thickets because animals had worn their own
paths through them over the years, and though I couldn’t help but look for a
human footprint among the hoof and pad marks, I never expected to see
one, and nor did I. In between there were wide spaces of grass and bracken
dotted with low shrubs. Jip loved this open heath because it gave good
hunting and all the rabbits he could dream of.
He ran so hard I began to worry about him damaging himself. Dad said
terriers could sometimes be so stupid they’d run themselves until their
hearts burst, but I don’t really think that’s true. Now I’m far enough away, I
realise Dad was a worrier who hid his fears in sternness and bouts of bad
temper that blew in without warning or sense, like dark storms from out of a
clear blue sky. Worrying about terriers having heart attacks was thinking out
of fear, though fear of what I don’t know. Maybe he was just worried about
losing a valuable dog. But Jip brought back three rabbits before he tired
enough to just walk alongside me, and when a hare exploded from a gorse
bush we were passing he took an instinctive couple of paces towards a
sprint after it, and then stopped and looked back at me, wagging his tail,
tongue lolling from his panting mouth. He was happy in the sunlight, and so
was I.
It was a hot day and the blister from the pack straps became
uncomfortable by lunchtime, when the sun was at its highest. It was berry
time of year and I’d been grazing and picking blackberries as we went. We
stopped by a small pool and sat under a willow for a rest. I ate the berries
I’d picked and some of the dried meat that remained. Jip drank noisily from
the water, and disturbed something that splashed and then rustled off into
the long grass and docks on the other side. Jip looked after it with his ears
up, but then he dropped to his haunches and panted in the shade of a nearby
hazel tree.
I looked at my arm, which seemed fine to me, and thought about how to
deal with the painful pack strap. I’d seen tufts of wool on some of the
brambles as we passed, and now wished I’d picked enough off to make a
pad to spread the pressure. I decided to do so as soon as we set off. Since
wool on the thorns mean there were sheep somewhere around, I also
wondered if I should shoot one if I came across them. Fresh meat would be
good, and I could perhaps smoke some to carry with me. But there were
plenty of rabbits and berries everywhere, and killing such a big animal and
wasting the bulk of the meat seemed a waste at the time. I did not intend to
be on the mainland for so long that I would need to lay in stores, let alone
carry them. I could live off the land as we went, I thought. I didn’t know as
much about hunger then as I do now. But at the time I thought I was moving
fast and travelling light. I didn’t know that some journeys are best taken
slow. At that point, I even felt guilty for resting in the shade of the trees and
using my new book to identify them. I felt I should be up and walking every
hour of daylight.
I remember all these details about that stop by the pool very clearly.
Even down to the bright colours of the dragonflies hovering and zipping
over the water. I remember lying back and looking up at the blue sky
through the pale green screen of willow leaves and thinking that rather than
killing a whole sheep, maybe I could air-dry rabbit meat on my pack as we
walked so that we had some food in the days when Jip might not be able to
catch our dinner, or I shoot it. And then I remember we were walking
towards the notch again, and I don’t remember much about the next couple
of days because it turned out that my arm was not getting better at all.
I walked in a sort of daze, counting paces and pebbles and sleeping
under trees. I know we passed houses, lots of houses, but I don’t remember
going into any of them. I do remember realising I had forgotten to transfer
pebbles to keep track of my pace-counting, even though I had not forgotten
to keep track of my steps. I drank a lot of water and stopped talking to Jip.
My arm had given me a fever, I think. All I do recall is the notch in the hills
that seemed never to get closer, and the counting. And then I went to sleep
one lunchtime under an oak tree and when I woke I was shivering and it
was dark and Jip was barking at me. I got into my sleeping roll and stayed
there. For a couple of days all I could do was sleep, shake, stumble out of
the bedroll to shit and then when there was no food left in me to come out, I
swallowed the last oatcakes and lay there thinking this was a very stupid
way to die. Jip just stayed beside me, giving me his warmth in the nights
and his companionship during the day. He’d disappear and return with
rabbits, but I didn’t have the strength to light a fire and so he ate them while
I watched.
I don’t know how many days I was sick, but I do remember when I
decided it was time to go. I had crawled to the edge of the water to refill the
bottles, and was doing so when all the noise in the world seemed to stop.
The birds went quiet and even the breeze seemed to slow so that the
leaves above us were silent. I turned to look at Jip who was standing rigidly,
looking into the bank of woods opposite. All the hairs on the back of my
neck went up. I saw nothing and the noise slowly bled back into the world,
but just for an instant I had the absolute conviction that I was being looked
at. And not looked at kindly. And even though I was still feverstruck and
retching out most of what I drank, the thought of remaining in that place
became impossible. I stumbled back to my lair and the first thing I did was
string my bow and lay an arrow ready. Then, keeping my eye on the
woodland opposite, I re-stuffed my pack and slipped out from under the
willows and slunk away on to the rising heathland. My head was splitting
with pain and all the joints in my body seemed to have grit in them, so that
any movement was both stiff and painful. But despite that, the feeling I’d
had by the water was so intense that I had to get away from it as fast as I
could.
Maybe there had been nothing there. Maybe it was the memory of the
large unseen thing that had rubbed noisily around the corner below us in the
night at the museum. Or maybe I had been looked at by something that saw
me as prey, in much the same way that I looked at rabbits or deer. Or sheep.
Sick, shaking and stumbling, I walked the whole day with the bow in my
hand and an arrow nocked and ready. When I finally stopped at nightfall,
my hand had frozen into position and I had to massage it back into life.
I stopped at a house. I wanted doors and walls to be safe behind. It was
brick-built with two floors and an intact roof, and it stood beside a big pond
in the middle of a stand of trees which had overgrown whatever garden it
had once been surrounded by. I climbed in a broken window on the ground
floor and looked around. The trees had sprouted so close to the house that
their leaves pressed against the glass that remained, making the interior
dark and claustrophobic. The stairs were sound enough, and I carefully
creaked my way to the upper floor where there was more light. There were
two rooms and a bathroom. The bathroom had a fireplace. Strangely the
bedrooms didn’t. I was feeling terrible and was realising that the full day’s
walk was a mistake. I couldn’t stop shaking. Jip must have thought I was in
trouble, because he hadn’t set off on the rat hunt that usually marked his
entry into a new house. Instead he stayed close, looking up at me with his
head cocked.
Sleep, I said. Just need sleep. And fire. Cold.
The sun had not set on what had been a warm enough day, but my teeth
were chattering. I kicked a couple of chairs to bits and kindled a fire in the
bathroom fireplace. The chimney drew well, and the flames took. I went
back into the bedrooms and took the drawers from a chest of drawers and
stomped them to more firewood, which I laid in a stack by the grate, and
then I shook out my bedroll and, in a house with two bedrooms, lay down
on the bathroom floor. I would have gone to sleep right there had my arm
been itching as badly as it had been ever since I came ashore, but the very
fact that it had stopped began to worry me and go round and round like a
worm in my head. I wondered if that meant it had got worse, that the
infection had poisoned the arm so much that it had begun killing off the
nerves. I wondered if I had come so far, so impulsively, only to end up
another unnoticed tangle of bones and rags on the floor of a house no one
would ever visit again, friendless, forgotten and far from the sea.
I sat up and made myself unravel the bandage on my arm, painfully
conscious I had not changed it for days. I think I expected to see blackened
flesh and rot, but in fact the honey had begun to do its job. I knew I should
boil the bandage before re-applying it, and while I was thinking about what
to do and if I had the energy to in fact do anything at all, I did the only thing
I actually was able.
I fell asleep. And I don’t remember anything else except when I woke it
was bright sunlight and my mouth was dry as old straw and something
smelled dead and after a bit I realised that smell was me. I’d messed myself.
I felt ashamed even though there was no one but Jip to see. He came over
and licked my face to show he didn’t care and was glad I was awake, and
then went out, presumably to go hunting.
I drank deep from my water bottle and got up a little too fast which
made me retch. My legs felt bendy in all the wrong directions, and the room
swam alarmingly around me as I tried to walk. I took off my soiled clothes
and took them downstairs with me, holding on to the wall as I went.
I climbed out of the window and carefully walked to the pond. It was fed
by a small stream that came off the slope behind it, so it wasn’t stagnant
water. I drank some more and then set about cleaning my clothes. It took a
lot of scrubbing and rinsing and doing it over again and again to get them
clean, but I did it. The stink wasn’t just the mess I’d made: it was the sweat
with which I’d soaked the rest of my clothes, lying asleep in my fever. And
of course it was also me. Leaving my clothes spread out on a bush, I got
into the pond and washed myself too, ducking below the surface and giving
my hair a good scrub as I did so. It was deep-bone cold but I’ve never
swum in warm water so the ache and tingle of it was familiar and, in its
own way, comforting. I turned on my back and swam to the middle of the
pond, where I floated, looking up at the sky and feeling that great sense of
exhilaration that comes when you’ve been so ill you had forgotten what
well feels like. I wasn’t strong, or even really over it, but I was definitely
over the worst. On the mend, as Dad used to say.
You can work today because you’re on the mend.
The warmth of the day was going, however, and the sun dropping. I
realised as I floated there that I must have been asleep for almost a full
twenty-four hours. And it would be dark again soon.
Jip brought a rabbit to the edge of the pond and dropped it with a bark
that said it was for me.
I got out and took the rabbit and my wet clothes back to the house. I
broke up some more furniture and got the fire in the bathroom going again.
I was feeling well enough to poke around, which got me a couple of
cooking pots and a good knife from the kitchen, and in the bathroom
cabinet a curved plastic pot with a flat lid and a faded label that said it was
DR HARRIS ARLINGTON SHAVING SOAP. It still had the ghost of a
smell, clean and sharp. I decided there and then to heat water in one of the
cooking pots and re-clean my clothes with some of this soap. The lid
cracked when I opened it, but I still have a much smaller puck of the soap
with me wrapped in a piece of cloth. I think the smell must have really gone
but I sometimes take it out and sniff it and imagine I can get the faint
outline of what it once was.
That night, I wrung out my newly fragrant clothes and hung them in
front of the fire to dry as I slept. I boiled the rabbit meat with a sprig of
rosemary I broke from a bush by the kitchen door. It didn’t taste of much,
but I ate it all and slept long and deep, waking once to see Jip lying across
the door, facing the stairs, on guard just in case anything came in to see
what we were up to. Comforted, I quietly told him he was a good dog and
went back to sleep.
He was gone when I woke.
 Chapter 16

Shooting the albatross

I got dressed and waited for him by the pond. And then I walked around
whistling and then calling for him until my throat went raw. When waiting
got to be unbearable, I left my pack so that he’d know I was coming back if
I missed him, and then I took my bow and went looking for him seriously. I
tracked back along the way we’d come, and then I returned and walked ever
widening circles around the house, still whistling and shouting and
listening. I froze many times, ears straining at a distant noise in the woods,
convinced that at any moment it would turn into an excited crashing
through the undergrowth that would end up with an exhausted but happy Jip
bounding back to me. But that never happened. I ate berries when I
remembered to, but I didn’t have the heart to go hunt a rabbit or find
anything else to eat, maybe because I couldn’t think of anything sadder than
the lonely meal waiting for me at the end of the day if I didn’t find him.
But I didn’t find him, and he didn’t find me. All that did was a darkness
that seemed to come earlier than I’d expected, and a long night back in the
house without a fire. I didn’t light it because I didn’t want the crackling of
the wood to drown any sounds outside that might be an injured dog trying
to get my attention. But in truth I knew then that I’d likely never know
where he went. Or why. Or if he meant to come back and couldn’t. I told
myself that accidents happen, even to terriers. Thinking of what that
accident might have been kept sleep away for more than half the night.
I was awake before the dawn, waiting for the greyness to take over from
the dark, but first light brought nothing but a short and depressing rain
shower and no dog at all.
 I was feeling physically stronger, but my spirits could not have been
lower. I was so worried and sad that my thinking was nearly as muddled as
it had been when I was gripped by the fever. Once the shower had passed, I
sat on the stairs and listened to the water dripping sullenly off the trees
pressing against the windows and tried to think realistically and practically.
Again, I don’t know if it was the right choice, but I decided to look for Jip
again for one more day—and then move on.
In my heart, I think I would have waited for him for ever, if I truly
believed he was coming back. But it wasn’t just the house and the woods
around it that I was circling. It was the nasty, heartbreaking truth that Jip
would never run off and leave me. It was the very opposite of his nature to
do something like that, and while he might stay away hunting all night, he
would always have returned if he could. Nevertheless I spent hours walking
around the woods, looking into rabbit holes, listening even, just in case he
had dug himself into a tunnel he couldn’t get out of. I’d seen how far he
would dig into the sand dunes at home if he thought there was a chance of a
rabbit at the end of it—ten feet or more sometimes.
It was while crouching silently by one of these holes that I looked up
and saw the badgers. Two of them across a patch of nettles, staring back at
me, unmistakable white heads with two thick black stripes running from
either side of the muzzle up across the eyes to the ears behind. The first
badger I saw was in a book about a rat and a mole that went on a great
adventure. That badger was wise and tough and stern and a good friend in
need. I don’t know if these badgers were wise, but they looked tough and
stern enough and while not unfriendly, they didn’t seem especially
concerned by the sudden arrival of a human. But they did look larger than I
had expected a badger to look in the flesh. They not only looked quite big
but more than sturdy enough to give as good as they got in a fight with a
terrier the size of Jip. As they lost interest in me and shambled of into the
undergrowth, I began to wonder if there were other ways Jip might have got
into trouble than digging too enthusiastically.
I found the corpse at just about the time I was going to give up. I almost
missed it, but the tail of my eye must have noticed the fur and the brown
paw sticking up in the air against the grey-green trunk of a beech tree. Or
maybe it was the geometrical regularity of the bones of the ribcage among
the chaotic shapes of the undergrowth. Without thinking, my head swung
back to see what I’d so nearly walked straight past and I felt my stomach
flip and something unswallowable appear at the base of my throat.
I went very still for as long as I could manage, and then found I was
moving towards the body, pulled by a magnet I couldn’t escape no matter
how much I wanted to.
Jip was more than my dog; he was my friend, my family, my brother.
He was not this freshly dead fox at the foot of the tree.
Relief hit me so hard that my legs went and I dropped painfully to my
knees in the rough tangle of fallen twigs and beechnut shells. I found
myself gasping for air as if I’d been holding my breath for a long time.
Maybe I had. Since I was little, since Joy was taken from us over the high
cliff at the back of the island, I’ve always prided myself on not crying when
things hurt or get tough, so I don’t think I was crying, but the sobs of air I
took in might have sounded like it if anyone was watching.
I spent one more night in the brick house, which I had come to hate
because it was where I had lost my other dog. I sat beside the bathroom fire
on my bedroll and read the book on trees by the glow off the flames. That’s
where I learned the name of the beech the fox had died next to, and the fact
that the little three-sided nuts spilling out of their hairy cases were called
beech mast. And that they were edible. That’s about all the good I got out of
that night, and again I did not sleep well. There was a wind, and the trees
that were slowly squeezing in on the house from all sides rustled and
scratched away at the windows all night. When I did sleep, my dreams were
full of things trying to get inside the house, and trees that walked, and
triffids—which were from a book I read about a very different end of the
world than the one you and I are on either side of. Your world didn’t end
because of meteorites that blinded everyone, or killer plants. Although Ferg
said one theory he’d heard from the Lewismen was that what did it was
something your lot put on the plants, something that got into everybody’s
bodies and then became infectious and stopped breeding happening. That
was just something he said. To me that sounds as fanciful as triffids. Or
krakens. That was another strange book by the same writer. Maybe if I’d
been sleeping by the shore, I’d have dreamed of krakens. But I was far
inland, and my eyes hadn’t seen the healthy sea for days. I think I was as
soul-sick for the sea as I was feverstruck. And now I look back on it, I also
think my mind was reeling from all the new things I had seen, not just the
novelty of bridges and churches and towers and trees, but the sheer,
relentless immensity of what had been left behind. It was the volume of it
all, pressing in on my head like the big bench vice in Dad’s workshop.
I did a spiteful thing when I left the brick house. I feel bad about it even
now, though I don’t know exactly why I should feel like this, any more than
I know precisely why I did it. I regretted it the first time I looked back and
saw the column of black smoke rising into the still air behind me, but by
that time it was far too late to do anything about it. I had walked four
pebbles without turning because leaving a place that Jip had been and just
might one day return to was so hard I think I might have broken and run
back and waited—as I said—for ever. I had broken up the empty chests of
drawers and left them spilling into the fireplace when I left, waiting until
they had caught before leaving, hearing the thrum of flames vibrate through
the ceiling above me as I climbed out of the downstairs window for the last
time.
It was a cremation. A fire burial. A Viking funeral. An end, marked. A
farewell signal put into the sky for what was left of the world to see, to
honour a dog and then to be dispersed and blown away in the wind. Those
were some of the high thoughts I had as I walked away towards the notch in
the hills, definitely not crying. Then, when I did stop and look back, I saw it
for the meanness it was. I had just hated the house for what had happened in
it and had not thought of how it had sheltered me while I got better. I had
burned it and the homes of the animals that lived in its walls and under its
floors, and the birds that had nested under its eaves, and I had burned the
crowding trees too. The trees had done nothing bad, other than grow where
they could. A bad thing had happened to me in that house, but it had
happened as blamelessly as the rain. The bad thing that had been done in
that house, to the house, that was done by me. I walked onwards, sickened
at myself, the nasty feeling that I had somehow called down bad luck on my
future growing with every pace.
You know the rhyme about the ancient sailor that stoppeth one in three?
Dad used to read it to us by the fire in the winter, and it chills me now to
think of it as much as it did when he did the voices, and described the
icebergs on the polar ocean and the other warm and sluggish sea that
trapped them later, thick with sea snakes and ghost ships. It seemed to be
describing another planet entirely. I felt just like that poem. Like that
ancient mariner, in my case at sea in a land whose rules I did not quite
understand until it was too late. I never understood why the mariner shot the
albatross that had saved them, and I still don’t know why I burned the house
that had sheltered me. But I did. And I did it on purpose, in a kind of
vicious lashing out at something just because I was scared and confused and
sad. I didn’t need to see the bright lick of the red flames at the base of the
black column of smoke towering over the copse and the pond to know that,
just like the rhyme said, I had done a hellish thing.
I had shot the albatross.
 Chapter 17

Woe

I walked away from the accusing finger of smoke with the thumpity-thump
delivery Dad had always read the mariner poem with pounding away in my
brain. If you listen to someone reading a poem often enough, it hammers
itself into your mind and makes it not only easier to remember, but also
harder to forget. I would really have liked to have forgotten the lines that
kept going round and round, the ones that said something like:

And I had done an hellish thing,

And it would work ’em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Ah wretch! said they, the bird to slay
That made the breeze to blow!

Well, I told myself. At least I don’t need breezes to get me moving. All I
need is my legs.
And I did punish them, walking more pebbles in that first day than I had
done in two before I had lost Jip. I walked hard to make my body ache
enough to distract me from the heart-wrenching question of why I had set
off on a probably futile search for one dog and then lost the other. In shame
and self-loathing, I walked through the dusk and on into the darkness, lit by
moonlight until the clouds came and then I rolled into an uncomfortable
bundle beneath a little rounded bridge that had once taken a small road over
a single railway track. It was dry and like a house without walls on two
sides. I slept well and woke to the sound of birds in the trees all around me,
and stepped out into the sunlight feeling that this was going to be a good
day. The feeling lasted through most of the morning, and even raised a bit
as my nose caught a whiff of woodsmoke blowing into my face as I climbed
the first proper slope I had so far encountered on my walk from the coast. I
knew from the direction of the wind that I was not smelling Jip’s funeral
pyre behind me. And I knew I must be close to the spot I had marked what
seemed an age ago on the rain-lashed viewing platform on the tower, the
source of the distant firelight I had seen winking at me in the storm, the
spark of hope and mystery that I’d been so excited about when I had been
confident and angry, and had a good dog to travel towards it with. Before I
lost Jip and shot the albatross.
Some part of me must have been thinking straight and acting cautious,
because I crested the slope with my bow in my hand, arrow ready.
The fire had not been manmade. Ahead of me was a burn mark just like
the ones on the heather-covered slopes at home. It had blown through the
bracken and gorse in the same long distinctive tongue shape. I walked the
length of it, from the widest point to the narrow tip where it had begun.
There I found a small stand of trees protected from the wind in a crease in
the land just below the ridgeline, and half of them—on what must have
been the windward side—were still green. The others were charred and it
was easy to see where the lightning had struck and ignited the fire. One tree
still stood—taller than the rest but dead on its feet, split in two by the strike.
The halves leaned away from each other exposing the burned-out
heartwood. It was somehow terrible—both the sight and the thought of the
power it must have taken to do that, electricity jagging out of the sky. Even
at the time, it seemed like another bad omen. I did not know that one day I
would know exactly what the tree had felt like, riven in half by a bolt from
out of a clear blue sky.
The burn scar stemming from the lightning tree was still fresh. No
growth had begun to fill in. The smell was new and strong. The fire had
been nature, not man. The spark of distant hope had been an illusion and the
adventure it had lured me into was a mistaken ordeal instead. It had also
killed my dog.
I was still as alone as I had ever been. I sat on the ridge and looked
down at the countryside spread out below. I decided the best way to deal
with the disappointment was to look at the map and try and work out how
far I had come, where I was, and how far I had to go to get to Brand’s
hideout. I was thinking of it as that by then—a hideout. A place thieves and
pirates took their plunder. It was fanciful, but at that point I was not seeing
the world as it is, because I had still seen so very little of it. I know that
now, now that I have had a long time to do little else but think. I was still
seeing it through the lens of the books I had read about it before it died, and
that coloured things. It was like the old pair of sunglasses that Bar used to
wear when fishing, the ones that made the water look different. It’s not
exactly like that because Bar’s sunglasses actually took away the reflection
on the surface of the water and let you see what was happening below. My
lens of books didn’t seem to be helping me see any hidden things below the
surface.
The map was both helpful and confusing. I had a rough idea of where I
was, even though I had messed up my distance counting while I was
feverish, on the days when I had futilely plodded away counting steps but
forgetting to mark them with my clever-but-actually-not-so-clever-if-you-
forget-to-do-it pebble trick.
Before I laid out the map, I climbed as high as I could, out on to the
edge of an area of high moors, and looked down. My compass gave me
north, so I was able to lay the map down at my feet and orientate it in the
right direction. I weighted the edges against the wind and spent a long time
carefully trying to match up the features that were so confidently marked on
the map with the much blurrier details time and vegetation had overgrown.
It took me most of the rest of the daylight to put it all together in a way that
at least half made sense, but even as I went to sleep I was not sure I’d got it
right. My plan was to walk to the curving line of trees about five klicks
away and see if it was, as I guessed, one of the important roads the map
showed and numbered beginning with the letter M. If it was the one I
thought, then walking along it would take me to a very big city in the
middle of the country, and then if I confirmed that I could make my way
east by following the path of old roads and a railway line until I hit the
coast more or less where I wanted to. It would be better than steering by
notches in the hills. Especially because on the downside of this high ground
there would be no more slopes rising ahead of me.
 I woke and looked for Jip and then remembered he would not be
greeting me on any more mornings, and so I drank some water, checked the
map and got going, my stomach telling me it needed filling and my legs
wondering why they couldn’t have a few hours more rest.
I hit the M road where it cut into the shoulder of the slope I was
descending. The deeply cut sidings were a vivid slash of purple and green,
and as I pushed through the head-high plants, the seed-pods snapped
noisily, firing seeds in every direction. It made me jump at first, but then I
decided it was quite a cheery thing and even whacked some of the plant
heads as I passed, just to see the sharp little explosions.
Grass and moss had invaded the roadbed, but I could see it had
originally been many cars wide and had once had a low barrier of metal and
thick steel cables running down the middle of it. It made a sort of green
road that ribboned away between purple banks for several klicks ahead and
I wove my path along the old road, checking my compass every pebble to
make sure it was the one I imagined it was, and wasn’t a different road
snaking me back the way I had come.
I saw two strange and differently wonderful things on that road, before
the next bit of albatross luck happened. The first was a true marvel.
As the roadway passed through another deeply cut groove in the
surrounding high ground, there was an impossible bridge. It was beautiful,
as if made from two thin ribbons of stone which I expect were concrete.
One carried a road that ran straight across the chasm, continuing the line of
the slope that had been removed. The other ribbon supported it in a
breathtaking arch that sprang from the right hand side of the cutting, barely
seeming to touch the top piece before curving back down on to the left-hand
side. It was obviously rock-solid, having stood there in all weathers for
more than a century, probably a century and a half, but it was so light and
joyous it seemed more like movement than something built. It was like a
leap made from stone. A leap and a balancing act. Would it have looked so
wonderful to you? Or would you have driven a car beneath it and not
noticed? With so many marvels around you, did you stop seeing some of
them?
The other wonderful thing was what was on top of the bridge looking
down at me. It was a black bull. Or maybe a big cow. It looked male
though, and it had stubby horns and a huge hump of muscle around its
shoulders. It wasn’t nearly as interested in me as I was in it, because as I
walked under the bridge and looked back, it did not bother to come to the
other side to watch me on my way. I had never seen a bull or a cow before. I
didn’t feel particularly frightened by it, though I definitely doubted I would
be able to kill one with an arrow if it decided to attack me. A pony was the
biggest animal I had seen thus far in my life, and the biggest one I had
hunted was the deer. The bull was rangy and bunch-muscled at the same
time. It looked like all it would have to do was flex those muscles and
arrows would bounce off it. And if the arrows didn’t bounce off, there was
too much body between the outside and the vital organs within for even the
most powerful bowshot to penetrate. I looked back at the empty bridge
behind me and was glad that cows and bulls were plant-eaters. Something
that size with a taste for smaller mammals would have been terrifying.
On the other hand, something that size would feed a person for a year if
you could kill it and smoke or salt the meat. And there were other ways of
killing and catching than shooting with a bow. Traps, for example. I was
thinking all this as I walked, maybe because the universe sometimes has a
warped sense of humour—or perhaps just a really sharp sense of timing.
Before the end of that day, I was the one in the trap.
It started with being hungry. The diet of berries was fine enough, though
it wasn’t entirely agreeing with my stomach. I reckoned I was about half a
day’s hard walking from the big city where I would have to take a turn from
the M road and follow a railway line towards the coast—if I could find it. I
had made good time so far and decided to see if I could find some rabbits to
shoot. With that in mind, I waited until the road bottomed out into flatter
land surrounded by heath that had once been fields. Then I turned off the
road and walked parallel with it, bow ready. I saw a hare that ran too soon
and too fast for me to fire at it, and then a couple of white tails turned up
and ducked into thickets before I could aim properly. There was enough
game around for me not to worry about firing at every opportunity. It just
wasn’t worth the risk of losing a precious arrow loosing off at anything but
a certain hit.
I walked off the heathland onto a small built-up area beside the M road,
this one connected to a similar collection of single-storey buildings on the
other side by a bridge that was too thin for cars and which had buckled in
the middle and fallen onto the roadway. I suppose it was a bridge for
walking on. It was covered, like a big pipe you’d have to go through.
Probably to keep the rain off. A huge rectangular canopy had fallen in and
landed drunkenly on top of some rusted boxes that I recognised as petrol
dispensers from the couple I’d seen back on the Uists. It was tilted up on
one corner, propped on a tank. This was my first tank, and I knew it by the
long gun-barrel and the tracks rusted to the wheels on either side. I don’t
know why an army tank would be on a petrol station. I climbed up on it and
tried to open the big metal hatches, but they were corroded shut. I hopped
down again and then froze as I saw a child’s face in the end of the gun-
barrel looking at me. And then I realised it was a toy doll’s head that
someone had put inside it. Again, I don’t know why.
Before there was a tank there, this must have been a place that travellers
came to eat and refuel when going along the M road. The low building
smelled damp and earthy. I didn’t trust the saggy roof, but through the
broken window walls I could see the rusting skeletons of chairs and tables.
A faded plastic sign told me to try a Whopper.
I don’t know what a Whopper was. Maybe you tried one once. I hope it
was good.
I walked on, hungry, skirting the M road, still tracking it in the hope of
rabbits. A few pebbles later I saw something in a stand of white-barked
birches and stopped walking. It was a deer, smaller than the ones on the
island, with a lighter coat and much shorter antlers. I carefully shrugged out
of my pack and took two arrows. One I put through my belt at the back; the
other I nocked as I began to carefully move into bowshot.
The wind was in my face so I knew I couldn’t be scented and the deer
seemed totally absorbed in cropping the grass between the birches. I moved
slowly, keeping an eye on the ground in front of me to be sure I didn’t tread
on anything that would make a noise and spook my next week or so of
meals. The deer moved away, and I thought I had lost it, but it had only
decided to graze on a different patch of grass. I entered the birch wood
carefully, trying to calm my breathing. Beyond the thin strip of birches was
a taller mass of vegetation, a steep rampart of brambles and creepers rising
above the silvery leaves like a dark thunderhead.
The pale deer was easy to see against it. It was entirely unaware of how
close I was getting. I slowly raised the bow and said the silent apology and
thanks that Ferg had taught me when he and Bar first took me hunting, the
one that calms your breathing and brings good luck. And then I shot it.
I don’t miss much. And the deer was close and perfectly broadside on. I
saw the arrow feathers thump home exactly where I had aimed, just behind
the shoulder. The deer gave a couple of instinctive steps forward, and then
fell. I dropped my bow and the spare arrow and ran in, unsheathing my
knife in case it was lung-shot and needed a quick mercy. Ferg said every
second you left an animal in pain when you could end it for them was a
curse on you. But the deer was heart-shot and dead, and looking as
suddenly sad as all prey does when the life is gone. I said another silent
thanks and promised the meat would not be wasted, which was not
something Ferg or Bar had taught me, but something I had added myself
when I shot my first deer.
I should have dragged it out the way I had come, but I would have had
to step over fallen logs to do so, and there was an animal track winding
through the trees that looked clearer. Because I wasn’t paying too much
attention to anything other than the light and whether I would have enough
time to gut and butcher it before dark, I didn’t see the boar until it was too
late. Jip would have seen it. He would have warned me. But Jip was gone.
I heard the huff and growl before I saw the small eyes and the large
tusks turning towards me from the brushwood just ahead. I went still and
the eyes and the tusks raised themselves off the ground as the boar stood up.
And up. It was much bigger than I had imagined a boar could be. Not as big
as a bull, but just as solid and hard-muscled. It just looked like trouble. I
don’t know what you would have done if you had met a giant boar on a
remote woodland track, but I do know that whatever the right thing was, I
didn’t do it. I kept looking at it, and backed away slowly.
It’s okay, I said, putting all the soothe I had in me into my voice. It’s
okay.
The boar huffed and grunted some more, pawing the ground. Its eyes
looked really angry. I didn’t know boars got so big.
I didn’t know how fast they could run either. There was a spit of dirt as
it launched itself at me. I twisted away and ran and everything that
happened next happened in a jumble I still can’t quite get straight in my
head. I ran and there was no room really, nowhere to run to. I felt the boar’s
breath on the back of my leg and tried to dodge sideways. I hit the trunk of
a tree that I hadn’t seen and then I was on my back, and the boar was sort of
turning round in its own length and charging at me and then I was on my
feet and instead of the boar’s breath I heard its teeth snap together and felt
the tug on my leg as it bit at my trousers, and I stumbled because though the
bite had missed my flesh it had tripped me. And then as I corkscrewed to
my feet, brambles ripping at me and trying to keep me pinned in place, the
boar leapt at me and hooked its tusk into my thigh. That tusk must have
been keen as a shaving blade because I felt the air on my leg as the material
was cut from knee to inner thigh as I was jumping in a forlorn and desperate
attempt to save myself—and even though I was going up and away from the
boar’s head, the tusk punched into me like I was being hit with a
sledgehammer. It wasn’t a sharp feeling like a cut. It was a horrible dull
punch and I knew the damage was bad even as my fingers found the branch
above me and I swung out of the animal’s way. It turned and twisted, ready
to slash me again, but somehow I lifted myself high enough so my feet were
clear of it. And then, with a last grunt of pain, I swung one of my legs
across and got a precarious toehold on another branch and held myself
there, shakily parallel with the ground,
Where the tusk had got me was close to the big artery on my inner thigh.
In that moment, as I held myself in an awkward horizontal position,
stretched between two thin branches, I knew that blood loss would very
soon make me lose my grip. And I knew that the position in which I was
desperately clinging to safety was also ridiculous and undignified. Maybe
that’s always the way death comes. I made myself look across at my thigh.
There was no sheet of blood. Just a ruined trouser leg.
It made no sense. I had felt the blow. And then I craned round to see
what the boar was making such a noise about, thrashing this way and that
below me.
He had my little book of trees and my tin of beeswax impaled on the
tusk. I’d been carrying the book in my front pocket so I could identify what
kind of trees I was walking past. I took advantage of the fact he was so
occupied with clearing his tusk and scrambled closer to the trunk of the
tree, where I managed to get the right way up and climb higher.
There was blood, but it was not mine. And it was the thing that had
made him angry enough to attack. He was hurt. Something had taken a
great scoop out of the flesh on his back leg, close to the tail. It was nasty
wound. I could see the dried blood on his leg from haunch to trotter, and as
he shifted I could see the torn up and exposed muscles flex and move. I
didn’t have much time to feel sorry for him because he finally got the book
and the tin off his tusk and started circling the trunk of the tree, looking up
at me and butting it. It wasn’t a very big tree, and I don’t think his butting
and rooting at it had as much effect on it as my weight as I scrambled
around getting on the other side of the trunk from him. To my horror the
whole tree began to tilt alarmingly. Very aware that I had used up any good
luck that was due to me with the trees book, I knew it wouldn’t be very long
at all before this tree fell over and dumped me right back at tusk level. As
the tree began to topple towards the cliff of brambles, I scrambled as high
as I could and then leapt desperately towards it.
Hurling yourself into a bramble patch is not to be recommended, not
unless the alternative is dropping into range of a murderously angry wild
boar in so much pain that nothing will do but inflicting even more of the
same on you. I know the thorns tore at me because I still have some of the
scars, but at the time I felt nothing, fear numbing me as I grabbed
desperately at the high bank of greenery and briars. It must have been ten
metres high. Even as I had jumped, I had a vision of myself tumbling into
the centre of it, the briars ripping at me but too insubstantial to hold my
weight. Instead I hit something so solid it nearly jarred both wind and
consciousness out of me. I held on and scrambled into the bramble cliff,
half stunned and unsure what I was seeing.
The Neatfreaks were the Baby Busters who tried to tidy things up and
leave the world in an organised fashion. I think it must have been them who
had stacked so many old cars on top of each other. I had hit a rusted axle
end and used it to crawl further in to safety. I lay across an old drive shaft
and got my breath and my senses back. Inside the wall of brambles there
was a three-dimensional maze of corroded car bodies. There were some
creepers and briars twining around within the structure, but most of the
growth was on the outside where the sun was. It was a strange space,
broken up by the ribs and spines of the long dead cars, and the covering of
vegetation gave it an underwater feeling. It would have been peaceful if
there hadn’t been an angry wounded boar snuffling around just beyond the
wall of thorns.
When I moved, the car skeleton shifted slightly. Something broke away
from something else and fell noisily through the remains of the five or six
cars below, hitting a bit of each one on the way down. The car pile was not
a wholly safe place to hide. As I clung there and looked around, I was able
to see how far gone most of them were. The solid panels had mostly
corroded off. Where they survived, they were laced with holes, well on the
way to crumbling into nothing. The frames of the cars were thicker metal
and they and the wheels and axles were what was keeping the pile intact.
The floors of almost every one I could see were either gone or clearly not
suitable for treading on. The seats had long rotted away, right down to the
springs, which were themselves rusted. There was nowhere you could trust
yourself inside the whole pile. I had the strong sense, as I shifted again and
heard the grinding noise that accompanied the movement, that the whole
structure was just waiting for an excuse to fall in on itself. And even if that
didn’t happen, there was an equally uncomfortable possibility that I might
fall through the tangle of sharp rusty metal and impale myself on
something, or that an axle or an engine block might drop out of a hulk
above me and finish me like that.
I clung on and tried to figure out what to do, other than stay still. I had
seen what the boar’s snout was capable of, pushing at the thin tree trunk. If
it started jostling away at the foot of the car pile, I definitely thought it
could destroy the balance and bring it all painfully and fatally down. I
peered down at it and decided that it was mean enough to do that out of
sheer spite and anger. I could see my bow and an arrow lying in the
undergrowth beyond it, but there was no way I could get down and past it to
get to them, and I was pretty sure it was too tough to kill with a single
arrow unless I was unbelievably lucky.
It seemed like my only option was to stay very still, lying on top of the
axle until the boar got tired and went away. The boar didn’t seem to have
any plans to do anything else, however, and stayed where it was, huffing
and snuffling with what I first thought was anger but that—the longer I
listened to it—I realised was pain. I tried to think of good things, like the
miracle of the tiny book of trees that had saved my life. I told myself it
could be worse.
And then it started raining, and it was. The metal got slippery and,
badder than that, the car above was one of the few that still had some bits of
bodywork intact, a roof that was angled just right to catch the rain and then
funnel it in a small waterfall, right on top of me. It was miserable, cold and
dangerous. And the more I tried to stay still, the stiffer I got, and the longer
I waited, the more I started to notice the stings and aches of all the scratches
criss-crossing me, the ones I’d got from throwing myself to this precarious
almost-safety inside the cliff of briars. Once again, I thought what a fool I
had been to rush off alone after Brand. And that thought led to the worst
thing which of course was not dying alone, because I supposed when that
happened I wouldn’t know much about it, but the losing of Jip. That was
my responsibility. If I hadn’t come inland, away from the sea that I knew
into this country I was so ignorant about, Jip would still be alive and by my
side.
I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else, something that
would stop me feeling like I was going to slide off this axle and cut myself
to shreds on every exposed bit of corroded metal below me. But I couldn’t.
Jip wouldn’t get out of my mind. It was like a haunting. Every time I tried
to distract myself, he was there, like a ghost. Happy memories of simpler
times? Jip was there. Setting off on this foolish journey in the Sweethope?
Jip was there. Sitting by a warm fire in the safety of an island winter? Jip
was there. He was so there that I imagined I could hear him barking.
The boar stopped snuffling and went very still.
The only sound was the rain. And Jip’s barking.
I opened my eyes. I wasn’t imagining it. Jip was barking and he was
getting closer. It was unbelievable and it was unmistakable. Jip was alive,
he was coming and the excitement in his bark told me he had scented me.
My heart leapt. Then the boar huffed and turned and trotted towards the
noise and my heart plummeted. Jip had the heart of a lion, and didn’t know
to back off a fight, but he had the body of a terrier and the boar that was
trotting towards him was much bigger and heavier and was equipped with
tusks that would rip his belly open in a single twitch.
No! I shouted. Jip, no! Run! No, Jip! Go away!
His barking raised in excitement at the sound of my voice.
My guts turned to water.
No, Jip! I yelled. Bad dog! Bad dog! Get away with you! Bad dog!
I heard a squeal of anger and swear I felt a tremor in the earth below as
the boar must have seen him and kicked into a charge
I heard Jip’s answering snarl.
NO, JIP! I shouted, launching myself off my axle perch, half scrabbling,
half tumbling down through the car carcasses to the ground, some forlorn
hope moving my body before I knew what I was doing.
NO, JIP!
There was a thunderclap.
And the world bucked.
And the boar’s squealing stopped dead.
I froze. No sound but the rain and the car chassis rocking against each
other overhead, disturbed by my sudden descent. I stared at the wall of
brambles between me and the fate of my dog.
And then there he was, barking happily at me on the other side.
Once more I forgot about the thorns and burst through and then he and I
were together and he was jumping up and curving round me, barking and
licking excitedly, tail thrashing and I was trying to hug and stroke and
scratch him all at the same time and we were such a tangled mess of
happiness I forgot about the boar and then my hand got snagged in the rope
round his neck and before I could quite realise what it was and wonder at its
strange out-of-placeness I heard a twig crack and looked over his head and
my eye followed the long loop of rope and at the end of it I saw her.
I saw the hooded figure and I saw the pale horse she sat on, and I saw
the long double-barrelled gun she was holding, pointed up at the sky like a
knight’s lance.
She saw me, nodded and then her eyes kept moving, scanning the
undergrowth around me, carefully, inquiringly. Finally her eyes came back
to me and she spoke.
Eskeelya doe-travek voo? she said.
I could tell it was a question.
Eskeelya doe-travek voo? she repeated, eyes again looking behind me.
I had no idea what it meant.
I don’t understand what you’re saying, I said.
I did understand what the gun meant when it lowered and pointed at me,
and then beckoned me out of the trees as she backed the horse away back
into the open. She pulled the rope for Jip to come. He resisted. I stroked
him.
I wondered if she could hear my heart thumping over the noise of the
rain.
She gestured again with the gun, and then grimaced as if my not
responding was causing her actual pain.
Veet, she said. Veet.
Okay, I said. Okay. I’m coming.
 Chapter 18

John Dark

The boar was dead. The gun had blown an ugly chunk out of its face. It was
just like the chunk blown out of its backside, only fresher. I didn’t know
then but I found out soon enough that this wasn’t a coincidence. She had
tried to kill the boar the day before, but only wounded it. If Ferg was right
about the curses that piled up as long as you left an animal hurt before
finishing it off cleanly, then she was drowning in them. And there was
nothing clean about the way the boar had been finished off. It had tried to
disembowel me, but now I looked at its poor hacked-about body I felt sad.
It had been in pain. A human had caused that pain. I don’t blame it a bit for
attacking the next human it saw.
But I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at it, or even thinking about it.
There was too much else to take in. Her horse. The other two horses behind
her, riderless, roped together, with great bundles hanging on either side.
They were all pale grey, dappled with whiteish blotches and long white
manes. They were much bigger than the little ponies we had on the islands.
They stood very calmly, not even that interested in me.
Oo son lays owe-truh? she said, pointing around the landscape with a
questioning gesture. She grimaced again and I realised that she was actually
in pain.
I don’t understand, I said.
The rain was easing and she pushed the hood back off her head. My first
thought was that her hair matched the horse’s—grey, strong and wild-
looking as the wind blew it round her face. My second thought was that she
had a face that was really two faces, the first old and weather-beaten but
one that had also kept alive within it the second, younger face it had once
been.
She grimaced again and pointed at the dead boar.
Sallo! she said, spitting at it. Pew tan de sangliay.
And she spat on it again and then turned her horse so that I could see the
other side and the thing that made her grimace every time she moved.
The side of the horse was pink with blood. My first thought was that it
was injured, but as I followed the irregular fan of blood back to its source I
saw the wound was in the woman’s side, a gash in her buttock that she had
tried to bind with a sash.
I had not expected to meet anyone on the mainland, or at least not until I
got to Brand’s home. I had been brought up in the sure and certain
knowledge that the mainland was empty. It made sense to me. I had, as I
said, been made to do the maths to calculate how vanishingly few people
remained in the world. And there was an unspecified sense that something
had happened there that made it mysteriously hostile to man. I had in fact
seen nothing that supported that on my journey so far, and had been
wondering if it was really true or just a story our grandparents had told to
make sure we kept safely out of the way, on the fringes of the world as the
Baby Bust died away. I had been a dutiful enough child, but maybe all
children have an urge to go where they’re forbidden, or to touch the things
they have been warned away from. I think that was how my secret wanting
to travel and see the forbidden world began. Even though I was now grown,
I had still felt a sense of excitement as well as righteous anger as I’d set out
on this journey. And though I hadn’t expected to meet anyone, I had of
course thought about what it might be like if the unlikely happened. But of
all the things I had imagined, I had not anticipated that we would not be
able to speak to each other.
You would have thought of this possibility, coming from a world still
crammed with people talking in a whole mishmash of different languages.
In fact, when I now look at the photo of you, I realise I don’t even know if
you and I would have been able to talk if we had met. I had just assumed
you spoke the same language as me. But maybe you were from somewhere
else, like she was. This mainland was no more hers than it was mine. As I
eventually found out, she came from across the sea channel dividing it from
the bigger mainland to the south. She was French. But before I knew that, I
knew three much more important things about her: she was badly hurt, she
needed help and she was extremely bossy. I think the long word that
describes her best was imperious. She carried herself—and her gun—as if
she were in charge of the world. And she hated to be seen with any kind of
weakness.
Communication was hard at first. She seemed both frustrated and
slightly offended that I didn’t speak her language, which was an odd thing
since later she had me dig a small book out of one of the packs: an
English/French dictionary. She wouldn’t have brought it along with her had
she not anticipated the problem. Once the book was found, we moved from
communicating by sign language alone to doing so by sign language and
pointing at words in the dictionary. But that was long after she had showed
me how to put up her shelter and had managed to painfully get off her
horse.
The shelter was a rectangle of oiled cotton, with metal-ringed holes in it
from which hung long strings. She showed me where to tie it off between
two trees, and then she threw me some aluminium pegs so I could pin down
the back to make a sloping roof. Then she waved me away, again with the
gun, and got off her horse. She dismounted on the other side of the animal,
and I think she did that so I wouldn’t see her wince and cry out as she did
so. Imperious meant that she was proud before she was anything else.
I went to help her, and again she waved me back.
She took two steps towards one of the horses, obviously intending to get
something from the packs, and then she stumbled and yelped and fell hard,
and then lay there.
She’d fallen on the gun and was panting with the pain from her wound. I
leapt across and yanked the gun out from under her. It wasn’t the gentlest
thing I could have done, but I wanted it out of the way quickly in case she
grabbed at it.
She gasped and then growled and glared at me as if she wanted to scorch
me with her eyes as a punishment.
If I’d been a really good person, I would have looked to see if I could
help before doing anything else, but I’m not a really good person. I’m just
me. Not bad. Just good enough. So the first thing I did was take out my
knife and cut Jip free. The second thing I did was check to see why he was
limping. It wasn’t deep, but he had a cut running three quarters of the way
around his foreleg, as if something had caught it in a noose. He licked my
hand in thanks and looked at the woman and then back at me.
I know, I said.
I opened the gun and saw there was only one shell in it, and that was the
one she had fired to kill the hog, so she’d been bluffing when she ordered
me around with it. Hadn’t really felt like she was threatening my life
anyway, but it was good to confirm that was so. I left the gun on the ground
and went to her packhorses.
She started shouting at me, but her voice was weakening and I ignored
her. I found her bedroll and placed it under the shelter she’d had me put up.
Then I pointed at it and used sign language to try and tell her I was going to
help her get to it. She batted my hands away when I first tried to get hold of
her. I stepped back and made calming gestures with my hand, the same
gestures I used to make when approaching the half-wild ponies on the
islands when we needed to get a halter on them. I said the same things to
her that I said to them, using the same calming voice.
It’s okay, I said. It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.
Maybe it was the tone but she allowed me to drag her across to the
shelter. I laid her on her bedroll and tried to look at the wound. Again she
batted me away, pointing at the horses. She wasn’t talking much now and
maybe that was because she was gritting her teeth to deal with the pain. I
got that the horses should be unburdened and that they should then be
hobbled and left to graze. The packs took some unbuckling, but the
hobbling ropes were on top and the horses let me slip them on their legs
with very little fuss, being used to it. They wandered off and began
munching the grass noisily.
More grunting and pointing had me going through the right pack and
finding her medical kit and the dictionary. The stuff in her medical box was
different to mine, but there were clean strips of bandage and a lot of herbs
and ointments I didn’t recognise. She snatched them from me and started to
try and deal with her wound. And that was the problem, because she
couldn’t twist around to get at it. She’d been able to tie a loop of material
around herself and cinch it tight, but the gash was behind her.
I indicated that I would have a look. She shook her head in irritation. I
picked up the book. Although I used it hundreds of times after that, I
remember the first word I looked up. The English was “infection”. So was
the French. I grunted in surprise. When I showed it to her, she stared at it
and the side of her mouth twitched microscopically.
Infection, I said. If you don’t clean it you will get infected. And you
can’t reach it.
Anfecksee-on, she agreed.
I took the book and found the next word. I pointed at myself, then at her,
then the word. She squinted at it.
Ay-day, she said.
Yes, I said. I will ay-day you.
She looked at me with those eyes that were both old and young.
Okay, she said.
Okay, I said.
She beckoned and I gave her the book.
She pointed to the word for clean. Then at the word for close. I must
have looked confused because she tutted and found another word.
Sew.
She pointed behind her. And grimaced.
Sew.
She rummaged through her medicine box, tutting as she did so. She was
looking for something that wasn’t there.
I walked away and found my pack. I brought back my honey and
showed it to her.
Okay, she said. She said other things in French but I was too busy
building a fire. After a bit, she watched me and said nothing. Her face was
getting as grey as her hair now, and the night was coming in. I wanted to get
this done while there was still light enough to do it by. The wound was long
and deep. I was going to have to clean it and then see if I could close it.
There would be lots to do before dark.
She stopped barking commands at me after a bit, I think because she
saw what I was doing and approved. I got the fire going and used two of her
cooking pots to boil the water we both had been carrying. When it had
boiled for ten minutes, I put her bandages in and boiled them for another
ten. While that was happening, I made a rack out of birch twigs and used it
to stretch the bandages on to dry in the heat of the fire as I let the boiling
water cool. I speeded that up by pouring the water from one pot to the other,
letting the air get at it.
 It was still just warmer then blood temperature when I started. I pointed
at her trousers. I indicated they would have to come off.
Pew-tan, she said, and took out a knife. Before I could stop her, she had
reached round and cut through the waistband just over her hip, wincing with
the effort. Then she started trying to peel the two sides apart to expose the
wound. The blood had dried and the material was stiff and glued to her skin.
She winced and looked paler.
No, I said. I’ll do it.
I felt sick when I saw the damage close up. The boar’s tusk had cut long
and deep, deep enough for me to see the different colour of fat and muscle.
It was worse than any cut I’d seen before, and the thought that I might have
to sew it up gave me a feeling like vertigo.
First things first, I said. First things first.
I helped her roll from her side to her stomach. Because I imagined this
would hurt about the same as having a bone set—which was something I’d
seen Dad do for Bar—I went and found a branch a little thicker than my
thumb and cut a short length from it. I gave it to her, making a dumbshow
to let her know she should put it in her mouth to bite down on for the pain.
Pew-tan, she said again, rolling her eyes. But she shrugged and put it
between her teeth and turned away.
The wound didn’t smell, and the blackness within it was dried blood and
not anything worse. I used the lukewarm water to soften the bloody trouser
material enough to free it and swabbed the revealed buttock as clean as I
could on either side of the horribly gaping slash.
I put my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t turn round.
I’m sorry, I said. This will hurt.
She nodded and said nothing while I sluiced the wound with the clean
water. Her whole body tensed, and I realised how strong and wiry she was
under the clothes that hid it. I tried to get it done as quickly as I could. The
only sound I heard was the wood of the branch crunching between her
teeth.
Cleaning it just made it look worse really: fresher but also easier to see
where the flesh had started dying. If it had been a gash on an arm or a leg, I
might have thought of just trying to hold the wound closed with a really
tight bandage, but being where it was there was no doubt it would have to
be sewn up.
 I realised that I had been staring at it for so long, trying to work out what
to do next, that I had not seen her turn her head and stare back at me.
Anfecksee-on? she said.
Not yet, I said. And then I held up the jar of honey.
Ah, she said. Ah bon.
She nodded her head and turned away.
I cleaned the needle by boiling it. It was the needle I always carried for
mending things that might rip, like bags or sails or clothes.
I almost scalded my hands washing them, and I used my shaving soap to
clean them. She watched me do all of this with her head craned round as
she lay on her stomach. I showed her the needle with an apologetic grimace.
Mared, she said.
Pew-tan? I said.
It was the first time I saw her smile properly. The stern face cracked and
let out a little unexpected sunshine.
Wee, she said. Pew-tan.
And she picked up the stick, bit down on it and turned away.
I think it would have been easier if she had fainted, but she didn’t.
Pouring the honey into the wound made her buck and flinch, but that was
the first, not the worst of it. I’ve done some horrible things in my life, but
sliding that curved needle in and out of living flesh and then making knot
after knot in it, pulling the wound closed and leaving a thin and badly
puckered gash is one of the things I still have nightmares about. I am not a
good sewer at the best of times. At the end of things, it looked more like a
length of barbed wire than anything else. But I got it done as fast and as
neatly as I could, and when there was no more wound to cinch tight, I
poured a line of honey over it and carefully laid a strip of clean bandage on
top to hold it in place. Then I made a pad to put over it and was going to ask
her to lift her hips so I could wind the long bandage around it to hold it in
place when I realised she was asleep. Asleep or passed out. She was
breathing though, so I left her undisturbed and just watched in case she
woke and tried to roll over on the wound.
Jip came and sat with me, and for a long time that was all I needed in the
world. He licked my hand and I scratched him, and then I buried my nose in
the familiar roughness of his neck fur and he let me hold him and tell him
how much I had missed him and how bad I had felt when I was sure he was
dead and it had all been my fault. And then we just stayed leaning against
each other and watched the sky and the sleeping woman. The horses
cropped away. It got darker. When she woke, she did try to roll but I
stopped her. Then she drank some water and went back to sleep.
Before it got full dark, I hung the pig upside down and cut its neck so
that if the blood had not already settled it might run out during the night.
Then I collected the horses and tied them to a tree each. And then I went to
sleep too. I didn’t know if what I had done would work or if she would take
an infection and die. As I lay in the darkness and listened to the unfamiliar
sounds of the night starting up, I wondered if it had been the right thing to
do. I decided I didn’t know if she was as dangerous a person as Brand. Then
I thought some more and decided she was probably as dangerous, but that
she had saved me and found Jip and that, all in all, I probably had done the
right thing. And then I slept.
I woke in the early morning, dew beading the trees and the grass. She
was poking me with a stick. She needed to piss. Helping her up was a
complicated effort. Holding her up while she squatted awkwardly keeping
the wounded leg straight so as not to put pressure on the stitches was even
more so. When I got her back on her bedroll, she looked white.
Door may, she said, nodding at my bedroll. Then she went straight back
to sleep.
By the next time she woke, I had slices of hog sizzling over the fire and
the three horses were untied and grazing again. I had also been through her
packs. I could make no sense of the things she had clearly collected on her
travels, some of which were useful—like tools—and others of which
seemed just to have caught her fancy because they looked interesting, like a
small bronze head, or a homemade doll, sewn together with buttons that
nestled in an old box full of shiny necklaces.
She was looking at me, her face unreadable. Then she gave me a nod, as
if I’d done something right.
Mare-see, she said. Mare-see.
I brought her some of the boar. She rolled onto the unwounded side and
ate propped up on one arm. She finished the slice and belched, deep as Dad
did. She smiled, as if pleased with herself. She picked up the dictionary and
flicked through it, found a word and showed it to me with a raised,
questioning eyebrow.
 Name?
Griz, I said. My name is Griz.
I pointed at her.
Mwah? she said, eyebrow still raised. She shrugged her shoulder as if
names weren’t important to her, as if she was above having just any old
name like everybody else had one. Then she made a face as if just picking
one of her many names.
John, she said.
John? I said.
Wee, she said, nodding. John Dark.
 Chapter 19

A bond

Even though we didn’t speak the same language, I liked John Dark. Even
though that wasn’t her real name, only what it sounded like. And the name
it sounded like wasn’t really her name either, I discovered. It was a joke,
and as good a name for a French woman as any. Though I didn’t get the
joke until it was explained to me long after our ways had parted.
I remember that first day and night very clearly, but the days that
followed blurred into one another. I was torn, wanting to be on my way to
find Brand, but not being able to leave her until she could at least get up and
piss for herself. There would have been no point sewing her up just to leave
her in a pool of her own mess. Would have been a waste of good honey, not
to mention the not-quite-so-good needlework. And of course I wanted to
know her story, why was she here, where had she come from, what had she
seen, what she knew. She looked like she’d seen a lot.
She got my story out of me first. Using the dictionary and lot of eyebrow
raising she asked, Where from? and I showed her on the map—not exactly,
but roughly. I didn’t quite trust her enough for that exactly. Family? was
easy. Four fingers answered that. So was Alone? That got one thumb. Why
here? was harder: I laboriously pointed out the words for “a man steal my
dog; I go find him, get dog”. She made me do it twice because she couldn’t
believe it. I added “red beard” the second time, hoping she might know
about Brand, but her eyes didn’t flicker a bit in recognition. Where? was
easier to answer. I just showed her on the map. And since I had it open, I
showed her where I thought we were. She made me get a map from her own
bag and, though hers was better, being backed in material, it showed the
same landscape. And we agreed we were just outside the big city in the
middle of the country.
We established she came from France which was not a surprise by then,
having read the cover on the grubby dictionary. What was a surprise was
when I asked, Where boat you? and she shook her head and made it clear
there was no boat. She pointed to the horses and rolled her eyes. How could
she get them on a boat? Then she made walking movements with her
fingers. I shook my head and pointed at the sea. She snorted and pointed at
another area on the land and traced it across the narrow channel. Then she
snapped her fingers and demanded the dictionary. She found the word for
“tunnel” which was another word like “infection” that was spelled exactly
the same. I didn’t believe her, because even if there had been a tunnel under
the sea, I’m sure it would have filled with water after a hundred years or so.
And that’s assuming the rising seawater hadn’t submerged the entrances and
filled it that way. However, she was emphatic that she had ridden under the
sea to get here, with an oil lamp that she showed me hanging off one of the
baskets.
I didn’t mind that she was lying. I hadn’t quite told her exactly where I
was from either. I did like the swagger of her lie. Ferg once said to me that
if I was going to lie I might as well make it a big one as a small one, and I
think that’s what she was doing. She didn’t want me to find where her
valuable boat was laid up.
I asked why she had come here. Her face did flicker then. Her finger
found “family” again. Then “daughters”. Then a word that I first read as
“pest” until I realised I was reading the French word and that there was an e
on the end and in English it meant “plague”.
I’m sorry, I said.
She shrugged, but her eyes were elsewhere for a long
moment.
I wanted to ask more questions, but I could see she was sad and tired
and so I went off with Jip to refill the water bottles from a stream that came
tumbling down the slope behind us. As I did so, I wondered about the
plague she had spoken of. I decided it was probably just a normal disease
that likely once would have been easily fixed with drugs we no longer had.
After all, a plague is a disease that sweeps through huge populations,
inflicting terrible damage. There just wasn’t enough population left to have
a plague in. I think I was wrong and she was actually being very accurate
about the symptoms, but that’s what I thought then.
She spent most of the day sleeping, and when she wasn’t she always
seemed to be looking at me with her head on one side, as if I was something
that she could not quite make out. It was late that afternoon, or maybe the
next one when she told me the other reason she was here. She thumbed her
chest, then pointed to the dictionary: I. Look. Someone. Too.
Someone? I pointed back and raised my eyebrows in imitation of her
questioning expression.
Kel Kun, she said. Kel Kun Demal.
Whoever this Kel Kun was, he made her eyes go away again.
I changed the dressings morning and night, and there was no smell of
infection, though the wound line was crooked and red and was, for the first
two days, worryingly hot. I kept using the last of my honey on it, and she
dosed herself with the contents of her medical kit, and between the honey
and the powders and leaves she ingested, the wound did seem to be healing.
She had several habits that were odd to me, things she was emphatic
about. Maybe everybody else’s habits are odd to strangers. One was the loo
garoo sticks. These were long torches, made from wooden handles which
had spools of material wound round the head, material that had been soaked
in sticky pine pitch. She never lit them, but she insisted that we kept them
laid close to the fire at night. When I tried to ask why, she just pointed out
at the darkness, at the three horses hobbled close by and the blackness
beyond.
Poor lay loo, she said.
I made a question with my face. She smiled.
Lay loo, she repeated and then made a mock-serious I’m-trying-to-scare-
you-but-not-really face.
Lay loo? she said, waggling her eyebrows. Lay loo garoo.
So the torches became the loo garoo sticks, and were—to me—a sort of
quaint pointless ritual she liked. Until of course they weren’t.
Several things became clear as we waited for her wound to heal. One
was that Jip had got caught in a snare she had set for rabbits around her
camp. I found a bunch of them, made from the thin wire in one of her bags.
She pointed at them and then at Jip’s leg with a shrug of apology. Another
was that she had seen the burning house I had left behind us and had ridden
to see what it was, in much the same way that I had been drawn to the fire I
had seen from the tower. Like me, she had been drawn to a possible sign of
other people—but unlike me she had found it was so. She said she had
thought the fire might have been Kel Kun Demal.
One afternoon she pointed at the horses and asked, by miming, if I could
ride one. We don’t ride the ponies on the island, just use them for carrying
and walking beside them. But since I had ridden them as a small child,
perched between the panniers carrying the peat, I nodded.
The next day, we ran out of honey and she decided the wound was
knitting well enough for her to start walking and trying the horse. She was
grey-haired but she was tough, and now that the pain had subsided and the
infection—if it had been infection—had gone, she was energetic again.
By a mixture of mime and dictionary-pointing, she made it clear that she
wanted me to go with her into the city, where she had seen a big nest of
bees. She pointed to my jar. She wanted to repay me by replacing the honey
that had healed her. I was in a strange state of mind—in a hurry to get to
Brand, overjoyed to have Jip back, but also not wanting to go our separate
ways, and since the city lay more or less in the right direction I nodded. She
spent the day reorganising the packs, and then she put one horse-load’s
worth on a tree, close in by the car stacks where she indicated she would
find it when she returned, and then made me get up on the second bag-free
horse and ride around a bit.
Jip barked to see me riding, and the horse snorted in something between
ridicule and frustration, as if it could sense how suddenly nervy I was, but
she said something to it and her words seemed to work like a spell and calm
it right down. There was light left in the sky, but after a couple of wide
circles to get used to the feeling of being carried across the landscape on
such a high and swaying seat, we returned to the camp and spent a last night
feasting on boar and berries.
She didn’t look so cheerful the next day as we saddled up and set off
down the hill. Her face was set and sour as the horse lurched over the rough
ground, and once again I saw her teeth set against any sound of pain that
might try and escape. It was a misty morning, and she rode with her hood
up. Jip criss-crossed the slope ahead of us, surprising some early rabbits,
but his heart was more in chasing than killing and anyway we had all eaten
well the night before, him included.
 By the time we descended to the old M road, the sun had driven away
most of the mist and as the day warmed, so did she. She dropped back to
ride beside me, watching me with a disapproving eye. By the time we had
gone five klicks or so, she decided that the various instructions she had
communicated in mime to me—things like sit up, squeeze with your knees,
relax your hand, don’t pull the reins and so on—had turned me into a
slightly less disappointing rider than I had been at the start of the day and
she grunted in approval.
Bravo, Griz, she said.
I don’t know which made me more surprised and unexpectedly happy.
Her approval or the fact that she’d used my name for the first time.
She rode ahead, leading the pack horse. My horse was happy to follow
as they wove in as straight a line as they could through the saplings and
larger trees that were invading the old M road. It’s a strange thing, riding
another animal. I hadn’t really thought about it when I had been given rides
on the peat ponies, but now I felt it strongly. It wasn’t so much the sensation
of moving along without doing much—that was familiar enough from being
driven by the wind on the sea—it was the fact that the motion which carried
me was obviously the particular movement of another living thing. It was a
controlled lurch, always—or so it seemed to me—on the point of tripping or
at least losing its own special cadence. But as the day progressed, I stopped
fighting it, and then by forgetting to worry about it I relaxed and slowly
began to feel a part of the horse, rather than apart from it. Which probably
doesn’t make sense unless you rode horses and felt what I was feeling. But
you probably drove around in cars instead. Did that feel as exhilarating, or
were you always worried the engine might run away with you, the same
way I had worried about the horse stumbling?
As we headed onwards, the city slowly started to rise around us, as if it
were a growing thing crowding in on either side. Once again, the scale of
who you were, the sheer number of you, began to wash over me. There
were hulks of long, low buildings that must have been factories, and then
mazes of regularly divided vegetation that must have been more overgrown
streets of identical box houses and then in the distance, converging with us,
another raised roadway striding across the intervening wasteland of shrubs,
trees and tumbledown buildings on stubby legs of concrete.
What did your cities sound like when these roads were full of cars? Was
it a whine or a rumble or a growl? Or a roar? Did all the different kinds of
car and lorry sound different? Could you tell what was coming without
looking? And seeing all the roads there were, how did you stop bumping
into one another if you were travelling at the speeds I’ve read about?
I couldn’t keep my wits about me or stay alert to danger, and I was just
riding one horse. If I had been able to, maybe I wouldn’t have ridden right
into it.
But then not all danger looks bad on the outside. We were just going to
get some honey.
Not everything sweet is good for you.
 Chapter 20

Kel Kun Demal

It started off as a great day. Sun was high but not too hot, the birds were
making a lot of noise and enough rabbits were running to keep Jip happy as
we wove our way closer to the centre of the city.
Birdsong like this was still a new thing to me. On the islands, there were
occasional shrieks and caws and the lonely piping of single birds flying
across the moor, but the birdlife was too thinly stretched to make anything
at all like the constant noise that you get on the mainland. To begin with, I
found the songs of the different birds was like a tumble of conflicting
sounds, none of them particularly loud on their own, but relentless in the
way they pecked at your attention from all sides—a coo here, a tweet there
and a warble from somewhere else. And because they were all different
noises, I kept twisting around, trying to spot where they were coming from,
to see what bird made which noise. And then after a bit the fact the noise
was always there seemed to blur those distinctive bits together into a wash
of sound, like the sea. It became background and not something I spent any
more time trying to unpick into the individual parts it was made of. By the
time I met John Dark, the ever-present din of the birdlife all around me had
become—like the sea too—a comforting noise. I had also got used to the
fact it sounded different at dawn to the way it did as the light left the sky at
the end of the day. And although I hadn’t got very far with identifying the
various species, I had worked out which birds were pigeons and which were
magpies from the small book I’d found in the museum shop.
There was one different-looking bird that had sandy feathers mottled
with darker brown ones that flew across our path as we rode down a sloping
ramp that took us off the raised M road. I think it was a song thrush. It made
a happy piping sound as it flew high above us, and when I looked over at
the woman I saw that for a moment she’d lost her stern mask and let the
younger face she kept hidden behind it have a moment in the sun as she too
watched the bird jink and climb over our heads into the clear blue sky,
looking as if it was singing and flying just for the joy of it.
Then her mask came back down and she nudged her horse forward
towards a gap in the overgrown ruins ahead of us. She knew where she was
going, and my horse just followed her lead. A brick-built building had
given up trying to keep standing tall at some time in the recent past and had
slumped across the narrow alley, filling the space with an untidy jumble of
bricks and glass. John Dark sucked her teeth in disapproval and turned her
horse to the side, finding a narrower alley to go down. I don’t think she
wanted to risk the horses cutting themselves or stumbling on the new
rubble. One thing I had noticed by then was the way you could easily tell
what ruin was new and what had fallen down a long time ago by the way
the vegetation overgrew it. New rubble shifted under your feet, but as soon
as moss and grass and the roots of plants had taken hold, it quickly became
stable as the plants and the dirt bound it together.
We emerged from the alley and pushed our way through an area of
scrubby bushes that were all about as high as the horses’ shoulders. This
had been an open area in the middle of the city, and once there had been
light poles to illuminate it. They were corroded into sharp stubs, or had
tilted and fallen, pulled down by the weight of the creepers that had
overgrown them, but they were regularly spaced, which made it easy to spot
them once you had seen the pattern. There were also trees that had grown
randomly among them, and after I had ducked beneath one as we passed,
imitating John Dark just ahead of me, I straightened up to see the three men
standing in front of me.
They had their backs to us, and the one in the middle had his hand raised
in greeting so that I instinctively looked beyond him trying to see who
might be waving back at them. But there was no one there, not even them
really: they were just statues facing a great tangle of wreckage where one
end of a huge stadium had collapsed a long time ago, making a hill of
massive concrete slabs and twisted metal pipes, all now well bound together
by the encroaching plant life. The statues were men and all wore short
trousers and had their arms around each other, like brothers. One of them
was bald and had a football held against his hip. When I guided my horse
around the front of them, I could see they all had expressions that weren’t
quite smiles, but more like they were expecting something. Whatever it
was, it had either come and gone, or perhaps just had never arrived. All they
had to look at was a ruin now. Not that they seemed upset about it.
Brambles had grown around the block of stone they stood on, but I could
still see one word carved in it. It said “BEST”. So I expect these were the
best players in the team. I was looking into their faces, wondering what they
had looked like in real life, when John Dark whistled at me.
E. C., she said, and stopped her horse.
She grimaced as she got off, and had to catch hold of the saddle to stop
herself stumbling to her knees. She didn’t like that I’d seen the weakness,
and made a great show of teaching me how to hang the horse’s reins over its
head so they dragged on the ground in front of it so that it wouldn’t walk
off, and then took things from her saddlebags and beckoned me to follow
her up the hill of debris.
I left my horse and did so. There was broken glass beneath the moss, so
we both trod carefully, but the building had been down long enough for
nature to have bound it back into the earth and made it stable. And then,
following her footsteps, I found myself at the top of the greenish hill the
rubble was now turning into, looking down into what had once been a
football field. It was now a hidden oasis of deeper green, with a stand of
what I now knew were oak trees at one end, and a thicket of flowering
hawthorn in the middle. Rabbits darted among the long grass around the
trees, turning tails as white as the May blossom when they ran away at the
sight of us. Jip immediately set off like an arrow, his mindset on serious
business as he plunged into the undergrowth.
The other three sides of the stadium were in better shape than the one we
were standing on, but on two of them the jutting roof that had once
sheltered watchers from the rain or sun had dipped and collapsed in on the
endless rows of faded pink plastic seats below. Trying to imagine the
number of people this arena must have held, what that looked like, what
that must have sounded like, made my head hurt. Does absence have a
weight? I think it does, because I stood there feeling crushed by something I
couldn’t see. It was a much stronger feeling than the one I had when
looking at a landscape full of empty streets. Perhaps it was because so many
people had once chosen to come and squeeze in close to each other in this
single space. Again, there are no such things as ghosts. It didn’t feel
haunted. But it did feel like something. Like it had once been peopled—and
very densely peopled—and now it just wasn’t. It was unpeopled, in the
same way something can’t be undone unless it has first been done. This was
the atmosphere I had been trying to understand ever since I stepped on to
the mainland, and it was a very different feeling to just being empty. It was
more like loneliness, not mine from finding myself alone in this world, but
this world’s loneliness without you. It had known you, and now you’re gone
—and maybe this is just for a while, perhaps until the signs of you having
been here are worn away and your houses and roads and bridges and
football stadiums have been swallowed back into nature—it will miss you.
Or maybe I’m going a bit mad thinking like this and then taking the
trouble to write my crazy thoughts down so that a long-dead boy who will
never read them will know what my theories are about a world he can never
visit. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend so long on your own, like
I do now. Maybe I’m just talking to myself.
Anyway, the rest of the afternoon was a very good day. Until it wasn’t.
Once she had got moving, John Dark seemed happier about the pain
from her wound and walked much less stiffly. She led me into the middle of
what had been the field and closed her eyes, holding her finger to her lips. I
listened. And then I heard it, just as she opened them again and looked a
question at me.
It was a low humming noise, a gentle sound that filled the background
and seemed to stroke the ears. Bees were thriving in the huge walled garden
that the stadium had become, and there were a lot of them.
There were two fallen trees that had begun to rot from the middle out,
and beside them was a strange kind of wooden shed on wheels. Maybe
someone had, at the end of things, decided to come and live here behind the
protection of the stadium walls. Maybe she kept the bees. Her shed on
wheels had become a kind of huge beehive, and there were bees in the
fallen trees too. It was a very protected space, and the meadow that the field
had become must have been a ready supply of bee food.
John Dark pointed at a recent campfire and pointed at herself. I
understood she had been here not long ago. This was how she knew about
the bees. She then pointed to one of the fallen trees and grinned. We were
going to get the honey from inside the trunk.
We worked together more or less in silence, and she was able to show
me with deliberate movements what we were going to do. I don’t know if
the silence was in order not to stir up the bees, or just because in doing
something physical it was easier to mime, but it was a strangely calm and
intimate way to spend time with another person.
I felt closer to her in those few hours than I had to anyone outside my
family, now I look back on it. Even when working with the Lewismen,
there was always a distance. Perhaps because we were two tribes—working
together but supported by the others in our own family who also shared our
difference to them. With one person, all those barriers went away, and we
just talked with our hands and eyes.
Like I said. Intimate.
She built a fire on the ruins of her last one, and fed it until it got going.
Then she moved the burning coals using her knife and the flat of a small
hatchet and held them in front of the opening in the fallen trunk, right
against the wood so that it began to scorch and smoulder. She fed that baby
fire, indicating that I should keep the mother fire going as she did so. Then
she started putting damper material on the smaller fire making it begin to
smoke. The trick was to keep the core of the smaller fire hot enough and
then to damp it with just enough material to keep it smoking heavily. Then
she had me go into the stand to break off a plastic chair bottom. I shattered
a couple because the material had become brittle with age, but on the third
try I got a rough square and came back. She then had me fan the smoke
plume so it entered the rotten hole in the trunk.
I should say that before we did all this we wound some sacking material
she had in her saddlebags around our heads, and fastened our clothes so
there was little chance of any of the bees getting in and stinging us. She had
gloves too. I wound more material around my hands instead. I once read an
old comic about an Egyptian god who came back from the dead as a
mummy. That’s what we looked like. Half grotesque and half ridiculous.
And me waving the seat back and forth, trying to create a breeze that would
force the smoke in and the bees out. But of course there was no one to see
us or laugh at the spectacle we must have made amid the smoke and the
swarm of bees beginning to exit the trunk and buzz around us, out where
the air was less thick.
She took her hatchet and began to hack efficiently at the rotten wood,
enlarging the opening and exposing the honeycomb. The bee’s nest was
formed in great rounded lobes of beeswax that looked fleshy and a little
unearthly. I think it was the organic shape of the lobes that were in contrast
with the geometric regularity of the honeycomb from which they were
made. There were still big clumps of bees crawling over the fat lobes,
which made them seem alive. We moved the fire closer and fanned the
smoke until most were gone or just drowsing. And then, without warning
me, she reached in with one hand and chopped a couple of the lobes free.
The bees got angrier and less drowsy at that point, and some flew into the
slit in my face covering that I’d left to see out of.
One of them stung me on the eyelid. I tried to keep fanning but the pain
was like a hot needle had been stabbed into my eyeball. I gasped and
staggered away, dropping the seat.
I heard her laughing and stumbled after her. The bees were buzzing
louder as we emerged from the protective haze of the woodsmoke, but
amazingly we weren’t followed by a large cloud of them trying to sting us
in revenge for our theft. We stopped and sat on the crumbling cement steps
at the far side of the field.
She looked elated, and carefully put the stolen honeycombs on the grass
at our feet. Then she looked at the smoking tree trunk in the distance.
Mared! she said.
And then she took her largest water bottle and walked back into the
smoke and the circling bee cloud. I thought it was a heroic thing to do. And
it was the right thing too. I liked her for doing it. She kicked the fire away
from the entrance to the trunk and poured water to douse the smouldering
end. Having stolen some of their honey, she made sure that their home was
not burned down at the same time. She even picked up the seat and put it on
top of the hole she’d widened, giving them a new roof. Then she half ran,
half danced out of range of the bees, laughing as she came. Once more, she
looked younger than the face she normally wore. She sat next to me and
unwound the sacking strips, using them to wrap the first piece of
honeycomb which was about the size of her head in circumference, though
flatter from the side. Then she clicked her fingers at me to take my
bandages off to wrap the second piece. My eye had swollen alarmingly so
that I could only see out of the other one, and she looked surprised when
she saw it—though whether at what it looked like or at the fact I had not
made more fuss about it I never knew.
Because at that point, the other—unsuspected—bee that had got inside
my layers began to vibrate angrily against my neck, and everything began
to go wrong fast. As I tore open the fastenings at the neck of my shirt, she
saw something and her eyes widened. I saw it and thought for a moment
that she had seen my secret, but then I checked and she looked away, and I
knew it was not that but something else, something she was hiding. And
because I was relieved it was not the one thing, and because my eye was
really hurting quite badly, I did not take time to think too much about what
the other thing she was reacting to might have been.
She rummaged in her bag, and took something out which she shoved in
her pocket before turning back to me. She leant down and broke off a piece
of honeycomb, squeezing the gold honey on to the finger of her other hand.
Then she pointed at my eye and held up the honeyed finger.
Bon, she said. La me-ay say bon poor sa.
I let her reach over and daub the honey on my bulging eyelid. It felt
sticky and warm and then things suddenly got confusing and fast and then
shockingly painful. Not the eye, but my neck, because on what was,
because of the eye, my blind side she pulled the thing that she had shoved
into her pocket out again and looped it quickly over my head and tugged it
tight.
The thin copper wire of one of her rabbit snares bit into my neck as she
leapt behind me and yanked my knife from my belt. It happened so fast I
was frozen in confusion for a second, and then I was choking and trying to
get my fingers under the noose so I could free myself. And then she hissed
in my ear and jabbed the tip of my knife into the base of my skull, not hard,
not enough to break the skin, but enough to warn me to be still.
She said a lot, very quickly, spitting and hissing the words out in a long
stream of anger. I don’t know what she was saying, but it was not good.
And then the knife hooked under the silver steel ball chain of my pendant.
She worked it round until she could hold the pendant and look at the lucky
eight in its circle of arrows.
She went quiet. I didn’t move. I was sure I could feel blood dripping
from the wire around my neck. It could have been sweat.
 All I could hear was the hum of the bees in the distance, that and my
heart thumping away in my chest, like a panicked secret trying to punch its
way out into the open air.
Pew-tan, she spat. There was wonder and disappointment in the way it
came out. And anger. A lot of anger.
She yanked the chain so that it snapped. She hefted my pendant in her
hand, staring at the symbol pressed into it.
My lucky eight, at the centre of all those arrows going everywhere.
But like I said, not good luck.
And with the wire round my neck, and the very angry woman keeping it
cinched tight—not going anywhere either.
What? I said. My voice sounded ragged. What?
She held the pendant in front of my good eye and unleashed a torrent of
words, only three of which I got as she showed me the symbol, too close to
my eye to really focus on.
Ooh ate eel? she said. Ooh ate eel?
 Chapter 21

Key ay voo

The pendant was a key. I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that. I only
know it was a key because she showed me the word in her dictionary later,
when she was trying to get me to tell her where I had found it and what had
happened to the person I had taken it from. It doesn’t spoil anything
because whatever the key was made to open remains a mystery. This story
is not about a mysterious journey that ends up opening a wonderful door
with a magic key. It’s not that kind of story. I’m writing this on the wrong
side of a locked door, has no key and I don’t know if it’s ever going to open.
And I only have her word, I suppose, that it was a key anyway. It didn’t
look like any key I’d ever seen. And she was less interested in the fact it
was a key than in how I’d got it and who from. I tried to explain I had found
it on the top of the tower, but my answer seemed to make her even more
angry. She didn’t believe me. She kept asking where the man was. Her
finger kept stabbing the words “where man?” And whatever I managed to
communicate to her was just wrong—no man—what man?—found key—
found key on tower—not know—all the answers seemed to rub salt in some
wound I couldn’t see.
She shook me angrily and looked deep in my eyes.
Ay voo? she said. Voo, Griz. Key ay voo?
All I could do was shrug, still bewildered.
I don’t know what you want, I said. But I’m not an enemy.
She tied my hands behind me with more wire, and then she loosened the
noose around my neck. It was while she was tying me to the flaking metal
holding the seats to the stadium steps that Jip came back, looking suddenly
confused as he dropped a rabbit at my feet and then looked at us both,
sensing something was wrong. She straightened up and spat some words at
me, and then went away, towards the horses.
Jip looked at her and then at me and whined, confused by the fact I
hadn’t picked up the rabbit or ruffled the fur between his ears.
We’re in trouble, boy, I said. I pulled against the wire binding my wrists
but stopped as it bit into my skin.
Jip saw me wince. He trotted up the steps and looked at my hands,
pinioned behind my back. He whined, unsure of what was happening.
It’s okay, I said. It’ll be okay.
He licked my wrists. I scratched his neck with my fingertips. As best I
could. Then he moved away and barked.
It’ll be fine, I said. She’ll calm down.
She didn’t. She came back, leading the horses and set them to graze on
the overgrown pitch. Then she carried my bag up the steps, past me, and
into a doorway where the steps disappeared inside the stadium. The landing
made a square concrete-lined cave in the slope of the arena. She made her
camp there, lighting a fire and unrolling her bedroll. If I scrunched round, I
could sort of see what she was doing.
She was talking to herself, low and angry. She undid my pack and tipped
all my possessions on the floor in front of her. Then she painstakingly
spread them out and sorted through them. I don’t know what she was
looking for, but she didn’t find it. That made her even more angry and she
squatted on her haunches and looked at me as if everything in the world
was my fault. Her silence and the flintiness of her stare was unnerving.
There was no trace of the younger version of herself, the one that she had
let out earlier in the day before the light began to fail.
As it got darker, the concrete roof and walls of the landing in which she
had set her campfire made a warm square in the surrounding darkness, but
all that did was make me feel the chill of the evening coming in. It was
colder than it had been, and you didn’t have to have a dog’s nose to smell
the rain in the air. Jip walked up the steps and looked at her. She ignored
him. He sat down and barked at her. She might as well have been deaf for
all the attention she paid him.
She gave me no food, no water and just left me sitting against the seat
frames. I tried sawing the wire against the old metal stanchions, but it was
too painful and, from what I could feel with my fingers, all I was doing was
cleaning the corrosion off them, taking it back to the smooth metal beneath.
The wire seemed no closer to breaking and I stopped. If anything was going
to get sawed through, it was my wrists. I had no choice but to sit it out.
Literally sit, because she didn’t bring me my bedroll or allow me to lie
down. I’ve spent uncomfortable nights in strange places, and can sleep
almost anywhere if I’m tired enough, but that started out as the worst night
of all. Then things went downhill. And then—with the visitors—they fell
off a cliff.
To begin with there was the physical discomfort. The longer I sat, the
less of me there seemed to be to provide some kind of padding between the
cold concrete and my bones. Then there was the awkwardness of sitting
with my hands behind me. It made my shoulders and my neck ache, and it
made my arms numb. I kept wiggling my fingers to make sure I wasn’t
losing circulation. The least uncomfortable position was to let my head lean
back until it rested on the plastic seat bottom, which left me staring up into
the night sky, but did rest my neck a little.
It didn’t rest my brain though, and it was that as much as the physical
discomfort that kept me awake. I tried to keep it calm, but I had no luck
with that. It raced away, whirling furiously round and round like a windmill
in a high wind. I kept replaying everything that had happened since I
encountered John Dark. I had thought we had a sort of trust between us. She
had certainly helped me—rescued me even—and I in turn had helped her
with her wound. I had imagined we had also found a way to understand
each other with our miming and pointing at words in the dictionary.
It had seemed a bit of a cruel joke to meet one of the very few people
left in this wide and empty world only to discover we couldn’t talk because
we spoke different languages, but we had made the best of it. And the worst
of it was that I had liked her. As I have said before, I did not have a lot of
other people to compare her with, but she did not seem untrustworthy. She
just seemed like herself. She had never tried to make me like or trust her. I
had taken her to be what she appeared to be: gruff, tough, definitely rough-
edged, but straight. Brand, in retrospect, had been too much of a storyteller
for anyone more experienced in the ways of other people than I was to trust.
He was putting on a show. I rescued a book once called Modern Coin
Magic by J. B. Bobo, and I spent one long winter practising the tricks
inside. One of the things that made them work—apart from having nimble
fingers—was making the people watching you look at the wrong hand at
the right time, and so miss what you were actually doing. That’s what Brand
did: his smile and his stories were all showmanship making you look over
there while his other hand was picking your pocket over here. John Dark
was not like that. And this was the uncomfortable thing that kept whirling
around my head. How had I got her so wrong? Had I misunderstood
something vital in our halting communications? Why did she seem to
suddenly mistrust me as deeply as I mistrusted Brand? The looks she had
given me and the way she had spat her words after she had discovered the
key round my neck definitely seemed like she felt fooled or betrayed. But
by what? What did the key have to do with this Kel Kun Demal? Or had I
been wrong from the very beginning, and had she always been dangerous to
me? It didn’t feel right, the thought that she’d been baiting a trap for me
ever since we met, but maybe she had? Maybe she had just needed a
separate pair of hands to sew her up. But that didn’t make sense. None of it
made sense. All of it churned round and round in an endless loop in my
head, wiping out any chance of sleep or rest.
I’d smelled the rain coming, but I didn’t see it when it finally did arrive
because the overhanging cloud had blocked out the stars and the moon.
Instead I felt it, full on my upturned face as the first fat drops fell heavily
out of the darkness overhead. I blinked and squeezed the unexpected
wetness out of my eyes, and then instinctively bowed my head as the rest of
the following downpour hammered down after them. In seconds I was half
drowned, rain hitting the concrete around me so hard the drops seemed to
bounce back up to have a second go at soaking any bits of me they might
have missed on the way down.
I heard Jip barking at the downpour, and then I felt hands at my back
and heard a lot of what I took to be French curse words as John Dark took
pity and freed me enough to drag me up into the dry warmth of her square
cave. She refastened my wrists, but in front of me this time which felt a lot
better, and then she pushed me down to sit on my own bedroll against the
wall on the other side of the fire from her.
Thank you, I said.
She grunted and leaned back, eyes as hard as the concrete she was
resting against.
 I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, I said.
Door may voo, she said, and mimed closing her eyes and resting her
head against her hands. Door may.
Whatever the words meant, it was clear she wanted me to go to sleep. I
had no real objection to that plan. I was exhausted by the whole day and the
ugly turn that things had taken but—as I said—my brain was whirring too
fast to let the rest of me slow down and rest. Her eyes bored into me across
the low flames of the fire. That became too uncomfortable to bear, so I
slumped down and closed my own eyes so as not to have the added problem
of whether to stare back—and so perhaps provoke her further—or to look
shifty by avoiding her gaze. Unexpectedly this did help me slow down a
little. Unable to see anything, I listened instead, and the regular hiss of the
rain slamming the concrete all around was in its own way almost as restful
as the sea-noise I was used to falling asleep to, and though my back
remained damp, the heat from the fire that I could feel on my front dried me
out and made me feel almost comfortably drowsy. Jip came and leant
against me, and the warmth of his sleeping body added a bit of comfort and
made everything just a little less grim and a lot less lonely. And with all
that, pretending to be asleep could so easily have turned into being asleep, if
it was not for the one remaining thought that would not stop scratching at
the inside of my head every time it went around.
Why did she want me to go to sleep? What was she going to do when I
was unconscious? I didn’t think she was going to hurt me. Or kill me. She
had had a chance to do both of those things the moment she disabled me
with the wire noose around my neck. But then I had not thought Brand
would steal from us, and he had not—until he thought we were all asleep.
Mistrusting sleep is a horrible thing. Brand had not just stolen from me; he
had left his own unpleasant gift in its place, a gift that goes on taking even
more from the receiver, because it stops the one thing that you need to rest
and re-gather your energy. I read something somewhere about someone
“murdering sleep”. That’s what Brand’s deception has done for me. My
sleep is not quite murdered. But ever since he stole from us, it has been
fitful and getting worse—sometimes too much, never restful enough. I
opened my eyes to find she was still looking at me. And now her look
seemed to have an air of satisfaction about it, as if she had caught me red-
handed in a dirty trick, pretending to sleep.
 She pointed a finger at me.
Voo, she said. And then she seemed to speak English. Just two words,
but definitely almost English. Freeman voo?
It didn’t quite make sense.
Voo, she said, and this time she held up the key and jabbed it at me. Et
voo an Freeman?
This time the two words seemed to slide together into one.
No, I said. I showed her my wrists, wired together. No, I’m not free.
She shook her head as if she didn’t believe me.
Pew-tan, she said. And then she put a couple more bits of wood on the
fire and slid a little further down the back wall so that her eyes were hidden
by the flames.
The rain didn’t ease up for at least an hour. And when it did, the noise it
made receded and let the other sounds it had been masking be heard. The
main noise was water rushing down the sloped stairs and walkways of the
stadium, and the splattering noise of the run-off dripping all around us. But
the best noise was John Dark’s breathing. Although it was more than
breathing because breathing alone would not have been loud enough to
make itself heard over the wet noise all around us. It was her snoring.
Maybe if it hadn’t started raining so suddenly she would have repacked
my bag after she’d searched it. Maybe not. Maybe she would have just
swept my things into a big pile against the wall. Out of my reach. But she
hadn’t. They were just strewn over the floor. And though the fire had died
down to a reddish glow now, there was enough light for me to be able to see
the glint of my Leatherman.
Jip woke the moment I moved. I felt his body tense and willed him to
keep quiet. I twisted round and put my hands on him, stroking him, letting
my touch tell him everything was all right. I didn’t want him making any
noise that might stop the regular snoring on the opposite side of the fire. I
rolled down onto my side and squirmed round onto my stomach. Then,
worming my body along the cold concrete floor, I inched forwards on my
elbows and knees, heading for the tool and, I hoped, freedom.
Something brushed past me and I froze, but it was only Jip, walking to
the edge of the landing to look out and take a sniff at the night air. The
slight clicking of his claws on the hard floor seemed horrifically loud to me,
but the snoring didn’t lose a beat, and I relaxed.
 If I had not been so focused on reaching the Leatherman, I might have
noticed Jip going very still. And I imagine that if there had been more light
I would have seen the hackle fur on his back bristle and rise. But although
the clouds had moved on and allowed some moonlight back down onto the
pitch, I was not looking at him. I was holding my breath and reaching for
the multitool. Metal scraped against concrete, again a tiny sound that
seemed catastrophically loud, and then I had the familiar heft of the well-
used steel in my hands and found I was able to open it quite easily, despite
my wrists being bound, turning the thin rectangle of steel into a pair of
pliers.
If I had not been so worried about dropping the pliers as I awkwardly
reversed them so that they pointed towards my elbows, I might have heard
something moving on the field below us. There must have been some noise,
however small.
And if I had not been so elated by the ease with which I was able to slide
the open jaws of the pliers down the channel between my wrists, far enough
to put the wire binding them together into the sharp indented blade of the
wire-cutter waiting at the bottom of those jaws, I might have noticed the
snoring had stopped.
If I had not been so focused on freeing myself, I might have noticed
what was about to happen. But I was, and I didn’t.
I leant forward on my hands, my chin on the damp concrete, putting the
whole weight of my body behind my fingers which were squeezing the
handles of the Leatherman.
There was a click like a gunshot as the wire-cutter severed the wire. And
then the thing that happened happened and what happened was really three
things and they all happened at once.
Jip barked and hurtled into the night.
John Dark said pew-tan very angrily.
And a horse screamed in the darkness below.
 Chapter 22

Loo garoo

There was a fourth thing, but it happened a moment later.

It was a wild, high howling, a noise that shivered a deeper crack in the
darkness itself. And it seemed to be in answer to Jip’s barking. And it was
followed by snarls and growls that made the hairs on my neck stand up just
like a dog’s. I’d never heard it before, but my ancestors and yours had, and
maybe that left some memory of what it meant deep in the back of my
brain, because the sound of it made my gut flip and go watery so that I had
to clench so as not to piss myself.
Son day loo! said John Dark and plunged the loo garoo stick into the
fire. The pitch-soaked material blazed into light and she literally jumped
right over me as she raced down the steps towards the noise, carrying her
gun in the other hand.
She either did not notice or she didn’t care that my hands were free.
A boom like a thunderclap split the night as she fired her gun at
something that set off a new series of howls and yipping and then I was on
my feet, grabbing my bow and arrows. I strung the bow in one fast tug, and
quickly looked around for my knife.
Then I heard Jip bark again and then snarl, and followed John Dark
hurtling down the steps towards the light of her flaming torch that was now
arcing back and forth on the pitch below.
The steps were very wet and slick with rain and moss, but I kept my
footing by a miracle until I tried to stop myself at the bottom and slipped
and half tripped to a halt on one knee, hitting it so hard that I later found I’d
ripped the knee out of my trousers. I snatched an arrow and nocked it and
only then—panting and shaking but finally still—was I able to make sense
of what was happening.
At first I thought they were dogs. They weren’t. Nor were they anything
you would have expected to find roaming free on this island when you were
alive. As a kid, I read a whole book about how they returned to the country
after centuries of being extinct, but that was a fantasy. They were something
much older than the tamed land you knew, older still than the empty one
that we have inherited from you. But there’s no question they do fit the
wilderness that time is turning it back into.
Wolves.
In the circle of light cast by the flaming torch in her hand, John Dark
stood with the horses, one of which had a sheet of blood washed down its
flank. A dead wolf lay in front of her. And Jip stood at bay beside her,
snarling out at the loose ring of wolves circling them. The wolves moved all
the time, never still for long if they did stop, always pacing and watching. I
could see the glint of their eyes on the other side of the horses, behind John
Dark. The circular movement masked the fact that they were slowly but
definitely getting closer. She seemed to realise this, and kept on turning
herself, cutting fiery swathes through the night with her torch, trying to
force them back. The horses were terrified, eyes rolled wide in their heads,
but they stayed close to her. At first, I thought it was because they trusted
her to protect them. Then I remembered she had hobbled them so that they
wouldn’t stray.
There was one wolf that was bigger than the others, and where they
circled left, it circled right, which added to the confusion and the difficulty
in keeping track of them. It kept its belly close to the ground as it moved.
John Dark was trying to keep her eye on all the wolves at once. Jip just
watched the big wolf. The dog was stiff and quivering with bottled-up
tension, almost fizzing with the fight building up inside him. It was a look
that terrified me almost as much as the wolves themselves. It meant Jip had
decided that when the wolves got too close, he would kill the big one first,
before going on to the next and the next. That was how his mind worked.
He was born without an inch of back-off in him, and I think—being a terrier
—he always assumed he’d win and would never stop until he did. Until he
didn’t. At which point he’d be too dead to care much.
It was a big wolf. About the size of two, maybe two and a half Jips.
 I realised there was a sort of plan to the way the wolf pack moved. It
kept John Dark just distracted enough trying to keep track of them all so
that they could each move a little bit closer every time her back was
momentarily turned. I wanted to shout a warning, but didn’t want to distract
her. Now I realise that I too was getting mesmerised and immobilised by the
movement of the pack.
I was certainly distracted enough to miss the first lunge the big wolf
made at the rear of the already bloodied horse.
Jip was un-distractible. He hit the wolf broadside on, like a small
snarling battering ram that bit into the wolf’s neck as the momentum of his
attack knocked it over and the two of them somersaulted across the grass.
The wolf threw him off and rolled to his feet before Jip did. Now Jip was
stuck between the big wolf and the others. The big wolf snarled and stepped
towards him as two smaller wolves slunk behind Jip, into his blind spot.
John Dark swung the torch towards the big wolf who turned and looked
at her, just in time to see the gun come up and point at his head.
It went click.
Any ammunition that remains from your time is so old and unreliable
that it is always less likely to shoot as hang fire, which is why I was raised
to the bow. The look the wolf gave her, even as it cringed away from the
swinging flames of the torch, was almost human in its contempt.
Then one of the wolves behind Jip darted in to try and bite out the
hamstrings in his back leg, and as Jip jumped and turned so fast that I heard
the wolf’s teeth clash on the empty space where he had just been, the big
wolf twisted away from John Dark as if it had had eyes in the back of its
head all the time, and sprang for the back of Jip’s unprotected neck.
The wolf jerked in mid-air and hit Jip solidly in the back, hitting him
like a sack of bricks, just as heavy—and just as inanimate. The back of the
arrow stuck out of the base of its skull, buried to the fletch. Even if I were
to touch a bow again, I’d never make another shot as good as that. And the
funny thing is that I don’t remember thinking I should fire, or aiming, or
drawing or loosing the string. All I remember is the arrow in flight and the
sure knowledge that it was not going to miss, and then the sound of it
hitting which was like the noise an axe makes when it bites into the wood.
It must have severed the spinal cord at the very top, killing the wolf as it
leapt, so that it was dead on landing.
 Jip must have known the wolf was dead before the wolf did, because he
didn’t even try to fight it as it landed on him. Instead he shrugged the body
off and scooted beneath the horses’ bellies to take up his previous position,
keeping guard with John Dark, watching the bits of the circling pack she
couldn’t keep track of.
She looked across the darkness at me. If she was surprised to see me free
and with a new arrow nocked and ready, she didn’t show it.
On core de fur, she shouted, gesturing with the guttering torch. On core
de fur!
It was clear what she meant. It was also clear that her eyes were not the
only ones now looking at me. I turned and pounded back up to the campfire
as fast as I could. I grabbed the other loo garoo sticks and lit one.
I heard her shout from below.
Veet! she shouted. Veet!
Jip barked to underscore the urgency of whatever she was saying.
I went back down the steps three at a time, and when I got to the bottom
I didn’t stop, but hurdled the fence and ran at the wolves with the fire held
in front of me, waving it back and forth like a scythe. They parted and then
I was inside the ring with Jip and John Dark and the three horses. There was
no need for talking. Her stick was dying in her hands, so I handed her the
other one and took over keeping the wolves at bay while she lit it. Jip
barked at me, exulting in the midst of all this danger. I think he was happy
because even though there was a bigger pack out there, now he had his own
pack with him.
We were together, but the night was still going to last longer than the
remaining two torches. John Dark fumbled with hers, holding it in the same
hand as her gun which she broke and tried to reload with two more
cartridges. I understood why she was doing it, but took little comfort from it
when she snapped it closed again. There was no guarantee either of the
things would fire, and the illusion of safety is a danger all of its own. Out of
habit I went to retrieve my arrow from the big wolf. I swung my torch to
keep the others back and flipped it on its back with my foot. It was solid
and much heavier than I expected. It looked doglike enough for me to feel a
pang of something close to guilt as I reached down, put my foot on its neck
and pulled the flat-headed arrow all the way out. The other wolves seemed
to growl a little deeper as I did so. The shaft was red from tip to butt by the
time I got it out, and I snapped my wrist to clear the blood off the feathers,
sending a spray of red arcing towards them. This seemed to enrage them
further, and two began to howl.
I risked a quick look at John Dark and caught her wincing as she moved.
Her wound was obviously hurting. Maybe the stitches had torn open. The
torches were burning down and we were running out of time.
I knew what we had to do.
There! I shouted, pointing at the red cube cut into the darkness above.
We take the horses to the fire!
She stared at me. I pointed at the horses and did my best to mime that
we should all go up the steps to the safety of the concrete box and the fire
within.
It will be safe, I shouted. There are walls! The fire will last longer than
—
She shouted something angrily at me, but she was nodding agreement. I
think she was telling me she understood and I should shut up and we should
get on with it before the last two sticks of fire began to gutter away and
leave us blind and undefended in the darkness.
She stepped quickly across and gave me her torch, then quickly
unhobbled the horses. She took the reins of all of them in one hand, slinging
the gun over her shoulder before she reached for the torch. Then she nodded
up at the square firelit cave.
Al on zee, she said.
Slowly and awkwardly, with the wolves following all the way. John
Dark led the horses over the barrier, which they didn’t like, and up the
narrow, steep steps between the endless lines of seats, which they liked
even less. Jip came with us, doing his own kind of circular patrol around us,
keeping close but growling at every wolf who ventured a little nearer than
the others. I brought up the rear, walking backwards, trying to keep the
wolves in front and to either side of me within the edge of my vision. I had
my bow slung on my back, but in my free hand I carried an arrow, ready to
stab at anything that leapt at me. Other than the low growling, there was
very little noise apart from the scrape of the horses’ progress up the wet
steps. I backed into one of the horses as we went and it whinnied and lashed
out at me with its hoof. It missed, but the side of its leg made glancing
contact and knocked me over, so fast and unexpectedly that I fell
awkwardly, face down with one arm tangled in a seat. I heard something
snap and for a moment knew for certain it was my arm, then realised it was
the arrow. The torch lay on the concrete steps below me, half rolled under
one of the plastic seats that was already beginning to catch fire from it, and
beyond that two pairs of wolf’s eyes gleamed hungrily, low to the ground
and getting closer.
I felt wolf paws on my back, and knew I was done for, and then I heard
the wolf on top of me bark warningly at the two pairs of eyes that then
slunk back a bit, and I knew it was Jip defending me and not a wolf at all. I
scrambled to my feet and darted forward to retrieve the torch.
Jip stayed close to me for the rest of the clumsy retreat up the terrace, as
if he didn’t quite trust in my ability to take care of myself, which was
probably an accurate assessment of the situation. He kept up a low, almost
subsonic growl all the way. I found the rumble of it next to my leg was
quite comforting. There was one final spasm of ungainliness as John Dark
had to yank and cajole the already very spooked horses into the confined
space of the landing, and then we were in—protected on three sides by solid
walls with a staircase behind us that we’d have to keep an eye on, and only
the open end of the box to defend.
We stood there, panting hard, suddenly immobile and not sure what to
do now other than wait.
Mared, she said.
The horses had not liked being led to the back of the landing, past the
fire. They were crammed in next to each other, still skittish. John Dark said
something else, something I missed but that sounded irritated and worried. I
followed her gaze. The fire was not as big as I’d remembered. And there
was certainly not enough wood to keep it blazing until dawn.
It’s okay, I said. I’ve got it.
The plastic seat I’d accidentally set fire to was still burning halfway
down the terrace. It backlit the wolves who were now arranged in a lumpy
half-circle among the lines of seats sloping away below us. The prickling on
the back of my neck and the growling that Jip was directing up into the
darkness above the mouth of our cave made me sure the circle was a full
one and there were wolves up there waiting to leap if we ventured too far.
I pointed out the burning seat to John Dark, then pointed at the seats
beyond the mouth of the cave. Then I unslung the bow from my back and
put an arrow in, ready. She understood my sign language and nodded.
As she walked out and lit two seats on either side of the steps below, I
watched her back by keeping my arrow trained into the gloom above us. No
wolf sprang down on us then or later in the night as we made more forays
out to light more plastic beacons when the first and then the following pairs
guttered out. It might have been that there were no wolves circling above
us. It might have been that those that were there were so impressed by my
marksmanship that they were too scared to try it. Or, and I think this is the
real truth, the noxious chemical smell of the thick black smoke that plumed
above the burning plastic made them run somewhere safer, downwind.
We made it through until first light, protected by the fire. Safe, but at the
cost of a foul chemical taste and smell that stayed in my mouth and nose for
days afterwards. I understand why there’s still so much plastic in the world,
still pale fragments of who-knows-what-it-once-was washing up on the
beaches, or just junk slowly weathering away like all the seats in the
stadium. If you’d tried to burn it all on a rubbish heap, you’d have choked
the world to death.
The dawn was accompanied by a complete absence of wolf, except the
dead one down on the old playing field.
John Dark and I had taken it in turns to sleep. The light came while I
was dozing and I woke to find her poking at me with her boot and nodding
towards the field.
Eels on two party, she said. Lay loo. Eels on two party.
I think lay loo means wolves. But whatever that meant, it was good,
because it was her younger happier face saying it.
Then a serious look came over her.
Eel foe parlay, she said. Tew nay pars un day Freemen. Okay. May eel
foe parlay day Freemen.
She pulled the key from her pocket, looked at it and showed it to me.
Okay? she said. Okay, Griz?
I nodded. At the time I didn’t really know what she meant, but at least
she wasn’t trying to tie me up. I sensed things were better between us now.
After our shared ordeal, I felt she knew I had saved her and the horses, and
that whatever the misunderstanding about the key was, it was at least now
agreed to be a misunderstanding, and that we would sort it out.
Maybe it was the sunshine peeking over the edge of the stand opposite,
but everything felt more secure. More optimistic. Safer. Trustworthy.
Turned out she wanted to tell me a story.
And we already know how safe those things are.
 Chapter 23

Freemen

The story of the Freemen came in fits and starts over the next few days as
we travelled. It was told in a mix of mime and pointing at words in the
dictionary, and because of that I might still not have it quite right, but I
think I have the general idea. I do know I have the specific reason John
Dark came to this place looking for the one Freeman in particular. I know
what her grudge against him was. He had killed her daughters.
But before we get to who the Freemen were, or maybe even still are, I
should put us on the road again. After the night of the wolves, we left the
stadium, taking our honey and the horses. The one that had been wolf-bit
seemed almost unaware of the damage to its flank until John Dark put a
thick wipe of honey across the wound, and then it flinched and whinnied
and tried to bite her. I was holding its head and the convulsion nearly pulled
me off my feet.
She had quizzed me at first light about the way I had found the key. As
best I could, I explained about the tower and the pile of clothes and my
feeling that the person—who she called “Freeman”—had killed himself by
jumping off the platform. She asked me about the clothes and I told her
about the boots and the red-hooded jacket. The jacket seemed to confirm
things for her.
It also untethered something behind her eyes, and she sat for a long
while, not looking at me but not looking away either, as if she had forgotten
I was there while she watched whatever it was that had been pulling her
away. I think knowing that the Freeman she was hunting was dead was not
a simple release for her. I think she had filled whatever the hole was inside
her with the quest to find him, and now that was not possible, she didn’t
feel satisfaction, but a different kind of loss. I wonder if that explains why
she rode with me. She suddenly had no purpose. Maybe she rode with me
while she worked out what her new purpose was going to be. Maybe she
just wanted company. Maybe she knew more about where I was going than
she let on. But she did ride with me, and I was happy with the company, and
grateful for the horse to ride on. And as we rode, as we camped, as we sat
by fires and streams, this is what she told me, in the most halting and
patchwork way.
She and her family lived away from the sea, near the mountains between
what used to be France and Switzerland. She said it was good farmland and
there was snow most winters. There was a big lake on the Switzerland side
and they went there and fished in the summer. They were horse people like
we were boat people. That part of the story was easy enough to understand.
They lived there because of the Freemen, although none of her family had
ever seen a live Freeman. The Freemen had once lived there, because of the
“brain circle” underground.
That’s where our trouble with communicating made things a little hazy.
She said there was a big circle, underground, and it was said to be full of a
brain. That seemed wrong, so after some back and forth with the dictionary
we agreed that by brain she meant machines, or a computer. She had never
seen them as they were locked away in a circular tunnel a hundred metres
under the ground, but they must be long dead as there was no electricity to
wake them up and make them remember things. Her father’s father’s father
had gone down into the rock and seen the endless curve with one of the last
Freemen. He had said it hummed. And then the Freemen had turned off the
lights and it had stopped humming and they had left it and locked the
entrance as they went.
It was a story her family told, that they had come here when the last of
the old people who worked on the big underground machines were very old,
and had helped them until they were gone. Those old people were Freemen.
They had worked until they died, trying to make the underground ring
remember so much about what humans had discovered so that it became
human too. They had tried to teach her great-grandparents their secrets, but
it was too late. They were already horse people and farmers. They were not
science, she said. That’s what John Dark said, and it was what she had been
told: they were farmers, and not science now. Her family had been told that
the underground brain was just one of several across the world. She said
there were once other groups of Freemen trying to do the same thing.
Life, she said by pointing at the words in the book. Life in machine.
Body die. No babies carry new life. Freemen try make life go in machine.
And then she found another word, and her blunt finger stabbed it to the
page.
Freemen mad.
Freemen say: life in silicon.
I asked her what that meant.
She shrugged and said it was something her great-grandparents told her
it was what the Freemen said a lot.
Freemen say life bigger than people. No babies. No new bodies. So life
not in bodies. In silicon.
Silicon is a kind of rock. Life in rock?
It made no sense then. It makes less sense now even though I know a
little more about the Freemen and the scientist who they named themselves
after. But I got that part of the story in plain English, later, from my worst
enemy. And even though that helped it sort of make sense, just thinking
about the size and the ambition of what they tried and failed to do leaves me
feeling sadder and more alone somehow. Definitely more helpless.
You had an internet. You lived in a web that linked you with all the
answers that ever were, and you carried them everywhere with you in a
glass and metal rectangle that was pocket-sized but could talk to satellites.
You never needed to be stupid, or not know things about everything.
We’re out here on the wrong side of a dying world trying to piece
together the story of what’s happened from torn fragments that we can only
snatch at as they flutter past us in the wind. Like with the army tank with
the doll’s head in the gun-barrel under the fallen petrol station canopy, I will
never know why everything happened. Or what it meant. I will never see
the big story.

She said there were other Freemen and though the tunnel was locked away,
her family always remembered where the door was in case one of the other
Freemen came, but they never did. Not for three generations, by which time
it was quite clear the Baby Bust Freemen were long gone.
And then the Freeman came from the east, riding out of the mountains,
carrying the key that matched the symbol on the door of the Freemen’s
cave. The key that I had thought was a pendant. The man who killed them
all.
He came from far away across the mountains. He was not one of the old
people. His family learned from the Freemen. They did not become horse
people. Not farmers. Not only farmers. They learned what their fathers and
grandfathers learned. To be what he was. Electricians. The word in the
dictionary was almost the same in French as English, only with an e instead
of an a.
Understand machines not, she said, pointing at the words. Only know
turn on power.
So I think the electrician and his family had been taught how to maintain
the power at a place where other Freemen had buried a brain machine, and
had passed that on down the generations.
Power electrician home not work, John Dark indicated. Bad time.
Electrician come find family me.
So maybe when the underground computer brain his family had tended
all the long years had died, he came looking for one of the other ones to
make that work.
Except he couldn’t and it didn’t.
Brain dead, she stabbed. Power dead.
She was crouched beside me over a campfire in the dark when she told
me that, because I remember she had to tilt the pages to catch the light from
the flames as she did so.
Ordy natoor footoo, she said out loud, and spat into the flames.
And then he had killed her family. Not on purpose. But when you’re
dead the how doesn’t matter as much as it does to the ones you left behind.
He brought a disease.
La pest, she called it.
Maybe that’s what made him come looking for another Freeman
settlement. Maybe his family died of la pest. Anyway, he brought it with
him, because she saw the boil scars under his arms when he bathed. And his
were healed but the ones that her family got didn’t.
Jay duh la sharns, she said, her face twisted and sour as she spat into the
fire again.
Sharns, as she later showed me in the dictionary, is spelled “chance” and
means lucky.
The sour twist in her face meant she wasn’t.
He left while she was nursing the last of the people she had loved, and
then when she had buried them, she followed him with nothing in her mind
but the need to send him after them.
I understood without her having to put a name to it, but before she put
the dictionary away for the night, she showed me anyway.
Vengeance is the same word in both languages.
 Chapter 24

An itch between the shoulder blades

She showed me her armpits. After she told me about la pest, she showed me
there were no boil scars. She wanted me to know she had not caught the
disease and was not carrying infection with her the way the electrician had.
She meant it to be friendly, to show things were okay between us and that
was the way she wanted them to be from now on. Up until that point, I had
not thought ahead enough to worry that if he had infected her family, she
might be carrying la pest in the same way. It didn’t quite stop the worry she
had now raised in my mind, because I didn’t know much about how
diseases worked or how the germs went from person to person. I wasn’t that
clear on what germs actually are and if they all work in the same way.
So we rode on together, and now I worried a little bit about whether I
was going to catch la pest, but not enough to leave. I decided that however
it was that germs went from person to person, if it was going to jump from
her to me it would have already happened, probably when I was sewing her
up, my hands smeared with her blood. But she looked healthy and strong
and after a couple of days I forgot about it. There were other things to fill
my head by then.
The higher ground began to slope away to the east, and we entered a
new area of vegetation. The scrubby moorland, overgrown and extensive as
it was, was nothing compared to the huge swathe of trees we now found
ourselves descending into. What had been the midlands of the mainland
was now really a great forest of broadleaf trees, mainly beech and oaks and
sycamores. On the map, the land ahead should have been full of towns and
villages, webbed together with roads and railways. It looked clear enough
on the map, but as we looked down on it, it was now hard to make out how
the variations in the patchwork of forest matched the confident—but much
more than a century old—marks on the paper. We were looking down on a
wilderness of treetops. Maybe this was what looking down onto clouds
looked like. Only green.
This was when my compass really came into its own, because when we
entered the wood, there was no more chance of navigating by landmarks.
We rode in among the trees and it was immediately a very different world.
Because of the sun filtering through the high canopy of leaves, the dappled
light all around us was green. It was almost like being underwater. But it
was most like being in a story, one from my childhood, the one about the
hobbit that Ferg read us one winter when the weather outside was too fierce
to do anything in for weeks on end. It was a story I loved, but I had had to
imagine the woods and the forests and the strange creatures that peopled
them because, as I said, there is no real woodland on the islands: the only
dwarves there are the trees themselves, which are stunted things it would be
easier to trip over than fall out of.
But this greenwood was deeper and greener than any I had imagined.
There was more birdsong. More insects, like the big shiny black beetle that
gave me a shock scuttling past my head when I leant back against an oak
tree on our first halt. It had mouthparts that looked like the antlers on a deer
and was as big as my thumb, like a metal toy. And then there were
butterflies. I hadn’t really imagined a wood would have butterflies, but they
were all around, orange ones, purple ones and my favourites which were
black and white and appeared to flap less than the other butterflies as they
glided silently between the trees, seeming to use no effort to do so.
The lack of a distant horizon made me much more aware of the sounds
close by me. Not just the horses’ hooves on the ground, or the small
branches breaking or whipping back once we’d pushed them aside in order
to pass: it was the more intimate noises, the horses’ snorting, and my
breathing. And John Dark’s humming. She was always humming when she
rode. It was not exactly tuneless, but it was no single tune, and no mix of
any ones that I recognised. It was more the idea of a tune, but with
important bits left out. I don’t know if she was even aware that she did it. It
was mostly okay, but sometimes I found it annoying. Usually when I was
tired and hungry, which was when almost anything was annoying.
 I know having the fanciful thoughts about the hobbit story may seem
strange because I was on as serious a journey as I could imagine, going to
get my dog back from someone who was likely to be ruthless and wholly
opposed to my plan. Not the time to be thinking about a child’s book with
wizards and elves. I had thought what getting Jess back might involve, and I
knew that in the last resort, if it came to it, I would use force. And since
Brand was bigger than me, using force likely meant doing it at a distance
with my bow, and using my bow meant maiming or maybe killing. The
chance of an arrowhead finding an artery even if I didn’t mean it to was
real, and I wasn’t cocky enough to think I could just bluff him. So a bad
second choice of violence likely lay at the end of my journey if my first
better choice, stealth and theft, didn’t work out. I was really holding on to
the fact I was good at not being seen when hunting.
My fantasy was that Brand would be there (not a guaranteed thing) and
that I would sneak up on him (this in my mind’s eye meant darkness) and
that Jess would be calm enough when she realised I was there (wholly
miraculous if it was to happen) that she would then let me sneak her silently
away. This would neatly pay Brand back, giving him the rude awakening he
had given me: a new dawn and the knowledge he had been outwitted. In
some of the daydreaming which I allowed myself, I stole his boat too and
sailed home, leaving him arriving at the beach or jetty just too late to do
anything than shake an aggrieved fist at me. Or in other versions, he smiled
that white dazzle of his and shook his head like a good loser,
acknowledging he had been viked and outsmarted by a better pirate. But I
was pretty sure that honour among thieves was just a pretty phrase I’d read,
and not something that existed in the real world. So daydreams apart, there
would be blood at the end of this journey. And I didn’t know how I felt
about that. I’m ashamed to say I had felt fine about it in the flushes of anger
that Brand had provoked me to—the theft of Jess, the poisoning of my
family, marooning me on Iona and the burning of my boat—but violence is
an ugly thing and in the calmer moments I racked my brains for other ways
to get what I wanted. Better a brain than a fist. A brain can hold anything,
from giant things, like distant stars and planets, to tiny things we can’t see,
like germs. A brain can even hold things that aren’t and never were, like
hobbits. A brain can hold the whole universe, a fist just holds what little it
can grab. Or hits what it can’t.
 I wondered if the man who wrote about the hobbit had ridden through
the greenwood like this. Despite the bird noise it was a peaceful place that
lulled you. Without the compass it would have been easy to get lost. It was
a maze without walls, just tree trunks and bushes, and animal tracks beaten
through them. John Dark rode with her hood up and the grey hair escaping
it, astride a similarly grey horse. From the back, there was something a bit
wizardish about her, and it was easy enough to imagine there were other
eyes in the forest watching us from behind a screen of leaves or brambles. It
was even easy to imagine the bigger trees looking down on us and noticing
us passing. I thought a lot about that book as we wove east among the oaks
and beeches, and that is certainly why I called the house we ended up taking
refuge in the Homely House, because that was the name of the house the
travellers in the story made a much needed halt in. And the Homely House
we found ourselves in did, in its way, contain a kind of magic, though the
magic was in truth just the kindness of long dead people, not immortal
elves.
The woods had swallowed everything on this side of the mainland in a
way they hadn’t in the west. I don’t know why there was a difference like
that—but it made it a strange journey. Often I’d look at a stand of brambles
and realise it was the body of a house, and then look around and realise I
hadn’t noticed we were weaving through a collection of buildings in a
village or on the edge of a town, surrounded by houses that had collapsed
into mulch, or become roofless shells out of which trees now grew to a
height of a hundred feet or more. Often the clue was realising the thinner
“tree trunks” were old street-light poles that had remained upright and
unrotted. Brick and stone houses of course lasted better than the ones built
with plaster and wood and plastic, but again most still had roofs that had
fallen in and were now just shells full of healthy rot and vegetation.
On this side of the mainland in the great forest it was much harder to see
the hard edges of your world.
One afternoon we found ourselves riding alongside an enormous cliff of
dark green that I later worked out was a yew hedge, and when we came to a
gap in it we saw the ash trees on the other side were growing around a pale
stone church. The gravestones were mostly tumbled flat, and I only noticed
the first one that gave the clue to what all the others were because my horse
slipped on it. I looked down, saw the writing “Gone to my Father’s House”
and knew it was a graveyard. The squat church still had its roof. It looked
hunkered down somehow, like a squat blockhouse determined to fight the
encroaching trees, most of which were at least the height or higher than its
stubby tower.
Light was just beginning to fail, even though there were a couple more
hours of visibility left in it, but John Dark was tired and made a noise and a
gesture that indicated we might as well stay the night here, pointing at the
door of the church. I was keen to get on, but not so keen that I didn’t, for a
moment, think of agreeing. Even if we couldn’t force the door, the covered
stone porch would have made a good dry cave to sleep in.
Then we heard Jip growling. The air went very still. John Dark suddenly
had her gun in her hand, her head swivelling back and forth, trying to see
what it was that Jip was reacting to. I unslung my bow and nocked an
arrow. A purple butterfly went past between us, but apart from that, nothing
else seemed to be moving in the wood. And that itself was ominous. It had
suddenly gone very quiet. No birds sang.
It was so still that Jip’s growl seemed to vibrate the air around us.
I couldn’t see anything. But I had the same sense of something large, of
something aware of us that I had had in that museum, when we’d slept with
the lady in the yellow dress and had woken to feel as much as hear
something rubbing round the corner of the building in the street below us.
Pa bon, said John Dark quietly, and backed the three horses out of the
graveyard. We both kept our weapons ready and continued on our way, very
aware of every noise and movement around us. After ten minutes or so, the
ground began to rise and the birds began to sing again.
I don’t know what had alarmed Jip. I don’t know if it was something
about the church, or if there was some animal watching us that he took
exception to, but as we rode away he kept up a rearguard action, circling
back and standing in our trail, staring down the way we came, hackles still
raised and nose testing the wind behind us. It was unnerving in one way, but
in another way it was comforting to know he was there to sense the things
we couldn’t see.
Griz, said John Dark. I turned to see she had paused her horse beside a
beech tree. She pointed at the trunk.
The grey-green bark had been shredded, and recently. Something had
hacked and dragged sharp scratches through it, exposing the vigorous
orange of the underbark and the paler sapwood below it. They were deep,
angry gouges, and whatever had made them was not just strong but big,
because even the lowest of the slashes were started about five or six feet off
the forest floor.
Pa bon, said John Dark and made her hand into a claw which mimed
slashing at the tree.
Gross griefs, she said. Pa bon do too.
And then she mimed keeping eyes and ears open, and led on. I paused
by the clawed tree trunk and felt the gashes. They were deep and they were
still wet. This had happened recently, which meant that whatever had done
it was not far away. Maybe it was the thing we had sensed by the church
among the ashes.
Jip peed on the tree in a defiant and matter-of-fact way, and we moved
on. Maybe it was a boar like the one that attacked me, I thought. Maybe the
gouges were tusk marks. But that would still mean a giant boar, which was
not a cheery thought as the night came on. Even less cheery was my real
thought which was that they were claw marks, and I had no idea which of
the animals I had thought were native to the mainland could have made
them.
Zoos. I’ve read about them and I’ve seen pictures. Places you put
animals when their natural habitats got swept away by farms and mines and
things. Were they good? Did you go to zoos? Did it feel like visiting the
animals in a prison, or was it exciting? Do you think the animals knew they
could never go home because home had been cut down and burned and
turned into something else, full of people and machines and not them?
Maybe they would have been grateful then, happy that you found
somewhere for them to be instead of just killing them all. Or maybe they
just went a bit mad. I saw a black and white photograph in a book and the
chimpanzee was behind the bars and the look in its eyes was just like a
person, lost and frightened, even though it seemed to be grinning like a
maniac. Maybe it was just showing its teeth.
Anyway. Zoos.
I thought about zoos as we rode away from the church and the slashed
beech trunk, and what I thought about them was this: what happened to the
animals as the world slowly aged and died? Did you kill them in their
cages, or did you let them go, to fill up the world that was slowly emptying
of you? I thought a dying world would have had more on its mind than
shipping wild animals back to the places they’d been taken from, but
perhaps I’m wrong. I thought it was most likely that you let them get old
like you and then die or maybe put them gently to sleep instead. But there
was another thought that stalked me as we rode onwards, which was that
maybe someone had let the animals out and left them to find their own way
home. And if so maybe some of the animals had just decided to stay. After
all, the world was hotter than it had been. The mainland had not been a
good habitat for them when their ancestors had been stolen and brought
north to the zoos in the first place. Maybe the climate changed enough to
make it good for them. I was thinking of tigers and lions but it could as
easily have been bears. I hoped if it was something it was bears because
bears did not, as far as I knew then, stalk people and horses.
And, like Jip who kept looking back down the trail, I couldn’t quite lose
the itch between my shoulder blades that told me something was watching
them every time I turned my back.
 Chapter 25

The Homely House

John Dark had the same itch between her shoulder blades. She didn’t check
behind her, but she looked from side to side much more often than normal,
and she never put the gun back in the scabbard that hung from the saddle in
front of her knees. I think she didn’t look back because she knew Jip and I
were bringing up the rear, behind her and the packhorse. It was a kind of
trust. The packhorse between us was also getting jittery. And again, it may
have been because it was the end of a long day of travel, or it may have
been that it could sense something out there stalking us, but the spooked
horse made me more aware of the shadows lengthening around us as the
light dimmed.
Jip suddenly burst into action, plunging into the undergrowth and
barking wildly. We both stopped and swivelled in our saddles, listening for
what our eyes couldn’t see. Jip crashed through the undergrowth, still
barking, getting further and further away. It was hard to hear if he was
chasing something and if so, what it was. And then the faint barking was
cut off short and there was no sound of movement that I could hear.
La pan? said John Dark, and mimed rabbit ears over her head.
I shrugged and turned back to listen, peering into the late afternoon
dimness, ears straining. Jip suddenly bolting away like that was unsettling,
and the barking stopping so abruptly was worse.
I whistled and waited, then whistled some more.
I was just about to turn back when he trotted out of the bushes, head up,
tongue out, looking very pleased with himself.
John Dark looked pleased too, but I noticed she quickly tried to hide the
smile as soon as I saw it.
Jip, she said, tapping the side of her head, as if testing whether it was
cracked. Eel ay foo.
By this time, I had worked out that eel ay is French for “it is”. The other
word was clear, in context, given the tapping of the head.
Yes, Jip, I said, shaking my head at him. You are foo.
Jip just kept panting and smiling, tongue lolling redly out of his mouth
as he did so. His air of satisfaction, given the fact he was not carrying a new
dead rabbit friend, made me think he had chased something off, rather than
chased something down. I don’t think Jip could have chased off a lion or a
tiger or even a bear, unless it was a very small and unusually timid one, but
as we proceeded the itch between my shoulder blades seemed to have gone.
And given the fact that neither of us had actually seen anything stalking us,
it is possible we had invented the stalker and so brought it along to shadow
us only in our minds. We both relaxed a little and pressed on.
The next halt came about half an hour later when John Dark pushed up
through a stand of low hazel trees and pulled her horse to a stop. I emerged
beside her and followed her gaze.
The Homely House sat in a clearing on the edge of a steep slope, with
trees crowded in behind, but an open glade in front of it. The trees weren’t
green, but a dark purple, which looked closer to inky black in the failing
light. They were, I knew by now, copper beeches. They made the stone with
which the house was built look pale in contrast. It was a big two-storeyed
house, and would have been old even when you were alive. It was wide
rather than tall and felt tucked into the crest of the slope, as if it had been
comfortable there for centuries, watching the world change below it. There
was a high wall on one side of it, and a couple of lower buildings to the
other side, built of the same aged stone.
Bon, said John Dark. E. C.
She rode on, up to the high wall. There was an oak door, grey with age
and studded with big nailheads the size of limpets. She dismounted and
tried it. It was stiff and the hinges graunched alarmingly as she pulled it
towards her, kicking down the grass tussocks which had grown in its way
since it was last opened. And then she stepped through the door in the wall
and disappeared. I got off my horse and took a moment to stretch and
scrabble the hair between Jip’s ears, and then I heard her calling and
followed her in.
It was—had been—a walled garden. There was just enough order left to
see that once there had been a neat grid of fruit trees at the centre of it, and
glass houses had been built against the two walls that caught the sun. One
of them had collapsed, but the other was more or less intact, and John Dark
was standing in it. Her mouth was smiling and dripping with wetness. She
had a half-eaten fruit in her hand. I thought it was an apple, but she
beckoned me and pulled another off the tree scaling the wall behind her.
The day had been a long and hot one. As I walked over to her, I was
engulfed in the thickest, headiest smell I had ever experienced. It was sun
and it was warmth and it was clean sweetness—all distilled together.
Nothing on the island smelled like that. And the apple? Wasn’t an apple at
all. Its skin wasn’t shiny, but matt and furry, and it was yellow and pink,
almost red.
John Dark grinned and bit some more out of the one in her hand.
Pesh, she said. Pesh bon, Griz, pesh bon.
I bit into the fruit. It still held the heat of the long day’s sun and was
much softer than an apple, though the only apples I have tasted come from
the walled garden on Eriskay, and they are small, hard and sour. This tasted
big and generous, and sweeter than anything I had ever tried. It didn’t have
the sharp bittersweetness of Brand’s marmalade. It had a shape that filled
your mouth, a rounded and warm sweetness that immediately made the
saliva run and mix with the juices in anticipation of the next bite. It tasted
just like the smell around us, but more so. It was like tasting a smile. You’d
have thought this fanciful, I expect. Your shops would have been full of
pesh and other things even more exotic. You probably wouldn’t even have
been able to remember the first pesh you ate, among all the different tastes
you were used to. And of all the glories and riches in your gone world,
that’s one thing I don’t envy you for. That’s something I have that you
didn’t: the glory of that first pesh, taken in the warm sun at the end of a
long, tiring day. It was perfect.
Not many first times are perfect. That was.
We turned the horses out to graze, hobbled for the night, and then we
faced the house. The windows were narrow and made of stone with
diamonds of glass held in place by lead strips, like the house I had left in
flames, but this house seemed much older than that one. The memory of
having burned it out of spite made me feel a bit bad, but the words painted
and still visible across the door of this new place made me feel better.

WELCOME, STRANGER

It was the same kind of once bright spray writing that had been used to
put the Bible verse on the church in South Uist, but the hand that had
written was firmer and more generous. The original colour of the paint had
faded to almost white, but the message was still clear.
John Dark looked at the words and then at me.
Okay, I said.
I stepped past her and tried to open the door. It was also oak, like the
gate in the walled garden. I could see from the thick crust of moss that had
grown across the bottom gap that it had not been opened in living memory,
and I was fully expecting we would have to kick and shove at it, but it
didn’t even squeak too loudly as it opened with just the smallest resistance.
This was unusual enough for me to look back at John Dark and exchange a
look with her. She made a face and shrugged.
Okay, I said. Bon.
Wee, she said. Good.
I walked in. The room was low and broad and had an immediate
generous feel to it. The walls were panelled with wood. There was a wide
staircase leading to the floors above. There were carpets laid out across the
hall, dark rectangles on the lighter floor, with complicated patterns on them.
The colours were muted both by age and the layer of dust that covered
everything. The only sign of neglect was that layer of dust. The house had
been left in good order, and that had been done on purpose, as we were to
find out.
Griz, said John Dark.
I turned and found she was standing at the big table that took up the
centre of the room. There was a frame, like for a painting, and behind the
glass someone had placed a couple of sheets of paper covered in big letters.

WE HAVE GONE.
WE ARE IN THE BATHROOM AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS.
 DO NOT WORRY ABOUT MOVING US
WE ARE HAPPY THERE AS WE WERE HAPPY HERE IN
LIFE.
PLEASE MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME.
FOOD IN THE WALLED GARDEN.
FIREWOOD IN THE SHED BY THE BACK DOOR.
TAKE WHAT YOU NEED. USE WHAT YOU CAN.
STAY AS YOU PLEASE OR GO AS YOU WISH.
BE WELL. BE HAPPY. BE KIND.

I read it twice, and then I cleared my throat and tried to translate it for
John Dark. It made me feel strange, reading something directly meant for
me, written to me from the past. I mean, I know it wasn’t written for me,
Griz, but it was written for anyone who came into the house and found it
and that was me.
When I had made it clear what it said, we headed upstairs without
needing to agree to do it. It just felt the right thing to do. Paying our
respects.
They had gone neatly, making as little mess as they could, and they had
gone together. They were just bones now, tangled together in the giant
metal bathtub which had feet like a dog’s which lifted it off the ground.
Their skulls leaned together, companionably, one bigger than the other. The
water had evaporated over time, leaving a flaking, rusty tidemark that was
probably not just rust. There was a knife lying on the floor beneath the bath.
Looking round the room it was hard not to imagine their final moments.
There were saucers everywhere, full of puddled wax that had once been
candles, and where there were no candles there had been vases and buckets
full of flowers and branches, of which nothing remained but dry stalks and
twigs that crumbled to dust when I touched them. There was a green bottle
of wine with a foil around the neck, and there were two glasses lying
unbroken among the bones. It looked like the big one had held the smaller
one lying against him. I supposed they might be a man and a woman, but I
do not know what the difference is in skeletons. They had filled the room
with candlelight and flowers, and then they had got in the bath together, and
drunk the wine and then I think they had gently cut their wrists perhaps in
the warm water and I hope that they had just felt they were going to sleep in
each other’s arms. It didn’t feel a sad or a creepy room at all. Bones are just
bones. And it didn’t feel haunted. Like I say, there are no such things as
ghosts. But it felt like we were intruding.
I think John Dark felt the same.
Eels etay day john four, she said. Tray four.
Then she nodded and walked out of the room. She went downstairs to
hunt around, and I walked along the corridor looking into the rooms on
either side. They had covered everything with sheets, to keep the dust off I
think. They had been there so long that they had caught drifts of dust, and I
was coughing because I had just moved the sheet aside to look into a tall
cupboard to see if there were any good clothes or boots to vike when I
heard a noise that sent an immediate spike of fear down my spine.
It was a high-pitched woman’s scream, long and wavering, and it wasn’t
John Dark. And then there were suddenly other voices, more voices than I
had ever heard in my life.
The sound almost made me pee in shock.
And then I heard John Dark shouting for me.
 Chapter 26

Tannhäuser

It wasn’t a woman screaming, and there weren’t other people downstairs.

There was just John Dark and a blocky sort of box with a handle on the
side. The box was covered in a skin of mottled material that might have
once been made to look like leather, but it was worn and frayed and the thin
plywood beneath poked out at the edges. Its lid was open, and inside a disc
like a big flat black plate was turning around and around despite the fact a
sort of tubular metal arm like a goose’s neck appeared to be clamped over
it. When I had time to look closer, I saw that in fact it only touched the
spinning disc very lightly, with the end of a needle that went along a tiny
groove that spiralled from the outer edge to the inner circle. The centre was
a round paper label, a dark red and gold thing.
The screaming was singing, as were the other voices. And the noise
flowing under them was music. Big music. I had not heard your music
before. Not like that. I had heard music, of course, but it was all little music
—Ferg’s salvaged guitars or Bar’s tin whistle, and I had been transfixed by
the lone sadness of the violin Brand had played in the chapel on Iona. But
those were all one, at most two instruments at a time, and I had heard the
music as it was being made. It was good but compared to this it was thin.
This was music so large and deep that I could not really imagine what the
instruments were that made it. It was shocking. And frightening. It was
exhilarating and all those things in between because I was touching your
reality as you would have experienced it. I wasn’t poking through
overgrown ruins and sorting through the cracked and rotting stuff you left
behind, trying to patch together your world from the rubbish pile. This was
like a time machine: the sound I was hearing was the same sound you
would have heard if you had turned the crank on the player. These
musicians were long dead, but the sound they made together had outlived
them and all the generations following, through the Gelding, through the
Baby Bust and right on up to now.
I know you had all sorts of ways to record sound and moving pictures of
people. But the devices you used don’t work now. The electrics have not
lasted; they’ve corroded and died and your screens, big and small, are only
useful to us as glass surfaces if we need something perfectly flat. This
machine didn’t work on electricity. I opened it up carefully later and found
it ran on a big spring that you wound tension into with the handle. As it
unsprung, it turned the plate on which the disc sat, and the needle somehow
picked up the sound from the disc and sent it out into the world through
what must have been a noise box mounted on the head of the goose neck.
This was older tech, and it had outlasted the electric music machines. It
was a magic trick, this disc, catching voices in time and then holding them
across much more than a century and then releasing them into our ears at
the drop of a needle. The sound was sort of crackly, as if it had been
captured next to a fire that spat and popped as they played and sang, but
through it you could hear the music loud and clear. I didn’t see the picture
of the dog on the label until it stopped spinning. It was sitting looking into a
cone attached to another kind of music player. It was a terrier like Jip and
Jess, white where they were black. Whoever painted the dog had caught the
way they listen when something gets their attention, head cocked to one
side. At first I thought the label meant the music was called His Master’s
Voice, but when I read it and found the other discs with the same label but
different writing I figured out it was the name of the company that made the
discs.
We both agreed it was bon.
We kept the music going as we searched the house, going from room to
room, taking the note on the hall table seriously. Whenever a disc finished,
one of us would go back and put a different one on, sometimes the other
side of the one we had just heard, sometimes something completely
different. Some music slowed you down and made you want to sit and listen
to it again and again; other kinds of music made you want to jump up and
move around to it and dance. This all would have meant so much less to
you, I think. You wouldn’t have thought it a kind of magic. You probably
had hundreds of different bits of music you could listen to. I doubt you were
any more amazed at the ability of a machine to capture musicians’
performances and hold them through time for you to enjoy whenever you
wanted than you thought there was anything extraordinary about a car that
moved, or a plane that flew. What a luxury, to get used to magic like that.
I found a bigger compass that unfolded and had a round mirror and a
kind of sight on it. It was designed for walking, I think, because it hung
from a string you could put round your neck. The kitchen had knives, and
even better, a sharpening rod that looked like a pencil that would fit in my
pack without adding weight. Because of weight, I only took two knives, one
made from a single piece of stainless steel, with black dimples bored into
the handles for grip. In the study, I found a drawer with folding knives in it.
I took one with a chequered dull silver handle which had a red shield and a
white cross on it. It wasn’t as good as my Leatherman, but it was great. It
had a saw and a spike and a screwdriver as well as a blade and it was
scarcely tarnished. The blade took a good edge when I sharpened it. I also
found a really powerful pair of binoculars. They had “Trinovid” stamped
into them and the lenses were still clear and uncloudy, which was unusual. I
took them to the window and they made the distant trees leap forward
almost into the room itself. I was pleased to have them because of the
power they gave me over distance, to see where I was going. I didn’t know
they would be the root of my downfall.
And then there were the books. There was a room lined with
bookshelves from floor to ceiling next to the one with the music box in it.
John Dark wasn’t interested in it, because the books weren’t in French, but
because the room had been dark and dry and sealed they were in great
shape. I made a mask out of a square of material tied round my face and
began to explore the shelves. Book dust seems to be the worst kind of dust
in my experience. I didn’t want it in my lungs, making me cough all night. I
found a few books I knew which was like meeting old friends in a strange
place, amid a multitude that I didn’t know. In another life, if I had not been
on my way to get my dog back, I think I would have stayed there for a long
time, just reading books and listening to music and eating pesh.
There was a book on the shelves whose title caught my eye. It was
called Surprised by Joy. It was partly the title that reminded me of my lost
sister, and partly the name of the author whom I recognised because he had
written books Mum had read to us when we were little. They were the kind
I had liked, about a group of people on an adventure—children who went
through a wardrobe and found a land of magic and talking lions and an evil
ice witch. This didn’t seem to be that kind of book, not a story but a
memory about the writer’s own life. But it had a poem inside it which had
the same title as the book. I can remember the first lines as they gave me a
pang of extra familiarity:

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom
But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb.

Joy had always been in a hurry, trying to catch up with our older
siblings, determined to do exactly what they did even though she was much
younger. And the wind had taken first her kite and her over the cliff at the
back of the island where the water was certainly a deep and silent tomb. I
read it several times because I don’t quite have the way of poetry in my
head and also because when I come across a “thee” in a book I know it’s
old words and probably not written for me in the now, so my brain seems to
wander off, but the rest of the poem unravelled itself. In the end, I realised it
was about mourning someone and being betrayed by a second of happiness
that makes you forget your loss for a moment, and then feeling worse
because that unthinking instant of happiness ends up feeling like a betrayal
of the lost one.
We made a fire in the fireplace and sat with the windows open, watching
the light die on the landscape below. The music we found ourselves
listening to was like the house itself: just the right thing at the right time.
The label said it was called “The Overture” from Tannhäuser. I remember
the second a had those two dots over it. Must be a foreign name. And
wherever Tannhäuser is, I bet they have fantastic sunsets, or maybe dawns,
because the music fit them both. We sat—eating pesh and fire-roasted boar
—and played that record again and again until it was dark. It started very
slowly and confidently, building a gentle but quietly powerful tune, and
then a different instrument, I think a violin, maybe more than one, swirled
slowly in and seemed to ask a kind of mournful question answered by more
violins steadily building and then the whole thing developed into a kind of
strong upward cascade of sound that had rivulets of violin tumbling down
out of that building cliff of noise, in a way that reminded me of the
hundreds of tiny burns and streamlets that sprang down the slopes of the
island after a heavy rain. Half the music swirled you upwards, while the
other bit tumbled away in sharp, ordered fragments. That won’t make sense
unless you ever heard “The Overture” from Tannhäuser and know what I
mean, and since you don’t exist anywhere except inside my head, I suppose
it just doesn’t make sense to anyone else except me. And maybe you too, I
suppose, since you’re the one I’m talking to, trapped inside here with me.
Watching the red sunset glow and then fade to blue over the great forest
with this music playing again and again is something I will not forget. I
don’t know what the birds and the animals all around made of the noise.
They were probably as startled as we were. None of them would have heard
anything like it either.
We slept in the music room, with the fire playing shadows on the
ceiling. And when I woke, the red was back in the sky and I played the disc
one more time, and that is how I know it works even better as the sun rises.
It had more hope in it. I took that as a good omen.
As I went out to check on the horses, I heard John Dark put on some
different, faster music, and when I came back I caught her doing a kind of
jigging up and down and shaking her bottom which stopped as soon as she
heard me. She turned and her face was young and her smile not a bit
embarrassed.
Dance ay, she said, beckoning me. Dance ay, Griz. Say bon.
And so there in the house that I was already calling the Homely House,
John Dark and I danced. As we danced, Jip came in and began to prance
around us, barking. His tail was wagging, but I don’t know if he was joining
in or telling us we had gone a bit mad. We danced to something called
“Tiger Rag” and then we danced to someone called Louis Jordan and then I
must have overtightened the crank because it wouldn’t play, and that was
when I took the player apart a bit. I was terrified I’d turned the spring too
tight, maybe broken it, perhaps trapping all that music back in the disc,
never to escape again. I had a horrible cold feeling of guilt as I sat and used
my new knife and the Leatherman to unscrew the top and tilt it so I could
see the mechanism. I jiggled and poked and nothing sounded broken, and
then John Dark, who had been sitting and watching me with interest,
disappeared and came back with a little can with a spout and a plunger.
Wheel, she said and pressed the plunger. A little drop of golden oil
appeared and fell to the floor. She handed it to me. I used it to make the
mechanism slippy again, and worked some into the hole where the crank
handle went. And then I put it all back together and by a miracle it worked
again.
We didn’t do any more dancing though. I looked at the sky and saw it
was towards midday already. I didn’t want to leave, but I knew staying was
a trap. A nice trap, and well meant by the people who had lived here and
sealed it all up so as to preserve it as a haven for those who might come
after. But a snare all the same.
I made it clear I wanted to leave.
Say bon E. C., said John Dark.
I know, I said. But I have to go.
I pointed to the east.
I have to get my dog.
Mime and pointing at the dictionary followed and then she went for a
walk in the walled garden and I went to hunt rabbits with Jip but they were
all gone or sleeping far underground. I sat with Jip looking out over the sea
of trees to the west and south of us, and listened to the birdsong and the
murmur of the wind. He rolled on his back at my feet, which is not
something he does very often, and I took as an attempt to cheer me up. I
scratched him on the special place on the side of his ribs and his leg jigged
up and down as it always did.
And then we went back into the house and found John Dark with a pile
of fresh pesh and a finger pointing at the dictionary, jabbing at the word for
tomorrow.
Okay, I said.
Okay, she said.
We both made separate passes through the house before it got dark,
looking through the neatly laid out objects stored away for those who came
later. I decided to take a different set of books about trees and plants, and a
couple more pocket-sized leather-bound ones that had thin paper like onion
skin. Big, but light. They were books I had heard of from reading other
books. One was The Iliad, one was Treasure Island and the other The
Odyssey. Looked like a lot of reading in those slim volumes, and I thought
we had many nights ahead of us.
I also took a hat and a long oilskin raincoat. Its collar had been eaten by
something, maybe a family of moths, but the greeny-brown oilskin was
thick and heavy. It would double as a groundsheet on wet ground.
We played Tannhäuser as we watched the sun go down, and then we
stoked the fire and turned in, anticipating a big day come morning. I slept
deeply and don’t remember any dreams, prophetic or otherwise. I woke
with first light and found John Dark was already up and packing away her
stuff and loading up the horses. I had a last look round the library, trying not
to think of all the wonderful stories I was abandoning there, and then made
my own preparations to leave.
 Chapter 27

False start…or there and back again

The day began early and was tinged with sadness from the very start as we
saddled the horses and strapped on their packs, and then said goodbye to the
Homely House.
I hoped if all went well that I might pass by there again one day, but the
world—big and empty as it is—still contains more surprises than you can
imagine, and so even before what happened happened to me, I knew
returning to that happy place was not something to rely on.
We had—as invited—taken things that were useful to us. We had
enjoyed the comfort and calm atmosphere. We had argued about whether to
take the record player, but in the end had decided to leave it. One day,
someone else might find their way to the house and the rooms would again
fill with music. I think the couple in the bath deserved that.
As John Dark was packing the horses, I took a bunch of lavender which
I had cut from the hedge of it that divided the walled garden and went to
say thank you. I know it’s an odd thing to do for an iron tub full of long-
dead bones, but the fancy took me and I did it quickly and quietly, not
wanting to have to explain it to John Dark. I wasn’t ashamed or
embarrassed or anything. It was just too complicated a thing to explain in
sign language and by poking at a dictionary. I wasn’t even quite sure why I
was doing it, only that I should. Jip came with me up the stairs.
John Dark had been there before me. She had taken the dry stalks out of
one of the vases and left it full of newly cut roses, big pillowy ones that
grew on the sunny wall of the house. The smell of them already filled the
room. I grinned at Jip and cleared another jug of dry stalks, half of which
went to powder in my hands as I did so. Then I put my lavender in and
nodded to the bath.
Thank you, I said. We were happy here too.
Only Jip heard me say this, and he didn’t seem to find it too stupid. I
closed the door on the way out and we walked down the stairs. John Dark
was waiting. She saw the remaining dry flower stalks in my hand and
grunted. I don’t know if she was embarrassed by me having seen her roses,
or thought I was shy of being caught with the evidence of my own parting
gift, but we never talked about it.
Al on zee, she said briskly. Foe part ear.
We closed up the house and made sure it was as weatherproof as we had
found it. And then we mounted up and headed east.
In the end the Homely House was a place of death, but its lesson was the
dangerous and seductive one that death might not be terrible, but instead
nothing more than a long-needed rest, an endless and gentle sleep. Those
were the thoughts I had about it as I rode away, and though they weren’t
exactly bad thoughts, I knew they were not useful thoughts for a person to
have, not someone who had things to do in the world. They were later
thoughts, to be filed and retrieved when I was older. They were thoughts
that dulled the edge, and I still believed at that stage that I had years ahead
of me full of unknown terrain through which to cut my way.

Ends happen fast, and often arrive before you’ve been warned they’re
coming.

Jip ran happily in a big circle round us as we descended the slope and
entered a flatter country that was not as thickly forested as the tract of land
we had come through. It was still well wooded, but just thinly enough to
make out the shape of old fields here and there, given away by the straight
hedgerows that had towered into something more like natural fortifications.
In the first hour, we had to double back on our tracks twice because we’d
found ourselves bottled in on three sides by impenetrable blackthorn
thickets.
And then we came to an open meadow that was passable, but totally
overgrown with giant hogweed. I didn’t know what it was called then but
between what happened next and where I now find myself there were
enough lonely nights by the campfire for me to have found it in one of the
books I’d brought from the Homely House. If you ever saw cow parsley,
you’ll know what it looked like, only much, much bigger. Ribbed stalks
thicker than my arm, bristly and purple-blotched, rose maybe three or four
metres above us: these stalks supported a wide bowl-shaped spread of white
flowers, like an upside-down umbrella, each about two metres wide. All the
flowers faced up into the sky. It promised a clear enough passage, with
plenty of width to weave our way through the stalks, and Jip bounded
happily ahead of us. But John Dark pulled up short and turned to me. She
pointed at the stalks and said:
Mal.
Which by now I knew meant “bad”. She mimed itching wildly, and then
pulled up her hood and yanked her sleeves down to make mittens to cover
her hands. I did the same. We were about thirty metres into the plantation of
hogweed, and I was looking closely at the ribbed and bristly stalk of a
particularly thick plant as I passed, wondering if it was the hairy bristles
themselves that were mal, when there was a crack and a yell and then a
horrible crunch and thud, heavy and meaty enough to feel it through my
horse’s hooves, and I turned to find John Dark had disappeared off the face
of the earth. I looked around the other way in case I hadn’t seen her cut
around me, but I was alone beneath the strange-looking plant heads.
Then Jip barked and ran across and began to paw at the rim of what I
now saw was a hole in the vegetation covering the ground. John Dark and
the horse had not only vanished from the face of the earth, they had fallen
into it.
I dropped off my horse and ran to the edge of the pit. They were both
still moving and still alive at that point and, though it was hard to see down
into the darkness, even before my eyes adjusted I could tell it was very bad.
Even before the horse started screaming. Even before I saw it trying to
stand on brutally snapped front legs, struggling to get itself off the vertical
length of rusty pipe that had gone straight through it as it landed.
Someone, long, long ago, had buried a water tank in the field. A big one.
It had stayed there as the field turned into a wilderness of hogweed, and
then it had corroded and waited and then John Dark had taken the wrong
way round a stalk and fallen through the roof, jolted off the saddle as her
horse impaled itself, landing in about a foot of water.
I could see her face looking back up at me, fish-mouthing in shock. So I
knew she was the right way up and not about to drown. I ran for the
packhorse and grabbed the rope she kept in one of the panniers. I looped it
around the base of the thickest hogweed stalk I could find and ran back to
the hole.
Jip was barking and John Dark was shouting my name, though the
splashing and the screaming of the horse made it impossible to hear what
else she was saying. I quickly tested the rope to make sure it was anchored,
said a prayer to a god I don’t believe in and slid down the rope into the tank,
which made Jip bark even more urgently.
Everything in the tank happened badly, and it happened fast, and even
now I can’t quite remember the order of things. It’s like a broken pot in my
head. I can see the shards, but they’re not quite joined up into a complete
object any more.
It was dark in there and the sky above the hole in the roof was bright, so
my eyes kept trying to adjust to the stark contrast in light levels.
It’s probably good that I couldn’t see everything clearly, but seeing it in
fragments and flashes made it even more like a nightmare.
John Dark had blood streaming from her head, and her nose was mashed
sideways. She was trying to crawl through the black water towards the
horse, but something had happened to her leg.
I tried not to think of the horse, but it was stuck and struggling on its spit
of rusted pipe and its front legs were bent in all the wrong directions.
It huffed pink bubbles of blood and foam as it panted and screamed.
Its rolling eyes were the whitest things in the world. Brighter than the
sky above.
I stumbled through the water to John Dark. She had managed to throw
herself across the horse’s neck.
It bucked and twisted in her arms.
I thought she was trying to comfort it. I wanted to shout at her.
I remember I was angry. At least I think I was angry, for a flash.
I wanted to tell her it was beyond comfort. Tell her what we had to do,
what I had to do now, fast, before anything else. But I didn’t have the
words. I just had the knife, already in my hand, without knowing I’d drawn
it.
 Even now I can see it as a living nightmare. Like I’m still there.
A fragment of her face staring at me.
I think she doesn’t understand.
Non, Griz! she shouts.
I think she doesn’t want me to do it. I think she doesn’t understand how
very, very terrible the hurt to the horse is.
Then I see she isn’t trying to comfort the horse. She’s desperately trying
to reach her arms round it. She can’t. Her fingers point for me.
They shake with the tension; they stab at what I should be seeing, what I
should have thought of.
I hurl myself across the tank and try and pull the gun from the scabbard.
At first it won’t come, then the poor horse spasms as it tries to stand one
more time and the gun slides free.
Veet, Griz! she screams and buries her head in the mane of her horse,
looking away.
Veet!
I lean over her and jam the barrels awkwardly behind the horse’s head,
where the spine meets the brain. It’s an awkward position. I don’t have the
butt properly seated on my shoulder. I don’t have time for perfect.
I pull the trigger.
As I said, it’s not unusual for old ammunition to just go click and not
fire.
In this case that prayer to the god I don’t believe in must have found an
ear, because the metal tank bucked and exploded in a thunderclap. The butt
of the gun jerked off my shoulder with the recoil and smashed into my
cheekbone.
The horse dropped and went slack as the death twitches
set in.
I was deaf, ears ringing. I didn’t know yet that the recoil had split the
skin over my cheekbone. I didn’t know yet that I would have a black and
bloodshot eye for many days to come. I still don’t know if the faint sobbing
I could hear was me or John Dark.
It was probably both.
Getting her out of the tank was almost impossible. If she hadn’t had the
rope on her packhorse, it would have been. Her leg was broken, and she’d
taken a really heavy blow to her face and head when she landed. She was
also as soaked as was I from the foul water in the bottom of the tank. There
was only about of foot of it, but every bit of it stank, and now it had the
horse’s blood in it too.
Thankfully she passed out the first time I tried hauling her out of the
tank with the rope looped under her arms like a sling.
Lifting someone’s deadweight is brutally hard, and I couldn’t do it by
myself. I lowered her back down, wincing as she ended up slumped across
her horse’s body. I untied the end from the hogweed anchor and knotted it
to my horse’s saddle, then walked the horse away.
It took some trial and error, and I’m afraid she took some more knocks
as I tried to manage the horse and keep the line taut enough to run back
along it and grab her before the horse moved and lowered her out of my
reach.
Finally, I snatched hold of her hood and managed to get her out of the
hole before the horse backed up again. She got some extra scratches and
grazes as I did that, but she ended up in the air, breathing oddly, eyes closed
like she was never going to wake.
I didn’t know what to do about her leg. I didn’t know what to do next.
She was alive though. Doing something is always the best way to think, so I
dropped the rope down again and went back down to get her saddlebags and
rescue the gun, and also the knife I had dropped, which took a bit of finding
in the water.
Her horse had stopped twitching by then. I patted its warm neck in
apology and left it there as I climbed out. She was still unconscious.
There was no neat and tidy way to do what I had to do next. So, hoping
she’d stay unconscious, I went into the wood that edged the field and cut
some straight poles and brought them back to her. I measured them against
her leg and cut them to length. I had seen this done when one of the
Lewismen had fallen off a roof on North Uist. I had been small, but it was a
simple thing. I took off my belt, and I took off hers. I made some new holes
with the point of my knife.
And then I hurt her badly. She whimpered and flinched and at one point
opened her eyes without seeing anything as she made a deep groan like a
man might make. But she didn’t wake properly as I slit her trouser leg to
see the damage, and then felt for the break and laid it as straight as I could.
Then, not sure if this was right, I braced myself and pulled her leg until the
broken bits seemed to line up as best as I could get them. She moaned a lot
as I did that. And then I lashed the poles on either side of the leg to keep it
straight. Once I’d used the belts to cinch the first two poles tight, it was
easier to tie the other poles around it, so her leg was held in place and
protected in a bundle of rods.
I looked down at her face, wondering if I should try and put her nose
straight while she was unconscious too, but I didn’t have the nerve for it. I
was sweating with the effort and fear of it all. I decided if I was going to
wake her it should be while doing something useful, because I probably had
one chance. So I brought the packhorse over and rearranged the saddlebags
on either side so their tops made a kind of flattish bed at right angles to the
spine of the horse. And then I used the last of my strength and luck to lift
her on top of the horse, and lash her to it. I used the rope and criss-crossed
her body with it so there was no chance of her falling off.
I turned my horse’s head around, with the packhorse following, and
headed back across the hogweed field, towards the Homely House.
It started to rain. Either the god I didn’t believe in had a fine sense of
fairness and was balancing out the good luck of the gun firing first time, or
it had a malicious streak. Or maybe there’s more than one imaginary god
and that one liked matching the mood to the weather.
I didn’t bother about keeping myself dry, since I was already soaked
from the water at the bottom of the tank, but I pulled the oilskin mac I had
intended as a groundsheet over John Dark to keep the rain from her face. As
I did that, I had the nastiest thought that I was wrapping her in a shroud,
like a corpse, and wondered if she would still be breathing when I next took
the cover off her face.
We retraced our tracks back to the Homely House. It seemed to take
three times as long as it had coming down. Jip no longer patrolled round us
as we went; instead he trotted beside me, looking up every now and then as
if to see how I was. I told him I was okay but my voice sounded woolly and
trapped inside my head. The trees kept some of the rain off, but not much
and as my hearing came back I heard nothing but the trudge of the horses’
hooves and the dripping of the water off the leaves. Then we climbed the
final open slope in the full pelt of the rain, and although the horses didn’t
slip much on the rain-slick grass, they felt shakier and less surefooted.
I stumbled when I dismounted in front of the door we had left sadly but
hopefully that morning, going down hard on one knee. Jip barked worriedly
and came and licked me. I got back up and went to see if John Dark had
survived.
I pulled back the tarp and saw her eyes were wide open and unblinking.
My legs began to go again, but then she blinked.
Okay, I said. It’ll be okay.
She didn’t look at me. She just closed her eyes and turned away.
She must have known I was going to hurt her again. Getting her off the
horse was easier than getting her on, but not much. I took the door off one
of the tumbledown sheds in the walled garden and propped it at an angle
against a table I dragged out of the house, making a kind of ramp. Then I
untied her and tried to pull her on to the top of the ramp without jerking her
leg too much.
I tried to be as gentle as I could, but again I was manhandling
deadweight. She didn’t make much noise in protest at my efforts to start
with. And then she didn’t make any at all because I think the pain made her
pass out again. Or perhaps it was the hit to the head.
I got her on the door. And then I dragged the door across the ground, up
onto the porch and—skinning my knuckles as I just managed to squeeze it
through the doorway—into the house, out of the rain.
I used a big padded stool to balance the door on so that she was level
with the long deep sofa in front of the fire, and then I slid her off it and onto
the cushions. Her eyes flickered as I took off the wet outer clothes as best I
could. This revealed more ugly bruises on her body. I think she had broken
ribs too. I looked at her nose, mashed sideways. Dad had straightened Bar’s
nose when she slipped on a rock and broke it against the gunwales of the
Sweethope two summers ago. I knew it had to be done as soon after the
break as possible. And half a day had gone, so it was now or never. I think
if she hadn’t have been breathing so weirdly I might still have left it, but I
thought it might clear her nose enough to stop the snuffing heavy snorts that
she was occasionally racked by. So I put my hands on either side of her
face, gripped the nose between my thumbs and told myself this was a little
thing compared to setting the leg, and that if I was going to do it I should do
it once, hard and sharp and decisive. And then I gritted my teeth and twisted
it back into the centre of her face. She growled in shock and her eyes
snapped open for an instant, but then fluttered closed again. The graunching
feeling as I did it made me feel a little sick, but when I took my hands away
I was happy that it now looked more or less in the right place and wasn’t so
obviously smeared across her cheek. And then when I put blankets over her
she seemed to sleep again, though I had no idea of the difference between
sleep and a coma.
I wanted to lie down on the other sofa and sleep too, but I got a fire
going first, and then I went and took saddles and packs off the horses and
left them sheltering under a tree.
I ate some food because I knew I had to keep my energy up. There was
no pleasure in it. The pesh just tasted sour, and the smoke-dried rabbit was
so tough it hurt my teeth as I tried to chew some of the goodness out of it.
And then I put a covered pot with some water and boar meat in the fire to
cook away as I slept, and changed out of my dirty wet clothes.
I hadn’t been naked in a long time, not since swimming in the pool
behind the house I’d burned. And I hadn’t been naked in front of anyone
who was not my family ever. I was tired and wet and cold and exhausted
and I thought, in my heart, that John Dark was probably in a coma she
wasn’t going to come out of any time soon, if ever. What I really thought,
especially after seeing the bruises on her broken ribcage, was that she was
dying. I had no idea what internal damage she might have suffered, and
certainly no hope at all of healing it, whatever it turned out to be. So bone-
tired, wet, cold and sledgehammered by the day’s events, I stood in front of
the flames, naked, my hands braced against the high lintel of the
mantelpiece and let the fire warm me.
Her eyes were open when I turned to warm my back. She stared at me. I
stared back at her, and then I twisted away and pulled a blanket around me.
When I looked at her again, her eyes were closed and I don’t know if she
saw anything.
She didn’t say anything about it the next morning, or indeed anything
for the next two days. She hovered between a dull unhealthy sleep and a
waking that was pained and undignified. I fed her when she was awake,
pesh and the broth from the boar meat, and between bowls and pans and
wet cloths to clean her up with and a tarp under her blankets to lie on, we
coped with her need to piss and shit despite being unable to move. It didn’t
worry me, but she hated that part of it.
The only good thing was the swelling on her nose got better, and
although both her eyes remained yellow and purple and bloodshot, they
were on either side of a more or less symmetrical face again.
I think I understood her silence. She was like a terrier that had been hurt.
She had just gone into herself to heal. I came back into the room on the first
morning, bringing more firewood and Jip had climbed on the sofa and lay
against her, giving her his warmth. He looked at me.
I said it was bon.
 Chapter 28

Onwards, alone

It all comes down to pissing and shitting in the end. That’s what Dad used
to tell us about getting old and ill, or looking after those who were injured.
He wasn’t wrong.
Now that things had taken a turn for the worse, I began getting more and
more worried that Brand would arrive at his home and then leave before I
got there. I resented the time I was losing by nursing John Dark. And I
could have left her and gone after him at any time I suppose, but she wasn’t
able to move off her bedding to take care of herself, so I would have been
condemning her to dying in her own mess. I couldn’t do that.
Days passed in a blur of sameness. Feeding, helping her do what she had
to do, cleaning her up when she did it while she was unconscious, again and
again, day after day. It was harder because she either couldn’t or wouldn’t
talk, and I began to worry she couldn’t see either because sometimes she
squinted and sometimes she stared with wide-open eyes that didn’t seem to
react to what was happening in front of her.
She wasn’t dead, but maybe she was just dying slowly. She certainly
didn’t seem to be getting any better. I filled my days when she slept by
reading books from the library, but the pleasure I normally took from it was
damped, because I knew I should really be on my way to Brand and Jess.
Too much time to think made me second-—and third- and fourth-—guess
my belief that he would be there. I went back and forth over my reasoning
as to why I had been so sure the marks on the map meant that Norfolk was
his base, and every time I did I came up with more reasons that I had been a
fool to set out on such a crazy quest on such thin evidence. I punished
myself for chasing an illusion just because I had wanted to take action
rather than accept the impossibility of my loss. I told myself I should have
stayed home and looked after my family and been satisfied I still had Jip.
But I kept coming back to the same thing.
Brand had stolen my dog. I didn’t actually have a choice. He had to
expect me to come after him. It was a matter of loyalty. Even if I never
found her, I had to try. I had to give it my best shot. I knew in my better
moments that I was doing this because I wouldn’t have been able to live
with myself—or Jip—if I didn’t.
And so, on the principle of planning for a better future, even if it seemed
unlikely, I kept my mind calm by keeping my hands busy. That worked
better than just sitting and reading and living in my head with all the
echoing doubts bouncing around inside it. I made John Dark a pair of
crutches. Then I dug a hole just outside the door to the garden, as a toilet,
and I knocked the bottom out of a sturdy wooden chair that had armrests
and planted it over the hole. I filled a bucket with wood ash from the fire
and left it by the chair.
I wondered about making her a chair with wheels, but none of the
wheels I could find turned any more: they were corroded in their axles or
the rubber tyres had perished to nothing. I started getting jealous of the
attention Jip paid to her. That was stupid and mean-spirited, but I felt it. I
began smoking meat in the large fireplace and when done I hung a good
cache of it from the walls. I found as many pots and pans and bottles as I
could and filled them with water, leaving them round the edge of the room.
I don’t know if she knew what I was doing. She watched me and her
face gave nothing away. The bruising was fading to all the colours of a pale
rainbow, and as it disappeared her skin was now always as grey and washed
out as her hair.
I lived those days like I was slowly drowning in despair and a large part
of that was because I didn’t know how to do two things I knew were the
right thing to do, two things which cancelled each other out.
In the end, she showed me.
I woke to find her gone. The dawn light was watery and the fire was
cold and long gone to ash. I sat up and looked around. The crutches were
gone too. So was Jip.
She was on the seat over the hole in the garden and she was crying. I
think it was partly from the effort to get there, and partly out of frustration,
because one of the crutches had toppled away into the grass and she
couldn’t quite drag it back into her reach with the other one. She looked
away as I came out onto the dew-soaked grass, and I picked up the crutch
and gave it to her without speaking. After a bit, I realised she was sitting
motionless because she didn’t want me to see the effort it was going to take
to get back on her feet. I went back into the room, but watched her from
behind, through the window. She got shakily upright, and then swung
herself precariously to the door, where she leant and panted for breath. The
effort of keeping her splinted leg off the ground was exhausting. She was
trying to use muscles she hadn’t used for many days, maybe even weeks. I
had stopped counting because the mounting tally of wasted days felt like it
was pressing down and slowly suffocating me.
She looked at me and nodded. I helped her get from the door to the sofa
and she lay down and went straight to sleep.
She didn’t exactly get better then, but she got more mobile. I think she
knew something was wrong with her head and something else was wrong
with her body inside. I would see her wince in pain and hold her hands to
her temples until whatever was hurting her went away. It made me think of
Dad wanting to drill the hole in Mum’s head when she’d cracked her skull. I
couldn’t see any fluid coming from John Dark’s nose though. And I
certainly didn’t go looking for a hand drill.
She asked for things by pointing. I brought her the dictionary and I
brought her a pencil. She pointed at the record player and I put music on.
Then she waved me away, wanting to be alone.
I went hunting with Jip. He caught a rabbit and I shot two, though I
missed another and spent an irritable half-hour searching for my arrow in
the middle of a tangle of brambles.
When I came back, she was sleeping. She woke and ate and then went
back to sleep. I read until it was dark and then went to bed myself.
Dawn came with a poke in the ribs.
She stood over me, jabbing with her crutch. I sat up and she handed me
a note. She must have spent all the time I was out hunting stitching the
words together from the dictionary. She didn’t know how verbs work in
English, but it was painfully clear what she meant. As I unfolded it, she
swung herself out into the garden and made noisy use of the hole in the
ground.
I know this is exactly what she wrote because I have the note still,
folded into the book I am writing in.

YOU TO GO TO FIND YOUR DOG NOW.

I HURT ME NOT TO BE BETTER.
I NOT TO WANT TO BE SEEN LIKE THIS.
I TO BE HAPPY TO LEAVE ALONE WITH MY MEMORIES.
WATER. MUSIC. FOOD. HOLE IN GROUND. THANK YOU, GRIZ.
TO GO QUICK. NOW. IMMEDIATE.
BEST WAY TO SAY GOODBYE.
TAKE HORSES.

If she believed she was going to get better, she would have said take one
horse. It was telling me to take both that made me wipe my eyes.
But she was right about a fast goodbye. There was no point lingering or
arguing. She had given me permission. She had solved my problem for me.
She came back and stood leaning in the doorway.
Bon? she said.
I nodded.
Veet, she said. Allay veet.
I left her the saddlebags full of stuff from the packhorse. I dragged them
inside and put them close to the sofa. She nodded. It wasn’t just useful
things she had collected, there were memories in there she had brought
through the tunnel from France. Then I picked her a basket of pesh and took
a bag for myself and saddled the horses.
I gave her the basket when I went back in to say goodbye. I caught her
scratching Jip behind the ears, which he was enjoying, though she
pretended she hadn’t been as soon as I entered the room. I found I didn’t
know how to say goodbye properly. She beckoned me closer and suddenly
hugged me so tight I think she wasn’t just hugging me but all the ones she
had lost.
Or maybe she was making the most of her last moment of human
contact.
 Then she spoke English. She must have learned it from the dictionary.
Her voice was ragged and raw, and the words sort of twisted in her mouth
and came out with a French flavour, but it wasn’t hard to understand.
Griz, she said. Griz. Thank you, friend.
I squeezed her back and said “friend” too, then the rest of the words I
wanted to say got choked up and stuck and we both stayed like that until we
had composed ourselves. Then she let go and pushed me back firmly. She
held out another folded piece of paper.
Not to read now, she said carefully.
And then she kissed me on both cheeks and sat back down on the sofa,
avoiding my eyes and waving me away with a hand gesture as imperious as
a queen.
I rode away with that familiar unswallowable lump of loss stuck behind
my breastbone. As I did so, I heard the record player start to play the fast
and happy tune we had laughed and danced to, and I knew she wasn’t
dancing but putting a brave face on what was to come and trying to cheer
me up. I heard it three times and then either she got too tired to wind the
player again or we had got too far away to hear it any more.
Jip kept looking up at me and then stopping and looking back at the
house, and then running to catch up and look at me again, as if asking me a
question I had no good answer for. Once the sound was gone, I picked up
the pace, moving faster than we had before. Now the decision was made,
there was no good to be had from taking any longer than necessary.
We got many klicks beyond the hogweed field before night fell, and
found ourselves on the edge of a more varied terrain that stretched away flat
and featureless ahead of us.
I watered the horses in a pond and hobbled them for the night.
Only when I had eaten and laid out my bedroll did I take out the note. It
was too dark to read by then, but I poked the fire back into a blaze and
turned myself so that I could read it. It didn’t say much, but in a way it
broke my heart and made me feel terrible about leaving her all over again. I
still have it here in my other hand as I write this.

YOU TO LIE TO ME, GRIZ.

IT OK. I TO UNDERSTAND.
 BUT I TO KNOW WHY YOU ARE SO STRONG.
YOU TO REMIND ME OF MY DAUGHTERS.

And yes, my eyes were stinging as I closed them to start chasing sleep
that came in unsatisfactory fits throughout a long cold night. And no, it
wasn’t because of the woodsmoke.
 Chapter 29

First sight

I know reading has made me sentimental. Dad doesn’t read much other than
practical books that don’t have stories in them, and apart from sometimes
sitting with Mum and holding her hand by the fire when he thinks we aren’t
watching, he is not a needlessly tender man. He’s brisk, often curt, and
decisive. He gets things done, like he has a list in his head that he is always
adjusting, adding to and ticking things off.
I made myself more like him as I rode away from the Homely House
and John Dark. I stopped myself from wondering each night as I made the
campfire if she had died during that long day, if she was lighting her own
fire as I lit mine, or if the Homely House was quiet again, and now the
home of a new corpse. I didn’t read any of my books, not even the new
ones. I told myself I didn’t need to soften myself with distractions like that,
but that if I succeeded in my wild quest I would allow myself as much
reading as I liked as a reward. Instead of reading, I just used the map and
the compass and tried to make sense of where I was, to keep on track for
where I was going.
My biggest piece of luck was looking for shelter one night as the rain set
in again, and finding what I took to be a big metal lean-to, overgrown with
creepers. There was room for me and the horses under it and it was only
when I lit the fire that I saw the underside and the giant writing and realised
it was a large, miraculously still legible road sign which had fallen and
ended up tilted against the trees that had grown up around it. It took a night
of lying there thinking, but once I worked out what to do it made it very
easy to get a sense of where I was: I just looked at the distances to various
towns, and used a piece of string to measure those distances against the
scale printed on the bottom of the map. Then I found the towns named on
the sign and drew circles of the right diameter to match the distances—and
where they all met had to be where I was.
Knowing my position gave me an added sense of purpose as I pressed
on. I ignored the houses that I passed and wasted no more time viking
through any of them. I slept under the stars, or under John Dark’s tarp
shelter, and I disciplined myself to focus only on what lay ahead. I suppose
it was like what being a soldier must have been, preparing to go to war. Not
wanting to fight, but getting your head straight so you were ready and as
unsurprised as possible in the face of whatever fate held in store. Every
morning, I woke and practised with my bow, fifing three quivers before I
ate and moved on for the day. At midday, I fired three more. At night, just
before dark, I fired a final three. Jip often stood and watched me, as if
wondering why I was hunting tree trunks, or how many times I expected to
bury arrowheads in one before I killed it.
I sharpened my mind by trying to remember every moment I could of
those I’d spent with Brand, so I would be able to read him better when we
next met. I practised the arguments I might have to make. I also sharpened
my knives.
I tried to make myself go cold inside, methodical and unemotional like
my dad. Jip made that difficult because he was having such a happy time,
running all over this new terrain, exploring the sights and the huge variety
of new smells that the changing landscape must have presented him with.
Even with a simple human nose, I could tell things smelled different: for
him the mainland must have been like me discovering the bigger music on
the record player. The islands are simple—sea, salt, heather, wildflowers in
the machair. They were like music made with a guitar or a tin whistle, or
Brand’s single violin. The mainland with its variety of plants and flowers
and trees must have been like a huge orchestra for him. Tannhäuser through
the nose. He hunted with me and he slept close, sharing the warmth. His
happiness was infectious. He brought me rabbits and a rat and early one
morning chased a hare over the low ridge ahead of me, and when I crested
it, ten minutes later, he was standing, hare-less, silhouetted by the still rising
sun, nose to the light breeze, tail stiffly behind him, staring at what should
not, according to my map, be where it was.
 It was a sea marsh, and beyond it, sending a tang of salt even I could
smell, was the sea itself. Much closer than the map had led me to expect it
might be. The land had gone, swallowed by water that had risen as the
world had got hotter. On Eriskay, you can swim and look down on the old
ferry jetty sunk a metre or so below the waves. On Berneray, you sail in and
moor your boat to the chimney stack of houses that used to line the
foreshore. So although the world is still a big place, the dry bits of it are, I
suppose, smaller than in your time. And the flat lands on the east, one
bordering the North Sea, had now gone under it.
Which made sense of the map which had put Brand’s base so very far up
the river from the estuary. Because now it wasn’t hidden away so far from
the sea at all. The sea had come and found it. That explained lines I had
thought slapdash, the ones that “flew” over dry land. Because that land was
not dry now, but marsh or seabed. I got off the horse and found the new
binoculars, steadied them on a low tree branch and took stock of the terrain
ahead. The trees thinned out and gave way to a sort of in-between land
where dry spits and peninsulas jutted into the marsh. The marsh was
covered in great expanses of reeds in some places, like flat islands in the
water, dotted with wading birds, and in other places you could see the shape
of the huge fields that had once been here by the skeleton remains of old
hedgerows with their feet in the shallower water. The carcasses of several
old buildings were tilted and half collapsed in the water here and there all
across the marshscape, looking surprised to find themselves shipwrecked.
Some of the old giant electrical pylons had survived a century or so of
storms and the power cables they had supported as they marched in heroic
swags all the way across the land curved down into the water here and
finally lost themselves in the incoming waves.
The sound of gulls was distant, but immediately recognisable, and the
noise sent a treacherous wash of nostalgia through me to soften the
hardness I had been practising. I’ve read that smells are the most evocative
things, but the right sound can take you out of yourself too. For a moment
my mind went away, back to Mingulay and my simpler life. And then Jip
barked and I jolted back to the present.
He was looking up at me, head cocked. Like I was missing something.
Then he barked again and looked out at the landscape again, nostrils flared,
tasting something on the wind.
 I pulled out the map and tried to make sense of what I was seeing the
marks the map makers had made, but it was very hard, especially because I
had only a sketchy sense of where I was. I took the time, because I was still
on slightly higher ground. Once I approached the new coast, it was all going
to be flat and wooded and impossible to make out any remaining
landmarks.
It was the low sun that gave the overgrown town away. I saw a flash and
looked at it, and saw the house windows dully reflecting the light back at
me through a stand of willows, far in the distance. It was so far that I hadn’t
been able to see the river beyond. But once I fixed on the houses and the
overgrown ruins beyond, I scanned slowly around them and saw two things.
The first was a wind turbine turning very slowly. And then, just beyond it,
there were uprights that were too regular to be trees that I first took for
headless light-poles, and moving further on from them I saw another dull
flash of water, which must have been the river, and just seaward from that I
saw the thing that made me realise the light-poles were masts and I was
looking at a mooring along a river’s edge.
I was thinking it was perhaps not more than a morning’s ride away when
I saw the sails further along the bank.
The red sails.
 Chapter 30

Be careful what you ask for…

It was always a gamble.

Ever since I’d stolen the map, a little part of me had known I might be
making a huge mistake. The lines that radiated from the place I was now
overlooking might not have been Brand’s home at all, and even if they
were, there had never been any real guarantee he was heading back there.
He might have been off on another years’ long voyage to other unexplored
parts of the world. Or they might not have been lines that marked his
comings and goings at all—they might have been someone else’s lines,
some long dead sailor’s tracks left on an old map that Brand had later viked.
As I had travelled down across the broken spine of the mainland, I had
certainly had enough lonely nights and days to consider these possibilities.
I’d begun to ask myself whether my quest was more to do with what I
wished than what I could rationally expect. And as the wear and tear and
the losses had mounted up—not just the loss of Jess that began it all, but the
Sweethope, and even John Dark—I had started to dread rather than wish for
the moment of arrival. I had reason enough to suspect very strongly that my
luck had gone, but since my boat was burned I had no choice other than to
try and finish what I had started. And then when the accident with the
buried water tank happened, I think I knew for sure that fate was against
me. And still I had plugged on, not really through doggedness or the
courage of my convictions, but because I didn’t know how to make sense of
those horrible losses—other than by playing out the hand I’d chosen,
clinging to a wild hope. Which is another way of saying I was too stupid to
know what else to do and I should have cut my losses, but I didn’t know
how.
I had always been bad at card games. Ferg or Bar almost always won
because I usually held on for a bit too long, forever sure that the next or
even the final card would be the one in fifty-two chance I needed to
complete my own winning hand.
Hope less, count more! Bar would say.
But keeping a tally of cards like it was a maths problem never seemed
like a game to me. It was more like a chore. And so I enjoyed playing for
the companionship of it, but seldom won. Though on the rare occasions
when I did beat them, the infuriation that it sparked in my more careful
siblings made victory all the sweeter.
Seeing the red sails was like that. A hoped-for but actually totally
unexpected win. Very, very sweet. So sweet that I shouldn’t have dropped
my guard and stopped expecting it to turn sour.
I had to get closer. I had to lie low and spy out the land. I had to be
clever and quiet and match the headlong recklessness of my decision to set
out on this hunt in the first place with a cautious and well-thought-out plan
to make it end well. I had to not squander this unlikely turn of luck.
I went forward carefully now, making sure the horses and I stayed in the
woodland and didn’t expose ourselves in the open areas. I wanted to get
close enough to lie up and watch before I did anything else.
Now I kept Jip close by putting a long rope on him. As I did so, I
explained we needed to be quiet, that he shouldn’t bark and this was just to
stop him running off on a hunt and giving us away by mistake. Of course I
was really talking to myself, but I had always spoken to the dogs and
explained things, and I think even when they didn’t understand the details,
they understood the tone in my voice. Jip hated being leashed, but after a bit
he gave up tugging the line taut and trotted beside me, the rope slack
between us. Every now and then, he would look up at me as if to ask if it
was time for this game to stop, but I shook my head and told him it was
necessary.
After a couple of hours of quite slow progress, I hobbled the horses and
climbed a tree. You probably climbed lots of trees. Maybe you even had a
tree house. For me this was a first. Jumping into a tree to escape the boar
didn’t count. I tested each branch as I hauled myself higher and higher, and
then I stopped, held myself steady with one arm around the trunk and
peered east through the thin screen of leaves. Towards the mooring.
Again, at first I thought I had gone astray, because I couldn’t find it.
There was a light breeze, and the branches moved in a slow heave like the
sea that made the clouds of leaves all around me murmur and rustle. It was
quite peaceful. I took another look through the binoculars and this time I
found the sails and the buildings, which were closer than I had expected.
In the distance, at the very edge of my hearing, I thought I could hear a
dog.
I climbed down the tree as fast as I could, worried that Jip would start to
answer the distant barking and give
us away.
The wind was coming over our shoulders, and down on the floor of the
wood the noise was more muffled, so he didn’t get a smell or hear any
sounds that might set him off. However, I was determined that he shouldn’t
give us away by mistake, so I retraced our steps about a klick and then—
greatly to his mystification and outrage—tied him to a solitary tree and left
him with the packhorse. The tree was an old and very tall pine. Its red bark
zigzagged into the sky and supported dark green shoals of needles and
cones that were moving gently in the breeze. Older brother and sister pines
had fallen around it, their greying trunks and roots making a kind of natural
stockade around its base. It would be an easy landmark to find on the way
back, and would be far enough away for Jip’s protesting barks to remain
unheard. I left him a pan full of water and then I knelt and ruffled his neck
fur with both hands as I looked into his eye.
I’ll be back soon, I said. It’ll be okay. I can only do this by myself.
And at the time, I meant every one of those three lies.
I felt odd setting off without him. Naked almost. He always came
hunting with me. Not having him cutting back and forth in front, looping
forward to see what was ahead and then coming back to check on me, felt
odd. Like I was missing a limb. Like it was making me walk funny. Self-
conscious. Unnatural even. I felt lopsided. And unprotected.
But I pushed on, carrying my bow and keeping my eyes and ears open.
I was just scouting. I wasn’t planning on doing anything rash. This is
what I kept telling myself. Though I did think if by some miracle Jess came
to me we would make a run for it and trust that Brand, who wouldn’t have
horses, would never catch me in the wide maze of emptiness and ruin that
lay between me and home. In my mind, even if I couldn’t find enough of a
boat to mend and retrace my steps back once on the west coast, I could ride
to the ruin of the old Skye Bridge and swim across to Skye with the dogs.
From there it would be easy to get to the westernmost edge of the big island
and start burning things until Dad or Ferg or Bar—or the Lewismen even—
came over the water to see what was going on.
Hope can keep you afloat in troubled times. It can also drown you if you
let it distract you at the wrong moment. I was enjoying thinking about how
surprised they’d all be to find me waiting on the beach with both dogs,
when the tree in front of me spat bark shards into my face as an arrow
thunked into it.
Don’t move, said a muffled voice ahead of me. Or the next arrow is
yours.
On the plus side, it wasn’t Brand. On the other hand, I had been wrong
about the horses: there were three riders, faces hidden by old gas masks and
scarves. One had a gun with a long and curved magazine underneath it; the
others had bows aimed right at me.
Okay, I said.
They stared at me. Not being able to see their faces was unnerving, but
they somehow seemed just as unsettled as I was. Like they didn’t know
what to do either.
I’m Griz, I said, and raised my hand in the beginning of a wave.
Don’t move, said the one with the gun. And don’t talk.
I had the strongest sense he needed quiet to think what to do next.
I nodded.
Are you sick? one of the bowmen said. His voice sounded younger.
Yes, said the gunman. Good. Are you sick?
No, I said. Just tired.
Have you been sick? said the other bowman.
Not especially, I said.
Where are the rest of you? said the first bowman.
There’s just me, I said.
The gunman snorted.
And where have you come from? he said.
North, I said. I come from the north. Who are you?
Shut up, said the gunman as the second bowman began to answer. He
turned to me again.
Leave your weapons here, he said.
I hung my bow and the quiver full of arrows on the tree.
All of them, he said.
So I took my knife and then my other knife and left them sticking in the
tree too.
No more knives? he said.
I shook my head. My Leatherman wasn’t really a knife. I could pretend I
forgot it if they searched me.
But they didn’t search me. They didn’t come any closer than they
already were.
Who are you? I said. I don’t mean any harm—
Plenty of time for talking later, said the gunman. He reached into his
saddlebags and threw something at me that thumped into the grass at my
feet with a clink of metal on metal.
Put one of those on each wrist and close them until I hear them click, he
said. Don’t play games.
They were two pairs of handcuffs made to hold your wrists together.
One was silvery, the other a dull black.
Why? I said, wondering if they would get me if I turned and ran, or if
that moment had passed.
Because I’ll shoot you if you don’t, he said. I’m sorry, but I’ll have to.
He did sound sort of sorry, but he also sounded like he’d shoot me
anyway.
I bent and put them on. The hinges were oiled and they clicked into
place, and I stood and showed each pair dangling off a different wrist. It
wasn’t clear to me why he wanted me to do that.
Now click the cuffs together, he said.
That made sense: I would have found it too awkward to cuff myself with
one pair of cuffs, because my wrists wouldn’t have bent that way, but
cuffing myself with two pairs was easy.
They’d done this before.
You don’t want to get close to me, do you? I said. That’s why you’re
using two of these. Otherwise you could have come over and cuffed me
with one pair. What are you scared of?
We’re not scared, said the second bowman as if I’d insulted him.
 Don’t waste your breath, said the gunman. Like I said. Plenty of time to
talk to him if he survives.
If I survive what? I said.
Quarantine, he said.
 Chapter 31

Quarantine

Quarantine was a cell, half underground, in a bunker. Or maybe it was the

cellar of a building that had fallen down. Maybe a police station. Maybe an
old army barracks. It was quite a distance from the mooring with the red
sails, although you could see the masthead and the settlement next to it
from the windows of the cells on one side of the bunker. There were six
cells, three on each side of a hallway, facing each other.
The distance from the settlement was on purpose. It was quarantine.
They didn’t want to catch whatever I might be carrying. If I was infectious.
Which I wasn’t, of course.
They made me walk ahead of them as they shouted instructions, guiding
me through the trees and into the edge of the old overgrown town towards
the bunker building. Then they dismounted, and the bowmen made me walk
down a flight of steps and then one made me stand as far as possible from
himself as he opened a barred gate and stepped away as I was ushered
through it by the other. They made me go to the far end of the hall before
they approached the gate and re-locked it.
The six cells all had heavy doors with slits in them so jailers in the old
days could have looked in on the inmates to see how they were doing.
Don’t you close those doors, said one of the bowmen, his voice
indistinct as he backed up the stairs. You close them, you’re stuck for ever
because we don’t have the keys. Use the toilet in the end cell on the right.
The old drain’s clear but you flush your business away with a bucket
of water.
Wait, I said. What are you scared of?
 Not scared, he said. Prudent. Last visitor but one brought a plague killed
three people. Fucking Freeman… You’ll stay here a month; we’ll see if you
get sick. You’re still alive after that, we’ll be happy to let you join us.
He doesn’t want to join you, said a voice from the deep shadows in one
of the cells I had taken to be empty.
The voice sounded tired, disappointed in me, and chillingly familiar.
He just wants his bloody dog, it said.
I turned and peered into the gloom. His beard split in a thin smile,
showing me a flash of white teeth.
I told you to go home, Griz. I did warn you.
Brand. I felt winded and couldn’t speak for a moment. I heard the door
at the top of the stairs slam shut and then the noises of the horsemen
leaving.
Brand didn’t get off the cot in his cell. And he didn’t say anything else.
I went into the cell across the hall from his and sat on the cement ledge
staring at him, framed in the two doorways. It felt like a lot of time passed
in silence then, and maybe it did. But eventually all that silence seemed to
be sucking the air out of the cells, and talking seemed like the only way to
keep breathing.
Where’s Jess? I said.
She’s fine, he said.
Where is she? I said.
Took the chart, he said. That’s how you got here, right?
Where’s my dog? I said.
You find another boat? he said. Is that it? But then—how likely is it you
found a boat that was ready to sail? You find a boat these days, you got to
cannibalise twenty more to get enough lines and sails and tackle that work
to make it go. No. You didn’t find another boat. You walked.
He got off the cot and came and stood in the slant of light falling across
the doorway and looked at me closer. He shook his head and grinned.
I wanted to kill him. I don’t like violence. I think violence is a kind of
stupidity. But right then, for that grin, I think I could have killed him.
You’re a tough kid, he said. Stubborn. I mean, you’re like an irritating
little cough I can’t seem to get rid of but I give you that. You have my
admiration.
I don’t want it, I said. I just want Jess.
 Jess is a commodity, he said. A bitch that can have pups is a rare thing.
Bitches have puppies, I said. It’s what they do.
No, he said. No, that’s not so.
I glared at him some more.
You walked across the mainland? he said.
I didn’t nod.
Never saw a pack of wild dogs, did you? he said. Strange that, no?
I shrugged.
Sure we talked about this back on your island, didn’t we? he said. The
Baby Busters put some kind of poison out for the packs of hungry dogs they
got scared of once the population got small enough, and that poison messed
with the bitches’ ability to have pups. Least that’s what I heard.
The thought made me look away. It had the nasty finality of an
unwelcome truth. I felt ashamed of being human.
Dogs were with us from the very beginning. And of all the animals that
walked the long centuries beside us, they always walked the closest.
And then they paid the price. Fuck us.
Maybe the Gelding wasn’t an accident. Maybe it was just desserts.
That’s what makes her a commodity, he said.
What’s a commodity? I said.
I knew. Sort of. But I wasn’t sure he did. And I wanted time to get my
thoughts together and get away from the sad thought of the millions of dogs
that must have wondered why they couldn’t have litters any more.
It’s something you trade, he said.
And you’re a trader, I said. When you’re not being a thief.
Sometimes, he said, nodding. Mostly I’m just a traveller. I don’t meet
enough people to trade with.
But you meet enough to thieve from, I said.
Do I? he said.
Yes, I said.
That converter. For the wind turbine. The one I came to trade with your
dad, he said.
What about it? I said.
You came aboard my boat, he said. Like a thief yourself. No invitation.
Took my chart.
That’s different, I said.
 You see that converter while you were there? he said.
I let the silence suck a little more air from the room as I thought.
I wasn’t looking for it, I said. It was dark.
You didn’t see where I left it on the beach on your island then, he said.
I stared at him. He grinned some more and then shrugged
magnanimously.
I mean, fair enough—you came after me like your arse was on fire, so
you probably didn’t have time to have a good look around, he said.
But, I said.
And you were well asleep while me and your dad were still up talking
by the fire, he said. So you don’t really know what deals were done. Do
you?
Dad would never have given up Jess, I said. Jess is my dog.
Sure about that, are you? he said. Sure your dad would never make a
deal where he sacrificed one thing to save a bigger one?
Jess is mine, I said. She’s not anyone’s to trade.
Okay, he said. If you say so.
Liars lie. That’s what they do. That’s what he was doing. Lying, and in
so doing trying to make me lie to myself. Trying to make me not trust my
family. Liars lie by cutting you loose from what you thought was so and
persuading you this other thing they are waving in front of you is the new
truth. You will have come across many liars in your crowded world. I
expect you knew this from the get-go. I imagine you were prepared for
them, and knew how to deal with them. I hadn’t met a liar until Brand
sailed into our lives. But I already knew this about how they work and what
they feed on. Liars want you off balance and alone, so you can drown in
self-doubt.
Brand already had me halfway there before I noticed what he was doing.
If you’re doing so well, I said, what are you doing in here?
That, he said, is a good question. But before I answer it, you answer my
question. Man to man. Are you going to try and kill me?
What? I said. His directness had again winded me.
You’re glaring at me like you are going to leap at me at any moment and
it’s a small enough space we seem to find ourselves in, and we should get
this out of the way, otherwise it’s going to be exhausting. So I’ll ask again.
Man to man. Are you going to try to kill me?
 You’re bigger than me, I said. And violence is stupid anyway. And you
stole my dog. You didn’t kill my family.
I paused for a moment and wondered if they had recovered. I had after
all left them distinctly vomitous and grey-faced.
So? he said, blue eyes glittering.
So, I said. Man to man? I won’t kill you.
He nodded.
Okay, he said. Well, that’s reasonable if we’re to be locked up in here for
a while.
Especially if you give me back my dog, I said.
He didn’t quite know what to make of that. He decided to hang a smile
on it, but it hung a little more lopsided than normal and I had the
satisfaction of knowing he wasn’t quite sure of me.
So what are you doing in here? I said.
It’s as they said, he said. A lone traveller, a Freeman came through
carrying a disease that raised boils in the armpits and killed three of them
after he left and went north.
This had to be the same traveller John Dark had told me about. The one
who caused la pest, the Freeman whose key I wore round my neck.
So the Cons have decided anyone from outside has to sit in quarantine
and not be ill for a month before they let them into the compound, he said.
That’s why they were wearing the masks and scarves. They don’t want to
breathe our air until they know we’re clean.
The Cons? I said.
Conservators, he said. It’s what they call themselves. They’re not the
nicest people in the world. They don’t have much of a sense of humour.
They have a mission instead. But though they don’t travel much now, they
are great traders for the few of us who go about the world.
What’s their mission? I said.
They want to conserve the human race, he said. They want to repopulate
the world. They want to fix what has changed because they think that
“changed” is the same as “broken” and that the glories of what once was
must always be better than the excitement of what might be in the future.
Great breeders they are, and they want to put the clock back, and there’s no
telling them it can’t be done. They’re stubborn—like you. But with less
heart.
 That was typical of Brand. Unsettle you and then slide in a compliment
to make you trust him a little bit.
And that was never a good thing to do. As I was about to find out.
Again.
Forewarned is not always forearmed. Sometimes you spend so much
effort looking out for the trap you know is there that you miss the other one
you didn’t know about.
 Chapter 32

Visitors

I had to tell them about Jip. I figured he would be all right for a day maybe
even two, but the pan of water I had left him wouldn’t last, and it would be
better for them to have him than for him to die a long nasty death of thirst.
And then the packhorse had to be unhobbled too, taken in or allowed to
roam free.
I decided, however, that I would wait out that first day in case I could
find a way to escape, that Jip would forgive me this. I did, after all have my
Leatherman. They hadn’t searched me because they had been scared to
touch me.
Have you tried to escape? I said to Brand.
Why would I? he said. They’ll let me out eventually. I haven’t got the
plague. They feed me well here. It’s quite restful. I catch up on my sleep,
nothing to worry about. And they like me.
So they don’t know you very well, I said.
Again that flash of white parted his beard, the little grin that now put my
teeth on edge.
They’ve stopped travelling, he said. They used to. But then the three
best sailors among them went off on a fine summer’s day, dropped over the
horizon into a dark storm that lasted a day and a night and never came back.
My guess is the sea took them. And now those that remain, they think it’s
too dangerous. So they like me because I can go out into the world they’re
scared of and bring them back useful things.
Like my dog, I said.
Well yes, he said. They like the idea of being able to breed guard dogs.
And then he sighed. There have been wolves around that attack their sheep
and they worry that one day the wolves might attack them, which is stupid,
because wolves don’t attack people. I read that in a book.
I didn’t tell him he was wrong. Maybe one day he’d trust a wolf,
believing the lie he’d read, and that would be as good a way for him to get
the nasty surprise I wished on him as any other.
I’m going to try and escape, I said.
Don’t, he said. It’ll just make them angry.
If I escape, that won’t be my problem, I said.
You won’t, he said. Why don’t you just sit down and tell me about your
journey? I like a good story.
Me too, I said. But this one hasn’t finished yet.
So we had some more silence, which I didn’t mind and he didn’t like.
I passed the time looking out of the three different cell windows on the
sea side of the bunker. I could see the top of his boat’s sails. And there was
a smudge of smoke, about the size of a cooking fire, beyond that which
marked the Conservators’ settlement. I could see some movement beyond
the trees that screened it, but just flashes. The bigger movement was the
sails, which kept dropping and then rising.
What are they doing to your boat? I said.
He came across the hall and into my cell, and looked out of the window
next to me. I was uncomfortable having him this close to me. I don’t know
why. He smelled of sea and woodsmoke. And he had something about him
that was always dangerous, like the dark pull of a cliff edge.
I stepped aside.
He sucked his teeth and made a snapping noise with his tongue. It
sounded like he was swallowing some irritation.
I’d say they’re monkeying around with it, he said. I’d say one of them is
trying to learn how it works.
Maybe they’re not all scared of the sea, I said. Maybe when they learn to
do what you do, they won’t like you
so much.
He watched for a while. I could see he wasn’t too happy with people
touching what belonged to him. Ironic, that.
They’re all scared of something, he said. It’s how they work.
How many of them are there? I said.
 Now you want to talk, he said.
I watched his back.
I’ll trade you, I said. I’ll tell you how I got here if you tell me about
them.
He turned and looked at me.
I want to know about them, I said.
You don’t, he said. Really you don’t. It won’t make you happy.
I’m already not happy, I said. I haven’t met many people. I’m interested.
I was told there was no one left living on the mainland.
And if you found there were other things you were told that aren’t quite
true, you’d be even more unhappy, he said.
No, I said. I’d be less ignorant.
You want to know about them because you’re planning something, he
said. And it’s pointless. Just wait. What’s going to happen will happen.
How many are there? I said.
You don’t give up, do you? he said, and sat back down on the concrete
ledge.
No, I said. Not really.
I think there are nine, he said. But they keep some of them away in
another locked place.
A bunker like this? I said.
No, he said. Not like a prison cell. Like a private area. Behind a fence.
If there aren’t any people left in the world, who are they trying to keep
out? I said. They can’t have built a fence just for you.
It’s not to stop people getting in, he said. It’s to stop them getting out. I
think.
Why? I said.
It didn’t make any sense to me. It’s not like there were so many loose
people on the planet that you could waste any useful bodies by locking
them away.
Because that’s where they protect the breeders, he said. That’s where
they keep the girls and the women.
Breeders? I said.
Their word, he said. Not mine.
I felt a coldness in my gut. It made me feel a little sick. I sat down and
looked at my feet until it passed.
 I guess I was wrong. They weren’t wasting any useful
bodies.
I felt his eyes on the back of my neck.
Feeling happier yet? he said.
You said they were great traders, I said. What do they like to trade?
People, Griz, he said, and there was a kind of sadness in his voice, as if
he were telling me this for the second time, as if it is something I should
have gathered from what he had already told me. They like to trade for
people. Especially girls.
And then he made me tell him about the first part of my journey, chasing
him from the chapel to the pier where he’d burned the Sweethope. I told
him the bare bones, and though it was the last thing I wanted to do I did it
for two reasons. Firstly because he refused to tell me more until we’d
“traded”. And secondly as I remembered and spoke about it, I was able to
take my mind off what he had told me.
I stopped my story at the point he’d burned my boat, and told him it was
his turn. And in this way he gave me the story of the Cons, and I told him
about my journey south across the mainland. I didn’t tell him about the
wolves or about John Dark. I don’t expect he told me everything about the
Cons either, but in the give and take of it all, this is what he told me.
As far as he knew, the Cons were the only people left living on the
mainland. They were the largest group he’d come across on his travels.
They believed their mission was to repopulate the world, as he had told me.
And they believed the mission was so important that it justified them in
doing things that were not good. Brand thought that if there had been more
of them they might have gone raiding and rounded up entire families,
bringing them back to what they called the Conservatory, forcing them to
live and work there like slaves. But thankfully there weren’t enough of
them to do that, so instead they did something else. The ones who could sail
went on journeys, and when they found families they would offer to trade.
No one normal would trade a child, but they always offered because they
saw themselves as good people doing a good thing, even if others didn’t
understand it. Then they would come back, preferably in the dark, and steal
the child if they could and disappear over the horizon before dawn. It was a
theft, but it was for the greater good. That’s how they justified it.
And then their sailors had set off and never come back. Maybe the storm
Brand talked about is what got them. I thought it was just as likely they’d
tried to steal a child from the wrong family, and had been caught and dealt
with. That was a happier ending, to my way of thinking.
After that, the Cons had stayed home, fearful of venturing further to sea
than was necessary to fish the shallow waters around them for food. Instead
they relied on what Brand called Sea Tinkers. He was one, he said, and he
knew of two others, though had only met one of them. People like him,
moving back and forth across the waters, looking, trading, restless, yet
always happy to barter stuff they’d found for food or other things they
couldn’t find on their own. Like companionship.
Companionship sounded like a word loaded with more than one
meaning. I didn’t push it, and he glided past.
The Cons had a supply of pre-Gelding medicines that still miraculously
seemed to work for the most part. That was valuable and worth trading
almost anything for. They also grew a plant that could be smoked or cooked
with, which made the world lighter and eased pain and worry for a while.
They told the Sea Tinkers they wanted girls for their mission, and would
pay well for them. They didn’t mind if it was trade or theft that brought
them to the Conservatory, and they tried to smooth everybody’s conscience
by pointing out how well looked after the girls were. Treated like family.
Brand saw my face.
I know, he said. And for what it’s worth, Griz, I never took them up on
the offer. But I know at least one of the other Tinkers did. And you know
what the worst thing about all this is?
Right now, it sounds like a long list of things, I said.
He nodded.
The worst thing is that the Cons still think they’re good people.
And then we heard a noise outside the window and got up to look at
what was coming.
It’s food, he said. They’ll feed us well. You’ll see.
There were three of them. I recognised one from his gas mask, but the
others were new. One was wearing a different kind of gas mask; the other
had a scarf across the face and a pair of goggles.
They had old plastic baskets on the end of long poles. They came close
enough to push the baskets against the bars of the window and then moved
away fast, as if even touching the building we were in with the end of a
long stick was potentially dangerous.
How are you feeling? shouted the man I recognised.
Fit as a fiddle, shouted Brand. He made his voice light and cheery, as
though he had not a care in the world.
I hope you stay that way, shouted the man, like he was a friend.
Well, we’ll know soon enough, said the other. He didn’t sound as if he
liked Brand as much as the other. Tomorrow night’s the inspection.
That reminds me, said Brand. Would you be kind enough to bring me
my fiddle from the boat? It’s at the foot of my bunk. Black case, you can’t
miss it.
We’ll bring it later, said the friendlier man. And look forward to hearing
it.
Well, said Brand, we can at least share music without fear of infection.
Indeed, said the man.
Oh, said Brand, just one thing… who is monkeying around with the sails
on my boat?
Oh, said the man. That’s Tertia. She just wants to see how it works. I can
tell her to stop if you like.
That’d be good, said Brand. My boat is my home. I would not like it
broken.
Of course, said the man. She’s too inquisitive for her own good anyway.
But she’s doing a fine job of looking after your dogs.
Thank her for me, said Brand, glancing quickly at me.
They walked away and Brand, who was taller, reached out and brought
the food and the water inside.
I won’t have people jiggering around with my boat like that, he said.
Tertia, I said. Never heard a name like that.
It’s old language, he said. A number. They use numbers to name
themselves.
Why? I said.
I told you, he said. They like the past. That’s why they’ll do anything to
make it happen again. But I reckon giving you a number instead of a proper
name makes people feel they’re things, not people, if you ask me. That one
speaking is Quintus. Means five.
What does Tertia mean? I said.
He shrugged.
 I don’t know, he said with a shrug. Four? Three? Doesn’t matter. The
women’s and girls’ number names end in an a. That I do know.
He looked at me.
What’s the inspection? I said.
Oh, it’s nothing, he said. They just stand and look at us and see if we’ve
got boils yet, to see if we’re infected.
Where? I said.
Over there, he said, pointing to the bars at the end of the passage. We
just stand there, turn around, show our armpits and our crotches. It’s no big
thing. They do it every night.
So we have to take our clothes off? I said.
Yes, he said, but they don’t prod you around or anything. They just stand
back and have a good look to make sure. Now cheer up. Let’s eat. The
food’s good, and everything looks better on a full stomach. They’re not
going to poison you.
 Chapter 33

The truth will set you free (and other

lies)

Some poison goes in by the mouth. Other poisons go in at the ear.

And Brand was always a good talker, able to sweeten his words with a
grin or a joke to make you miss the tell-tale taste of something that was
going to eat you up from the inside later on.
The food was good: bread, potatoes, some green leaf that was pleasantly
bitter and mutton—salt marsh mutton, he said. You could taste the sharp
tang of the sea in the meat, as well as an underlying sweetness. It tasted a
bit like the sheep did at home, and for a moment I went back there in my
head, wondering what they were eating and what they were talking about as
they sat round the table. And even though Mum would not be joining in the
conversation, I had such a pang of longing just to be next to her and holding
her hand by the fire that I stopped eating.
I’ll finish that if you’ve had enough, said Brand.
I shook my head and forked more mutton into my mouth. Chewing
meant I didn’t have to talk until I was ready.
So you lied, I said.
Did I? he said, raising an eyebrow. That seems unlikely.
You said you were raised here. Back at home. When you were telling
your traveller’s tales, you said you grew up on these marshes on an island in
an estuary, and that your family died and you went off travelling the world.
So either you were lying then, or you’re lying now. Either you didn’t grow
up here, and are lying. Or you did grow up here, and you’re one of the Cons
yourself.
He looked at me.
I like you, Griz, he said. I like the way you don’t give up. I also like the
way you make me feel… uncomfortable. Like with that question.
It wasn’t a question, I said. It was just a statement of what must be true.
There you go again, he said. Did I tell you about the archipelago in
Sweden and the pale girls?
Yes, I said.
That was home, he said. And they were my sisters.
Were? I said.
Maybe they still are, he said. But if you tell the Conservators about
them, I will kill you. Understand?
When he didn’t smile, when he looked at you and his face went like a
rock and his eyes turned into unblinking blue ice, he was someone entirely
different.
Yeah, I said. If what you told me about them is true, I understand why
you wouldn’t want them to know about your sisters.
And you understand I’m not joking? he said.
I don’t know, I said.
The lines in the crag that was his forehead rearranged themselves.
What? he said.
You’re a really good liar, I said. You know how to use stories to get what
you want. And telling me you’d kill me if I told anyone you came from this
archipelago thing is a really good way to try and make me believe it’s the
truth.
His face went much more serious, colder, flintier and then the great red
spade of his beard split open again and was full of white teeth and the pink
inside of his mouth as he threw his head back and roared with laughter.
Griz, he choked, and punched me hard on the shoulder—not to hurt, but
to show some strange affection. Griz, I do like you. I like you a lot. You’re
just a kid, but you’re no fool, that’s for sure.
I’m not a kid, I said.
When your beard comes in, that’s when you’ll be a man, he said.
Nothing wrong with being a kid.
You’re right, I said. But my beard isn’t coming in.
Not yet, he said and punched my shoulder again.
 Not ever, I said. And if you punch me again, I’ll punch you back and it
won’t be the shoulder.
I meant no harm, he said.
I know, I said, but for a cunning man you’re pretty stupid.
Stupid, am I? he said.
Just as stupid as me, I said. Because I believed what you said, because
you said it well and brought gifts like marmalade, and you believe what you
see because you were told what to see.
He looked at me. And then he looked at me harder.
Then he sat back, like some of the wind had gone from his sails.
I am stupid, he said. Might as well shit and go blind. Can’t see what’s
right in front of my nose…
You’re right, I said.
You’re—he began.
Yes, I said.
I’m a girl.
He blew out his cheeks and looked at his boots. Like he suddenly found
it uncomfortable to look at me.
Well, he said. That’s no good. Not here. Not now.
No, I said. No, it isn’t.
 Chapter 34

Liars lie

Why did you have to tell me that? Brand said, after he’d given his boots a
long and painstaking inspection. I told you how much they want girls.
Breeders, I said.
It might have been a trick of the light, but he seemed to wince.
If they’re going to make us strip, you’re going to find out soon enough, I
said.
Why tell me now? he said. He really looked angry for some reason.
Because I’ll make you a deal, I said. You’re a trader, right?
Griz, he said. These Cons, they’re…
I know what breeding means, I said. I don’t think he heard the crack in
my voice. You’re still thinking I’m a young kid because my beard hasn’t
come in. I’m older than you think, remember?
He nodded. I’ve never seen a face that split the way his did. Like half of
it was fascinated and couldn’t tear itself away, and the other half wanted to
be anywhere but where it was.
So, I want to make a trade, I said.
Griz, all that you’ve got to trade, they’re going to take anyway, he said.
Here’s the deal, I said. They’re going to see I’m a girl. Then they’re
going to wait and see if I’ve got la pest.
La what? he said.
The plague, I said, moving on fast before he started asking questions
that would lead to my time with John Dark. Once I’m out of quarantine,
they’re going to want me as one of their breeders, right?
Right, he said. I’m sorry.
 He looked so hangdog I wanted to believe him. Almost did.
So there’s nothing we can do about that, I said. That’s just going to
happen.
Again I think he missed the shake in my voice. I cleared my throat to
cover up and make sure.
The deal is this: when I’m out, and not locked up in here, you steal me
and take me home.
He stared at me.
You think I’m a better man than I am, he said.
I do, I said. I think you’re a better man than you think you are.
I hadn’t listened to him without learning a few tricks. A little sweetness
to ease things along. No harm in making him feel good about himself.
But that’s not what I’m relying on, I said. What I’m relying on is you
doing what’s best for you. Making a better trade than they could offer you
for anything.
Like what? he said
You know the other thing you don’t know about me, I said, reaching
inside my shirt. What else you don’t know about my family?
No, he said.
No, you don’t, I said, and I pulled out the key and showed him.
We’re Freemen.
I showed him the symbol on the key.
Do you know what this symbol means?
He leant forward and stared at it.
Infinity, he said. And the moment he did, I realised that the eight was in
fact not an eight at all, but meant to be read on its side, not standing up. It
was the symbol for infinity.
How do you know? I said.
Because I’ve seen it before, he said. It means infinite in all directions.
Exactly, I said. And do you know what lies behind the doors this can
open?
Dead electric brains, he said. Broken computers.
No, I said. Not everywhere. You save me, I’ll take you to a place where
medicines are stocked that still work. Where there is some old tech that still
functions.
He stared at me.
 Or leave me here and I’ll make the same deal with them, I said. I’d
rather you helped me, because you’ve got a boat, but I can take them the
long way overland and I’m sure that’ll be fine too.
Old tech that works, he said. Like what?
Screens that move, show pictures and stories. Little computers that still
compute. Electric compasses, binoculars that pull the horizon into your lap
and make pictures of it you can look at later. Music players.
I was running out of things to tempt him with.
You think that I would need a trade to try and help you, he said. His
voice sounded a little hurt.
Yes, I said. You told me. You’re a trader. This is a good trade.
You don’t think I would try and help you just because these are bad
people? he said.
I’d like to, I said. I’d really like to. In fact you have no idea how much
I’d like to. But my experiences with you so far don’t make me think that’d
be a good idea. And like you said, I’m not a fool.
He stared at me.
You were at least correct about that one thing, I said.
He took a deep breath.
This is going to take some doing, he said. And we’re going to have to
work out how to play this before they get here.
You’re right, I said.
Music players? he said.
I nodded.
He was hooked.
 Chapter 35

A choice made

Until I met Brand, I didn’t think I’d met anyone who told lies. As a result, I
wasn’t very good at knowing how to deal with them. But that was then.
This is now, and here’s what I know about them: when liars say they’re
going to tell you the truth, it’s time to listen extra carefully to their stories—
not because they’re going to try and hide the truth inside them, but because
the truth’s not going to be there at all. The real truth is going to be in the
things they don’t mention. So if you listen to the shape of their lie, you can
see the room it takes up, and then you look for the truth in the empty spaces
in between.
You used the map to get here, said Brand.
Yes, I said.
And where is it now? he said.
It doesn’t matter, I said. I didn’t want to tell him or anyone about Jip and
the horses. Not yet. Not until I had to.
You can’t let them find it, he said. I’m serious.
Okay, I said. They’re not going to find it. Not unless I tell them where it
is.
If I told them where to go to untie Jip and see to the horses, they would
find it. I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t look through my bags. I just didn’t
see any point telling him that. He looked at me and shook his head. I
suppose liars are good at spotting other lies and half-truths.
Griz, he said, if they find that map, you’re dead.
That’s not a very good way to start our agreement, I said. Not by
threatening me.
 I’m not threatening, he said. I’m warning. I’m trying to help. If they find
that map in your possession, they are going to think you did something very
bad. And they will punish you for it.
I thought for a bit. Trying to see the shape of what he was saying.
You mean you did something bad, I said. I took the map from you. If it’s
evidence that you did something bad, I’ll just tell them that.
And I’ll tell them you’re lying, he said. I wouldn’t want to, but if you
told them that, I’d have to. Just a matter of survival.
Your word against mine, I said.
They know me, he said. They trust me. I bring them stuff they like. Stuff
they need. They found you sneaking around. Hiding things from them.
Like being a girl, I said.
That, he said, but mostly I meant being a Freeman.
I wondered then if I’d fallen into a trap of my own digging.
Last Freeman came through here killed people they cared about, he said.
So they’re not going to be much disposed to like you or what you have to
say. But, Griz…
He seemed like he was in mild pain as he paused and looked at me.
Griz, he said. This is a stupid conversation. We’re on the same side. I’d
never betray you. Unless you betrayed me first. That’s all I’m saying. And
like I tried to tell you—keeping the map out of their hands is just a matter
of survival.
Sometimes Jip or Jess will look at me and make their eyes big, and it
usually means they want some food but can’t get it, like if we’re on the boat
and they can’t hunt their own meat. That’s what his eyes looked like. Soft
and warm, despite the blueness of them. I made myself remember how
quickly they could turn wintry.
Who died? I said.
I could make my eyes go wintry too.
I didn’t say anything else. I just waited him out. And he always hated
silence. So eventually he moved closer, holding his hands open and palm up
to show he meant no threat, and then he began to tell me another story,
speaking quietly as if afraid someone outside might hear.
I told you they’re scared of long voyages, he said. The ones they used to
take, raiding for girls.
Yes, I said. You said the three men who did them sailed away and never
came back, because of a storm.
I never said it was three men, he said. Interesting you think that. No, it
was two men and a woman. The woman was the best sailor, and she also
put people at ease when they met them as strangers. She would talk to the
girls and the men, and both would like her for different reasons. She was the
one made the marks on the map.
I looked at him, betraying myself a little.
You thought they were my marks, he said. Is that right?
I still do, I said. I had seen the pencil line marking his passage to our
island. I didn’t know why he would be lying about this but I was sure it’d
become apparent if he carried on talking.
That map is theirs, he said. The three sailors. It shows where they went.
If you were on the Falki, I would show you.
What’s the Falki? I said.
My boat, he said. I have the other maps hidden there.
Hidden? I said.
I told you, he said, it would not be good for them to be found. But they
are maps of their travels.
So they didn’t drown, I said.
He moved a little closer.
No, he said. They didn’t drown. They got to their destination safely
enough. They just didn’t leave it.
And then he told me another story.
He told me it was the real truth. I don’t know if it is. The Conservators
had come to the house that was his real home on the Swedish archipelago,
seemingly to trade but actually to take the pale girls who were his sisters.
And he and his kin had stopped them, because they were not fools.
They came, they stayed, they ate with us, they asked if we’d like to
come join their settlement—and when we said no, we liked it where we
were, they left friendly. And then they came back after dark, he said.
Nothing friendlike in their hearts. Carrying weapons in their fists. And
handcuffs. They said they just wanted one girl. They called it a “tithe”. Do
you know what a tithe is?
No, I said.
It’s like a bribe, he said. Like they used to take taxes from people or
they’d put them in prison if they refused to pay up. Except a tithe is for
gods. These people are dangerous because they think they are doing this
because a god wants them to do it. It means they don’t have to think like
humans.
So you killed them, I said.
No choice, he said. Even if we’d hidden—or fought them off—they’d
have come back. They now knew where we lived. We liked where we live.
Still do. We didn’t want to spend our lives hiding from them, moving
around, living in fear of the next time they tried, of what would happen if
they brought more people to help them. We had no idea how few of them
there are here. That’s why I came, the first time, to see if there was a threat.
That’s when I discovered they had grown afraid when the others hadn’t
returned. They turned from the sea.
And you killed them, I said again. The others.
We did, he said. My sisters are strong women. They did not take well to
the idea of being someone else’s breeder. I did not take well to the idea of
someone stealing my sisters. Nor did my parents. Or our friends.
Friends. Parents. He had not said there were more than the pale girls
when he first told the story. Now he seemed to come from a village. I didn’t
say anything, but I stored the thought away. It could have been another lie.
We knew they’d come back, because there was something extra in the
men’s eyes after they had met my sisters, he said. So we waited and when
they slunk back, we did what we had to do. I did not like doing it, but it had
to be done. It was their choice. They could have stayed away, but they came
back, with weapons and handcuffs.
All that and yet you thought you could steal my dog and no one would
follow you, I said.
A dog is not a sister, he said.
No, I said. But it’s still family.
And then things went quiet between us for a long time, and eventually
he walked off and lay down in his own cell across the way, and seemed to
do nothing but stare at the ceiling.
You think I’m a bad man, he said after a while.
I didn’t answer. I could see no point. I was too busy trying to figure out
what to do. If I told them to go and look after Jip and the horses, they would
then find the map and that would not be good, because there was no way of
knowing how they would react to it. It was a sort of proof that the holder of
the map might well have been involved in the death and disappearance of
their loved ones. But if I didn’t tell them, and I was unable to escape in
time, then the horses and Jip would die, tied up and hobbled. And in this
half-buried bunker with concrete walls, barred windows and a locked gate, I
didn’t think an escape would be a quick thing, even if it was eventually
possible.
The choice was of course not a hard one. I knew what I had to do, but
the tough thinking was all about the how of doing it. I was struggling. I
tried to keep believing that if I was just calm and clever enough there would
be a way to do this. Without it being more disastrous than it had to be.
Because Brand was right. They would believe him long before they
believed me. And since it looked like I was going to have to rely on him to
help me escape this place once quarantine was over, it didn’t make much
sense to betray him or even make them distrust him a little bit more than
they might already do. I had seen that one of the men who had brought the
food liked him but that the other was not as friendly. There was no point in
feeding the second one’s misgivings.
My feelings about Brand at that point could be neatly summed up by my
wanting to cross the hall and slam the door on his cell tight shut, just as we
had been warned not to do, locking him away behind a door that had no
key. I thought it would serve him right, and I also thought I would be spared
the distraction of his company. I don’t imagine many other people could
have thrown themselves on a bed and stared silently at the ceiling in such
an irritatingly conspicuous and noticeable way. It was almost childish, as if
he—the thief—was resenting that I—the victim—had objected to the theft
and had called it for what it was.
The dog jerked me from my thoughts, her excited barks immediately
recognisable.
It was Jess, and she was close by and getting closer with each bark. My
heart suddenly felt like it had swollen to twice its normal size and was now
trying to punch its way out of my ribcage.
I scrambled up on to the ledge below the window and looked between
the bars. As I said, the bunker was half sunk in the ground so that the
opening was only perhaps twenty centimetres above the grass. I saw Jess
and Saga and then a figure running after them, awkwardly yanking on a gas
mask as they got close to the bunker. Saga was still held on a rope, but Jess
was bounding across the grass towards me trailing her own long length of
rope behind her. She must have caught the scent of me and pulled free of
the hand holding her.
Jess! I shouted, and jammed my hand out of the window, reaching for
her, my shoulder wedged between the narrow bars. Jess! Good girl!
The chasing Con managed to stamp on the end of the trailing rope and
bring Jess to a sudden brutal halt. She lost her footing and yelped as she
was yanked over onto the ground. The Con scrabbled for the rope and then
fell and landed in a sitting position, pulling Jess towards them.
Hey, I shouted, then felt a hand on my shoulder, pulling me back.
Quarantine, said Brand, peering over my head. Can’t let the dog touch
you or they’d have to do something to it to stop it spreading whatever
infection you might be carrying.
The Con pulled Jess back into their arms and sat there. He or she wore a
sort of glove on one hand that seemed twisted in on itself, as if the leather
covered an injury, though they seemed to pay it no mind. The blank glass
eyes of the mask seemed to be pointed at me, not the dog.
Don’t worry, shouted Brand. The dog must have smelled me.
There’s no reason for them to find out you know the dog already, he said
very quietly, for my ears only. That’ll just raise more questions than we
have comfortable answers for.
The gas mask just watched us. Jess seemed to calm down a bit, but kept
trying to twist in the Con’s arms and find her way to me.
Although I hated the way Jess had been yanked off her feet by the rope,
what Brand said made sense. And I could see the Con actually had kind
hands and was trying to calm the dog and not hurt her.
They might have shot the dog if they thought it had touched us, said
Brand, as if he had heard my thoughts.
So I had to satisfy myself by staring at Jess and just being pleased and
amazed that after all these miles she was, as I had hoped against hope for, at
the end of my journey.
The Con stood up and stared at me. I couldn’t tell whether it was a
friendly or a hostile look. The mask made it impossible to read: the glass
just reflected the gunmetal sky overhead and gave nothing away.
Jess whined and barked again, tugging at the rope. The Con reached
down and calmed her with hands that were, again, kind and tuned to the
way a dog likes to be touched. And then abruptly turned away.
It was in the turn that I made my decision. Looking back on it now, I
know I made it for some of the right reasons, and all the wrong ones. The
first was the way the Con had handled Jess after the initial violence of
bringing her up short. They had not been the actions of someone who was
cruel to animals. They were the opposite, and Jess had responded, as if she
too trusted the Con in some way.
The second reason was that as the Con turned, a thick braided pigtail
swung behind her head in a way that reminded me immediately of Bar.
I figured, wrongly, that a woman would be kinder and more
understanding.
The third reason was that if there were wolves out there, as the Cons
believed, then Jip and the horses would not have much of a chance against
them, tied and hobbled as they were, even for one night.
All sorts of bad things flowed from that decision, but I still think it was
the right one to make, given what I knew at the time.
Hey, I shouted. Hey you!
The Con stopped but didn’t turn.
I have a dog too, I shouted. And horses. They’re out there, tied up.
Waiting for me to come and get them.
Griz, said Brand, his voice deepening to a warning growl.
If I tell you where to get them, can you fetch them? I said, shrugging off
the hand that had gripped my arm. They’re not far. But they’re not safe
alone.
Griz, hissed Brand. Don’t—
They’re tied, I said. They can’t run or fight if anything comes for them.
And the dog will starve or die of thirst if it’s left.
If they find the map, said Brand.
They will, I said, turning to hide my mouth, as if the gas mask could
read my lips even if I spoke low, which I did. But I can’t help that. I told
you. What goes for Jess goes for Jip. They’re family. And even if they
weren’t, what kind of person leaves an animal defenceless and without
food?
A person who wants to stay alive, he said, his face grim. These Cons do
not have a sense of humour. And the god they like seems to be the
unforgiving kind.
 The Con turned and cocked her head at me.
Please, I said.
That’s Tertia, said Brand.
Tertia, I said. I’m Griz. I can see you like dogs. I can see you have the
way of them. Please save my dog, and you can have the horses.
Tertia stared at me some more.
You think she’s going to be all friendly just because she’s not a man,
said Brand quietly. Again, irritatingly it was like he knew what I was
thinking. Bad mistake.
Jess whined and tugged the rope, straining towards me.
The woman Tertia stood there like a statue. I couldn’t tell what she was
deciding. She was so still that I couldn’t even be sure she was thinking
about what I had said at all.
I once asked why she wasn’t kept with the breeders, said Brand. They
said she was too hard. Like a cold and rocky cliff that life can’t cling to was
what they actually said. She’s tough enough, that’s for sure, but she does
have a thing about Saga. And now I guess she’s taken to the other dog as
well.
And he turned away from the window and sat on the ledge, looking back
into the room.
The one you stole, I said. Her name is Jess.
You’re going to get us killed, he said.
My dog, I said. My responsibility.
My neck though, he said. Fair warning. I like it as it is, uncut and
unbroken. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep it that way.
All’s fair in love and war, I said.
What? he said.
Something I read, I said. Means you do what you must. I just did what I
had to.
And then I turned back to Tertia, and told her where I had left Jip and
the horses, describing the lonely pine and its fallen brothers and sisters.
I still didn’t know if she was going to do anything about it, but she
listened and then abruptly turned away, pulling the two dogs behind her,
and dropped out of sight over the edge of the low slope towards the
settlement.
None of what you just did changes anything, said Brand. They’re still
going to wait the quarantine out, and by then they’ll have figured you’re a
girl, and then they’ll make you a breeder. You changed nothing and all you
did was put us in danger.
I saved my dog, I said. And—
I cut myself off before I said John Dark’s horses. John Dark had been a
good thing and I had no wish to share anything good with this thief. It
would be like staining a clean memory the next time he talked about it.
And my horses, I said. I saved my horses.
You really think a dog’s life is worth a human’s? he said.
A life’s a life, I said. And those lives were in my care.
You’re crazy, he said.
I know what I am, I said. And I know what you are too.
And what’s that? he said.
Someone who doesn’t know what they are, I said. Someone who lies,
even to themselves. A thief who thinks he’s not a bad man.
He looked at me then, eyes flaring flat and cold as iceblink.
You think you’re a hero because you did one good thing, because you
saved your sisters? I said. Maybe you were then. But now? Thieving, lying,
stealing people’s dogs?
I found I wanted to hit him too. Instead I spat on the floor.
Heroes aren’t for ever, I said. You shit on your past, you don’t stay
shiny.
I think I preferred you when you were a boy, he said.
No, you didn’t, I said.
I looked back up at him, right in the eye.
See? You don’t know the first damn thing about yourself.
 Chapter 36

A reunion betrayed

All the lies came home at first light. And they didn’t come home to roost
like gentle doves, they came home like scavenging birds of prey, ripping
and tearing and leaving nothing but the bones.
Brand and I had not spoken again as the night came on. I know he had
watched me waiting at the window, straining my eyes trying to see if
anyone had in fact gone to get Jip and the horses. When full black erased
everything but the stars and a glimmer down in the settlement that might
have been lamplight or a kitchen fire, I remained there, listening instead,
ears reaching out into the dark for what I could no longer see.
But a punishing rain came on early and carried on through the night, and
I heard and saw nothing other than the downpour. I used the old steel toilet
in the end cell and tried not to feel self-conscious about the noises Brand
must have heard, then I swilled a bucket of water down it to make it go
away, went back to a cell Brand could not look into from his and slept,
surprisingly deeply and dream-free.
It was the last good sleep I had. My nights nowadays are torn and
uncomfortable things, and though I do doze off at some stage towards
mornings, I wake feeling more tired than I was the day before, as if I have
spent the dreamtime running and running, but always ending up awake back
in these four walls, with a barred slit for a window.
Maybe fate knew what was coming and gave me one last good night’s
sleep out of pity.
I woke to the sound of metal hitting metal in a fast and insistent rattle. I
stumbled out of my cell and blinked at the figures standing behind the bars
at the end of the hall. Brand emerged from the door across the way and as
he did so the tallest figure stopped rattling the pistol barrel between the
bars, which was the source of the noise that had woken us.
I thought they looked like judges, standing side by side, shoulder to
shoulder behind the bars, their faces hidden by masks that—this close up—I
could see were all different and patched with tape or stitched leather. Their
voices were muffled but easily understandable. There were four of them—
three tall ones—and the shorter figure of Tertia.
The next shortest figure was in the middle of the other two men, but he
was clearly in charge. Despite the mask there was a kind of energy coming
off him like the buzz in the beehives back in the ruined stadium a lifetime
ago.
He held out the map.
Even as I saw it and tried to ready myself for what might be coming, I
felt a strong sense of release, because if they had the map that meant Jip had
been rescued.
You, said the man with the map, pointing at me.
My name’s Griz, I said, trying to ignore the black metal gun now
hanging from his hand, pointing at the floor.
Don’t mess with him, said Brand from behind me, speaking low, for my
ears only. That’s Ellis. He’s the father.
Ellis shook the map at me.
Where did you get this? he said.
I found it, I said.
Where? he said. Where did you find it?
His voice sounded like he was talking to a child who was either being
stupid or impolite on purpose. Like him it was short and taut, like it might
snap into something much louder and nastier at any moment.
On a boat, I said. He actually shuddered visibly with impatience.
Where? he said.
One of the figures beside him spoke. Despite being taller than him, the
voice surprised me by being female.
Who was on the boat? said the woman. Who was on the boat and what
did you do to them?
There was no one on the boat, I said.
And as I said it, I made a very strong effort not to look at Brand, whose
eyes I could feel burning holes in the side of my face. His silence seemed to
me to be as loud as any shout. I hoped they couldn’t hear it too, or begin to
wonder why the normally voluble pirate was saying nothing.
It was deserted, I said. This much was true. I had after all found the map
on a deserted boat. That made the lie easier to tell. I wasn’t having to make
a story out of nothing. I had a truth to build on.
There was no one aboard, I said.
Liar, spat the woman, taking a step towards me as if the sudden rage that
fuelled her might let her walk right through the metal bars that separated us
in order to grab me and shake me.
Let him speak, said Ellis. Let him say what else he wants to tell us.
The calmness in his voice was small and hateful.
I found I had nothing to say.
They stared at me.
He’s not a boy. He’s a girl.
The silence broken by a familiar voice.
But it wasn’t Brand’s.
It was the girl. It was Tertia.
She lifted her mask off her face with her twisted glove-hand and glared
at me.
My world split in two.
I had never seen this woman before. And I had known her all my life.
I had never seen the woman she was, but the girl she had once been was
as much a part of me as my heart. In fact she was the deepest crack in that
heart—the best-beloved broken bit we all lived with.
I had expected to be betrayed by Brand.
I never expected to be betrayed by my own dead sister.
And the hatred in her eyes widened that crack in my heart and tore me in
two, dropping me to my knees so unexpectedly and so brutally that it was
only Brand catching me that stopped me falling further.
Tertia! snapped Ellis. Put your mask on now!
Joy just stood and glared at me, the hostility and fury in her eyes
somehow locking us together in an endless unbreakable moment. I couldn’t
breathe. I don’t think she could either.
But how—? was all I could say.
They sold me, she said.
 I didn’t know what she meant. Who she meant. I stumbled to my feet
and stepped towards her, standing there on the other side of the bars.
They sold me to have a quiet life, she said. For the rest of you.
Who? I said.
She hit me then. Like the question I had asked was too big to answer.
Her gloved fist a tight knot of bone and skin that came through the gap in
the bars and split my lip and left the taste of blood in my mouth. The taste
surprised me more than the impact knocked me backwards. A blow is a
blow, but blood makes it personal.
Why didn’t you come earlier? she said, hard eyes shiny with tears like
wet steel. You were my sister. You were a part of me. But you all let me go
and be brought to this flat land…
Tertia! shouted Ellis. Your mask! Or by God I will—
The man between Ellis and Joy grabbed the mask and jammed it back
over her face. We never heard what Ellis was going to do by his god or
anything else. He just snapped his fingers and spluttered at her instead, like
he was choking on a fury all of his own.
Take off that glove and burn it! he snarled. If you weren’t wearing it, I’d
lock you in quarantine too, you stupid little bitch! Now get out before I
maim your other damned hand.
I am sure it was the prospect of being made to be any closer to me that
made her peel off her glove and stumble away up the stairs, as much as the
vicious threat.
It got bad then.
I don’t remember the right order of things, because I was sleepwalking
in shock. But this is the patchwork I do recall. They made me strip. They
wanted to check that I was not a boy. It wasn’t the undressing or the way
they were demonstrating their power over me, making me take my clothes
down so they could see me that I minded—I have swum naked with my
whole family and the Lewismen too without giving it much of a thought.
They’re just bodies after all. It was the fact that the men turned away while
the woman checked me that made it horrible. As if my body was a dirty
thing they should not be made to see. I don’t know if Brand stole a look,
because he was behind me, but being a thief I expect he did.
Then they made me sit on a chair and face them through the bars and tell
them about the map and how I’d found it. I told the story again and again,
the words coming haltingly over my split and puffy lip, and the more they
asked the more real it became in my head, perhaps because I was building
my lie on the truth of stealing from Brand’s boat, the Falki. I just added two
things to the story. I told them I had found the boat washed up next to a pier
like the one I had moored the Sweethope to in Blackpool. I told them I
thought something must have happened at sea, because the sails were torn
but still raised, and the anchors had not been dropped.
And when they asked me what had happened to the three people who
they said had crewed the boat, I told them I did not know but that if they
had made it ashore it might be that the wolves had got them, since that
stretch of coast was teeming with them. I told them this because at that
point I was still under the illusion that I might somehow escape and that it
would be good if they were as afraid of the mainland behind them as they
were of the sea in front of them. Then I did not know I was going to be
where I am now, writing this. Trapped. Hopeless. And never going home
again.
And after that they abruptly put me where I am now. In the end cell. And
they closed the door until it locked itself shut.
I didn’t know they were going to close the door until they did. I shouted
when I saw it about to happen, and I heard Brand’s voice drown mine as he
too tried to stop them.
But the tiny click of the lock closing me in drowned us both. Maybe it
was so loud because we knew it had no key to open it again.
I remember a jumble of voices after that, muffled by the heavy steel
door. The gist was that they had to keep us quarantined, but they couldn’t
have Brand and I locked in together in case we fucked.
They didn’t use that word. They said “bred”. Somehow the way they
said it stained the day much darker than an honest swear word would have
done.
Brand’s protests that the door was without a key were met with
assurances that once the quarantine was up they would find a way to get me
out, even if it meant knocking a hole in the wall.
Don’t worry, Ellis said. We’ve not got so many that we’re going to let
her rot in there. She’ll be fed and watered as good as you. We’re not bad
people. She’ll come to see that. We’ll treat her well.
By “not so many” he meant breeders.
 I don’t remember much more of that day because I spent most of it
dazed by seeing Joy alive, and then seeing her full of hate for me. I was torn
apart. Like the lightning tree I had found on the ridge, the source of the light
I’d seen from the tower. I was split in two—my heartwood blasted and
burned out. I was dead on my feet. I couldn’t get the taste of blood out of
my mouth. It, and the thought that it came with, made me sick. Literally. I
lay on the bed ledge, my mind stumbling around the horror of it, trying to
catch up with itself, deaf to whatever Brand kept saying through the slit in
the door, and then I felt my body convulse as if rising in rebellion against
the facts of the day. I only just made it to the bowl before I threw up the
contents of my stomach in what seemed like an endless chain of
convulsions. It felt like I was trying to vomit myself inside out, and when it
did finally stop I was left shaking and weak but too tired to be able to find
any relief in sleep. I lay there, convinced I would never sleep again. The
horror of Joy pushed everything out of my head. I don’t think I thought of
Jip or Jess or anything other than the nightmare I had woken into.
Somewhere in that blurred-out day, they brought me food and they
brought me water—water to drink and water to flush the steel toilet. They
set up a length of old steel pole poked through my window and poured from
a distance as I mechanically filled a jug and the buckets. And then they
asked if I wanted anything else and I did have enough sense to ask for my
backpack and they brought it and took anything like a tool or a knife from
it, as well as medicines, but that’s at least how I got this notebook I’m
writing in.
Welcome to the now.
 Chapter 37

The now

I suppose everything becomes a routine that you can get used to if you do it
all the time—even sadness and horror and loneliness. I miss Jip and Jess,
though I do sometimes catch a glimpse of them being walked on a rope in
the distance through the trees. I find I miss them even more than my home,
which is strange. Maybe it’s because they are close enough to see and
almost near enough to touch.
I have been stuck in this concrete box, on my own and writing all this
for twenty-three days. It feels like I am never going to be allowed to leave.
I have quarter of a pencil left. I will have to ask for more.
They feed us well enough and they keep the water coming and they
often ask if I want things. I say I want to get out and it’s so routine that they
think it’s a joke when I say it and laugh like they’re sharing something
pleasant and fun with me. They’ve explained being walled up in this cement
box is all for my own good. It’s for my protection (from Brand) and theirs
(from the imaginary germs I might be carrying to blight them). They
probably believe it. They say that when I am allowed to leave here they will
make it up to me and I will like them and their home and want it to be mine.
I try and smile and say maybe, but I don’t smile well when I would rather
shout. I smile to help them relax about me.
They do not know what I do at night.
They come and sit on an old stool outside my window at any hour of the
day and ask all sorts of other questions. About my family, how I got here
without being eaten by wolves, would I like to know about their god
because he’s really good at helping you understand why the world has trials
and tribulations and how it’s all a way for him to show his love, and much
other stuff like that. They keep their masks on because they believe in
germs too.
I tell them my family is dead, because I don’t want them knowing where
they are, and I tell them that I was safe deeper in the mainland because Jip
is great at keeping wolves away. I want them to feed him and treat him and
Jess like something of value. I also tell them I’d like to know why—since
they seem to think breeding is such an important thing—that their god is a
father and not a mother. I told them I did like the sound the bells on their
church make though.
And that’s true. I like hearing them at the end of every day when they all
go in to have a big pray-up together, because that means there’s one less day
until they come and knock down the wall and get me out of here, and then
all I have to do is grit my teeth and trust that Brand will be good on his
word and help me escape before it gets too grim or repetitive. Though since
Brand and I aren’t talking at the moment I write this, maybe I do also hate
the church bells because they might just be marking off the time until he
betrays me again.
Ellis told me that my liking the bells was a start and that I should likely
come to love his god because his god loved everyone. I didn’t argue.
Everyone in my family likes the lobsters we pull out of the deep clear water.
I don’t think the lobsters like us much. Nor do I think they’re obliged to do
so.
Ellis asked me if I’d ever been with a man. His manner was equal parts
swagger and furtive.
I didn’t answer.
He dared to come closer, as if shy about being overheard.
He told me I should like it. He told me in a soft voice that made my
flesh creep. That he would make me very happy. That it was not a painful
but a wonderful world of sensations he would introduce me to. He told me
not to worry about disappointing him, that he would show me how to give
him pleasure too.
I think he stumbled as he left because the glass on his gas mask had
steamed up a bit. I saw him wipe it as he took it off and walked away.
When Brand and I were still talking, I asked him about Joy’s hand. Why
it was twisted. Why she wore a glove.
 What he told me hit as hard as that knotted fist coming through the bars.
I only know what they told me, he said. I don’t know how much is true.
Just tell me, I said.
He was looking at me through the Judas hole in the door.
Ellis gave her a child, he said.
Do you mean he gave her someone else’s child, or that he made her
pregnant? I asked.
He made her pregnant, he said.
There’s a word for that, I said.
I know, he said.
But I had no words. Just sadness. And a sudden need to find Joy and
hold her and say I understood why she was so hard and angry. I was still a
fool. Soft. I didn’t know anything.
She carried the baby but it was delivered dead, he said. Maybe once
upon a time doctors could have saved it.
Joy. Breaking my heart again and again. I sank to the bed and stared at
the floor.
She was too young, said Brand. That’s what the woman said.
What woman? I said.
The tall one who was beside Ellis, said Brand. Mary. She’s called Mary
like the mother of their god. She said Tertia was too young, so the baby died
and then she was useless as no life could cling to her womb any more.
Her hand, I said.
Ellis wanted to try again is what she told me. Years later. Maybe he said
it was for breeding, but I expect it was just for the doing of it, said Brand.
He has hot little eyes, Ellis. He tried to force her and frighten her with a hot
poker from the fire. That’s how her hand got burn-scarred into a claw like
that.
He burned her hand, I choked.
No, said Brand. She said no. And she said that she wasn’t frightened of
him. He said he’d see about that, and he put the red poker in front of her
face and asked if she was still so brave and…
His voice trailed off.
And? I said. And what?
And she was, said Brand. She just grabbed the hot end and pushed it
right back into his face. So her hand is puckered and pulled out of shape by
the burn scar, and he nearly lost an eye, and carries her mark across his
cheek beneath that mask.
Good for her, I said.
Yes, he said. Good for her. Tough little nugget. No doubt she’s your
sister. Looks like you too.
That’s why I first cut my hair short at the back and sides, like a boy.
Because even when Mum was at her worst she’d see me and get distressed,
thinking I was Joy come back. I thought Dad would be angry with me for
hacking off my pigtails, but he wasn’t. He said it looked good and even
tidied it up for me. Now I think maybe he also wanted me to look like a boy
in case they came back, looking for more young girls to steal. I don’t know.
I just like my hair like this. Out of the way, no fuss when you’re in the
wind, working.
I do know that’s why he introduced me as a boy to Brand. For my own
protection. It was a warning, even then. Do not trust this stranger. Any
strangers, really. That’s why I went along with the lie with John Dark.
Dad’s always been overprotective about me, but somehow in his eyes Bar’s
always been big enough to look after herself. He’s not used to the fact I
grew up and am just as tough as her now.
Was it always safer being a boy than a girl, even when you were alive?
I thought about what else Joy had said.
Do you think they sold her? I said. My parents?
His eyes went away from the Judas hole. I heard his body slide down the
door into a sitting position, leaning back against the metal.
Do you? he said.
Not for a minute, I said. Not for a minute.
For a tithe, he said. Would they have paid her as a tithe?
You mean because of what she said? I said. So they’d leave the rest of us
alone?
Yes, he said. Would your father have done it?
I didn’t have to think.
No, I said.
Because you’re so sure he’s a good man? he said.
No, I said. Because he’s not soft.
No, he said after a bit. No. He didn’t seem to be.
He isn’t, I said. Any more than I am.
 Or I, said Brand.
We’re not the same, I said. You’re not the same as us.
Maybe, he said. But we’re all from the north. Things are harder there.
And soft doesn’t get much done.
He was like that, Brand. He always said one thing too much. He liked
the sound of his voice I think. So he would overspeak and get braggarty—
and then you trusted him less than if he hadn’t gone on.
“We’re all from the north” was the sort of thing that sounded good until
you tapped it and realised it was hollow as an empty bucket.
I’m sorry she hates you, he said.
And then he was like this too—he could say just the right thing, the
words that swung in under your guard and got right to the core of you.
Me too, I said. But I don’t know what to do about it.
I’ve been thinking about it, he said.
She’s not your sister, I said. You don’t have to.
No, he said. But I can’t help thinking that she could have been. And
what it must feel like.
He could get so close with his words that you had to hate him to keep
yourself protected from him.
They poisoned her mind, he said. They must have done it to try and
make her accept what had happened. To stop her trying to escape, because
if you all had given her up, then where was she going to try and run to?
She was so young, I said.
This world? he said. It’s so far past old, nobody’s young any more.
We’re all living on borrowed time.
That doesn’t mean anything, I said after I’d thought about it, giving his
words another good tap in my mind.
I’m just trying to say we’re all on the edge, he said. You know what
extinct means?
Sort of, I said. Yes.
Well, that’s us, he said. Humans. Sort of extinct.

That’s when we were talking. Now we’re not. It’s all because of the
Leatherman and what I do at night. Which is lie under my bed and scratch
away at the wall. I started doing it to mark the days, using the sharp
screwdriver bit to mark a day in the paint. Except the paint cracked and
flaked off and revealed the powdery plaster underneath. When I scraped
some more I found the plaster was just a thin skin on top of those knobbly
blocks you used to build with—bigger than bricks and with hollow spaces
in between them. I went under the bed and did some more scraping, and
very quickly had the plaster off a block and decided if I could move the
block I could crawl into the next cell, and if I could do that I could maybe
do it to the half-wall at the end under the bars where Joy had hit me.
Brand told me I was crazy.
Then he told me they would hear me.
Then he told me I would get us both in big trouble. And then he said
he’d have to tell them if I carried on because even if they didn’t hear me at
first, when they eventually found out I was trying to dig my way out they
would know he had kept quiet.
I told him he had to do what he had to do. And I had to do what I was
doing.
He didn’t tell them.
But he did stop talking to me.
I told you a book saved me. All the time I was lying on my side,
scraping the cement out of the gap between the blocks I thought of The
Count of Monte Cristo, an adventure of mistaken identities and a man who
doesn’t give up as he tries to escape the impossible Chateau d’If.
My if was equally impossible. If I got through one wall, why did I think
I could get through the next? But you can’t let ifs and buts stop you. So I
kept eating and sleeping and writing in this notebook and scraping when I
wasn’t and was sure the Cons weren’t around to hear. I became a sort of
dazed character in my own adventure, unsure of the outcome, only knowing
I could not stop, wherever I was going.
And however much I strained my eye to look for her, I never saw Joy
again. Though some nights I would wake up and look at the window, sure
that she had been watching me as I slept.
It was a stronger sense than a dream, almost tangible, like a scent of her
in the mind, but whenever I jumped to the window to see her, the night was
always empty and only peopled by my unfulfilled hopes drifting away in
the dark.
Hope eventually became just like half the things that had stalked me on
my journey across the mainland: not really there at all, just something
prowling around me in my mind, distracting me from the darker truth of my
situation.
There is one other reason Brand and I have stopped talking, and maybe
I’m not writing about it because I’ve caught my story up to the now and
every day is so much like the other that I’ve started to ration things.
Because when I have written it all down I won’t have you to talk to, and
will truly be on my own.
 Chapter 38

The then

I am the one who took that photograph with that last bit of writing on the
back and put it between the leaves you hold in your hand as you’re reading
this. First I reread all the words that came before—the story in the book—
some of them now hard to make out, the lines jammed in close to make the
most use of the paper, sometimes so thinly scrawled I had to guess at what
they were. And having got to the end, I thought that I should slide the
photograph between the pages and explain how my story and that
photograph came together and ended up so very far from the place my book
was stolen. There are only a few of them, but I think there are enough
empty pages left to do so.
My name is Isabel. My mother used to tell me it was a pretty name. She
said it was her mother’s name. And yes, Isabel turned to Grizabel in my
father’s mouth when I was too small to walk even, and then it got shortened
to Griz—and now you know my fancier name, the one that doesn’t fit me at
all.
What I didn’t know, although I suspected it, was that it was Joy who had
stolen my book.
I told you stories saved me. This one did. Because she read it. And like a
magic spell or a prayer—all the right words in the right order—that
changed everything. Or maybe it was a curse. Maybe a curse is sometimes
just a desperate prayer seen from the wrong end.
There was—after all—a death to come.
But first there was a noise outside my window. Two days after the book
had gone, I had put all my energy and despair into scraping away at the
mortar around the block in the wall beneath my bed.
I had scraped and scraped and gouged and hacked and swore until my
hands hurt and my back felt like it was never going to unbend and be
straight again. And then as I was hunched on my side in the tight space
beneath the bed, my ears caught a noise and I stopped.
I heard nothing else, but the nothing that it was sounded dangerously
like someone else being very still and listening right back. For me. So I
rolled quietly out from under the bed and lay on my back in the middle of
the floor and looked up through the darkness at the moonlight slanting in
through the barred window.
Are you sick? a voice said.
Joy’s voice—but very different to the last time I heard it spitting at me.
I stopped breathing, not consciously, but as if my body had just forgotten
it was necessary. I was trying to work out what it was that had changed in
her tone.
Yes, I said. Sick of being in here. But no. I haven’t got a disease.
Good, she said. Because I’m not wearing their bloody mask.
An arm reached out and then her hand—the scarred one—hooked one of
the bars and then her face swung into the window, cutting out half the
moonlight. And there she was. Looking down at me.
To me, in that moment, she was a wonder. She looked like I did, I
realised. And she looked like Mum. And she wore her hair like Bar’s. I
don’t know if it was because I was starved of them or just starved of any
people to look at, but I stared at her for a long time just drinking in both the
strangeness and the familiarity of her.
Joy, I said, sitting up.
Mum’s not dead, she said.
No, I said carefully. No—she’s not. She doesn’t talk though. But she still
smiles and her hand is still her hand and she likes us to sit and hold it with
her.
I was slowly getting to my feet—moving deliberately carefully so as not
to spook her into leaving.
She won’t like my hand, she said, a catch in her voice. It’s just an ugly
claw now.
I reached up and put my own hand on it. She flinched and tried to pull it
away. I didn’t let her. I gripped it. There were scar ridges but it just felt
warm and normal. Like a hand should.
Brand told me how it happened, I said. I’m so sorry. And I’m so happy
that—
I know, she said. I read your story.
And then there was nothing to say, because there was suddenly too much
to say so we just stood looking at each other. After a bit, she relaxed and
stopped trying to pull her hand free. She looked away from me, up at the
moon. Her voice was raw but steady. Only the pale moonlight betrayed the
wetness streaking down her cheek.
She took a deep breath.
They told me she was dead, she said. They told me and I saw her lying
on the ground. And then I fainted or they did something to me because the
next thing I remember is that it was night, or maybe two or three nights, and
when it was day I didn’t recognise any of the land we were passing. They
told me I had been traded and that Dad had done the deal, that Mum had
had second thoughts and chased after me and fell and they hadn’t hurt her,
not like I thought they had.
And you believed them, I said.
Not at first, she said. But when Dad and Ferg and Bar didn’t come after
me, the only reason I could think of was that they were telling the truth.
I’m sorry you lost your baby, I said.
Yes, she said. Yes, I am too, though I didn’t want him to start with. And
then when he was born the way he was, a poor little blue shred of a thing, I
thought he looked like a doll no one could have loved except me and I was
sadder than you could ever imagine.
He was a boy, I said.
Ellis told me it was not as big a loss as if it had been a girl, she said.
They want more breeders. Not more boys. That’s why Ellis is so excited
that you’re here.
Ellis, I said. He’s…
Yes, she said. All the bad things you’re thinking? He’s them and more.
And the way he looks at me it’s like he knows.
Knows what? I said
That I’m going to kill him, she said. I’ve always meant to. Now I have
to.
I’d spent most of my life—ever since that worst day—thinking of her as
a little girl. That difference in her voice? She sounded like Bar. Or like Bar
would have sounded if she’d ever felt the need to be dangerous and
protective. That was my big sister talking.
You don’t, I said. Can you get me out of here?
No, she said. I mean I can open the barred gate at the end of the hall, but
there are no keys to your door. Ellis is going to take a sledgehammer and
knock a hole in the wall when it’s time to get you out.
But I’ve nearly done it, I said. The excitement made my voice catch.
Joy, I said. I’ve nearly done it. I’ve scraped out a big block under the bed. I
just need a couple of hits with a hammer to get it moving back out of the
way and I can crawl through.
They’ll hear a sledgehammer, she said. Sound carries. But I know what
you can do.
Her voice had caught my excitement.
Whatever I can do, it’s “we”, I said. Or I’m not doing it.
What do you mean? she said.
I mean I’m not doing anything, I said. I’m not doing anything on my
own. Maybe never again. But definitely not this. We’re doing it. Us.
What? she said.
You know what, I said.
We’re going home.

Her idea was better than a sledgehammer. It was a jack. The kind you
would have put under heavy things like cars to lift them by cranking a
handle. She went away for a bit and came back with one that she handed
through the bars. She passed in another length of pipe like the one they used
to bring the water to me.
Here’s what you do, she said.
I got it, I said. Good plan. Brilliant really.
She smiled.
Hard to believe, she said. But you’re really nearly as old as me, aren’t
you?
Yes, I said.
Right, she said. Ellis has forbidden me to come near this place. But if the
jack works, call for the dogs when I walk past in the morning. I’ll whistle
for them so you’ll know to look. If it doesn’t work? Don’t call out for them
and we’ll have to think of something else.
What are we going to do if we do get me out? I said.
Well, she said. For a long time I thought about locking them in their
church one day and burning it down. But that seems a little too much.
They’re not even really bad people. Not without Ellis. They’re just easily
led. They like the god stuff. It makes them feel special, and it makes them
feel less lonely about having been left behind at the end of things, the way
we have been. I think Ellis knows the god stuff is not real. Or not real for
him. But it was a good way to tell a story they could all agree to, that put
him at the top of the pile. That made breeders seem like a good idea. Like it
was god’s work, so if it felt a little not quite human, that was the reason.
We’re not burning them alive in their church, I said.
No, she said. And her eyes went away for a moment, like she didn’t
want me to see what she was thinking. No. We won’t do that. But we’ll
have to stop them following us.
We can take Brand’s boat, I said quietly. She shook her head and leant in
to explain why we couldn’t.
I don’t think he was listening anyway. But it was a wise thing to do.

He heard me later, when I jammed the metal pole across the room and used
the jack against the other wall to push it against the block. The grating noise
as it moved woke him and he came to see what was going on.
It worked well. As the jack opened, the block pushed back, and though it
jammed a few times, all I had to do was slack it off and reposition the pole
and before long I had opened my trapdoor to freedom.
Brand was sitting on the bed in the next cell as I crawled
through.
You’re going to get us killed, is all he said.
I asked him if he had a better plan.
Yes, he said. The one we agreed on. Where I save you once we’re out of
quarantine.
You see the two reasons why mine is a better plan? I said. I mean, quite
apart from not having to end up underneath Ellis before you get me out?
Well yes, he said. Well, one at least. You don’t have to trust me to save
you.
That’s a big one, I said. And the other is bigger. I save myself.
Well, I know you can trust me, he said. But I can’t persuade you of that.
And I certainly can’t argue with the Ellis point.
I just don’t see how this helps, he said, pointing at the hole I had come in
through and then at the locked barred gate at the end of the hall.
I’m okay with that, I said. Good night.
And I crawled back and pulled the block back in place and rolled the
jack and the pole lengthways under my bed ledge so the Cons would not see
it if they looked in in the morning. And then I tried to pretend to myself that
I wasn’t too excited to sleep.

I heard Joy whistling for the dogs in the middle of the morning and when I
looked out of the window I saw she was appearing to innocently walk them
past my window at a suitable distance. Jip was moving in a lopsided way.
Jip, I shouted, Jess! Good dogs!
She let Jip loose, seeming to accidentally drop the rope and chase after
her. He lolloped towards me, his happiness making him ignore whatever
was making him limp. One of the other Cons was visible in the distance.
Jip ran up to my window and barked happily at me.
Good boy! I said. Good good boy.
It hurt us both not to reach out and touch him, but I didn’t want to have
the Cons think he was infectious, not when we might be so close to being
free.
Come here! Joy shouted angrily as she grabbed Jip and made a show of
pulling him away from the window.
Tonight then, she whispered, and winked.
Why is he limping? I said.
Ellis stamped on him, she said. Then kicked him hard.
Why? I said.
Because I like him, she said.
Then she stood up and waved at the distant Con who had turned and was
walking towards her.
It’s all right, she shouted. Got him before she touched him.
The Con nodded and waved and turned away again.
That was a long day. And then night fell after they brought us food and
refilled my water through the pipe. And then infuriatingly nothing at all
happened as the darkness deepened. And I must have fallen asleep.
I woke with her tapping the bars.
Now, she said. We go now.
My heart began thumping with adrenaline as I jumped off the bed and
scooted beneath, pushing the breeze-block aside and worming head first
into the next-door cell.
Joy was moving fast, because she was at the barred gate and trying to
open it when I emerged into the hallway. She was trying a series of keys
from a big ring held in one hand.
Don’t worry, she said. It’s one of them. I’ll get it in
a second.
Jip and Jess were boiling around her legs and trying to get to me through
the bars. I buried my face in their neck fur and hoped there was no one
close by to hear their happy whines.
The horses are outside, she said. It won’t be long and we’ll be gone.
What about me?
Brand’s words came slipping sideways through the darkness behind me.
You can come too, said Joy after a beat.
Thank you, he said, though not like he meant it. He stepped out into the
moonlight. He wasn’t quite threatening, but he did change the atmosphere
in the room. But if I did, then I could never come back here and maybe
there are not so many places with people in them who want to trade that I
want to lose one.
Then we can leave you here, I said. Better that way.
And if they send you after us, and you do it, said Joy. I will kill you.
Joy, I said. This doesn’t have to end in blood.
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, she said. But that’s my choice. They’ve
taken everything from me, but they have left me that one thing. Ellis
deserves…
But we can escape without killing Ellis, I said.
No, she said. Voice low and suddenly flat. No, Griz. Killing Ellis is
done. That’s why we have to go now.
I felt a cold pit open in my stomach. I stared at her. She shrugged. She
didn’t look different. But because of what she had done, she was. She had
to be. I didn’t care much about Ellis. I was worried that her having killed
would hurt and change her, but she looked calmer than I’d seen her.
Released even.
It’s done, she said. It was mine to do.
What? said Brand. His voice raw, filling the silence that seemed to have
somehow imploded the room, turning it into a tiny, claustrophobic place.
He ate something he shouldn’t have, she said, carrying on trying the
keys. Seemed a fitting end. He was always greedy about taking things that
weren’t his to take.
Bar had been teaching Joy about herbs before she was taken. It was one
of the things Joy was in a hurry to learn, always pestering her.
The moon caught the side of her face as she moved a little, steadying
herself against the bars on the gate as she tried yet another key. I saw she
was looking right at me. Watching to see how much this had changed things
between us.
He was looking forward to taking something else he shouldn’t have too,
she said.
Joy, I said.
I couldn’t allow that, she said. You know that, Griz. The others are all a
little sick too. But they didn’t have enough to do any permanent harm. He
had the special portion. They think it was the salted mutton.
But won’t they know it’s you? I said.
No, she said. They don’t know I know what I do. If they did, they’d stop
wondering why I never had another baby. But it doesn’t matter. They’ll
figure I’ve just gone to find my own private bush to be sick behind.
And then the right key clicked the lock open and she pulled it wide. I
went through it fast and filled my arms with Jess, who I never thought I’d
really see again, and who now bucked and curved around me, tail
thrumming as she tried to lick my face and simultaneously nudge Jip out of
the way as he tried to do the same thing. Even though we weren’t yet free
and away, it felt and sounded and smelled like home.
Are you coming? said Joy.
I looked up to see she was looking at Brand.
I suppose I’ll have to, he said, otherwise you’ll steal the Falki.
Is that the only reason? she said.
Yes, he said. Well—
 I closed the gate. He stared at me as I locked it.
Too late to steal your boat, said Joy. I’d seen to it before I knew Griz and
I would be leaving.
What have you done? he said, bounding forward and grabbing the bars.
I haven’t burned your boat. Not like you burned the Sweethope, she said.
Though when I read what you did I wanted to. But then I had a better idea.
Open the gate, he said. Let’s—
And I’ve left you your dog, she said. So there is no reason for you to
follow us.
Griz, he said. What has she done?
I cut all the ropes from your boat. And the rudder-lines. Not as
permanent as burning. So you can thank me for that, said Joy. I threw them
in the water. And the anchors. You’ve a lot of work to do before the thing’s
seaworthy again.
But she didn’t burn it, I said. And if you work hard, the Falki can take
you home again.
His eyes burned into me.
I know where you live, he said.
And I know where your home is too, I said.
You believed that story, did you? he said.
Yes, I said. Now you’re trying to make me doubt it like that, yes, I do.
He looked at me, long and hard. Then his beard split and revealed that
infuriating flash of white that came when he smiled.
If I come after you, he said, what of that?
If you bring these people, it’ll go badly for you, I said. I expect then
there will be blood at the end of that story.
And if I come alone, he said. Griz?
Don’t, I said. It’s not that kind of story either.
Joy looked at us.
You heard, she said. Don’t come with them. And don’t come alone.
He just stared at me. I don’t know what he was thinking. And I hadn’t
seen that thing in his eyes before.
Maybe it was doubt.
Don’t come alone, she said. Bring your sisters.
Joy, I said, my head whipping round to look at her. She shrugged.
Ferg might like to meet them, she said. And no one knows the end of
their own story, not except the very end, where they die. Not even you,
Griz. Now we have to go.
 Chapter 39

True north

Leaving happened in a fast, furtive dash through the darkness towards the
stable and what must have been the paddocks around them, the dogs
running beside us, Jip’s limp improving with every step, staying silent as if
they instinctively knew we should not draw any attention to ourselves. Joy
had my bow and arrows strapped to the saddle, and our horses ready to go.
We turned loose the Cons’ other horses so they couldn’t follow us, but we
kept the two best ones to carry any useful things we might vike on the
journey ahead, and then we rode hard into the night, taking them and my
horses north, back the way I had come, following the happily reunited dogs
all the way.
Until we lost sight of the settlement over the first low rise of land, I had
my shoulders hunched and hardly breathed, as if expecting a bullet out of
the dark with every hoofbeat. Once out of view and lost in the night, I
relaxed. No one came after us, the next day or any other.
The journey that followed is a whole other story and there is no room in
the pages remaining here to tell it properly. But we made two stops that
belong in this one:
First, we stopped at the Homely House to bury John Dark.
Maybe because we were nearing somewhere I already knew was a place
of death, my thoughts turned a little blue as we got closer to it. I think Joy
found the same thing happening to her, so perhaps it was just the comedown
after the relief of our escape.
Should we have freed the other women? I said as we carefully crossed
the expanse of giant hogweed near the house.
 They were free, she said. Most of them. Two of them held me down
when Ellis tried to scare me with the poker.
We rode on a bit more.
It will be easier on the softer ones now Ellis is gone
she said.
And as we started up the slope to the house she sighed.
I don’t know, Griz, she said. Maybe we should have tried to persuade
them, but then maybe we wouldn’t have got away. Maybe I was too scared
to do all the right things.
Maybe doing most things right is good enough, I said.
Maybe, she said.
And then, after a pause:
Perhaps one day we should sail back and see if I’m right.

We weren’t able to bury John Dark as I’d planned to. Mainly because John
Dark thought it was a bad idea, as she hadn’t quite managed to die. Instead
she’d gained a limp, which she didn’t like, but which didn’t seem to slow
her down. So she came north with us too, and she is sitting beside my
mother and Joy and Bar in front of the fire as I write these last words. She is
scratching Jess behind the ears.
Jess seems to have become Joy’s dog now. And I couldn’t be happier
about it. It feels right. It’s a good sight, and if I had the knack I would
sketch it and leave it as the last image of this story. The once dead daughter
who never died but was gone returned to the mother, and the grieving
mother whose girls have gone but who finds herself with a new family.
There is a mismatched symmetry in there somehow, a patched-together
happiness. Maybe that’s what we have to make do with now, here at the end
of the world. Or maybe that’s just what people have always had to do since
time began.
The second stop was Glasgow, where we camped in the library where
Mum and Dad once slept in a fortress of books. The roof was still on, and
there I found the Freeman’s book. It was the other reason we stopped there.
Other than looking for a boat to vike and repair and sail home. I have the
book on my lap now, under the thin last pages as I write. It’s a wonderful
book, about science—which we’ve lost—and hope—which we haven’t.
There is stuff in it I don’t understand, but what I do makes me happy and
sad in equal measure. It’s about spirit as much as science, and about life, not
just humanity—how it’s strange and tenacious and good at adapting to
almost any circumstance. Like us, really, when we’re at our best. It’s called
Infinite in all Directions and that first Freeman’s other name was Dyson. I
can see why he inspired the Freemen to try and put life in computers before
we all died out. Even though I believe they failed, I think trying made them
human. And I think I’d have liked him.

Life on the islands is the same and different. There is more laughter but
more carefulness too. Having been in the ruins of your world, I feel the
fragility of life like I never did before, but also the glory of it. I want to see
more. Jip and I will make more voyages, I think. But maybe not on our
own. Perhaps Joy will come too, and Jess.
I do not think the Cons will come here. But I still watch the horizons for
sails more than I once did. Jip and I find time to sit on the top of the island
most days, and from there on a clear one you still feel like you can see for
ever.
Joy says if I’m looking for red sails they will likely come from the north,
and I tell her to go boil her head.
She also told me no one knows the end of their story, other than at the
very end we all die. But I have half a page to fill and then this book is full.
I never really told you why Brand and I stopped talking, before the book
was stolen by Joy, and now there is no room. That’s fine. It was maybe not
such an important reason as I thought at the time. As either of us thought. I
don’t know.
But on this last empty page, here’s what I do know.
I know I’m tough. And I know I’m stupid. I’m clever too. I’m scared of
things. I try to be brave. Mostly I succeed. Sometimes I spend so much time
thinking that I don’t actually do anything. Sometimes I work so hard I
forget to eat. Sometimes I don’t plan ahead. I just jump in and do things
impulsively, without working out what happens next. I talk too much. I
don’t always say what I mean. I don’t always mean what I say either. I kill
things. I make things. I break things. I grow things. I lose myself in stories.
I find myself there too. I read them because I like getting lost. And I wrote
this one because I thought I was lost, for real and for ever. And maybe
because I had no hope and no power and was entirely alone, I made up a
friend and talked to them in a world I made out of nothing but words.
And then a book saved me. Because Joy read this and found the truth.
So here I am, writing much more than I knew I was going to be able to,
right to the end of the last page.
That makes it look neat, but it didn’t work out like I planned. Nothing’s
perfect. Especially not me. I’m just like you were. Human. Hanging on.
Holding out for a happy ending. But knowing it ends badly.
And then being surprised by joy.
 Acknowledgments

The Outer Hebrides have a special place in my heart: I owe a huge thank
you to Lucy Rickards who first introduced me to them, and made me fall in
love on the spot. Thanks also to Mary Miers whose unstinting generosity in
later years made it possible to share the beauty of the islands with my
children, whose world is that much bigger and wilder because of it
Very many thanks to all at Orbit—especially Jenni Hill and Joanna
Kramer in the UK and Priyanka Krishnan in the US (especially Jenni for
her patience, understanding and restraint…). I’m grateful to Lauren
Panepinto for the cover (and to Jack Fletcher (@kid_woof) for the assist in
drawing precisely the right kind of dog for it…). Thanks to my family for
being so good-natured about the grumpy writer in their midst, and D, thank
you for being first listener. As ever, this one’s for you.
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