Merrial was, as promised, waiting. She sat on the plinth, as I had done, under the Deliverer’s equestrian statue. She wore a loose summer dress with a colourful tiered skirt. Something stirred in my memory, then vanished like a dream in the morning. She was in animated conversation with a man sitting beside her. They both looked up as I arrived.
‘Hello,’ I said warily.
He was a tall, thin man, about thirty, I reckoned; quite brown, with sharp features and dark eyes which had a sort of quirky, questioning look in them; black hair curly on top, short at the back and sides; dressed in leather trousers and jacket and a white cotton T-shirt with a red bandana. A fine chain hung around his throat beneath the bandana, its pendant—if any—below the T-shirt’s round collar.
‘Hello,’ Merrial said warmly. ‘Clovis, this is Fergal.’
The man stuck his right hand out and I shook it, noticing as I did so that one of his thumbs pressed the back of my hand and that he held on, as though waiting for some response, for about a second longer than I subconsciously expected, before letting go.
‘Pleased to meet you, Clovis,’ he said. His voice was low and deep, his accent was hard to place: correct, but by that very correctness of intonation in each syllable, somehow foreign; it reminded me of a Zanu prince I’d once heard speak at the University.
‘Let’s get some drinks,’ he said, rising to his feet. We strolled to the nearest
vacant table outside The Carronade. Fergal took our requests and disappeared inside.
‘Who is that guy?’ I asked.
Merrial favoured me with a slow smile. ‘You sound jealous,’ she teased.
‘Ah, come on. Just curious.’
‘I’ve known him a long time,’ she said. ‘Nothing personal. Just … one of us.’
‘Well, I had kind of figured he was a tinker.’
Merrial’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said.
Fergal returned in a few moments, taking his seat beside me and opposite Merrial. I offered him a cigarette, which he accepted with an oddly ironic smile.
‘Well,’ he said, lighting it, ‘you know about the … concern, for the ship?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, but Merrial said nothing about its being shared.’
He grinned. ‘Oh, it’s quite widely shared, I can tell you that. It’s a brave offer you’ve made, and—’ he spread his hands ‘—all I can say is, thanks.’
I was more puzzled than modest about this reference to the bravery of my offer, so I just shrugged at that.
‘Are you on the project too?’
He seemed amused. ‘I’m not on site, but I am on the payroll, if that’s what you mean,’ he said. ‘All of—’ he glanced at Merrial ‘—our profession are very much involved in the project as a whole.’ He took a long swallow of beer, and a draw on his cigarette, becoming visibly more relaxed and expansive as he did so. ‘Its success matters a lot to us. We’re very keen to see the sky road taken again.’
‘I like that,’ I said. ‘“The sky road”.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well, it took you people long enough to get back on it.’
‘Back?’
‘You walked it once.’ Another glance at Merrial, then a smile at me. ‘Or we did.’
‘Our ancestors did,’ I said.
‘That’s what I meant to say,’ he said idly. ‘But to business. I’ll have to get a piece of equipment that you—or rather, Merrial—is going to need. That’s going to take some time, but I’ll manage it this weekend. You’ll have to book some time off and seats on the Monday train.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Not much point trying to travel on the Saturday or the Sunday, anyway. No trains and damn slow traffic, even if you wanted to drive.’
I nodded. ‘And the University would have all its hatches battened anyway. ’
‘Yeah, that’s a point. Still, can’t complain—the free weekend is one of the gains of the working class, eh?’
‘You could call it that,’ I said. ‘Mind you, whether what goes on at the University should count as work—’
We went on talking for a bit. Fergal was cagey about himself, and I didn’t press him, and after another couple of beers he got up and left. We had the evening, and the weekend, to ourselves.
Merrial slept, leaning against my shoulder, all the way from Carron Town to Inverness. It seemed a shame for her to miss the journey, but I reckoned she must have seen its famously spectacular and varied scenery before, many more times than I had. Besides, I liked watching her sleep, an experience which, in the nature of our past three nights, I had hitherto not had much time to savour.
We had caught the early train, at 5.15 on the Monday morning. Each of us had separately arranged to have the first two days of the week off, by seeking out our different supervisors in the Carron bars on the Friday evening. It was to be hoped that Angus Grizzlyback would remember that I was not coming in this morning; but if he didn’t, I was sure my loyal friends would remind him, with predictable and—as it happened—inaccurate speculation as to how I intended to spend the day.
We had, in fact, spent the Saturday and the Sunday in just that way, very enjoyably, in bed or out on the hills. On the Saturday afternoon Merrial had guddled a trout from a dark, deep pool in the Alt na Chuirn glen; leapt up with the thrashing fish clutched in her hands and danced around, sure-footed on the slippery stones. Again, something had moved in my mind, like a glimpsed flick of a tail in the water, which had—as soon as the shadow of my thought fell on it—flashed away.
The sun rose higher, the shadows shortening, apparently in the face of the train’s advance. We stopped at all the small, busy towns built around forestry and light industry and—increasingly as we moved east—farming: Achnasheen, Achnashellach, Achanalt, Garve … The electric engine’s almost silent glide surprised the short-memoried sheep, rabbits and deer beside the track, and set up a continuous standing wave of animals, sauntering or lolloping or springing away. I saw a wolf’s grey-shadowed shape at Achanalt; as we rounded the cliff-face at Garve I saw a wild goat on a shelf; and spotted an eagle patrolling the updrafts above the slope of Moruisg.
I didn’t wake Merrial for any of them.
I smoked, once, with a coffee brought around on a rattling trolley by a lass in tartan trews. Neither the sound nor the smell nor the smoke stirred Merrial at all, except to a few deeper breaths, long ripples in the spate of her hair across her breast and over my chest. I let her head nestle in the now
awkward crook of my left arm, and alternated the cup and the cigarette in my right hand. It was a quiet train, for all that it was busy, with clerks and traders on their weekly commute from their coastal homes to their work in Inverfefforan or Inverness.
On Merrial’s lap, with her left arm—crooked like mine—protectively over it, lay a bulky poke of polished leather, fastened with a drawstring thong. It may have bulged a little larger, and weighed a little heavier, than the kind of bags that lasses tend to lug around, but it would have taken a close and sharp observer to notice. Inside it, concealed by a layer of the sort of oddments one would expect to find in such a poke—a cambric kerchief, cosmetics, small-bore ammunition and the like—was the complicated apparatus that Fergal had delivered to her house early on the Sunday evening. It was built around a seer-stone about fifteen centimetres in diameter, nested in neat coils of insulated copper wire. The strangest aspect, to me, of this device was an arrangement of delicate levers, each marked with a letter of the alphabet, queerly ordered:
Probably, I thought, a spell.
‘Grotty old place,’ said Merrial, rubbing her face with her hands and looking around the damp, flagstoned concourse of Inverness station. Her cheeks reddened, her eyes widened under the smooth friction of her palms. Her dress, this time of blue velvet, looked a bit rumpled. We were standing at the coffee-bar, having twenty minutes to wait for the 8.30 to Glasgow.
I looked up at the creosoted roof with its wide skylight panels and suspended electric lamps. ‘At least it doesn’t have pigeons.’
‘Can’t say herring-gulls are much of an improvement.’ She kicked out with one booted foot, sending a hungry, red-eyed bird squawking away. One end of the station opened to the platforms, the other to the main street. The arrangement seemed peculiarly adapted to set up cold but unrefreshing draughts. Despite its mossy walls and paving, the station was more recent than the buildings outside, most of which pre-dated the Deliverance, if not all three of the world wars.
I finished my bacon roll, smiled at Merrial—who was mumbling, half to herself and around mouthfuls of her own breakfast, some irritated speculation about the degenerative evolution of scavenging sea-birds—and wandered over to the news-stand. There I stocked up on cigarettes and bought a copy of the
Press and Journal
, a newspaper which outdoes even the
West Highland Free Press
in its incorrigible parochialism and venerable antiquity.
Most of its pages consisted of small advertisements, to do with fishing, farming, uranium and petroleum mining and, of course, Births, Marriages and Deaths. The last of these could take up half a tall column of small print: ‘Dolleen Starholm, peacefully in her sleep, aged 251 years, beloved great-great-grandmother of …’ followed by scores of names; and sometimes (as in this case) the discreet indication of cult affiliation: ‘RIP’ or ‘IHS’. More frequent, and more prominent, were proud affirmations of the orthodox hope: ‘Returned by the Flame’ (or the Sky or the Sun or the Sea) ‘to the One’.
I went back to the counter and, while Merrial finished off her breakfast, scanned the sparse snippets of national and international news that had managed to wedge their way in among the earth-shakingly important football and shinty reports, fishing disputes and Council debates.
The Congress of Paris had ceremonially opened its ninety-seventh year of deliberations, and had immediately plunged into bitter controversy about a proposal to empower the Continental Court to adjudicate border problems between cantons and communes; the apparently more difficult matter of disagreements between countries having been resolved by the Congress long ago, its success had apparently gone to its collective head.
I sighed and turned the page. Another American republic had voted a contribution from tariff revenue to the spaceship project, which was gratifying but mysterious—there was even an editorial comment about it, full of sage mutterings about how their ways were not ours, and that we should not disdain such assistance, immoral though it might seem to us. I wasn’t too sure; to me, it smelt of stealing money, but the Americans have a much greater reverence for their governments than people have in more civilised lands. If offered some loot by an African king or Asian magnate or South American cacique, I should hope the International Scientific Society would politely decline, and this case seemed little different. But all of this was, at this moment, quite theoretical, as no such offer, and indeed no news at all, from Asia or Africa appeared in today’s edition. I rolled it up and decided to leave the national news until later.
Merrial brushed crumbs from her lips and looked at me with amusement. ‘You really look as though you’re paying attention to all that,’ she said, picking up her leather poke. I hitched my canvas satchel on my shoulder and we strolled to the Glasgow train.
‘Well, I do follow the news,’ I said, somewhat defensively, as we took our seats, this time facing each other across a table. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
Merrial shrugged. ‘It’s so … ephemeral,’ she said. ‘And unreliable.’
‘Compared with what?’
‘Don’t misunderstand me,’ she said. ‘I’m sure this, what is it—’ she reached for the paper, and spread it out ‘—Congress here is real, and really did do what the article says it did. But it is only a tiny part of the truth, and
perhaps not the most important part of what is going on there in Paris. Let alone what is going on elsewhere in Paris. So that, and all the other such pieces give you, really, a false picture of the world.’
I could have been offended, but was not. ‘I’m a scholar of history, remember?’ I said. ‘I understand how newspaper reports, even documents aren’t everything—’
‘Oh, you don’t want to hear what I think about
historical documents
!’
‘So what else can you do?’
She frowned at me, puzzled. ‘You travel around and find things out for yourself.’
‘Aye, if only we all had the time.’
She touched the tip of my nose with the tip of her finger. ‘It’s what tinkers do, and they have all the time in their lives for it.’
The train pulled out, the Moray Firth in sight at first, with its kelp fields and fish-farms, and then nothing to see for a while but the close-packed pines of Drumossie Wood as the train turned and the engines took the strain of the long, slow ascent to Slochd.
A couple of hours later, maybe, after Speyside of the malts and bleak Drumochter, we were in the long and beautiful glens between Blair Atholl and Dunkeld. On one side of the line were streams full of trout and turbines, on the other hillsides buzzing with the saws and drills of workshops. The train stopped for five minutes at Dunkeld. A small, old town of stone, still with its Christian cathedral.