Where the World Ends Read online

  It alone had triggered the panic. It could take the blame, not Quill. And as soon as it had plodded its way onwards, on its big webbed feet, the gannets would finish circling, and settle back down.

  Quilliam took the opportunity, while the sentinel bird was away from his perch, to clamber as far as the ledge that ran along behind the finger of rock. He inched along the ledge – even began to climb the pinnacle – but hearing the flapping of huge wings above him, froze to the stillness of a stone statue. Patiently, patiently, he waited, though his fingers lost their feeling and the summer flies droned around his eggy hands and hair. The gannets circled, then sank down, a hundred at a time. King Gannet stood at full stretch, flapping his wings – all fussy self-importance. Then he settled back on to his throne, shoulders hunched, and peered down at the host returning to their roosts.

  The climb – all that fingertip clinging on – had set Quill’s hands shaking. He flexed his fingers until the spasms stopped. Then he felt about for a foothold wide enough, and launched himself upwards, onto a level with the King. In the same movement, he took hold of its wings and pinioned them behind its back, then freed one hand to wring its neck. A quick twist. A silent death. The gannets below noticed nothing.

  “Fair. Fair,” said Calum laconically afterwards.

  Davie wanted to shake Quill’s hand. All the other boys knew they could have done just as well, given the chance.

  Mr Farriss said, with his little, crooked smile, “The King is dead: long live the King,” and awarded Quill the title of “King Gannet” for the duration of their stay on the Stac.

  Mr Cane said sourly, “The Lord smiteth the proud and bringeth down the mighty. Think on that, laddie.”

  Then they turned back to the task in hand – killing gannets, doing battle with beaks, battered by wings. But when Quill looked for Murdo, to get back his jacket, his friend had been sent on a separate expedition to catch fulmars. So he was obliged to go in among the gannets with only the thinness of his shirt. He barely cared. He felt invulnerable, clad in warm sunshine and the knowledge that he was a king.

  They lit the evening fire using a pile of Murdo’s fulmars. Fulmars burn better than wood, being an oily breed of bird. Then boys and men alike spent the evening cutting the stomachs out of dead gannets to serve as bottles for all the fulmar oil they were planning to take home. The Stac was full of riches – things the Owner would sell to city people who (unimaginably) had no birds of their own to feed and warm them, and must buy their feathers, oil and meat with real money.

  Bedding down in the soft, welcome bigness of his father’s jacket, Quilliam could not sleep, despite his weariness. He seemed to feel the whole weight of the Stac bearing down on their little cave. A single drop of water fell from the lip of the cave mouth, and he found himself waiting for the next to fall and the next and the next… Determined not to succumb to homesickness, he steered his thoughts, like a boat, towards pleasanter things. Murdina.

  He fell asleep thinking of her, but his dreams were as chaotic as a colony of gannets. Through them blundered the great garefowl, white-masked like some holy highwayman. In his dream, her glossy black back was not soft with feathers at all, but a fall of young woman’s hair, and from the ridged and hefty beak came songs Murdina had sung, about trees and lochs and love.

  A bundle of clothes thrown ashore. If a wave had knocked the boat off-skew, the parcel might easily have fallen in the sea and been lost. But the skipper, Mr Gilmour, came over from Harris every couple of months, bringing supplies and mail. It was his particular genius: to fetch a boat nose-on to the rocks. No one else could do it. He knew every rocky flank of Hirta, and just how to time a throw ashore. He also had a good strong throwing arm, so the bundle of clothes bowled along the ground and came to rest among those waiting to welcome the boat’s arrival.

  The bundle contained the belongings of Old Iain, who had gone to Harris to visit his widowed sister, and died there. Not much to show for a life – a bundle of clothes – but some men die owning less. In due course, the villagers would share out the contents – make what use they could of the rags and remnants. The “Parliament” of village elders would decide who got the tobacco pouch, for instance. But for the time being the bundle was slung into the schoolroom; there were other parcels, crates and wallets of mail to be taken ashore.

  “What did he die of?” asked Flora Martin.

  “Of what did he die? A shortness of breath? An absence of life? What does any man die of?” asked the Minister, Reverend Buchan, grandly. “His race was run and now the Good Lord has taken him to His breast.”

  But something else came in on the boat, too. Murdina Galloway came. A mainlander. A niece of Mrs Farriss. She waited until the rise of the next wave and stepped ashore before the boat sank down again. Christ himself, walking over the sea, probably arrived with the same lack of fluster.

  The prow bumped gently against the rocks. Many a boat had splintered planks against Hirta’s cliffs: their wrecks had provided useful wood for doors and benches – there were no trees on Hirta. To anyone like Quill, who had never left home, a tree was a thing he could only struggle to imagine.

  Murdina was much the same. Dark-haired, with winter-pale skin, she bore no resemblance to the women on Hirta. Their eyes were screwed into creases from peering into rain and mist or the sea’s brightness. Hers were huge and round and peat-dark. Her hands were not rough or crabcrooked, but smooth and pale and long-fingered. She gestured with them. They talked, those hands – as did she.

  Sometimes, on a windy day, everything indoors is calm and pleasant, then the door bursts open and in comes…the wind. It does not stay long. But it is…disturbing. Murdina disturbed Quilliam, and he did not generally welcome being disturbed. When life is harsh, everyday-ordinary is to be cherished. Excitements come from bad things – a baby born dead, a man falling from the rocks, the sheep breaking into your vegetable rig, a storm flattening the grain. The Minister spoke of “glories ineffable” awaiting them in Heaven: it was his favourite phrase, “glories ineffable”, but since Quill had no idea what “ineffable” meant or what a “glory” consisted of, he had never quite got to grips with the idea. Everyday-ordinary was good enough for him. Then Murdina stepped off the boat, and Quill was full of glories ineffable. Feelings scrabbled about in him like a mouse inside an owl. She might be a niece of Mrs Farriss, come to help at the Minister’s school, but she was nothing akin to anyone Quill had ever met.

  There was the talking, for one thing. In sentences! Sentences as long as an anchor chain sometimes. They had him holding his breath to hear where they would end. Hirta folk are not great talkers. The women would gossip as they worked together at softening the tweed cloth or gutting fish. Hirta boys might chatter and giggle as they vied to see who could piss furthest. But generally Hirta mouths stayed closed. A wrong word can give offence. The cold wind can be painful on a troublesome tooth. Quill’s mother liked to use the phrase “a thing said cannot be unsaid”. And even Reverend Buchan (whose job it was to talk for hours in the church, on Sundays) made many a mention of “unclean lips” and “golden silence”.

  But Murdina talked to anyone and everyone, about everything. She even carried words around with her – there were never fewer than two books in her pockets. Mr Farriss’s reading classes were anxious, troubling times for the children of the island, who strained and struggled to read down a page of words, like trapped sheep trying to get down a cliff. But then Murdina started helping out Mr Farriss with the lessons, and everything changed. Letters slotted together. Words came to life.

  Losing patience with “A-for-apple”, “B-for-box”, “C-for-cat”, she would launch into a story about Cats hiding Apples in Boxes in preparation for a war with Dogs when Eggs and Fish, Gugas, Hats and every other letter of the alphabet would get loaded into cannon and fired by the warring rivals… She told them stories. She read poetry to them from the books in her pockets.

  She sang, too: lullabies and laments and love songs,

&
nbsp; “The water is wide; I cannot cross o’er

  And neither have I wings to fly…”

  The Minister only really approved of hymns. He could just tolerate lullabies and working songs. Love songs sent shudders through him.

  Murdina laughed, too, showing her perfect white teeth to the wind without the least fear of toothache. The Minister was disturbed by Murdina Galloway’s laughter.

  But not as disturbed as Quilliam.

  Her laughter struck him like the clapper hitting a bell, and the reverberations shook their way through him. He was not sure what to do with the clamour. So one day, when there was a big, noisy sea running, he climbed to the top of Oiseval Hill and shouted it out of him, towards the horizon: “Murdina Galloway! Murdina Galloway! Murdina!”

  The seagulls brought it back to him in their beaks: “Murdina…Murdina…” a thousand times repeated.

  Of course, he could not tell anyone. She was a visitor. A mainlander. And a woman fully three years older then he. But when the wind blew her clothes hard against her body, Quill had no explanation for what he felt – unless it was the Minister’s second favourite phrase: “sins of the flesh”.

  But she was only a visitor. A mainlander.

  Shortly after the fowling party set sail for Warrior Stac, Mr Gilmour would arrive again from Harris with mail and timber, tools, blue dye, lamp chimneys, paper, books and tobacco. When he left, he would take with him the minister, Reverend Buchan, to report back on his missionary work. Murdina, too.

  By the time the fowling party got back from the Stac, Murdina Galloway would be gone from Hirta. Quill would not see her again. The supply boat would carry her back to Harris. From Harris she would travel on to the mainland, where those unimaginable trees she spoke of would watch her comings and goings, day in and day out.

  “I leaned my back up against an oak,

  Thinking that he would shelter me…”

  One day Quill had plucked up the courage and asked her to describe an oak tree to him, and she had said, “I shall do better, Quill. I shall grow one – just for you!” And she had drawn for him, with a sharp stone, in a patch of white sand, a big, big oak tree, and put leaves on its boughs – each one an imprint of her bare feet – and put pebble acorns in its branches. He had stared at it in wonder and disbelief for so long that he was late home for his dinner.

  Next day, when he went back there, he had convinced himself the tree would still be there. He would be able to set his own bare feet in Murdina’s leafy footprints. But of course the sea had erased it completely – so completely that he almost thought he had imagined it.

  When he got home from the Stac, in three weeks’ time, the sea would have carried Murdina herself away. Almost as if he had imagined her, too.

  Within days of arriving on Warrior Stac, the fowlers moved house – from Lower to Midway Bothy, halfway up the Stac. It had no more home comforts than the Lower, but they could descend on ropes from up there and harvest birds from the cliffs. Also, it swallowed less spray when the sea was rough. They put the cooking pot outside to catch rainwater for drinking: it was simpler. The sacks were shared out to sleep on and under.

  The older boys were quickest to grab a sleeping place. Though one patch of rock floor is no softer than another, the older ones knew that a flat space is better than one on a slope that seems all the time to be trying to roll you over. A ridge or a hole in the floor can leave a bruise by morning. A trickle of water from the roof can soak an entire boy overnight. Sleep at the back of the cave and there might be fewer draughts, but birds and mice have probably chosen to die there and rot. So, after the men had stated their claim, the boys who had been on trips before to the stacs grabbed their sleeping places within seconds, leaving the littler ones to fit in where they could. Davie stood by the cave-mouth, waiting patiently for someone to tell him where to sleep.

  “You could hang ’em over a stone wall and they’d sleep deep, those wee ones,” Quill remarked to Murdo, but still felt a pang of guilt at seeing the broken patch of rubble where Davie bedded down.

  Visiting fowlers meaning to stay longer than a week would pile up boulders around the opening to keep out the wind. But no one wasted time on that now: the weather was mild, and the view too spectacular to block out. They could have seen all the way home to Hirta, if it were not for Stac Lee sticking up in between.

  On the first Sunday in Midway Bothy, it was Col Cane who mustered everyone for prayers, and apologized to the Almighty for them working on the Sabbath. Quill could see the other men were annoyed that he should elect himself to the post of temporary minister. Euan, though, was always glad of a chance to say his prayers.

  Euan: soulful, solemn little Euan whose voice had not broken yet, and who said colours had tastes, and that holy words were magic. Kenneth said that Euan was trying to get into Cane’s good books by pretending to be a little saint. But the only good book Euan wanted to get into was the golden one where angels wrote your name if you were fit for Heaven.

  Euan and John, Niall and Davie settled themselves at Mr Cane’s feet, hoping for a Bible story or that their prayers would be answered if they could make it be like a proper Sunday. But the older boys sat at a distance, not convinced that Col Cane had any real magic to offer.

  If Reverend Buchan, the actual minister of the kirk, was a chilly man, Cane was a bucket of cold water. He called himself “the Minister’s Right Hand”, though in fact he was only the sexton, employed to dig graves, tend the manse vegetable plot, mend the roof and clean the barn which served as a kirk. When the island’s Owner presented the “kirk” with a ship’s bell, Col Cane had made it his job to ring the bell, too, before services, summoning the villagers to worship. He thought it made him an important “officer of the kirk”.

  Quill’s father whispered that Col Cane thought God was on the other end of the bell rope, and he pulled it to get the Almighty’s attention. Quill’s mother said she was thankful for ears, so that she could put her fingers in them. Quill suggested that if Mr Cane ever laughed, his own ears would fall off in surprise.

  In short, Col Cane would not have been anyone’s first choice as a stand-in minister.

  They netted storm petrels that day, down at the water’s edge. Like with fulmars, the trick was to keep the oil inside them, pinning their wings behind them before they could puke up the rust-red contents of their stomachs in a jet of terror. Bird oil was a cure for everything from toothache to lumbago, so people on the mainland (who could afford to get ill) paid a good price for it. Still, it was fiddly, greasy work emptying the little fulmar sacs into the big, rubbery gannet stomachs and knotting them closed. They were all glad when they could turn their attention in earnest to the most valuable birds of all – the gugas. The gannet chicks. Born in the spring, they had grown so big by August that they weighed more than their parents. Guga meat would fetch top prices on the mainland, and make for a sumptuous feast back on Hirta.

  So, every day the older boys and men went out to catch guga. The babies sat, like fluffy dumplings, on narrow ledges of the steepest cliffs. It seemed extraordinary that they did not roll off and plummet flightless into the sea or bounce-bounce-bounce down the escarpments. To reach them, the older boys swung down the vertical cliffs, supporting their own weight on horsehair ropes looped under one thigh, and were pulled back up again by the men, the dead chicks hanging from their belts.

  During the daytime, they caught gannets; during the evening they ate gannets. At night their dreams were shot through with puffins and fulmar, and riddled with gannets.

  Murdo and Quilliam made a competition of the work, vying every day to see who could catch the most. They had been fowling together since they were first trusted to catch more birds than they scared away. They had passed muster on the same day, venturing out onto the terrifying Kissing Rock, high above a pounding ocean, bending to kiss the stone. It was proof they were competent enough to go fowling. Of course, once you were out fowling, you did not have actually to kiss the birds, just grab the
m by the neck. As Murdo pointed out, “If it were an easy test, you might go fowling next day and get killed, an’ ’twould be a pitiful waste of all the porridge and clothes your ma and pa ha’ given you since you were born.” (Murdo thought a lot about the cost and value of things. Even people.)

  Murdo’s father had made and owned the finest rope on Hirta – plaited horsehair hand-sewn into a sheepskin sheath. One day it would belong to Murdo, bequeathed to him, as lords and gentlemen bequeath their houses and lands and swords to the first-born son. And one day Murdo would like as not pass it on to a son of his own.

  Euan had already inherited his rope – his father had died in a fall – but he was not old enough yet to do rope work. Still he had brought it along: each rope taken on a trip earned a “wage” payable in birds or feathers, and Euan’s mother needed such extras now her husband was gone.

  So it was on Euan’s rope that Quill found himself dangling, high above the sea, taking gugas with one hand, while supporting his own body weight with the other. Under one thigh and over the other, ran the rope – a soft, pale loop of beauty – rather like Euan, really.

  A worn-out pony saddle battened to the rim of the cliff kept the rope from getting cut or worn on the sharp cliff edge. Davie, for some reason, gave himself the job each day of lugging this saddle from the Bothy to the cliff and watching Mr Farriss fix it in place. “It is safe now, Quilliam,” Davie would say, nodding earnestly, then rush off in his socks to join the younger boys plucking birds.

  There were upwards of eighty cleits on the Stac: little towers built of rocks, where the dead birds were stored to dry. A cleit keeps out all but the wind, and wind dries the birds inside almost as well as a smokehouse. Sitting with their backs to a cleit, little huddles of boys would pluck away at the birds they had caught, stripping off feathers until the tower and the ground and the boys and the air were all downy white. The younger ones crammed the feathers into sacks until, day by day, weightless fluff became as heavy as bags of stones. Thanks to them, some day soon, a rich mainlander would sleep on a feather mattress stuffed with down that smelled not only of birds, but the fish those birds had eaten and the sea that had held those fish.