Where the World Ends Read online

  The August dawns sliced their way cleanly through the horizon. The sunsets were feathery and pink. The brief nights were spark-filled with stars.

  But working from dawn till dusk meant fifteen hours of fowling: climbing, plucking, strangling, netting, lugging, storing, rope-mending, bottling, “beachcombing” for firewood, egg-gathering, puffin-snaring and the wicking of petrels. By the time the sun was at its highest, boys were falling asleep whenever they sat down – on ledges and clifftops and scree slopes, and would have to be woken, for fear they turned over in their sleep and fell to their deaths – woken, too, to go back to work, gathering, snaring, plucking, storing…

  Still, there was satisfaction to be had from the numbers of feather-filled sacks, the bursting cleits. Hard work plucked the hours and minutes out of the days, and the wind just blew them away. Soon they would be home on Hirta.

  Three weeks and then a fourth.

  The boat would come when it could. Tides and winds would decide. Perhaps Hirta’s one and only boat had scraped its hull against rocks, or developed a patch of wood rot: some repair was needed. Maybe Calum’s father had hurt himself and could not sail it. In that case, surely, Mr Gilmour would come instead, in the supply boat, since it must be time for another delivery of goods? Well, perhaps not. Perhaps there was no mail to deliver. Perhaps “Parliament” had not ordered any supplies.

  Mr Cane marked two more Sundays with prayers and stout advice. Then another. The boys dared not gripe, but the job of work on Warrior Stac began to feel less of an honour and more of an ordeal. Even Mr Don – a stolid, implacable man – began to grunt and mutter to himself that he needed to get back to mending his roof while the weather was good. Mr Farriss wanted to get back to his wife and babes.

  Quill stopped inventing reasons why Murdina Galloway might have stayed on in Hirta instead of going home: he was never going to see her again now, not ever. So he settled for wording imagined letters to her, dropping a mention here and there of the number of gugas he had taken, or about being King Gannet, and how much he missed her singing. In his imagination, Mr Farriss did not even have to help with the spelling.

  In his imagination, Murdina wrote back.

  A team of boys and men who can work a sea stac for four weeks can work it for longer. Of course they can. No one dies of sleeping on a rock floor. They had plenty of birds to eat, to light their cave and kindle their cooking fires. So what if they were dirtier now than their mothers would have liked? A little dirt helps keep you warm. They wanted to be going – were ready to get back to their dogs and ponies and sisters and (above all) the proper earth-dug toilets behind their house. But no one wanted to be the first to gripe – make himself sound puny. Only the sound of Davie crying softly after the last glimmer of the cooking fire blinked out kept Quill awake a while. That and the drip drip drip of water from the lip of the cave mouth.

  The gugas fledged and turned into adult birds, shrinking to the size of ordinary gannets. The summer sea darkened.

  “Why do they not come?” asked Calum, and everyone glared at him for saying out loud what they had been so scrupulously keeping to themselves. Calum had gouged open a hole everyone else had been trying to plug.

  “There will be a good reason,” said Domhnall Don.

  “As soon as they can, they will come,” said Mr Farriss.

  “We are in God’s hands,” said Mr Cane, pompous as ever.

  “What if it’s pirates?” blurted Niall: the words rushed out of him as if brigands were after them.

  The question lay unanswered. Niall never asked it a second time – not because it was ridiculous, but because the answer did not bear thinking of. Not in their lifetime, but within the memory of their grandparents, pirates had come to Hirta. They had ordered all the people into the kirk, then set the kirk alight. Stories like that, they’re for adults at Halloween, not for boys far from home. Murdina would never have set such a story loose in a boy’s head. Quill wondered what comforting thing she would have said instead. What would she…? What should he…?

  “Like as not, they took the boat out fishing and scraped a rock and they had to go chasing after wood to mend her – such as the minister’s gate – but the Parliament of Elders wouldna let them take that, so they hadta wait for some wood to wash up and then they hadna the right tools to fix the boat, because Mr Don is here, not there, and Mrs Don canna lay hands on his chisel, because maybe Mr Gilmour had a borrow of it and forgot to give it back and took it home to Harris when he sailed.”

  “Thank you, Quilliam,” said Mr Farriss, and sincerely meant it, because it had taken the jitters out of the little ones and mesmerized the others.

  “Quill has eyes for your niece, Mr Farriss,” said Kenneth, snide and jeering. His lower teeth naturally overlapped the top ones so that his jaw was always jutted, belligerent-looking, like a hog.

  There was a general sniggering, which mortified Quilliam and baffled little Davie. “What, the mainland maiden? Miss Galloway, d’you mean? But she’s so black! And she has a big nose!”

  “Like a garefowl?” said Niall and there was more laughter.

  Mr Farriss scowled at Davie for his bad manners, but the boy was simply startled at Quill’s idea of beauty.

  Quill denied it, of course. He absolutely denied having eyes for anyone. But Kenneth went on wearing that glinting smirk of his. Kenneth picked up secrets wherever he went – little sharp things that might come in useful when he wanted to cut deep and give pain. So Quill did not argue about the size of Murdina’s nose – which, in his opinion, was very like the nose the Queen of Sheba probably came fitted with. And he did not say that black hair could be every strand as beautiful as brown or red.

  Conversation turned to “foreigners” in general. Whether from across the oceans, or in the devilish cities of Scotland, or on the big islands like Harris, Mr Cane declared them all “worldly” and “too much given over to making money and merriment”. (How he knew this was anyone’s guess, since he had never travelled farther afield than the sea stacs.)

  “The Owner lives on Harris,” said Domhnall Don solemly, and scowled at Cane.

  No one spoke ill of the Owner of St Kilda. Like God, he never visited the isles in person – only sent his Steward once a year to collect the rent from his tenants. Like God, he was held in awe by everyone on Hirta. The very fact that he could own a whole archipelago of islands and stacs made him seem like the Creator Himself.

  Col Cane blushed and blustered. “There may be some – like the Owner – who lead good lives,” he conceded. Mr Don looked over at Mr Farriss and winked.

  At least there was no more talk that evening of why the boat had not come to pick them up.

  And a thing not talked about barely exists, does it?

  “Have they forgotten us?” asked Davie as he helped Quill put the capping back on a cleit. The little stone tower was full to the very brim with birds now. The ones at the bottom must already be dry enough to sell. “Have they, Quilliam? Have they forgotten us? Must we live here for ever?”

  “Away with you, ninny. ’Course not. They’ll come tomorrow. Next day, maybe. Soon.” Quill was weary of scouring about for explanations to soothe the fears of the littler boys. He was irritable – sick of being always in company. Everyone’s temper was short.

  Mr Farriss was indignant about the boys being “kept so long from their kin”. Mr Cane intoning down his nose every five minutes, “What cannot be altered must be endured” made Mr Don writhe with annoyance.

  Perhaps the blue-green men, shaped out of the sea’s foam, had come ashore and kidnapped wives for themselves.

  Perhaps lightning had struck.

  Perhaps there was a war somewhere, and the Owner had sent all the men on Hirta to fight for Scotland.

  No one believed a word – not even the people who made the suggestions.

  Until little Euan spoke.

  Mr Cane was leading prayers. The Bothy was lit with bird-lanterns, the rigid oily little bodies of dead storm petrels thre
aded through with tarry wicks and lit with Cane’s precious tinderbox. They burned as brightly as any beeswax candle in a French chandelier and would smoulder right down to their feet before they went out.

  Quill had his eyes closed but was not praying. Rather than listen to the drone of Mr Cane’s miserable voice, he was trying to conjure up the face of Murdina Galloway, for fear he’d forget it. Suddenly Euan, seated in a low corner of the cave, jumped up, then gave a cry. The cry was followed by a general gasp. Everyone had looked around to see him, hand raised to his head, fall face-first onto the floor. He lay like a dead thing. Mr Farriss scuttled over to him, bent double.

  “He hit his head on the roof!” said Niall, aghast. “Is he dead?”

  But Euan stirred, turned over and stared about him – not at the people, but at the cave walls, as if pictures were painted there that only he could see. “I know,” he said.

  “What do you know, boy?”

  Blood trickled furtively out of Euan’s hairline, like an unthinkable thought escaping into the open. “They are all gone up.”

  “Gone up where, boy? Who?”

  Mr Cane made huffing noises at the interruption to his service.

  “They have been taken up, do you see?” said Euan, blue eyes wide. “I seen it like a picture in my head: the End of the World, and everyone getting taken up to Heaven to be judged. But we were not seen, because we were in-the-rock, and now they’re gone up and we are left behind.” His high, musical voice was both awed and terrified.

  No one laughed. Around them on every crevice of the rock walls, headless petrels burned, the wicks encircled by haloes of flame, as though a band of skinny little angels was peering down at them. They made it easy to believe the unbelievable.

  God had decided to end the world. The Last Days had come. A golden trumpet had sounded and sent God’s angels down to earth to fetch all the good people home to Heaven and pack off all the bad people to Hell. The angels had visited Hirta because it was big and green, and had houses on it. But they had never thought to look on the stacs, because the stacs were only lumps of rock sticking out of the sea – and who lives on a rock, apart from limpets and birds? Not people. Not men and boys sheltering in a rock crevice. So, by accident, the fowling party had been left behind in an empty world.

  Niall, Davie and Lachlan ran outside into the near darkness of a rainy day and began shouting up at the sky. “We are here! Look! We are here! Pull up! Pull up!” It was the shout of fowlers who have finished a day’s rope work: Pull up! Pull up! The pricking rain made their faces twitch.

  The rest of the boys hesitated. “Is that right, Mr Cane?” asked half a dozen voices, because, for all he was a pompous and dismal man, Col Cane was the closest thing they had to a minister on the Stac. “Is Euan right?”

  Cane did not answer at once and his expression was hard to read. He still seemed inclined to press on with the service that Euan’s vision had interrupted. He did not like the boy, Euan, who showed a tendency to mysticism and prettiness which was none too Presbyterian. The noise of hysteria outside the cave made Cane pucker his bushy eyebrows. He wiped the corners of his mouth where spittle tended to cling. His eyes shot to and fro, without lighting on any one face, then he said: “Euan has the truth in him. I myself have been minded to think thus during my own contimpations. I kept silent fearing to cause upset among the younger ones. How-so-be-it…”

  That ridiculous, pompous “How-so-be-it…” hung in the cave, lethal as the rumbling before a rockslide.

  “How-so-be-it, this boy has been sent a vision, and we must swallow the fearful truth. Our Lord has gathered in His lambs and, being…away from home ourselves…we have been…for a short time…overlooked.” Cane nailed home his argument: “Ask yourselves: what else can have happened?”

  Mr Farriss and Mr Don plainly disagreed. Whenever Col Cane put on his sanctimonious voice and pretended to know the mind of God, they always rolled their eyes and growled. They were both devout, God-fearing men, but unlike Cane, they had children on Hirta and it would take more than the End of the World to make them forget it.

  “If we can get across to Boreray,” said Don, “we can signal home from there…” He said it every night, believing it the only route to rescue. But no one was listening. The boys were variously crying, calling for their mothers, asking questions or simply rocking on their haunches, arms over their heads. Quilliam, who had balanced fearlessly on many a cliff-ledge, suddenly knew what it was to be falling through fathom upon fathom of fear. His hearing was muffled, his eyesight shot through with colours. The End of the World? The End of…

  A visiting boatman had once confided to him that drowning was not so very terrible. The secret was to stop struggling for air and take a single deep-water breath. So Quill breathed deeply now, and found the falling slowed; found himself suspended in a thick liquor of calm. “What do I do?” he said out loud. But the racket of the boys outside made it impossible to think of an answer. Murdina, what do I do? he asked, without letting the words escape his mouth.

  He ducked out of the Bothy, and the cold air told him how feverishly hot his skin was. The hysterical boys were standing perilously close to the edge, their feet scuffing pebbles over the brink to fall all the way down to the sea. In their agitation, they were pushing and pulling at each other.

  “We should make a signal! What d’ya say?” Quill said it again, louder, and again and again, until he had their attention. “Let’s us make a signal – and keep it burning, so no one can forget we are here!” Davie unthinkingly took hold of Quill’s hand, as he might have taken his father’s. “Think on this,” said Quill. “The angels must be working theirselves weary fetching home the good folk. All those countries to visit – all those cities! No ear to spare for listening. But when all’s done and finished, our people will tell them soon enough: ‘Hoi! You missed a few!’” Their eyes fastened on him with such intensity that he was embarrassed. Did they suppose that he really knew any more than they did? All he knew was that he had to get them away from the cliff edge. “Then the angels will clap their wings to their mouths ’n’ groan ’n’ haste on back here to find us!” (What kind of nonsense was he talking?) “’S’a long way from the mainland. Hard to find! You recall how Mr Farriss showed us a map once? Of the world? And Hirta was nowhere marked on it?” (What was he suggesting now? That God’s angels were using inaccurate maps?) Why did the boys not laugh and tell him he was a fool? But no, they continued looking at him with such a desperate thirst for information that he carried on despite himself. He assured them that, one day soon, the angelic host would sail into sight or come galloping over the waves in chariots of gold, and that a signal fire was what was needed, to guide the boats (or chariots) through sea mist or night darkness, so that the angels would not pass straight by. It was simply a matter of staying safe until they arrived – taking care – because anyone dying right now might miss the coming of the angels to take them to Heaven.

  Did he believe it himself?

  Not for a moment. But as a diversion, it did the trick.

  The boys abruptly noticed the closeness of the edge and moved away from it. Niall fastened the trailing laces of his boots. They waited for more instructions.

  “Lachlan, go and ask Mr Cane if we can use the tinderbox,” said Quill.

  But Lachlan came back without it. “Mr Cane said I couldna be trusted. So I brought this.” He opened his coat and revealed a little haloed, headless body sheltering inside his jacket: a petrel-candle, still burning. Col Cane was wrong: Lachlan could be trusted to do whatever was needed.

  The four of them clambered as far as the nearest cleit and uncapped it. There were nets stored inside, and Quill said that those were too valuable to burn because they might still be needed. So they pressed on to the next cleit, one crammed with a mixture of gugas and puffins.

  They made an excellent bonfire, those birds. Light and smoke streamed out through the gaps in the stonework and swirled around the boys’ legs, lit their faces, made th
em sneeze.

  “They will come now,” said Davie solemnly. “The angels will see our fire and come.”

  “Soon,” said Quilliam. “Quite soon. Possibly.”

  Did he believe it?

  Not for one moment.

  Where were the omens that would have foretold the end of all things? People on Hirta were continuously watching out for omens to tell them what the coming days might bring. They watched for soul birds, strange-shaped clouds, a ring around the moon, a shooting star… Surely God would have signalled that the world was over and done with? Where were the signs promised in the Bible: the blood-red moon, the beast with numbers on its forehead, the sea drying up? There would have been signs, surely. More than just the lack of a boat to fetch them home.

  Smelling the smoke from the burning birds, he could think only of good food gone to waste. They might need every morsel if they were to stay on the Stac for… But he refused to finish that thought. It was unthinkable.

  Next morning, despite the world having possibly come to an end, another day’s fowling began. Because what else was there to do? Quill was glad of it: the climb to new roosts would give him a chance to talk to Murdo on his own, and Murdo could always be relied on for wholesome good sense.

  But John insisted on climbing alongside him, asking questions as if Quill (who had mastered the mystery of reading) might know the answer. “The angels – do they know a person’s secrets without asking? And do they keep what they know to theirselves or spread it round Heaven until everybody knows it?” The red-cheeked, plump face was agitated and that quite altered it, because John was generally as placid as a pillow. (The only time Quill had ever seen him alarmed was when they had stood outside Niall’s house together and listened to Niall’s mother giving birth.)