Where the World Ends Read online

  “Secrets? What y’asking me for? Wasna me had the vision.”

  “I’m asking ’cos I thought you might have secrets,” said John defensively. “’Bout the foreign lassie.”

  “Well I havena!” He tried to climb faster, so as to move ahead. But John had broad hips and bandy legs, so took a powerful long, lizardy stride up any rock face, and kept level.

  “But if you did have a secret…”

  Cornered, Quill sighed heavily and invented an answer: “Reckon they canna smell out a secret ’less it stinks o’ badness,” he suggested. “If it’s a sweetish secret, they’ll not be troubled.” John paused to take this in, and Quill veered away in search of his friend.

  But when Quill tracked him down, Murdo was shirking work to sit on a mucky ledge and throw rock chippings into the sea. He had wound himself in his father’s rope and was equally entangled in some furious train of thought.

  He kept talking about “shares” and his “due”. “If we’ve to stay, we must each man have a cliff that’s ours!” were his first words. “Am I not right? The slopes must be shared out, like at home. The youngest will get the easiest ones and we the worser, because we are older. So the birds we take must be ours, and not shared, right? I mean to mark every bird I take from now on. You must, too… An’ I wants cleits of my own, to store mine in, so I can say, These birds are mine – hold off yer paws! And whose is the saddle now, would you say? Do we all own it? And who’ll pay the ropes? Will the ropes get paid? Father’s rope is mine now, so I’ll be wanting the rope-money!” It was nonsense – gibberish, almost – but Quill could not break through the wall of words his friend was piling up around himself. Murdo kept slamming the heel of his hand against the rocks and practising his arguments: about how the Stac must be shared out fairly among them if they were going to live out their whole lives there.

  “Our whole lives?” said Quill, glimpsing at last the image in his friend’s head: a lifetime perched on a barren rocky pinnacle; nothing to eat but the summer birds; no one left living to rescue them; no one left to make life fair again. “Away! We’ll be off here soon enough!”

  “It’s all very fine for you!” Murdo said, pushing him away ferociously. “You’ve lived. I never even got started. I wanted… I never even had a…”

  A flicker of distant wings came out of the sun, impossible to identify thanks to the brightness. Murdo sat bolt upright.

  “Someone will come,” said Quilliam. “From Hirta, I mean.”

  “I know that,” snapped Murdo, but his eyes were on the flutter of movement approaching along the sunbeams. “Euan is a fool. Euan was always a fool,” said Murdo, but his quick glance begged Quill to see what he was seeing.

  “What did you ‘never have’?” Quill asked.

  Large shapes, fast moving; wing beats so powerful they could be heard above the roar of the sea. Murdo lifted both hands from his precious rope, and raised them in the air – a gesture of welcome. Or surrender. The angels were truly coming for him!

  “Blackbacks!” yelled Quill. “Get down!”

  Then the blackbacked gulls were on them, mobbing and pecking and battering them with steely wings, aiming for their faces with vicious beaks. Quill and Murdo curled up in a single ball, shielding each other from the marauders shrieking in their ears. Get off our stac! the birds seemed to say. Get back where you came from. These cliffs are ours!

  The attackers finally relented and roosted higher up, fluttering and muttering. Quill and Murdo uncoiled themselves and turned instantly away from one another, Murdo to conceal the fact that he was crying, Quill to be sure he did not see it. But he had felt the rage go out of his friend, and the hope, too. The precious rope spilling out of Murdo’s lap made it look as if the blackbacks had torn the very guts out of him. In a way, they had: a flock of vicious birds is a poor substitute for a host of angels.

  If even Murdo believed in the possibility of angels – thought the world had come to an end – perhaps Quill was the fool, after all, for doubting it. They had never disagreed on anything before.

  “What did you never have?” he asked, as if their conversation had not been interrupted.

  “A sweetheart, ’course,” said Murdo.

  Quill was mystified. “Nor me.”

  “But you love Miss Galloway.”

  Quill would have denied it, but he was intrigued to know: how did that constitute having a sweetheart? (Murdo had older sisters and knew more about such things. He had been able to tell Quill about the monthly mysteries of women, after all.) “Murdina didna love me back, man!”

  “So?”

  “So if you love a lassie, does that make her your sweetheart? D’you not have to – you know – have prospects?”

  “Nah, man. Once you have her inside your head, that’s like you’ve put a wall round a cow, so the cow canna wander off. She’s your cow ’cos you built a wall round her.”

  For both of them, this revelation quite dispelled the pain and fear of the blackback attack. Murdo felt wiser for knowing something Quill did not, and Quill felt he had mastered a magic he never knew of before. Murdina Galloway might be far away in the mainland – possibly even farther away, in Heaven – but the woman in his head was still his captive. King Gannet had a sweetheart! “Could you not take a sweetheart yourself, so?” he suggested.

  Murdo looked about him, spreading an empty pair of hands. What, imprisoned on a spike of rock? said those empty hands. With eight other boys? After History has just ended? What were the chances?

  “Perhaps when you get to Heaven?” suggested Quill.

  Murdo pulled a face. “I wanted to lie with a girl, not just look at her! Ye canna do that while you’re standing about in Heaven singing hymns, and with all sorts looking on… And I d’na think we get to keep our bodies there, either. We are just wee spirity things, a-floatin’.”

  “Ah,” said Quill, who had not thought so far ahead.

  Euan did not go birding next day. Nor did Col Cane. They might not have been missed, but there was a blustering, snatchy wind blowing that might pluck a climber off his rope or a skinny boy off a rock face. So Domhnall Don decided they should turn to netting birds instead. Sent to fetch the net and the tinderbox, Quill and Murdo arrived to find the cleit where the net was stored was being turned into an altar. Col Cane had kept back Euan to help him decorate it. Here (Cane told them), he would be holding prayers every day, at dawn and dusk.

  “Ay, but can we get to the net, Maister?” asked Murdo.

  Euan pointed out that the bird-net had been used instead of an altar cloth and stuck through with sea pinks in place of embroidery. Much to Cane’s annoyance Euan had spent all morning prettifying it. As the boys admired his handiwork, a particularly sharp gust of wind plucked the flowers out one by one and stripped the net bare again. Grudgingly, Mr Cane allowed them to lift the flat capstone and pull the net free…though he did not help with the lifting himself. Asked for the loan of his tinderbox, Cane again refused. “Do you have the fire-penny to pay me?” he asked me.

  “Us, Maister? No, Maister.”

  “Then no, you canna have the tinderbox. If you’ve a need of light, then I shall bring light. I shall be ‘Keeper of the Tinderbox’ and when it is truly needed, I shall bestow it.”

  Murdo did not understand. “So…would you come now, then, Mr Cane? Mr Don wants a light. To draw out the puffins?”

  “‘Minister’,” said Euan. “You must call him ‘Minister Cane’ now.”

  Again, Murdo and Quilliam looked at one another. They were ready to call Col Cane the King of Scotland if he would just loan them the tinderbox, but when the man still refused, they decided Cane would never be anything more than the village gravedigger as far as they were concerned. The little cave for which Domhnall Don wanted the net was home to dozens of families of puffins. Puffins like crevices. Where there is peat and earth, they build burrows, but where there is only solid rock, they nest in crevices and cracks. Two fowlers would spread the net across the doorway, then t
hose inside would light a flame in the middle of the cave. Lured from their hiding places by curiosity over the flickering light, the birds could be knocked out of the air with belts or sticks or bare hands.

  Without a flame to attract them, the birds had to be dislodged by boys thwacking their jackets against the walls of the cave. Kenneth, armed with Mr Don’s broad belt, stood in the centre of the cave and swung it at anything that came by him.

  The first time he caught Calum a blow, it seemed like an accident. But when he caught John on the thigh and Murdo on the backside, the grin on his face made it plain he got more pleasure from hitting boys than birds.

  “Stop that, Kenneth,” said Murdo.

  “Stop wha’?”

  Puffins pelted them, too, their preposterous beaks hard as hammer heads as they hurtled out of the rock walls and collided with the fowlers. The men outside, holding the net, heard their yelps and blamed the puffins, so that Kenneth’s reign of terror lasted until the nets in the doorway were so stuck with puffins that there was too little light to see by.

  Secretly, Kenneth wanted to be thrashing angels out of the air, breaking their wings, bending their trumpets, punishing them for keeping him waiting. Whenever things went awry for Kenneth – disappointed, scared or thwarted him – he filled up with unmanageable temper. If, like a fulmar, he could have puked it out of his mouth it might have eased his rage. As it was, the bully had to settle for hurting puffins and children.

  Naturally no one said anything of it to Mr Farriss or Mr Don: it is not the way of boys to run crying to their elders. But Lachlan must have been left with a greater loathing for Kenneth than the others. As the party scrambled home across the Stac, picked on by the bullying wind and burdened with a great netted ball of dead puffins, Lachlan clambered nimbly past ponderous, bulky Kenneth. He pointed to the bruise Kenneth’s belt had left on his neck and pulled a sad mouth. “Shame. Never get up to Heaven now, Kenneth, will you? They dunna let your kind in.” Those who heard it feared for Lachlan’s safety, but Kenneth came to a sudden halt, and blocked the way of those behind him, and had to be told by Domhnall Don to shift himself. Lachlan was so much smaller and younger that Kenneth seemed unsure whether the boy was serious. Or perhaps Lachlan’s jibe had pierced some painful part of Kenneth’s soul.

  It is not clever to be out alone on the Stac. A boy out of sight might be a boy missing, a boy fallen into the sea or wedged in a crevice, bones broken, or trapped on a ledge. The younger lads were content to sit crammed together in the Bothy, like puffins on a cliff. But the older ones had complicated things in their heads; things that needed to be thought through. Mr Farriss himself disappeared for hours at a time when the working day was done, and Quill was regularly sent to tell him supper was “now-or-never”. Quill would find him sitting on some rocky terrace, staring out to sea in the direction of Hirta. As often as not, when told about the meal, he just shrugged, not minding whether he ate or not. Farriss simply wanted to be left alone.

  Quill knew how he felt. He wanted it too: to be left alone to think about Murdina Galloway. If what Murdo said was true, then somehow Quill had brought her with him to the Stac. Everything he owned might be over yonder, lying in his home on Hirta, out of reach for ever. But he still had Murdina inside his head. And no one could take her from him.

  So, when Quill was sent yet again to find Mr Farriss, he dawdled, and found himself a level place to sit that gave some relief to perpetually aching knees and hips. A few moments of privacy could not hurt; a half-hour watching the storm petrels eating their evening meal. The birds made spidery footprints on the waves, sipping invisible food out of the air.

  Then he caught sight of the garefowl again – the same one bird who had roused up the gannet colony on the first day. She was standing on the landing place, the surging water winding her feet in lacy foam.

  “It could swim away whenever it chose. Why does it stay?” asked a voice behind him.

  Somehow Quill had passed right by Mr Farriss without seeing him. He was more scared than relieved at finding the man, who was lying on his side, curled up tight within a rocky cleft. The skin of his face seemed to have cleaved tight to his skull. He was nibbling the hairs from the backs of his fingers, and the hands were shaking. He did not even try to get up, but went on peering at the garefowl on the rocks below. “Why does it not step off? In the water it would be free of that great body.”

  “This is not a bad place, Maister. If you’re a bird. Like as not. Her kin live here. She calls the place home. Like as not.”

  But Mr Farriss was incapable of imagining contentment, even in a garefowl. “No. I have been watching it. It thinks to throw itself in the sea in despair. Like Fearnach Mor. But it lacks the courage.”

  Quilliam knew the story well enough, but he waited, out of politeness, for his teacher to tell it. “Mor was a sheep stealer, y’mind? He was caught and condemned to banishment in the worst place anyone could think of. This place. They put him in a boat and fetched him out here, and all the way he was cursing their eyes and their mothers. Vowing to change his ways. Swearing his innocence. Pleading for mercy – to be sent to a prison on the mainland – to be sent to Boreray – anywhere but the Warrior! So terrible was the prospect, that it took three men to get him out of the boat. And when they did, as the boat pulled away, Fearnach Mor threw himself into the sea and swam after it. Swam till he drowned.”

  To Quill, it seemed singularly unlikely that the giant bird standing there on the shore, staring at her big feet, was contemplating suicide by drowning: garefowl can swim like fish.

  “She’s maybe lost her mate, Maister,” said Quill. “She’s maybe waiting for…”

  “Aye. Like us,” said Farriss. “Waiting. For a thing that will not come.”

  Quill thought of sidling away, so the man could weep in private. But the garefowl suddenly began preening herself, cracking open her stubby wings; shaking herself so all her plumes stood out. She looked directly up at him with her bandit mask and that club of a beak. Stay, she seemed to say.

  So Quill racked his brain for a cheerful word. “He musta had a terrible bad conscience, that Fearnach Mor. All those crimes he did. They musta weighed him down – the thought of all those sheep he thieved?” And he bent his knees, stumbled about and mimed the villain staggering under the burden of a dozen sheep weighing on his mind. (What made him do it? Who jokes when their teacher is lying out in the rain like an upturned crab waiting for the gulls to eat it?) “Maybe he didna jump at all! The ghosts of all those sheep came and toppled him into the sea! He lacked for goodwill, that’s what… Ma says you can be happy anywhere, with a jar of goodwill and clean ears.”

  Mr Farriss smiled despite himself. “Is that what your ma says? Has she lived in many anywheres?”

  “Just Hirta. But she’s always cheery – and a marvel with the corner of a pinafore. Even our sheep have clean ears.”

  “And goodwill?”

  “It’s good wool with sheep. ‘Good wool ’n’ clean ears’.”

  Farriss sat up. They both watched the awkward flailing of a gigantic garefowl preening herself, and questioned how garefowl managed to keep their ears clean. Farriss was not convinced they had ears at all, so Quill whistled, to find out, and the bird looked round straight away. “They maybe help each other out with the preening and the ear-cleaning,” he speculated, “and that’s why they live all crammed up together.”

  Farriss looked at him, eyes not-quite-focused for want of sleep. He had bitten so hard into the corner of his bottom lip that it had swollen and bled. He had twisted tufts of hair out of his hairline, too, and left a row of little white holes. “I cannot help you boys, Quilliam.”

  “We can look out for ourselves, Maister.”

  Abruptly, Farriss stood up. “You have fortitude, Quilliam,” he said, without looking at him. “When the men go down, the other boys will need you.” And he walked back towards Midway Bothy, rock shale falling from his clothes like pieces of eggshell.

  Quill did no
t follow. For some reason, he climbed down the scree slope towards the sea, for a closer look at the solitary garefowl. How likely was it to be the same bird as before? On the other side of the Stac, or over on Boreray, there might be hundreds of identical birds standing shoulder-to-shoulder.

  Perhaps garefowl are so sleek and fat that the fear slides off them. Or else they are born stupid. The bird did not shy away. She simply muttered to herself – like the Owner’s Steward when he visited Hirta to collect the rent: always making calculations under his breath and noting down numbers in his little ledger.

  Quill said, “Hello. I’m King Gannet. Remember me?”

  The soft mutterings went on, the bird rocking to and fro, balancing her great weight on one foot at a time.

  “Has the world ended, d’you know?”

  The garefowl opened wide her stubby, flightless wings and rattled them. Lit by the setting sun, the spray fanned out like golden seed. Her flat feet made patterns on the landing place, which the next wave wiped out. She mumbled to herself, hoarse and crabby. But after a time, the noise came to sound more like Gaelic with a thick, mainland accent. And, inside his head, Quill could see Murdina Galloway printing the sand with her bare, white feet. He could even hear her singing:

  The water is wide, I cannot cross o’er

  And neither have I wings to fly.

  Something had happened on Hirta. End of the world or not, their people were not coming to fetch them off the Stac. They would have come if they could, but they could not. No one was coming. No one would ever come…unless it was God’s angels and Judgement Day. Quill realized that, like Fearnach Mor, he had been pleading inwardly for some different outcome, all the time hoping for a reprieve. Now the truth fell on him, like an icy, breaking wave: no one was coming. They were marooned on Warrior Stac, no matter why. Ships go down at sea and all aboard them drown: it happens all the time. And on every one of those ships the sailors and passengers must have been hoping, up to the very last moment, for some twist of fate to save them.