Where the World Ends Read online

  Quill wanted to get the crying out of the way before he had to go back to the Bothy. But that music was still like a frenzy in his head, trying to stop him thinking:

  Give me a boat that will carry two

  And both shall row, my love and I.

  So he shut his eyes and, instantly, he pictured himself walking up to the family rig – the strip of land where they grew wheat and vegetables. A girl was standing there on the fresh-hoed earth, sprinkling seeds. They fanned out from her hand like golden water drops.

  Murdina?

  Hello, Quilliam.

  Will you come with me, Miss Galloway?

  Maybe. I like travelling. Where were you meaning?

  Some of us are going out to the stacs. Fowling for fulmar and guga. You can come if you care to? Stow away on the boat? Creep ashore and hide, and we can meet in secret and there’ll be maybe a corner in the Bothy where no one ever looks, and you can hide there and no one will know.

  I would like that, Quill. You have fortitude. And very curly hair. You are sure to become King Gannet, and a king’s a fine match for any…

  A damp weight pressed heavily against Quill’s leg, and his eyes flew open in fright. The garefowl, lonely for her mate or the massed flock, was leaning against his shin, studying him with her bandit eyes. He reached out and stroked her back.

  And the fright eased. That’s to say…he laid it by. Like a dead bird, it would keep for later.

  When he got back to the Bothy, there was no supper left for him. In place of it, “Minister” Cane served him up a little sermon about the sin of dawdling. Murdo was angry, too, because he had been worried by Quill’s lateness: a boy late might be a boy fallen to his death. Mr Farriss cast anxious looks in his direction, as if he should never have confided so much in a mere boy.

  But Quilliam did not need supper, or a lecture, or Mr Farriss’s trust. He curled himself up in his sleeping place and shut out every sound but the singing in his head:

  Oh never will I married be until the day I die,

  Since the raging seas and stormy winds parted my love and I.

  He looked inside his skull, like a cleit, and found it full to the brim with imaginings that might just sustain him through the bad times ahead. The weight of rock towering above him weighed less heavily. And despite his rumbling stomach, he slept.

  Every day someone else came face-to-face with the same thing. That moment, when fretting turned to knowing for certain: they were all alone. No one was coming. One evening, it even happened to John – round, jolly, easygoing John, who never seemed to do “fretting” at all. John went out of the mouth of the Bothy and began calling: “Mam! Mammy! Where are you?” The littler ones, picking up on the panic, joined him, and they shouted and shouted until Domhnall Don bellowed at them to cease their row, and the “Minister” started to sing a hymn.

  Unnerved and ashamed, the older boys went and plucked the younger ones forcibly indoors and shook them and called them a shame to their fathers, but panic is infectious, and they too were as jittery as sheep when the dogs are loose. Euan lent his sweet piping voice to Cane’s hymn, but it did nothing to quell the rising tide of fear in the cave. Mr Farriss turned his face to the wall and covered his ears with both hands.

  When the hymn finally finished and Quill could make himself heard, he piped up with “Who’s for a story?”

  “Minister” Cane was put out. Kenneth’s lip rucked into a sneer.

  “From the Bible?” asked Euan cautiously.

  But Davie just scuttled across the floor to sit directly in front of Quilliam. In due course others crawled over to join him.

  “Do you know why this place is called Warrior Stac?” They looked back at Quill blankly. “Minister” Cane began to humph and harrumph, as if he knew, but it was too complicated to explain.

  “Because it looked like a Warrior?” asked Niall lamely.

  “It did once, man. Once, when the sea was dryer and there were lanes across it where the ground showed through, the Amazon Queen came driving her chariot, all the way from Ireland.”

  And he saw their stampeding thoughts swing away from the precipice and trot to a stillness, mesmerized by the familiar music of storytelling.

  “The news came of a dragon – a great fire-breathing dragon far away in the Northlands, where the monsters are made of ice. And, well, she had to go and fight it, because you hav’ta when a thing like a dragon turns up. But the people on Hirta said, ‘What about us? What say the fairies invade – or pirates! – or a wave comes, tall as the sky, or a wind fit to capsize us? What say whales come, big as the Isle of Lewis?’ They were sore afraid, I can tell you (though they were generally very brave). Then the Amazon Queen told one hundred and more of her armed men to stand one on another’s shoulders, and with a wave of her chariot whip, she turned them into just one warrior, and ordered him to stand in the sea and guard the people of Hirta from all danger while she was gone, no matter what. And he stood and he stood, and the Queen drove away in her golden chariot. And he stood and he stood, till the sea filled up and covered all the dry lanes. And he stood and he stood, and got so blown on by the wind that, year by year, it tore every rag of clothing off his back. Even though he was mortal cold in his bare skin, he went on standing and standing, with the waves breaking and the wind plucking out his hair, because he had the bravery of a hundred men in his chest. And all the birds that were too tired or too heavy with eggs or had no wings to fly – like the garefowl hasn’t – all took shelter in his armpits and his belly button and up his nose and all over every bit of him – which was good, because it kept him a bit warmed. And right up to this very day he stands here, because the Queen told him to look after us.”

  When Quill opened his eyes, the first face he took in was Davie’s, gazing at him. The next was Col Cane’s, his veiny cheeks and nose dark with rage. “So! D’we have a pagan among us?”

  “Just a story,” Quill said.

  The younger boys were all looking round at the roof and walls of the Bothy, as if to identify what particular crease of the Warrior’s body was keeping them safe.

  “There’s no help for us but in the Lord!” blared Cane in his best “Minister” voice.

  “I didna mean…”

  “The boy meant no harm,” said Mr Farriss out of a corner of the cave untouched by candlelight.

  “Will I cook you an egg, Col?” asked Domhnall Don in an effort to change the subject.

  But the self-appointed Minister was too full of outrage to appreciate a supper of coddled eggs. “I d’na wonder this lout defiled the Lord’s altar!”

  There was a gasp. After a moment’s bewilderment, Murdo understood and started to explain about needing the birding net out of the cleit before it got turned into an altar. But his words petered out as he saw Euan solemnly nodding his head, confirming that the cleit-altar had indeed been desecrated by Quill and Murdo and all its flowers scattered to the four winds.

  “In the name of God, I forbid anyone to speak to this pagan boy for a week,” proclaimed Cane, “lest his unclean words creep in at your ears!”

  The little circle of listeners drew back obediently from Quill, and crawled away. Even so, they went to their sleeping places the warmer for a story to wrap themselves in. The Stac was not just a lump of rock, but a giant guardian who had tucked them into his pocket for safekeeping.

  And Mr Don and Mr Farriss made a point of wishing Quill goodnight.

  When “Minister” Cane declared it a sin to work on the Sabbath, none of the boys objected. They were bone weary from climbing, endlessly climbing, and from want of a comfortable night’s sleep. Every one of them had accumulated bruises, grazes and sprains on the cliffs. The fear, too, was exhausting: the fear and the not knowing.

  But Mr Don was appalled by the suggestion of letting Sundays go to waste. The summer was sliding away as inexorably as an outgoing tide. With it would go the birds. Though the fowling party had plucked and wrung their way through a mountain of birds, as far as Don was
concerned, there could never be enough. Like the miser saving for his old age, he could think of nothing but providing for the dark and unknowable days to come. And of keeping the boys busy.

  Mr Farriss backed him up: “We have winter bellies to think of. Better to work than to sit chewing on our own cud.”

  “The only purpose of Living is to think upon the Lord,” Cane intoned, and his voice actually rose and fell as if he was considering setting the words to music.

  Farriss was unimpressed. “And who’s to say when it’s Sunday, will you tell me? I’ve a loose enough hold on the month, leave alone the days of the week.”

  “Then it is as well the Holy Spirit enlightens me,” said Cane with breathtaking arrogance. “I know in my soul when the Sabbath day dawns, as any good Christian does.”

  Farriss was less annoyed by the implied insult than by the folly of Cane’s idea. As was Domhnall Don. He was Hirta’s master craftsman: his big, strong hands could as readily build a stone wall as carve driftwood into spoons or knit a jerkin from the wool of his sheep. “We should be out seeking timber,” he growled, “not sitting here on our arses. God helps them who strive to help theirselves. If we can once build a raft and get us over to Boreray…”

  In the village Parliament, Farriss’s and Don’s votes would have outweighed Col Cane’s. But here on the Stac, Cane had formed an unbeatable alliance – with God and with Fear and with Weariness. In a sermon half sung and half bleated, he warned the boys that if they dared to break Holy Law and work on a Sunday, they would be left behind whenever the Good Lord chose to send his angels down to Warrior Stac.

  “Fowlers we are and foul we be indeed in the eyes of God! Think on your sins and repent!” he boomed that night before bed. It was not a lullaby anyone wanted to hear before sleeping, but Cane delighted in the sound of his own voice echoing around the Bothy.

  Quilliam was relieved to find that no one obeyed Cane’s ban on speaking to him. The older ones could not quite manage the leap from “Cane-the-gravedigger” to “Minister-Cane-who-must-be-obeyed”. The young ones could not remember to obey it: when they thought a thing, it was out of their mouths before they could help it.

  “What do people do in Heaven, Quill?” asked Davie next day.

  “As we do, I suppose, only without ropes.” And Quill described the angels clambering about the peaked clouds, gathering fowl and tucking the heads under the golden cords they wore around their waists till they bulged with gugas and ospreys and white swans.

  But overhead the clouds were bruised black, brown and purple with pent-up rain. The sea bucked and heaved. The wall of stones now piled up in the mouth of the Bothy to keep out the wind, grated against one another. A squall swept through next day, swiftly followed by another and another. The fire lit to alert the angels would have been doused, if it had not been allowed to burn out long since: fuel was too precious. At least they managed to keep a flame alive in the Midway Bothy: since Minister Cane liked to eat his food hot, he was generous with the use of his tinderbox at mealtimes. Draughts from outside wrapped their heads in steam from the cooking pot – the one Davie’s mother had lent in return for four eggs and three birds.

  “How will my ma eat hot herself, Quill?” Davie asked, ambushed by tears every time the cooking pot appeared.

  “She’ll be at a neighbour’s fireside is my guess,” Quill said.

  “What, she’s not in Heaven?” Davie was aghast.

  “Well that’s what I meant,” Quill said hastily. “D’ye think there’s no neighbours to be had in Heaven? Or cooking pots? It’s one long Christmas feast up there.” And Davie nodded earnestly.

  Through some slit or loop in the rocks overhead came an eerie yowling, like pure sorrow. Autumn winds brought the noise every night after that.

  The old ways are powerful. Beliefs lingered on Hirta that were a thousand years old. For St Kildans, the isles and stacs fluttered with the souls of the dead, caught, like sheep’s wool, on the stone walls or sharp rocks or thorn bushes. Every time the wind shrieked, it gave voice to some ghost stranded on a cliff edge or under a waterfall or down a ravine until its sins had been purged away by the weather. That was the noise they heard when the draughts howled through Midway Bothy. But whose ghosts were they here, howling in their ears? Drowned sailors wrecked against the cliffs? Fowlers fallen from the rocks on some summer trip to the Stac and left behind, unburied, by their friends?

  “’Tis the ghost of Fearnach Mor,” Kenneth hissed into the nape of Lachlan’s neck, “come to slit your throat in the night.”

  “Nah!” Lachlan retorted. “He’d see your hulking carcass an’ take you for a great sheep an’ steal you away an’ eat you up.”

  But a frisson of fear went through several who had overheard the whisper. Unlike Lachlan, they were easily scared by talk of ghosts.

  The howling inspired a different fear in John, whose whisper arrived with the icy touch of a nose in the crease of Quill’s neck. “Are we ghosts, would you say? D’you think maybe we drowned on the crossing and it’s just our souls that reached here?”

  The face was too close to focus on, but Quill took in tears and an awful ashy pallor. Why did they keep asking him these unanswerable questions? Why should he know? He had cramp in his calves from five hours’ cliff work and he was certainly not feeling like a disembodied soul. “Nah. We would recall. You dunna forget a thing like dying. Why would you say it?”

  But the tears still trickled down. The two of them took John’s problem outside. “Well, we mighta been put here till all our sins are blown off us – like the Warrior’s clothes were blown off him! …D’you reckon sin looks like blood, Quill?” John reached inside the waistband of baggy, inherited trousers. The fingers that emerged were bloody.

  “Tell someone,” was Quill’s reaction.

  “I am. I’m telling you.” John seemed ashamed at leaking life blood. Quill was simply scared. What if it was a catching disease? Or a fate they might all start to suffer? He mustered possible explanations for a sudden up-welling of blood. When, last year, Mrs Campbell’s boy had fallen to his death, blood had spilled from his mouth and ears: Quill had seen it. “Did you have a fall today?”

  “Nowowo!” groaned John.

  When fulmars puked up the contents of their stomachs, the liquor was ruby red. “Did you maybe spill a fulmar when you tucked it under your belt?”

  “Nowowo!”

  And, of course, according to Murdo’s older sister, once a month grown women bled, to prove they were not pregnant…

  John was rocking to and fro, clutching a griping belly ache. Bare feet emerged from the ragged ends of ancient trousers. The ankles were skinny, not like Quill’s. Kilda men are bird-men – thick-ankled with toes that splay out as birds’ do. It was pointless studying the big, round face: John’s hair was chopped off short; the skin was chipped by rock shale and chapped by wind.

  “John, can I ask you a thing? Is there a chance… Could you maybe…” But Quill stammered to a halt. If he was wrong, he would certainly get his nose broken: John had a powerful pair of fists. There is no acceptable way of asking a mate, a fellow, another boy… Are you a girl, by any chance?

  “Women bleed that way once a month,” he suggested tentatively. “Or so Murdo says. ’S natural. They dunna come to harm from it, far as I know.” He watched what effect his words had on John.

  “They do?”

  “That’s what Murdo says. And he has sisters.”

  “Did he say it gives them belly ache?”

  “He said it makes them ratty.”

  Head bowed, eyes closed, John seemed about to make Confession. And she did.

  Apparently, John’s mother had given birth to eight children, but seven had died. (This much Quill vaguely knew. It was not an unusual story: not on Hirta.) But when the eighth was born a girl, the mother thought her husband might just die of disappointment: he was that set on having a son. So, she cut the cord herself, wrapped the baby tight and told her husband it was a boy. The “boy�
�� had been named John and raised accordingly. The truth was kept even from John. After all, who would be hurt by one well-meaning little lie?

  No one, perhaps, but John.

  “I couldna grasp it: why I kept spraining ma ankles. An’ ma voice was pitched so high. An’ in them pissing contests – why could I never win ever? Not once? I thought I was born wrong – a useless piece o’ sheepshite – an’ I sank into a gloom. In the end, Ma hadta say. Told me, on condition I never ever told Father nor any other soul. Said she’d die of shame if I did. So you mustn’t tell!” John concluded in a panic.

  “Who would I tell?” said Quilliam. “Did she say anything about blood, your ma?”

  John shook her head. “She shoulda! She shoulda told me! It’s no fair.”

  Quill could not help agreeing: it was not fair to have left John in ignorance. Perhaps the poor woman liked to pretend to herself that John truly was a boy. Or maybe she had plain forgotten. But the more Quill thought about it, the more unkind it seemed – to cut John off from all those girl things she might have liked or wanted: the red headscarves, the blue dresses, the penny brooch every woman wore, the singing at the work-tables – marriage even! – and a baby’s crib at the foot of the bed…

  But of course John was right: Quill must not tell her secret – not here, not now. The girls went fowling together. The boys went fowling together. But mix the two and it would be like putting candles into a sack of feathers. “Best keep it ’twixt you and me,” said Quilliam. “Could make all manner of trouble.”

  She nodded dumbly. Then asked what he meant.

  His own mother had always said: Kindness doesna cost a penny, Quill. He must find something kind to say now. “Well, think of the duels, man! The broken hearts! All the boys would be after marrying you! You being so…bonny, n’all.”

  John coloured with pleasure. “Had you guessed already, then?”

  “Nooo! Well…I had an inkling, maybe – you being so… wee and fragile.”