Flower of Scotland 2 (4 page)
Read Flower of Scotland 2 Online
Authors: William Meikle
"And if I fail?"
"If you fail, I take the hand of your daughter Myrna, in marriage," the god said.
Now Ragna saw this as a wager where he could not lose, and the King and the god shook hands on the deal.
On the morrow they took to the water in the boats, and all the menfolk of the people went with them.
Loki took them to the south, to land’s they had never before fished, in seas they had never before sailed. And great was the bounty in the waters, where the shoals of herring stretched for miles and the whales dived in their hundreds.
"And what is it you wish us to catch, my lord," Ragna said to Loki. And Loki smiled, for he had a secret.
"I have a special catch for you this day, King Ragna." And suddenly, all around their boats, the heads of seals bobbed in the water, their plaintive cries echoing across the water.
"But these are no sport," the King said.
"Nevertheless, these are your wager," Loki replied.
So the fisherfolk went to it with gusto. They sang as they hauled the catches in, and soon their nets were full to the busting with the screaming seals. But their songs soon turned to wails, for as their catch left the water the seals began to change, into wives, and daughters, into mother and sister, the womenfolk of the fishermen, now all gasping for air.
"Like fish out of water," Loki said and laughed.
King Ragna ordered the catch put back, but he was too late, and the bodies of the dead floated around them. All save one, a single seal that sang a plaintive song of loss and sorrow as the men in the boats wept.
"It seems you have lost the wager King Ragna. It seems I have to tell Odin I am a better fisherman than you, for look…I have got myself a sea wife, your daughter, Myrna."
And Ragna, in his rage, lifted Loki from the deck, but the god merely laughed and changed his form to a huge black crow, whose cawing laugh echoed long after it had flown in to the north.
And Loki returned to Odin, and told a tale of how the fisherfolk had thought them selves above even Odin himself, and how he, Loki, had tricked them. But he did not tell of the deaths of the womenfolk, and although Odin knew there was a lie in the tale, he could not separate the bigger lie from the smaller one, and in time the affairs of Asgard took precedence over the affairs of men.
Far away in Midgard, Ragna made a new home, there where his daughter swam and sang. And great was the sorrow of the people, for without the womenfolk they grew old and died, and none followed them.
And it came to pass that King Ragna became an old, bent, man, and he was the last of his people. And with his dying breath he called down a curse on the sons of Loki…that they would come when one of Myrna’s blood called, that they would be father and protector of Myrna’s children, that they would be cursed to serve the very line that Loki had tried to erase.
And high in his halls, great Odin heard, and now he knew of Loki’s perfidy. So he sent to Myrna a song, a lay that would entice the sons of Loki. And even as King Ragna’s eyes were closing for the last time, he heard the song, and saw, on the beach, a seal turn into a man, a man called to be the first, first of the sea-husbands.
~-oO0Oo-~
You wake up.
The walls are tight and cramped around you causing you to crouch, knees bent and curved. The air is hot and dry, rasping at the back of your throat and burning your sinuses.
Your eyes are gummy with sleep but you can’t raise your arms to rub the sleep away. It is only then that you realise that you are handcuffed, the cold metal rubbing new welts into your wrists as you struggle.
You scream and the sound echoes back at you, again, and again until it finally fades and the silence returns, heavy and threatening.
As your eyes begin to adjust to the dark you notice two slits just below eye level - windows to the room outside. But beyond the slits all is dark and the room is silent. You moan and are comforted by the sound, any sound, anything that will tell you that you are still alive.
A sharp cramp hits the muscles of your calves, a deep heat that burns inside threatening to engulf your legs in fire. You try to straighten, if only a millimetre, but the top of your head comes up tight against cold metal, and as you struggle your prison begins to move and sway in time with your movements.
You, spin, encased inside the steel, and the motion causes your stomach to roll in turmoil. You choke back on the vomit and taste its greasy cold thickness on your tongue.
There is sound in the room outside your prison, the drawing of metal against metal. Through the slits you are vaguely aware of an orange glow, a heat that is moving ever closer. Blackness comes and takes you away.
And still your prison spins.
John woke, sweat smearing across his face, his chest and his feet. He lay curled on the left edge of the bed, and as he rolled over the needles and pins exploded in his left arm. He sat up in bed, panting heavily.
"Jesus Christ," he whispered softly.
That made it four nights in a row, each time a little more of the dream being revealed, and each time a little more trauma on awakening. He reached over and switched on the bedside light before picking up his notebook.
"I am getting closer," he wrote.
It started with the book two weeks before. He was in the library when an out of place book caught his eye.
"Lucid dreaming - unlock your innermost secrets."
He read it all in one sitting - there was something about the techniques mentioned that appealed to him. That first night he lay and stared at the ceiling, repeating the author’s phrase - I will remember, I will remember. A flashing light from beyond the curtains distracted him. At the same instant a vibration started in his legs, a pleasant, almost warm buzz that spread quickly up his body. When it reached his head his brain seemed to explode in white light, and when it faded, he was somewhere else. When he woke, he had only one memory. The word he wrote in his notebook was "CELL".
He’d practised every night since.
I’m getting close.
The next day passed in a daze. He couldn’t concentrate on his work and he was already thinking towards the night ahead. He went back to the books and for long hours forced himself to get lost in the columns of figures. He hadn’t realised that he’d fallen asleep until the vibration hit him in the chest and shook his body like an electric shock.
There is a sound in the room outside your prison, the drawing of metal against metal. Through the slits you are vaguely aware of an orange glow, a heat that is moving ever closer.
Your prisons spins and for two seconds there is only blackness and the ever-increasing cramps in your ankles, your calf muscles, your back. And the glow is closer, and with it comes heat, at first merely a tingling warmth which soon grows to a searing flame that brings beads of sweat to your brow, your palms and your chest.
Your prison spins. The orange slides off to your left but the heat is still there, at your back now, getting hotter still, then even hotter until the pain begins and the blackness takes you down and away once more.
John sat up in the chair and almost screamed as a sudden cramp clutched his stomach. He only just made it to the toilet in time before his sphincter unlocked.
He was almost afraid to leave the washroom, fearful of his body betraying him once more, but he managed to get himself out of the office and into his car without further eruptions.
The car was stifling and humid, even with the air conditioning turned up full and John found himself doused in sweat long before he made it home. As he made his way to bed he resolved that there would be no experiment that night.
His stomach was still in turmoil as he lay down, but the vibration came anyway, an explosion of white flaring light and heat.
Your prison spins. The orange glow slides off to your left but the heat is still there, at your back now, getting hotter still until the pain begins.
Your prison spins and the hot poker becomes visible closer and closer to your flesh before finally it is thrust hard, into the deep muscle of your thigh. You burn and you scream as the flesh chars and sears and finally, overcome, you fall once more into blackness.
You dream, about a soft bed and a pale faced man, about a notebook and a pen. But when you wake, you are still in blackness.
Your prison spins.
~-oO0Oo-~
The Scotsman came over the pass in the Spring of ’89, the first visitor after the hardest winter on record. Tommy Jeffries saw him first, when he had just crossed the Eastbrig over the Powell. By the time the wagon started on the last slope up to the eastern reaches most of the town had come out to watch his progress up the valley, wondering about the occupants. Talk ranged from a new family out of Boston, to dynamite for the new mine-workings, to the Haberdasher that many of the women of town had long looked for.
When he pulled into what passed for our main street, he proved to be both more, and less than had been hoped for. A tall stocky man with a full black beard and hair flowing in a swathe over his shoulders stood up at the reins. He started his spiel as soon as he brought his wagon to a halt, his thick accent immediately apparent.
"Duncan Campbell is my name," he said. "And I am here to fix what ails you."
By now almost everyone from the town who wasn’t down the mine had gathered to hear him. The scenes painted on his wagon told us more – the town had its first ever Travelling Show, all the way from Scotland. There were pictures of rivers and valleys; painted warriors running through heather and tall stone castles on rocky shores. He saw us looking.
"Behold," he said, his voice booming. "The same rocks you have here underfoot have traveled through the very earth all the way from the homeland. In aeons past we all came from the same place. Indeed, many of you here have even more recent good Scots blood in you. I can make that blood sing for you. I can bring you home."
He drew something from the folds of his coat. All of us present could instantly recognize it – a fiddle, nut brown and faded with great age. A second movement produced a long stringed bow.
The Scotsman took hold of the instrument and raised it to his neck. Before starting he looked out over us. The small crowd went quiet. When he spoke, it was barely more than a whisper, but it carried to each of us, as clearly as if he were a Preacher on the pulpit.
"Breathes there the man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said, this is my own, my native land?"
He started to play. I was expecting Leather Britches or Wind and Rain. What I got was something else entirely. I did not find out until later that each and every person present shared my experience.
His bow moved across the strings, setting up a drone – and beneath us the old rocks sang in recognition. As his tune began, the stones started to dance. I felt it first through the soles of my feet, but soon my whole frame shook, vibrating in time with his rhythm. My head swam, and it seemed as if the very walls of the town buildings melted and ran. The wagon receded into a great distance until it was little more than a pinpoint of light in a blanket of darkness, and I was alone, in a vast cathedral of emptiness where nothing existed save the dark and the dance from the fiddle.
Shapes moved in the dark, wispy shadows with no substance, shadows that capered and whirled as the dance grew ever more frenetic. I smelled fresh flowers, and was buffeted, as if by a strong, surging wind, but as the beat grew ever stronger I cared little. I gave myself to it, lost in the dance, lost in the dark.
I know not how long I wandered, there in the space between. I forgot myself, forgot my friends, in a place where only the dance mattered.
I have never felt more complete.
When the dance stopped it was as if my heart had been torn from its root and I felt bereft, felt the loss as keenly as I had the death of my mother three years before. Tears coursed down my cheeks. As I wiped them away I heard sobbing from the women nearby.
I blinked and looked to the wagon – but it was no longer in front of us. A large tent that hadn’t been there before was pitched beside the church. The Scotsman stood at the entrance in front of a chalkboard. It read: For one night only. Entry 25c. There was no explanation as to what we might be paying for, but I knew that we would all be there that evening.
And evening was closer than we thought. The morning shift was already making its way up out of the mine, faces and hands grey with grime, eyes deep set in their skulls with long ingrained tiredness. They found a crowd of townsfolk looking around in bewilderment.
We had been gone for nearly two hours.
That fact alone was enough to queer Malone the mine owner against the newcomer – six men were late for the afternoon shift and Malone docked them a whole day’s pay. I do believe the Irishman might have tried to ban us all from attending that night’s show for fear that it might disrupt the next morning
’s work
. But, powerful as he was, and tight as his grip was on the town, still the pull
of that fiddle was stronger still. By the time we gathered in front of the tent at sundown we were all present – not just those who had heard the Scotsman play, but everyone else in the town as well. They had seen the effect on the rest of us, and even Malone was there, standing across the street and observing proceedings with a critical eye.
A box had been provided to collect our money at the entrance and we shuffled in. The tent somehow seemed much larger inside that its exterior suggested. Rows of pews, like church seats, sat in front of a small raised stage. I did have a fleeting thought that there was no possible way that all of this had come up the hill in the wagon we had seen, but all other thoughts were secondary to the anticipation. I was going to hear the fiddle again, and I could hardly contain my excitement. And I could see by the eyes of those around me that they were of the same mind.
An audible sigh of disappointment ran through the crowd as the Scotsman stepped up on stage without the fiddle in his hands. A hood obscured his features, and his face sat in deep shadow as he walked to the front of the stage and stood above us.
"I am the Dubh Sithe," he shouted. "And we are gathered tonight to open the way… with music."
From far off came the sound of a solo fiddle.
"… with magic… "
He spread his arms wide, clenched his fists, and when he opened them again two crimson birds, each the size of a large gull, rose from his palms and fluttered away towards the roof of the tent.
"But mostly… with blood."
He snapped the fingers of his right hand, and the red birds burst as if they had been shot. An arc of blood sprayed towards the front row of seats. Even as the audience cowered away, he waved his hand, and instead of being drenched, softly falling rose-petals showered around us like red snow.
He dropped the cape, revealing the garb of a kilted highlander in battle-ready dress beneath. We clapped and yelled in appreciation as he drew a long sword from its scabbard and began a series of stylized, almost balletic, moves across the stage.
"I have come far to be here with you, my brothers of old," he said. "From miles across the sea your pain and suffering has been heard. The rocks speak to their brethren, even as you hew and cut. You are not alone. Scotsmen are never alone. Not when we have the auld tunes."
The fiddle started up again in the distance, fluttery, like a little bird in flight.
Another collective sigh ran through us, like wind in a field of wheat. The Scotsman smiled and spoke over it, his voice low but carrying over the crowd.
"I promised to heal what ails you. And I will keep to that oath. But first, in the grand tradition, we will have a volunteer from the audience."
Malone stepped forward. I was looking straight at him at the time, and it looked like he had moved before even thinking about it. A momentary confusion showed in his face, but his features were grim and set hard as he stepped onto the stage.
"See," the Scotsman said. "A volunteer, at the first time of asking. What would you have me do with him? Shall I cut him in half?"
He raised the sword and made a mock swing, stopping just short of Malone’s ample belly. As one the crowd cheered. That did not improve Malone’s mood. He looked fit to burst as he turned to the Scotsman.
"What is your purpose here?" he said, his voice high, almost a shout.
The Scotsman merely smiled.
"I have already said. I have come from the auld Homeland, come to heal what ails these good people."
He swung the sword in the air above his head. The Irishman flinched, but when the Scotsman’s hands came down he had the fiddle in one hand and a bow in the other. He put it to his chin and started to play, the tune coming from the far distance at first, but getting closer, ever louder. The ground beneath us seemed to swell and thrum. As one, we began to sway.
A loud Irish voice broke the spell.
"Enough of this mummery."
He made to reach for the fiddle but the Scotsman danced away, still playing, mocking Malone and teasing him by throwing notes and phrases full in the Irishman’s face. The tent seemed to melt and flow and we danced in time, lost in a place where there was no hurt, no tiredness, only blessed peace.
We were dropped back into grim reality by the blast of a single gunshot. The fiddle blew apart in a cloud of splinters, and a red hole appeared at the Scotsman’s neck. He was dead before he hit the ground. Malone stood over him, his Colt still smoking in his hand.
I do believe the crowd might have lynched Malone that very night had he not held such clout over us that we depended on him for almost everything from employment to food. As it was the tent was in uproar until he fired another shot over our heads.
"Go home," he shouted. "All of you. And I want you all at work as usual on the morrow."
We went, with the sound of the gunshot ringing in our ears.
For the rest of the evening I thought of little but the sound of the fiddle and the tune that had seemed both so strange yet so familiar. The air played in my head even after I lay down abed. So when I heard the strain of a fiddle starting up, I was unsure for long seconds whether I was awake or asleep.
But this was no pastoral tune. Yes, it spoke of the auld country, but now it held a martial air that spoke of battles against tyranny, of blood feuds and scores settled. The auld country called… and we answered.
When I walked out into the street I found all of my neighbours already there. We followed the sound of the fiddle, dancing to its tune all the way to the small cemetery at the rear of the church.
As we shuffled into the hallowed ground the tune finally faltered and fell silent. I was first on the scene, which is why it has fallen on me to relate this tale. The sight I saw will be forever etched on my memory.
It was obvious that Malone had started to dig an unmarked grave for his victim. A shovel sat on the ground beside a pile of disturbed earth. Two bodies lay there. The Scotsman was still just as dead, the red hole gaping at his neck. But he had a broad smile on his face.
The reason for the smile was also obvious.
The mine-owner Malone lay beside him, a black tongue lolling from a wet mouth. He had been garrotted… almost beheaded.
Two fiddle strings were wrapped tight around his neck.