The Binding (15 page)

This beach was steeper than the bothy beach, and narrower. It made a V shape into the cliffs, which were higher and steeper. Heaps of driftwood were piled up along the top of the beach at the foot of the cliffs.

I waited, listening hard. I couldn't hear Duncan clambering over the rocks or trying to catch his breath, although the fog was full of sounds. I heard the waves slapping and sighing in and out on the sand, and the gulls further out, screaming to each other over the sea.

I sat on a railway sleeper that had been washed up long ago and was half-buried in sand. Before long, the waves were nearly up to my feet and I had to move.

Where was he?

I walked back towards the end of the beach, having to stay near the bottom of the cliff now because the tide was so far in. I peered into the mist, but I didn't see Duncan. What I saw was the sea, washing over the rocks I had run over just a short time before.

I felt sick. I felt stupid too. There was a reason why the driftwood on this beach had never been collected by the islanders, and that was because the beach was difficult to get to. The cliffs were higher and there was no path down, and the only other way onto the beach was along the rocky shore, which was cut off at the high tide.

Where was Duncan?

A wave broke over my feet and I had to retreat back up to the very top of the beach. I looked up into the V of the cliffs, and there he was, looking down.

‘Say I'm the leader,' he shouted. ‘Say you accept the laws of the Binding!'

Not a single soul knew where we were.

‘Say it!' he shouted again.

Chapter 6

A really big secret

Duncan was holding something in his hand, shaking it at me. It was a coil of rope.

‘Say I'm the leader!'

The cliffs were steep but not sheer. They weren't like a slab of solid stone, but rocky and rubbly, with patches of grass and earth. They were no higher than the climbing wall in the Mill Street gym and I might have been able to climb up if the weather had been dry, but the mist had made everything slippery.

‘Be confident.' That's what Dad had said the first time we went to the gym. ‘But if you can't be confident, don't climb.'

‘Throw down the rope!' I yelled, suddenly finding my voice. ‘Stop being an idiot!'

‘I can wait,' he said. ‘Shame you can't.'

The sea was lifting the driftwood up from the sand and swilling it around. If it got closer to where I was standing, I was afraid a big wave might fling it at my legs and knock me over.

I reached up, testing for firm footholds and handholds but the first one I tried fell away.

‘I could leave you here!' shouted Duncan.

There had to be a way. I walked along the bottom of the cliff as far as I could in both directions, while Duncan shouted down at me about how I wouldn't win and I was nothing but a stupid outsider who didn't understand anything.

‘If you think I wouldn't leave you down there, think again!'

I made a few more attempts at climbing the cliff, but each time, either my foot slipped or the surface gave way, sending down a shower of rocks and earth.
Even if I managed to get some of the way, the risk of falling was too great.

Then I heard something, very faintly, in the distance. It was Tressa's voice, calling our names. Hamish joined in, then Elspeth, and then they all called our names together. Duncan and me both stood stock still, him at the top of the cliff and me on the beach below, listening. Minute by minute, they seemed to be getting closer.

I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted back. ‘Tressa! Elspeth! Hamish! Over here!' I kept shouting, so they could hear where we were, even though they couldn't see anything in the fog.

Duncan suddenly disappeared and then came back again. He threw the end of the rope down over the cliff and it dangled close to where I was standing.

‘It's OK,' he shouted. ‘I've tied it to a fence-post. It'll hold your weight. Don't worry!' His voice sounded completely different, not mocking and threatening any more, but like a rescuing hero. It was slightly louder too, as if he was playing to an audience, and straight away, the audience shouted back.

‘Duncan! Jack!'

Elspeth, Tressa and Hamish sounded very close now. ‘Where are you?'

I got a grip on the rope and gave it a tug. It felt firm, but I didn't trust Duncan. I wanted to wait until the others were there before I tried to climb up. I kept shouting their names.

‘It's all right—I've tied it!' Duncan yelled down at me. ‘What are you waiting for?'

Then I saw what I was waiting for. Tressa's face peering down at me through the fog, with Elspeth and Hamish on either side.

‘How did you get down there?' Tressa cried.

Before I could answer, Hamish yelled, ‘Watch out!'

A big wave was rolling towards me, covered in floating driftwood. I grabbed the rope and got my feet up off the sand just in time. Then hand over hand, using the rope to take my weight, I felt for toe-holds with my feet and worked my way slowly up, until I got near enough for Hamish and Duncan to reach down and haul me over the edge onto the soaking grass.

‘How could you be so stupid?' Tressa said. ‘That was really dangerous.'

I was still on all fours, trying to catch my breath.

‘He tricked me,' I managed to say, between gasps.

They all looked at Duncan.

‘It's not my fault if he's stupid,' he said.

I struggled to my feet. ‘He said it was the challenge. It was supposed to be a race, but it was a trap.'

Hamish looked confused. He said to Duncan, ‘He could have drowned.'

‘I brought the rope, didn't I?' Duncan snapped back.

The fog was pouring up over the cliff on an updraft of air, swirling around us, drenching our hair and eyelashes, covering our clothes with tiny droplets of water. Hamish took a step away from Duncan, as if he wanted to get a better look at him, or as if he was seeing him for the first time.

Elspeth said, ‘This is what happened between you and Fin! Isn't it?'

Duncan had his back to the cliff, with the four of us penning him in. He looked angry and mean, like a rat in a trap.

‘Answer me!' Elspeth said, in a voice that wasn't a whisper any more, but strong and clear above the wind.

‘Your precious Fin was stupid too.' He spat the words at Elspeth but she didn't flinch.

‘You drove him away,' she said. ‘You made him feel glad he was leaving.'

Duncan turned to Hamish to back him up. ‘Fin was spoiling the Binding, right? He had to be stopped.'

But Hamish shook his head. ‘You don't get it, do you? Someone could have got killed.'

‘My brother could have got killed!' yelled Tressa, suddenly making a lunge for Duncan. I grabbed her and pulled her towards me, scared they might both go over the cliff. We could hear the sea crashing against the rocks below, though we couldn't see it in the mist.

Duncan took his chance. He dived through the gap where Tressa had been, and ran off into the darkness. Nobody moved to go after him.

My legs went weak and I had to sit down, even though the grass was soaking wet.

‘How did you know where we were?' I asked.

Crouching down beside me, Tressa said she'd noticed that I wasn't at the dance when she got fed up with Milo trampling on her feet and started looking for someone to take over. She told Elspeth and Hamish, and they realised that none of them had seen Duncan for a while either.

‘We knew it must be the challenge, so we went down to the bothy,' said Elspeth. ‘You weren't there, but as we started coming back, Tressa said she heard something, so we stopped to listen.'

‘It sounded like someone shouting, but we couldn't really tell,' said Tressa. ‘It could have been a sheep that got stuck in a fence, or even seagulls calling, or maybe it was nothing and we imagined it in the mist.

‘We decided to go a little way towards where we thought it was coming from, but we couldn't see two metres in front of us, so we all held hands and picked our way across the field.'

As they moved nearer, the sound became clearer, so they knew it was people shouting, and very soon, they knew who.

‘So we started shouting your names,' Elspeth said, ‘and by then I thought I knew where we were going. Towards the driftwood beach, not the long way around the coast but directly, as the crow flies.'

‘What are we going to do now?' Hamish asked.

‘We should probably go back to the ceilidh before they send out a search party,' said Elspeth. She offered me her hand and I let her pull me up.

We followed the stream inland and hit the track between Anderson Ground and Jean's house. Mum had left the porch light on but there was obviously no-one home yet, so we carried on down to the hall.

We dived into the toilets before we went in, slipped out of our sweatshirts to shake the droplets of water off and dried our hair under the hand-driers. But Mum still greeted us with, ‘Have you been outside? You look soaked and frozen!' Matt said all kids loved running around in the dark, and he was probably right—Milo would definitely have been cross with us for going without him if he hadn't been busy teaching Meggie his made-up ‘London reel'.

I didn't want to dance any more. My head felt fuzzy and my legs felt weak. None of us wanted to dance, so it was just as well that the band was packing up. Some people stayed to clear away the leftover food and sweep the floor, while the rest of us scrabbled for our things in the jumble of coats and poured out into the night.

It was properly dark by then, and we had to point our torches at the ground because if we pointed them straight ahead all we could see was luminous fog. There was a crowd of us at first, but gradually people filtered off as they reached their own houses.

Me, Tressa, Hamish and Elspeth were walking in a huddle at the back, not really talking but still wanting to be on our own. Mum stopped and waited for us to catch up.

‘Where did you get to?' she asked. ‘I think you were gone a long time.'

She knew something had happened.

‘We went to the beach,' I said, which wasn't a lie because we did go to a beach, only not the one she assumed, the one with the jetty.

‘It was spooky in the fog,' Tressa said, trying to make it sound like a great game.

Elspeth and Hamish played along. ‘We all held hands so we wouldn't get lost.' ‘We had a race along the water's edge.' ‘We watched the tide come in.'

Not one of us told on Duncan. It wasn't a plan, just an instinct. We kept his secret, which was a big secret, like the one that Fin had been keeping. Only this time it wouldn't be one person's word against another's if we should ever decide to tell.

Now everyone else had the power, and Duncan had none.

Chapter 7

Ashes on the water

By morning, the mist had cleared and me, Tressa and Milo walked down to the bothy in the sunshine. We were meeting Hamish and Elspeth, but none of us had any idea what we were going to do when we got there.

‘It'll be like when we first found the bothy,' Tressa said. ‘We thought it was a den, and now I suppose it is.'

I suddenly remembered coming down onto the beach our very first day and seeing the bothy huddled
under the cliff; Tressa's hand on the door handle; me saying we shouldn't go in. Then the darkness inside, the fish-box seats and the driftwood table.

I remembered how it felt as our eyes got used to the dark and we found the curious circles of things in the corners, the shelves in the wall, the plate and the knife, the row of tiny skulls and finally the locked tin box with
Privite—keep out
written on it. Tressa's eyes lighting up as she realised it was a child's writing and that meant this must be a den.

But this time, it wasn't like the first time at all. The door was open, and everything had gone. The makeshift chairs and table, the shelves and all the things on them, the candles, the pile of driftwood beside the hearth, the fishing net with all the things in it, the shell circles and the line of skulls. The bothy had been stripped bare.

As we stood there in the gloom, trying to take it in, a shadow blocked the light from the door and Hamish walked in, closely followed by Elspeth.

‘Where is everything?' she said.

We looked at each other and shrugged. Then Hamish said, ‘I think I know.' He led us back outside
and down to the circle of big stones where we'd built the fire for the Feast of the Ancestors. There was a heap of new ash in the middle, with charred bits of wood from the fish-boxes leaning in from the sides.

Blackened shells and pebbles broke the surface of the ash, with scraps of string from the fishing net and empty tea-light foils. In the middle was the tin box, all twisted and burnt out.

Hamish picked up one of the pieces of wood and poked at the ashes.

‘It's cold,' he said. ‘Duncan must have done this last night.'

I tried to imagine Duncan coming back, deep in the darkness, making the fire, dragging the driftwood table down the beach, throwing all the things from the bothy into the flames. Had he been in a furious rage? Or had he been sad, because it was the end of the Binding?

Elspeth sat down, and then we all sat down around the dead fire as if it was still alight, gazing into the ashes as if they were flames. It was like we were waiting for someone to come and tell us what to do.

‘I suppose we could start again,' said Hamish. ‘We could find some more fish-boxes and make a new table.'

I noticed a scrap of black cloth, snagged on a charred bit of wood, all that was left of the Judgement.

‘Maybe we should look for a new place,' said Elspeth.

‘Yes, but where?'

I tried to think of the many old sheds and buildings we'd seen on the island, but they all seemed to either have no roof or no door or no glass in the windows, or else they were too close to people's houses. Then I had a brainwave.