21 Ravens

　
As the train rumbled northward, rain came in from the west in waves dense enough to surf on. Rob peered through the windows for wildlife but saw little, most of the wild things under shelter or simply absent. There were some deer, though, red deer, mainly in small groups far from the railway line. The only exception was a hind standing in a vivid green pool of water, algae, he supposed. It stood with its neck down and arched to one side, grazing. He thought it looked like a mosaic in some recently uncovered Roman villa down south. The Romans came this far north but built no villas, only military marching camps, the decoration of floors less important than fighting and surviving.
When the train reached the port of Mallaig he found a room for the night and had a meal. Afterward, as darkness descended, he wandered around the harbour taking photographs with his new digital camera. He remembered books that said you should not mix colour sources; that you need different films for different kinds of light. He had usually shot in black and white so had no need of that advice but now liked the effect of different kinds of light on the image: remnants of sunset, halogen arc lights at the harbour, car lights, streetlights, and the warmer tones spilling from seafront homes. The colours all mixed in the camera, made the kind of light that illuminated many of his dreams. He thought of the images made of pixels, another mosaic.
Next day he sailed for the Isle of Rum.
It was sunny and warm and calm and islands surrounded the boat like curious whales. The engines rumbled as if the boat was in conversation with the sea. As it steamed up the loch to the pier on Rum he looked around and saw that the sea was of several shades of blue and so was the sky and the land offered a variety of greens and greys of bracken and grass and stone and pine trees but the castle at the head of the loch was only one shade of red.
When they docked things got a little strange, it’s always that way when you are met by government land rovers. And people in uniform. If matching sweatshirts count as a uniform and he thought that they did.
But explanation is needed. Rum is owned by a government agency and run as nature reserve. Visitors were discouraged but the new parliament in Edinburgh brought in rights of access legislation and so Rum has had to open up. No-one lives there but the scientists and a few people running the hostel, the natives were largely thrown off the island in the nineteenth century by the English industrialist who wanted the isle as his little fiefdom, his hunting preserve, his kingdom.
Those who disembarked made their way to the castle along a chalk-white path through the pine wood. The people who had booked had their luggage delivered by the land rovers; the others had to shift for themselves. And since the hostel people were unsure of how many unbooked they could accommodate until they got back to the hostel, this resulted in an unacknowledged race; a line of rucksacked figures trying to walk as fast as possible while appearing to stroll. He found himself walking alongside a man he had noticed on the boat; that accidental walking alongside that immediately calls for speeding-up, slowing-down or conversation. The man had been talking to another passenger on the boat, had told how he was a gillie, a marksman, on his way to cull some red deer. Walking the path now he did not look the traditional figure of a highland stalker; more a Mafia hit-man, dressed in a short black leather coat and with his rifle in a matching black samsonite case. Rob tried the conversation, ‘Maybe we’ll be sure of rooms if you use that now,’ nodding at the guncase and the figures striding ahead. The man just scowled. Don’t make fun of my calling, his red face said. Rob knew he should have chosen the speeding-up choice so he did, left the Assynt assassin behind, the Buchaille button-man, the Torridon torpedo, he ran out of names as he reached the castle and was soon settled in a small room with two amiable climbers from Tyneside, one of whom, it would transpire, was in serious training to represent the UK in the next snoring Olympics. Accommodation was in the former servants’ quarters in the attics. You could rent a proper bedroom, four-poster bed and all, but Rob was here, he told himself, for stern exercise, not mollycoddling and feather beds. He also would cook for himself and eat in the kitchen. Dining in the hall was for the pampered, he thought sardonically, or those not on a budget, he added rather more honestly. He bought some supplies in a small shop that was run by the rangers, one of a group of prefabricated buildings painted in huge flowers, rainbows, suns and moons. The sixties live, he thought, and checked round the back for any half-built wicker men.
Rob awoke early and felt pretty refreshed, thanks, he thought, to the large wads of toilet paper that had eventually muffled the midnight racket. He exchanged good morning nods with the silent climber returning from the common room sofa he had slept on as a last resort, and was soon washed, breakfasted and on the move.
He passed a girl leading a horse, a bay, tall and strong. He remembered that Rum has its own race of ponies but this seemed pretty big. He acknowledged to himself that he was no horse-fancier though, as he noticed the strange-looking saddle on the animal’s back. Someone called out to the girl,’ Portia!’ Watch out for that sports-car he thought, immediately ashamed at himself for the ropy joke. Portia! Where are the Shonas of yesteryear? Now he felt doubly guilty. He could see more ponies loose in a field across the glen and it came to him that the saddle had seemed odd because it was not for riding but for deer carcases, the deer culled by the man with the rifle.
He concentrated on walking. The track was unmetalled and rough with stones large enough to stumble on. He carried on up Glen Kinloch as the sun grew in power until he saw something standing above the track on the left. It was of iron, red-skinned as a Royal Artilleryman in the desert, North Africa, 1943. Rob shucked of his pack and climbed the bank to have a look. A plate on the side identified it as a stone-crusher. It had stood here probably since the landowner built the track, big solid teeth crunching on rock for the track and bridges over the mountain streams. Now mute and still, it still gave off strength, Rob half-expected it to growl into action, snag a sleeve and drag him in, spitting out his bones as white gravel . Some might decry it as a blot on the landscape, overlooking that without it they would have no track or bridges to use. Rob, while careful of his cuffs, liked it, thought it an artefact of the second Iron Age. He photographed it with respect and carried on walking. He rested at a stone bridge and checked the map. The route called for turning onto a footpath through the peat and he almost missed it, a faint way through heather on dark soil. As he walked on it, it gave slightly with each step as if it was the flesh of something alive, as if the island itself knew of his presence in a way that it had not when he walked the hard scar scab of the rocky track. He walked on, following the vague path on a curve up and across the moor and to the east, then over a col and turning west. Now he was in sight of the sea far below, beyond a wide glacier-scooped strath. A few reddish cattle were the sole occupants. He stopped for a rest, took some water and food and checked the map. He had been right. That hill at the edge of the sea and further than he had really expected, was Bloodstone Hill.
He never liked to stop for long, so was soon on his way and, after an hour, and was on the slope of the hill. Perhaps others did not tend to come so far; the only tracks he had seen were of a pony that seemed to him deep, as if the pony had been heavy-laden with a deer carcase. Now the path faded until he realised that he had lost it completely. It was not that important, he had intended to keep to it as a conscientious act, a way of minimising erosion. But that now seemed unnecessary; few seemed to make their way here. Then he found the tail.
It was sitting on the grass, long blades bent below it showing that it had not sat there long. About twenty inches, he corrected himself mentally, about fifty centimetres long with sparse, coarse hairs, of black or white it came to a sharp point and the base was still bloody. It looked bitten-off. He glanced around. He thought himself fairly knowledgeable about mammals, British ones at least, but had no idea what animal this came from. Perhaps it had been dropped by a bird of prey, something that had flown from over the see with the tail in its mouth. Maybe a roc bird.
Whatever it was, wherever it came from, it gave him an uneasy feeling. He took a couple of photographs of it. Later, he could email them to experts for their opinion. Perhaps there were creatures on the island unknown to science; perhaps scientists had been producing unknown creatures.
The moment he reached the top of Bloodstone Hill, cloud rolled in from the sea and swallowed it up.
A hundred metres away shapes moved, grew out of the earth. It took him a moment to realise that it was a herd of red deer that had been resting on the grass. As they saw him, they rose to their feet and watched. He could make out no antlers; a group of hinds. They each slowly and in turn moved off into the grey.
With nothing else to see and tired from his hike, Rob decided to lie down and close his eyes for a few minutes. Silence and stillness made it hard to judge the passing of time and when he opened his eyes and stood up, he was not sure if the nap had been of five minutes or an hour and he deliberately avoided looking at his watch, enjoying the dislocation from any sense of schedule. But he was also not sure of direction, which way had he come? He left his backpack where it was and walked a few metres, suddenly coming to a cliff edge, a sheer drop into the Atlantic. Height and the cloud had somehow stifled the sound of the breakers, he could easily have strolled straight off this edge. Maybe that was why the deer got to their feet; they were keen to see the spectacular fall.
Then the cloud tore open in a sudden breeze and he could see the isle of Canna below like a ceramic brooch on the cloak of a sea-witch or the time-blurred tattoo on a blue giant’s arm.
That night he slept well, the climbers had moved on but he was so tired even the volcanic snoring of the night before would not have kept him awake.
He was up early and alone in the echoing kitchens, breakfasted, and was soon on his way. He stopped off at a walker’s information point by the ranger’s office with maps and leaflets about the island, filling in a card with his planned route. If he fell, searchers would have an idea where to find him.
The mountains of Rum are multicultural; with names of Gaelic, Norse and even English origin. A leaflet told him that the Vikings named mountains for their use as seamarks. Two on Rum are named for spear shafts, often made from ash. Askival and Ainshval, and today he would climb Askival via Hallival, maybe all three if the weather improved. He stuffed the leaflet in by his map and strode through the Kinloch woods and up the track onto the hill.
He tempered his pace as the slope steepened and followed the stream called on his map Allt Sluggan A’ Choillich, that’d be, he thought, the stream of the wooded gorge or gully. The route took him to the black corrie, Coire Dubh and over it through the Beallach Bairc-Mheal, the pass of something, his Gaelic had given out. Soon after the pass he crossed an invisible battle-line between long vanished Gaelic and Viking hosts, and was on Hallival.
Not breathless at all, he told himself, merely stopping to look at the fantastic views. But the views were rapidly diminishing as rain clouds swept in from the ocean. He started across a boulder field; stones as large as cars, vans, houses and the rain slickened the surfaces below his boots. I should have stuck to the long route, to the way on the grass, he thought, because this is no fun. He decided to cut his losses with the rocks and lose some height, maybe fifty metres, make for the grassy path. He headed down through and saw a route though a natural stone arch. Unwelcoming, he thought, even sinister. Nothing could be seen through the arch but swirling cloud. He made his way through and one second’s inattention led to a slip and a crack on the head. This is turning out well, he thought through the pain. He got to the grass and sat on the slope. No blood, just wait till the ringing diminishes. The clouds broke and he saw a raven. And another, three, four, he kept counting until he reached twenty-one once, twice, three times. Twenty-one then, an extended family, a clan.
One peeled off from the group and made a low pass over his head. They’ll do that, ravens, he thought, they’ll check you out if you come onto their territory. Another pass from a slightly different direction, like he’s building up a 3D image, fixing me in the landscape, my space-time co-ordinates.
It did not seem quite as normal, however, when the whole clan came in, circled once, twice, then began to settle around him like cinders beyond the thermals of a bonfire.
One looked at its neighbour and gestured with his head at Rob.
‘Is this the one?’
‘Yes, this is the lad alright.’
‘You’re sure? We can’t be making any mistakes here.’
It’s him, I’m certain. On the hill yesterday, found a wolf hair, picked up a bloodstone and put it in his pocket. I’ll bet it’s there now.’
Rob had had the occasional strange experience elsewhere on the hills; on the Quiraing on Skye, where the calls of the ring ouzels echo between rock formations as the dusk thickens and on Schiehallion, the Fairy Hill of the Caledonians, where he’d got lost on a perfectly conical hill in the fog. Both places he’d slept and dreamt strangely, but he was awake here, near as he could tell.
The first raven spoke again. ‘You’re in a lot of trouble here, son, if that’s true, about the hair and the stone. Is it? The stone in your pocket now?
Stone? And what hair? Did they mean the tail? Rob remembered the tail all right, but had barely noticed that a pebble he’d picked up was of bloodstone and that he had absently pocketed it. He put his hand into the pocket and felt it there now. He could tell that the birds had watched and understood the action.
The leader spoke again. ‘Do you know what a geis is? No? A geis. A sort of forbidden thing or behaviour. You have broken an ancient geis, two really, in touching that hair and in bringing a bloodstone to Hallival.’
Rob looked away, concentrate on something else and this will fade. That hill, it’s Trollval. He knew that the Vikings thought that trolls shrieked from these mountaintops at night, and that they were actually Manx shearwaters at their nest-burrows, but why had the Vikings only named one mountain for the trolls? Maybe they were perfectly aware of the difference between the cries of seabirds; they were Vikings for goodness sake, and the roars of the demonic. Maybe it was lucky he wasn’t on Trollval. These birds were not conversing with him.
No, they were conversing with each other about him. In raven.
The leader turned back to him. ‘Well, son, it’s a shame, but breaking two geis! We cannot let that go without the ultimate punishment. You’re a goner. We are going to have to lift you up and drop you on your head from a great height. You won’t know what hit you. Which is just as well because being hit by a planet can’t be much fun.’ That got a big laugh from the crowd.
‘I can’t believe for a moment that you’re serious,’ said Rob. ‘A geis?’ Memory was kicking in. ‘I have heard of that. But isn’t it a Gaelic thing, Celtic rather than Norse? And aren’t ravens more of a Norse than a Celtic symbol’
‘Not bad son? Though I don’t suppose we would care to be thought of as a symbol. Geis is a Gael thing right enough, strangely enough, you lot have imported a Polynesian word ‘taboo’ for the same thing. Polynesian, isn’t it?’ He turned to the others who seemed to agree on the origin of the word taboo.
‘But we’re on the cusp here aren’t we, where the two cultures intermingled. We could try and claim to be pure one or t’other, not like ravens only lived in Scandinavia, but we’ d be ignoring the facts. And some suggest we’re the direct descendants of Odin’s raven advisors; Hugin and Mugin, but how do you prove something like that? And it’s so long ago, would it matter anything at all if we were?’
‘Hugin and Mugin, youngster’, said another,’ were personifications, if I may use the word, of memory and thought, so if we are their descendants, we may be only memory and thought also, and unlikely to carry out any retribution for the breaking of the geis. Your own mind might be what takes you over the cliff.’
‘Or you’re original perceptions may be the correct ones,’ took up the chief raven again, ‘and there is nothing symbolic about us. We are here to police a law of which you have fallen foul, ignorance no excuse. Plus, if we were the advisors of Odin, who must still live as he is a god and therefore immortal, you would think he would keep his sage advisors by his side until Ragnarok.’
‘That’s the end of the world.’
‘When the wolf Fenris consumes it.’
‘Which he hasn’t, too busy moulting.’
‘Possibly.’
‘It’s debatable.’
The chief was looking annoyed at the crowd butting in. Rob spoke up.
‘So you don’t really know of you origins or why you are fulfilling the demands of ancient laws. You can’t define exactly the point or reason why your tribe came up with or acceded to these laws?’
‘Don’t get all superior, human. Most of your tribes can’t do that either.’
‘So you’ll follow destructive edicts without understanding the need for them?’
‘Again, as do you.
‘Question anything and you question all. Maybe that’s just the thing that would bring on Ragnarok; a world entombed in ice, the last raven’s wings frozen to a windswept rock.
So we’ll do as we’ve done.
Don’t take it personally. You’re probably regretting now all the time you’ve wasted sitting in front of the television, reading rubbishy stories, hanging around in pubs. Must add up to years. But you can’t get them back; you can’t get time to run backwards. That would be just silly.’
‘Silly and against the laws of physics,’ someone pointed out. Everyone nodded.
The same bird continued. ‘And if you start with the ‘what ifs’, you have to accept an infinity of what ifs, any one of which might have led you to a worse fate. You feel robbed of years that were never guaranteed you.’
Rob felt that he was a tumbler in an old iron lock. There was no real choice but to fall as the key turned. He could only feign rustiness, slow the inevitable, no matter whether the lock was to open or shut. Or maybe not part of a lock, maybe one component of an eye that could not be aligned with the others necessary to provide a single vision.
Someone said, ‘We’re not alone.’ There was a rustle like that of black silk at a Victorian funeral.
He noticed that the ravens were looking downhill to a string of brightly garbed walkers like a child’s broken, cheap, dayglo bracelet. The Buchans from Macduff, he thought, in their garish waterproofs. Or is it the MacDuffs from Buchan? A family of hikers, cyclists, marathon runners, though he had got the impression that the teenage son was getting to the age of wanting to hang around on beaches and look at girls. Now they doggedly ascended, faces down, eyes on the heels of the person in front. Father Buchan, or MacDuff, leading as ever from the front, glanced uphill without seeing the raven conclave. The hill in rainwater and edges of sun was like the tarnished cuirass of a long dead soldier.
The family, other tumblers in the lock, disappeared from view below a ridge.
‘Well,’ said the chief, ‘we’d best get on.’
With a susurration of wings in the wind and rain, the clan was in the air and circling tightly around Rob. An unspoken signal and they were on him with beaks and claws and lifting him into the air, over the cliff and then letting go.
He fell into the lochan of the deep corrie. They knew what they were doing; had lived here long enough, could navigate their way around the island in darkness, cloud or fog with unerring accuracy. Ravens are intelligent, they need their distractions, and where they might have once dropped the transgressor into the ocean or chasm; they knew now that myths can be treated simply as stories, as amusements with a thrill of fear, enough to raise the feathers on the back of your neck.
Rob, butt of the joke, mouth full of black, peaty water, soaked just a little more than he had been in the driving rain, slid muddily over the lochan’s edge and made his way back to the castle. That evening, he sat with a hot drink in the reading room on a huge leather sofa among glass cases of stuffed hawks and seabirds, listening as a woman told him of the Pictish fort she could see from the kitchen window of her farmhouse.