Sunday, November 14, 2010

Virtual Scotland: a vigorous sample

Virtual Scotland was, at one point, a book of linked short stories. It went round a few publishers in the 90s who all explained short stories were all very well, but I needed to write a novel instead. I suppose they didn't think they (the short stories) really were all that very well, but nonetheless a few got published elsewhere, including 'Horse Island' -- where, even I don't remember.

Horse Island

1.
When I crossed the small strip of causeway separating Horse Island from the rest of Scotland, I had a fleeting sense of leaving not just one country but one dimension, and entering another. The sun gleamed on the cobbles as though they were metallic, the sky boomed blueness, shattering the small clouds that clung to its corners. I felt light-headed, as though on a mountain-top rather than -- literally -- at sea level. It would not be long before the tide would sweep back into the narrow channel, and water had already begun to shine between the stones.

Upon arrival in the village I was examined by the Doctor and the Magistrate. Notes were taken as to my occupation, date of birth, height, weight and the colour of my eyes; all the usual passport stuff. Then the samples were taken. Small squares were cut from each item of clothing and gummed to my form. Snippets of hair, blood and urine samples, even some excrement (I had been advised by the tourist board in Ullapool not to “go” before I went, as it were). Most of these items were placed in little cubic compartments in a plastic tray that was then frozen. I had to politely but insistently refuse the Doctor’s requests for “a wee drappie sperm”. She pursed her lips at this and made a note I couldn’t read.

I then signed a document which stated in English, Scots, Gaelic and Neo-Latin, that any drawn, painted or photographed images, cuttings of plants, clippings of the local paper or any literary work found on Horse Island, as well as any writings I might do, should all be listed on my departure. If at all possible copies should be deposited with the Chief Archivist. When this was done I was introduced to the Assistant Archivist, a Dr Tully, who issued me with a camera and some black and white film, and two notebooks, one blank and one ruled (narrow feint). I signed for all of these and thanked him, whereupon he bared his rather sallow teeth (he was one of those gentlemen who have triangles rather than rings beneath his eyes), and presented me with a card.

“The shop belongs to my brither-in-law. Ony pencils, pens, paints or ink, ye can buy them there.”

The Magistrate now presented a card of his own, advertising another shop where I could purchase or hire tape-recorders and camcorders, if I so wished. He did not specify his relation to the owner of this establishment, and I was so bamboozled by details by this point, I considered this a kindness. He then introduced me to the Town Geographer, a perky round man who looked as if he spent a great deal of time outdoors with a shooting stick and a flask of malt. He briskly issued me with a thorough guide to both village and island, with historical and literary sections as well as maps. The Magistrate now pressed a small card into my hand. It had my name and home address on it, as well as a picture of me crossing the causeway (which I had not been aware had been taken). In it I was squinting a little against the light, and concentrating on my steps. There was also an incomprehensible computer coding symbol.
Then, finally, I was introduced to the Town Photographer, who I cannot describe, as he did not remove his head from the black cloth hanging from the back of his upright camera, merely extending a burnt-looking hand for me to shake. I was then photographed an extraordinary number of times: straight passport, then casual, then as the photographer imagined me (as Napoleon, for some reason), then with the Doctor examining my genitals (I thought at the time that this might have been revenge for refusing the semen sample), then with the Magistrate apparently condemning me to death, then shaking hands with the Assistant Archivist, shaking hands with the Town Geographer and, at last, a group shot on the steps of the Incomers Building.
I stepped down onto the main street of the village (indeed its only street) in a complete daze. Perceiving my distress, the Magistrate took my arm, saying “Come on, I’ll tak ye to the Hotel. Ye’ll need a wee drink after aa that.”

It still seemed to be daylight, though it had been late afternoon when I arrived. I was unable to focus much on my surroundings, as the paving-stones and the walls of the houses all glittered intensely in the late light. I couldn’t tell if this was some quality of the stone, or my own slightly dazzled state of mind.

“Mind yir caird,” the Magistrate went on. “It’ll see ye into the Archive and into the Restaurant. The Sergeant will accept it as confirmin yir identity and oor local Madame will tak it as guaranteeing yir guid health and freedom from infection.”

Had I heard that right? He was staring straight into the distance as he spoke, as though addressing the horizon.

“Ye cannae imagine how that’s simplified oor bureaucratic system, jist having the one caird. Ye can even use it to hire bools or gowf clubs. Dye play chess at all?”
“Not really...that is, I used to prefer backgammon.”

“Ah well, we’re lucky to have a very good backgammon club here on the Island. Not that I play it masel, but the Doctor’s very keen. That’s the medical Doctor, ye understand, whom ye’ve aaready met. I’ll sometimes play her a bit, but I’m no a bettin man, and she’s jist...well, jist a wee bit ruthless with the bettin.”

As he finished we arrived at the door to the Hotel, a rather grand Victorian structure which towered a floor above the houses around it. I suggested he joined me for a drink, but he smiled no, and strode off down the street at twice the pace I’d been able to maintain. He seemed the most active man imaginable, apart from the Doctor and the Town Geographer, who had both given off this manic sense of energy. And yet he was clearly old, if not venerable, in his deeply-creased pepper-and-salt trousers and dusty frock coat.

I realised I was grinning involuntarily as I watched him pause abruptly, tilt his grey head at something on the ground (exactly like a hen), then nimbly bend down to snatch it up. He stuffed this objet trouvé, whatever it was, into a weskit pocket without looking at it, and carried on briskly. I shrugged and stepped into the Hotel.

2.

It was the exceptional purity of the malt (the Island’s own) that had stopped me fully taking in my surroundings. I didn’t have a particularly discriminating palate, but I could tell this was something neither from the great islands to the south, nor from Strathspey. It was almost a small sensation, mellow after the Irish model, though with none of that dangerous drooping toward sweet blandness, but then it just kept coming. The second sniff yielded more than the first, the second taste was bigger, broader. It was a dominy of malts; it taught you about itself as you took your third sip, and suggested, like all the best teachers, that beyond this beginning was more discrimination, and yet more vigorous detail. It was also, I realised, setting the glass down reluctantly, potent enough to cause instant blethering in the drinker. It was then that I first allowed myself to look around.

I had kept my head down as I registered, wary that another ritual of identification might begin, and hadn’t glanced about me on entering the bar. I didn’t want any ostracising glares from the regulars until I’d had a seat and a dram. Now I realised I was alone, alone, that is, apart from the art.

Every inch of wallpaper appeared to be covered by drawings and paintings in every conceivable medium; crayon, oil, watercolour, pencil, collage -- even a few peculiar-looking specimens which I guessed were made of juice rubbed from plants. My head started reeling again and I sacrificed the rest of my whisky in a good, stabilising slug: I had to come to terms with all this. The profusion of subjects was equally bewildering: there were views of what I presumed to be the other rooms, both full of people and emptied of them; there were views from all the rooms, in various weathers. There were views of the Hotel from different angles and at different times of year; there were views of the ramshackle inn which (I supposed) must have preceded the Hotel’s construction. I ordered another drink before continuing my mental catalogue, and enquired as to when dinner was served. The girl handed me a very bulky menu that would probably take a further drink to read through. Perhaps I could settle in to the intensity of life on the Island before cirrhosis got hold, but at this rate it would be a close thing.

Of course, the reason I had not felt alone in the bar was because it was full of portraits, both of regulars and hosts, stretching back across the generations. Family resemblances were noticeable across the walls; a certain pink-tinged idiot grin, the same extraordinary eyebrows, a dogged persistence in wearing a deerstalker rather too small for several heads (perhaps the same deerstalker?). The room was replete with a sensation of absent but imminent laughter, of conversation deferred but not done, of arguments and feuds still to be resolved. It was impossible to be lonely in such a bar; simply glancing around fitted you in. In fact there was one figure (I got up and peered closely at a faded interior) who looked rather like me, reading by a lamp in the middle of the last century. Were the others listening? Smiling again, I finished my drink and took the menu upstairs.

Ten minutes later, dumbfoundered and more than a little pissed, I ordered “whatever’s first on the list” down the telephone, and was brought a bowl of porridge by a giggling maid. She deposited a card with my tray, saying “It’s ma sister.” The card said:

Dr Eileen MacMorrow
Tourist Guide & Councillor
8, The Square,
Kinawe, Horse Island.

Clutching this small talisman in one hand, and my porridge spoon in the other (“supper” was delicious, by the way) I fell into a deep, comforted slumber.

3.

“Maist people date the Tendency back tae the first Statistical Account and an unusually enthusiastic minister called McIlwraith, but ye should note that a bardic college was maintained on the site of Kinawe for mony hundreds of years afore that, and the poets of Gaelic Scotland were trained tae perform considerable mnemonic feats.”

“How absolutely fascinating, Dr MacMorrow.”

“Caa me Eileen, please! Anyway, be that as it may, Horse Island has certainly had mair than its fair share of lads -- and lasses -- of pairts, mony of whom went to the University in Glasgow.”

“But not the girls, surely, Eileen. You’re not suggesting that Scotland was a haven of equality in the nineteenth century!”

“Not at all. But Edinburgh’s first lady lawyer came frae Kinawe. And we had mony stalwarts amang the Scottish Suffragette movement. Blackwoods first remarked on us in 1819, suggesting that it was something tae dae wi the importation of exotic airs via the Gulf Stream Drift, that gave us a combination of “Scottish wit and Latin temperament”.”

I couldn’t have phrased it better; Dr Eileen MacMorrow was that perfect marriage of pale complexion and thick dark brows one sometimes finds among Italo-Scots. She had an energetic hairstyle (it seemed to be swept up in an otherwise impalpable breeze), a long powerful nose and high, rounded cheeks, and very brilliant, rather fierce blue eyes. Her mouth was brightly lipsticked in what seemed to me a continental manner. Sitting with her at this small café in the town’s central square was like clinging to the rail of a yacht being expertly thrown about a rough bay. I tossed back another espresso, noticed the Town Geographer crossing the park, and suppressed an impulse to yell “Ahoy!” Instead I knuckled down to what I saw as the task in hand; getting the good Doctor to steer me through the bewildering profusion of information on Horse Island.

I had already successfully negotiated the strange interior of the café under her careful tutelage. I was surprised at first to find a café with pavement tables so far north, but, thinking it was a nice day, I had sat down gratefully. “No, no,” she’d insisted, dragging me in to meet the owners.

“It’s awfy rude to treat people as though they are unimportant, simply because you’ve never met them.”

Once indoors we met the two old women who had run the café together for thirty eight years precisely: Jenny Baxter and Shona McCafferty. Jenny took our order, while Shona showed me round the exhibits. The café was divided into tall booths covered in red leather, and between the booths were large glass cases filled with ancient ice-cream making machines, beautiful Italian cappuccino machines, and a great deal of packaging from the early part of this century, of biscuits, chocolates, sweets, coffees and teas. There were samples of the different china the café had used at different periods, the two women’s extensive collection of butter dishes, each carefully labelled, and, their especial delight, doilies, napkins and tea towels of many nations.

They had apparently travelled widely, and the tea towel genre was very well represented. They had a tea towel map of Sarawak, a tea towel listing the principal nineteenth century poets of Argentina, with small samples of their verse, a tea towel depicting in blue and yellow the shellfish of Maine. They even had two tea towels displaying ground rice recipes in French from Africa. When Jenny had tugged my sleeve to indicate my breakfast was ready, I was in the midst of the terrible realisation that I found tea towels interesting. They were jaunty, colourful, useful for saucers and cups, and unfailingly informative. Hurrah (with suitable ironic reserve) for the tea towel!

I had noticed, as I sat down shakily in the sun’s first heat, that Eileen had been regarding me with a quirky smile in one corner of her mouth. She was watching me with the same smile now, and I realised I must have lapsed into a benign but vacuous silence after spotting the Town Geographer.

“Okay, let’s talk some more about the Tendency,” I said, as breezily as I could muster. “How does it operate? How does it, say, affect you personally? Is it like...an itch for order, for tidiness?”

“Well, I wadna go as far as to say that the Tendency exists in precisely that way. It was a humorous term, you recollect, invented by rival students at the university. As such, it carries undertones of uncontrollability, almost of infection.”
“Yes I know, this is one of the things that interests me: is it catchable?” This was said, I must admit, with several undertones of my own, while peering as deeply into those startling eyes as I could.

“I think it wad be mair accurate to say it is attractive.”

Attractive? I had been so busy trying to present my “witty” subtext to the conversation, arching imaginary eyebrows and so on, I realised I had no idea of which level her response was intended on. Again, as with the Magistrate, I had a sense the people of Horse Island had simply dispensed with several layers of “normal” responses. “How do you mean?”

“Since the 1860s we have been defying the demographic statistics of the ither islands. People actually come here from the cities, rather than vice versa. Not in large numbers, of course, but the brilliant few are always welcome. So we are attractive, magnetic. The Magistrate was an incomer once, you know.”
“Really, but he looks as though he’s always been here.”

“Even the Chief Archivist came frae the mainland, though he’s the first wan to haud that post.”

“But you yourself, I hope, are Island born and bred.”

“I am indeed, though my faither was an Italian painter, fleeing Mussolini. Anywhere else in Scotland he would have had to give up his work and open a fish and chip shop.” She laughed gently at this. It was clearly an old family joke. I bunched my hands into my pockets, delighted: I had known she was an Italo-Scot!

“What does your father do on Horse Island, then?”

“Oh, he rins the fish and chip shop.” This time she burst into hoots of laughter, as I realised I’d fallen into the second half of their family joke. “But here...” she continued through snorts, “here he can paint as well.”

4.

Eileen MacMorrow palmed me off on the Town Geographer effortlessly, for all my “witty” subtexts. I was clearly not the first holidaymaker to hope for more than instruction. This man, Kintail, seemed to spend his days orbiting the island in various wobbling ellipses, most of which included the two pubs and the distillery. Over the next few days we always seemed to be coming on the whitewashed walls and round houses of “The Sweat of the Mare” from new and surprising angles. One short chalky tower within the distillery compound was his indispensable landmark.

“Keep that ahent ye and ye’ll hit Kinawe. Keep it ahent ye the ither way, and ye canna miss Kinell.”

This piece of information, so simple on the surface, didn’t really stand up to further scrutiny, as I told him one lunchtime in “The Wicker Man”.

“Aye, well, the ither thing tae remember is the waater. Once ye’ve hit the waater ye’ll no be that far aff either place.”

It was on my fourth day that we struck the Island’s cemetery, or rather the combined cemetery and sculpture park. These two little towns of stone face each other across a valley, and had clearly been sited so that the rays of the setting sun struck the gravestones, while those of the rising sun hit what Kintail called “the merrystanes”.
Apart from this detail, it would have been hard to tell the two apart, as there was little exclusively sombre about one, or “merry” about the other. How people wished themselves to be remembered, it seemed, was indistinguishable from those forms in which they had celebrated life. Each featured a number of people dancing; whole stony reels, in which animals, birds, fish and more abstract shapes joined in. There were also blockish stones, with reliefs and copious lettering in a wide range of languages and calligraphies. Some people’s sculptures crept along the ground, or impersonated parts of shipping. Since it was midday, I confessed myself at a loss after wandering through both parks as to which was which.

Kintail pointed to one with the stem of his pipe: “Mair angels,” he observed.

“The dead prefer angels, do they? Why are there no straight inscriptions?”

“Everybody kens wha’s here. The bare facts are in the Archive. And it’s no that they prefer angels, it’s jist that they canna avoid them ony more.”

“I wouldn’t have said that the people of this Island are in the habit of dodging any experience.”

“Aye, well I’ve had a few I’d like to see comin next time.”

“Such as?”

“Did ye ken the haill clanjamfrie was swappit ower, fifty year ago?”

My goodness, my first instance of issue-ducking. I made a mental note to ask Eileen about Kintail’s background: another incomer?

“What, dig them all up? Why on earth would they do that?”

“He. Why on earth would he do that.”

“Who’s he?”

“The Chief Archivist.”

“Of his day, you mean.”

“Of his day. He decided one fine morn that the symbolism was jist as interesting the ither weys aboot. So, up comes Granny.”

“That’s a lot of power for an Archivist to wield.”

“Aye, well the Archive is very important on Horse Island, as I’m sure you’re beginning to appreciate.”

I photographed him as he said this, so splendidly had his brows gathered; if golf-balls had been crimson, he would have made a smoulderingly intense golf-ball.

5.

“'Up comes Granny!' Oh, I like that!” The Magistrate and Eileen MacMorrow were in fits. I was feeling rather po-faced, having convinced myself I’d hit upon some ructions beneath the smooth surface of Horse Island. We were sitting in the Hotel bar that same evening, with the violet light beating through its small windows and off the innumerable pictures within. The bar was full of locals, few of whom were distinguishable in any way from their predecessors. Had the walls been lined with little mirrors, the effect would have been much the same.

“Kintail’s an obscurantist, he’s a millenarian,” said Eileen, guffawing.

“He’s a reid aboot the heid!” said the Magistrate, and they were off again.

“Doesn’t the Chief Archivist wield an extraordinary amount of power here?”

“Nae mair than Kintail does, but he jist likes to scandalmonger as well,” replied Eileen.

“Still, digging up the dead.”

“Every one of those people signed a medical form giving permission to the Doctor or the Archivist tae dig them up and dae whit he liked wi them. Deid’s deid. They ken we wadna dae onything that was too disrespectful,” said the Magistrate.

“What about MacPhail’s Tea Party?” countered Eileen, and they both went spiralling off into hoots of laughter.

“MacPhail’s tea party?” I enquired, when they’d recovered a little. The Magistrate smoothed down his beard and inserted a small nip of whisky before replying.

“MacPhail’s the Toun Photographer. People said he shudna’ve done that, but they were aa neatly stacked in the kirk atween interments, and he’s an awfy man wi a drink on him. The Doctor’s nae better; it wis the pair o them.”

“What did he do?”

“He recreated Lady Croma’s soirée,” said Eileen.

“Who was Lady Croma?”

“She was a great patroness of the arts on Horse Island. After we dispossessed her husband, she threw the family resources into the theatre, the art gallery...”

“Wait a minute, you dispossessed her husband?”

“It wis his idea,” interrupted the Magistrate, puffing up his whiskers as though a shot of static had just gone through him. “It wis him that cam back tae the Island fuhl o Prince Kropotkin and started posting pamphlets on the Toun Hall.”

“It’s all in yir guide,” said Eileen. “Huv ye no read it yet?”

“There’s been no time,” I spluttered.

“Och time. That’s aa you incomers go on aboot. As if there wis onything but time. And yet ye come lookin to us for amusement because ye don’t know what to do wi your precious time.”

I was alarmed by the note of contempt in her voice, and determined to stick to the point: “What was Lady Croma’s soirée?”

“She held a salon every Thursday evenin, and MacPhail thocht he’d recreate the one she’d held in honour of Alexander Smith.”

“Smith? Didn’t he write the Life-Drama?”

“And some very fine work on Skye. He visited Horse Island in 1872. MacPhail simply got all the relevant bodies thegither in appropriate costume, transported them to the theatre, and “boom boom!” -- as his flash tends to put it.”

“This is outrageous.”

“Nae mair ootrageous than Taggart prentin the picter in the Chronicle as though it hud jist happened,” muttered the Magistrate, with the beginnings of another smirk.

“Is Smith buried here? Surely his heirs would have protested.”

“Naw, naw. Young Morton stood in fur Smith, richt doon tae the whiskers.”

“Sam Morton is a local poet of increasing standing nationally,” Eileen said, in her best Guide’s manner.

I stomped off to the bar to get another round. Horse Island had flabbergasted me yet again. Were they kidding? I decided I would go to the Archive the next day and look up the appropriate issue of The Free Horse Chronicle.

6.

That night I woke up with a ravenous desire for food. A snack, a sandwich, a four course dinner: anything would do. I hadn’t eaten because I’d gotten so caught up in our conversation, and I’d been out all day with Kintail on the hills. I picked up the menu, thinking forlornly that I could at least read about food. It was a stunning document, typical of the Island, or, as I’d come to think, amply displaying the Tendency. It was divided into main meals, which then broke down not just into lists of courses and delicacies, but also recipes, drawings and reminiscences from previous generations of Hotel cooks.

There were exotic foreign dishes, plus sparkling little vignettes of where and how they had been picked up. There was a stunning array of local and Scottish dishes, the former seeming to quite overwhelm the latter, with quotes from various literary diners. This last category included an account of a dinner had in the Hotel by Boswell during Johnson’s Highland Tour, which sounded distinctly apocryphal, if not downright phoney. The main dish was, appropriately, fish. Burns, too, had apparently stayed in the Hotel, and had left a small stanza on “Mrs Sempill’s Bannocks,” which contrived to sound remarkably lewd, something about “slappin’ doon the farls” and flour flying about like powder from the buttocks of a fine lady.

The menu was turning out to be a damn good read, but it did nothing to relieve my pangs of peckishness until I came across the statement at the foot of the last page: “Guests please note the kitchen maintains a twenty-four hour service and can be contacted via Reception.” This stretched even Kinawe’s bounds of credibility. I reached for the phone, then, on an impulse, slipped out of bed and into my dressing gown and slippers. I opened my bedroom door as quietly as I could, and crept downstairs.

As I creaked down the large central staircase, with the hall light flickering through its dark wooden banisters, I began to detect little noises from the kitchens. These were located in some indeterminate space behind the Reception booth, and connected to the Dining Room by a long corridor. I negotiated the darkened dining room by light filtering from the hall and through the smoked glass door which led to this corridor. The breakfast settings were already in place, and the dim light played with silver and cut glass as I threaded between the tables.

The noise was much more distinct now, a round of clatterings and voices raised, half in dispute, half in instruction. Every now and then the tone would break and a gale of laughter would blow down the corridor, or a great cursing and wailing would arise. I pressed my forehead to the lightly swinging door and pushed.

The corridor was dimly lit. Obviously they weren’t particularly expecting anyone to come down it. But light exploded from the far end of it as though from a blast furnace, and, unmuffled by the opening of the door, voices roared over a continual timpani of pots banging, whisks whirring, knives sharpening and thudding dully into boards, chopping interminable vegetables.

There was a squealing of oven doors swinging this way and that, clunking shut or creaking open, and the bubbling, hissing, scraping and sighing of meats and sauces, custards and potatoes being manipulated by what appeared to be an army of cooks and assistants. Just then I distinguished the voice of the maid who had brought my porridge, Eileen’s sister Rosa:

“Mrs Sempill, Mrs Sempill,” she was saying, “Ur these roastit enough yet?”

A sensation of stark terror flooded over me, and I was gone in a second, before even thinking why, back through the dining room and heading up the stairs to my room. At the top of the flight I calmed down a little, concluding that of course it was a small island, and family names persisted, and, what’s more, it was quite likely a descendent of Burns’s cook would be working here still. I proceeded to my room with my dignity restored, but the little nerve thrumming in my brain said, “So what made ye jump, then?”

7.

The following morning I breakfasted with Eileen inside the café. It was a little dull outside and I was secretly hoping to get round the rest of the tea towel collection before I visited the Archive. She was looking wonderfully sober, despite or perhaps because of the ravages of the night before. Her hair was tied back and there was a dark vertical stroke between her brows, as if from a soft pencil. She was concentrating on a few shapes I’d made with our paper napkins, folding them into hats and boats.

“How dye initiate new shapes? Is there a free-form version or is it always the same opening steps? Show me the Bird Base again.”

I did so, opening and refolding one napkin, and explaining, “This is my favourite shape. I don’t usually bother making all the next things. It’s really pure, abstract.”

“Like a meditation,” she said, smiling to herself. Jenny brought our coffees and rolls. “Oh Jenny, can we get some more napkins?”

“Ye can get proper origami paper at the Art Shop,” Jenny pointed out, but brought some more anyway. Eileen set to folding them neatly to form squares, then tearing the extra length off.

“Are ye allowed to mark them in any way? I mean can ye decorate the paper, not jist one face but specifically, so the particular effect is intensified?”

“You can do what you want. I think drawing on them looks a wee bit naff if it’s representational, though.”

“How can we no tear it? Does this work wi thin metal?”

I sipped my coffee, amused. After nearly a week, the vitality of the Islanders no longer astonished me. Everywhere I had gone I had been politely quizzed as to my intentions, my circumstances, my politics, my opinion as to their shop’s lay-out or their garden’s symbolic resonances. I had signed visitor’s books (always having to include a comment), rendered up a considerable portion of my hair (more, frankly, than I was willing to part with), and even contributed a short verse to a renga drive.

I had sat in bars with complete strangers discussing my politics, their politics, other people’s politics, my thoughts on art, their thoughts on music, my hopes and plans, the disappointments of my past life, their strongest childhood memories, their extensive travels. Anything which two casual acquaintances elsewhere would have considered taboo was to them the very bread of life.

“Why do you do it, Eileen?” I said fondly, not just for her, but for Horse Island as a whole.

“Do what?” she replied, rather shortly.

“All this,” I gestured vaguely, “all this...focusing. I mean, take the cemetery: all that labour, the sentiment...”

“Sentiment?” The word clearly did not agree with her. “Until you actually perform an action, you cannot understand it. Do you understand the experience of childbirth?”

This was a little sharp, and my face must have shown it, as she softened instantly.
“This is why the Archive is so important. If we didna make every effort to assimilate aa the material relevant tae ony given subject, then we micht be forced tae experience its consequences, however far-fetched.”

“So it’s a kind of response to...are you familiar with chaos theory?”

“We have been concerned with this matter since Lord Croma advanced his principle of Incremental Anarchy.”

“Incre...what? You let the gentry...”

“You’re being incoherent, my dear Osmond. Mebbe you’ve had too much caffeine. Incremental Anarchy is based on the famous statement by Archimedes, you know it? “Gee me somewhaur tae staund, and I shall muve the warld.”

“I didn’t realise Archimedes spoke in the Doric.”

“That is beneath even you, Osmond Dips. Why ye have to mock yir ain language escapes me. Anyway, treating pig ignorance wi the contempt it deserves, I shall continue my point. If ye’re still interested.”

“Where does it come from, your energy?” I interrupted, taken by her charming fury as she had clearly intended, striking the pose of pugnacious explicator, fist on thigh and nose in the air.

“The real question is: where do you lose yours? For us, life is an indivisible mystery. It’s because your energies are so low that you resort to compartmentalising everything, or rather a few wee portions of it.”

“Oh scathing, scathing. You people compartmentalise everything. You itemise butter dishes, you scalp strangers, you reduce the world to a list of lists!”

“On the contrary we are constantly looking for ways to simplify our systems. We are against specialisation in any field, but we do not fall into the pathetic trap of assumin ye can jist abandon some phenomena afore ye’ve examined as much of its effects as possible.”

“But...where do you find time?” I was losing ground, I realised, falling back on an old, weak argument.

“How do you avoid it? Look at ye, you’re not a lazy man. From what I’ve seen of yir sketches, ye’ve got some skill, and you claim to be a writer. But your drawing line looks podgy, and you mainly jist moon aboot. Were ye a hyper-active child? There’s a theory that they suppress creative energies out of guilt for their parents, ye know. You lose two, mebbe three hours a day navel-gazin.”

“I like to think,” I protested, sounding peevish even to my own ears.

“How exactly is it you can stop thinking?” she snapped back.

“I don’t always understand how I behave...” I began.

“Then visit our Archive,” she concluded triumphantly, and went back to her folding. I watched the dark line reappear between her brows and sighed.

8.

The Archive itself was a single-story building of Victorian design, a cross between Greek temple and Scottish bungalow. It was set on a rectangular grassy mound which suggested much material was stored below ground, and it hived off at the back into several extensions which in turn lost themselves among the buildings at this end of the village. Inscribed above its doors was a Latin inscription: “Non omnia possumus omnes.”

As I stood staring up at this, the Assistant Archivist came out and took me by the elbow. “We can’t all do everything,” he whispered. “Virgil.”

I allowed myself to be drawn into the main hallway of the Archive as I pondered this statement of humility. It was full of the inevitable glass cases, here displaying ordinary household objects from every period of the village’s history. At least in these surroundings, the appearance of a museum was not unsuitable. The Assistant Archivist murmured something about seeing “if he’s ready,” then disappeared down a stair which descended from a trapdoor behind a desk. I noted it had no banisters.

I turned my attention to the Archaeological and Natural History sections. Here were geological samples, fossils, prehistoric tools, the skeletons of small birds and mammals. A few cases contained very badly stuffed rabbits, pine martens, red squirrels and the like. Some of these, I realised to my horror, consisted of those Victorian genre scenes, in which the animals are positioned to display human foibles. Here was a recreation of a pub, with a drunken rabbit floundering on the floor while the landlord, a capercaillie, stood over him threateningly. Mice and rat regulars studied their pint pots carefully, ignoring the fracas. Here was a traffic scene, with rakish young guinea fowl in a little trap drawn by a kitten, and a fox cub in police uniform taking their particulars.

“I see you’ve discovered our Unnatural History section,” said a thin, dry voice from the stairwell. “This way, Mr Dips.”

I turned in time to see a small bald head vanishing jerkily down the stairwell. So this was the all-powerful Chief Archivist. By the time I reached the first step, I could just see the tips of his shoes in the shadows. I hurried down towards these as the precise quaver of his voice floated up: “Do mind your head.”

At the bottom I was in a narrow corridor apparently walled in carpet. My companion was concealed by a hanging flap of some material labelled “Mrs Erskine-Lamond, own design, 1923”.

“This is our domestic section, Mr Dips. Follow me.”

I brushed aside the curtain-like material and found myself following a tiny grey-suited man down a sloping passage lined with samplers, antimacassars, lacework of all kinds, cushion covers, and so on. It was impossible to catch a glimpse of his face, and quite difficult to fathom our direction. I noticed en passant that the samplers did not confine themselves to alphabets known to me, while the cushion covers were dyed a dazzling range of colours, showing little restraint when it came to bluebottle greens and electric oranges.

“Are you familiar with the phrase “Rancho Malaria”, Mr Dips?” shot back the dry voice. “It describes the kind of dwelling where vividity rather than modulation has been the guiding principle behind decoration.”

We came out into a large gloomy space piled high with furniture, including chaise longues and entire three piece suites, some of which looked as though they had been made by amateurs, so misshapen and misaligned were their appearance. Somebody at some point had been very interested in futurist design, it would seem, judging from some rather dramatic and unsteady pieces heaped to one side which looked as though they might not be comfortable, but would certainly be capable of a fair lick of speed.

“We’ll get round to all this one day, I suppose,” the old man muttered disconsolately as he picked his way through the ruins. I caught a glimpse of a sharp little profile as he glanced at some derelict sofa, which sprawled like a punchdrunk walrus.

Next we plunged into another, rather poorly-lit corridor lined with glass cases filled with a miscellany of objects. What looked like ancient legal documents were mingled with stamp collections, prints of the various geological wonders of the island were mingled with a photographic encyclopaedia of human types done in the late nineteenth century. As I tramped along after the Chief Archivist, I was scrutinised by all the tribes of humanity, gazing imperturbably through tattoos and head-dresses, feathers and crowns, collars and ties and hats of a supposedly “civilised” nature. Men, women and children in a olive-coloured monochrome, with the focus always on the tip of their nose, watched me descend deeper into the Archive.

We turned a corner and were in a section where the lights worked properly and the floor did not lean to one side or descend imperceptibly. Here the walls were panelled in wood and had cases in glass cabinets. This whole stretch of corridor was devoted to lepidopterae. Vivid colours shone in neatly regimented rows as we continued, as though a miniature nation had turned out in their finest garments to watch us pass. I had not realised the world possessed so many species of butterfly.

“Did you know the butterflies depicted in the scrolls of the Chinese ancients very frequently have no counterpart in the real world?” inquired my enigmatic guide. “And yet there are so many real butterflies. I wonder what is the characteristic which prompts humanity to invent still more?”

“Surely we just reflect Nature’s own talent for variation?” I ventured, determined not to be overawed by all this.

“I’m sure you’re right, Mr Dips. I’ve often thought we must diagnose Nature as an omnipotent schizophrenic, whose every uncontrollable whim is, uncontrollably, possible.”

That shut me up for the remainder of our travels, which ended in yet another dim room of uncertain proportions, filled with metal shelf units which reminded me of the storage section of a supermarket. Here and there stood entire bookcases full of old leatherbound tomes and great tea-chests crammed with rumpled paperbacks. The fact that none of these was ranged against a wall made them appear thrown down at random. There was a very large wooden table in this room, stacked with more books, old microscopes, bowls and racks for bottles, some of which did indeed contain old bottles in apothecary blue. There was a TV with no insides, and numerous heaps with dirty sheets flung hastily over them. Standing at this table was the Doctor who had examined me on first arriving on Horse Island.

The Doctor was a tall brusque woman in her early fifties, with a rather long face and beautiful soft black hair with long threads of grey, bound up rather severely. She wore a grey pullover and a tartan skirt which seemed to be entirely in tones of charcoal. The slender gold chain which was attached to her spectacles had the air of an extravagance thrust upon her by a courageous admirer. I remembered the Magistrate’s comments on her skills at backgammon and wondered if it could be a trophy.

Extraordinarily, she looked very like the Chief Archivist.

Not in build of course, as the man could only have been half the Doctor’s height. But about the face and in her bearing especially, there were the signs of relation. The Archivist was clean-shaven, with a long upper lip and a small dagger of a nose, but his brows were similarly querulous, and they both shared the intense gray glare of the typical Islander. They were undoubtedly father and daughter.

“Doctor Vaisey tells me she has not yet obtained a sperm sample from you, Mr Dips. We don’t normally experience any difficulty of this nature with our male visitors.” The little man regarded me momentarily through his brilliant eyes, then turned his attention to the Doctor.

“You did explain, Deirdre, about payment and pornography?”

“She did indeed, sir,” I interrupted, determined to take control of this delicate issue. “I said at the time I didn’t understand the need for such a...personal detail of documentation.”

“Most masculine incomers appear to have spent a great deal of time spreading their seed hither and yon with no apparent signs of delicacy or squeamishness,” the Doctor said, pursing her lips in the gesture I remembered from our first meeting. I glanced at the Chief Archivist in mute appeal and saw the same expression. Then it registered that this was the family’s version of a smile.

“Do you collect eggs from your female incomers, Doctor Vaisey?” I asked, determined to be as challenging as I was being challenged.

“Ah, a smart one indeed,” the old man interjected. “Come sit down Osmond my boy, we have much to discuss before you leave us.” With this the Chief Archivist beckoned me over, while the Doctor produced two armchairs and a stool from the shadows behind a shelf. The stool she commandeered for himself, and leaning an elbow on the gutted TV, she watched us sit in silence.

“We do indeed collect eggs from our women guests,” Mr Vaisey said, leaning forward and tapping my knee in a conspiratorial manner. “But they are generally asleep and unaware of the process.”

“Isn’t that highly unethical?”

“This is not a place for moral vertigo!” he exclaimed abruptly, and sank back in the armchair, studying me closely. “What do you think, Deirdre?” his dry voice emerged from the wings of the chair.

“He has a fine head,” the Doctor announced.

“What do you do with all this genetic booty?” I asked.

“Do? Nothing. Nothing at all. We merely catalogue it, as we catalogue everything.”

“Why do you catalogue everything?”

“Do you know Virgil, Mr Dips? ‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.’ I translate: he is a lucky man who understands the causes of things.”

“You want to know how things change, don’t you.”

“Quite right. We want to understand how all change occurs. Social change, psychological change, genetic change, mythic change. You have a fine head on your shoulders, Mr Dips.”

“What is it that you want to change?”

“Ah, that is where you come in. We have computers working on that problem right now.”

“Computers? I don’t know anything about computers. Are you offering me some kind of job?”

“A very interesting way of expressing it. Deirdre.”

The Doctor stretched across for a corner of sheet and tugged at it, bunching the sheet up as it came. This process gradually exposed a complicated mass of machinery bunched around a big jug. Doctor Vaisey clicked on an overhead lamp illuminating this jumble of stuff. In the jug was a human head.

9.

To say I was not prepared for this vision is to present my reaction in a restrained manner. I screamed quite suddenly and very loudly, and succeeded in alarming myself, the Archivist, the Doctor, and the Head. I refer to this last personage impersonally because, although I was told his name I could by no means associate this entity with a merely human title. For me he must remain the first Head. There were more, many more. There were, apparently, corridors of them.

The Chief Archivist led me off down one such corridor, briskly pointing out faces he thought I might know, whilst urging me to reconsider my decision. He kept tapping at the glass cases behind which the Heads swam in their individual jugs, as though checking some monstrous barometer. My decision had been, wholeheartedly, “No!” The request I can only explain in terms of what happened next.

“These people are no longer in any pain or any distress,” he said. “Their personality maintains itself for a few hundred years, though latterly it becomes a dream-like unit, as more and more of the brain is directed to the work in hand. They tell us that there is a definite cut-off point -- if you will pardon the expression -- at which the kind of person they once were no longer relates to the manner in which they think. They evolve through their consciousness into a greater being, one that participates in all their thoughts and dreams.”

“Explain again how they are still alive at all.”

“They are not. Look here.”

We were at the end of one corridor, and the beginning of another. He clicked on a light, and I saw that the cases were full of skulls, some of which looked primitive, prehuman.

“All our containers and chemicals and monitors only enable us to maintain easy contact with the Heads. In the old days it was necessary for the shaman to enter the world of the captured Heads in order to communicate with them. A perilous operation, as not all of those Heads were voluntary sacrifices, like ours.”

“You can’t expect me to believe that this is behind Celtic head-hunting.”

“I present you with theory and example. Your conclusions are your own.”

“And these heads are your computers?”

“The mind that has been freed from physicality can harness all its energies, not just the miserable percentage we are able to spare. In such a condition they dwarf the capabilities of existing technology. Most importantly, they are not limited to logic. They are dreaming virtual worlds, whole countries every bit as complex as the one we inhabit. They are dreaming of other islands, other Scotlands. You know Chuang-Tzu’s dream of the butterfly? Perhaps it is the Heads who are dreaming us. There is raw myth in your skull, Mr Dips, wouldn’t you like to harvest it?”

“Let me talk to one of these Heads, prove to me this happens.”

“That is exactly where we are going, Mr Dips. Really, you do not think we are -- how would you put it in that quaint Americanese into which I hear you lapse now and then? some sicko skull cult?”

We now entered another of the cavernous chambers filled with shelves, books, monitors, and other peculiar pieces of apparatus. Here Eileen MacMorrow awaited us by another suspicious-looking box with a sheet over it. She dragged up a stool as we approached.

“Here, Osmond, you perch on this. I told ye he wouldna go for it Mr Vaisey,” she said to the Chief Archivist. He shrugged youthfully and stuck his hands in his pockets.
I sat down facing the box and she began sticking wires to my forearms and head with sellotape. She pulled the sheet off it and I realised I was gazing at a head encased within a TV.

“This is Marian. She’s still keen to keep in touch. Dinna worry aboot the TV, ye’ll find the shape gives yir subconscious the right sort of signals. Dye want him drugged?”

“No, no,” said the Chief Archivist. “I want him to realise how powerful and clear the signals are for himself.”

“Okay. Dinna close yir eyes till she gets through, then ye’ll find it helps.”

I stared at the discoloured face squashed up against the glass of the set, not two feet away from me. The hair was blonde and smeared here and there about the face. It was impossible to guess an age; the skin looked quite wrinkled, but that might have been the solution it was in. The eyes were closed, and one corner of her mouth was open. I could see dirty little teeth within. Her right cheek pressed against the glass, alarmingly white, a soft amorphous shape, like the underside of a snail.
All at once I began thinking in disjointed blurts. Jagged colours and shapes came into my head involuntarily. It was very frightening, as though you were in a plane and the clouds had suddenly cleared. I felt I was much closer to the ground than I had realised, and that the “ground” consisted of a startlingly unknown territory.
None of this was linguistic, there were scarcely any images in the visual sense. It just seemed like great slabs of something “other” were being intruded into my consciousness. These slabs seemed composed of infinite numbers of small squirmy things, like animated numbers or letters. It made my head feel like it was full of insects. I had a sudden insight that these squirmy things were individual thoughts, and that the slabs were therefore whole nations of insects, large amounts of related information.

None of it felt like facts and figures, however. It felt like driving through a plague of locusts, or being caught in a cloud of midges. It was as though a book, instead of staying flat on the page, dissolved into its component letters and flew at you. It was all intensely disturbing: my every nerve was being set on end and I could find no way to calm them down.

Abruptly these sensations ceased and I became aware of being enveloped in a medium. It was like floating in a swimming pool, except the pool was sentient. This was Marian. She was utterly calm, utterly accepting; she understood all my disquiet and revulsion at once, and accepted them without reservation. There was still no verbal communication, but neither was there any sense of impediment to communication. I was understood through her absorbing me, her holding me, weighing me, and accepting me. She was understood through her opening herself to me, and concealing nothing from me. I recognised the sensation immediately, though I could not articulate from where or how. I knew that time had ceased to operate for the duration of this sensation, and that this reformation of the very principle of duration would sustain itself as long as we maintained this contact.

Then, quite suddenly, starkly, I was back in the gloomy room covered in wires and sellotape and the contact was over. I found that I was shaking and that every nerve in my body felt like it was audibly jangling. I felt awful and the sight of that head lurching in a jug of pickles made me nauseous.

“Okay, cover her up,” sounded the voice of Mr Vaizey, the Chief Archivist. “She’s seen enough.”

10.

I was back upstairs in the Archive’s main hallway being force-sipped sweet tea by Eileen. Doctor Vaizey had reappeared briefly to take my pulse and my temperature, but after pronouncing me “perfectly normal for a justified paranoiac,” she had vanished back into the body of the Archive. The Assistant Archivist was fussing over me, but of Mr Vaizey himself, there was no sight.

I felt totally disorientated and somewhat ashamed. I felt I had failed in some test and now could never redeem myself. I felt like crying and was only restraining myself because I was sure Eileen would treat me with total derision. She was being brisk and efficient, and was completely unreadable.

“How did I do, Eileen, how did I do?” I finally mumbled in my misery.

“How did you do what, you silly man? You’ve not been taking a driving test, you know.”

“What happened? I feel so ghastly...”

“What didn’t happen! But you want tae know how you got on, don’t you. You met Marian, is what happened. She tried you out wi a bit of real thinking and your brain seized up. So she grabbed haud of ye and lulled ye back to a condition where we could pull you out. That was it.”

“So I’m not up to it, is that it?”

“Not at all! Most of us cannae thole the way the Heids go on, but ye get used tae it. The important thing wi you was the recovery time. Very quick, jist as the Chief Archivist predicted.

You’re adaptable, Osmond ma boy. We’re jist a bit concerned you lack stamina.”
“Stamina? What do you mean stamina?”

“Well, could you do that mair than once a day? It gets mair familiar, but no that much. Could you tolerate mair than one Heid? Could ye answer back?”

“The way I feel right now, I don’t think I ever want to go through that again.”
“Aye, he predicted that as well. But see how ye feel in a week.”

“In a week? My holiday runs out in three days! I’ve got a job to get back to.”
“Correction, pal; your holiday runs out the morn. You’ve been talking to Marian for twa haill days. And ye don’t have tae worry about your job. You’re Junior Archivist while you choose tae stay.”

At that I gave up altogether and allowed the Assistant Archivist to give me a blanket, and nodded vaguely whilst he spoke about sorting out a desk for me with his brother. Eileen decided I should try and make it back to the Hotel and got me wrapped up in the blanket. Then, as I tottered gamely for the door on her arm, she battered down the final shreds of resistance.

“Oh, by the way, Doctor Vaizey said to thank you for the sperm sample.”

“What? Oh, you don’t mean I...”

“Oh yes. It’s an invariable first reaction. We were expectin it, though not sae suddenly. Still, Doctor Vaizey said it was “fine and vigorous”. So that’s aa right, isn’t it.”

Soot: Chapter One

Soot is an old-fashioned children's story in which resourceful lass goes on a quest accompanied by enigmatic familiar. In fact most of the creatures and people she encounter turn out to be a little less trustworthy than they at first appear: fortunately her life has taught her to be wary, but is she wary enough?.

1

The strangest thing was that she wasn't frightened, not at all, not at first. Though it was hard to say when 'at first' had actually been. Did it begin when her father left her alone in the little old house on the mouth of the firth? Or did it really start before that, when her mother left both of them. Certainly, the first incident dated from his mad dash to patch things up, when it was perfectly obvious that her mother was never coming back.

She'd been perfectly calm that morning when she had read the scribbled note on the kitchen table: 'Got a text from yr mum. Wants to sort things out. Back soonest. Love, Dad.'

He'd obviously driven off at midnight again, drunk probably. She'd made herself a cup of tea and boiled an egg while she studied the note. What exactly are 'things', anyway? Not, apparently, clothes or books or plates or pans or furniture, which both parents left wherever they were, whenever they moved, which had been every three to four years for as long as she could remember.

She'd sighed, and resigned herself to a spell alone in this latest unfamiliar house with its draughty-panelled front room and its creepy landing with too many doors. (One was only a cupboard, but when you went to the toilet in the middle of the night you could never remember which.)

Then there was the tree that stared in through the window in her loft bedroom, with those shapes in its branches you couldn't help but see when you lay there and couldn't sleep. And she wouldn't sleep -- he could be gone a week, he had been in the past, on other hare-brained schemes, though at least in the past her mother had still been around.

But you couldn't say she was seriously alarmed then, nor was she three days later, which was when she realised something was actually wrong with the house as opposed to her life.

It was then, on the third morning, when she had come downstairs and found the paw-prints. Sooty black paw-prints, everywhere. On the grim grey carpet and the thready table-cloth, on the fake-wood kitchen worktop, and all over the neat desk he had set up in the hope of tempting her mother here, to the frozen north-east of a country she had never liked. As though she'd be prepared to work in the same room as them like that, as they presumably sat and gazed at her lovingly.

There were paw-prints on the two unhappy armchairs he had salvaged for them, and on the week-old newspapers. In the minute downstairs bathroom, there were paw-prints in the sink and in the chipped old bath, and on the already grimy green towels. (How she hated that lime green.) There were even paw-prints all round the seat of the toilet.

Obviously some neighbourhood cat had got in -- first into the coal-shed, and then into the house. She checked the shed but the door seemed securely shut, and the only window still slightly open was in her dad's bedroom, the door to which had of course been closed since he left. God knows how it had got in. She fretted over it all morning, as she cleared up the mess (the house was due a clean anyway, she'd just been putting it off). Could a cat get down the chimney, she wondered? That would explain the soot. She peered up the flue dubiously.

Her father had insisted on big banked-up fires for their first few weeks in the house, but then she hadn't really been sure how to prepare those, so she'd dragged an old three-bar heater downstairs from his bedroom. As a precaution she pulled the fireguard in front of the ash-filled fireplace. It was one of those copper wire jobs, hinged in three sections, and she leant the coal scuttle in front of it to hold it in place, then went and shut his bedroom window.

2

The next morning was even worse, but at least the cat's mode of access was clear: the fire-guard had been pushed over and there were identifiable paw-prints in the ashes, large and neat and white against the grey. As there were most other places, though neither neat nor white.

As well as the carpet and the kitchen and the bathroom and particularly the writing-desk, the cat had apparently climbed the curtains and left paw-prints all up them; it had stretched itself as far up the walls as it would go (and it was obviously pretty elastic), and left a rim of paw-prints all round there. In the kitchen it had walked on the tops of the storage heater and the cooker and the fridge. It had even, as she discovered when she tried switching on the TV and ignoring the mess, pressed its big sooty paws to the screen, so that nothing at all was visible of whatever the people on it were shouting about.

Everything smelt of horrible greasy soot, and it took nearly the whole day to sponge the house kind of clean, during which time two questions rattled round her head, both unanswerable: why would a cat do that? And then, why would a cat do that again?

Late that afternoon she went outside and looked around. A few hundred yards away was Mrs Dalrymple's place, pretty much the same cottage, but with its back turned to them, a little like Mrs Dalrymple, from whom they were renting the place, but who had spent the few brief meetings she and her father had with her staring at both of them in bewildered indignation, as though she couldn't quite work out what these awful people were doing on her property.

Mrs Dalrymple favoured scratchy heather-coloured tweeds and blue and turquoise silken scarves she wore over her shoulders so they didn't touch her neck. She gave them to understand that their money wasn't quite as good as that of fishermen of a certain social class, who normally stayed in the cottage, but that she would somehow force herself to accept it.

Mrs Dalrymple definitely didn't have a cat, in fact she'd be surprised if any living creature could come within half a mile of her without dropping down dead, felled by that forcefield of sheer disdain. She wondered if her fishermen ever caught anything living. She certainly didn't feel like going and asking about weird cats.

Beyond there the road petered out by the salmon house, a little old stone building which more or less marked the point where the river bank turned into beach. Her father had explained this was where salmon fishermen would store their catch upon great heaps of ice. Proper fishermen with nets, not rich hobbyists with rod and line, as he had put it, still smarting from Mrs Dalrymple. So that gave the salmon no chance whatever, she had thought.

Either side of the stream (it was so narrow at this point, it was hard to think of it as a river), the white pepper beach and open grey sea stretched away. 'The Northern Riviera!' he had declared it, though it had been too cold and blowy since they'd arrived for that title to stick.

She turned to look in the other direction: it was a three mile walk to the town, though cottages and farms could be sighted every mile or so. She didn't know anyone who lived in any of them, though. In fact, just about the only person she did know was the second-hand bookshop owner in the town, since that was the place where her father had spent most time with her. Shopping for groceries was done in a flash (an inefficient flash, usually); the pub was where men went by themselves, for hours; but bookshops were where father and daughter hung out and socialised with...well, second-hand bookshop owners, basically.

This one was a short woman with flyaway grey hair designed to cover up sticky-out ears, two pairs of glasses on silver chains ('For near-seeing and far-seeing'), flyaway blouses in mauvish tints, mohair shawls in lavender and purple, silver brooches with cairngorms and other semi-precious stones -- presumably jaspers and agates, whatever they looked like, since there were numerous books on that sort of subject. Well, the bookshop owner it would have to be. It was a pity she couldn't remember her name. Wondering how many miles she could walk per hour and when second-hand bookshops shut (when they felt like it, in her experience), off she set.

3

'You have a soot-kitten!' the second-hand bookshop owner (her name was Katriona, as it turned out) exclaimed with delight.

'A what?'

'It's a supernatural being, dear, part of the folklore in these parts. I've read about them, of course, but never encountered one.'

'Yeah, that'll be right.'

'Well, let me describe it, and you tell me whether it's right or not,' Katriona had retorted, with a flinty little flash of her far-seeing lenses.

'Soot-kittens are made from all the soot that builds up inside a chimney year after year. The story is a bird will come and try to nest on top of the chimney in an abandoned house. Then someone new moves in, lights a fire, and smoke billows out into their living room. Then they get a sweep in to poke brushes up it and drop weights down it.'

'We had to get a sweep,' she reluctantly confirmed.

'Well, this gets rid of the bird and all the twigs that are choking up your chimney, but it also annoys the soot. Imagine all the soot that lines a chimney after long disuse. Suddenly there's the heat of a fire -- usually too big a fire -- then brushes poke their beards up and weights crash their cannonballs down. Naturally, it wakes the soot up.

'Now, when soot wakes up it gathers into a furious black ball on the ledge just above your fireplace. It has two red hot-coal eyes and long fine black ash ears and sharp coal-black claws. Its fur and its tail and even its crinkly whiskers are made of fine black soot, all sticking together into a cat-shape filled with annoyance and spite.'

'Look, there's no such thing as soot-kittens, but thanks for the ghost story.'

'You might as well know the story's end, then I'll give you a lift back to your house which definitely doesn't contain a soot kitten.' This time Katriona's eyes were glinting with good humour. It was getting dark: she knew when she had a captive audience.

'When soot-kittens are still little they are messy but they're just playful, and they can be kept quiet by lighting a fire and keeping it burning, so that they drowse during the day. But the more coal you burn the more soot you send up the chimney, and the more soot there is, the bigger it will grow.

'And when you've got a full-grown soot-cat, then you're in big trouble. A cat can blow out of the top of your chimney and form a black cloud that drops soot on everyone’s cattle for miles around, spoiling the milk. Washing doesn't exactly stay clean either. A soot-cat can burn a whole house down. You know those black cats that bad witches have in the drawings, perched on the end of their broomsticks? Those are always soot-cats, arsonists to a mad, quivering whisker.'

'So when that happens I'll pass it on to Mrs Dalrymple, she's the baddest witch I've met round here.'

When Katriona was dropping her off back at the house she pulled a book out of her glove compartment. 'Here,' she said, 'just in case it is a soot-kitten, you might want to consult this.'

It was a warped thing, not very thick, more of a booklet, its cover so blackened she couldn't read the name on the spine. She flicked it open and read the title page in the light from the open car door, 'Soot: the Keeping of Its Kitts and Containment of Cats Fashion'd Thereof'.

'I'm not really sure I want to keep it,' she said, then remembered the purse was still in the kitchen. 'How much is this?'

'No charge for the time being. Just tell me how you get on.'

4

That night she settled down in front of the nearest to a roaring fire she could build, and read the book. Almost the first thing it said was 'Do not bank the fire up at night. While a lit fire during the day keeps the soot sleepy, a banked fire at night will only feed and make the kitt larger.' Great, that had taken an hour to get wrong.

'You must feed the soot-kitt on a proper diet by night,' the book went on, 'to keep it even-tempered.' But what was a proper diet? 'Field-mice, headless, well-scorched. Milk, boiled till the pan burns.'

That was a good one. She amused herself by imagining where she might get field-mice at this time of night: a rodent kebab shop? What about that 'headless'; were you supposed to chop them off yourself? And as for burning a pan of milk; she knew from six months of her father's cooking what that smelt like -- no way.

She realised that she had advanced a certain amount of the way towards taking the book (and the bookshop owner) seriously. Funny how darkness influences your decisions in these supernatural matters. She thought for a bit, and then remembered a tin of pilchards her father had bought without thinking whether either of them actually liked pilchards. It was tucked away at the back of the larder.

(The one thing she liked about this house was that there was a kind of triangular cupboard built into the corner of the living room nearest the kitchen, lined with shelves and filled, when they'd arrived, with rusty old tins. They'd thrown most of those out, but christened it the larder, and put it to the same use. It reminded her of a similar-shaped cupboard in her grandmother's house -- what was it called again?)

'Cats like fish,' she thought, 'even supernatural ones.' So she went to the cupboard (the 'aumrie', she remembered), opened the tin and threw the pilchards on the fire to hiss and burn. Then she went to bed. For once she slept right through.

The next morning -- apart from the stink of scorched pilchards -- everything seemed fine. There were no paw-prints in the living-room or the kitchen or the bathroom. She sighed with relief, and went to treat herself with the last clean white top from her cupboard.

It was horrible. Every top (she only had four) was covered in black paw-prints. She went to the chest-of-drawers and both drawers were the same: paw-prints on her winter vests, paw-prints on her pants. She went to the ottoman on the landing and lifted the lid: paw-prints on the spare sheets, paw-prints on the change of towels. How had it got into the drawers then closed them again, how had it lifted the lid?

Then she had a horrible suspicion. She went to the kitchen and opened the sugar jar. There it was, a single black paw-print. She checked the flour jar: another paw-print. 'Fooled you,' she thought bitterly: 'I never touch the flour jar.' She remembered when her mother would make them pancakes on a Sunday morning, then, sighing, she went to the bathroom and slowly unrolled the toilet paper; there was a single paw-print spoiling each sheet as far as she cared to look.

'Two things,' she told herself. 'Firstly either cats can open jars, or there is such a thing as soot-kittens.' (Even here, perhaps because it was morning, she didn't feel afraid.) 'Secondly,' she thought, 'this particular soot-kitten does not like pilchards.'

5

She went to the butchers in town to see if he had any headless field-mice, but, after getting her to repeat herself so the whole shop could hear, he had just given her a very funny look. As indeed had the whole shop, including, it felt like, the pigs' heads. She hung about outside the pet shop for a while, peering in at the little pink-nosed white mice, but couldn't bring herself to buy one, just to chop its head off.

Eventually she went back to the bookseller and told her what had happened.

'It screwed all the lids back on the jars and rolled the toilet paper up neatly?' she laughed. 'That is a very clever little kitt. They're so playful at that age.'

Of course it wasn't her clothes and food getting covered in paw-prints when there wasn't money to buy new stuff. Katriona grasped this after a while and stopped grinning so broadly. 'Clearly only fresh field-mice will do. Have you tried the spells at the back of your book?"

'Spells? I didn't realise it had spells in it. Would that work?'

'Oh, you need to know some magic if you're going to keep a soot-kitten,” Katriona replied airily.

'I never said I wanted to keep it.'

That night she studied the spells at the back of the little black book. There was one for forming a cloud-mouse in the sky, but that was for a full-grown cat to play with and it was very long. There was one for getting soot out of your laundry; she made a note of that. There was one to conjure up a fire-dog to chase your soot-cat off, but fire-dogs, whatever they were, sounded even worse than soot-cats, and the book stressed that this spell was only to be used in the direst emergency.

But here it was: a spell to call up all the mice caught in traps around your neighbourhood that day. The book advised you to stand on a chair to recite it.

'Yeah right,' she thought. 'That's for elephants and the wives of elephants.' So she stood in the middle of the kitchen, and recited the spell, which, as it was in old language, was by no means easy to get right:

May ilka breidless, heidless moose
Cam intae this guidly hoose --
May aa the prancin, dancin mice
That deed the day
In trap or hay
Appear afore me in a trice.

She threw some stale breadcrumbs on the floor (the book said they had to be stale, and fortunately she just happened to have a loaf of pretty stale bread to hand). And then she waited. Nothing happened.

She waited some more, thinking, 'I am an idiot for believing any of this,' and then thinking, "How will they get in if I don't open the back door?'

She glanced towards the door and back to the floor, and then, for the first time, she was actually afraid, since, standing around her in a circle, balanced on their hind legs, and without a trace of a head on their blood-streaked little shoulders, were twelve dead field mice. She began to tremble and realised she couldn't stop, but neither could she bring herself to step over them and get away.

'If I'd been standing on a chair I could've jumped,' she thought, and realised that, even if this was all madder than bats, at least the book was giving her straightforward advice. There was something here she could cling onto. She clung to the book, though her hand was trembling so much it made the print wobble, and recited the next part of the spell:

Noo I have spreid
A feast o breid
Sae in ma hoose
Be unca gweed --

Dinna loup aboot ma legs,
Dinna sowp ma hennies’ eggs:
Follow faur I dae retire
And rest yirsels upon ma fire.

With that you were supposed to lead the mice to the fire, keeping your eyes on them all the time (the book said not to look away even for an instant, and, given what had happened earlier, she was determined to follow it to the letter). She led them into the living-room, pulled the guard from the fire, and one by one they leapt into the flames. She shivered, despite the heat, and thought, 'I hope twelve is enough.' Then she went off to burn the milk.

6

That night she was woken by a most curious sound. It was like that noise a fire makes sometimes, a sort of hissing and wheezing, as though there’s some water trapped in the coal and it’s trying to get out. But it was also like the crackling, snapping noise that wood makes as it burns. In fact it was like both those sounds, combined, and really loud, and coming and going. It was like having a food-blender with a blocked nose in the bedroom. She opened her eyes cautiously and saw two red hot-coal eyes floating in the darkness at the bottom of her bed. Then she knew she was looking at the soot-kitten and it was looking at her.

Curiously, once more, she was not afraid. Not like when she had seen the mice. In fact she felt oddly calm. Of course, she thought drowsily, two things were happening back then: the thing I didn't believe in was turning out to be true, and that's always a shock, and then the way it was true was pretty gruesome. Now, however, I already know it's true about the soot (though a bit of her still couldn't quite believe it), and it's nice. Well, sort of.

She couldn't make out its shape, but sensed that the darkness was denser where its body should be. It seemed a lot bigger than any kitten she had ever seen. Thankfully, she also sensed that it was pleased. That horrible ratchety noise was only purring. The bedroom was really hot and sweaty because the soot-kitten was giving off a lot of heat, so she carefully peeled a blanket off the bed. It showed no signs of moving, so she settled down and went to sleep again, lulled by the peculiar noise. The last thought she had before dropping off was that the kitten should really be called 'The Soot' -- not 'Soot,' but 'The Soot.'

That morning the house was spotless (apart from the foot of the bed, where the wood was scorched). It was also very snug and warm. At breakfast she was trying to remember the name she had given the kitten before falling asleep, so she opened the little black book at the chapter called "Benefits of The Soot-Kitt", and ate her stale toast, and read:

'A well-fed kitt will radiate warmth and well-being throughout the home. It can also help with cooking: fish should be hung up in the fireplace. The Soot will come down and breathe upon them overnight. Ham and cheese can also be treated in this way.'

'"The Soot" -- that was it,' she thought. 'Perhaps I should invite the bookseller over for breakfast tomorrow.' She didn't want to be owing her for the book, and perhaps that would make it alright. She'd have to buy some unsmoked fish first, though.

She wondered how much money she actually did have left. Sometimes there were five pound notes scrumpled up among the receipts her father jammed into his pockets or the desk drawer. Then she saw the heading 'Soot Magic' which was followed by a warning in brackets: '(For the Adept)'.

'Cool,' she thought. And that was when everything started to get seriously frightening.

The Book of McGonagall: Chapter One

McGonagall's trek to Balmoral is, as I have yodelled elsewhere, one of the great Quixotic acts. This novel, in the poet's mantic utterance, is an account of that walk and the strange visions which come to the famished imbecilic bard en route.

I begin this eternal work on Friday the 13th of July 1878, because my Angel tells me I am to crack all convention. My name is Guglielmus Nasreen Caspar Triskodekophilus McGonagall, and I am in a state of temperate hilarity. This means no drink has passed my lips, but they tremble with the joy of the Lord that is in every word he has donated to us as the English language. When I say hilarity I do not mean to suggest that this volume will be in any way humorous: my Angel who enters me through the left foot and through my stocking sole (where there is a convenient hole my wife has not yet darned) informs me that the poet Dante from Florence did not mean his Divine Comedy to be a joke, but to have a happy ending. And so, I pray most devoutly, may my tale.

Dante was a very famous poet of the Italian peninsula, the country of Garibaldi, just as Shakespeare was in Britain, and Rabbie Burns in North Britain. But Rabbie Burns was a partaker of alcohol, which could not be said of Shakespeare, nor, judging from his portrait by Rossetti which hangs in the Municipal Gallery of Dundee, of Dante either. All great poets are temperate souls like me, though filled with the inspiriting hilarity of divine intervention. I am indebted to this spirit for all the things hidden from me by my poor upbringing in this magnificent city of Dundee and on the island of Southronaldsay. So if there are words you are not familiar with, dear reader, then we must blame my Angel (how I tremble again at the thought of you clutching this book to your bosom in your study like that of my great friend the Reverend George Gilfillan. I am sure you are a pure girl and well-thought of by your parents.) My parents were only Irish, but very good people, and came from a village in the County of Donegal that neither me nor my Angel is able to spell.

But to my purpose, which is to tell you of the journey I am about to undertake. I am to keep a diary throughout this trip, which is a kind of pilgrimage like the poor folk of Ireland used to undertake to Loch Derg which you might know as St Patrick’s Purgatory. Of course I am talking of Catholics here and I am sure you are a good Protestant girl, my dear reader. My pilgrimage has nothing to do with papacy or idolatory of that sort, but is a visit to our dear Queen who is sitting in Balmoral with her ponies and her good friend the Scotsman John Brown. You see I am a poet, and my verses are often about the doings of her Majesty. If this book has, as I pray it will, a fine frontispiece picture of your humble servant William, then you will see from my long nose and wrinkled brow and the depth of feeling in my eyes that, like Dante, who I resemble somewhat, I am truly a poet.

(Will you call me William in the tranquillity of your study? Which, now I consider it, would surely be more lady-like than my friend the Reverend Gilfillan’s, who is a great scholar and critic as well as a holy man. Your study is perhaps filled with more romantic volumes as befits the gentler sex, though I am sure your loving parents will have placed a temperance tract and something on the good morals of young people therein. But I mean it will have more of the air of a boudoir, with perhaps lacey curtains and a picture or two, perhaps that picture of Dante that is in the Municipal Art Gallery mourning his beloved Beatrice, thanks to the beneficence of our Majesty the Queen in memory of her beloved Prince. But my Angel tells me I must return to my subject.)

A poet does not earn any more money than a handloom weaver, which is what I was before I was seized by the left foot and compelled to utter verses, and still am in those short intervals in between poems, so a poet requires a patron. I have written many letters to the rich and famous of our thriving burgh of Juteopolis (which is what we call Dundee), to the Lords of the industries of weaving and the blubber trade – the Baxters gave shelter to the young Mary Shelley who wrote about the horripilating monster Frankenstein, and so had little change to spare for me; similarly the Glendales told me they had a great interest in the arts, and wished me very well, and I have heard nothing back as yet from the Dundee, Perth and London Shipping Company, perhaps because so many of their able skippers are at sea, hunting the great beasts of the deep in the far-off frozen wastes.

So I have decided to make a pilgrimage to our great Queen and Empress, Victoria herself. Surely a lady so noble as to build us the Albert Institute and surround it with such magnificent and decorative shrubberies will hear the solemn pleas of a humble poet and subject.

Whilst I am on my voyage, for which I shall have to employ Shank’s Pony, a noble beast, though his shoes need a little cobbling to keep out the wet (you see, my dearest reader, I am not totally without fun in my hilarity), I will regale you with tales of my various adventures and voyages, including my trip to the United States of America, to London, and also to Crieff. Of course several of these pilgrimages have not yet taken place, but my Angel informs me they shall all go splendidly and add immeasurably to my reputation which shall ring down the ages like a large dinner gong in a splendid hotel.

But before I do perhaps I should say a word about my Angel who is my constant companion in my trials and tribulations with the people of Dundee and publicans. I was a weaver by trade as was my parents, and earning a little money and living in a dwelling in Paton’s Lane near the Perth Road when I felt a curious itching in the sole of my left foot. Thinking that a tack had come through the linoleum, I bent to examine the floor, attracting the curiosity of my wife who was sewing by the range.

‘What are you doing now, William? Cannot you sit still for a moment? I swear the man has a glass _rse,’ she said. (I apologise for the profanity, but those were the words she uttered, and, as our great poet Rabbie Burns said in a moment of sobriety, Facts are chiels that will not ding. Chiels being children. In any case, when this is a book I will insist that the printer disguises the offending word. Dear reader, I would not like any harm or corruption to come to you through the foolish mouth of my wife who, I must say, has not always supported me in my divine task.)

‘I feel a something in my foot, dear,’ I replied, ‘and it is rising to my bosom.’

‘I feel something in my foot, and it’ll be rising to your _rse if you don’t settle down. I’ve twelve more of these to finish this evening,’ replied my dear wife.

At that moment the sensation reached my brain and I saw my hand begin to twitch. I heard as clearly as the larksome voice of my wife a strong voice saying to me ‘Write! Write!’

‘But what shall I write?’ I asked the voice. ‘Where is that pencil?’ I asked my wife.

‘What are you blethering about the now?’ she replied, while the voice continued to intone solemnly, ‘Write! Write!’

I felt like Samuel in the Bible when he wakes and goes to Eli. My mind was ablaze and my hand was twitching on the table. The voice was light and sonorous, a pleasing tenor, though it had an element of the foreign about it, like a dago or an Italian. I thought to myself, ‘Perhaps this is the voice of Dante himself.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said the voice. ‘Now just write! Write!’

My eye fell on a copy of the Weekly News, which contained an article by the Reverend George Gilfillan, which I had recently been perusing after my labours at the handloom, and it came to me that I should address my first ever poem to this great soul, who Dante would be sure to place in the Paradise section of his magnificent hilarious poem. And so I commenced to writing verse.

And ever as I faltered the voice of my Angel recited to me the next line, teaching me how to beat out the rhythm just as Shakespeare does in his penny plays MacBeth, Richard III, Hamlet and Othello, and ever I was careful to place a rhyme at the end of the necessary lines, and it all came out very naturally as if I had been doing it since my early youth.

‘Whit on earth is this rubbish ye’re wasting paper on?’ asked my wife, a woman until this moment unacquainted with the workings of a poet’s mind, so I explained what had happened and she struck me about the head.

‘In yir head is it?’ she asked. ‘Well, I’ll soon knock it out of there, the foolish cratur. Let it go and live in Holy-face Gilfillan’s heid if it wants. It’ll be better off there. Less draughty for a start.’

And as she was saying these dreadful calumnies on the good man to whom I had just written my first ever verse, she was smacking and cracking me about the head with her hands and fists, and grabbing hold of my hair and shaking me as if to loosen the Angel from its residence within. I tholed all this with forbearance, for wife-beating is the provenance of drunkards, though I interjected now and then that the Reverend Gilfillan was a man of the Lord and of good folks everywhere.

Meanwhile inside my Angel’s voice was clear as the clapper on a bell (and indeed my head felt like a bell, so light was it with all the dinging it was getting from my dear wife), and it was saying unto me, ‘Well done, McGonagall, your career is begun. You shall crack all conventions and see the queen. You shall cross oceans and your fame shall cross the centuries. Well done, McGonagall, well done!’

Now whenever I sit at my loom and listen to the shuttle click and clack I feel transported to the clouds that rest in awful majesty above the Tay, frowning and lowering. I hear the train upon the track and think: this is how the Storm Fiend sits and watches us go back and forth across the Firth, all the time weaving his broad cloth of disaster, grey and grim, grim and grey.

My head aches and thrums and I’m in an awful dover till my wife comes upon me and skelps me around the lug, saying, ‘Wake up ye lazy skelf! Whit dye think ye’re daein, making lace doilies for Her Majesty? We need bulk tae gather tanners, sae stop yir idling and set to it, man!’

But my Angel is with me always, though my wife will often shoo it with her besom up the lum, where it lurks among the soot and flinders and whispers to me, ‘Shabby treatment indeed, but I have a word for you: shrubbery. Remember it, McGonagall, for it is a good word and one of Shakespeare’s finest.’

The Book of the Shaman: Chapter One

This novel is almost a 'historical' detective story, in which the detecting team are a Pictish shaman and his gang, and the Roman officer who employs them to find a kidnapped girl. It's sort of Stevenson on acid, with a nod to the heroic fantasy Pictland of Robert E.Howard, and a touch of Satyriconic kinkiness thrown in, just in case.

1.

It was in a small inn three day’s ride from our most northerly camp that I first clapped eyes on the so-called shaman, Dan Bleflum. Not that it corresponded to anything we would call an inn, being more of a cross between a hut and a tunnel, a black centipede of a place you practically had to slide down the throat of to get into. If you could bring yourself to do so -- and I had no choice but to steel myself to it -- you would then find yourself bent double in grimy, wattle-walled darkness, with a few lamps on the stamped-earth floor burning down the oil of what smelt like some well-rotted sea creature. The roof was uneven, hardly-worked beams, and there were no tables, no chairs – just bodies sprawled here and there and not one of them as much as lifting their head to look at you.

This was one of the ill-reputed heather ale houses, where the Picts would descend into week-long stupors of communal drinking, sometimes because of festivals in their incomprehensible calendar, sometimes in the face of calamities with their crops or their interminable skirmishing and thievery, but most often in response to some sullen secret impulse which that people has to curl up like dogs in their own dirt, indeed to roll in filth as dogs most like to do. And so it was I found the famous wizard, so incoherent I couldn’t tell whether he was in a genuine trance or simply, like the wretches around him, stupefied with drink.

I could not distinguish him by his garb, which was as begrimed as his fellows’, simply a long stretch of some thick wool twisted about him like a parody of the toga, with faint traces of some rectilinear pattern upon it under the layers of grease and the plentiful spatters from both ends of his digestive processes. But I had been told he always travelled with a small retinue, and these were distinctive enough guardians to tell me that between them lay what amounted to a priest of these Northern savages.

One was a bald walrus of a man, his beard and moustaches parted into two greying forks like dull fangs. His pate was tattooed with two great stags' heads, which I had read were central to their religion, their horns locked in the rut, and his bare arms were wrapped around here and there with what looked like dried intestines -- possibly, given their fixation on masculinity, ram or stallion. A couple of dagger hafts jutted from his belt. This one sat upright, apparently unaffected by the horns and bowls strewn around the den, though I later found that he was so intoxicated he could neither speak nor stand. This was Pechem, a notorious former highwayman, who was Bleflum’s sworn bodyguard, able to maintain the appearance of ferocious alertness even when barely conscious.

The other figure was a curled-up, waif-like figure, head swathed with a black ragged scarf, who made my heart lurch with hope – had he somehow found my target by some Hyperborean magicry before I had even declared my most desperate mission? Then memory soberly rebuked my over-eagerness: this was only the woman who always travelled with him, the obscure Nel-Ebri, who, it was variously rumoured, was his sister, his slave or his wife, not that Picts seemed to make much distinction between these categories in their dealings with women lower than royal blood. Those were quite another matter, and so, I rapidly discovered, was Nel-Ebri.

She alone of that narrow hall of drunkards was regarding me with a black and intelligent eye. I immediately realised my attempt to appear civilian would not fool that regard, and bared my head, so that my military crop made my status clear, and squatted down before her, glancing at the lolling figure between her and Pechem, the great Bleflum himself, who lay nipping at the smoky air with finger and thumb like a crab on its back, and rolling the whites of his eyes (even these were discoloured as the tusks of a boar), muttering rapidly in so guttural a voice I was unable to catch a single word.

‘Is your master wrapped in visions?’ I asked her quietly. ‘I have a good coin I would like to show him, and a question I need to ask.’

‘He’s sleeping,’ she answered, ‘or as near to it as he can get. Come back in three days.’

My report had covered this type of response. Agents who had taken Bleflum or his associates at their word invariably returned to find not only no trace of the mage or his retinue, but also that no-one could remember ever having seen any persons of that description.

‘My coin is so heavy and so devoted to its new owner that it will not let me leave his side. Perhaps it is my question that he dreams about.’

‘He dreams about the Drowning, as always. Let me see this loyal coin.’

‘I have its little sisters, just for you,’ I countered, and held out some coppers.

By way of response she lifted up her skirt with a weary gesture, and exposed her genitals. These were cleaner than I might have expected, had I expected to be shown them at all. The pubic hair was also neatly trimmed in an unusual manner, so that instead of the dark lateen one might expect, there was an oval, almost an orb of thick black hair. The absurd impression occurred to me that it looked compellingly like a sea urchin. I was later to learn that there were fashions among Pictish women in this matter, some favouring squares, diamonds, or even rudimentary silhouettes of trees and fish.

'No, that wasn't what I meant,' I hastened to say, pushing her hand and the garment down. I'd had an unpleasant encounter with a Pictish whore before leaving camp. It had ended in bloodshed, albeit minor, over some incomprehensible slight -- how can you insult a whore?

In any case, it had left me far from eager to repeat the experience. As if being deliberately obtuse, she then exposed the shaman's genitals, still with an air of bored enquiry, as though we were bargaining. His member was partly erect, spindly, rather bulbous at the tip, and far from clean. It kept twitching with an unpleasant air of prescience, as though it were sniffing something out. Again I pushed her hand down, then pulled it towards me and pressed into it twice the amount I'd intended.

This seemed to have been her aim throughout, as she smiled to herself, tucked the coins away and appeared inclined to pay me no further attention. I ventured another look at Bleflum, whose face was momentarily bared by his restless turning. He was no longer a young man, but by no means as old as I’d been led to think. Somewhere around fifty, he was, unusually among a menfolk much given to facial hair, clean-shaven, with a matted crown of grey receding from a beetled, much-creased brow. The eyes were deep-set amid many wrinkles, and there were more lines around the thick-lipped mouth, and great bunches of muscles at the stubbled junctions of the jaws. All this either implied much determination, or much effort at determination. He was also dribbling copiously, a side-effect of the ale.

‘Tell me about this drowning,’ I asked Nel-Ebri, who seemed to have fallen into a small trance of her own. She gave me another shrewd glance, and indicated a half-empty bowl with her foot.

‘Have you tasted the heather ale?’ she asked, in a bright voice, as though we sat in sunshine at a fine table. ‘Here it is brewed well – more dreams, less blindness.’

This was hardly a selling point, but she leaned in and added, ‘There are stories which you cannot hear from outside an intoxication, and this would be one of them.’

I picked up the cheap clay dish and tried not to sniff at the contents, which were milky and lethargically fizzy. There was a layer of greenish-yellow looped over the surface of the liquid I refused to think of as sputum from its last drinker, who may well have been Bleflum. I also tried not to think of the state of his teeth, and sank the bowl in one, thus saving myself the prospect of revisiting it.

As it made its ropy way down my gullet, I was reminded of swallowing shellfish, that acrid, brackish quality that climbs the back of your throat and makes you wonder if, this time, you’ve swallowed the off specimen. It tasted sweet enough, but with a sickly, sour butter edge. I reminded myself, if you’ve tasted troopers’ wine, cut with vinegar to an inch of its life, and if you’ve (barely) survived your uncle’s grappa, then heather ale should hold no fears. Nonetheless, it did.

‘When Himself was still a boy, and a bright boy at that, the darling of the most blessed clan, which we no longer name; when the Fisherman was able to take up herring with a dip of his hand into the lightest wave, and the Forester could fell a fir by looking at it with his sharpest glance; when the Smith could smelt a sword simply by breathing upon it his hardiest breath, and the mushrooms gathered thick among the cattle’s hooves and gave our people the truest dreams, he was taken to the great well at the Court of Gruoch, for he was rumoured to have great potential for the Seeing, and held up by one heel by a Princess of the Firth, and she was more beautiful than the dolphin, mightier than a lonely shark, and she held him below the water of the sacred well firstly for the span of five breaths, but he glimpsed nothing of the Guardians, so then…’

As she spoke, she let the scarf fall away so that I could see her profile for the first time. This was nothing spectacular: she had a long thin nose that dragged on the groove over her lip, so that both twitched as she spoke, and the teeth thus revealed were prominent and twisting. But her eyes had that same flash as the dreaming Bleflum’s, and I could hear the lilt that intoxication gave to all their voices, as she let the incantatory coils of the story wind around her brain. I could already feel the same thing catching faintly at mine, a kind of drag within the trunk and the skull, as though your skeleton is somehow sinking into the floor although your flesh has not moved at all. I realised I’d slipped into a daze, and the story had advanced somewhat.

‘...after the fourth hour’s immersions they laid him out along the clean sea-grass and told his father he would never be a shaman, and the old man covered up his head with mud and weed and went from that place. Towards the sunset he expelled the holy water from his stomach and gullet and sat up to see cold night coming in, and understood he had no future within the college of the shamans, and so no home among the people of his own clan, and thus began his wanderings…’

At some point a figure I supposed must be the inn-keeper had pressed another brimming bowl of heather ale into my hands and extracted some coins from me I had not meant to give him, and this bowl had followed its predecessor far more easily down a throat that felt both far too warm and far too numb. As she carried on the apparently endless tale of his meanderings, I found myself slowly collapsing toward its sleeping subject in such a manner as to feel almost part of his story. I too seemed to be on the prow of the fishing boat where his first vision struck him, as, leaning out over the water to haul on a net, he found himself staring into the face of his first familiar, what we call a porpoise, but the Picts have a somewhat different concept of.

I was looking at the fish’s broad flat face as it poked from the collar of the water, and it seemed to me it was my own reflection, but somehow crossed with that of Bleflum, and I could no longer tell if it was in the inn or in the dream that the face of the fish or the shaman or my own reflection suddenly sat stark upright and yelled, ‘Faker! I know your true name!’

I struggled to make a coherent reply but instead found my head speeding towards the floor with an irresistible, almost exhilarating momentum.