Mythology Abroad

by Jody Lynn Nye

  Holl watched him closely. This Big Person’s size made Holl feel a sudden kinship for him. He felt guiltily that he shouldn’t be permitting such a superficial similarity to make a difference, but it did. He smiled whenever Parker met his eyes, which the professor did frequently with all the members of the group, drawing them in and making them feel accepted.

  This one’s a born leader, Holl thought. I wonder if I will make the same good showing when my turn comes to lead.

  The next morning when they came out of the Mackenzie house, the sun was already high in a bright blue sky.

  Keith stretched, and listened to the vertebrae in his back click into place. “I’m stiff. The cats got into the room last night and sat on me in a different place every time I turned over.”

  Holl grunted, stumping down the hill beside him. “You’re a magnet for lower life forms, Keith Doyle. They feel a kinship with you.”

  “Ha, ha,” Keith said, refusing to acknowledge a putdown. It was a bright morning, and there were songbirds trilling in the distance. It was unbelievably pastoral. He felt relaxed and energetic at the same time. He couldn’t wait to get down to the site and start work.

  The day was not as warm as one in Inverness, but it felt like spring. The sun was trying to burn its way through the thick layer of cumulus clouds that interrupted its beams from time to time, but it was there. Everything looked and felt so sharp it crackled. At the bottom of the hill, the sea had been hewn out of silver-grey flint, and polished into waves. The noise of waves crashing seemed detached from it. In the field next door, the sheep sang them a morning chorus in baritone and alto voices, drowning out the birds.

  “Morning, ladies,” Keith called, feeling expansive after a big hot breakfast. “These are all shorn,” he observed to Holl.

  “You were wearing their winter coats on your back yesterday,” Holl pointed out. “I’m sure they’re relieved now, but they’d have been glad of it a day ago.”

  “I know, can you believe the change?” Keith said, looking around him at the hills, and taking in the beauty of the land. He stretched out his arms and felt the heat of the sun through his thin sleeves. “Yesterday it was next door to a blizzard, and today it’s summer again. I thought only the Midwest did this much of a quick change act. Of course, Lewis might have been at it longer. This place feels old.”

  “Aye, it does,” Holl acknowledged, concentrating. “Old bones and little to keep the skin from sloughing away in the wind.”

  “I feel that there’s something deeper to this place than it looks. Don’t you feel it? Maybe there’s magic here,” Keith suggested hopefully.

  Holl shook his head. “I don’t sense much of it, myself.”

  “Well, what about that circle of stones up there? We walked through it yesterday. That’s supposed to be a temple or something.”

  “As nice an office building as I’ve ever been in,” Holl said flatly, ignoring the bait Keith had laid before him. “But I do like this island. It isn’t a bad place at all.”

  “Nope. I like it, too. All browns, greens, and dark blues. It’s kind of a macho landscape,” Keith added, trying to sum up the sensation. “It’s beautiful without being full of little roses and daisies. You know, I think we’re going to have to forget about your bellflowers for the time being. There’s hardly anything growing around here except for heather and yellow gorse.”

  “I know it,” Holl said mournfully. His hair fluttered in the wind, and he pushed it out of his eyes with an impatient hand. Keith noticed that the ears were still in their Big Person form. He decided to brave the question.

  He cleared his throat, and tried to sound casual. “Say, Holl, why haven’t you changed your ears back?”

  The elf started, and then shrugged, his shoulders sagging low. “Oh, I intended to. As soon as I got out of the hospital, I was going to change them back. Our ears are badges of pride to us, as you know. I realized that you had urged me to alter them to save my life, but I’d sooner evade detection by wit.”

  “Yeah, but you were in no condition to use wit. It was the best thing I could think of with you lying there unconscious. So why are they still round? Going native?” Keith asked, forcing his voice to be light.

  Holl was silent for a long time. The words stung him, because that’s just what Curran and the other Conservatives would say to him back home. “Well, it’s easier this way to get along,” Holl said uneasily, but he was as little satisfied with the answer as Keith.

  “You’re getting along fine. The other guys like you just as you are.”

  “They don’t know what I am. They accept me well enough,” Holl acknowledged grudgingly, “so long as they think I’m one of them, and a child at that. Only now, I can take off my hat in company. Imagine what they would say if I went bareheaded among them in my normal state.”

  “I can’t imagine you doing that,” Keith said truthfully. “But the guys are used to your hat, too.”

  “It’s artificial in this culture. It was easier in downstate Illinois, where many men wear their caps in diners and stores. Here, I stand out too much. It’s considered an affectation for my head to remain covered all the time.”

  “Oh,” said Keith sadly. “Well, I like you the way you were, bull-headed tradition and all. I admired the way you survive by sneaking around but never pretending to be different. I’m sorry you’ve lost pride in yourself, denying your elfhood.”

  “Elfhood! Your terms, Keith Doyle … Well, I haven’t!” Holl protested hotly, kicking stones down the hill. “It’s just … easier to be this way.”

  “Forever?” Holl gave him a sad look which made him wish he had kept his mouth shut. The mixture of unhappy emotions that had surfaced in Holl’s face for that brief moment surprised him. Keith would have offered an apology, but they had nearly reached the site, and other people were now within earshot. There was nothing Keith could do to take back his words. The discussion was over.

  ***

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Good morning,” Dr. Parker hailed them. “I cannot get used to having the sun up so early. How strange to have light nearly the clock round! It makes me feel as if I should be up and doing at what usually proves to be an ungodly hour. As you can see, we’re a small group, so we greet your arrival with pleasure, as we will miss you when your time is up. By then, we’re expecting a group of students from the University of Wales, but that’s, let’s see, nearly three weeks away. Ah, but let me introduce you to your coworkers. Mind the gate there. The latch sticks.”

  A waist high wooden fence of pickets and wire had been driven into the tall grass, encircling the site and dipping down the shallow slope to where the land fell off abruptly into the sea. The half-revealed mound they were investigating, which seemed set in a depression lower than the surrounding terrain, lay nearly on the shore of a small inlet west of the standing stones, which were visible above them on the high hilltop. Parker hurried forward to open the gate, nearly disappearing behind it, and admitted Keith and Holl with a wave. By its pale, un-weathered color, Keith judged that the fence was recent.

  “Why is this here?” Keith said. “The area seems pretty deserted to me.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind the curious onlooker,” Parker said expansively, latching the gate behind them, “so long as it’s human. I don’t want to have to pay the local sheepherders for the loss of a nosy ewe. The sheep are everywhere on this island, if you hadn’t noticed. You’re the last two to arrive, I think.” Parker screwed up his long face and did a mental count. “Yes. Please, come with me.

  “Not much of the Neolithic culture remains on view here, except for cairns and round chambered tombs, which is what we have on this site. The Leodhas Cairns have had rather an interesting history. They were built long before the peat covered Lewis, and were shown on topographical maps to be no more than irregularities in the gneiss. Can you imagine? They were already two thousand years old when the Romans came to this island.” Keith and Holl waited while Parker clambered over a low project
ion under the grass. Keith started almost guiltily when he realized that he had just stepped over the same ridge without conscious effort. He and Holl slowed their pace until the small professor caught up. Parker didn’t seem to notice any hesitation on their part or expect any special consideration, and continued his chat.

  “You’ll have noticed on the way here from town how very much construction is going on here on the Isle, haven’t you?” He met their eyes again in his friendly way and waited for nods. “Ah. Well, demolition here above the western shores of Loch Roag caused subsidence in the neighboring fields. The sea was much lower when all these monuments were built. Air pockets and water pockets have been waiting for just such a momentous disturbance, and some of them burst. The outlines of long-buried stone structures were exposed in the peat, like a piece of furniture in an empty house under bed sheets.”

  Keith could easily see what Parker was talking about. The other two low mounds lay revealed some yards away from the one which the party was excavating. He had seen similar lumps of peat and grass in a dozen places between Stornoway and Callanish, and wondered just what it was that told the scientists they were different from all the other lumps. The marks of tearing and wrenching were just a little newer than most of the features of the Lewisian landscape.

  “There’s bound to be some damage to the structures underneath, since what these poor old fellows have just experienced is tantamount to an earthquake. That’s one of the things we need to determine. We hope it won’t be much. It’ll be some years before we’ve uncovered all the secrets of this place, but it’s rather exciting to be the first to open the box, if you see what I mean,” Parker continued engagingly. “Now, some underground caverns may have collapsed. The sea has been nibbling away at Lewis for ages, drowning farmland, and possibly other burial sites. Those small islands you see out there were once simply high ground. Hence our haste to uncover the secrets of the past in the low places. We don’t want it to disappear before we’ve had a good look, eh? Nor you to disappear into the bowels of the earth. I caution you to pick your way warily, because we don’t know if there is further instability under the site itself. There’s strange stories told of the Western Islands and of the Long Island in particular.”

  Keith felt his whiskers twitch in anticipation. He wondered if Dr. Parker knew any of those stories, and if he would tell them.

  The group was divided among the professor’s regular assistants. “Can any of you type?” Parker asked hopefully. Of the ones who raised their hands, Holl and Mrs. Turner were chosen, and paired off with a blond-maned young man. Their job was to organize the data and transfer measurements and notations from penciled notes into a personal computer right there on the site. Keith was relieved. He didn’t feel he could work the whole day with Holl, unless they could talk without fear of being overheard. He wanted to settle their argument and undo the tension. There was more going on with his friend than mere unwanted cosmetic alteration. He was moody, and he seemed to walk around in a daze half the time. Still, that wouldn’t have to be resolved immediately. Work would keep them both busy, and maybe Holl would have a chance to cool off. Keith knew that he wasn’t to blame for his friend’s mood, that the ear thing was just the tip, so to speak, of Holl’s troubles. Holl was just going to have to call long distance and see what was really happening on the farm. Maybe one of the others, Marm or Tay perhaps, would give him a true report.

  Keith found that he and Narit were assigned to work with Dr. Stafford. This man, Dr. Parker’s second in command, was a giant, with rough blond hair and beard, and a deeply tanned, lined face, giving him the aspect of a lion walking upright. He had returned only a few weeks ago from an archaeological exploration in Africa. While they worked, The Lion described in a booming voice the investigations in which he had participated near a site known as Great Zimbabwe. “I’d have been there longer, but the governments down there tend to limit the amount of time that foreign scientists can stay each year. It means you’ve got to pass the baton to someone who joins you partway into the dig, like in a relay race, to look for things you were still seeking when your time ran out. No continuity. Still, I don’t see that there isn’t some sense in that. No one can become proprietary about a site, and science doesn’t have to come to a stop because the one man who knew it all dies.” Keith glanced occasionally over his shoulder at Matthew, who was listening to Stafford with a sort of hero worship written indelibly all over him like tattoos, while hoisting buckets of the heavy peat out of the pit.

  Dr. Stafford treated them all with a dry, humorous affection that Keith found appealing. He could see that the big professor’s calm, matter-of-fact manner soothed Narit so that her hands stopped darting tentatively, and became deft and sure as she picked stones and shards out of the nearly rock-hard peat. The Neolithic era was positively new minting as far as Stafford’s usual specialty went, but he had come to the Hebrides to assist Dr. Parker, who had been his tutor thirty years ago. Now he was a tenured professor in the department which Parker chaired. Stafford clucked over Parker protectively when the small professor was trying to do too much. It had been some months since they had seen each other, and they were catching up on past times. “And he hasn’t changed his ways at all. He’s still not taking care of himself,” The Lion complained in his booming voice.

  Keith liked Stafford instantly, and he started watching Parker too, turning the director away from treading on loose rocks that would plummet him into the depths of a pit. Parker tended to work like a kitten, expending all his energies in great bursts of activity, and then sitting down exhausted. The man was so involved in what he was doing that he came across as absent-minded. It was mere appearance, though. Anyone who moved a stone or a shard of pottery or a bone without marking the site found Parker at his or her shoulder, fitting the piece back into the enveloping peat, signaling for the measuring rods and camera.

  Parker had evidently attracted young scientists who were of a similarly intense but easygoing nature. The Educatours group found they were working very hard, but their questions were never treated as stupid or a waste of time by the team. The core group was small, a fact which worried Parker, when he reflected openly how little time he had to examine this site.

  As Keith worked on the open mound, and saw the outlines of the tombs begin to emerge more clearly in his eyes, he sympathized with Parker’s longing to stay. Keith himself probably wouldn’t be satisfied until he had explored all three structures. The wind played gently with them that day, sending tentative breezes among them instead of the forceful gales. As the sun rose higher, it got warmer, burning off the morning mist. The birds’ morning song changed to conversational trill, and the sheep, sounding strangely distant, could be heard adding their music to the chorus.

  “If there’s any luck, we’ll find an intact version of the chambered tomb which is up there,” Parker told them, pointing up at the standing stones. “I’d give my eyeteeth for a few unspoiled artifacts as well. Peat is anaerobic, and does kindly by organic compounds, but with the sea so close, I’ve no idea what will be left.”

  Under the noon sun, the colors in the landscape were even more pronounced, greens and yellows drenched with light. When he paused for breath, Keith started picking out the colors that echoed the ones that he had seen woven into his tweed jacket, in the things that he could see growing on the land.

  “Are the dyes made from these things, like the peat for brown, and the heather for purple and green?” he asked the tea shop ladies at lunch. “I couldn’t help but notice that what’s out there ends up in there.” He pointed to the shelves.

  “You’d better ask the weavers that question,” the dark-haired girl said, serving him a sandwich and a bowl of soup. “I know only that they design their own patterns, and mix the colors to suit themselves. You might ask old Mrs. MacLeod about it. I’m sure I don’t know.”

  Holl paid little attention to the discussions going on behind his back. Ignoring his lunch, he fingered the lengths of cloth on the shelf ag
ain and again, trying to make up his mind what might best serve the needs of those in the village. “You’ve got to like something which is virtually indestructible, sews well, is remarkably warm, and has a natural waterproofing from the lanolin,” he had explained to Keith over and over again in the B&B. “You don’t see sheep with such a long wool staple in the Midwest as you do here. We’re not yet self-sufficient enough to be making our own cloth, but it would still take years to achieve a quality like this.”

  Now Holl was using his interest as an excuse not to sit down and eat with Keith. “You’ve got tons of money with you,” Keith pointed out patiently, coming up and leaning over his friend’s shoulder. “Why don’t you just make up your mind and bring a lot of cloth back for your folk? They sell it by the yard here, and it isn’t that expensive for the value.”

  “It’s remarkable stuff,” Holl said almost to himself. He had fallen in love with the multicolored fabrics. He was inspecting each bolt, and making sketches of the various weaves with color notations.

  “He’s right,” Keith commented to the Tea Shop’s ladies. “This stuff is so good it’s a wonder why you have any left on the shelf at all.”

  The young woman made a friendly grimace. “Ah, well, if we had more customers like you, we might sell out more frequently. But I think that those people scare away the tourists.” Keith didn’t need to ask who those people were. The unkempt band hanging around the tents behind the shop had put some of their group, Mrs. Green and Mrs. Turner particularly, on edge, though they never actually accosted any of the party. The ladies would only approach the croft with escorts. Keith had seen worse, but he didn’t say so. The girl seemed genuinely distressed.