by Leyland, L J
Noah pulled me to my feet and the pain from my broken ribs stabbed through me. I winced and touched them gently but found that I was bandaged underneath my shirt.
‘Plaster made from willow bark,’ said a female voice from behind me. ‘Willow bark is a painkiller too, so we’ve been making you drink some willow tea. Probably won’t feel the full pain of your broken bones until tomorrow, mind, so don’t go leaping around the room again or you might cause yourself some damage.’
I turned to thank the lady but leapt back in horror again when I saw her.
‘Ach, what did I just tell you, lassie? No leaping or hollering or jigging or nothing. Just sit and drink some warm ale.’ She thrust a cup into my hand that had been hollowed out from a wide branch. A cloudy liquid slopped unappetizingly inside.
‘Fermented oats, honey, and cranberry. Try it,’ encouraged Noah.
It was delicious but I couldn’t concentrate on drinking it. My eyes kept on straying to the woman. She was wearing antlers.
‘What’s? Whose?’ I was unable to form any coherent sentences and tried shaking my head to rid myself of the cloud of dumbness that had settled on my brain.
Noah led me to a chair covered in furs by a roaring fire. The chair was framed by a massive pair of antlers on either wing. Antlers protruded from the walls as though a stag had run headlong into the outside of the house, pierced the inner walls with its head, and was stuck there until someone freed it. I heard shuffling and looked towards some small children with wild auburn hair who were daring each other to get closer to me. The smallest one feigned bravery, strutting towards me.
I coughed and he fled in terror and joy, screaming with delight. His crew danced with giddiness and anxiety. Mini-antlers were affixed to their heads and they wore a red-and-black tartan cloth.
‘What on earth?’ I mumbled, marvelling at these deer people.
‘Maida, we’re at Fergus and Mhareen’s house. They helped us escape from the deer and led us through the explosions. They’re members of the Deer Clan.’
‘Hence the antlers?’ I asked.
Mhareen laughed. ‘Catch on quick, you do, lass. We take the antlers from the first deer we kill and we wear them to show our status in the clan. The bigger the better.’ She smiled and stroked her not inconsiderable sized antlers. Her voice perfectly fitted her appearance. She was round, soft, and comforting, as though she would be a very soothing person to have around in a crisis.
‘The children?’ I asked, pointing at their tiny horns, feeling sorry for the young boy who would be stuck with the miniatures for the rest of his life but also feeling slightly in awe that they could manage to kill at such a young age.
‘Ah, no. They are just toys to make them feel like they’re grown up. They’ll make their kill at eighteen, when they become adults.’
A muted explosion could be heard and I walked to the window, drew back the fur curtain, and saw that it was fully dark outside. An orange glow blazed in the distance.
‘Explosions still going, not safe to head down until tomorrow,’ said Fergus. He was the type of man who spoke in statements rather than sentences, dispensing with the words he found unnecessary to his meaning. He looked as though he was carved of old wood; strong, craggy, and knotted but still kindly. His antlers were huge and I wondered how he balanced his head or got through doors.
Mhareen saw me looking and said, ‘Fergus has the biggest antlers. He’s chief of the clan. Mine are next,’ she smiled, ‘good job I’m his wife or else there mighta been some fighting.’ Her laugh lacked any edge and Fergus smiled back, unthreatened by the fact that his wife rivalled him for power over the clan.
‘What are the explosions? I mean … what causes them? Is it the flags?’ I asked as I supped my warm ale. It was easing the pain of my ribs and I wondered whether Mhareen had secretly slipped some willow bark in there for me.
Fergus looked darkly out of the window. ‘Explosions are the Metropole’s punishment. Landmines. Around the edges of the island. Keeps us ringed in. Keeps others out.’ He laughed. ‘It disnae work.’
‘You mean because we got in?’
He grinned. ‘No, I mean coz we get out.’
‘And you put the flags there to warn you where the dangerous mines are? That’s really clever.’
‘You see, that’s the Metropole’s problem. They disnae see us as clever. Underestimate the Highlanders at their peril. But mostly we want to be left alone. We don’t want to mix with the weaklings and traitors. We do well by ourselves.’
‘You think everyone else in the Periphery is a weakling and a traitor?’
‘Listen, lass, I don’t even recognise the term ‘Periphery’. On the periphery of what? The Highlands are the centre of the world as far as I’m concerned and they are the ones on the periphery.’
I let the silence gather around us as I could tell that Fergus had more to say, it just needed to be left to flow from him. He was not a man who could be coaxed against his will.
He sighed and picked up his train of thought. ‘But yes, lass, I do see the rest of you as traitors. Only we stood up to the Metropole. Only we repelled them. We’re the only place in Britannia, in Europa, that isn’t occupied. And look how we’re punished. Landmines. Every few months they drop them from planes. We have to keep on top of the flag system or else we end up losing clan. But you. People in Britannia. You’re content as cows for the slaughter – obeying your master as long as you get one more day to live, even if it is in an abattoir. What do they give you in return for your slavery? A nice house? Food? Jewels? Gold?’
‘No,’ I replied.
He laughed heartily. ‘Then what the bloody hell do you let them do it for?’
Good point, I thought. But this man had me riled now. ‘It’s different for you. You have the mountains and the sea and the forests to protect you. We’ve nothing but marshes; people don’t have the stamina or the resources to resist,’ I protested, feeling fiercely protective of my people.
I wasn’t going to let this man slur Brigadus without even having experienced the hardship, the daily grinding difficulties that filled every day; the hunger, the thirst, the disease that we felt every waking moment and every moment in our terror-filled dreams.
‘Well, girl, if you really believe that, what are you trying to resist for? If you think it’s a lost cause and it will never work, why are you here?’
‘What? How do you know that’s what we’re here for?’
Noah looked sheepish but pleased. ‘Erm … I told them everything. They think they know where Iris might be.’
My heart quickened and I tried to stand up to embrace him but my ribs protested at the sudden movement asked of them.
‘It’s OK,’ he soothed, sitting next to me and putting his arm around me. He stroked my hair out of my eyes and whispered, ‘We’re almost there.’
I smiled, contentment lapping quietly through my body as the ale, warmth from the fire and the candle light did their job. Soothed, I felt myself yawning.
But I abruptly sat up, flustered.
‘Matthias?!’ I shouted. How could I possibly forget about him?
‘Don’t worry, he’s with a healer in the children’s bedroom. He’s … been better but he’s stable. He lost quite a lot of blood but his wound is closing and he should be ok after some rest.’
‘Your lad carried him all the way back to the house,’ said Mhareen, ‘I wouldn’ta believed that a man that size coulda been carried but your lad did it. Nimble too, avoided all the mines and explosions. Never seen such strength.’
Noah’s wonderful blue eyes lowered in embarrassment and he said, ‘Really, it’s nothing.’
‘Was not nothing, you saved his life. He woulda burnt to death or else bled dry if it hadn’ta been for you. You feel lucky that he’s with you lass,’ she added at me.
I stroked his hand, avoiding the bandages that covered his burns and he blushed.
‘Don’t you want to know how Grimmy’s doing?’ he asked.
‘Nope,’ I replied.
He laughed and I fell asleep to the sound of his soft rhythmic breathing.
Chapter Twenty-six
Carved onto the prow of their boat was a demonic-looking creature. It bobbed and swayed in the current as though it was possessed. The boat was long and thin, hewn from one massive log. The vessel was decoratively carved with scenes from Highland folklore – wolves, deer, hunters and arrows. Rounded shields protected each rower from view and also from waves determined to drench both clothes and spirits. It was a fearsome boat, made all the more frightening when twenty-four Highland warriors began to row in time to an ominous drum beat, pounded out by Mhareen, dressed exquisitely in amber fox furs, her antlers crowning her head.
Fergus made Noah, Grimmy, and me sit on the prow whilst Matthias had been ordered to lie on a bed of fur blankets brought especially for him. The blood loss had left him feeling physically weak but did nothing to affect his acid tongue. One of the first things he did when he awoke from his concussion was to roundly and happily denounce Grimmy to the heavens. I laughed to see it; as weak as a kitten but with the roar of a lion.
Fergus was navigating. I had to duck whenever he turned his head to avoid getting clipped by his enormous antler crown. I offered my binoculars to him but he laughed. ‘Lass, I’ve been traipsing across this stretch of godforsaken sea for over thirty years now. If I can’t find my way by sight then I deserve to drown.’
So I took to using them myself. In the not too far distance, I could see other mountains, huge and craggy. There was a chain of them like the points on a crown. ‘Which one are we going to? Which one do you think Iris is on?’ I shouted to Fergus above the beat of the drums and the crash of the waves.
‘Ben Hevan,’ he replied, ‘home of the Eagle Clan.’
He pointed towards a far off north-westerly giant which was so vertical and steep that I wondered how anyone could actually live there.
‘Fergus … why are your clans named after animals? I thought Highland clans had family names?’
‘Aye, we used to, before the Flood. But the Flood caught everyone unawares. No time for the clans to gather with their kin. MacDonalds stranded with Munros, McKinnons with McClarens. It woulda been useless to try to keep the clan system going. Not to mention deadly, clan factions fighting for power on the islands that were left. That’s no way to live. In times like that, you have to stick together or else you all perish. So new clans were formed. Based on habitat and creatures. Each clan has formed a bond with their surroundings and their animal neighbours. It works well. At least for us – we got the deer, most highly respected of animals. Pity the poor clan that got the Highland shrew!’ He laughed heartily and slapped his leg.
I smiled uncertainly. He was quite a frightening man but not in the same way that the Mayor was frightening. I was frightened of him because I wanted so desperately to impress him; I wanted him to think me worthy of his attention. I didn’t want to let him down. But at the same time, I wasn’t sure what would please him. His laughed descended into a hacking cough and he pulled out a pipe and stuffed it with dried leaves that smelled like liquorice.
‘What was wrong with those deer yesterday? I’ve never seen animals act like that. Is it something to do with your … your special relationship with them?’ I asked. I was hesitant because I realised how ridiculous ‘special relationship’ sounded. But, I’d racked my brains all night and could come up with no other explanation for it.
His old eyes fixed on me. He took one last deep drag on the pipe and removed it from his mouth. Smoke seeped from him like he was smouldering. ‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘It’s nothing to do with us, it was The Flood. The deer on this island are very agitated. They can’t roam very far and they are hungry. The problem of being stuck on a small island with very little to eat. I guess desperation makes us all crazy, even animals.’ He took my binoculars and looked at the lenses. ‘How far can these see?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure. Pretty far I guess.’
He took a wooden compass from his pocket and located directly north. ‘Look that way and let me know what you see.’
At first, the bright winter sunshine blinded me and all I saw was a white halo of light. But as my eyes adjusted, faint images were suddenly etched onto the horizon. A dark cloud hovered above the sea surface, quivering and changing shape regularly. I squinted but still could not make out what it was. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Seagulls,’ replied Fergus but his voice was grim.
Oh. My heart fell. I was expecting something exciting and dangerous, possibly something to do with the Flood and the Arctic, considering that we were so high north.
‘What, seagulls don’t interest you, girl?’ He registered the look of disappointment on my face.
I shrugged. No, they most definitely did not – but I didn’t want him to think that I was being difficult. ‘We call them pirates in Brigadus. Because they steal. I built a scarecrow to stop them from taking the drying fish from my roof but they stole the damn thing as well. Just flapped off with an entire straw man dangling from their claws. Wanted the stuffing. It was quite funny to hear the townsfolk in the docks the next day, talking about how the seagulls were beginning an uprising and kidnapping children. Never seen them so panicked. But no, apart from that brief interlude of amusement, they don’t interest me. What’s so special about seagulls at sea?’
‘Look again. Have you ever seen a flock as big as that?’
I raised the binoculars to my eyes and pulled back the focus. I realised that I had only been looking at a tiny portion of the flock the first time that I observed them, but now, I could see that there was hundreds of thousands of them. Millions, possibly. The flock was about a kilometre wide and goodness knows how deep. It was like a tornado, swooping, diving, and circling. ‘What the –?’ I breathed. It was a plague of squawking, beady eyed pirates. ‘What are they gathered for?’
Fergus scratched his beard. ‘We’re not sure but we guess feeding. A lot of dead things float down from the North now. Whole shoals of dead fish, sharks, jellyfish, whales. They eat anything.’
A whale had once beached itself on Brigadus shores. It was such an exciting day. The townsfolk children even got out of school for the occasion. We all piled down to the shore to watch the monster slip away into unconsciousness and then death. The children danced around it and climbed on it like dwarves triumphing over a giant, shaking their hard little fists in victory as though they had personally slain it. It was albino; white with humorous, intelligent black eyes and a rounded head. One of the more adventurous fishermen had said that he had heard that these albino whales were called belugas and that they lived in the Arctic. That’s why they were white, to blend in with the snow. Only there was no snow now.
I didn’t even stop to think that this creature may have been the last of its kind. It had lost its home and its entire purpose for living. Perhaps that’s why it died, out of loneliness and heartbreak. I still relished eating its soft, blubbery flesh, though, and I would probably do it again given the chance. The Flood has turned us all into pirates and scavenger seagulls.
‘These things, whales, fish, are all dead because of the Flood? Because there’s no cold water left? No ice?’
‘Possibly,’ Fergus said, but his tone was non-committal.
‘You don’t believe it’s just that, though, do you?’
‘No, lass, I don’t. We have trade links with the very northernmost islands, the Shetlands, Faroes, Iceland, Scandinavian islands. All illegal of course but the reach of the Metropole doesn’t always extend to the frozen wastelands of the high north. The pampered puppies don’t like the cold that much. The traders tell us that at night, they can hear sounds. Some nights, we can hear them too if the wind is very still – a rare occurrence in this wild region but sometimes the wind drops and we can hear far-off noises from the North. The traders think the noises are getting more frequent. They think they are getting louder, too.’
My voice fell to a whispe
r and my heart beat in time to the solemn drum Mhareen struck. ‘What sort of noises?’
‘Explosions, rumbling, crunching. I don’t know. There are earth tremors, too. The traders feel them often. We felt one about a month ago. Everything lurched to the right.’
‘Fergus, about the Flood. We think it was man-made, we think the Metropole melted the ice to get to the oil and gas underneath, we think that the Mayors of Britannia were in on it –’ The words tumbled from me in one great gush but I was too excited to explain properly.
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, lass, I know, I know. Remember, us Highlanders have known about this since our neighbours found your Iris floating around the sea in a wooden rowing boat years ago. We know it was done on purpose, she told the Eagles everything she saw between your Mayor and those bastards of the Metropole. That’s what the noises and tremors are, we think. Machines hacking away at the earth to get to the oil and gas. God knows what sort of devastation they are wreaking up there but let me tell you this; none of the creatures can stand it. They all float down here, dead as dormice.’
He resumed his pipe smoking and his expression became philosophical. ‘Never in my life would I have believed that people could condemn their fellow humans to a life of such suffering for a few years of comfort. But human beings are constantly surprising. You can’t trust them. Now, a wolf you can trust. You can trust that he is going to try to kill you and eat you. But a human? You can never plumb the depths of a human’s mind. Therefore, people cannot be trusted.’ Disgust had filled his eyes.
‘You can trust some people,’ I replied meekly, thinking of Noah and Matthias.
He laughed. ‘A folly of the young.’
I turned my back on him sulkily.
‘Ah, lass, I’m not having a go at you. Just preparing you for your future.’
‘I don’t want a future where I can’t trust anyone.’