Silver Skin

by Joan Lennon

  Then, as they came into the paved place, there was Voy. Just standing, leaning heavily on her staff. Looking at them.

  The cheerful voices died away – and then swelled up again as everyone suddenly began talking at once, vying to tell her what had been happening, pointing at Sketh, pointing at the bundles oozing boar blood onto the stones of the paved place, gesticulating, acting out the scene in the clearing, praising the now furiously blushing Rab, including Cait in the acclaim.

  And Voy had let them talk. She stood, motionless, her face without expression, until all the words and gestures were done.

  ‘It’s true, then,’ she said to Cait.

  Cait misunderstood. For once, she didn’t pick up the warning signs. She thought it was about Sketh. She started to detail the treatment she’d given him – cleansing, layering, sewing – when, abruptly, the Old Woman jerked stiffly forward, swinging her staff up and then down. Cait had just enough time to flinch away to the side, so that instead of crashing down on the crown of her head, the wood only glanced off her cheek.

  ‘You put the selkie in danger.’ Spittle flew from the Old Woman’s mouth. ‘I told you he mustn’t die – and you took him and you put him in front of a sex-crazed boar.’

  Voy raised her stick for another blow. The villagers shifted uneasily, but Cait knew no one was about to come between the Old Woman and the object of her anger.

  ‘You’re crazy.’

  Cait and Voy froze. Everyone gasped.

  It was Rab. ‘Nobody put me anywhere. We were trying to save Sketh’s life! And we did. Though it was mostly Cait.’

  Had there been a murmur of approval from the others? It seemed a bit dream-like now.

  Then ‘I really think we should get him inside, er, don’t you?’ Rab had said and, amazingly, the villagers had scuttled to obey him, careful not to catch their Old Woman’s eye.

  Then there was only Cait and Voy left in the paved place.

  ‘If he dies, it’s your fault,’ said Voy.

  It didn’t occur to Cait until later to wonder which he she meant.

  She’d been lucky. Sketh’s wound hadn’t gone bad. He didn’t die. He was strong. For some reason, Mewie was grateful. So grateful she took her own necklace from around her neck and insisted Cait have it. It was far finer than anything she’d ever owned before.

  It was an unaccustomed weight round her neck.

  All at once she felt suffocated, surrounded by the sleeping village.

  I need some air. I need to see the sky.

  She slipped out of Sketh’s house and crept along the passageway, touching the carved places on the walls without thinking. She expected to have to pull back the bar that closed the main village door at night. But it was already drawn aside.

  She paused for a moment, bent double at the threshold. It was Sketh’s task, of course, to make the village secure each night and while he had been laid up, Mot had taken on his father’s duty. The boy was so earnest, so proud of the responsibility – it was inconceivable that he could have forgotten.

  There must be someone else from Skara Brae feeling restless tonight …

  Cait slipped out into the paved place and straightened. She caught her breath at the sudden cold. The selkie’s kind autumn was gone. When she looked up at the sky, she could see from the clouds across the moon that the wind was from the sea, and quickening. Abruptly the full whiteness of the moon emerged in the black sky.

  She ducked her head, hurriedly closing her eyes, but her night vision was gone. She waited, silently sniffing the cold air, listening for any sign of who might be out there. The hairs on her arms and the back of her neck tingled – and suddenly she knew.

  She opened her eyes and there was Voy, standing at the far edge of the paved place. She was looking inland.

  The Old Woman spoke without turning her head. ‘It’s time. We leave tomorrow. Choose someone to stay with Sketh.’ She was holding the selkie’s skin in her hands. Cait caught a shimmer of silver, and then the clouds dimmed the moon’s light again. When it re-emerged, the skin was no longer in sight. Voy had returned it to the bag at her waist. But it was still there, in the night, with them. A powerful presence. Powerful …

  Poor Rab! My poor selkie! Would Voy ever let either of them go? And then a tiny voice at the back of her mind whispered, But if Rab stays, how bad would it be if I stayed too …?

  She was so full of her thoughts that she hardly noticed as the Old Woman stumped past on her way back into Skara Brae. And then, unexpectedly, she thought she felt something on her bruised cheek, feather light, almost like a gentle touch.

  But when she spun round, there was no one there.

  PART THREE

  Rab: The Way to the Ring of Hills

  Old Benth was to stay behind to tend Sketh but everyone else in the village, from the youngest to the oldest, was up and ready to leave at first light. The adults were laden down with carrying bags and baskets full of food, sleeping hides and fleeces, skins for lean-tos, cooking pots, fuel. The children were doing their best to look appropriately solemn and, for the most part, being much too excited to succeed.

  Rab kept trying to get near to Cait. Ever since the day of the visit to the cave he’d thought of little else. He wished he was brave enough to take her hand, right there, with everybody watching. But since they’d brought the wounded hunter back to the village, he’d barely seen her. She’d been busy keeping Sketh alive, of course. But was it just that? She seemed … distant. Hugged inside herself. She was watching Voy – well, she was always watching Voy but there was a new wariness in her face, as if she weren’t quite sure what was going to happen next.

  But that was ridiculous. She’d been to the Ring of Stones every cycle of her life. Why should it be different this time?

  When we get back from all this fuss, we’ll talk properly. There’ll be time then. The thought cheered him up. She hasn’t changed. She’s just preoccupied.

  The weather had changed though. Rab couldn’t stop shivering. Even now the sun was fully up in the sky, frost still showed in the hollows of the hills and in the shadows of rocks.

  The track led inland, away from the village, away from the sea. The emptiness of the landscape still made him a bit queasy but at least, he told himself, he’d got better at hiding the way it made him feel.

  Or not.

  Mewie was suddenly at his elbow.

  ‘Don’t worry, selkie,’ she whispered, peering up at him. ‘The sea will be near again when we get to the Ring of Hills.’ Then her voice took on the singsong tones of something learned by rote. ‘The place of the sun and the moon, the salt and the fresh, the water and the land, the stones and the sky. The place where the roads meet. See? It’ll be all right.’

  She patted his sleeve encouragingly, then dropped back to chivvy Mot.

  Rab blushed, feeling like a fraud.

  There seemed no particular order to the column of travellers. People moved along the track or to either side or surged ahead or stepped aside for others. When he spotted Cait, she was already well ahead of him, near the front. She was moving easily. Powerfully. Gracefully. He found himself staring at the way her hips moved, the way her clothes slid over her backside and thighs. It was mesmerizing …

  Tripping over a roughness in the path at this moment brought him back to himself with a jolt.

  ‘Steady, seal boy,’ growled Ailth who had come up behind him unnoticed. The expression on his face made it clear he knew exactly what Rab had been thinking about. Scut! Is everybody a mind-reader now? This time the blush that raced up Rab’s neck stayed there for a long while.

  The emptiness of the moorland continued to unsettle him. As they came over the rim of each hill, he kept looking for signs of people or habitation, but each time there was nothing. Just brittle winter heather, russet bracken, flashes of open water fringed by the last white rags of bog cotton. There was a mournful scream in the huge sky, answered by another – a pair of buzzards circling on invisible thermals, watching for prey.<
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  How small we must look from above. Ants scuttling across the world on ant business …

  He took a ragged breath and walked on.

  After several hours of tramping they came to a place where another track, snaking down from the north, joined theirs.

  Rab sidled up to Cait. ‘So that’s the track the northern villages come in on?’ he asked, pointing. He said it for something to say.

  But, surprisingly, Cait shook her head. ‘That’s the track all the villages come in on. The ones from the east and south as well.’

  ‘But why? Isn’t there a track from the south?

  ‘Of course there is. It joins this one over the next rise.’

  ‘So why don’t the villages from down that way use it?’

  ‘They do! On the way home. All the villages except ours go home that way.’

  ‘I don’t understand …’

  She made an impatient noise. ‘Think about it! The Ring of Hills is what?’

  ‘I don’t know – a ring? A circle?’

  And then he remembered. She’d explained to him about walking round circles and deosil and widdershins.

  ‘There’s only one entrance into the Ring of Hills. It’s closest to us. Everybody else has to come round the Ring. Deosil. Sunwise. It’s obvious.’

  Obvious. So some of these people, who will have been on the road for several days maybe already, get to add another day’s walking in a great big pointless circle.

  But at least he’d got her to talk to him.

  Back off now, though. He kept away from her for the next while, until the track brought them to the brow of a final rise. A lush, low valley lay ahead, the circling hills rising like the sides of a great bowl. The bracken glowed amber. He saw a herd of deer flow up and over the hill opposite. Not so very long ago, he wouldn’t have spotted them, or noticed that the grass here seemed greener and taller than the pasturing round Skara Brae. Or, where the soil showed, that it seemed so much richer and darker than the used-up dirt of the Skara Brae fields. But he noticed now.

  Whoever lives here is lucky! he thought, looking about for the domed roofs and rising smoke of a village.

  There was smoke, but no houses. Instead, there was an open-air gathering of many people, with campfires already started and bed places laid out by the shores of an inland loch. That must be the fresh water. From the west, another loch shape fingered into the valley, but it was marshland – salt marsh? A cloud of shore birds flew up from the reeds and then settled again.

  ‘Fresh and salt,’ he muttered, trying to remember. ‘Sun and the moon, wet and dry, up and down.’

  ‘The stones and the sky.’ It was Cait. She was standing beside him, close to his shoulder, looking out over the valley. He was aware of her body in a way that made him want to shout out loud. He felt the blush coming up his neck again and forced himself to focus on the view.

  ‘Yeah. Right. Stones and sky,’ he repeated her words, not really taking in what was in the distance.

  ‘There!’ She nudged his shoulder and pointed. He looked where she indicated – and there it was.

  The Ring of Stones.

  A circle of thin megaliths, more than he could count, rising out of the russet of bracken and the green-grey mounds of heather, reaching up into the dying light of the sky. They were surrounded by a bank and a water-filled moat. In the centre there was a raised mound, with a dark smudge at the centre of that.

  An early owl cried, disturbed by the strangers in its territory. Its voice was pale and piercing.

  As Rab stared out across the valley he started to see other structures, wrecked and half-buried in the ground. A jumble of stone walls and ruined buildings stuck up confusingly in swathes of heather and gorse, spreading across the boggy-looking land bridge that divided the loch from the salt marsh. What is all that? Some sort of temple? A town?

  And beyond that …

  ‘Look, there’s another one!’

  A smaller circle of standing stones with moat and banks. And that looks like a village – what’s left of a village – over by the loch. He turned his head to ask Cait about that when his eye was caught by another glint of slant afternoon sunlight on water, even further away. He squinted, not sure what he was seeing, but then he realised it was a mound – a great green mound – like an enormous house, but with a moat around it and a bank around that, like the moats and banks round the two stone circles. And between that place and the place where he stood there were scattered, individual megaliths. Leading down to the encampment, and from the encampment to the larger ring, he could see there were well-defined pathways, but everything else in the valley was covered in unbroken heather and grass. It was clear that part of the great Ring of Hills had been deserted for a long time.

  Deserted, in plain sight. Rab noticed that whenever the villagers accidentally found themselves looking in the direction of the mound or the smaller circle, their eyes slid aside and they turned away.

  The polite thing to do would be pretend I haven’t seen them either, Rab thought to himself. Too bad.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing.

  ‘That is the Maes Howe,’ Cait said in her singsong I-know-this-from-memory voice. ‘It is a place from the Greater Days. Long ago, the people who came before us knew many secrets, about this life and the next life and the ways between them. They were the ones who built the great circles and raised the watch stones – and the Howe. Every cycle, they would cross over the bank and the moat and take away the stone from the doorway. They went into the heart of the Howe and the Sun followed them, revealing mysteries.’

  ‘And then? What happened to them?’

  ‘No one knows for certain. It is thought that a sickness came, and between one year and the next so many of them died that the few that were left forgot everything except scrabbling to find enough food to stay alive. By the time their numbers had grown again, enough to care for their fields and flocks and not be facing starvation every winter, it was too late. The knowledge of the Howe was gone.’

  ‘What’s inside it?’ Rab asked, lowering his voice, and again Cait replied, ‘No one knows for certain. It is said that the Howe is filled with the bones of the great Healers and Hunters and Cherts. It was the highest honour their people could pay them, to lay them in such a tomb.’

  ‘And what happened to the ones who built the other things – the other circle, and the ones who lived in that village and the ones who made that mess of walls in between?’

  ‘That was in the Greater Days.’

  ‘Yes, but you must know something!’

  Cait didn’t answer. She just shook her head and looked away.

  The Greater Days. Suddenly they were more than just words. He stared out across the valley – a valley full of history they didn’t understand and were afraid to even wonder about.

  ‘Voy says we are a pale people compared to them,’ said Cait.

  This time Rab took her cold, rough hand and held it tight and, just for a moment, she let him.

  Voy: The Ring of Hills

  Voy stared out over the great bowl of the valley, listening to the girl’s garbled explanation. Had she taught her so poorly? Or did she just not care? That was how it was lost, the knowledge of things. Like the carvings on her bed edge or the cryptic scratches in the long passageway. Oh, the villagers touched them for luck, every time they sidled past, but nobody knew what they meant any more. Times past became times that never happened because some stupid girl was too interested in the fantasies in her head to listen properly. To commit to memory. To be committed to the memory.

  She remembered everything Hesta told her. Even at the end, when it was all so much babble that came out of her mouth – I could still quote every word.

  I wonder why I’m thinking about her so much …

  ‘Go away and bar the door, Voy,’ Hesta would say, and Voy would sigh and do as she was told. She’d squat in the passageway, guarding, waiting, listening to the strange moans and thrashings from within. Worrying. Un
til a small, wearied voice would call to her, and she would unbar the door and go in.

  ‘What did you see this time?’ she used to ask, as she cleaned the room and washed Hesta, rank with strange-smelling sweat and, often, vomit and urine.

  Strange tales, the ones Hesta told her then, with the black centres of her eyes tiny points or huge pools, depending on the draft she’d taken. Much of it was senseless, even to Hesta herself, and Voy hoped this might convince her to stop her experiments.

  But then all that changed. Hesta had found something new to take.

  ‘I think I must have become a bird, Voy, because I was very high up, looking down on the village and the bay, so high up I could see the Ring of Stones if I turned my head and the Lesser Ring and right to the far shores, north, south, east. But no bird could have hung there so long because I swear I watched for years and years, thousands of years. Where the bay is now, was eaten up by a great white wave – snow and ice that raced down from the north, covering everything, and then as suddenly as it came it was gone again and the bay and the islands were changed into green, steaming forests with animals – such animals, Voy, you wouldn’t believe – greater than whales, but with thunderous thick legs, walking through bogs that smoked like a pot on the hearth, and the land was sailing like a cloud overhead except that it was underneath and it was green, a hundred greens …’

  It was all just another poisoned nightmare, but Hesta was utterly convinced. ‘I’ve seen time! I’ve seen the life of the world!’

  She kept going back for more. ‘I have to know.’

  ‘Why?’ Voy demanded. ‘Why do you have to know? It’s past – it’s gone – even if it’s true, what good does it do?’ and ‘If you have to find out about what came before, why not find out about the ones who built the Maes Howe? The ones who built the Rings? The ruins in the Ring of Hills? Find out what happened to them!’