The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  The piper’s stiff fingers bounded up and down the chanter like the legs of a ballet dancer. Kate threw another coin into the tin and again his eyes smiled. A ray of sun struck through the gate even as shadow of the walls reached greedily eastward. The archaeologists consulted in low voices over a roll of paper that flapped in the wind like a sail.

  Kate had had some vague idea of going back to Sligachan or Portree herself tonight. The hotels were bigger, with more amenities, but also with more of her own countrymen, like the tourists in the chauffeured car. Portree was closer to where Skye was tied to the mainland by a graceful and yet stern concrete span. This is the world, it seemed to say. Make the most of it.

  She’d made the most of the drive up the coast, stopping at cliffs and waterfalls and amazing geological displays—rock, good solid rock, sustaining the springy turf like bones sustained the flesh—but she wasn’t sure she wanted to tackle that same narrow road in the dusk. . . .

  Stop rationalizing. She liked it here, where the craggy hills were softened by brush-strokes of purple heather and the wide horizon was closed by the blue peaks of a mirage. This place even had a soundtrack, the birds, the sea, the music of the pipes.

  The piper segued into “Amazing Grace”. Whoever had first thought to play that old hymn as a pipe tune was a genius. The simple tune cut like a knife and Kate mouthed the words, “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me . . .”

  “Thank you,” she said, although she knew he couldn’t hear her. And yet his eyes crinkled in reply.

  She walked back to hotel with every microscopic hair in her ear canals still waving to the music, even when the music died to a low resonance of wind and sea. A smell of peat smoke hinted at evening, dinner, a comfortable bed. Yes, she needed to go to ground for the night. She retrieved her suitcase from the trunk of her car and went back into the hotel.

  Lucy was in the dining room counting out packets of butter. She looked around with a broad grin. “Needing a room, are you?”

  “Yes, please,” Kate told her.

  “No problem. Number 3, end of the hall. Just fetch the key from behind the desk, there, I’ve soup boiling over in the kitchen.” Wiping her hands on her apron, Lucy hurried into the back.

  Feeling like a member of the family, Kate found the key and lugged her suitcase up the narrow, twisting stairs. Number three was small and spare. The bed sagged in the middle but its sheets were bleached to dazzling whiteness. A dressing table sat in front of the window, its discolored but polished mirror turning its back on the view. The bathroom was wedged into a corner, so tiny Kate could touch toilet, shower, and sink without moving a step.

  She laid out a bar of soap and her toothbrush, making her mark not in shit but in cleaning implements, and took a quick shower. The stall was the size of a coffin. She’d have felt trapped by her body as surely as she felt trapped by her mind if she hadn’t been able to look through the door and see how behind the mirror the landscape opened out broad and free.

  Defiantly she toweled off in front of the window. If a Peeping Tom was outside he was getting the sight he deserved.

  Kate sat down in the dining room expecting the food to be either boiled or microwaved, prudent and tasteless. But what Lucy set down on the starched white tablecloth was a tomato soup enlivened by curry, flaky salmon fresh from the sea, baby vegetables ripped untimely from the earth, and whole-grain bread. Dessert was a bowl of strawberries bursting with flavor. Lucy hovered holding a pitcher. “Cream?”

  Appetite is shameful, Kate thought. Appetite is evidence of the physical, of the primitive. Taking pleasure in the appetite is the original sin. She should play it safe and stay on her diet. But it was too late. She’d admitted to hunger. “Yes, please,” she said, and Lucy poured a stream of thick, rich cream over her strawberries.

  Kate ate, feeling deliciously guilty, and licked her lips like a cat licking its whiskers. Were those silk flowers on the table? She touched one silky petal. No, they were real roses, damp and pink as her own flesh.

  A speaker in the corner of the room emitted a mumble of muzak, the original melody smoothed into margarine, artificially-colored, artificially-flavored. What Kate wanted was the throb of the pipes. She wanted music with the power to break her heart and the magic to heal it. She wanted. . . . Well, never mind what she wanted. A nightcap would have to do.

  She threw down her napkin, got up from the table, and walked across the hall to the bar.

  Glasses and bottles gleamed on one side of the room. A diminutive but fierce fire gleamed on the other. A young couple in the corner were talking in a language that wasn’t Scotspoken English or even Gaelic with its gutturals soft like thistledown. They sat close together, unabashedly groping each other. Honeymooners, no doubt. Enjoy it while you can.

  Kate turned toward the bar and stopped dead. The piper stood there, wiping a glass with a dishtowel. Now he was dressed in a demure white shirt and a tartan tie which matched his kilt—oh yes, Kate saw with a peek over the bar, he was still wearing the kilt. And the earring, too.

  No longer compressed around the mouthpiece, his lips curved like the outline of the islands on the horizon. “Hello there, Kate. What’s your pleasure?”

  She almost told him. Instead she managed a return smile—no wonder he’d recognized her, when she dropped three pounds into his kitty—Lucy must’ve told him her name. . . . It was wanting the truth, not appetite, which was the original sin. “A glass of that Lagavulin, please. The sixteen-year-old. I guess it’s old enough to drive.”

  Stupid joke, but he kept on smiling as he drew off a shot of the golden liquid and set it before her.

  His red hair was smoothed flat now and his eyes were less blue than gray in the electric light. It was the flicker of the firelight that sculpted the planes and angles of his face. He had good bone structure beneath his taut, fair skin, like Skye itself had good bone structure below its soil.

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem.” He jotted her name on a notepad, starting a tab.

  “Kilcolm Hotel,” was printed at the top of the pad. “‘Kil’ means cell, doesn’t it? Like a hermit’s cell?”

  “Oh aye, some old hermit set up here, ages ago. A saint, they say, saints being a bit thicker on the ground then than they are now. Might even have been Columba himself, running away from Ireland after fighting a war over a manuscript.”

  Fighting a war over a manuscript. That was a good one. “No wonder saints saw visions. Sensory deprivation.”

  Kate turned around, intending to sit down at a table. Through the door beside the fireplace she saw the lounge, and through the lounge’s windows she saw the sunset. Clear tints of amber, pink, and blood-red scarlet flowed across the sky. Each of the islands was edged with gold. They were Tir nan Og, the Celtic Otherworld. Not Hades, the Underworld, but the Otherworld.

  She sipped the whisky. Its first fiery rush polished the cream from her tongue, leaving it tingling. Her mouth and nose filled with peat smoke and sea spray, earth and heaven fused. Her stomach glowed.

  “No,” said the voice behind her. “Sensory overload.”

  She looked back around, and for one quick moment felt her fingers playing in his hair and along the edge of his kilt. Hoping he’d think the red in her face was from the wind and the sun, she dropped her eyes to the nameplate on his breast pocket. “Alexander.”

  “Oh aye. Not so great, though.” He started wiping another glass.

  I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Kate pulled up a stool and sat down. One drink and she was already dizzy. Sensory overload. . . .

  And what was here for a young man? Her kids always hung out in shopping malls, but there wasn’t a mall for miles. This place looked back, not forward. It was a place of long, harsh memories. It was the place where middle-aged women came to lick their wounds.

  “Are you having a good holiday?” Alexander asked.

  It’s not a holiday. She said, “Yes, thank you.”

  “Dunshian’s a f
ine old castle. Good job it’s at the end of the road, no one’s robbed the stone. But then, when it was built there were no roads, only the sea. It was the guardian of the straits, then.”

  “Not just a tourist attraction?”

  The blue-gray eyes targeted her again. “The guide this afternoon, he was laying on all the old stories for those tourists, wasn’t he? The true stories, not the prettied-up ones.”

  “I’m sure he was also feeding them the romantic guff about Flora MacDonald and Bonnie Prince Charlie and Over the Sea to Skye.”

  “Flora’s grave is just down the road. That’s real enough. What’s the harm of a bit of romance, of tales that’ve become more real than the reality, when there’s a grave at the end of the road?”

  Kate had no answer for that. She drank again. The flavor flared in her mouth like the sunset blazed across the sky. “Even Flora and Charlie’s reality—they met, they took a boat ride, they parted—even that’s more palatable than those grim stories from the castle. The same stories you get in Greek mythology, Medea murdering her sons by Jason, or Tantalus never able to drink from the pool he stands in, or even Prometheus, chained to a rock with birds tearing at his guts because he stole the fire from the gods. . . .” She wasn’t sure where that bit about Prometheus had come from.

  The dishtowel squeaked faintly on the glass. “Such stories are our myths of origin. Our Dreamtime. Stories, music—and songs, the words and the music together—they feed the soul the way food feeds the body. Greek, Norse, Celt, your stories need taking seriously.”

  Either that made perfect sense or she was finding truth in the bottom of a glass. Kate poured the last of the whisky down her throat and sighed. “I figured you modern Scots were trying to outrun your past and only got dragged back into it because of the tourists. Packaged heritage. Shrink-wrapped wishful thinking. Passion served up with an order of fries.”

  “Packaged passion rehydrated by the listener’s own body fluids.” He smiled again. A Mona Lisa smile, mysterious and distant. “Thank you for contributing to the band.”

  “You play in a band?”

  “Oh aye. A few of the lads, guitar, drums, my pipes. One of the few instruments that’ll hold its own with an electric guitar.”

  “Rock music? Really?”

  “Folk-rock. Rock ‘n’ reel. Forward into Scotland’s past.”

  “Where do you play?”

  “Here and there. Mind you, we don’t make more than a few bob.”

  “You could move to Edinburgh or even London, get a larger audience.”

  “But that takes a few bob as well.”

  So here was yet another youth with ambition but no money. And Kate was middle-aged with money but no ambition. . . . No. That was a lie. Her ambition was choked, pent up, impacted, just as her soul was plugged by emotion. By poetry and music and stories left dried and stored. She was tongue-tied and ashamed—of what? Of having stories to tell? Or of being afraid to tell them?

  Yes, she wanted to tell him, follow your dream. But she was hardly setting a good example. Maybe she could be a cautionary tale.

  Alexander was drawing off another whisky. Whisky, usquebaugh, the water of life. She hadn’t asked for another one. She must look thirsty.

  He set the glass down before her and this time didn’t add it to her tab. “We’ve named the band ‘Keridwen’ after the mother goddess with her cauldron of inspiration. One of the old pagan spirits that never went away in spite of the iron swords and the iron fists that tried to stamp them out.”

  “That tried to stamp out the music. That burned the pipes and the fiddles and turned the dancers to stone.” Kate sipped. She’d half expected her tongue to be numb, but no, it was extraordinarily sensitive, so that each word came out burnished brightly. “I thought Keridwen was the crone, or at least the mother, not a young woman like a muse.”

  “A wee lass playing a harp is no muse for this country. You need a strong experienced woman, a proper muse for the creative heavy lifting, eh?”

  “An experienced woman. You think?” The whiskey leaped in her mouth, in her stomach, like the fire on the hearth. “Oh for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!” But Shakespeare had lived in smooth, green lush England, not Caledonia, stern and wild.

  She could feel Alexander watching her like she could feel the warmth of the fire or the cold wind off the sea. The oleaginous muzak was doubly annoying now, when what she wanted to hear was the skirl of his pipes. “Where did you study music?” she asked.

  “I learnt to play from my grandfather. My parents weren’t so keen on the old songs and the old tales, wanted something fashionable. I suppose the tourists are like me, in a way, after digging out their roots. What once was lost but now is found.”

  Odd, somewhere in the recesses of Kate’s auditory canal she really could hear the pipes, slowly building behind the muzak.

  “You should’ve heard me practicing, for years I was scaring the jackdaws from their nests. The neighbors went about with their eyes all screwed up, painful like. It’s hard to hide your mistakes when you’re playing the great highland pipes.” With a small chime Alexander put the glass back into its rack and chose another. His long, strong fingers traced its rim round and round, then plunged inside. Kate could see her own distorted reflection in the bowl.

  “You’re a writer, then?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, even though she’d denied it earlier today, like Peter denying Christ. “Well, I took a couple of writing courses. One instructor had us writing for the local newspaper, small and safe. The other gave us formulas for stories. I sent out a few, but never sold any. The classes were all just theory, not practice . . .” She almost said, like sex, where practice rarely meets the imagination. “Then I tried journaling. But why write about my life when what I want is to get beyond my life? I keep hearing David Balfour whispering behind my back . . .”

  “David Balfour from Kidnapped?” Alexander asked.

  “From the sequel, actually. When long, long after Culloden, after the Jacobite cause had crashed and burned and Charlie was back in France, Alan Breck says he’ll go on fighting. And Balfour tells him not to bother, no one wants him to go on, it’s all over.”

  “Ah well, David Balfour was always a bit of a prick, I’m thinking.”

  Kate surprised herself with a laugh.

  “Oh aye, Alan should’ve given up the war. That’s history for you, dead cold. But you’re making your own history, aren’t you? You’re telling stories. Tales that’re more real than the reality.”

  Kate couldn’t believe she was talking so openly and honestly. It was like toweling off in front of the window. But shameful as the flesh was, it wasn’t as shameful as raw emotion. . . . The whisky had loosened her tongue. She should’ve known better, letting herself get drunk, not just on alcohol but on Alexander’s voice, like the whisky mellow and tart, acid and smooth.

  She stroked the smooth glass and the polished wood of the bar. No, her fingertips weren’t numb either. And she really could hear the pipes, ranting to a rock beat, backed by the high, pure soprano of a penny whistle and the alto keening of a fiddle, not quite on key, not quite off, and a snare drum like her own heartbeat beneath the music. The notes looped round and round and came out where they went in, Celtic interlace in sound. She wanted to leap up and pump her fist in the air. Or pick up a sword and kill an Englishman. Or vault over the bar and embrace Alexander.

  She looked up. He was still watching her, his eyes the silvered indigo of the sea. Humoring a paying customer, no doubt—got a live one here, help pay for the band. But while there was humor in his expression it was wry rather than mocking. Slight creases at the corners of his mouth made her wonder suddenly if he was as young as she’d thought.

  The couple walked across floor entwined. Kate hoped they could make it upstairs. She didn’t want to find them going at it on the staircase. It was hard to remember what it was like to be that turned on. Even though something was melting down t
hrough her gut right now, something more than alcohol, more than music. She laughed again.

  Alexander looked from the couple back to her with a knowing grin. Kate didn’t blush. Her face was already hot with whisky. The lad, the young man, the piper—he was reading her mind. She’d had too much to drink, too much to think. “Good night,” she said, and discovered to her surprise she could still stand up.

  “Good night,” said Alexander.

  She walked a more or less straight path from the room, met the muzak, bland and unthreatening, in the hall, and left it behind as she climbed the staircase.

  Outside her window the sun was a rosy gleam in the southwest and the sky was Prussian blue, clear and deep. Kate hoped to see a ghostly army marching across the parking lot, a parade of disembodied souls, figments of memory. But she saw nothing but sheep grazing on the hillside below the black crest of the castle. Out of a harsh land, strength. Out of a long memory, beauty. . . . Was it Plato who’d said memory was the mother of the muses?

  Yes, she liked it here, this land where past and present interlaced, where the rueful acceptance of necessity didn’t dull the imagination but whetted it. Even if she was seeing the world not through rose-colored glasses but whisky-colored ones. “Thanks, Alexander.”

  Kate turned out the bedside lamp and watched the long, slow twilight fade into darkness. The sheets warmed to her body and emitted the faint aroma of sea air. She was just teetering unbalanced on the precipice of sleep, a moment away from that long glide into nothingness, when she heard the pipes again, remote but insistent.

  The music drew her out and down. Rocks split the foaming surf below her, teeth around a gaping mouth. What the . . . She hit, hard, the breath knocked out of her, and the waves rolled her over and pulled her down. But instead of the hollow ring of deep water she heard music swelling around her, music that danced and marched and cried all at once.