by Robin Hardy
Then came the one event of that memorable day that no one had planned exactly as it happened. Howie could hear shouts from the throng. Then someone was running towards him. An instant later a man was grovelling in front of Howie and Lord Summerisle had quickly moved forward raising his hands to halt the procession, before the man should be trampled underfoot. Howie recognized him almost at once as Beech, the self-styled guardian and king of the sacred grove.
Lord Summerisle seemed excited at what had occurred and as Sorrel, the gillie, hurried up to lead her brother away he restrained her and gently raised Beech’s head so that the poor deluded man could look up at Howie. What Beech saw in the sergeant was a man transfigured by pride and dignity. A man absolutely confident that if he was not to be saved here, then he would shortly be in heaven. Beech’s lips moved wordlessly as he gazed at the sergeant.
‘Perhaps he is trying to say ecce homo to you, Howie!’ said Lord Summerisle, fascinated by Beech’s conversion.
‘God forgive you your blasphemy!’ said Howie, simply, to Lord Summerisle.
‘The King. There is the real King!’ shouted Beech, getting to his feet and pointing out Howie to the congregation.
‘The real King’s name is Jesus. Go and read about Him!’ said Howie quietly to Beech, planting the seed of a new faith in the man.
Sorrel was now able to lead her brother away. He went meekly with her, back to his place in the procession. The drum started its beat again and Howie now led them with a firm tread right to the foot of the Wicker Man. The islanders had spread around the edifice in a great circle.
Oak carried the trussed Howie up the stairs of the Wicker Man, holding the helpless sergeant upon his shoulder. Having laid him upon the floor of the central cage, Oak hastily left and padlocked the door, which had three one-foot-square windows in it, through which Howie was able to look out at the throng of islanders more than forty-five feet below him.
Lord Summerisle stood at the foot of the steps facing the tangerine sun. An irreverent and silhouetted flock of gulls, momentarily all but eclipsed the deity but then the laird cried aloud the Lord’s Prayer of Summerisle.
‘Nuada, Great God of the Sun
Hear Summerisle!
Giver of all life
Ender of night
Accept this our anointed King
Our sacrifice.
Give us music, love
Health, crops and joy.
Nuada, make our island fruit!’
Then the islanders all turned and faced the sun and, bowing their heads, responded.
‘Nuada, mighty God of the Sun, accept our sacrifice!’
‘Reverence the sacrifice,’ said Lord Summerisle.
The islanders turned once more to face and reverence Howie, who was searching the darkening sky for any sign of an aircraft–the ocean for any sighting of a ship. There was none. Not that he didn’t realize that it was far too late to save him now, but he still was policeman enough to hope that the blaze they were about to make would attract some attention. For he could understand, now, what Lord Summerisle had meant by ‘There will be no traces!’ Also he’d been waiting for a chance to focus the attention of the islanders on one last message he had to give them. He must, before it was too late, tell them the absolute truth of their situation in the Word of the true God, as the Scripture had told it.
Therefore, while Lord Summerisle had the ladder taken down, Howie sought, in his memory, the fire and brimstone passage that the minister had addressed to them at times when he felt that Portlochlie had so far sunk into iniquity that the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah might soon overtake it. It was odd how apposite it was, as it came back to him.
‘Hear ye the words of the Lord,’ he shouted. ‘Repent ye heathens! And howl! For it is the Lord who has laid waste your orchards.
It is He who hath made them bare.
Because the truth is
withered away from …
the sons of men.
Desire shall fail …
… and ye shall all die accursed!’
He looked at them now that he’d spoken his last words, or rather God’s words to them. They gazed up at him with an implacable curiosity mixed with awe. He realized that they were not killing him because they hated or feared or despised him, rather the reverse, but mainly because it was expedient. More, in their eyes, his death was vital. Beech alone, of the whole congregation, applauded his words and seemed to be weeping for him. The others ignored Beech, tolerant in their acceptance of a single, mad individual as an aberration to be expected in any flock.
Lord Summerisle gave a signal to the torchbearers and they stepped forward and lit the piles of brushwood. Howie could smell the burning long before he could see any smoke, let alone the flames. At the same time as the lighting of the brushwood at the feet of the Wicker Man, a drum gave four enormous beats, and, led by Lord Summerisle, the entire congregation started to sing:
‘Summer is acumin’ in
Loudly sing Cuckoo
Grow the seed and blows the mead
And springs the wood anew.
Sing Cuckoo!
Ewe bleats harshly after lamb
Cows after calves make moo
Bullock stamps and deer champs
Now shrilly sing Cuckoo …
… Cuckoo … Cuckoo.
Wild bird are you! Be never still Cuckoo!’
The poor animals were in a pandemonium of screaming and cackling and honking as they could hear and smell the fire mounting the edifice towards them. Howie looked out at the individual islanders as they all stood swaying and singing with a communal joy. Willow’s expression was indistinguishable from Old Loam’s expression, in spite of her beauty and his hideousness. Lord Summerisle’s exultant look was exactly mirrored by that of Rowan and Sorrel and Miss Rose and May Morrison and Cuckoo and Lark and Swallow and the rosy-cheeked girl who had so prophetically called ‘Alive, alive … oooh!’
Howie was reminded of having seen, one night on BBC television, the replaying of a famous documentary about the Nuremberg Rally. It had been called Triumph of the Will. Lots of well-scrubbed blond people with expressions just like this congregation. Of course, they hadn’t burned anyone there, as far as he could remember. That had come later.
He realized he still didn’t know if he was the first of their human sacrifices, but he knew, looking at their faces as they sang, that he wouldn’t be the last.
Some pigs below him were meeting their death with the most frightful shrieks, and Howie could see that the whole of the trunk of the edifice around him had taken fire, while his feet were already blistering in the extreme heat.
The inactivity of waiting for death was almost as dreadful as listening to the sound of it all around him.
In one patch at the side of his cage the flames were already intruding, leaving a hole through which he could see one of the arms of the Wicker Man–in which wood pigeons, plovers, ducks, and geese were incarcerated, but whose cages had not yet caught fire.
Poor Howie had to hop about on the now burning floor but he was able to get his wrists to the flames where they were coming through the wicker side of the Man. He remembered, as he deliberately burned through the ropes that tied his wrists, how much more painful a burn was a little time after the actual burning process had singed the flesh. Painful now, but not yet the pain that was to come. With God’s grace it might consume him entirely, this fire, before that lingering agony ever reached him. Meanwhile the sight of the birds in the as yet unburned arm had given him an idea. He looked at his lacerated wrists and blackened hands and experimented with his fingers. The tendons worked well although the pain of working them made him shout. He kept on shouting now, for shouting he could keep moving. And moving he could still take action.
His mission in coming to this infernal island had been to find a child. If he could only save some of the increasingly terrified birds he could see in the Wicker Man’s arm he might not count his police mission here an entire failure. For that as
pect of what was happening to him he kept quite separate in his mind from the witness he’d been able to give to his faith, and from which he felt a growing exaltation, as his death crept closer. He kept Mary Bannock deliberately from his thoughts for he knew he could not think of his grief for her and act, at the same time, to save the birds. He was certain that his soul and Mary’s soul were both assured an eternity of bliss. Earthly bliss was not God’s will for them.
‘Amen!’ he shouted.
He had noticed that there were big joists of wood in each corner of his cage. If he could tear one of these away from the burning fabric of the wicker, he might be able to poke it through the hole and so force open the cages in the Wicker Man’s arm. First he took off the white garment, the hem of which was already on fire, and stood naked in his cage, bellowing at the pain of his burning feet, but determined still to try to free the birds. He pulled and yanked at the joist with his bleeding, blistering hands, until it came away. Then he rushed to the hole in the side of his cage.
Looking down he could see the swirling, twenty-foot flames from the tarred tree trunks that were the Wicker Man’s legs. The wickered fingers of the arm were already burning. He could see that each group of birds in their small cages was enclosed by a door with a latch and pin mechanism, and that he had only to use his joist to lift the pins. Wiping the sweat from his eyes, he tried to aim the end of the joist so that the pin could be knocked up and out of the latch. It worked. But with the door of their cage open, the pigeons were too frightened, at first, to move. Howie used his remaining strength to resist his mounting agony and to open three more cages that were within his reach. By that time the pigeons had started to flutter out in ones and twos. Soon the other birds, scared into motion by the sudden roar and crackle of the ‘hand’ below them catching fire, started to take wing. Howie watched them in triumph, even as he screamed again.
‘Jesus!’ he shrieked. Then he committed the last conscious act the ebbing span of his life permitted.
In his flaming, smoke-filled cage, he spoke direct to his God in words it had been his pleasure to learn and remember as a child. He took a deep breath from a corner of the cage unfilled with smoke.
‘O, God,’ whispered Sergeant Neil Howie in his last moment, for only by whispering could he keep his lungs clear of smoke, ‘Whose nature is ever to show mercy and forbearance, I humbly entreat Thee, for the soul of this Thy servant, Neil Howie, who will today depart from this world. Do not deliver me into the enemy’s hands or put me out of mind forever, but bid Thy holy angels welcome me and lead me home to Paradise. Let me not undergo the real pains of hell, because I die unshriven, but establish me in that bliss which knows no ending …’
The floor collapsed before he had time to say ‘through Christ Our Lord. Amen’. But he thought it as he fell into the thirty-foot bonfire between the Wicker Man’s legs. He was immediately unconscious, and dead only ten seconds later. To the remaining animals God showed less mercy, but that was part of a riddle Sergeant Howie was now spared from the solving, for one must suppose he already knew part, or all, of the answer.
The congregation sang on. Their eyes shone and the heat of the fire flushed their faces as they watched the whole sixty-foot man ablaze. In the mounting wind that was coming off the sea, the flames tore upward till the figure seemed to breathe and stir like a vast living thing.
The watching sun settled its rim, just kissing the ocean, and the escaped birds wheeled high above the huge graven image of that creature of whom it was once said, ‘If animals could conceive of a devil his image would be man’s.’
A few minutes later, as the sun was setting on the horizon like a spreading, melting clot of cream, the Wicker Man collapsed, and the voices of its victims were mercifully hushed at last. The good people of Summerisle wandered home tired after their holy day. The flambeaux men stayed with the bonfire to see it was all reduced to ashes. Carts were arriving for a collection of the residue; it would be diligently spread in the wake of the plough when the time came for the new fruit tree planting that year.
Summer was acumin’ in.
And as for Howie, it would be good to think that all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1978 by Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1978.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49878-6
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