The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  On Merrial’s lap, with her left arm—crooked like mine—protectively over it, lay a bulky poke of polished leather, fastened with a drawstring thong. It may have bulged a little larger, and weighed a little heavier, than the kind of bags that lasses tend to lug around, but it would have taken a close and sharp observer to notice. Inside it, concealed by a layer of the sort of oddments one would expect to find in such a poke—a cambric kerchief, cosmetics, smallbore ammunition and the like—was the complicated apparatus that Fergal had delivered to her house early on the Sunday evening. It was built around a seer-stone about fifteen centimetres in diameter, nested in neat coils of insulated copper wire. The strangest aspect, to me, of this device was an arrangement of delicate levers, each marked with a letter of the alphabet, queerly ordered: QWERTYUIOP… Probably, I thought, a spell.

  “Grotty old place,” said Merrial, rubbing her face with her hands and looking around the damp, flag-stoned concourse of Inverness station. Her cheeks reddened, her eyes widened under the smooth friction of her palms. Her dress, this time of blue velvet, looked a bit rumpled. We were standing at the coffee-bar, having twenty minutes to wait for the 8.30 to Glasgow.

  I looked up at the creosoted roof with its wide skylight panels and suspended electric lamps. “At least it doesn’t have pigeons.”

  “Can’t say herring-gulls are much of an improvement.” She kicked out with one booted foot, sending a hungry, red-eyed bird squawking away. One end of the station opened to the platforms, the other to the main street. The arrangement seemed peculiarly adapted to set up cold but unrefreshing draughts. Despite its mossy walls and paving, the station was more recent than the buildings outside, most of which pre-dated the Deliverance, if not all three of the world wars.

  I finished my bacon roll, smiled at Merrial—who was mumbling, half to herself and around mouthfuls of her own breakfast, some irritated speculation about the degenerative evolution of scavenging sea-birds—and wandered over to the news-stand. There I stocked up on cigarettes and bought a copy of the Press and Journal, a newspaper which outdoes even the West Highland Free Press in its incorrigible parochialism and venerable antiquity. Most of its pages consisted of small advertisements, to do with fishing, farming, uranium and petroleum mining and, of course, Births, Marriages and Deaths. The last of these could take up half a tall column of small print: “Dolleen Starholm, peacefully in her sleep, aged 251 years, beloved great-great-grandmother of…” followed by scores of names; and sometimes (as in this case) the discreet indication of cult affiliation: “RIP” or “IHS”. More frequent, and more prominent, were proud affirmation of the orthodox hope: “Returned by the Flame” (or the Sky or the Sun or the Sea) “to the One”.

  I went back to the counter and, while Merrial finished off her breakfast, scanned the sparse snippets of national and international news that had managed to wedge their way in among the earth shak-ingly important football and shinty reports, fishing disputes and Council debates.

  The Congress of Paris had ceremonially opened its ninety-seventh year of deliberations, and had immediately plunged into bitter controversy about a proposal to empower the Continental Court to adjudicate border problems between cantons and communes; the apparently more difficult matter of disagreements between countries having been resolved by the Congress long ago, its success had apparently gone to its collective head.

  I sighed and turned the page. Another American republic had voted a contribution from tariff revenue to the spaceship project, which was gratifying but mysterious—there was even an editorial comment about it, full of sage mutterings about how their ways were not ours, and that we should not disdain such assistance, immoral though it might seem to us. I wasn’t too sure; to me, it smelt of stealing money, but the Americans have a much greater reverence for their governments than people have in more civilised lands. If offered some loot by an African king or Asian magnate or South American cacique, I should hope the International Scientific Society would politely decline, and this case seemed little different. But all of this was, at this moment, quite theoretical, as no such offer, and indeed no news at all, from Asia or Africa appeared in today’s edition. I rolled it up and decided to leave the national news until later.

  Menial brushed crumbs from her lips and looked at me with amusement. “You really look as though you’re paying attention to all that,” she said, picking up her leather poke. I hitched my canvas satchel on my shoulder and we strolled to the Glasgow train.

  “Well, I do follow the news,” I said, somewhat defensively, as we took our seats, this time facing each other across a table. “What’s wrong with that?”

  Menial shrugged. “It’s so… ephemeral,” she said. “And unreliable.”

  “Compared with what?”

  “Don’t misunderstand me,” she said. “I’m sure this, what is it—” she reached for the paper, and spread it out “—Congress here is real, and really did do what the article says it did. But it is only a tiny part of the truth, and perhaps not the most important part of what is going on there in Paris. Let alone what is going on elsewhere in Paris. So that, and all the other such pieces give you, really, a false picture of the world.”

  I could have been offended, but was not. “I’m a scholar of history, remember?” I said. “I understand how newspaper reports, even documents aren’t everything—”

  “Oh, you don’t want to hear what I think about historical documents.”

  “So what else can you do?”

  She frowned at me, puzzled. “You travel around and find things out for yourself.”

  “Aye, if only we all had the time.”

  She touched the tip of my nose with the tip of her finger. “It’s what tinkers do, and they have all the time in their lives for it.”

  The train pulled out, the Moray Firth in sight at first, with its kelp fields and fish-farms, and then nothing to see for a while but the close-packed pines of Drumossie Wood as the train turned and the engines took the strain of the long, slow ascent to Slochd.

  A couple of hours later, maybe, after Speyside of the malts and bleak Drumochter, we were in the long and beautiful glens between Blair Atholl and Dunkeld. On one side of the line were streams full of trout and turbines, on the other hillsides buzzing with the saws and drills of workshops. The train stopped for five minutes at Dunkeld. A small, old town of stone, still with its Christian cathedral.

  Merrial looked out of the windows, around at the scene, and sat back with a slight shudder.

  “A strange place,” she said, “with the hills around it like an ambush.”

  “But that’s why it’s a great place,” I said, and told her the story of how the Cameronians had held off the Highland host and saved the Revolution to which they owed their freedom. She listened with more interest, even, than my telling of the tale deserved, and leaned back at the end and said, “Aye well, maybe there’s some use to history, after all. I’ll never be afraid of these hills again.”

  * * *

  It was two in the afternoon by the time the train reached Glasgow’s Queen Street Station, and glad enough we were to get off it. Sometimes two people who can fascinate each other endlessly when alone together, and who can spark off each other in convivial company, find themselves inhibited among strangers who are unignorably in earshot, and find themselves growing shy and silent and stale. So it was with us, towards the end of that journey. I couldn’t even find it in my heart to talk about the Battle of Stirling when we passed through the town.

  We both brightened, though, on jumping down on the platform. The familiar Glasgow railway-station smell—of currying fish, and curing leaf, and spark-gapped air, and old iron and wood-alcohol and hot oil and burnt vanilla—hit my sinuses like a shot of poteen. Menial, too, seemed invigorated by it, taking a deep breath of the polluted stench with a look of satisfaction and nostalgia.

  “Ah, it’s good to be back,” she said.

  I glanced sidelong at her as we walked down the platform. “When were you in Glasgow?
And how could I have missed you?”

  She smiled and squeezed my hand. “Oh, I forget. Ages ago. But the smell brings it back.”

  “That and the noise.”

  “The what?”

  “THE—”

  But she was laughing at me.

  We crossed the station concourse, agreeing that, on balance, pigeons were a worse nuisance than sea-birds (though, as Menial gravely pointed out, better eating). This comment, and some of the more appetising components of the smell, reminded us that we were ravenous, so we bought sandwiches and botties of beer from a stall in the station and carried them out to George Square.

  We sat down on a bench by a grassy knoll under the statue of the Deliverer.

  “Shee that,” Menial said, pointing upwards as she munched. “It’sh mean.”

  “ What?”

  She swallowed. “The statue. The old city fathers must have been a bit stingy.”

  I looked up. “No argument about the city fathers,” I said. They’re still tight-fisted. But that statue looks fine to me.”

  “The horse is black,” Menial pointed out. She tapped the handle of her knife on a fetlock. “And cast in bronze. The lady herself is green—just copper. They got out the oxy-acetylene torches and hacked off the original rider, a king or general or whatever, and stuck the Deliverer in his place!”

  I stood up and paced around it, peering.

  “You’re right,” I said. “You can see the joins. I must have looked at that statue a hundred times, and not noticed anything wrong with it.” I looked up at the lady’s head. “And she has a different face from the one in Canon Town, and they’re both different from any pictures I’ve seen of the Deliverer.”

  “Well, there you go, colha Gree,” she said. “Some things a tinker can teach a scholar, eh?”

  “Oh aye,” I said. I sat down again. “Mind you, it could hardly be just parsimony—it’s a fine piece of work after all, and they’ve done her hair in gold.”

  Ton’s gold paint,” she said scornfully. “And as for artistry, the breed and the trappings of the horse are all wrong for the time and the circumstances.”

  She was right there, too, when I looked. This was no steppe horse, bare-back broken, roughly saddled, such as was shown quite authentically in Canon Square. Instead, it was a hussar’s mount, in elaborate caparison. But I thought then, and still think, that the representation of the Deliverer herself was well done. A fine example of the Glasgow style; which, perhaps, makes the equine bodge appropriate, and part of the artist’s point.

  We binned our litter and headed for the nearest tramway stop, in Buchanan Street. The transport system is one of Glasgow City Council’s proudest public works, a more than adequate replacement for the great Underground circle, which was—it’s said—one of the wonders of the ancient world. Judging by the remnants of it that here and there have outlasted centuries of flooding and subsidence, it is quite possible to agree that such it must have been.

  The tram came along, bell clanging, and we jumped on and paid our groats and clattered like children up the spiral steps to the upper deck. The bell rang again and the tram lurched forward, creaking up Buchanan Street and swaying as it turned the corner into Sauchiehall.

  Glasgow’s main drag looked clogged with traffic, but everything—steam-engine and motor-car and horse-cart and bicycle alike—made way for the tram’s implacable progress. The pedestrians, at this time of the day, were mosdy women shopping. But all of them, whether young lasses just out of school or mothers with young children or retired ladies at their leisure, had to pick up their skirts, their pokes or their weans and run for their lives when the tram bore down on a crossing. The shops and offices from recent centuries are built of logs and planks, and rarely go higher than two storeys. The older, pre-Deliverance buildings are of stone; some have as many as five floors. In ancient times there were much higher buildings, but most of them were made of concrete, which doesn’t last well, and—agonising though it may be for archaeology—almost all of their structures have long since been plundered for steel and glass. Their foundations give rectangular patterns to the growth of trees in the forests around Glasgow: Pollock Fields, Possil Wood, Partick Thorn.

  Farther away, to the west, we could just make out the haze and smoke from the Glydeside shipyards, on which most of Glasgow’s prosperity depended. The shipyards were the seedbed of the skills which—along with Kishorn’s deep-water dock, almost unique on this side of the Atlantic—had made Scotland the logical site for the launch-platform’s construction.

  At the top of Sauchiehall there’s a new stone bridge, to replace the original concrete one that has crumbled away. It carried us over the Eighth Motor Way and into Woodlands Road, which runs along beside the Kelvin Woods. (They, and the river that runs through them, are named after Lord Kelvin, who invented the thermometer.)

  We stepped off the tram at the crest of University Avenue, and stood for a moment looking at the main building, a huge and ancient pile called Gil-morehill. It looks like a piece of religious architecture that has run wild, but it is solely devoted to secular knowledge, a church of Man.

  “It’s not as old as it looks,” Menial said, as though determined not to be impressed. “That’s Victorian Gothic.”

  I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t argue. I had felt in its chill stone and warm wood the shades of Scotus and Knox and Kelvin, of Watt and Millar and Ferguson, and no disputed date could shake my conviction that the place was almost as old as the nation whose mind it had done so much to shape.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Anyway, the department we’re going to isn’t there.”

  “Just as well,” Merrial said.

  It was actually in one of the small side streets off University Avenue, all of whose buildings date back at least to the twentieth century. The trees that line it are probably as old, gigantic towers of branch and leaf, taller than the buildings. Their bulk darkened the street, the leaves of their first fall formed a slippery litter underfoot.

  “So we just walk up and knock on the door?” Merrial asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve got a key.”

  She glanced down at her leather bag. “And you’re sure we won’t be challenged?”

  “Aye, I’m sure,” I said. We’d been over this before. As a prospective student, with my project already accepted even if as yet unfunded, I had every right to be here—in fact, I should have been here more often, through the summer. So no one should question us, or our presence in the old archive. We’d planned how we’d do the job, but its proximity seemed to be making Merrial more nervous than I was.

  “All right,” she said.

  The key turned smoothly in the oiled lock, and the tongue clicked back. I pushed the heavy door aside and we stepped in. I locked it behind us. The place was silent, and as far as I could tell it was empty. The hallway was dim and cool, its pale yellow paint darkened by generations of nicotine, and it divided after a few metres into a narrower corridor leading deeper into the Institute and a stairway leading to the upper floors. The place had a curious musty odour of old paper and dusty electric lightbulbs, and a faint whiff of pipe-smoke. I checked the piles of unopened mail on the long wooden table at the side. A few notes for me, which a quick check revealed were refusals of various applications for patronage. I stuffed them in my jacket pocket and led the way up two flights of stairs to the library, switching on the fizzing electric lamps as we went.

  Menial wrinkled her nose as I opened the library door and switched on the lights.

  “Old paper.” I said.

  She smiled. “Dead flies.”

  I made to close the door after we entered the room, but Menial touched my arm and shook her head.

  “I couldn’t stand it,” she said.

  “You’re right, me neither.” The still, dead air made me feel short of breath.

  I held her hand, as much for my reassurance as for hers, as we threaded our way through the maze of ceiling-high book-cases. Menial, to my surp
rise, once or twice tugged to make me pause, while she scanned the titles and names on cracked and faded spines with a look of recognition and pleasure.

  “The Trial of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites!” she breathed. “Amazing! Do you know anything about that?”

  “It was some kind of public exorcism,” I said, hurrying her along. I’d once glanced into that grim grimoire myself, and the memory made me slightly nauseous. “People claimed they had turned into rabid dogs who would go out and wreck machinery. Horrible. What superstitious minds the communists had.”

  Menial chuckled, but shot me an oddly pleased look.

  At the far end of the library the ranks of bookcases stopped. Several tables and chairs were lined up there, apparently for study—but no one, to my knowledge, ever studied at them. The most anyone could do was to put down a pile of books or documents there for a quick inspection of their contents under the reading-lights, before rushing out of the library. I recalled Menial’s comment that people today are more claustrophobic than their ancestors.

  Beside these tables was another door, of iron, with a handle but no lock. The mere thought of the possibility of that door’s having a lock was enough to give me a cold sweat.

  “Here we are,” I said, and added, to make light of it, “the dark archive.”

  “What’s inside it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been in it.”

  She frowned. “Is it off limits, or what?”

  “No, no.” I shook my head. “It’s not forbidden or anything. Hardly anybody wants to go in.”

  “No point in hesitating,” said Merrial. “Let’s get it over with.”

  I turned the handle and pulled the door back. To fit with my feelings, it should have given off an eldritch squeak, but its heavy hinges were well-lubricated. A couple of times I worked the handle from the inside. It appeared to be in good order, but I dragged one of the chairs over and used it to prop the door open, just in case it closed accidentally.