Where the World Ends

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Lachlan, Keeper of the Flame, got up and tended gently to the two petrel-candles glimmering on their ledges like holy icons on a church wall. Instead of joining the hue-and-cry to Raft Bay, he had climbed, instead, to Upper Bothy – despite his burns, despite his fatigue – and salvaged the still-burning stumps of two petrel lanterns, fetching them tenderly down again to light the place he thought of as Home.

  In the days that followed, he even began speaking to the candle-birds, as someone might to the saints in a stained-glass window – thanking them, bidding them goodnight as, from day to day, one bird burned down to its feet, and Lachlan passed on its flame to the next and the next and the next…

  If they ever went out, how would more be relit? What when the last cleit was empty of birds…? It was a question Lachlan never asked himself, for what then would be the need for a Keeper of the Flame?

  Col Cane survived the crossing. They knew it from the smell of roasting lamb and the pillar of turf smoke rising. Cane might be a castaway cursed with solitude; his hopes might be dashed of having the last and only woman on earth to himself; but he was eating roast lamb in front of a fire, wearing wool within his shirt, and his view was of home.

  “It is a signal, at least,” said Domhnall Don several times a day, cradling the agony of his arm, rocking forward and back. “They’ll look over from Hirta and see that we are living still.”

  “If there is anyone left to see it,” muttered Farriss. And the boys hissed at him through their teeth, writhing with resentment. At least Cane had offered them Heaven, angels, Judgement Day. At least Don was offering them family and hope. Farriss’s only explanation lay in tragedy, in having been utterly forgotten, and in a god who had turned his back and walked away.

  Parliament convened in Midway Bothy to discuss the situation.

  On Hirta, the Parliament of Elders met every morning but Sundays, the men of the island sitting on benches in The Street, their backs against the walls of the cottages, wearing their tam-o’-shanters. The people of Hirta laboured in the service of the Owner, far off in Harris, and dutifully paid their rent, in eggs, birds, feathers and oil, to the Owner’s Steward. But the day-to-day running of the island was decided and organized by Parliament: it set the tasks for the day. Heckled by birds, watched by the women in their doorways, interrupted by toddlers and dogs and an occasional blunder of sheep, Parliament studied the weather and made seasoned judgements according to the colour of the sky, the direction of the wind, the lambs due, the fullness of the cleits and, above all, any omens witnessed, good or bad.

  Omens seemed even more important here on Warrior Stac than they had on Hirta.

  With Col Cane no longer controlling their waking day, it felt only right to restore Parliament. The older boys were allowed to have their say. No sheep, babies, dogs or ponies disrupted proceedings. They tried to exclude John, on the grounds she was a woman, but she was having none of it.

  The first decision they made was to send Murdo and Quilliam to Upper Bothy, to fetch down anything of use that Cane had left behind. Egg baskets, for instance, and storm-petrel-lamps. They were told, too, to watch out for omens. Everyone was to watch out for omens.

  Cane had taken the sack of feathers with him to Boreray, but in the middle of the floor, amid the bones of cooked gugas, still lay the under-mattress Col had made himself out of a dozen woven egg baskets, their delicate craftsmanship crushed by Cane’s bodyweight into nothing but a pile of chaff. For a moment, the sheer waste brought Quilliam to a standstill.

  Also strewing the floor, however, were a great many white slips of paper. Murdo began to gather them up. “Bible bits,” he said, and thrust a handful at Quill, partly because Quill had an unaccountable liking for the printed word, but mostly in case a wrecked Bible counted as an omen. Quill shoved as many pages as he could inside his clothing, gathered up a row of petrel-candles, a bladder of oil and another of gannet butter, and steeled himself for the climb down. There were three long, stiff feathers, too – from a sea eagle, maybe.

  “Will we take some of this straw for kindling?” asked Murdo. But after pushing a fistful of it inside his shirt, he decided that kindling was not worth the prickling, and they left it. On the return climb, they were startled repeatedly by flickers of white on the Stac wall: more pages from Cane’s Bible. Still more escaped from Quill’s clothing, like gulls leaving their roosts.

  Back at Midway Bothy, John was asked to explain.

  “He did this curse thing,” she said, as Quill presented crumpled fistfuls of pages to Mr Farriss. “After some numpty came and cut up his trews, he did this damning thing. Bell-book-and-candle, he called it.”

  “He excommunicated…?” Farriss stopped short of naming Euan.

  “What y’do is open the Bible upside down, y’say something spiteful than y’shut the Bible and blow out the candle and ring a bell to make something bad happen to whoever… Dunna know what… But Cane had no bell, so he had me say ‘dong dong’ whenever he wagged his finger. And the candle had a poor wick and wouldna light. And he opened the book too wide in his raging, and the stitches broke and the pages spilled out in a great waterfall, and that put him to cursing the trews-slasher even more, because the Reverend Buchan give him that Bible for all he couldna read.”

  Euan turned white with terror at the idea of being cursed, bell-book-and-candle. However low his opinion of the “Minister” had fallen, Euan believed so powerfully in ritual and ceremony that he feared Cane – bell or no bell – had cut him off from all hope of Heaven.

  “Nah. I say the angels ripped the Good Book from his hands,” said Quill, “before Cane could do a devilish thing. They are kind that way, angels. Elsewise the curse would’ve fallen on Cane’s own head ’cos of him being not the real thing. Only ministers with reading and numbers can do proper cursing. Y’need a badge. Is that no’ right, Mr Don?”

  Domhnall Don, apparently roused from the laborious task of putting the loose pages in order one-handed, nodded earnestly. “The Church of Scotland hasna given out one such badge since the days of King Malcolm.”

  And so the curse of bell, book and candle was lifted, though those spilled pages continued to circle the Stac on a north-easterly wind, seeding the ledges and crags with words. In search of something they could burn to keep warm, the boys went after bird nests, as once they had gone after the birds. And if, while they were out there, a page was found, caught on a clump of dead sea-thrift or fluttering between two stones, it would be brought back and read aloud – like a horoscope – for signs, warnings, encouragement. Hope.

  Winter cold arrived. Invisible, it stood at the mouth of the cave: there was no door to keep it out. Cold came in and sat down among them, like one of the blue-green men who lived in the sea, whose very bodies were the sea. Cold laid clammy hands on their necks and kidneys, their hands and feet. It twanged on their muscles like a harpist. Their blood slowed, mushy with ice. Their tongues froze to a silence, and in the silence they could hear the waves break far below, one by one, two, three, four, five, six… No! Mustn’t count to nine or the Kilda Gloom will…

  “Keeper of Memories, what do you have for us?” said Domhnall Don, and Niall could not, for a moment open the sea-chest inside his head to fetch out a reminiscence: its lock was frozen solid.

  “My dog Rory is the best ever for puffins,” John volunteered. “I put him to a burrow and in he goes, good and deep. The puffins go for him, and bite his fur in their beaks, then out he comes covered in puffins, like clothes pegs, all over everywhere.”

  “That is a singular dog,” said Domhnall Don solemnly.

  Talk of the puffins sparked a different memory from Calum. “When my sister was Queen of Kilda, she led the girls’ fowling party to Boreray, hunting puffins. All girls. They took 277 in one single day!”

  A murmur of admiration ran round the cave, for all the memory had been told a dozen times already.

  “If they go again next year,” said Niall, “they’ll find Col Cane in the Hermit’s House, and h
e’ll tell them where we are.”

  The remark was punished with another blast of icy wind. The rocks in the windbreak shifted and creaked.

  “Tell again about the grease pudding and the whale, Quill,” said Davie, gibbering with cold. The fish heads and crab legs boiling in the cooking pot bobbed about as if they, too, were eager to hear it.

  It broke Quill’s train of thought. Murdina had just been asking him to show her the Stone of Knowledge on Hirta. So he had been taking her there on the first day of the moon’s quarter, helping her climb up onto the rock, hollowed and smoothed by generations of feet. And as she stood there, her hand resting on the top of his head, the power of second sight had come into her, and she had seen as far as next Easter, and her brown eyes had widened and her fingers tightened in his hair and she said… You and I, Quill, will surely…

  Then Davie’s question broke over him and washed away the scene like a picture scraped in the sand. He extricated his own fingers from his hair and put on his cap. “Tell it yoursel’, since you know it,” he snapped.

  Davie recoiled. Farriss uncurled out of his customary position facing the Bothy wall. Cold filled up the space beside Quill’s knees where Davie had been sitting. Quill dipped his head and concentrated on extracting horsehair from one of the ropes. He was making more wicks to thread through petrels, even though there were few petrels left. Keeping busy.

  Several boys had outgrown their boots since coming to the Stac. No amount of gannet grease would make the leather stretch or soften enough to fit growing feet. So Murdo passed his to Calum and was left only with his climbing socks. Calum’s boots went to Lachlan, and Lachlan gave his to Niall. The exchange played out like a ritual, sombrely, momentously, because a pair of boots is a precious possession and hard to part with. Boots hold the shape of their owners: at the funeral of Euan’s father, Quill could remember the widow holding a pair of her husband’s shoes, stroking the contours of worn leather as hollow now as her heart.

  Kenneth would not part with his boots, preferring to prise upper from sole to make room for his toes. But the rest made the gift freely. No payment was asked. The fowlers simply had it in mind to care for each other, being the only people in the world left to care.

  “I never had boots before,” said Niall with reverent awe. “Thank you, Lachlan! Thank you!”

  Domhnall Don, meanwhile, sat using his left hand to stitch gannet skin over several pairs of ragged, ravelling climbing socks. Keeping busy.

  Farriss gave his own boots to Murdo, saying he would not need them any more.

  “Keeper of Music,” said Murdo, his voice high in his throat. “D’you know that song that goes Mah daddy left me riches…?”

  And Calum sang, in the large, man’s voice he had grown into.

  “Mah daddy left me riches fine:

  A fishing rod without a line,

  A pair of shoes with leather soles

  And half a hundred big wee holes…”

  Seated beside Murdo, John gave a small squirm of surprise as an arm crept round her waist. She looked down at the errant hand as it spread its fingers across her ribcage. Then she glared at Murdo. The hand withdrew faster than it had come.

  John got up and moved to sit on the other side of the cave, next to Kenneth.

  “…A whistle and a babby’s spoon,

  The lamplight of a crescent moon…

  A flying-over skein of geese,

  The colour red, the whiff of cheese,

  The ring of bells, the sound of news,

  A herd of unseen faery cows…”

  As Keeper of Needles John was struggling to turn some fish-bones into needles, but the delicate spines kept breaking. “Can I be Keeper of some other thing?” she said, throwing them aside in disgust.

  “Ya can be Keeper o’ this,” said Kenneth and pushed her hand between his legs, at which point she discovered well enough a use for a very sharp fish-bone. After sticking one into Kenneth, she moved to sit beside the singer.

  “An eye to wink, a mouth to lie

  An’ wings that never learned to fly.

  Mah daddy left me riches fine,

  So tell me, maid, shall you be mine?” sang Calum, turning to address the last lines to John, who turned red with embarrassment and groaned loudly.

  Murdo, meanwhile, had picked up the crab shells littering the floor and begun surrounding himself with the small, pink carapaces. All eyes were gradually drawn to what he was doing.

  Generally, last thing at night, Mr Farriss would dose the boys with fulmar oil, squirting the rust-red liquor directly into each mouth from a gannet gut. It was an all-purpose medicine for aching limbs, coughs, toothache, sprains and nausea. All of these afflicted one or more of the boys. But the thing that afflicted them all, after months on the Stac, was constipation, and the mighty fulmar oil was the only remedy to be had. No one turned it down, that slimy, stinking ooze the colour of old blood. But tonight Murdo served it in eleven crab shells and set one down, reverently, in front of each person in the cave. Then he raised his own between two hands. “Sevenfold blessing to our friends, and the strong rope in time of need!”

  The familiar toast made every soul draw a sharp breath. They had said it a hundred times at home in their houses: at Sunday dinners, weddings and christenings, funerals, horse races and sheep-slayings, New Year, Easter and All Saints Day. How had they never thought to say it on Warrior Stac?

  “Sevenfold blessings to our friends, and the strong rope in time of need!” they chorused, the words bumping and overlapping as clumsily as eleven men and boys crowded together in a small cave.

  In the days that followed, this new ritual became so embedded in the day that they spoke it with one voice. “Sevenfold blessings to our friends, and the strong rope in time of need!”

  When the birds were all gone, and the fulmar oil had run out, they used rainwater instead.

  They shook hands with each other, too, before they slept. After all, Crow Cold had come to roost in Midway Bothy. It pecked holes in the skin of their faces, it stole the feeling from noses and fingertips and ears. It hopped about among their sleeping places, spread its claws on their throats, feeling for heat. And the little winged candles on the ledges, burning down from crown to feet, were too small to drive it away. There was a good chance Crow Cold would one night steal a life or two while they slept.

  Quill dreamed that Murdina asked to climb to the top of Conachair. But a cap of white cloud had draped itself over both Conachair and Oiseval and, as the two of them climbed into its clammy whiteness they were instantly lost. Quill called and called to her: nothing but seagulls answered him.

  “Be careful, a chiall mo chridhe! Ye canna fly!” he shouted and, in panic, began to pluck at the wreathing mist, as he would pluck his sheep for their wool. When he woke he found he had baldified a patch of the cap he rested his head on to sleep.

  He also found Murdo’s hand over his mouth. “Y’were yaldering of her,” he hissed.

  The clammy cold of his dream persisted despite waking. Warrior Stac was wound in a dense sea mist and any face pushed out-of-doors was instantly a-trickle with water drops. The little ones decided the Stac was being lifted up (like St Kilda’s kirk) into the clouds, swore they could feel movement, and clung to the walls for fear a jolt propelled them out of the cave mouth and into empty air. Befuddled by sleep, Quill could not understand how the weather of his dream could have leeched out of his head and filled up the whole Atlantic.

  Farriss and Don sat with their hats over their mouths: sickness clings to the water drops of a dank sea mist; it can leave a man with lung fever and a graveyard cough. There was no thought of venturing outside.

  An uncanny silence fell, every sound muffled by the fog: it was as if Time itself had stopped. Only the two petrel-candles, burning down from head to foot, marked the passing of the day. At around about noon, one went out, its flame extinguished by the sheer dampness of the air.

  The world outside appeared to moan, but it was the sound of
a wind suddenly rising. The temperature dropped so low that a rag of mist moved freely into the cave. Like a bolt of cloth it unwound and rewound itself into a column of cold, then took on a shape for all the world resembling a man – ragged white hair, holes for eye sockets, a greatcoat aswirl round its feet. Pieces fell away, like rotting flesh from a carcass. The phantom’s breath blew out the second candle.

  “’Tis the ghost of Fearnach Mor,” said Mr Farriss flatly as he might have said, during lessons, This is brown kelp. Here is Egypt on the map.

  Chaos exploded. Domhnall Don roared like a lion, a noise that was supposed to mean Nonsense! but which only increased the alarm. Children curled themselves into balls. John covered her face with both hands at the same time as starting to run, and banged her head on the roof. Kenneth hurled a puffin at the apparition. The bird passed through it and landed on the back of Calum’s neck as he crouched with his forehead pressed to the floor, and made him scream that Mor “had him by the scruff”. Murdo laughed hysterically, and Quilliam, in trying to get up, found Davie was clinging to his legs, and fell over on top of him. Lachlan and Niall scurried, on hands and knees, out of the cave, onto the rock shelf outside, like sheep with a sheepdog on their heels.

  “Mor died in the sea, y’fools!” said Don with a casual air that was supposed to quell the hysteria. “His spirit’s in some petrel now, walking the waves.”

  But Kenneth waved his hands in frantic denial: “Nah! Nah! Quill found his bones down below! Head an’ all! He’s here on the Stac! He’s here on the Stac!”

  Quill tried to extricate himself from Davie’s grip and to explain about the dead seal, and how he had been spinning Kenneth a line…

  And then, in a voice so clarion clear that it filled the cave as ringing fills a bell: