Where the World Ends

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  So Quill saw when the boy’s small hands opened, like starfish, stark white in the lightning. “I dropped it!” Davie gasped and started to wriggle. “I dropped the Iron Finger!”

  “No matter.”

  “No! No! It’s the Iron Finger! It’s magic! And I dropped it! I’m the Keeper and I dropped it!” And he began to pat at the ground round about, panicked, appalled, frantic.

  “We’ll find it later, man. Stay sheltered.”

  “No! No! The rain’ll wash it away! I have to find it!” And Davie crawled away, out of the lee of the little stone turret, searching for a fish-hook, on a mountainside, in the pitch dark.

  “Davie. Here. Now. Get back here!”

  THERE, said the lightning, aiming its fiery wand at Warrior Stac expressly to illuminate a tiny twist of metal on a bare cragtop awash with rain. Davie fell on it with all-consuming joy and picked it up and held it high in a triumphant fist, for Quill to see. His mouth started to shout something.

  With the same triumphant glee, the wind picked up Davie – picked him up bodily, high, high into the air so that, for a moment, he appeared to have taken wing: the bird-catcher become a bird. Then it flung him against the Stac. It must have made a great noise: flesh and bone and skull. But from where Quilliam crouched on hands and knees, staring into the renewed dark, the storm’s hooting obliterated every sound.

  Face down, belly pressed to the rock, ungainly as a seal come ashore, Quill wormed his way across the ground, discovering each dip and rise and crevice without aid of light. Each crackle of lightning he thought had seared the way ahead into his brain, but in the dark that followed, the image decayed and deserted him. At one point he found himself feeling for the far side of a gully only for the next lightning flash to reveal a drop to sheer and sickening nothingness right under his chin.

  “I’m coming, Davie! I’m coming, man! Hold still!” he called, but could barely hear his own voice, let alone a reply. The wind filled up his jacket and tugged so hard that he felt almost weightless.

  “I’m coming, Davie! Stay where you are!”

  His hand fell on a boy’s boot. The lightning kept him waiting a long time to show him the boy wearing it.

  Davie could not have hit the rock wall face-on. Apart from the blood coming from his nose and mouth, nothing had grazed or crushed his face. His legs were lying at implausible angles to his body, but he had landed in – or slid into – a slight hollow, so that the wolfish wind had not been able to drag him into the open and devour its kill. It could do no more than flick the boy’s long hair around his face. The hollow was full of water, though, and Davie’s flesh was the temperature of fish on a slab. He must be made warm. He must be got dry. He must be got to shelter. He must be alive. Anything else was unthinkable.

  Night had reinforced the storm’s cloaking blackness and there were no stars, no moon, flickers of lightning like the ghosts of murderers sharpening their knives. More omens, thought Quill with a nauseated, bitter resentment. What good were omens without the wisdom to make sense of them? What good were omens to Davie now?

  Lifting the boy’s upper body free of the water with his right arm, he reached inside Davie’s shirt with his left, but could feel no heartbeat.

  “Canna feel with that hand,” he told the boy. “Y’know when y’sleep on your arm and lose the feeling? Y’know? I canna feel a thing with that hand.”

  He took the measure of the storm. The storm was moving westwards, but dragging behind it a wake of rain: unceasing, freezing rain. It was as if it would rain till the world dissolved.

  “Between gusts of wind,” he instructed Murdina. “We must move him whenever there’s a lull.” But Murdina was precious little help with the carrying. Davie was such a weight – such an agonizing weight, that even the wind could not manage to lift Quill and hurl him to perdition. He was all for carrying on as far as the Bothy but Murdina said no, she was too weary to go any farther than the first cleit where they had sheltered. Perhaps it was she who felt the pulse below Davie’s armpit and pronounced him alive; Quill could not recall. Or perhaps he was fooling himself. But somehow, between them, they managed to lift the boy and lower him into the storage tower with its fishy reek of dried birds. Davie no more filled it than a single fulmar might. His belt broke in the process and let fall two petrels. Quill rent them open and spilled their oil in on top of the boy – not a blessing or even a medicine: although the plumage of the birds was icy, the oil inside was still warm, and Davie needed warmth.

  He and Murdina Galloway climbed in beside him, and stayed there all night. All night the wind howled and prowled around the turret, like wolves scenting carrion. Quill dreamed he was in his tomb.

  In the morning, he and Murdina were able to carry Davie as far as Upper Bothy. Though the storm was still ramping, the wind had turned sullen and pettish. And there was daylight. The day before, there had been a mattress of straw waiting that would have made a bed. But Quill had burned it, hadn’t he? And pushed over the windbreak? Nothing remained but a dark blot on the floor, and scurrying, icy draughts, thanks to his wasteful, stupid bonfire.

  Still, the Bothy was occupied.

  An army of petrels were huddled inside the cave. Mechanically, without thought, Quill went in among them, like a man harvesting carrots, plucking them up, cinching them under his belt, exhorting Davie and Murdina to guard the doorway and turn back any that tried to escape. Exasperated with their lack of help, he stood there himself, swinging and thrashing at them with his jacket. The cave soon whirled with birds as frantically as the fire had done, as frantically as his brain was doing. “We’ll fill your mam’s cooking pot tonight, man! Plenty to eat tonight, look!”

  What with birds escaping and birds falling to the floor, the movement within the Bothy finally stilled and, with it, the mayhem in Quilliam’s head.

  He arranged the dead storm petrels in serried rows, and laid Davie on top of them, for the sake of their body warmth. Both boys were smothered in the oil the birds had spat out in their fright. Quill had no wicks to thread through the birds, no needle to thread them with, no tinderbox to turn them into lamps, but if he had, he would have gone up in flames himself, like a petrel-candle.

  The birds beneath Davie’s head became suffused with red, as though they were turning into robins. It might have been the rust-coloured oil expressed from their oleaginous little souls, or blood from the back of Davie’s head where it had smashed into the rock face. When Quill placed his woollen cap there instead, it too adopted a red rosette, as though Davie had been awarded a prize as he slept.

  “I still have it, Quilliam!” Davie opened his eyes. It was the very first sign that he was still living. “I still have the Iron Finger, don’t I?” And he opened his palm.

  “You do so.”

  He had been holding it so tightly that the barb was sunk deep into his palm.

  “I kept it safe, didn’t I?”

  “You did so. Well done, man.”

  “So I can still be Keeper?”

  “Till you are a grey old man with a beard to yer knees and you know every fish by both its names.”

  Davie giggled. “I was thinking…we could maybe use the Finger to beckon a whale to come to us and carry us to Hirta. Just to tend to the dogs, y’mind?”

  “Like Jonah in the whale?”

  “Only on top. Not inside. Too dark. Some darks I’m brave with, but…”

  Quill agreed that the dark inside a whale would test his bravery, too. It was the worst kind of dark – too steeped in stink. But he was aware of another, worse darkness testing Davie’s courage to the utmost. The Bothy was dimly dawn-lit now, but for Davie it was still stuffed full of night.

  “Just to tend to the dogs, you know?” Davie repeated.

  “What, and then must we come back? To the Stac?”

  “To wait for the ships, yes,” said Davie.

  “The ships with the angels in? Ach, man, can we not wait on Hirta for them? Truly we can. We’ll light a fire in every grate and keep
the chimneys reeking night and morning, so the angels canna help seeing. Do you not think?”

  “If Mam has peat enough to spare,” said Davie. The only man in his household, he was still worrying about the housekeeping.

  Quill set himself the strenuous, bone-destroying task of rebuilding the windbreak he had demolished the night before to let in the draught. Since he had parted with his jacket, to cover Davie, the labour served to keep him warm. And emptied his head of thinking. Better, anyway, to keep busy and look unconcerned than to squat by Davie like a girl, cooing comforts and praying and stroking his hair. That’s not what a boy in trouble wants, is it? Not a boy who’s wanting to be brave?

  At least, for Davie, the ship was coming. Quill had lit a bonfire, so now the ship Farriss had seen would come for certain sure. Belief was pasted thicker on Davie than the oil, blood, grit and rock chippings in his hair. Over the ruins of the horizon, through the valleys between the mountainous waves, white as an albatross, a ship full of angels would come soon to ferry home the fowling party off Warrior Stac.

  “Your garefowl fetched the storm. That’s the way of garefowl. Mam told me. They fetch in storms.” He broke this news to Quilliam gently, apologetically, knowing his friend would be upset by the painful truth and the treachery of birds.

  “She’s no ‘mine’. Just a garefowl is all.”

  A little outburst of fright, a whimper, a widening of his eyes hinted that Davie had tried to move some joint, some limb and found he could not. “Will you help me to the ship, Quill? When it comes?”

  “Me and more. ’Course.”

  The rain outside hissed its derision. Two boys, impaled on the tip of a giant claw and held up close to the sky for cloud-beasts to squint at? There was no way down.

  At the touch of another thought, Davie snatched Quill’s wrist fiercely tight, this time in pure terror. “And you’ll not let Kenneth eat me?”

  “Eat you?”

  “He said when the food was all gone, he’d cook up the little ones and eat them!”

  “Huish, wee man, huish. That oaf talks through his arse. He’ll do no such thing… D’you think any of the others would let him? We all like you far too much… Shall I tell you a thing? When Murdo and I came up here, we found eagle feathers. White-tailed eagle. Tell you what we should do. We should catch a half a dozen, and harness them, and have them fly us to Hirta, first to see the dogs and then out to the white ship.”

  “We lost a lamb to an eagle last summer,” said Davie doubtfully.

  “So? They owe us a favour!” said Quill cheerfully, as though the deal with the sea eagles was as good as done.

  “Is Miss Galloway here still?” asked Davie.

  It jolted the heart almost out of Quill. The rock he was holding clattered over the windbreak and rolled out of the door. The blisters in the heels of his hands burst and wept tears into his palms. “Should I ask her to go?”

  “No! I like her. When I was dead – in the tomb, y’know? – she stroked my hair. I pretended she was Mam.” Clearly, during the long and terrifying night inside the cleit, Davie had been conscious…semi-conscious…now and then… All along? Quill went and kneeled down by the mattress of little birds. He curled his back, rested his forehead to the stone and let his arms lie flat along the floor.

  He implored the Warrior of the Stac to preserve the life of all Kilda men. He prayed to those angels squabbling over their crumpled maps to shift themselves and come to the rescue. He prayed to the soul-birds cushioning Davie’s broken back, not to sip the soul from his body as they sipped invisible insects from the sea spray. He prayed to Murdina to come and to remind him of the words of her song about the boats. He prayed to Farriss and Domhnall Don down below, to ignore the rain and climb to Upper Bothy and relieve him of this intolerable vigil. He prayed to God to make him braver – even half as brave as Davie. He prayed to everyone attending Sunday service at the kirk to remember the fowling party they had sent to the Stac and somehow forgotten to fetch home again. He prayed to the ghost of Fearnach Mor to learn pity, and the whales in deep ocean to fetch help.

  But only Murdina came.

  He sat up, crossed his legs and began to stroke Davie’s hair. First he sang:

  “The water is deep, I cannot cross o’er,

  And neither have I wings to fly.

  Give me a boat that will carry two…”

  Later he asked, “Would you care for a story?”

  “The one ’bout the Owner’s Steward and the grease-ball?”

  “If you’ll take my word that it’s a true thing and no word of a lie. The Owner’s Steward was caught in rough waters and queasy, and he took it into his head to calm the waters with a pudding of gannet grease.

  “‘Dunna do it! Dunna do it!’ said the crew.

  “‘Dunna do it! Dunna do it, sir!’ said the first mate.

  “‘Dunna do it! Dunna do it!’ said the skipper. ‘D’you not see what’s passing by?’

  “But the Steward thought they only wanted to share out the pudding between them. And he tied the grease-ball to a rope and over the stern with it – splash. Oh, and ask me, was the sea calmed?”

  “Was it calmed, Quilliam?”

  “Smooth as any pond, man. And the boat stopped its pitching. And the fishes came tumbling over themselves to nibble on the grease, and there was fine fishing… But another came too. Another so mighty it made the great sharks look like sprats beside it. It came, and it brought its nose along – sniff-sniff – its beady eye and its jaws, wide open. And twelve ton of carcass came behind it, and beyond that a tail the size of the King’s anchor! Because a whale had smelled that ball of gannet grease and come to eat it up!”

  Davie gave a gurgle of a laugh without opening his eyes. His body relaxed and spread a little, his hands turning outwards. The fish-hook was plain to see, embedded in his little palm. Quill went on stroking his hair. “Well, the Steward put on sail and he put on speed and he put on thirty years and his hair turned white with fright! That whale chased him halfway to Orkney before he thought to cut the rope and give the beast its titbit. And do you know? From that day to this the Owner’s Steward has never greased his boots, for fear a whale picks up the scent and comes rampaging in at his window.”

  Beyond the door, the wind shaped the falling rain – shaped and reshaped it into the likeness of giant figures walking by: sailors in their long sea cloaks or women in their blue dresses and red shawls.

  Quill pulled the barb of the fish-hook out of Davie’s hand. It hurt the boy not at all.

  When someone dies on Hirta, the cry goes out throughout the island, and work stops and play stops and all stops, as each person returns home. Everyone is less for the loss.

  Quilliam went outside into the rain and raised such a sound as Fearnach Mor must have made when the boat pulled away, abandoning him to his fate. It was not a call, but a noise from longer ago, when no one animal had raised itself up above any other, and men as well as wolves still howled at the moon. Even the rain recognized the sound and stopped.

  Down in Midway Bothy, men and boys were at last released to search for the two gone missing in the storm. They scattered across the flanks of the Stac, calling and whistling, as if to fetch wayward sheepdogs to heel. No one had seen the splendorous signal fire blaze its way into the sky – Quill’s half-minute triumph.

  But Murdo knew where Quill had been heading – to look for Bible pages in Cane’s hermitage. So Murdo was first to climb within earshot of Upper Bothy, first to hear the news that Davie was dead.

  He started back down then and there.

  “Where are y’going, man? Are you no gonna help me?” yelled Quill.

  But Murdo had no stomach for seeing, let alone touching a dead boy. And anyway, horror at Davie’s death was quickly followed by the thought: it could have been him. If he had agreed to climb with Quill to Upper Bothy, then he might be the one lying dead on its floor. Blame shifted, for Murdo. It was not the storm but Quilliam who had caused Davie to die.


  Quill was way ahead of him. If he had not made Davie a “Keeper”, fabricated that foolish game and feathered a spare fish-hook with ridiculous magic, or if he had agreed simply to go fishing for omens, as Davie had suggested… Banishment seemed no more than he deserved.

  Kenneth came all the way up to Top Bothy, because he had never seen anyone dead “but old people in their beds”. What he saw killed his curiosity. He pretended the sight was not as grisly as he had hoped and, as soon as his eye fell on the birds under the body, began pulling them out and poking their heads under his belt for the downward climb. He could not wait to be gone.

  It was Domhnall Don who brought a rope and somehow contrived to lash the body to his back and carry it, as he had carried many injured fowlers before. His broken arm was strapped against his chest to stop him reaching, grasping, pulling with it. So it looked as if he was carrying a baby as well as a child. As he and Quill descended, strange, inchoate noises burst from the man’s throat which might have been sorrow or exertion or pain. His face was chiselled stone, so it was impossible to tell.

  “Was there a ship, Maister?” pleaded Quill. “D’you think it saw us? D’you think there was a ship?” But Don had stopped believing Farriss’s version of events. If there had been a ship, no one else had seen it or, like the whales, it had passed by, oblivious to the castaways. His silence confirmed that Davie’s death had been for nothing: to no useful purpose.

  Back at Midway, John was asked to supply the customary weeping and wailing required, women being so much better than men at that particular rite. But John had spent so much of her life suppressing a girl’s instincts that keening did not come easily to her.

  No one stopped Euan from praying loudly and knowledgeably for an hour.

  On Hirta, the men would have set about making a shroud or a coffin of some kind – from whatever could be found – a rug, driftwood, a blanket… But where was any such thing to be had on the Stac, here where the living could barely cover themselves against the cold? Quill came up with the idea of coiling a rope round and round and sewing it edge to edge into two scallop-shaped shells – a lidded cradle of soft white leather.