On the Edge of Darkness

by Barbara Erskine

  ‘The fever, we call it,’ Adam corrected her. He was impressed. He could see the young man’s eyelids fluttering beneath Brid’s commanding hand. It seemed to Adam only a matter of seconds before Gartnait was sitting up, staring round him groggily, and not long after that that they were making their way back towards the hut, Brid and Adam supporting him, one bent beneath each shoulder, Gemma hurrying ahead to stir up the fire and set a pot of water over the flames to heat.

  Brid had, it seemed, a store of medicaments ready for just such an occasion. Adam watched as she brought a woven bag out of the hut and produced an array of small packages. Inside were numerous substances, most of which he guessed had dried herbs of various kinds.

  A handful of this and a pinch of that were thrown into the steaming water. A bitter, strong smell began to flavour the air. Gartnait caught Adam’s eye and smiled wryly. ‘Will not taste like chocolate cake.’

  Adam laughed. If the young man’s sense of humour had returned he was starting to mend, in spite of the startling pallor of his face and the purple bruise which was beginning to spread down his cheekbone.

  To Adam’s relief the venison stew was placed back on the fire beside Brid’s medicine and, thanks to Gartnait’s sudden healthy hunger, it was not long before they were all eating bowls of it, sopped up with chunks of coarse bread torn from the loaf.

  ‘Brid?’ Only once her son was settled, his arm in a rough linen sling across his chest, did Gemma at last turn to her daughter. ‘What has Broichan to do with this business?’ Her eyes were sharp on her daughter’s face.

  Brid scowled. ‘He threatened to hurt Gartnait.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He does not trust me. My power is too strong.’

  Gemma stared at her for a moment, then she shook her head. ‘That is no answer, daughter.’

  ‘No.’ Brid stuck out her chin. ‘I have the power from you and from my father – ’

  ‘Your father is dead!’ Gemma’s voice was hard. ‘His power was not strong enough, Brid. He was killed by the enemies of our people when he thought he was invincible. Nothing magic. A simple sword thrust in the dark from a raider, that was all it took to kill him.’ She could not hide her scorn as she leaned forward and put her hand on Gartnait’s forehead. ‘You will endanger us all by mocking Broichan. My brother is the most powerful Druid in the land and you would do well not to forget it. You are being conceited and foolish in challenging him. And you are selfish. You put this boy’s life at risk when you bring him here to our forbidden places.’

  Adam had been following the conversation with great difficulty but as they all suddenly stared at him he looked away, embarrassed and frightened.

  ‘A-dam has power of his own!’ Brid retorted firmly. ‘He is a traveller between the worlds and he is a healer – ’

  ‘He is not of our world, Brid.’ Gemma’s voice was very firm. ‘We will give him food, then he must go. Before Broichan returns. And you must appease your uncle. You have seen the strength of his magic – ’

  ‘Mine is as strong – ’

  ‘Not strong enough!’

  Adam had never seen Gemma angry before. Sitting, hugging his knees by the fire, he watched uncertainly as the two women confronted each other, their antagonism mounting. The moment of silence was intense.

  And in the silence no one saw the dark shadow of Broichan materialise out of the night. Their visitor arrived so silently and so swiftly there was no possibility of escape. He was standing over them before any of them realised it and Adam could only look up and meet the furious, pale-blue eyes of Brid’s uncle a few feet from him. His stomach knotted into a cold lump, and he felt the total paralysis of terror settle over him.

  No one said anything for several seconds, then at last Gartnait put down his mug of ale and hauled himself painfully to his feet.

  ‘Greetings to you, my uncle,’ he said respectfully. Adam understood that much. What followed was wholly incomprehensible but Adam could follow the meaning of the gestures as clearly as though he understood every word. They did not bode well for him or for Brid.

  Brid and Gemma were both very pale. They sat with downcast eyes and for all her earlier defiance, Adam could see that Brid’s hands, still clutched around her beautifully decorated goblet, were shaking visibly. The man’s voice grew louder. He appeared to be working himself into a furious rage.

  Gartnait raised his chin. The young man’s meekness vanished in a torrent of angry words. His eyes, dark and flashing, met those of his uncle and he was gesturing first at Brid and then at Adam.

  The shouting match ended with such suddenness that the silence that succeeded it was shocking in its intensity. Terrified, Adam glanced from one to the other. Brid and her mother were white-faced. Gartnait beneath his defiance also looked afraid. Adam’s blood seemed to have turned to ice. For a moment they all remained motionless, then Broichan stepped forward. For a long moment he stood over Adam, his eyes seeming to probe deep inside the boy’s head. Adam shrank back. He could feel the strength of the man’s mind inside his brain. It hurt him physically like a red-hot iron, and then suddenly it was over. Broichan spat on the ground in front of him. Then he stooped and seized Brid’s wrist, hauling her to her feet. Her goblet fell from her hand. With a little cry she tried to pull back but he gripped her more tightly and dragged her away from the fire.

  Adam looked from Gemma to Gartnait and back. Neither had moved a muscle. There were tears in Gemma’s eyes.

  ‘What is happening?’ he cried suddenly. ‘Do something. Don’t let him take her.’

  Gartnait shook his head. He gestured at Adam sharply to stay where he was. ‘He has the right.’

  ‘He doesn’t. What’s he going to do?’ Adam scrambled up, bewildered.

  ‘He takes her back to Craig Phádraig.’ Gartnait shook his head. ‘It is her destiny. He will not let her come back.’

  ‘But he can’t do that!’ Adam was frantic. ‘You can’t just let him take her.’

  ‘I can’t stop him, A-dam,’ Gartnait said quietly. ‘It is her chosen life. And you must go. Now. You must not come back to the land beyond the north wind. Not ever.’

  ‘What do you mean? Why not? What have I done? What’s wrong with me?’ Bewildered, the boy could feel tears in his own eyes.

  ‘You live in another place, A-dam. The place beyond the stone. Beyond the mist.’ Gartnait’s gaze was on the retreating forms of Brid and Broichan. ‘No one is supposed to go there or come from there. My uncle told me about it so that I could carve the stone. Brid followed me. She learned the way from me. She will learn about it in her studies, but it is secret. It is a secret which no man may tell. My uncle believes that we told you the way. I told him that your father is a powerful priest on your side of the stone, and that you learned the way from him, but he is still angry.’

  ‘My father didn’t teach me the way here. I found it myself.’ Adam was confused. ‘Or Brid shows me. What is so special? I don’t understand. Why should a track through the wood be so secret?’

  Gartnait frowned. ‘It leads to the back of the north wind, where no man may go. Not Broichan himself, not Brid, not even me.’ He sighed. ‘I told you to beware my sister, A-dam. She is a daughter of the fire and her power will kill. Forget her, A-dam. She is not part of your destiny. Come, my young friend. I will walk with you.’

  Adam shook his head, confused and miserable. ‘No, you stay here. You shouldn’t walk after your accident. And besides, you should stay with your mother –’ He looked at Gemma for a moment.

  She shook her head. ‘Go, A-dam. You bring trouble for us, my son.’ She gave a small sad smile and turning away, she disappeared inside the cottage.

  Distressed, Adam hesitated. ‘May I come back?’ His face was burning with shame.

  By the fire, Gartnait shook his head sadly as he turned back to the flames. He hoped Adam would never realise how close he had come to death that afternoon; how only his eloquence, courage and the fact that he had convinced Broichan of the power
of Adam’s father had saved the boy from the razor-sharp blade which, hidden in the older man’s sleeve, had been destined for Adam’s throat.

  ‘Gemma?’ Adam’s voice was husky with misery. He had a sudden vision of his own mother crying and fighting with his father. Was he always destined to cause trouble for the people he loved?

  She reappeared in the doorway and she held out her arms to him. He ran to her and she hugged him and kissed his cheek. ‘No, A-dam. Never come back.’ She softened the words with a gentle touch on his face, then she turned away once more and ducked inside.

  5

  A few days later, to his surprise and delight, Adam found his old school friend, Robbie Andrews, waiting for him by the gate to the manse. The boy’s face split into a huge grin as he punched Adam on the shoulder. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been hanging around all afternoon.’

  Adam shook his head. ‘I’ve been up on the hill.’ Mooching aimlessly around the stone. To no avail. There was no sign of Gartnait or Gemma or the cottage. He grinned back at Robbie, snapping out of his depression. Robbie, the son of the factor on the Glen Ross estate, had once been his best friend, but when Robbie’s mother had died Robbie had gone to boarding school and stayed with his grandparents in Edinburgh. Robbie had, he now discovered, come to spend the summer with his father up at the factor’s house on the estate.

  ‘I’ve got a message for you.’ Robbie glanced round conspiratorially. He was a tall thin boy with startling red hair, and at seventeen was a few months older than Adam. ‘Come over here.’ He ducked down out of sight of the manse’s study window and led Adam back down the street and towards the river. Only when they were in the wood by the burn did he stop and find them a fallen tree trunk to sit on, out of reach of the spray from the waterfall. He reached into his pocket and produced a crumpled envelope. ‘Here. It’s from your mother.’

  Adam stared at him. His mouth dropped open and he found he was having to fight a sudden urge to cry. It was two years, almost exactly, since his mother had left home and he had long ago given up hope of hearing from her ever again.

  He put his hand out for the envelope and sat staring at it. It was her writing all right. Every thought of Brid and Gartnait fled from his brain as he turned it over and over in his hands.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Robbie was eager to know what it said.

  Adam shook his head. He shoved it into his pocket and leaning forward, elbows on knees, picked up a moss-covered stone to throw towards the burn.

  ‘She came to see my grandmother,’ Robbie prompted him. ‘She said she had written to you and you never bothered to answer. She said she understood that you must be very angry with her.’

  ‘She never wrote.’ Adam’s voice was strangled. ‘Not once.’

  Robbie frowned. ‘She said she did.’

  There was a long silence. Adam was struggling to control his tears. When he managed to speak at last it was in a croak. ‘How was she?’

  ‘Good. She was looking very pretty.’

  ‘Pretty?’ Adam picked up on the word sharply.

  Robbie nodded. ‘She had a blue dress. And pearls round her neck. And her hair was kind of long and curly. Not like it used to be here.’

  Adam bit his lip. The description did not fit the repressed, meek minister’s wife who had been his mother. Perhaps his father was right. She had become a whore.

  Miserably he stared at the narrow tumbling glitter of the water in front of him. He said nothing.

  ‘Are you still planning to be a doctor?’ Robbie threw his own stone at the water, angling it so it skittered over the rocks and disappeared over the edge into the whirling brown pools.

  Adam nodded bleakly.

  ‘Are you going to Aberdeen medical school or Edinburgh next year? Tell your father you want to go to Edinburgh. We could have some wizard fun together. It’s great there, Adam. I’m going to read Classics.’ The boy’s face had lit up with enthusiasm. ‘And I’m going to fly. They all say war is coming. If it does I want to be in the RAF.’

  Adam shook his head. Talk at the Academy was all of war too. ‘Then I hope they see you coming. You can’t even ride a bike, if I remember, without pranging it!’

  ‘That was a while ago, Adam. I can drive a car now! Grandfather taught me. He’s got a Morris Cowley. And I’ve a licence to ride a motorbike. I can take you on the back!’ His enthusiasm was beginning to cheer Adam up.

  ‘What does your father say about all this?’ Adam had always rather liked the factor, who used to take him and Robbie on bird-watching trips up in the hills when they were too young to go on their own.

  ‘Och, he’s fine about it. He doesn’t care what we do.’ He sounded just a little too casual. ‘What about you, Adam? What about the minister?’

  Adam grimaced. ‘I can’t wait to get my Highers and go.’ It was true, he realised suddenly. Without Brid and her family, what had he to stay for?

  It was nearly dark when Adam sat on the window seat of his attic room and took his mother’s letter out of his pocket. He turned the envelope over several times and looked down at it. It had the one word Adam written on it. The sight of his mother’s handwriting made him feel strange. First he thought he might cry; then he felt angry. He crumpled it up and threw it in his waste paper basket, overwhelmed by a feeling of lost betrayal, then as suddenly he dived on it and tore it open.

  My darling Adam,

  I have written to you several times before, but I don’t know if you ever got my letters. It may be your father didn’t pass them on.

  Please try and understand. I could not live with your father any more. Why need not concern you now, only believe me, I had no choice. I had to come away. I know how hurt and angry you must be with me. Please, let me explain. Your father won’t let you come and see me now, but when you leave school, if you would like to, please come then. I love you so much and I miss you dreadfully. Your loving Mother.

  Adam put down the letter. His eyes were full of tears. No, of course his father had not given him her letters. He looked at the piece of paper in his hand again. She did not say if she was alone or what she was doing. There was just an address, in Edinburgh, and those few impassioned words.

  The light was on in his father’s study. Pushing open the door without knocking Adam thrust the letter across the desk. ‘Is it true? Did she write to me?’

  Thomas stared at the letter. There was no anger in his face when he looked up at Adam, only a terrible haggard sorrow.

  ‘And what was the sin you told me she had committed?’ Adam wasn’t sure where the courage had come from to allow him to speak to his father in this way.

  Thomas’s face darkened. ‘That is not your business, boy.’

  ‘Was it another man? Wee Mikey said she ran away with a Frenchman.’ The question he had wanted to ask for so long burst out of him. ‘Did she? Weren’t we good enough for her?’ Tears were pouring suddenly down his face.

  His father stared at him without expression for several seconds, then at last he shook his head. ‘I do not know, Adam, and I don’t want to.’ And that was all he would say.

  The stone was silver in the moonlight, the old symbols showing clearly, their deep incisions darkened by lichen, their design as clear as the day they were cut. Adam stood looking at them miserably. The serpent, the crescent and the broken rod, and there, at the base, the mirror and the comb. He frowned. Gartnait had never copied the mirror on his stone. The designs had been finished last time he had seen him but that small corner of the stone was empty. He bent and touched the outline with his fingers. The mirror on his mother’s dressing table, with her brush and comb, had been burned with all her other things on his father’s bonfire. He had found the blackened ivory and splintered glass next to some charred pieces of brown fabric which had once been his mother’s best dress.

  He would see her again. Whatever she had done, she was still his mother. She wouldn’t have gone if his father hadn’t driven her away. Even if she had found someone else – his
mind slid sideways around the thought, not able to confront it – she still loved him, her letter had said as much. And she missed him. His mind made up, he found himself smiling in the moonlight. He would go to Edinburgh next year, to study medicine as planned, and he would go and see his mother. And in the meantime he would write to her and tell her his news.

  Chastened and obedient, Brid learned the names of the thirty-three kings. She learned the rituals of fire and water. She learned divination from the flight of birds, from the clouds and the stars, from the trees and the falling of the fortune sticks. She learned spells and incantations and healing. She began to learn the nature of the gods and goddesses and how to intercede with them and about the sprinkling of the blood; she learned about the soul which dwells within the body but which can fly free as a bird, to travel, to learn, and to hide and she learned how she too by dint of study and dreams and the use of sacred smoke could enter the dream and travel through the layers of time to the worlds beyond the world.

  Her special study was the wildcat. She left the school as did the other women from time to time, completely alone, and followed the animals’ secret trails into the hills. She studied their hunting and their killing. She studied their sleeping and their lazy washing on a hidden sunlit ledge amongst the rocks and cliffs. She studied their meeting and mating and the secret places where the she-cats raised their mewling kittens. She learned how to read the mind of the cat and then at last she began to walk in the paw prints of the creature, feeling its skin as her skin, tearing her prey, eating the sweet raw meat of hare or vole or game and licking the rich blood from her paws.

  And back at the school in the evenings sometimes she spied on Adam in her dreams. Secretly she remembered the strength of his arms, the passion of his kiss, the soft boy’s cheek above the newly rough man’s whiskers, the deep thrust of his manhood, and she slipped from her meditation out into the plane where there is no time or place and all things are one, and she crept close to him to touch his lips with her own as he slept.