The people who had left me their candles had stayed up here for fun when things must have looked terrible for the world as it aged and died all around them. Looking back, it does seem a bit crazy of me to also have been thinking about doing something because it was fun then, at the very moment when everything else had just got as un-fun as anything had ever been in my life.
I heard Jip bark from below and went to tell him I was okay and I thought we might spend the night up here. There were blankets enough for both of us to be comfortable. When the storm cleared, I intended to spread Brand’s map on the floor and see if I could match what I could see of the landscape with the shapes on the paper. So, I told myself, there was also a practical, sensible reason for my night in the sky.
I’d dumped my rucksack on the landing halfway down, not wanting the bother of carrying it all the way, so I went back to get it and to lead Jip reluctantly upwards.
He spotted the glass floor immediately and really didn’t like it. He kept to the inner section where it was solid and lay there looking at me like I was the biggest fool in the world for bringing him there.
The storm arrived full force about then and was quite a thing. It dimmed the sky and then got darker still as the air filled with grey curtains of rain. I could see them distinctly as they swept in across the water beyond the lines of white tops marching towards the shore.
I wish I’d been alive when you could go in a plane. Not just to look down on land and sea, but to soar around the clouds and look down on them too. Did you do that? Go on a plane. See what the top of a cloud looks like?
I made a pad of blankets and waited until Jip settled in next to me, and then wrapped another two round us, and sat and stared at the lightning forking down over the sea in the far distance. Jip never liked thunder, and barked back at it from under the protection of the blankets, pressing closer to my leg as he did so. I put my hand on his neck, into the familiar wiry hair, and told him it was all right, and that everything was going to be fine in the morning.
That calmed him enough to turn the barks into growls. I just wished I believed it. I thought I’d probably feel better if I ate something, but then exhaustion took me and I fell asleep alongside him.
The thunder was still rumbling when I woke, but the rain had stopped and the noise was now coming from far in the distance. The gaps between the lightning flashes and the noise were long enough for me to know the storm was now worrying away at the landscape more than ten to twelve miles away. Jip shifted in his sleep. I took care not to wake him as I moved to get more comfortable and looked down at the jetty.
The sea was still heaving, but the clouds had lifted enough to let the sliver of moon throw enough light to reflect off the surface. I thought I could see the remains of the Sweethope still tangled in the great melted wheel, but maybe I was imagining it. It wasn’t there when the sun came up. But by then I’d made my choice and seeing it wouldn’t have done more than confirm me in it. The sea had also washed away the words of warning Brand had written in the sand. Seeing them wouldn’t have changed anything either. As I said, all they did was prove he could write. Not that he’d read the right books or learned the right lessons. Maybe if he had done so he wouldn’t have burned the boat and told me to go home.
You burn boats so your troops stay and fight, because they can’t run away home. Aeneas did that when he brought those who had survived the fall of Troy to Italy and founded another empire in Rome. And the Spanish explorer whose name I can’t remember did that when he arrived in South America with his troops. He ended up taking the whole continent and all its silver and gold with a handful of violent men with guns who couldn’t go home. I’m not violent, and I’m not a man and I didn’t have a gun. But Brand had burned my boat. And in doing so had made my choice for me, no matter what he thought the message he was sending was.
I wasn’t going home. Not then, not yet, or not to my home anyway. I was going to go to his home. I was going to get my dog. I was going to take his boat. And then, when and only if I did that, I would go home.
Like I said.
Bang on the head.
Chapter 14
A glimmer of light
That wasn’t the whole story. There was another reason. And in fact maybe the whole burning the boats thing is something I made up for myself afterwards on the journey as we walked. I certainly had plenty of time to think as I did so. And enough reason, as things got more complicated, to knit myself a nice excuse for all the harm in whose way I had put myself. Ever bang your thumb with a hammer? Hurts worse than a normal knock because you did it to yourself.
Before it got light, but after the storm had gone and the distant thunder had rolled away, taking the lightning out of sight beyond the hills to the north, I woke again, needing to pee. I went up the stairs and out on to the rain-slick platform where I added to the wetness on the ground, taking care to allow for the wind direction. It was when I was straightening up that I saw it and stopped everything.
There was a light in the darkness. A tiny pinprick on the horizon to the south-east, so small it could have been a star on the point of setting. Except it was orange and I’d never seen an orange star and the clouds were battened down overhead, so that no other stars were visible to compare it with. I clattered down the steps to get my binoculars and the compass, which woke Jip. I made him stay because I didn’t want him falling off the open side of the viewing platform, and then I went back up.
The light was still there. But it was a long, long way off. The binoculars couldn’t pull it closer, not enough to have any idea what it was anyway. The compass was useless in the blackness of the night. Dad gave it to me when I went off on my own for the first time. It had been his as a child and he said the markings once used to glow in the dark, but now they had worn out. I went back down and got a couple of the green bottles. Back out in the darkness, I sighted them carefully with my eye, so that the tops lined up with the distant orange spark. I then went back down and slept surprisingly well, knowing that when the sun came up I could look along my homemade sight line and see what was at the end of it.
I dreamed too, gentle happy dreams of walking into a village, which in those dreams looked like the one that always featured on the last page in a series of comic books I had loved as a child, an ancient thing with a stockade of wooden spikes and happy villagers sitting around a big fire having a feast while the village musician was always tied up somewhere in the picture, looking very annoyed because they didn’t like his music. What these villagers really liked was having punch-ups with Roman soldiers and eating roast boar. Except in my dreams the village was not just full of strangers, but Bar and Ferg and Dad and even Mum was there, laughing and handing out food, and there was a small girl with a kite running round and round the fire until she saw me and dropped the kite and sprinted towards me with her arms wide open and then I woke up.
At least that’s what I think I dreamed. Remembering dreams is like picking up small jellyfish—they slip through your fingers—and you never know if it’s a dream you had or if you added to the dream in the remembering. Sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re remembering a dream at all, or just a dream about remembering a dream. And if that doesn’t make sense, well, neither do dreams.
There was nothing at the end of the sight line. I was bitterly disappointed when I looked again in the light of day. But there was no unexpected settlement full of welcoming villagers waiting to help me. I wasn’t, of course, really expecting Mum or the girl with the kite, but I had gone to sleep wondering if there were people living in the empty landscape, people we had not been told about. But there weren’t, or if there were there was no sign of them and, since the one thing that hasn’t changed since the end of the world is that everyone still needs breakfast, the absence of smoke from a cooking fire seemed to seal the end of the hopeful delusion I had gone to sleep beneath.
There was just a slightly raised bump on the horizon, too far away to see if there was any building on it. I unfolded my ma
p and used my compass to orientate it. Then I took a bearing on the line I had marked with the bottle tops, and then I used the straight edge of one of the crutches to draw a line from the tower, right across the map.
And then—since the orange light had been broadly on the way to where I had decided Brand was based—I knew where I was headed. I could check it out, and keep right on going until I got to the other side of the land where I was sure he really had his home.
Jip was happy to get back to ground level. I pulled the kayak inside the hall of the palace. The building might be on its way to falling down now that the weather and the saplings had found a way in to the ballroom, but I reckoned it would take time, and the kayak would be safe enough for a while. Certainly until I walked back to get it on my way home.
I wonder if it’s still there.
We set off inland. I wanted to look back, but I didn’t because I knew if I did I’d start having doubts, and I had made my mind up. And there was quite enough to fill my eyes and my head as we walked through the charred skeleton of the town, Jip running ahead, quartering back and forth, nose to the ground on the hunt for new and interesting smells.
The shells of the broken houses leaned against each other as the road rose away from the seafront. The fire had burned the vegetation that had overgrown them right back so the old cracked tarmac had been revealed again, broken and buckled both by time and the bushes and small trees that had pushed through and which now survived as flame-stripped trunks and branches. The place smelled of fire char, but not a clean woodsmoke smell. More of a greasy, oil smell. Walking into your world, thinking of how many people had lived in this one street and then thinking how many other streets just like it must lie ahead did give me a strange feeling. But the blank window sockets didn’t look at me in the same way the empty houses on the islands did. Maybe the fire had burned out the last residue of whoever had once lived there.
Where the burn stopped and the houses continued, some still roofed and more or less intact, it was different. Just as empty but more alive again. Going was slower because the snarl of small trees and bushes got in the way, but it was still easy walking, though I would lose sight of Jip for minutes at a time. When glass survived, it winked the thin sunlight back at me as I passed. I remember one house had GONE sprayed across the front in yellow paint in letters that were higher than me. Birds flew in and out of the upper windows where I imagined they had been building their nests now for generations. It was a cheerful thing to see, as were the squirrels that loped freely along the roofs and tree branches. Life was making use of what you had left behind.
I’d never seen a squirrel except in a book, but the moment I saw the long bushy tails, I knew they weren’t rats. The speed and deftness with which they ran and kept their footing so high above the ground was exhilarating. At least to me it was. To Jip it was another affront, and he barked excitedly and tried to get at them, jumping up and even at one point trying to climb a tree. He didn’t have much time for books, so maybe for him they really were just rats with fluffier tails. Either way, they immediately got added to the list of things he knew he was born to hunt. I wonder what they made of us as we passed beneath them. They can’t have seen people before. It seemed like they were studiously oblivious to us as they hurtled smoothly from branch to branch—occasionally making wild and gravity-defying leaps from tree to tree, landing and carrying on as if they had not just performed a miracle of balance and surefootedness. I could have stood there and watched them all day. I decided I liked squirrels just as much as Jip did, but in a completely different way.
Once we left the edge of the town, the countryside sort of closed in, just when I would have imagined it would open up. The reason was, again, the trees. They got bigger and crowded in over the old road which was fully grown over, covered in moss and grass. As I said, at home on the islands there were no trees to speak of, and those very few that did survive were wind-shorn and stunted things, cowering behind whatever windbreak had allowed them to survive. There was one plantation of dwarfish pine on a hillside on North Uist, but it was a tangled and dark place into which I did not go.
Walking beneath real broad-leafed trees was something I had never done. And on this first day it was exhilarating. After an outdoor life spent under grey or blue skies, it was a novelty to find myself beneath a roof of green, and not just the one green, but so many different kinds of green. It wasn’t just the variety of trees that led to the medley of shades and intensities of colour—it was the sunlight beyond that turned some of the leaves into bright tongues of emerald that outlined the darker mass of the shadowed leaves beneath. They were tall, the trees on that first stretch of road, broad-trunked and ancient. The spread of their branches supported a thick canopy which must have kept down the younger generation that was trying to burst through the old tarmac road beneath the moss and grass. As if to prove this, after a couple of klicks I came to a place where two huge trees had blown down across the road and, where they let the light in, a new tree had already grown taller than the shaded saplings around it. The roots of the fallen trees had ripped great discs of earth out of the ground when they went down, and examining them made me realise that there was a huge system of roots beneath the surface to match the spread of branches high above it.
It’s a marvellous thing, a tree.
Rabbits had dug homes into the newly exposed earth, and Jip caught two before I could persuade him to come along with me. I was keen to get as many klicks behind us as we could before nightfall, and so I gutted them and hung them on my pack to skin later.
Good dog, I said. That’s our supper taken care of.
Many of the houses we passed were roofless shells, overgrown with brambles or cracked apart by the vegetation that had taken root in them decades earlier, but there were others that seemed less affected by time and neglect, at least until I got a closer look. Stone-built houses seemed to stand up better than brick, and brick better than houses made of frames covered in plaster. The walls of these houses had burst with damp long ago and here and there the remnants of the plastic sheeting they had been lined with fluttered like white flags. I remember coming out of the trees for a section of road, and found myself reflected in the long glass wall of a building that was, I think, a place for buying petrol or charging a car. It was an odd thing to see myself so small in a landscape, Jip at my side. Of course I’d seen myself reflected in mirrors and house windows before, but this was by far the biggest window I’d seen, and it made me look very small against the landscape stretching away all around me. Just me, my pack and my bow and then trees that towered above and a patchwork of brambles and hedges and scrubland beyond. The world looked very big. I looked tiny. Jip looked even smaller, but he also looked like he belonged in the wildness more than I did. The scale of me was somehow wrong, too big and too little at the same time. I looked like something not quite myself, like a character in a story. As I walked on, I wondered if that was what it was like seeing a movie or a television—a small person in a giant frame. Dad said that’s what people used to do, sit in the dark with lots of other people and watch a huge story take place on the screen hung in front of them. You’ll have seen movies. I wonder what you’d have made of Jip and me.
The other thing I could see in the glass, plain as day, is that one of my arms was considerably redder than the other.
That made sense, since one arm was also itching more. The scraping I had given it on the netting had never really had time to heal, and the salt sores that had developed had not gone away. I wanted to keep going, but I knew I should take time to take care of it before it got worse so I walked up to the petrol station and found the rotted carcass of a vehicle that had rusted to the chassis. Just like many of the dead cars on the island, the axles and the wheels and the engine blocks had survived longest. I put the rucksack down and got my first aid kit out, using the engine block as a table to lay it out on.
You had what Dad called the “’cillins” in your time: antibiotic medicines that mi
raculously stopped things going infected and septic. Any ’cillins that survived had been manufactured long before the world died, and even the ones that were packed away in foil packs to keep out the moisture couldn’t escape time. We found old pills every now and then when we were a-viking, but they had little effect. Luckily Dad had the way of other medicines from his ma, who he said was a wonder at healing, and so we all carried kits in our packs that could help us if we got hurt by ourselves. Unpacking my kit made me a little homesick, because of course everything in it had been made by Dad or Ferg or Bar. I remembered Joy boiling the cotton sheet we had found in an old house to make strips for the bandages, and I myself had gathered the honey in the small airtight metal canister. Ferg had made the ointment in the tin that had once contained a brown boot polish, but I had helped him gather the woundwort that went into it, stuffing bags made from old pillow cases full of the violet-flowered plant. Bar read in a herbal book that it was also called “heal-all” and “heart-of-the-earth”. I opened the tin and smelled it and thought how far I was from the heart of my earth. Then I recapped it and washed my arm with some of the drinking water from my bottle. I let the wind dry it, and then I smeared the most livid patch of sores and scratches with the honey. As I did it, I felt the heat in my arm like a fire beneath the skin and knew I should have done this two days ago, and told myself I was a whole different kind of fool to the one I already knew myself to be.
I wrapped Bar’s bandage over the honey, and tied it off. Then we set off again. Of course, now that I had taken notice of it and done the right thing, my arm kept intruding into my thoughts, itching and throbbing. Among the other things I had in the kit—like knitbone paste and staunchgrass—was some powdered red pepper from the plants Bar grew under glass. If the sores and the scratches were no better at nightfall, I told myself I would make a paste with that and put it in the wounds. The pepper paste burned badly, but it always seemed to make infection go away, especially if mixed with the garlic she also grew, but I had none of that with me. One of the family on Lewis had jumped off a rock onto the yellow sand at Luskentyre and impaled her foot on a razor clam. It had killed her in pieces, and the going was ugly and brutal as the infection had spread up her foot to the point where they had thought about cutting it off to save her, but because cutting a foot off your daughter is a terrible thing to do they had left it too late and the infection had spidered up her calf. When they did take her leg off below the knee they thought they had caught it, but she never woke up. Before the end of the world you had conquered infection, but it turns out all it had to do was outwait you. It waited until the medicine factories closed because no one was young enough to work in them, and then back it came.
A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World Page 12