The Way to Babylon

by Paul Kearney

  Reddening, he stood up. The girl’s arm encircled his waist, steadying him. She was as tall as he was. Dizzy, he swayed, and she leaned herself against him. He caught a fragrance of windblown hair. He felt like kissing her, but settled for asking her name.

  ‘Jennifer MacKinnon. My father is Calum MacKinnon, and it is our home you are in.’

  ‘I’m Michael Riven. Thanks.’

  She shrugged. ‘We’d hardly leave you lying up there. Come and have a look at what sort of trip you had down Dearg.’ She led him over to the window.

  Outside, blindingly white snow covered everything, and rearing up massively in front of him was the mountain, stern and blunt, dark granite faces scattered on it where the wind would allow no purchase to the snow. He looked at the pocked scree face. He had fallen down that, head over heels.

  ‘I survived that?’

  ‘Aye,’ she said quietly. ‘You did. There’s many a one wouldn’t, I’m thinking. What made you climb during that storm anyway? Had you a hound at your heels?’

  His face clouded. ‘Maybe. One that followed me all the way from the south.’

  And follows me still.

  ‘IT’S DISGRACEFUL, THAT’S what it is. You’ve been told so many times, Mr Riven, never to drive your chair on to the lawn. Now it will take an electrician to get it working again. Until then, you can stay in your bed—hopefully that will keep you out of further mischief. Don’t you ever think of the staff of this Centre, Mr Riven? Your attitude is incomprehensible. It had better improve, or I shall be having words with the consultant about the advisability of keeping you here.’ Nurse Bisbee paused. ‘Haven’t you anything to say for yourself?’

  Riven continued staring out of the window at the blue night and the rain that tapped on the glass.

  ‘Well, I’m not wasting any more time with you. There are patients who need me more, Mr Riven.’

  And off she goes, steam coming out of her ears. Righteous indignation oozes out of every pore.

  He lay and looked at the ceiling, unable to push out of his mind the way Nurse Cohen had manhandled him inside. Her hands on him.

  Christ, that’s all I need. A bout of horniness.

  The window rattled under the battery of the wind. He shut his eyes and heard again the gales in the Cuillin hills, the curlews, and the sea.

  I haven’t left this place in four months. Didn’t even go to the funeral. I was unconscious in a hospital getting wired together.

  THE CHAIR WAS not in operation for nearly a week, during which time Riven lay in his bed and fought a running battle against the memories. Doody called in frequently, and teased him about morning afters and wheelchair acrobatics. Riven did not see Nurse Cohen much. Nurse Bisbee took care of most of his needs with a tight-lipped silence, or neutral remarks about the weather which she usually saved for the elderly in the Centre. Or she talked about Christmas, which was drawing near; and which made Riven hate her. His memories of last Christmas were too close.

  He was taken to see Doctor Lynam, to have the progress of his legs monitored. They were pronounced ‘fairly sound,’ and the good man recommended, with a tap of his pipe, that Riven try them out after a few days and see how they went; as though they were a new car.

  So Doody and Nurse Cohen took it upon themselves to haul Riven out of bed, procure for him a walking frame, and help him down the corridor in a string of lurches and bumps and near-falls and pain and gritted teeth. By the time they had gone twenty yards—at Riven’s insistence—his head was in a red mist and the sweat was trickling down his back. He had to be put in the chair to return to his room.

  ‘Don’t worry, sir,’ said Doody. ‘What’s-its-name wasn’t built in a day, was it? We can have another go tomorrow, if you’re up to it.’ Riven nodded faintly. Nurse Cohen tucked him in.

  ‘We can always have a rest tomorrow if you like, and try the next day. It’s up to you.’

  He managed a smile for her.

  I’m as weak as a half-drowned kitten. My legs are in bits. How in the name of God will I ever be as I was again?

  He could not help but think about the army, when he had run and jumped and crawled and marched. And marched. Why did everything he wanted to do seem to need mobility? All that walking in the Highlands, all that climbing. If his legs were taken away from him, he had once supposed he could fall back on writing. But that was... gone, now. That was no longer a way out.

  Alone. As I was in the beginning. And I’ve gained so much and thrown so much away that I’m left with what I had at the start.

  The shadow of another world.

  A refuge, maybe, or a handicap.

  Time was when his world, the world of his novels, sat at his elbow always waiting for him, and he could turn and look into someone else’s eyes in a room that was empty, and see them laugh back at him. He had made a world of simple, open people who saw right and wrong as black and white with no grey in between. But then, in stories, things are always simpler. His books were of a world ringed by mountains and the sea; a wide place with room for some mystery in it—maybe even some magic. There was something of Skye in it. Stone and heather, and clean air. Just as Molesy had said. And magnificent, make-believe characters—people who ruled what he did just as surely as if they drove cars, played squash and got drunk in the real world. He had almost killed himself trying to prove he could be one of them. They had made him become a soldier and they had pursued him up mountains, until he had fallen and found the girl who was to become his wife at the foot of one. He had failed, but he had told their stories still—tales full of fighting and honour, and desperate deeds done with bright swords. Oh, yes. But he had betrayed them somehow, by giving his love to someone in his own world, and he was not sure if they would have him any more now, that he was bruised and bleeding from a loss so great as to leave his life empty of anything else but those stories, and the people in them. In the beginning they were all he had thought he had ever wanted, but now he did not know. Now that he wanted the world to be simpler, cleaner, he felt he had muddied whatever his imagination had given him.

  He could write no longer. There were no more stories left in him.

  RIVEN HAD NEVER been the most patient individual in the world, and the progress his legs made, though applauded by his coaches Doody and Nurse Cohen, was to him like pecking at a mountain with a needle. He chafed as he had not done before, and realised dimly that his time in Beechfield was nearly over. The thought chilled him. He did not know what would happen next.

  Leave it to the next year. This one is nearly over.

  ‘We’ll have you running a fucking marathon before Christmas, sir; then you’ll be able to outdistance the nurses who’ll be after you.’ Doody was watching over him as he thumped down the passage with the frame. ‘Still, I reckon Anne will keep them off you well enough,’ he added, smiling wickedly.

  Riven looked round sharply. ‘Don’t give me that shit, Doody. I’m bones and bolts, and I’ve got to get used to it.’

  Doody shook his head. ‘Your eyes must have been damaged in the fall then, too, you twit.’

  Riven kept the frame crashing along, with his feet following as though they were drunk. ‘I... couldn’t, Dood.’

  Doody’s eyebrows shot up his black forehead. ‘Looks like it’ll be you and me getting hammered again, then, sir. You’re hardly in a fit state to dance the night away.’

  Will I ever be?

  And he smashed the frame down, and sent his feet following after.

  AN IMMENSE EXPANSE of whiteness piled in mountains, falling away on one side to a blue sea. It shone in the winter sun, blazing soundlessly in a still cold. He breathed in the shrill air, bruises aching. The snow crunched slightly under his feet in the silence.

  ‘Bla-Bheinn, Sgurr Alisdair, Sgurr nan Gillean...’ the girl beside him said in her lilting voice, pointing with one gloved hand at the monolithic, jagged ice hills all around them. The names were like a pagan litany.

  He looked at her. Her face was healthy with raw air, eye
s sparkling, lips slightly parted.

  She caught his gaze suddenly, and reddened at once. ‘It’s rude to stare, you know.’ And she smiled.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said simply, ‘but I like the scenery.’ They both laughed, with only the mountains to hear them. He wanted to touch her face, but took his eyes away with the thoughts moiling within him.

  ‘Dangerous, busy Belfast is a long way away,’ he said, breath steaming.

  ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I hate cities, even Edinburgh. And especially London. Mountains and the sea are in my blood. I’m a Skye lass through and through.’

  ‘A Skye lass,’ he repeated, testing the words. A nice sound. She turned with a crunch of the snow, and pointed eastwards. ‘See Bla-Bheinn? It leans over Glen Sligachan, that runs right through the Cuillins. There where the glen ends at the sea is Camasunary. It’s an old shieling, and my father has a bothy there. It’s the loveliest spot on earth. No road to it, only a path that leads over the ridge to Torrin. I spend summers there.’

  ‘I’ve seen it. I camped there on my way round the coast to Glenbrittle.’ He smiled wryly. ‘When I was there, the rain was driven horizontal by the wind, and if you faced seaward it was impossible to breathe.’

  She grinned. ‘Aye. Well, you take the rough with the smooth up here.’

  The impulse was too strong, and he raised his hand to touch her cheek, caress her hair.

  ‘I wish I lived here, and didn’t have to go back south.’

  She stared at him with that smile he had already come to know. Secretive, conspiratorial; one corner of her mouth quirking upwards. She touched the plaster on his head lightly.

  ‘Stay a while, then,’ she said.

  BEECHFIELD CRAWLED ITS way through the darkest heart of the winter towards Christmas, and what passed as a festive spirit resurrected itself on the wards. Riven held himself apart from the preparations, eyeing the spectacle of elderly people making paper chains with profound dislike. He took to spending long hours by the windows that looked out on to the lawn and the river with an unread book on his lap, trying to avoid the well-meant attentions of the staff—even Doody. To keep thoughts of Sgurr Dearg out of his mind, he was thinking of higher mountains.

  ‘To the east of the western peaks, north of the sea, the land rose and fell in Dales and moors. In the Dales, herdsmen grazed their sheep and cattle, and there were small fields of barley for bread and beer. The people were scattered, coming together only to buy and sell, and for defence in the wintertime against the wolves and the other beasts that came hungering out of the mountains. There were old fortresses there in the heart of the Dales, at the crossing of the rivers or where the soil was very rich. They had been built by the first men to come out of the north, ringed with turf ramparts and stone walls. These were the Rorim of the Dales peoples, where the fighting men lived with the Dale lords and issued forth in their defence. They fought the wolves and the Giants from the ice, and the other creatures which few men saw except as brief glimpses outside their windows in the night...’

  Riven blinked. He had been recalling one of his own books almost word for word in his head. It sounded as portentous as a bible in his mind, and he looked out at the night beyond the window as though he were peering from a fortress. Was Molesy out there now? He was not a patient here, that was certain.

  Something moved down by the willows at the river—a shape that loped from one shadow to another. Riven jumped in his chair. A dog, a stray hanging around for scraps.

  And it was there again—no, this was another one. He was sure there were two of them out there, crouched in the deeper darkness underneath the bare limbs of the trees. The hair rose on the back of his neck. Dogs, merely. But he felt their eyes on him. They were sitting patiently on their haunches in the night, gazes fixed on the bright windows of the ward buildings.

  Dogs—yes. But they stirred some old, forgotten fear in him. Getting the bloody jitters sitting here by myself, that’s what I’m doing.

  Dogs—but they had looked like wolves.

  ‘Christmas may be coming, Mr Riven, but you are one goose that is not getting very fat,’ said Nurse Cohen from behind him. She came forward and looked at his bony frame disapprovingly. ‘We’ll have to try and build you up, especially now you are doing all this walking.’

  ‘Walking!’ Riven exclaimed. ‘I’ve never heard it called that before. I’ve never walked like that before.’

  ‘It’s a start, Mr Riven, and you’re doing very well. I can see you are determined to enjoy Christmas upright.’

  Riven bent his head. ‘Do you go out of the Centre much, after dark?’ he asked her, feeling foolish.

  She seemed puzzled. ‘There’s not much cause to be going out on a cold night like this. I generally make a run for the car as soon as my shift is over and beetle off home. Why?’

  He scowled. ‘No reason.’ But he wanted to be out there, in the night, by the cold brightness of the river. It was almost as if he were being called. And at the same time he knew that nothing would persuade him to go out alone in the dark.

  What’s there? My imagination? Nothing. Bugger all. Don’t be a fool.

  Nurse Cohen set a hand on the back of his neck, light as thistledown. Her fingers were cool on his nape. He could smell the clean linen smell of her uniform, and froze. His jaw muscles bunched wildly. Her face was suddenly that of the young, dark girl he had envisaged days before. He twisted away from her hand, and she gave a small sigh and patted him on the shoulder.

  ‘Don’t sit there too long on your own. Why don’t you come in and join the others? They’re getting quite lively with Christmas coming. Like a bunch of kids, really.’

  He shook his head slightly, and after a moment she glided away, back to the light and warmth of the recreation room.

  THAT NIGHT, HE had a dream.

  It was bitterly cold, and the snow lay thick on the ground. The rivers had become hard and grey as sword blades in the shadow of the hills. And the Giants were abroad, coming down out of the high mountains for the first time in generations.

  They were three days out of the Rorim when the blizzard struck, and the world became a whirling void of snowflakes two steps wide. They cast about for shelter in the lee of a hill and eventually came upon a bank of broken stone that kept the worst of the wind off them. They sat there with the whiteness piling around their calves and the slow, numbing chill eating through their winter furs. There were three of them. One was slight and dark, the other burly and red-bearded, and the third a scarred man whose legs were of different lengths.

  It was the dark man who started, his head snapping up and his eyes narrowing to stare out at the flapping curtain of the snow.

  ‘What is it?’ the red-bearded man asked at once. ‘What do you see?’

  The dark man grimaced. ‘I’m not so certain. Nothing, maybe—a shape on the wind.’ But now they all strained silently to pierce the blizzard with their tired eyes.

  ‘What was it like?’ Riven asked, rubbing his aching legs.

  ‘It was big,’ the dark man said shortly, and Riven cursed.

  The sound of crunching snow came to each of them at the same moment, and they froze.

  ‘Listen,’ Riven said urgently.

  ‘Shut up!’ the dark man hissed.

  They made no sound for many heartbeats. The wind had dropped slightly, and the snow was falling in a near-hush. They heard the sound again—a bulk moving through the deep-lying drifts. Perhaps a rasp of breathing.

  ‘Where is it?’ the red-bearded man demanded.

  There was a click of rock behind them, and they turned as one, scrabbling through the snow that covered them.

  Something rose up like a grey wall out of the snow, ten feet tall and pale with ice. Two eyes burned like blue balls of fire in a misshapen face, and the shadowy blur of a great arm swept through the air and smashed the bearded man ten yards through the air. Riven yelled with fright.

  ‘Run!’ the dark man shouted, tugging at his sword, but Riven could not move.
The snow had frozen into ice around his knees, locking him into immobility. He saw the dark man smashed aside like a broken stick, and the blue fires of the Giant’s eyes were upon him. They knew him.

  ‘Never marry a woman whose eyebrows meet in the middle,’ the Giant said with Jenny’s voice, and then it laughed, the sound clear as a bell in the falling snow.

  Riven shrieked.

  THE NIGHT WAS silent. Had he screamed? All he could hear was the pumping of his own blood in his ears, fuelled by a racing heart. His legs had become tangled in his blankets. The moon poured a bright eldritch light in through his window. He sat up, rubbing his scarred temples. The door to his room was closed. If he had screamed, it was possible no one had heard him. But no; the nurse would have.

  Only a dream, for Christ’s sake.

  But the Giant was straight out of his books, one of his pet monsters. And the other two men... He knew them from somewhere.

  ‘Fucking potty,’ he murmured.

  The dream had left him with a bad taste in his mouth, as though something somewhere were not quite right. There was a jangling feeling of unease in him that was allied to but separate from the miasma of grief he was continually fighting. Absently, he wondered if the weather was fine up at the bothy. On a night like this, the sea would be shining like a lamp and the waves would be a gentle sussuration of water on shingle.

  Ach, shit.

  He swung his legs off the bed and groped for his dressing gown and crutches. Sleep was a long way off now. The cold floor chilled his toes, like the clutch of winter’s ice. He shook his head. Dreaming of giants. What next?

  His crutches clumped on the linoleum as he laboured over to the window and manoeuvred himself into a chair. Outside, the gardens were a maze of silver and grey, the trees standing in ponds of shadow and the river glittering coldly in the light of the moon. He stared at the deep shadows a little anxiously, but there were no dogs there tonight. Or bloody wolves either, come to that. He smiled. Imagination is one thing, but paranoia quite another.