Twenty-Two

The land below Ballantyne Hill had probably been farmed for three thousand years, give or take a thousand.

Not always for wheat crop or cattle or sheep. Until the fourteenth century, the whole landscape had flooded regularly, until sea defences had been built on the coast, twenty miles away. The crop then had been fish in abundance. Even now the fields tended to be marshy, cut through with irrigation ditches. Further south they called them, picturesquely, the water meadows. Here, it was just the Levels.

They were level, too. Mile after mile of gently rolling land, patchworked into alternate pasture and crop. Occasionally the green was broken by the surrealistic yellow of rape, or the blue of linseed, until the land began to rise, and Ballantyne Hill itself made its surprising appearance. But Mike Musterne’s family hadn’t farmed below Ballantyne for three thousand years—only a mere eight hundred.

A dour family man of very few words, he drove the Landrover along the land at the back of the hill. It was growing dusk—a red line marked the sky behind the hill all the way to the Bristol Channel. Even now, with the first dew settling, the chalk dust flew up in the Landrover’s wake, obscuring the view in the driver’s mirror. It had been a long, warm day. Musterne squinted through both the dust and the smoke from his own cigarette, leaning down to look at the summit of the hill through the windscreen.

They had sheep at Ballantyne farm. He kept half in the pasture close to the house, and the other half were on the hill. It was a common grazing right that Musterne guarded as fiercely as if it were his, and his alone. He put sheep and cattle on the hill out of a sort of obstinacy, to spite its occasional visitors. He swung the Landrover over, and got out, opening the gate into the field.

The hill looked odd tonight. He stopped to consider it.

In some lights—early morning, late dusk—it looked like a series of rings or hoops straddling a vast green cone. Like something at a fair, on a hoopla stall. Over the centuries, the soil slippage had created a rippling effect on every side. In this light, tonight, it seemed that a giant hand had carefully ringed the hill over and over again with a grey pencil.

There were old beliefs, here. Much older even than the grazing right.

In Neolithic times, the hill had been used as a burial mound. A pit had been dug in the summit, lined with stone. As the soil eroded, the stones emerged—several blunt thumbs keeled over at angles. On old engravings they showed quite clearly. Then, sometime in the sixteenth century, a little chapel had been built over the stones, and, for perhaps another hundred years, services had been carried out here.

The chapel, too, however, fell into ruin, leaving only a ring of foundations where the church had been, and a curious flat rock to show where the Stone Age barrow had been reused as a flooring for the chapel. Now, the stones had worn glassy and smooth and looked almost modern. A piece of fancy brickwork, like a driveway or path, or an odd piece of modern art, lying perfectly flat at the summit and only visible once you had climbed the long rise from the fields.

Musterne drove the Landrover forward, and closed the gate.

The jeep rolled forward across the land until it reached another entrance. Here, the fence post had split, the rusted chain lock had dropped. Musterne got out and looked at it, kicking it for good measure. The gate posts were made from two lumps of massive timber, eaten by worm, cracked by weather, bleached by heat, but sunk so far in the ground that he had supposed that they would stand until doomsday.

‘Bloody thing,’ he muttered to himself.

He shored up the post and, taking a bolt cutter and pliers from the back of the jeep, he cut the chain and reset the lock. As he finished, he put his hand on the post. ‘Bloody thing,’ he repeated to himself, puzzled.

It was then that he noticed the shoe.

It was stuck in the grass at the side of the post, deep in the bindweed and thistles. Reopening the gate, he leaned down and picked it up, scratching his hand for good measure in the process. He turned it over several times. It was a woman’s shoe, a size four. A blue deck shoe with a white lace. An old shoe, well battered, with a hole wearing in the sole and the white rim fraying around the ankle.

He weighed it in his hand.

He had found a few odd items in his time, especially on the hill. Hippies had once left all kinds of stuff—quartz, flowers, threaded grass necklaces. Ribbons, too, on the gates. Someone in the village had told him that Buddhists used prayer flags, and that probably the ribbons were the same sort of thing. He knew there was such a thing as a wishing tree, too, because he had seen one once in Scotland, on the Black Isle; a huge tree hung with all sorts of rags, each one a wish, a desire. He looked at the shoe. Not so much a wish as a piece of fly-tipping. He threw the shoe over the fence, into the hedge. He walked through the gate and up on to the hill.

It was just getting dark as he reached the top. He had a fancy to look out at the view. As he came over the last rise, he was rewarded with a long panorama, twenty miles of green slipping smoothly into shadow. Down on the road, cars were switching their headlights on, and the long straight road was dotted with them. Directly overhead, however, the sky was amazingly blue, the violet-tinged blue of last light. He could hear a motorbike revving in the village three miles away. A dog barking. Closer at hand, the soft noise of the sheep tearing at the turf.

He looked at the old church floor, then looked again as he was turning away.

The other shoe, a blue deck shoe, was lying on the glass-like smoothness of the floor. Next to it was the remains of a fire, a circle of ash. And around the fire was a ring.

He stepped towards it, trying to make out what it was.

He squatted down, and touched it with the tip of his finger.

It was a ring of stars, made with blood.