There were twenty-six of the guisers, all told. Their long straw petticoats and high, pointed hats made them all seem taller than ordinary men. The bunches of coloured ribbons tied on petticoats, hats, and shirts, were like curiously-shaped fruit and flowers sprouting everywhere from them. The eyes above their handkerchief masks looked out like the eyes of mysterious strangers. Like strangers, too, they entered in deadly silence; for – as Robbie had just proved – even a few words spoken could give away the secret behind the mask.

A shout of greeting went up at the sight of them, and everyone rose so that there would be room for them to dance. Chairs were pushed back against the walls. Peter raised his fiddle; and still without a word spoken, the Skuddler’s men formed a circle with the Skuddler himself at its centre.

Peter struck an opening chord. The Skuddler raised the long white wand he carried in his right hand. Peter swung into a fast-stepping reel, and with a swish of his wand, the Skuddler commanded the dance to begin.

Instantly then, the but end seemed to explode into a whirling mass of straw. Tall hats shot up and down like tongues of flame flickering through the mass. Coloured ribbons tossed about in it, like fruit falling, like flowers being torn off in a gale.

The watchers in the but end clapped in time to the dancers’ antics. They cheered, they laughed. They shouted out guesses about which face lay behind which mask. For all the wildness of this dance, however, it was still carried on in deadly silence. It was still under the Skuddler’s command, too, for it was his wand that continued to direct all its movements.

Up and down the dancers leapt. In and out they wove. Round and about they whirled and twisted, all in obedience to the wand. The signals from it divided them into pairs, into larger groups, and then brought them back into one mass. Another signal stilled all the others while each man danced alone; and as he danced, each and every man kept his eyes on the wand. Each and every man danced for the Skuddler, but the Skuddler himself never shifted position.

It was only the hand with the wand in it that moved. And his eyes! The eyes of the Skuddler were everywhere, darting from dancer to dancer; and away at the back of his mind as he watched this, Robbie heard once more the voice of Old Da explaining to him the dance of the Skuddler’s men.

“They are supposed to be earth spirits – the spirits of corn, and fruit, and flowers – and the Skuddler himself is the god of the earth commanding them to dance in honour of all the good things he has created …”

“What’s the meaning of it all?” a voice breathed in Robbie’s ear, and turning towards the sound, he met the gaze of big, dark eyes – Finn Learson’s eyes drawing him into the same circle of mysterious power that held Tam and Elspeth; Finn Learson guessing at the knowledge Old Da had passed on and probing his mind for the secret of it.

“I don’t know,” Robbie lied, trying hard to break away from the gaze; but the voice of Old Da was still running through his mind, and he was desperately afraid that Finn Learson could somehow also hear it saying,

“It was the way they made magic in old heathen times, Robbie. The dressing-up was a sort of spell. The dancing was another part of the spell, and the whole thing made a magic that turned them into the creatures they were supposed to be – the earth-god and his spirits …”

“Who’s playing the Skuddler?” Finn Learson demanded. “Do you know that?”

Robbie backed off from the eyes boring into his own, then found that he had backed into his mother, and sighed with relief to hear her answering for him.

“Nobody knows,” she told Finn Learson. “The young men always decide that among themselves, and it won’t be until they all unmask at the end of Up Helly Aa that we learn which of them it is.”

A burst of cheering and clapping from all around announced the sudden end of the dance. Robbie found himself once more surrounded by the guisers as they crowded to take their share of the food and drink laid out. Shouts of laughter came from people jostling to watch each one swallow as much as he could without lifting more than a corner of his mask. Then Peter’s fiddle shrilled out again.

The Skuddler’s men swept back on to the dancing space, each with a partner from among the guests. Another fiddler joined Peter’s efforts, and yet another. The but end became a wild, weaving whirl of figures stamping in time to the music. The laughing faces of girls bobbed about among the white masked faces of the guisers. Peter and the other two fiddlers stood perched above the dancers, their faces red and shining with sweat, their bows racing back and forth at mad speed across the fiddle strings.

Somebody seized Robbie’s hand and pulled him into the whirl of dancers. He caught the gleam of white teeth and dark eyes as Finn Learson spun by, laughing, with Janet on his arm. A tall figure loomed over him, a masked face looked down, and the grim eyes of the Skuddler met his own. Briefly he glimpsed Elspeth’s hair in a tangle of gold, and scarlet ribbons, and then he was too dizzy to be aware of anything else except the floor heaving under his feet and the roof rafters seeming to turn like the spokes of a huge wheel above his head.

A gust of cold night air and a last ringing chord from the fiddles brought him to himself. Somebody had opened the door, he realised. The dance was at an end, and the guisers were departing to visit the next house on their rounds. Silent to the last, they were beginning to vanish through the doorway, waving farewells as they went, and all the younger folk among the guests were jostling to follow them.

Robbie was still dizzy. He held on to a chair to steady himself, and to his dismay, saw that Finn Learson and Elspeth were among those following in the wake of the Skuddler and his men. Quickly, in case his father or mother saw him leave, he ducked low and slid neatly in among the jostling throng.

The next moment he was outside and catching his breath in wonder at what he saw there, for there was a strange, tingling feeling in the air, and instead of the velvety darkness he had expected, the whole sky was aflame with green, leaping light.

Somebody shouted, “It’s the Merry Dancers!” – which is the name they have in these parts for the peculiar lights that sometimes leap and flicker over northern skies in winter – and this cry was taken up on all sides, for nobody could think when they had last seen so fine a display of these northern lights.

Every face stared upwards, and everyone began turning round and around as they stared, for the light seemed sometimes to roll in great green waves over the sky, and sometimes it was like long searchlights of green shooting brilliantly out from a huge and starless black dome. Sometimes too, all the green would vanish for a few seconds, and everybody was blinded by darkness until the lights appeared again, in little tongues of leaping, dancing green flame.

Robbie stared upwards with the rest, all thoughts of Elspeth suddenly forgotten in his wonder at this sky. Then, too late, he realised that the Skuddler and his men had moved on, and the others were following in little groups that straggled all over the hillside.

Shouting, he ran to catch up with the nearest of these groups, then stopped in sudden terror that they might be trows, for part of the power trows have at Up Helly Aa is that they can take on any shape they wish. Yet still, he reminded himself, he had to keep track of Finn Learson and Elspeth. He simply had to! In a shaking voice he mumbled, “God be about me and all that I see.” Then, hastily he crossed himself, and stumbled on, but it still did not prove easy to find Finn Learson and Elspeth among all those straggling groups, and with every hour after that, Robbie found it growing even harder to keep on their trail.

At the next house, the Skuddler and his band departed without any train of followers; but still there were people visiting back and forth between all the houses scattered over the hill, for in every house that night there was light, and music, and celebration of some kind. Moreover, Elspeth was as footloose as any of the others roaming the hill; and in each house she and Finn Learson visited, Robbie seemed to find himself being caught up in the celebrations at the very moment these two were ready to leave for some other place.

In one house, it was a guessing game that held him trapped among boys of his own age, all clustering around him to shout the riddle,

The more he tried to free himself too, the louder they called, “What am I? Guess, Robbie Henderson, guess!”

But still Robbie could not guess – until Elspeth herself gave him the clue. Turning at the doorway with Finn Learson, she smiled goodbye at everyone there; and in a flash, Robbie remembered her footprint in the lik straw, and the tangle of smoke uncoiling slowly out towards the summer sky.

“Smoke!” Triumphantly he shouted the answer, and darted outside to follow the two figures dancing and running on their way under the green lights of the Merry Dancers.

In another house it was a dance that held him marooned in a corner while Elspeth disappeared. In yet another house he was helping to hand around the food when she decided to move on, and he had no choice but to drop a plate of scones to the floor while he dashed after her. Yet still, in spite of all such problems, he had to make sure Finn Learson did not notice how closely he was keeping on Elspeth’s trail, and a dozen times that night he blessed Nicol for the scarlet hair ribbons that picked her out from all the other people milling around.

The further the night went on, however, the more difficult he found it to keep her always under his eye; for the further the night went on, of course, the more tired he grew. His legs began to ache with running over the tough, springy grass of the hill. His eyes smarted from lack of sleep, and it was the smarting eyes which at last betrayed him.

One moment he had the will-o’-the-wisp figure of Elspeth full in view as she danced ahead of him across the hill. The next moment, his weary eyelids drooped, and before he could blink them open again, the green of the northern lights had vanished behind one of the sky’s spells of total darkness.