‘Siuthad! Ich an aired! Eat more! It’ll feed you up.’
It was what the women of the district were continually saying to Lachlann Gillies. He would always respond in the same way, smiling and nodding obligingly as they stacked one more potato on the edge of his plate, dangled yet another coalfish in his direction, trying to tempt his appetite. They would grin with satisfaction as they watched another bite slide down the length of his throat, imagining its speedy progress round his intestines before lodging in a waistline most of them could span with a simple flexing of their hands.
‘Balach math! Good boy!’ they would say to the 11 year old. ‘We’ll have you healthy looking in no time.’
It was what his mother, too, kept saying to the son who had long ago towered above her head, repeating the same phrases whenever it was mealtime as if she was casting a spell that might have some miraculous effect on her giant-sized, taper-thin son. In conversation with all the other women living in the area, she would spend her time bemoaning her offspring’s physique, trying to defend herself from, what seemed to her to be, a spate of accusations that she was barely feeding her boy.
‘He’s been like that since the very beginning,’ she’d declare, ‘Remember when he was only a few months old. We were forced to saw the end of his cradle, put a long extension on it. And his toes stuck so much out of the box-bed, we had to take a few stones out of the walls of the house to make room for him. It’s hard to make our way past him when he’s fast asleep. A hop, step and jump is always required.’
‘Terrible, terrible…’ her female companions would shake their heads and mutter, pretending to believe every word of her tale. In their own homes, though, it was a different matter. They would hover closely round the boy the moment he stepped in the door, offering all sorts of delectations and delights that might fatten him. A helping of lamb stew might be laid before him. A slice of barley bread smeared with butter and sprinkled with sugar would be pressed into his hands. They would even forego the feeding of their own children as they contemplated the possibility of fattening Lachlann up.
‘It’s terrible, terrible, terrible…’ they would say. ‘How that woman doesn’t feed the child. It’s unnatural. Unnatural, I tell you. And you can see that even in the way the poor soul looks.’
And so the nourishment of Lachlann became one of the most important missions of the people of the district. It continued throughout his years of adolescence, as he stretched and stretched to ever greater heights. In every house he came across, there would be yet another feast as one more portion of porridge, a further helping of cabbage and turnip would be placed before him…
* * *
For all that these occurred in strange and unexpected ways, there was little doubt that the feeding of young Lachlann brought results. There was evidence of that in the way his height increased year after year. It wasn’t long before he was taller by far than all the other inhabitants of the district. The people spoke of him wherever they went till it wasn’t long before visitors came even from the mainland to stand in his shadow. He was as rare a sight as the single tree in Maransay that one of his fellow villagers had mistaken for an overgrown cabbage or the old broch in Cairnbost where the one-eyed giant, Mac an t-Cyclops had been said to live centuries before.
There were other aspects of Lachlann’s appearance that inspired a great deal of awe. His hands and feet were so huge that it was rumoured that this was where the excess food he had been given as a boy was stored. His toes were so long that they possessed the ability to grip as firmly as his fingers, able to move and shift, too, in a blur of speed. And then, too, there were his wrists and ankles. For all the thinness of the remainder of his body, they were the thickest anyone had ever seen. The women who could span his waistline with a stretch of their fingers needed the length of their arms to circle the bones of that part of their anatomy.
‘It’s uncanny…’ Ruaraidh, a man from the district, would say when he examined him. ‘I’ve never seen the likes of that in all my days.’
‘Aye. Aye. T-t-there’s no d-d- d-oubt about that. N-n-o doubt about that…’ Tormod Glugach echoed in his usual way.
There were some, of course, who disparaged Lachlann’s unusual anatomy. They mocked his huge ankles. ‘About the same size as that stupid tree in Maransay,’ they declared. ‘And just about as useful too.’ They made fun, too, of these fingers, the way they could nip and tuck, cut and whirl. ‘Fine talent for a girl,’ they would say, ‘For someone who might spend all her hours knitting and sewing. Useless in a man.’
Then came the day when even the most sceptical saw the value of his spindly frame. They were going out hunting for seabirds on the cliffs near the village. The 14-year-old came with them, only in their company because they needed as many as possible to bring their catch home, an additional puny shoulder to bear their harvest. As they made their way to the cliff-edge, Ruaraidh turned to his neighbour, nudging him with his elbow.
‘We’d better be careful that no puff of wind blows that straw away. We’d never be forgiven if we lost him.’
And then, as they watched him, their scorn turned to wonder. He slipped over the edge of the cliff, his long toes secure on every ledge and layer that creased and lined the rock-face. From its crest, he took giant strides. His feet leaped from crack to crevasse, finding every flaw and fissure in its stone, resting for a moment in each available clump of sea-pinks. At the same time, too, his hands reached and swirled, grasping the necks of every nestling, every gannet chick, the young of the guillemot, puffin and shag. They followed his every move with awe and amazement. They had never seen a hunter quite like this, able to overcome obstacles that none of them could ever dream of conquering. Perhaps, they now conceded, there was a reason why their mothers, wives and spinster aunts had chosen to feed this startling specimen of humanity with such diligence and care. Here was someone who had been bred to perfection to master all the demands of this task. A new kind of human. A bird-hunter of quite extraordinary power and majesty, as exotic as any of the birds he captured on the cliffs.
* * *
The men from the furthest island in the Hebrides soon came to hear of Lachlann. A few years later, they arrived at the village pier in their boat, having rowed across the many miles of the Atlantic to reach there. The group of small and scrawny beardless strangers waded to the shoreline, speaking to the first men that waited to greet them; the women, of course, having vanished to their homes as soon as they saw the vessel appear on the horizon.
‘We have heard strange legends of a special one,’ the oldest, most frail one declared, ‘A man who is designed perfectly for both the rigours and delights of our island.’
At first, the men of the district denied there was any such figure as Lachlann in their midst. They snorted as they towered above these miniature men who had come to their district, dismissing their every word.
‘Someone must have been telling you stories,’ they declared.
‘There’s not such a creature in these parts,’ they said.
But it was difficult to conceal such a figure as Lachlann. 16 now, he could not be hidden within the walls or below the rafters of any house in the district.
Soon they were able to see him, his dark head and chest bobbing as he walked down the track that ran through a field of barley. For all his youth, he had the beginnings of a thick, dark beard on his upper lip and chin. An old man from the distant isle pointed a shaking finger in his direction.
‘There he is…’ he grinned, unable to believe what he was seeing. ‘The man of legend. The special one.’
The men of the district stiffened and glowered when they heard this. For all that they had once mocked and jeered Lachlann, they now saw him as the most valuable man in their community. He provided the largest portion of food for their homes, prevented both young and old from starving through the harshest of winters.
‘You’ll not lay a finger on him,’ Ruaraidh declared.
‘N-n-n-or touch a hair on his ch-ch-chiny-chin-chin…’ Tormod Glugach added.
One of the small, thin men from the remote island smiled and shook his head. ‘No,’ they said, ‘We just want to talk to him. You can trust us. It’s all we really want to do.’
* * *
No one was able to listen to all the conversation the far-off men had with Lachlann that day. Some caught whispers on the wind, overhearing the occasional word or phrase passing from their mouths. One claimed that he had overheard the islanders boasting of the fine food Lachlann could obtain if he moved there.
‘Not for nothing did a Skyeman call us the best-fed people in Creation,’ one of them, even smaller than the rest, declared.
Another told of how the newcomers had mentioned the fulmar, the seabird that was only found at that time out on that distant edge of the world.
‘It brings us oil…’
‘And feathers…’
‘And the sweetest and pinkest of meats…’
There was further talk too. Alasdair, the greatest imbecile in the district, had sworn that these tiny figures from the far periphery of the Hebrides had spoken endlessly about the beauty of their womenfolk.
‘There is none like them. The most beautiful women, they say, anywhere in the world. And they have the most wonderful of talents, the greatest of grace. You know they can give a man greater pleasure than any who live anywhere else. They can lift a man up to the greatest of heights. Our womenfolk have known and practised these delights for generations.’
They mocked Alasdair when he told them of that, striking and punching him with their fists and feet.
‘You dirty beggar…’
‘Keep your foulness to yourself!’
Yet there was no doubting the truth of what happened the following morning. They watched Lachlann disappear, seeing him sitting in the stern of the islanders’ boat as they rowed west across the Atlantic towards their home. As they did so, his giant hand rose and fell, rose and fell, waving goodbye to those who had provided for him throughout the days of his youth, piling food upon his plate, greeting his arrival in their homes with the same phrase, again and again and again, words that were uttered in the end more in desperation than in any hope that they might be proved correct.
‘Siuthad! Ich an aired! Eat more! It’ll feed you up… We’ll have you healthy looking in no time.’
* * *
That should have been all there was to the story.
Except some 50 years later, after the most horrendous storm, Ruaraidh’s grandson, Ruaraidh Beag, found himself washed up on the far-off island. Recalling the stories his grandfather had told him, he asked the bearded men who gathered round him if they had heard of Lachlann the giant figure who had disappeared the morning after the visitors had come to their district.
‘Och, yes, yes…’ one of the islanders said. ‘He lived here all right. The best fowler of them all, a wonder on the cliffs, but he died some 20 years ago.’
‘Aye. I would’ve expected that,’ Ruaraidh Beag nodded. ‘It’s been a long time since he disappeared from our place.’
It was then he looked around him, examining the figures of the men who filled the shadows of the house that had granted him shelter. For all the differences in their sizes and shapes, even the looks on their faces, they all had the same thick beard. Their feet were extraordinary too. There was the length of their toes, the thickness of the bare ankles that could be seen, white and naked, below the legs of their trousers. Once or twice, he saw how they were able to grip and hold with this part of their body, stretching towards a corner of the room to lift a pipe or a bonnet.
A thought came to him then – about the words that Alasdair had said he had overheard that day. He smiled as he considered them and wondered for the first time if they might be true.