The red-sailed stranger told us his name was Brand.
He had a bag with him. It was heavy enough to pull down a shoulder as he walked up the slope past the drying racks that were thick with fish. There was rain in the air, but it had not yet started to fall, and we paused and took the last of the evening sun on the bench outside the main house. He put the bag carefully at his feet as he gratefully accepted a mug of water from the burn.
Good water, he said. Clean and cold.
He looked at the cod and mackerel on the drying racks.
If you’ve fish to spare, I’ve something to trade with you, he said.
We have everything we need, said Dad.
You don’t have a voltage converter for the windmill, grinned the traveller. But we’ll get to that tomorrow maybe. Your friends in Lewis told me you have been having problems.
Dad looked as if the traveller had already got the better of him in a trade he hadn’t even said he was interested in. But it was true enough. The windmill was eccentric in its performance, and Dad felt it was the converter and had been grumbling for a year or so about making a voyage to try and find another one.
Hmm, he said. Eat with us tonight. Trade tomorrow. We have time.
There are two questions that Dad, in my limited experience, always asks the few travellers who we meet: is there anyone else? And: are they coming? I never know if the questions are about hope or fear, though the fact we never go looking for ourselves makes me think that it might be the latter.
Before I was born, Mum and Dad did go to the mainland, way down the chain of islands and into the river called the Clyde. They went in one boat and came back in four, each piloting their own craft and towing a smaller one, all loaded with many of the things I have grown up with. My own boat in fact was the one my mum had towed. I always thought she had chosen it from the other ones because of the name, the Sweethope. Dad told me later it was because of all the yachts they had cannibalised in the tilted mess of the long abandoned marina it had smelled the least bad when they opened the hatch.
They had made two scavenging trips into the empty city that was once Glasgow, and then never went back. Ferg asked why, once, and Dad just said there was something there that neither could quite explain, but it sapped them and made them very low, so much so that neither could face a third trip, no matter how rich the pickings still were. One of my memories of Mum when she still spoke was her telling me about the huge library she had found there, miles of shelves and doors wide open. They’d slept there for several nights, camped out safely in a fortress of books. She closed the doors to keep the cats and foxes out when they left, and said if there was one thing that might tempt her back it was that. She loved books when she could read, especially stories, and I expect she gave that to me too.
So Dad asked his first questions, and Brand said yes but not many and seemingly less every year, and no, they weren’t coming.
And then, without much prompting from us, he began to tell his story. He was a good talker. His deep voice and easy smile drew you in slowly and gently, so smoothly that you didn’t know you’d been hooked until his sharp eyes caught yours, and even then it felt like he was sharing something merry with you, like a joke. It never felt like bait.
What did feel like a lure were the temptations he freely unloaded from his bag and laid out on the grass at our feet as he talked, seemingly without any other intention than getting them out of the way until he found what he was searching for at the bottom of the thing. Soon he was surrounded by a fan of interesting stuff, like knives and binoculars and first aid kits—military-looking—and a pair of hand cranked walkie-talkies as well as various tins and bottles whose contents would doubtless be revealed if we should choose to ask.
I know it’s in here somewhere, he said, as he carelessly laid another treasure on the ground and rummaged his hand deeper inside the bottomless bag.
We all exchanged glances over his bowed head, but none of them betrayed anything other than interest. Dad’s look contained no hint of a warning and the closest to a reservation about our new guest was the wrinkled nose Bar pantomimed at me.
I knew what she meant. He smelled different. Not bad, just not us.
When the world was full, did everyone smell the same? Or were you all distinct from one another? I can see from the old pictures what a crowd looked like, but I don’t know what it smelled like. Or sounded like even. That’s something I often wonder about. Did all the voices become one big sound, the way the individual clink of pebbles on a stony beach adds up to a roar and a thump in the waves? That’s what I imagine it was like, otherwise all those millions of voices being heard and distinct from one another at the same time would have run you mad. Maybe they did. Anyway. Brand eventually found what he was looking for and pulled it from the depths of the bag with a satisfied grunt. It was a long, clear glass bottle, and he handed it to Dad with a grin.
A guest-gift, he said.
But it came with a warning. We should be careful. It was strong stuff and it would make you woozy if you drank too much of it. Dad laughed and explained we knew all about alcohol since we made both heather ale and mead. But this bottle was from the Before and it was still sealed. It was clearish, like peaty water, and though the paper label was long gone there were embossed letters standing proud around the neck of the bottle that read “AKVAVIT”.
An unopened bottle from the deep past is a rare thing. The Baby Bust had a lot of sorrows to drown, after all. But Brand made little of the gift. He had more, he said. He had found a military ship grounded and tilting on a tidal flat in the far north, maybe Norwegian. It had unopened crates full of tinned food—all age tainted—and medical supplies. And the Akvavit. Lots of Akvavit. It was good, he said, but tasted of a herb. Dill maybe. Unexpected but not bad once you were used to it.
We moved inside as the sky began to spit, helping him bring in the contents of his bag and laying them anew across the hearth mat. Then Dad opened the bottle as Bar and I got the supper together, making a stew from salt cod and potatoes. We all had a drink, except for Mum who just sat by the chimney as she always did. Her eyes never left the redhead’s face. Understandable, because he was a new thing and she saw few enough of those, though she looked less interested than horrified. Dad explained she had injured herself a long time ago, and Brand bowed his head at her and smiled, raising his glass.
To the lady of the house, he said. Skol.
The alcohol made me choke. It felt like flames going down and my first thought was that Brand had poisoned us, but then he drank his glass in one gulp and grinned at me.
Firewater, he said.
That’s what it felt like, warming me from the inside. I coughed and nodded.
Better than that, Dad said, looking round at us all. It’s time travel.
There was a long pause. I didn’t know what he meant.
We’re tasting the past, said Bar.
Exactly, said Brand. That’s what I always think when I drink it. This is what they liked to drink. This is what the Before tasted like.
Bitter. Harsh. And not a bit sweet, I thought, not like the honey mead we make.
But time travel was not the only magic gift he gave us the night of that uneven trade. He had another trick, which was sweeter and being so was of course the one that snared us. And as with everything Brand did, it came so well wrapped in a story that you couldn’t quite see where the danger was.
He came from a family down south on the other side of the mainland, he said. But his family had taken ill and died, two sisters and a father, a long time ago. He had been on the move ever since. This was a surprise to us as we took it as a fact that the mainland was empty. He said that it was now, as far as he knew, but that he and his kin had grown up in a forgotten wildness of reeds and water on the south-east coast called the Broad or the Broads, a place so empty and unvisited that everything had seemed safe until it wasn’t. They’d lived in a big house on a flat island in an estuary, a place that was close enough to dry land on both sides that you could swim back and forth, not live like us perched on the wave-torn edge of things.
His father had been what he called a tinkerer, a man who understood the old machines, and who knew how to make and mend the mechanical ones. He was good at Frankensteining, said Brand, who then explained that a Frankenstein was a monster in the ancient stories made from bits and pieces of human beings. I didn’t tell him he was wrong, or that I’d read the book and knew that Frankenstein was the mad doctor who created the monster. He just meant his dad was good at cobbling together old machines that were meant to do one thing and joining them to other ones so that they did something new, like rigging a waterwheel scavenged from the mainland to make a tide-driven pump to bring clean water from a deep borehole on the island. I saw Dad’s eyes light up when he told us about that. We’re all Frankensteins now that nothing new is getting made and we have to stitch together our tech from the old, unrotted bits of what’s left behind. Brand learned from his dad, but he didn’t stay once everyone died. He left the Broads and took to the sea, looking, he said, for others.
He was, he explained, a mapper of people, a wanderer and a trader, though since his meetings with others were so rare, he did not live by trade but by fishing and gleaning. But it was trade he wanted with us, and though he talked of salted cod and vegetables and whatever food we could spare, I saw his eyes were on the dogs. And especially my dogs. He was very taken by Jip and Jess, I could see that from the first, though in truth he was open and made no secret of it. He crouched down and stroked them while pulling back their lips to see their mouths. They look small enough at first sight, but they’ve got long jaws and fierce teeth under that fur. He nodded in approval.
Good hunters your dogs, I’ll bet, he said, looking at Dad. Dad nodded at me.
Griz’s dogs, he said. And you’re right. They’re the very death of rabbits, those two.
Indeed if Jip and Jess had a fault it was that they took rabbits as a special challenge and would hunt them all day, given half a chance. There were none on the home island, nor had there ever been in my lifetime but there were some warrens on Sandray, and the Uists—now that people had gone—were heaving with them. It was an obsession they must have inherited from their parents: their mother Freya went rabbiting in the dunes one day and never came back, though we searched and searched. Their father Wode is so old that he now moves even less than Mum, at whose feet he sleeps most of the day, but once he too was a gleeful rabbit-slayer. Jip and Jess would start whining half a mile out whenever we went to the big islands, and were always first over the gunwales when we landed, tearing across the dunes and onto the machair where the rabbits sunned themselves. The only things they hunted more obsessively than rabbits were rats, and there were plenty of them in the abandoned houses. Rabbits they seemed to hunt for a game, chasing and doubling back and forth across the sand and grass in a kind of murderously happy abandon, but rats they took personally, as a kind of grim affront, and their assault on them was definitely war, not sport at all. Whenever we entered an abandoned house, we’d send them in first to clear any rats.
As he stroked the dogs, Brand told us he had spent thirteen years on his travels, looking for people and seeing the world. He had sailed the Baltic and up into the fjords of Scandinavia, and he had then hugged the deserted coast of Europe all the long way down to Gibraltar and then the Atlantic coast of Africa. He had not entered the Mediterranean, though he had gone quite far up some of the navigable rivers that penetrated the mainland. We all leaned forward as he spoke of what he had seen and what he had not, like the three families living together in a big ancient house in the Stockholm Archipelago, a scrabble of tiny islands around the old capital of Sweden.
When I first spotted them I thought they were ghosts, he said. They were like copies of each other—pale-eyed and pale-skinned with flyaway white-blond hair like bog cotton.
He said the women were very beautiful, but he had found them unnerving, and not just because of the strong physical resemblance that now spread across three families. He said they smiled just a little too much and left it at that. He had not minded leaving them, or that all he had taken from them were strange memories and their habit of saying skol when they toasted.
He told us of an eerie sailing ship suddenly seen on a windless, murky day on the North Sea that had sheered away as soon as he hailed it and then disappeared into a fog bank and never been seen again, something that had happened so fast he almost put it down to hallucination until minutes later when his becalmed boat had been rocked by the bow wave of the mysterious craft which seemed—even more mysteriously—to have been moving silently under its own power since there was no wind for the sails to catch.
He had sailed down into the Channel and then gone down the Seine where he found not only burnt Paris but before that, on the estuary, the nearest thing to a village he had ever seen, five or six families living like us, fishermen and farmers.
I liked them a lot, he said. I thought one day, when I’d travelled enough, I would go back and learn their language and live with them.
Only when he sailed back two years later, coming north from his great voyage to Spain and then Africa, they were gone.
Not a sign of them, he said. And their fields were so overgrown they might never have been there at all. They might as well have been something I dreamed.
And for a moment, as he spoke, his eyes seemed to be seeing something a great deal further away than the fire he was looking at.
Africa, said Bar. Was it hot?
All the time, he said.
I’d love to travel, said Bar, ignoring the look Dad threw her. Just to know what somewhere else was like.
And then Brand stood and said he must go outside for a piss, and I stumbled over the things laid on the floor as I hurried to show him the shed where the earth closet was. In truth I was just trying to stop him exiting first, in case he surprised Ferg who I knew had been leaning close to the open door so he could hear what was being said.
I saw him slip out of sight as I paused in the door and pretended to sneeze to buy him time, and then I stepped into the fading light of the evening and pointed to the outside toilet. The squall had passed and the rain had stopped spitting.
There, I said.
Brand looked at the tall upright shack. Of course it stood out like a sore thumb when compared with the other low-built stone outbuildings.
Well, he grinned. Good job you came to show me. I’d never have found it on my own.
I wondered if I’d made him suspicious, but his smile took the edge off his words. I watched him walk over the low heather to the toilet, and noticed how his eyes never stopped scanning the island as he went. At the time I thought he knew he was being watched.
After what happened, the way it happened, I’m not so sure. But the end result was just as bad.