The world came back, and it was on its side and it hurt. There was a great weight pressing my hip and my knee to the stone floor, and it was this pain as much as anything else that hooked me back out of the dark and laid me sideways, staring into the firelight, my cheek flat on the paving stones. I had a throbbing tightness in my forehead where it had hit the edge of the door, in just the same place that the boom had smacked it earlier. It felt as if my skull had cracked.
When I tried to feel it and see if there was any blood, I discovered my hands were stuck behind my back and I couldn’t move them. That’s when I did panic, and I thrashed around trying to get up and free them, and then the great weight—which was of course Brand—finished tying my wrists to each other and stood up.
The relief to the side of my knee and my hip was good, but the look he gave me as he stepped sideways wasn’t, not a bit. It was cold and fierce and as dangerous as the knife he picked up off the chair by the fire. I knew it was razor-sharp because it was mine and I sharpened it every time I used it.
Where are they? he said.
Who? I said. Before I could think better of it.
The others, he said. Your father. Your brother. The rest of you. You wouldn’t have come alone.
The fire crackled. My blood thumped in my ears. My head felt like it was going to split open.
They’re outside, I said, now having had that time to think better.
He looked at me.
You stole my dog, I said.
How many came? he said. And don’t lie and don’t call out or I’ll cut out your tongue.
Given that choice, it seemed like a good idea to do neither of those things. So that’s what I did.
How many? he said.
You shouldn’t have taken my dog, I said.
He looked at me some more, but his head was cocked and I could tell he was listening for something outside.
About then was when my head cleared enough for me to remember what had happened on the other side of the blackness I’d just been hooked out of and I began to wonder about who exactly had hit me from behind while I was watching Brand play all the sad magic into the night air. The Brand in front of me now seemed like a completely different person from the self-contained musician lost in the dream of his own creation. This Brand was on edge, all his nerves raw on the outside of himself, listening with more than his ears.
He suddenly put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Loud. Shrill. Twice.
There was an answering noise from out of the darkness beyond the doors. A bark. But not Jess or Jip. Not a bark like a terrier barks, sharp and hoarse at the same time. A deep bark, as much rumble as woof. The noise a big thing makes.
Something big enough to hit a person in the back and knock them hard into the edge of a door.
Brand looked at me.
You stay. You don’t move. You don’t shout. Do that? Maybe you keep your tongue, he said. And then he slipped out of the church in a low ducking kind of run and left me staring up at the fire shadows dancing across the great vaulted ceiling overhead.
Liar, I thought. Thief and liar.
His dog was not dead at all. But where was Jess?
It didn’t make sense. He’d stolen her. But she wasn’t on the boat. And she wasn’t here. She’d have barked if she smelled me. I wondered if they’d done something terrible to her. Or had she jumped overboard and tried to swim home and drowned? Had I been so set on following the distant red sails all day that I’d missed a small and loyal dog’s head in the waves as I passed it? Had she barked in relief as I got closer to her and then watched the Sweethope sail past, leaving her alone and bewildered on the wave waste as the cold took her?
All of those thoughts kept repeating in my head, images that got worse and more detailed every time they came around. And the more I tried not to think of her last moments, the closer I seemed to get to them. I could easily have missed a dog’s barking in the sound of the wind. Jip could have missed her scent. As my head whirled round and round on it, I became more and more convinced. We had betrayed her. But me most of all.
It hurt like losing Joy all those years ago, worse really because that loss had not been my fault, and by the time Brand came back after what felt an hour or more I had persuaded myself that she was dead and had died in the terrible way I had imagined.
He walked in taller than he had left somehow. Slower, calmer—not ducking any more. A big dog padded in at his heels, a dog with thick grey and black fur and a white face and the least doglike eyes I have ever seen. They were blue as Brand’s own eyes, but not then nor ever after did I see them go warm in the way his could; they were always cold, and would never look away from you. Dogs don’t like holding your gaze. Saga was different. Saga could outstare a rock.
Good dog, Saga, Brand said. Sit.
The dog sat in front of me and watched. Brand had made his fire out of chairs. He had a good supply of this firewood. There were lots of them in rows behind him, waiting for a crowd of believers who would never come again. He picked the nearest one up, stomped it to kindling and used it to feed the fire that had gone to embers and ash in his absence. There were lots of matching red books stacked on a shelf on the wall and he tore the pages out of one and fed the coals with them, using the empty cover to fan the fire back into crackling life. Then he kicked another chair to bits and added that to the new flames.
He took a chair and brought it close to the fire so he could sit over it and warm his hands and watch me at the same time.
You came alone, he said. Didn’t expect that.
I kept quiet.
Don’t need you to tell me I’m right, he said, nodding at the dog. Saga and I criss-crossed the island. It’s not big. And she’d have smelled them if they were there. The others.
I don’t know if you ever had your wrists tied together when you were alive. It’s a horrible feeling, especially when they’re trapped behind you. You’ve lost your hands and everything about you is open and exposed. It makes it hard to breathe normally. Brand looked at me and did the unnerving thing he could sometimes do, which was seem to hear what your head was saying to you. He smiled. Not a nasty smile, one of his good ones.
You can talk, he said. He took my knife from his belt and stabbed it into the seat of the chair beside the one he was sitting on so that it stood there, stuck in the wood, reflecting the firelight at me.
Not going to cut your tongue out, he said. That’d be a horrible thing to do to a person. Just said it to get your attention. Needed you to keep quiet.
I stayed that way. Like I said, hands tied behind you makes you feel powerless and the only thing I did have control of was my words, so I looked away and clenched my teeth to stop them getting out.
Was just a threat, he said. Don’t take it bad. It’s like when you tell a lie, it’s always better to put a grain of truth in it to make it stick, eh? Thing with a threat is you have to put a little picture in it, something specific so that it catches in the head. You add that little picture, the person you’re threatening has more to chew on in their imagination, and chewing makes them digest the threat properly and then before they know it it’s a part of them and they believe it much more than if it’s just words outside them, you see?
I didn’t. But I did wonder who in the whole wide empty world he had learned this from. Or done this to. Maybe it was something he read.
My silence unsettled him, I think.
Say something, he said. Are they coming after you?
Saga barked at me and the shock of the deep noise and her teeth so close to my face sort of jumped the words out of my mouth without me meaning to let it happen.
Where’s Jess? I said.
Who? he said.
My dog, I said. The dog you stole.
Jess, he said. And he leant back, smiling a little, scratching Saga’s ears, rewarding her for frightening the words out of me.
I didn’t know her old name, he said. I was going to call her Freya.
What have you done to her? I said.
She needed discipline, he said. She bit Saga.
Good, I thought. Good dog, Jess.
Locked her in a shed over there, he said, pointing into the dark. Small room, no food, hard floor. She’ll be better behaved come light, or she’ll stay hungry.
That was a relief. It flooded through me like warm water, washing away the images I’d made of her lonely death in the waves.
This was a holy place, he said looking around. That table up there was the altar. Where they made their sacrifices and such. There’s a metal board with writing on it out there by the shed. It explains it all. If you can read. Not just the church. The whole island.
I didn’t want to listen to him talk. Especially in the way he’d started to, all easy and friendly, like he hadn’t recently threatened to cut my tongue out.
Just give me my dog, I said.
I own her, he said.
No, I said. You stole her.
He looked at me oddly. And then he grinned and threw back his head and chopped out a short laugh.
No, he said. The name of the island.
And he grinned some more and spelled it out.
I-O-N-A, he said. Iona. Not I-own-her.
And then his eyes got cold and serious again.
Though I do that too, he said. That’s just a fact you need to get used to.
I want my dog, I said. You stole her.
You keep saying stole, he said.
I do, I said. You’re a thief.
It sounds like I was being brave, writing down what I said then, in that dark echoey place by the fire. That’s not true. I was angry and scared and felt very unprotected with my hands tied behind me. All I had for a shield was words.
A thief now, is it? he said. And he said it as if this was a word he had never heard before. A thief? Well now. That sounds bad.
Don’t mind what it sounds like, I said. Give me my dog. And the fish. And my dad’s coat.
He smiled then, looking down at the yellow oilskin.
It’s a good coat, he said. But it’s mine. I traded for it. Same as the dog that was yours and is now mine.
You did not, I said.
And how would you know? he said. Seeing as you were asleep at the time.
His eyes were level. Open, even. There was no real accusation in them. Maybe a bit of disappointment.
Ah, Griz, he said. I thought we were friends. Your father is a man who understands the nature of a proposition. There’s more to a trade than like for like. He really wanted that windmill part. And while you were sleeping, we came to an agreement.
Just for a moment I let the warm smile and the soft words make me doubt myself. Had I rushed off before anyone could tell me I had grabbed the wrong end of the stick? Had I missed the turbine offloaded and waiting on the shore? Had everyone been too sick to stop me with the truth?
And a liar, I said. Thief and liar.
Ah, Griz, he said again. Words like that can poison a friendship, you know?
I know you’re lying because if you had made a deal, you wouldn’t have run off so scared, asking if the others were there, I said. An honest man wouldn’t have done that.
To his credit, he didn’t drop the smile much.
Well, he said. Well. No one likes to be badly thought of.
They are coming, I said. They were right behind me. So you better let me go.
He shook his head.
Two liars now, he said. And us in a church. Double the poison, don’t you think?
I didn’t answer. None of the replies bubbling up in my throat made sense enough to be let out anyway. He stretched and then prodded a chair leg deeper into the fire.
They poisoned the dogs, you know? he said. At the end. They gave them something harsh and vicious to their wellbeing. That’s why there aren’t more of them. Why they’re rare.
I kept quiet. He didn’t like quiet. If he had a weakness—and I still don’t know if it was really a weakness—it was not liking quiet when there was company to be had. He liked to talk. He liked being the centre of any attention that was going. Maybe because he was on his own so much. I had lived with four—once five—others. I had no need to be heard. If I wanted to know what I sounded like, I had Dad and Ferg and Bar to listen to. They sounded just like me.
Brand carried on. The old bastards were frightened of dogs turning into dangerous packs, he said. So they dosed them.
I could have asked him how he knew that. Because of course it can only have been a story he had heard from long before either of us were alive. A traveller’s tale. A rumour. A lie. A story. I didn’t say anything.
Whatever they gave the dogs did for the bitches more than the males, he said. Way I see it, what bitches remain have litters with fewer females in them than they used to. So, fewer females, fewer dogs in the long run. Males on their own don’t breed. Males in a pack with no breeding to be done? Well, Griz, you can see how they’d get mean. You’re tall enough for a person to think your body’d be telling you what I’m talking about, but then you haven’t started with the hairs on your chin yet, so maybe it hasn’t come on you yet, the wanting and the not having. But when it comes on you, you remember what I say. Men with no breeding to be done are the meanest creatures in the world.
I didn’t like the look he gave me then, but it passed quickly, like he was as surprised by it as I was uncomfortable, and he just shrugged it back into whatever box it came out of.
So anyway, he said, scratching away at Saga’s ears again. What dogs there still are may be thinner on the ground, but they’re more dangerous. It’s like as if in trying to cure the problem they boiled it down and made it thicker and darker. Like a bone broth.
I’d never heard that term before, but I knew what it meant. We always had a stockpot on the go by the range, and the thought of it came hard, like I could smell it, and like a smell it took me on a short cut right back to a place where I had been safe and happy enough. A place exactly the opposite of where I was: in deepest danger with spirits low enough to match it.
And maybe dosing the dogs was not a story. Maybe it was true. Maybe not. Mucking up how a poor creature can or can’t have a normal litter seems awfully like what happened to humankind. If I’d been of a mind to talk to him I’d have said that the Gelding was a much more likely cause of there being less dogs than there should be. I didn’t think old dying mankind—the Baby Bust—would have had time or inclination to go about poisoning dogs just for the meanness of it.
I didn’t know then exactly how mean some Baby Busters found time to be. I just thought, who would want to poison dogs? It didn’t make any kind of sense. But then I’d grown up on an island. I hadn’t seen what a bunch of dogs or wolves could do when they were hungry and their blood was up. That came later.
He reached behind him and pulled a pack close enough to yank a sleeping bag from it.
I’m sleeping now, he said. You do too. A night sleeping on the stones here by the fire won’t do you much harm. And if you get cold, you’ve only yourself to blame. You keep to your side of the fire and don’t try anything because while I might not be a person who could cut another person’s tongue out, Saga here would take your throat out in a heartbeat. Seen her do it. And that’s not a lie.
And simple as that, he laid down on the bedroll and closed his eyes, and the dog lay down between us and kept hers open and looking straight at me.
I knew I was too uncomfortable to sleep, so I concentrated on calming my breathing and watching right back.
An hour later I was more uncomfortable than I had ever been in my life, and my hands seemed to be going numb.
I thought about waking him and telling him, but then just when I knew I’d never sleep again, I did.