That wasn’t the whole story. There was another reason. And in fact maybe the whole burning the boats thing is something I made up for myself afterwards on the journey as we walked. I certainly had plenty of time to think as I did so. And enough reason, as things got more complicated, to knit myself a nice excuse for all the harm in whose way I had put myself. Ever bang your thumb with a hammer? Hurts worse than a normal knock because you did it to yourself.
Before it got light, but after the storm had gone and the distant thunder had rolled away, taking the lightning out of sight beyond the hills to the north, I woke again, needing to pee. I went up the stairs and out on to the rain-slick platform where I added to the wetness on the ground, taking care to allow for the wind direction. It was when I was straightening up that I saw it and stopped everything.
There was a light in the darkness. A tiny pinprick on the horizon to the south-east, so small it could have been a star on the point of setting. Except it was orange and I’d never seen an orange star and the clouds were battened down overhead, so that no other stars were visible to compare it with. I clattered down the steps to get my binoculars and the compass, which woke Jip. I made him stay because I didn’t want him falling off the open side of the viewing platform, and then I went back up.
The light was still there. But it was a long, long way off. The binoculars couldn’t pull it closer, not enough to have any idea what it was anyway. The compass was useless in the blackness of the night. Dad gave it to me when I went off on my own for the first time. It had been his as a child and he said the markings once used to glow in the dark, but now they had worn out. I went back down and got a couple of the green bottles. Back out in the darkness, I sighted them carefully with my eye, so that the tops lined up with the distant orange spark. I then went back down and slept surprisingly well, knowing that when the sun came up I could look along my homemade sight line and see what was at the end of it.
I dreamed too, gentle happy dreams of walking into a village, which in those dreams looked like the one that always featured on the last page in a series of comic books I had loved as a child, an ancient thing with a stockade of wooden spikes and happy villagers sitting around a big fire having a feast while the village musician was always tied up somewhere in the picture, looking very annoyed because they didn’t like his music. What these villagers really liked was having punch-ups with Roman soldiers and eating roast boar. Except in my dreams the village was not just full of strangers, but Bar and Ferg and Dad and even Mum was there, laughing and handing out food, and there was a small girl with a kite running round and round the fire until she saw me and dropped the kite and sprinted towards me with her arms wide open and then I woke up.
At least that’s what I think I dreamed. Remembering dreams is like picking up small jellyfish—they slip through your fingers—and you never know if it’s a dream you had or if you added to the dream in the remembering. Sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re remembering a dream at all, or just a dream about remembering a dream. And if that doesn’t make sense, well, neither do dreams.
There was nothing at the end of the sight line. I was bitterly disappointed when I looked again in the light of day. But there was no unexpected settlement full of welcoming villagers waiting to help me. I wasn’t, of course, really expecting Mum or the girl with the kite, but I had gone to sleep wondering if there were people living in the empty landscape, people we had not been told about. But there weren’t, or if there were there was no sign of them and, since the one thing that hasn’t changed since the end of the world is that everyone still needs breakfast, the absence of smoke from a cooking fire seemed to seal the end of the hopeful delusion I had gone to sleep beneath.
There was just a slightly raised bump on the horizon, too far away to see if there was any building on it. I unfolded my map and used my compass to orientate it. Then I took a bearing on the line I had marked with the bottle tops, and then I used the straight edge of one of the crutches to draw a line from the tower, right across the map.
And then—since the orange light had been broadly on the way to where I had decided Brand was based—I knew where I was headed. I could check it out, and keep right on going until I got to the other side of the land where I was sure he really had his home.
Jip was happy to get back to ground level. I pulled the kayak inside the hall of the palace. The building might be on its way to falling down now that the weather and the saplings had found a way in to the ballroom, but I reckoned it would take time, and the kayak would be safe enough for a while. Certainly until I walked back to get it on my way home.
I wonder if it’s still there.
We set off inland. I wanted to look back, but I didn’t because I knew if I did I’d start having doubts, and I had made my mind up. And there was quite enough to fill my eyes and my head as we walked through the charred skeleton of the town, Jip running ahead, quartering back and forth, nose to the ground on the hunt for new and interesting smells.
The shells of the broken houses leaned against each other as the road rose away from the seafront. The fire had burned the vegetation that had overgrown them right back so the old cracked tarmac had been revealed again, broken and buckled both by time and the bushes and small trees that had pushed through and which now survived as flame-stripped trunks and branches. The place smelled of fire char, but not a clean woodsmoke smell. More of a greasy, oil smell. Walking into your world, thinking of how many people had lived in this one street and then thinking how many other streets just like it must lie ahead did give me a strange feeling. But the blank window sockets didn’t look at me in the same way the empty houses on the islands did. Maybe the fire had burned out the last residue of whoever had once lived there.
Where the burn stopped and the houses continued, some still roofed and more or less intact, it was different. Just as empty but more alive again. Going was slower because the snarl of small trees and bushes got in the way, but it was still easy walking, though I would lose sight of Jip for minutes at a time. When glass survived, it winked the thin sunlight back at me as I passed. I remember one house had GONE sprayed across the front in yellow paint in letters that were higher than me. Birds flew in and out of the upper windows where I imagined they had been building their nests now for generations. It was a cheerful thing to see, as were the squirrels that loped freely along the roofs and tree branches. Life was making use of what you had left behind.
I’d never seen a squirrel except in a book, but the moment I saw the long bushy tails, I knew they weren’t rats. The speed and deftness with which they ran and kept their footing so high above the ground was exhilarating. At least to me it was. To Jip it was another affront, and he barked excitedly and tried to get at them, jumping up and even at one point trying to climb a tree. He didn’t have much time for books, so maybe for him they really were just rats with fluffier tails. Either way, they immediately got added to the list of things he knew he was born to hunt. I wonder what they made of us as we passed beneath them. They can’t have seen people before. It seemed like they were studiously oblivious to us as they hurtled smoothly from branch to branch—occasionally making wild and gravity-defying leaps from tree to tree, landing and carrying on as if they had not just performed a miracle of balance and surefootedness. I could have stood there and watched them all day. I decided I liked squirrels just as much as Jip did, but in a completely different way.
Once we left the edge of the town, the countryside sort of closed in, just when I would have imagined it would open up. The reason was, again, the trees. They got bigger and crowded in over the old road which was fully grown over, covered in moss and grass. As I said, at home on the islands there were no trees to speak of, and those very few that did survive were wind-shorn and stunted things, cowering behind whatever windbreak had allowed them to survive. There was one plantation of dwarfish pine on a hillside on North Uist, but it was a tangled and dark place into which I did not go.
Walking beneath real broad-leafed trees was something I had never done. And on this first day it was exhilarating. After an outdoor life spent under grey or blue skies, it was a novelty to find myself beneath a roof of green, and not just the one green, but so many different kinds of green. It wasn’t just the variety of trees that led to the medley of shades and intensities of colour—it was the sunlight beyond that turned some of the leaves into bright tongues of emerald that outlined the darker mass of the shadowed leaves beneath. They were tall, the trees on that first stretch of road, broad-trunked and ancient. The spread of their branches supported a thick canopy which must have kept down the younger generation that was trying to burst through the old tarmac road beneath the moss and grass. As if to prove this, after a couple of klicks I came to a place where two huge trees had blown down across the road and, where they let the light in, a new tree had already grown taller than the shaded saplings around it. The roots of the fallen trees had ripped great discs of earth out of the ground when they went down, and examining them made me realise that there was a huge system of roots beneath the surface to match the spread of branches high above it.
It’s a marvellous thing, a tree.
Rabbits had dug homes into the newly exposed earth, and Jip caught two before I could persuade him to come along with me. I was keen to get as many klicks behind us as we could before nightfall, and so I gutted them and hung them on my pack to skin later.
Good dog, I said. That’s our supper taken care of.
Many of the houses we passed were roofless shells, overgrown with brambles or cracked apart by the vegetation that had taken root in them decades earlier, but there were others that seemed less affected by time and neglect, at least until I got a closer look. Stone-built houses seemed to stand up better than brick, and brick better than houses made of frames covered in plaster. The walls of these houses had burst with damp long ago and here and there the remnants of the plastic sheeting they had been lined with fluttered like white flags. I remember coming out of the trees for a section of road, and found myself reflected in the long glass wall of a building that was, I think, a place for buying petrol or charging a car. It was an odd thing to see myself so small in a landscape, Jip at my side. Of course I’d seen myself reflected in mirrors and house windows before, but this was by far the biggest window I’d seen, and it made me look very small against the landscape stretching away all around me. Just me, my pack and my bow and then trees that towered above and a patchwork of brambles and hedges and scrubland beyond. The world looked very big. I looked tiny. Jip looked even smaller, but he also looked like he belonged in the wildness more than I did. The scale of me was somehow wrong, too big and too little at the same time. I looked like something not quite myself, like a character in a story. As I walked on, I wondered if that was what it was like seeing a movie or a television—a small person in a giant frame. Dad said that’s what people used to do, sit in the dark with lots of other people and watch a huge story take place on the screen hung in front of them. You’ll have seen movies. I wonder what you’d have made of Jip and me.
The other thing I could see in the glass, plain as day, is that one of my arms was considerably redder than the other.
That made sense, since one arm was also itching more. The scraping I had given it on the netting had never really had time to heal, and the salt sores that had developed had not gone away. I wanted to keep going, but I knew I should take time to take care of it before it got worse so I walked up to the petrol station and found the rotted carcass of a vehicle that had rusted to the chassis. Just like many of the dead cars on the island, the axles and the wheels and the engine blocks had survived longest. I put the rucksack down and got my first aid kit out, using the engine block as a table to lay it out on.
You had what Dad called the “’cillins” in your time: antibiotic medicines that miraculously stopped things going infected and septic. Any ’cillins that survived had been manufactured long before the world died, and even the ones that were packed away in foil packs to keep out the moisture couldn’t escape time. We found old pills every now and then when we were a-viking, but they had little effect. Luckily Dad had the way of other medicines from his ma, who he said was a wonder at healing, and so we all carried kits in our packs that could help us if we got hurt by ourselves. Unpacking my kit made me a little homesick, because of course everything in it had been made by Dad or Ferg or Bar. I remembered Joy boiling the cotton sheet we had found in an old house to make strips for the bandages, and I myself had gathered the honey in the small airtight metal canister. Ferg had made the ointment in the tin that had once contained a brown boot polish, but I had helped him gather the woundwort that went into it, stuffing bags made from old pillow cases full of the violet-flowered plant. Bar read in a herbal book that it was also called “heal-all” and “heart-of-the-earth”. I opened the tin and smelled it and thought how far I was from the heart of my earth. Then I recapped it and washed my arm with some of the drinking water from my bottle. I let the wind dry it, and then I smeared the most livid patch of sores and scratches with the honey. As I did it, I felt the heat in my arm like a fire beneath the skin and knew I should have done this two days ago, and told myself I was a whole different kind of fool to the one I already knew myself to be.
I wrapped Bar’s bandage over the honey, and tied it off. Then we set off again. Of course, now that I had taken notice of it and done the right thing, my arm kept intruding into my thoughts, itching and throbbing. Among the other things I had in the kit—like knitbone paste and staunchgrass—was some powdered red pepper from the plants Bar grew under glass. If the sores and the scratches were no better at nightfall, I told myself I would make a paste with that and put it in the wounds. The pepper paste burned badly, but it always seemed to make infection go away, especially if mixed with the garlic she also grew, but I had none of that with me. One of the family on Lewis had jumped off a rock onto the yellow sand at Luskentyre and impaled her foot on a razor clam. It had killed her in pieces, and the going was ugly and brutal as the infection had spread up her foot to the point where they had thought about cutting it off to save her, but because cutting a foot off your daughter is a terrible thing to do they had left it too late and the infection had spidered up her calf. When they did take her leg off below the knee they thought they had caught it, but she never woke up. Before the end of the world you had conquered infection, but it turns out all it had to do was outwait you. It waited until the medicine factories closed because no one was young enough to work in them, and then back it came.
I knew I was strong, and I wasn’t too worried about my arm in the long run, but I was just worried enough to walk along with a niggle at the back of my head. At the time it wasn’t a big thing, but it was annoying. Like a tiny stone in your boot.
Before I set off, I picked up a few small pebbles and put them in my right-hand pocket, and then as I walked I tried to count my paces. This was a trick Dad had taught us on the long beaches on South Uist. A klick is a kilometre and once you’ve calculated how many of your steps that is, if you count paces you can see how far you can walk in a day. Or you can look at a map and if you know what direction you’re going and how far you’ve travelled, you’ll always know where you are. That’s the theory. I wasn’t yet aware I was in the process of testing that theory until it broke. I was just trying to count to one thousand, three hundred and fifty, which is my count for a klick. There were a lot of new things to see as I walked and I had to concentrate on not losing count. To help with that, every time I reached one thousand, three hundred and fifty I put a pebble from my right hand pocket into my left, in case I lost count.
I walked twenty-five pebbles that first day. I remember that. It was a round number. I walked them along the grown-over road because it went almost exactly in the bearing I had taken from the tower, with my glass bottles and the orange light. Because I had known that once I was on the ground the ridge where I had seen the fire would not be visible to me, I had marked the nearest landmark that I could see along that line. It was a sharp needle that had looked small when I saw it, but as I got closer I could see that in fact it towered over the surrounding landscape. It was a church steeple. I supposed they were called that because they were steep, but of the ones I have since walked past, it still seems the tallest and the sharpest, scratching the sky with a tiny bent cross at the very tip of it. What became apparent as I got closer was that it was in the middle of what must once have been a city. As I write this I realise I don’t really know the difference between a city and a town, except one is a lot bigger than the other. I suppose if I had a dictionary I could look it up. But I don’t have any book other than the one I’m writing this in. If it wasn’t an official city, it was certainly bigger than the town I’d left in the morning, and fire had not destroyed much of it. Or if it had, the fire had visited a long time ago and the living green had grown right over the char and ash it may have left behind. That doesn’t mean the city was intact. It was definitely well on the way to turning back into landscape. Like I said, nature will take a building down if you give it enough time. The rain gets in, the cold turns water to ice in the winter, the ice swells the building cracks and then seeds sprout in the cracks in the spring and all you have to do is wait for the roots to push the walls and the roofs further apart to let in more seeds and rain and ice and eventually things fall apart just as surely here on the mainland as out on the islands.
I wonder if it would be sad for you to think that the wild is well on the way to winning back the world you and your ancestors took and tamed. I can imagine it might be, especially when I see the amazing stuff you all built. I have seen things I could not have imagined, not even from the pictures I used to pore over in the old faded books back home. I have walked in the shells of buildings that I cannot believe were possible to build. I don’t know how someone could have got so much stone up into the air and left it so well made that it stayed there. And it’s not just the buildings—it’s the bridges and the tunnels. I am still awed by the power and the cleverness that went into building them, power and cleverness that must have been an everyday thing to you. But buildings are no different to trees really. Or people. Eventually they fall over and die.
I walked into the city and the ruins of the buildings seemed to rise and close in around me the nearer I got to the steeple. It took me two pebbles to get there from the edge of the countryside. Animals had worn tracks which wove along through the grass and bushes that filled the gap between them, the gap that had once been streets. In the mud and the leaf mould I saw the tracks of pads—like rabbits, but some bigger, and I saw hoof marks, which surprised me. I shouldn’t have, because we keep ponies on the islands, but somehow I hadn’t thought there might be ponies on the mainland. I turned a corner and found myself face to face with a fox. He was big, the same size as Jip, and his fur was a deep orange, except for the flash of white on his chest and at the tip of his tail. He looked at me without surprise but with that great stillness that comes over an animal preparing to run the moment they think it’s safe to turn their back on you.
He was standing at the foot of a great slope, which was the top floor of a building that had collapsed. All the floors had been concrete and there had been no walls. I think it had been made to put cars in. Anyway, the floors had fallen in and were stacked on top of each other like a tilted spill of oatcakes. The grey of the concrete was cut up into car-sized boxes by faded yellow lines which immediately looked like a giant ladder the moment the fox turned tail and ran for it, loping up the slope as Jip gave chase. The fox disappeared into a door faintly marked EXIT at the top of the slope, and Jip would have followed him had he not heard the sharp whistle I gave, and stopped dead. He gave me a reproachful look, pissed on the side of the exit door and then trotted back down to the road beside me.
I was itching to go a-viking in the huge buildings I was passing but I had everything I needed in my pack or on my belt, and I didn’t want to distract myself from my plan. Or rather, I did desperately want to distract myself and go hunting through the lost bits of this new territory opening up all around me, but I wanted to get my dog back even more. I had worked out how far I would have to walk to get from the tower to the place on the other coast where I was sure—from the marks on the map—that Brand called home. If I could walk thirty klicks a day, I could be there in ten or twelve days. Twelve days was not so long. But I could do my viking on the way back, was what I told myself. Once I had Jess. I hoped that Brand was sailing straight home, and I believed he might well be as his boat had been loaded to the gunwales with things he had picked up on his travels. Of course I had no idea as to how I might rescue her, but I was sure that I would come up with one once I saw the lay of the land. There were a thousand things wrong with this plan, not least that I was basing everything on the map I’d stolen, and hanging every hope I had on the web of pencil lines that radiated from that single spot on the east coast.
So. No viking. And if I was to be true to the plan, I should have walked past the steeple and gone another five pebbles before making camp. But I was tired and the day of trees and then the mass of overgrown buildings was so new to me that I felt somewhere between stunned and dizzy with the novelty of it all. So I decided I could make up the distance tomorrow. I sweetened the decision by telling myself I should try and climb the tower that supported the steeple and check out the next landmark on the compass line. The church was easy enough to find, though I did have to lace my way to it through a maze of smaller streets where red-brick buildings were tumbling into the dense thickets of brambles choking the roadways between. When I got there, I found it stood on a sort of point, above what looked like a river of trees that forked away on either side of it. I could see a real river sparkling in the sunlight beyond that. What I didn’t know then, but now do know, having seen a lot of country, is that the river of trees was actually the old railway lines, and the reason the tops were level with me was that they were in a groove that had been cut down into the land for them to run along. Railways fill with trees faster than roadways, perhaps because the rails were laid on loose stones, instead of the hard skin of a tarmac road. What I have found is that if you try and follow a railway on an old map, you make better time walking beside it in the clearer fields than you do trying to wind your way through the undergrowth that has enthusiastically recolonised the tracks. They’re more like greenways than railways now.
The church doors were locked, or corroded in place. They were made of heavy wood that had seemed to have hardened instead of rotting. The iron railings around the church had corroded into an uneven and unwelcoming barricade, and the stone forecourt was buckling with weeds and saplings. But the windows were all intact, at least all the ones I might have reached were. There was a big round window at one end, like a giant stone flower with coloured glass panels radiating out from the centre. There were broken panes there, but no use to me in getting in.
I would have given up, but Jip chased something fast and sleek under the arch supporting the tower, and when I followed his excited barking I found he had chased the rat inside the building, through a door I had missed. The door was actually locked, but a gutter above had failed, so that water had striped down the side of the church in a years-long stain and pooled in a depression under the tower. That had rotted the bottom of the door, making a dog-sized hole that he had pushed in through. I pulled away at the wood until it was Griz-sized, and crawled in after him.
Inside was wonderful and awful. The windows that had looked drab from the outside radiated light and colour over the high-ceilinged interior. The glass showed bright pictures of bearded men in robes doing things and women with scarves over their heads looking up into the sky and holding babies. The ceiling was a complicated structure of wooden supports stepping up to the peak, and on every possible perch there were more statues of men in beards. When I was small, I read a children’s Bible that told all the important stories, so I’m pretty sure most of the painted women were the Mary because their faces were the same, only the colours of their scarves and robes and the things they carried were different. Some carried babies, some odder things like wheels and flames. All of the beards can’t have been the Jesus, but I know the naked ones nailed to the crosses were. The statues weren’t just up on the roof supports. They were everywhere, big and small, free standing or hanging from the walls. The church in Iona had had one or two, but this—this was what a crowd felt like. It was the most crowded empty space I’d ever been in, and I had the nastiest feeling that they had all been waiting for me, or someone, to disturb their peace and quiet.
Although one end of the church was pretty untouched by time, at the other end there was a jumble of long metal pipes where something that I think was a musical organ had fallen down. In the books I read, people came to church for peace, or to talk to a god, or just to be with all their neighbours. I didn’t think this was a comfortable place to talk to a god. There was too much pain in the statues, too much relish in the way they were made. I think relish is the right word, if it means a delight in something. It felt like the sculptors had made the statues with a real liking for the hurt of being nailed to that cross. Maybe that’s my ignorance rather than their fault. Maybe loving the pain was a thing that made sense if you believed in invisible things like this god. I just felt… disconnected from the meaning of all that enjoyment. Like someone was giving the punchline to a joke I hadn’t heard the beginning of. Maybe I should have read a grown-up Bible to see what the point of it all was, but we had no time for gods where I grew up. It had passed, they had passed, just like you all had passed. Gods are just stories now. Bar said that’s all they really were anyway: stories to make sense of lives of those who wanted someone else to take charge of them, rather than cut their own way.
Bar read different books to the ones I did. Books of ideas, not stories, and practical books about how to do things or make things grow. They never interested me as much as a made-up book about people. But I liked the way her mind worked.
I found a small door that led up to the tower. The confined space made me a bit breathless, tightness rising in my throat as I ascended. I had the strange feeling of walking up into a dead end. I began wondering how I would get out of this narrow twisting stone spiral if the door at the bottom slammed shut and the one at the top wouldn’t open. I would be stuck like a bug in a bottle. My calm mind knew the door at the bottom would not slam shut as the wind couldn’t get at it even if there was a wind, which there wasn’t, and there was no one else who would push it shut as the world was empty. My fear-mind had other thoughts. The door at the top did open, though I broke one of the hinges tugging and kicking at it. I stepped out onto a stone platform that ran round the base of the steeple. Looking up, I saw the height of it and the bent cross on the tip, and I felt the huge weight of stone balanced overhead like a threat. Did you ever go to the edge of a cliff and feel a kind of pull, something sinister but exhilarating making you want to jump? The mass of all those stone blocks seemed to hang there with a similar kind of tug.
Stay there, it seemed to be saying. Don’t move. And we’ll be down to squash you any time now.
I took a bearing on my compass. I could see a notch in the high ground looming in the distance, with a paler hill rising beyond it. If I kept the peak of the paler hill just to the right-hand side of the notch—like a gunsight—I would be on target. I took out the map and drew the shape on a blank bit of sea so that I wouldn’t forget it. Then I went back down into the church. I had thought of sleeping in there, but there were too many eyes that would have stayed watching me as I slept. They weren’t human eyes, and though the statues stared there was nothing in the way they’d been carved that reached out to you. Not like the woman in the yellow dress. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I did sit on the altar and share some dried meat and oatcake with Jip before we left, and as I sat there looking back into the body of the church, I realised I was probably getting the same view the god’s priest had had when the rows of empty benches had been full of living people. I tried to imagine what kind of noise all those metal pipes now splayed like a giant’s game of jackstraws at the other end of the room might have made. I couldn’t, and when I left the building, the strongest memory wasn’t the statues and the cruel torture they seemed to take such a grim delight in, but the glory colours of the glass windows all around them. They stayed in my mind like jewels.
The woman in the yellow dress lived in a Greek temple in the middle of the town, squatting ominously on one side of a stone-flagged square. Of course it wasn’t a proper Greek temple, but it looked like a darker version of the white one in the book of myths Joy and I had pored over by the fireside a lifetime ago, where Zeus or maybe it was Athene lived. It had the same pillars in front, supporting a big triangle of stone, making a big porch, behind which were doors and windows. The windows had been shuttered with board, maybe to protect the glass. I spent a long time trying to work out what the letters carved in stone on the front of the building said. I think it was “TO LITERATURE, ARTS AND SCIENCES”.
The doors were cracked open just enough for me to slide in after Jip. Inside were more doors, glass this time. These inner doors were what had kept the weather and the animals out. I pushed them open with some difficulty, and went in. The upper windows weren’t boarded, so I climbed the stairs. It had been a museum. That’s what I discovered when I read the labels on the walls. But everything in it had gone. Everything except in one room in the middle. It was another big and empty space, and in it was a chair and opposite the chair was a lady in a yellow dress, staring right at me. I say she was a lady because a lady is a fancier kind of woman, and the dress was as fancy as you could imagine, long and luxurious and the liveliest yellow with black bits on the edges. It wasn’t a dress you could have done anything useful in. It was a dress made to get in the way. It was, however, a very good dress for lounging in and looking at people. And her eyes were doing a very intense job of looking. She was only one painting, but there was more life in her two eyes than in all of the blank Jesuses and Marys in the church put together. She looked right at me and I knew she was seeing me, just as intently as the artist must have seen her. She looked at you and you felt… connected. Maybe not connected with her directly, but with life. Because that’s what the painter had caught, that’s what the painter had liked. Her life. Maybe just life itself. I sat in the chair and looked back at her.
Hi, I said, I’m Griz.
And then I laughed at myself for talking to a painting and her look seemed to share the joke she had not been able to make. I hadn’t been able to bear the idea of going to sleep with all the sculptures looking at me, but I decided that sleeping in this room with just her looking over me would be a very different thing altogether.
I think someone else had found it restful sharing a room and a look with her, and that’s why the chair had been placed right in front of the painting. I expect one of the last of the Baby Bust had come here to see a young face after all the young faces had gone, dead or just grown old around him or her. It must have been so sad without a younger generation growing up behind them. I think they came to sit in that chair to touch that bit of life once again. I left my bedroll and went down to deal with the rabbits.
On the way, I got distracted by a room on the ground floor. The sign said “MUSEUM SHOP” and though from the mess and the dust overlaying it all it was clear someone—maybe many people—had gone a-viking through it a long time ago, there were interesting things left. It was mostly books, but also some pencils which I took and a little brass pencil sharpener with a steel blade that had not rusted. The books were mainly old picture books about art, too big to carry, but there was a tilted shelf of small books, about the right size for a pocket; they were guides to stuff like flowers and birds and rocks and things you might see on a walk and want to identify. I decided I could afford to add two of them to my pack without overloading myself. The obvious one to take was called Food for Free; it had a picture of blackberries and raspberries on the front. A quick look through showed it was a guide to eating things you found rather than things you had grown. It had lots of really good pictures to help identify the food that wouldn’t poison you. If I was going to forage my way across the mainland, a book that told me what not to eat among the new plants I was encountering was nothing but a gift. The less obviously useful one was called Trees which I took because I liked it, having only really just discovered a world with proper big trees in it. Looking back, I suppose both books helped me survive. But only one of them saved my life. And it wasn’t the obvious one.
I took a pile of the less portable books out with me to look at after I had made a fire on the porch between the heavy columns. I sat with Jip and paged through the larger books as the rabbits cooked, feasting my eyes on the colourful pictures that were still bright on the page after more than a century. I ate my rabbit while it was still hot, and Jip waited until his was just warm and then took it out onto the steps to eat slowly in the privacy he always favoured. Jess was different. She always ate fast, but kept looking up at you and wagging her tail, as if including you in the fun. I felt a pang at the thought of her and hoped Brand was feeding her properly and that she was safe, wherever she was. And then I remembered her chained to Saga and knew she wasn’t.
As Jip ate, I carefully unbandaged my arm and inspected it while the light was still good. I decided it looked a little better. I put some more honey on it and equally carefully rebandaged it. If it didn’t actually look better, I told myself, it didn’t look worse. That was something. In the morning I would refill the two water bottles from the river I had seen, so I drank most of what I had left, pissed as I watched the sunset from the top of the steps and then went inside for the night.
You would have thought it was a very early time to go to sleep, but then you had electric lights to keep the rhythm of your day as you liked it, not as the sun dictated. And it had been a long walk, as far as I had ever walked in one day and my feet were sore, my arm was still throbbing and the pack straps had rubbed a blister on one shoulder. I closed all the doors behind me and laid out my bedroll in front of the lady in the yellow dress, and lay down. Jip patrolled the edges of the room, ever hopeful for a rat, and then came and went to sleep beside me. I looked into the eyes in the painting and tried to think what her life had been like. There was kindness and intelligence and even a sense of humour in her face, but I wondered if she could ever have imagined while the painting was being made what would come of it, what would become of her. I didn’t think she would have dreamed that her strong gaze would go on to outlive her many-greats-grandchildren, and end up looking at Jip and me as we slept on the other side of the end of the world.
And sleep I did. Long and deep, right into the heart of the night.
And then I was awake, and very still, listening to the low growl coming from Jip.
It was the kind of noise you definitely don’t want to wake up to. It put a cold chill right down my spine.
It was pitch-dark, but when I put my hand out I felt he was standing rigid, hackles raised, quivering.
I sat up and found my knife.
I let my other hand stay on his back, telling him we were okay by touch and not sound. I wanted to listen for whatever it was that had roused him. He stopped growling, but he stayed on his feet and the bristle of fur at his shoulders remained erect.
There was something moving outside the windows, down on the ground. I could hear a kind of rubbing and moving noise—nothing specific like footfalls or breathing, just the noise of movement, faint and almost inaudible, more like a disturbance in the air than an actual sound. But it was definitely there and it was the noise something larger than a rat or a squirrel would make. I edged to the window and tried to look down and get a sight of whatever it was, but the angle was too steep and I couldn’t have seen what was there, even if there had been more light. All I could do was sense that the noise seemed to be travelling towards the front of the building. The front of the building with the unlocked door.
I went and got my bow and arrows as quietly as I could and took Jip with me out on to the stairhead. I told him to stay close, which is one of the suggestions he knows to follow from our time hunting on the island. He sat next to me as I knelt in the dark, facing the main door below. I nocked an arrow without thinking and laid the others where I could grab the next ones without looking, and then we both did a very good job of mimicking the stillness of all those statues and reached out into the night with our ears.
The thing (or the person—Brand even, because I was half thinking he had tracked me) scuffed its way up the steps and on to the portico. I swear I heard sniffing, and immediately knew they were examining our campfire and discarded rabbit carcass. There was a horrible sound of bones crunching and then silence, after which came more of the general sound of something moving, this time closer to the front doors. Then there was more silence, so long that I had to switch knees to stop getting cramp, and longer still until I began to wonder if we had imagined it all and relaxed enough to rest both knees by sitting on the top step of the stairs instead of kneeling.
Then there was a loud bump and a creak as something barged the front door and Jip took a step forward, fur bristling again, his warning growl rumbling low and unmistakable and I had the bow drawn and ready for whatever was coming in.
And then nothing did.
Just nothing and more nothing and then the sound of some bird hooting in the distance, a noise I knew was an owl, a noise so perfectly recognisable that even though I had never heard an actual tuwit-tuwoo there could be no mistake. And then more silence.
I don’t remember relaxing, though I do know that Jip sat down after a very long time. And I certainly don’t remember going to sleep in such an awkward position.
I woke with sun in my eyes and a bad crick in my neck from where I had slumped against the wall and slept half sitting, all crooked and folded in on myself.
I thought I would go and see that it was safe before I let Jip out, but the moment I opened the inner glass door he bolted through my legs and darted out onto the porch, casting left and right.
I felt strangely foolish peering out of the half-open door, bow held ready as I scanned the square for the night visitor, trying to see if he was lying in wait for us.
Jip had no such qualms as he raced back and forth, furiously intense as he tried to get the scent of it. He disappeared round the corner, and was gone for several minutes, then he came back looking much happier than when he’d left. He cocked his leg on the corner of the museum where we had heard the thing rubbing along, and then he trotted to the centre of the square, nose down, until he discovered a large pile of fresh shit. It wasn’t recognisable as human, which I felt relieved by, but I had also never seen its like. Jip didn’t seem to mind what kind of new and unseen animal it had been. He just cocked his leg and put his scent on it too.
He seemed pleased with his work, and I too felt cheered up by his attitude. With that and the sunlight, the night’s fears seemed to disperse. If my arm hadn’t been so itchy and tight it would have been the perfect beginning to the day.