The day began early and was tinged with sadness from the very start as we saddled the horses and strapped on their packs, and then said goodbye to the Homely House.
I hoped if all went well that I might pass by there again one day, but the world—big and empty as it is—still contains more surprises than you can imagine, and so even before what happened happened to me, I knew returning to that happy place was not something to rely on.
We had—as invited—taken things that were useful to us. We had enjoyed the comfort and calm atmosphere. We had argued about whether to take the record player, but in the end had decided to leave it. One day, someone else might find their way to the house and the rooms would again fill with music. I think the couple in the bath deserved that.
As John Dark was packing the horses, I took a bunch of lavender which I had cut from the hedge of it that divided the walled garden and went to say thank you. I know it’s an odd thing to do for an iron tub full of long-dead bones, but the fancy took me and I did it quickly and quietly, not wanting to have to explain it to John Dark. I wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed or anything. It was just too complicated a thing to explain in sign language and by poking at a dictionary. I wasn’t even quite sure why I was doing it, only that I should. Jip came with me up the stairs.
John Dark had been there before me. She had taken the dry stalks out of one of the vases and left it full of newly cut roses, big pillowy ones that grew on the sunny wall of the house. The smell of them already filled the room. I grinned at Jip and cleared another jug of dry stalks, half of which went to powder in my hands as I did so. Then I put my lavender in and nodded to the bath.
Thank you, I said. We were happy here too.
Only Jip heard me say this, and he didn’t seem to find it too stupid. I closed the door on the way out and we walked down the stairs. John Dark was waiting. She saw the remaining dry flower stalks in my hand and grunted. I don’t know if she was embarrassed by me having seen her roses, or thought I was shy of being caught with the evidence of my own parting gift, but we never talked about it.
Al on zee, she said briskly. Foe part ear.
We closed up the house and made sure it was as weatherproof as we had found it. And then we mounted up and headed east.
In the end the Homely House was a place of death, but its lesson was the dangerous and seductive one that death might not be terrible, but instead nothing more than a long-needed rest, an endless and gentle sleep. Those were the thoughts I had about it as I rode away, and though they weren’t exactly bad thoughts, I knew they were not useful thoughts for a person to have, not someone who had things to do in the world. They were later thoughts, to be filed and retrieved when I was older. They were thoughts that dulled the edge, and I still believed at that stage that I had years ahead of me full of unknown terrain through which to cut my way.
Ends happen fast, and often arrive before you’ve been warned they’re coming.
Jip ran happily in a big circle round us as we descended the slope and entered a flatter country that was not as thickly forested as the tract of land we had come through. It was still well wooded, but just thinly enough to make out the shape of old fields here and there, given away by the straight hedgerows that had towered into something more like natural fortifications. In the first hour, we had to double back on our tracks twice because we’d found ourselves bottled in on three sides by impenetrable blackthorn thickets.
And then we came to an open meadow that was passable, but totally overgrown with giant hogweed. I didn’t know what it was called then but between what happened next and where I now find myself there were enough lonely nights by the campfire for me to have found it in one of the books I’d brought from the Homely House. If you ever saw cow parsley, you’ll know what it looked like, only much, much bigger. Ribbed stalks thicker than my arm, bristly and purple-blotched, rose maybe three or four metres above us: these stalks supported a wide bowl-shaped spread of white flowers, like an upside-down umbrella, each about two metres wide. All the flowers faced up into the sky. It promised a clear enough passage, with plenty of width to weave our way through the stalks, and Jip bounded happily ahead of us. But John Dark pulled up short and turned to me. She pointed at the stalks and said:
Mal.
Which by now I knew meant “bad”. She mimed itching wildly, and then pulled up her hood and yanked her sleeves down to make mittens to cover her hands. I did the same. We were about thirty metres into the plantation of hogweed, and I was looking closely at the ribbed and bristly stalk of a particularly thick plant as I passed, wondering if it was the hairy bristles themselves that were mal, when there was a crack and a yell and then a horrible crunch and thud, heavy and meaty enough to feel it through my horse’s hooves, and I turned to find John Dark had disappeared off the face of the earth. I looked around the other way in case I hadn’t seen her cut around me, but I was alone beneath the strange-looking plant heads.
Then Jip barked and ran across and began to paw at the rim of what I now saw was a hole in the vegetation covering the ground. John Dark and the horse had not only vanished from the face of the earth, they had fallen into it.
I dropped off my horse and ran to the edge of the pit. They were both still moving and still alive at that point and, though it was hard to see down into the darkness, even before my eyes adjusted I could tell it was very bad. Even before the horse started screaming. Even before I saw it trying to stand on brutally snapped front legs, struggling to get itself off the vertical length of rusty pipe that had gone straight through it as it landed.
Someone, long, long ago, had buried a water tank in the field. A big one. It had stayed there as the field turned into a wilderness of hogweed, and then it had corroded and waited and then John Dark had taken the wrong way round a stalk and fallen through the roof, jolted off the saddle as her horse impaled itself, landing in about a foot of water.
I could see her face looking back up at me, fish-mouthing in shock. So I knew she was the right way up and not about to drown. I ran for the packhorse and grabbed the rope she kept in one of the panniers. I looped it around the base of the thickest hogweed stalk I could find and ran back to the hole.
Jip was barking and John Dark was shouting my name, though the splashing and the screaming of the horse made it impossible to hear what else she was saying. I quickly tested the rope to make sure it was anchored, said a prayer to a god I don’t believe in and slid down the rope into the tank, which made Jip bark even more urgently.
Everything in the tank happened badly, and it happened fast, and even now I can’t quite remember the order of things. It’s like a broken pot in my head. I can see the shards, but they’re not quite joined up into a complete object any more.
It was dark in there and the sky above the hole in the roof was bright, so my eyes kept trying to adjust to the stark contrast in light levels.
It’s probably good that I couldn’t see everything clearly, but seeing it in fragments and flashes made it even more like a nightmare.
John Dark had blood streaming from her head, and her nose was mashed sideways. She was trying to crawl through the black water towards the horse, but something had happened to her leg.
I tried not to think of the horse, but it was stuck and struggling on its spit of rusted pipe and its front legs were bent in all the wrong directions.
It huffed pink bubbles of blood and foam as it panted and screamed.
Its rolling eyes were the whitest things in the world. Brighter than the sky above.
I stumbled through the water to John Dark. She had managed to throw herself across the horse’s neck.
It bucked and twisted in her arms.
I thought she was trying to comfort it. I wanted to shout at her.
I remember I was angry. At least I think I was angry, for a flash.
I wanted to tell her it was beyond comfort. Tell her what we had to do, what I had to do now, fast, before anything else. But I didn’t have the words. I just had the knife, already in my hand, without knowing I’d drawn it.
Even now I can see it as a living nightmare. Like I’m still there.
A fragment of her face staring at me.
I think she doesn’t understand.
Non, Griz! she shouts.
I think she doesn’t want me to do it. I think she doesn’t understand how very, very terrible the hurt to the horse is.
Then I see she isn’t trying to comfort the horse. She’s desperately trying to reach her arms round it. She can’t. Her fingers point for me.
They shake with the tension; they stab at what I should be seeing, what I should have thought of.
I hurl myself across the tank and try and pull the gun from the scabbard.
At first it won’t come, then the poor horse spasms as it tries to stand one more time and the gun slides free.
Veet, Griz! she screams and buries her head in the mane of her horse, looking away.
Veet!
I lean over her and jam the barrels awkwardly behind the horse’s head, where the spine meets the brain. It’s an awkward position. I don’t have the butt properly seated on my shoulder. I don’t have time for perfect.
I pull the trigger.
As I said, it’s not unusual for old ammunition to just go click and not fire.
In this case that prayer to the god I don’t believe in must have found an ear, because the metal tank bucked and exploded in a thunderclap. The butt of the gun jerked off my shoulder with the recoil and smashed into my cheekbone.
The horse dropped and went slack as the death twitches
set in.
I was deaf, ears ringing. I didn’t know yet that the recoil had split the skin over my cheekbone. I didn’t know yet that I would have a black and bloodshot eye for many days to come. I still don’t know if the faint sobbing I could hear was me or John Dark.
It was probably both.
Getting her out of the tank was almost impossible. If she hadn’t had the rope on her packhorse, it would have been. Her leg was broken, and she’d taken a really heavy blow to her face and head when she landed. She was also as soaked as was I from the foul water in the bottom of the tank. There was only about of foot of it, but every bit of it stank, and now it had the horse’s blood in it too.
Thankfully she passed out the first time I tried hauling her out of the tank with the rope looped under her arms like a sling.
Lifting someone’s deadweight is brutally hard, and I couldn’t do it by myself. I lowered her back down, wincing as she ended up slumped across her horse’s body. I untied the end from the hogweed anchor and knotted it to my horse’s saddle, then walked the horse away.
It took some trial and error, and I’m afraid she took some more knocks as I tried to manage the horse and keep the line taut enough to run back along it and grab her before the horse moved and lowered her out of my reach.
Finally, I snatched hold of her hood and managed to get her out of the hole before the horse backed up again. She got some extra scratches and grazes as I did that, but she ended up in the air, breathing oddly, eyes closed like she was never going to wake.
I didn’t know what to do about her leg. I didn’t know what to do next. She was alive though. Doing something is always the best way to think, so I dropped the rope down again and went back down to get her saddlebags and rescue the gun, and also the knife I had dropped, which took a bit of finding in the water.
Her horse had stopped twitching by then. I patted its warm neck in apology and left it there as I climbed out. She was still unconscious.
There was no neat and tidy way to do what I had to do next. So, hoping she’d stay unconscious, I went into the wood that edged the field and cut some straight poles and brought them back to her. I measured them against her leg and cut them to length. I had seen this done when one of the Lewismen had fallen off a roof on North Uist. I had been small, but it was a simple thing. I took off my belt, and I took off hers. I made some new holes with the point of my knife.
And then I hurt her badly. She whimpered and flinched and at one point opened her eyes without seeing anything as she made a deep groan like a man might make. But she didn’t wake properly as I slit her trouser leg to see the damage, and then felt for the break and laid it as straight as I could. Then, not sure if this was right, I braced myself and pulled her leg until the broken bits seemed to line up as best as I could get them. She moaned a lot as I did that. And then I lashed the poles on either side of the leg to keep it straight. Once I’d used the belts to cinch the first two poles tight, it was easier to tie the other poles around it, so her leg was held in place and protected in a bundle of rods.
I looked down at her face, wondering if I should try and put her nose straight while she was unconscious too, but I didn’t have the nerve for it. I was sweating with the effort and fear of it all. I decided if I was going to wake her it should be while doing something useful, because I probably had one chance. So I brought the packhorse over and rearranged the saddlebags on either side so their tops made a kind of flattish bed at right angles to the spine of the horse. And then I used the last of my strength and luck to lift her on top of the horse, and lash her to it. I used the rope and criss-crossed her body with it so there was no chance of her falling off.
I turned my horse’s head around, with the packhorse following, and headed back across the hogweed field, towards the Homely House.
It started to rain. Either the god I didn’t believe in had a fine sense of fairness and was balancing out the good luck of the gun firing first time, or it had a malicious streak. Or maybe there’s more than one imaginary god and that one liked matching the mood to the weather.
I didn’t bother about keeping myself dry, since I was already soaked from the water at the bottom of the tank, but I pulled the oilskin mac I had intended as a groundsheet over John Dark to keep the rain from her face. As I did that, I had the nastiest thought that I was wrapping her in a shroud, like a corpse, and wondered if she would still be breathing when I next took the cover off her face.
We retraced our tracks back to the Homely House. It seemed to take three times as long as it had coming down. Jip no longer patrolled round us as we went; instead he trotted beside me, looking up every now and then as if to see how I was. I told him I was okay but my voice sounded woolly and trapped inside my head. The trees kept some of the rain off, but not much and as my hearing came back I heard nothing but the trudge of the horses’ hooves and the dripping of the water off the leaves. Then we climbed the final open slope in the full pelt of the rain, and although the horses didn’t slip much on the rain-slick grass, they felt shakier and less surefooted.
I stumbled when I dismounted in front of the door we had left sadly but hopefully that morning, going down hard on one knee. Jip barked worriedly and came and licked me. I got back up and went to see if John Dark had survived.
I pulled back the tarp and saw her eyes were wide open and unblinking. My legs began to go again, but then she blinked.
Okay, I said. It’ll be okay.
She didn’t look at me. She just closed her eyes and turned away.
She must have known I was going to hurt her again. Getting her off the horse was easier than getting her on, but not much. I took the door off one of the tumbledown sheds in the walled garden and propped it at an angle against a table I dragged out of the house, making a kind of ramp. Then I untied her and tried to pull her on to the top of the ramp without jerking her leg too much.
I tried to be as gentle as I could, but again I was manhandling deadweight. She didn’t make much noise in protest at my efforts to start with. And then she didn’t make any at all because I think the pain made her pass out again. Or perhaps it was the hit to the head.
I got her on the door. And then I dragged the door across the ground, up onto the porch and—skinning my knuckles as I just managed to squeeze it through the doorway—into the house, out of the rain.
I used a big padded stool to balance the door on so that she was level with the long deep sofa in front of the fire, and then I slid her off it and onto the cushions. Her eyes flickered as I took off the wet outer clothes as best I could. This revealed more ugly bruises on her body. I think she had broken ribs too. I looked at her nose, mashed sideways. Dad had straightened Bar’s nose when she slipped on a rock and broke it against the gunwales of the Sweethope two summers ago. I knew it had to be done as soon after the break as possible. And half a day had gone, so it was now or never. I think if she hadn’t have been breathing so weirdly I might still have left it, but I thought it might clear her nose enough to stop the snuffing heavy snorts that she was occasionally racked by. So I put my hands on either side of her face, gripped the nose between my thumbs and told myself this was a little thing compared to setting the leg, and that if I was going to do it I should do it once, hard and sharp and decisive. And then I gritted my teeth and twisted it back into the centre of her face. She growled in shock and her eyes snapped open for an instant, but then fluttered closed again. The graunching feeling as I did it made me feel a little sick, but when I took my hands away I was happy that it now looked more or less in the right place and wasn’t so obviously smeared across her cheek. And then when I put blankets over her she seemed to sleep again, though I had no idea of the difference between sleep and a coma.
I wanted to lie down on the other sofa and sleep too, but I got a fire going first, and then I went and took saddles and packs off the horses and left them sheltering under a tree.
I ate some food because I knew I had to keep my energy up. There was no pleasure in it. The pesh just tasted sour, and the smoke-dried rabbit was so tough it hurt my teeth as I tried to chew some of the goodness out of it. And then I put a covered pot with some water and boar meat in the fire to cook away as I slept, and changed out of my dirty wet clothes.
I hadn’t been naked in a long time, not since swimming in the pool behind the house I’d burned. And I hadn’t been naked in front of anyone who was not my family ever. I was tired and wet and cold and exhausted and I thought, in my heart, that John Dark was probably in a coma she wasn’t going to come out of any time soon, if ever. What I really thought, especially after seeing the bruises on her broken ribcage, was that she was dying. I had no idea what internal damage she might have suffered, and certainly no hope at all of healing it, whatever it turned out to be. So bone-tired, wet, cold and sledgehammered by the day’s events, I stood in front of the flames, naked, my hands braced against the high lintel of the mantelpiece and let the fire warm me.
Her eyes were open when I turned to warm my back. She stared at me. I stared back at her, and then I twisted away and pulled a blanket around me. When I looked at her again, her eyes were closed and I don’t know if she saw anything.
She didn’t say anything about it the next morning, or indeed anything for the next two days. She hovered between a dull unhealthy sleep and a waking that was pained and undignified. I fed her when she was awake, pesh and the broth from the boar meat, and between bowls and pans and wet cloths to clean her up with and a tarp under her blankets to lie on, we coped with her need to piss and shit despite being unable to move. It didn’t worry me, but she hated that part of it.
The only good thing was the swelling on her nose got better, and although both her eyes remained yellow and purple and bloodshot, they were on either side of a more or less symmetrical face again.
I think I understood her silence. She was like a terrier that had been hurt. She had just gone into herself to heal. I came back into the room on the first morning, bringing more firewood and Jip had climbed on the sofa and lay against her, giving her his warmth. He looked at me.
I said it was bon.