South of Carlisle they rounded a bend at the edge of a stand of pine trees to find, two hundred yards ahead of them, a line of cavalry drawn up across the road. They kept going.
“Are they waiting for us?” asked Medina.
“Why would they wait for us?” said Calley. They spoke without looking at each other.
“Two men,” said Medina, “travelling north. One a Spaniard. To be stopped.”
“Bollocks.”
“They are looking for someone.”
“Not for us.”
Nature was at its most benign, or benign for Cumberland. A small shower of rain in the early morning had given way to sunshine and clean blue shadows. Trees shone. The hills looked comfortable.
“Twenty,” said Medina.
“Twenty-two,” said Calley. “No. Twenty-three.” He had picked out the officer, a man on a grey horse riding slowly just to the rear of his men. There was no one else on the road. No farm cart, no pedlars or packhorses. Nor were there any turnings, left or right.
Fifty yards now. It was a game! Twenty-three pairs of eyes were staring them down. Medina’s horse tossed its head and he reached down to smooth the heat of its neck.
At thirty yards the four troopers in the centre of the line started their horses forward and peeled away, two to one side and two to the other, facing across the road. Had they rehearsed this? Drilled it? There was now a gap on the road about the width of a field gate. Ten yards to go. Five. They were entering the range men fight at. Length of a man’s arm plus the length of his blade. Close enough now to see the braiding on a collar, the creases in a boot. Medina nodded. He did not aim it at anyone, just nodded. No one spoke. The silence was inhuman. They entered the line; they passed through. It was like passing under the shadow of a bridge. The road ahead was empty, its surface spotted with the glossy dung of the cavalry horses.
“Don’t look back,” said Calley.
“I do not intend it,” said Medina.
“Don’t even look at me.”
“I do not intend it.”
They were both grinning, both light as air.
The last part of the journey was the most tedious. They felt they were close but they weren’t, not yet. They crossed the border, crossed a line of hills, crossed another. They learned the name of the river they were following, the Annan. Several times they stood their horses off the road to let drovers pass. On one occasion more than three hundred cattle were herded past them, heading south. There was something military about it. The numbers. The smell and churn of the road.
To Medina the land seemed wild as Spain, as old Castile. In the high country he saw eagles—small bent sticks turning in the currents of the sky, the sky itself a type of blue like the lining of something, like the source material of distance. Madre perla. Madre de Dios . . .
Two nights they slept in the hills, waking shivering, hugging themselves, foul-tempered, though by noon the sun was hot enough to suck the damp from their coats so that each man rode inside his own cloud. On the third night they stayed at an inn, solemnly eating everything that was brought to them, then sleeping in a windowless room on two straw pallets, sprawled, silent, dead to everything.
In the morning they followed a new river. (“Fuck the Annan,” said Calley, and Medina had said, “Yes, fuck the old Annan.”) The sense was of having climbed the country river by river. The Severn, the Wye, the Eden, the Annan. Now they had the Clyde.
One more night in the open, then, early afternoon the next day, Medina stood in the stirrups of his horse and pointed to the smoke that hung in a brown cloud over the river. An hour later they could pick out spires, the stacks of industry, and later still—pushing their horses on—the sun setting in window glass, all Glasgow for half an hour like the embers of a fire.
The city built itself around them. A zone of scrubland, a midden ghosted by dogs. Then shanty, brickfields, the first formal streets newly built or still unfinished (tons of dressed stone with a watchman camped at the top). Further on they saw the bones of an older city, streets in a curl, houses piled like broken crockery, human faces white as bindweed . . .
They had lost the river; now they discovered it again, its channels running through mud beneath a handsome bridge. There were globe-headed lamps on the bridge and the lighters were at work, one of them, a boy, holding a length of smouldering cord of the kind gunners use.
On the far bank they found a lodging house so close to the quayside you could, without much risk, leap from an upstairs window and catch hold of the yardarm of a ship. The place was Calley’s choice—all were Calley’s choice—though it seemed to Medina he had simply walked up the steps on impulse. Beside the house was a shop selling wines and spirits, a light in an alcove above its door like a wayside shrine. Medina decided he would go there later and buy enough wine to get drunk. He thought he still had the money for that, just. Two bottles of northern wine. Drink one fast, then find somewhere private to lean, drink the other slowly.
They stabled the horses and went up the stairs of the house behind a man carrying a fish-oil lantern, its orange glow creeping up the walls with them as they climbed. On the fourth floor he opened a door and led them into a room. He said they had a view of the river though when Medina went to the window there was no river in sight, only what appeared to be a garden or perhaps a small burying ground that had come adrift from its chapel.
“You know a place called Dumbarton?” said Calley. He repeated the question four times before the man understood him.
Dumbarton! Of course he knew Dumbarton.
“Far, is it?”
“Far? No.”
“So how do you get there?”
The man pointed to the window. “You go doon the water.”
“And what about a man called Browne. Lives there. A sea captain.”
“Browne?” said the man. “Browne of Dumbarton?” He bared his teeth; he was thinking, perhaps passing the residents of Dumbarton, one by one, before his inner gaze. He shook his head. “Someone will know him.”
“All right,” said Calley.
The man looked at them both. “Are you two Swedish?” he asked.
“No,” said Calley.
“Yes,” said Medina.
The man seemed satisfied with this. He left them the lamp and went out.