1

THE OLD STORY has it that Archie, tired of the north wind, sought to extinguish it.

He built a house, then a wall, then a doubling-wall, and fences and hedge-barriers, but the whining whistle of the winter wind still filtered through. The more he refused to listen, the louder it roared.

So he planted a forest to the north side, then dug deep to establish a lake to absorb some of the wind’s force, then another thick forest on the far side, but as he lay in bed on those long January nights he could hear the whole world move.

‘Was that a sparrow, somewhere to the north?’

‘Impossible, in the depth of winter.’

‘Maybe it was to the south, with the swirling gale carrying it through the barriers? To sound as if it was coming from the north?’

He looked out the attic window where the universe was quiet and white in the snow.

Lying back in bed he listened again. The sound of breathing downstairs, where his wife rested. The distant throb of a television in his son’s bedroom. How loudly the snowflakes fell onto his window. He was a thin man. Like a wisp of grass really, all short and stubbly in the winter, lush and long in the summer. Where sheep grazed, and cows munched and the speal – the scythe – mowed. How precious grass is in this bare, rocky place.

Years ago, in a Geography book in school, he was told that the snow came from the east. Born in Siberia, it travelled across Russia like an army, recruiting flakes to fall gently on these western shores as a soft blanket on a bed, pure and pristine and white. Virginal they called it then, which now seemed such an archaic word in a world where everyone was born knowing.

And then the thaw would come and the white world grew ugly, messing up the streets and muddying the socks inside the shoes until all the snowmen had gone, leaving only a fractured stick here, a disused scarf there.

When he was born, Archie knew nothing. Slowly he realised that the sweet thing in his mouth was his mother, and that the dark thing that hid the world from him was the inside of a drawer in which he slept, and that the stranger who came home from sea every year-and-a-half was called his father.

When he was five he was sent to school and was told that other worlds existed beyond the fank and the hill and the shoreline. They had different colours from the one he inhabited. An elongated green one was called Canada, while the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was red and the United States of America light blue, just like the sky on a bright summer’s day.

His republic was divided into quarterly segments, called earrach and samhradh and foghar and geamhradh – spring and summer and autumn and winter, though the old people never tired of telling him that these were modern divisions which made no sense to them, who calculated by the old dispensations beyond the Gregorian calendar.

‘In our days,’ they would say, ‘we measured differently. By the moon and stars and the sun and tide.’ And they would chant out old names to him, which made as much sense as saying Pluto or Mars or Saturn – names which he had once detected on an atlas hidden in the teacher’s room, tucked behind the blueish globe.

And they would patiently explain to him how February really began in what was now January and never finished until what he called March was almost done, and how April used to be in two parts, pre-sowing and post-sowing, and how August was the month of both the harvest and the badger moon, and how Samhain marked the beginning of winter, which would always be long and wet if it happened to fall on a Wednesday. Most of his life these remained glorious truths as well as mysteries, like the name Tanganyika which he recalled from the story of David Livingstone, and the name Aix-la-Chapelle which he remembered from the war stories of his uncle, his father’s brother, who returned with one leg and one shiny medal from a muddy place called France.

Archie himself was no hero. He had never done much, neither college nor university. Leaving school at fourteen he had been apprenticed to the local smithy, a wizened old man reduced to the nickname ‘Gobhlachan’ – literally, ‘Crotch-ridden’. Some said this was merely because he always sat astride his anvil like a horseman, others alluded to withered balls; some argued through age, others through natural disposition, some seeming to recall an accident of long ago when his testicles were crushed by the back-kick of a Clydesdale horse he was shoeing out in the open yard.

Whichever it was, Gobhlachan’s trade was a dying art. In the twinkling of an eye, all the horses were gone and the little work he procured was a mixture of welding for the emerging cars and the re-moulding of iron railings for garden furniture.

Archie was taken on as an apprentice in a golden moment, when a woman from Poland arrived in the area with a string of horses, intending to open a beach riding school down by the shoreline. The woman – Olga Swirszczynska – had once been a ballet teacher and musician, but a back injury – caused in an air accident, she claimed – had finished her career and forced her to try all kinds of exercises, from yoga to gentle horse-riding, in an effort at regaining fluidity.

Instead, she fell in love with horses: their smell and physical presence, their power and beauty, their raggedness and temper, their sheer hard-earned intimacy. Sure, there were some who nuzzled up and cooried near like well-behaved children, but these were never the best: when put to the test out in the dawn air, they were too soft and lazy.

It was always those other ones – the awkward bastards whose trust had to be earned – who proved best when the rain hammered down at 5Am and you led them leaping over the down hedges.

That was in England, of course, before the stable failed and went bankrupt and before she moved north, picking up horses here, there and everywhere on the way, from dealers and circuses, from farmyards and the RSPCA, finally arriving in this godforsaken, windy spot on a cold April morning when the Atlantic was brewing like a kettle, preparing for the storm that went down in history as An Siabadh Mòr, The Great Shaking.

Those who lived through it described it as you would describe the moon: as a marvel placed above your garden. ‘It came,’ they said, ‘unexpectedly, from the north, though the sea had been thrashing in from the west all night. By that time, everything was tilting eastwards – the haystacks and the peatstacks and the carts and byres – but just when we thought it was all over, it suddenly moved northwards and the icy wind blew as if you could see God’s cheeks bellowing in and out, and it left nothing standing. We survived because we hid, in the hollows burrowed out in the machairs where the little-people once lived, though the bones we shared the hollows with are now all gone, taken by the later storms and the erosion.’

Naturally, of course, some folk blamed the strange Polish woman, who had arrived that very day with her string of horses. ‘How did she survive anyway?’ they muttered, not really believing that the horses had corralled themselves into a magic circle round the woman, nose to tail, their shiny flanks offering her all the world’s protection from the hurricane.

Once the wind abated, this was the first sound the survivors heard: the thunderous roar of the hooves on the hardened machair as the horses ran southwards, away from the cradle of the remembered storm. She herself arrived later, on foot, dressed in man’s clothing – something unheard of in the district except in the sailors’ tales of women in far-off lands who wore turbans on their heads and wielded scimitars as wildly as the Turks.

By that time the horses were subdued and grazing on the seaweed-strewn thin grass. They snorted and neighed quietly when she came in sight, continuing their slow munching as if nothing had ever happened except this eternal chewing, here, in this stubbly sand, on the very edge of the world.

When the woman came to Gobhlachan, the talk was inevitable: the strange horsewoman and the unballed man. What a fine match they would make, she with her long wild hair and he with his small, sharp claws. The meeting of fire with earth, or of ‘òrd le ighne’, hammer with anvil, as they named it.

In actual fact, despite their physical differences, Olga Swirszczynska and Gobhlachan were the perfect match. Not so much fire with earth or hammer to anvil, as hand to glove and swan to lake. They were gentle with other, like wild horses tamed, or like sheared sheep.

‘Of course, he’s the woman,’ the men sneered enviously, watching Olga each morning as she harnessed the horses, tethered the ploughs to their haunches then set off to furrow the ancient fields between the two rivers which had lain unused for generations. And she would be seen in the thin dawn light leading her horses through the phosphorescence down to the seashore, where they could be glimpsed moving through the misty binoculars like ghosts in an old story.

She did all the work which had hitherto belonged to men, from peat-cutting to thatching the byres, from line-fishing to burying the horses when they died.

‘Chaidh an tarbh beag a’ spothadh,’ they said of Gobhlachan – ‘The small bull has been truly castrated’ – though he was as happy as Fionn the Warrior resting on the Hill of Plenty and continued daily to sit astride his anvil, a cup of tea in one hand and in the other a hammer, which he regularly rattled against the iron, imagining the sparks flying as in the believed olden days.

But none of this had happened when Archie was first taken on as Gobhlachan’s apprentice, for at that time Olga had just arrived in the district. Once the storm had ceased, much repair work needed to be done and Gobhlachan’s services were required everywhere, to fix broken axles and wheels and carts and bits-and-bobs for which Archie had no name but which were essential for survival, from the small chain which hooked the pot to the fire to the anchor-hooks which held the boats fast against the tide.

The day he was fourteen he left school forever, as he was legally entitled to do. ‘The law has its uses,’ the schoolmaster said to him when the bell rang for the last time.

It was now Monday. Instead of lying in bed as usual till sunrise, he rose while the sickle moon still slept in the sky. Instead of the woollen school clothing, he put on his dungarees and wellingtons and went outside where the arc of his urine perfectly reversed the sickle of the lying moon.

He smelt the air, which was frosty and sweet, a mixture of rain and manure, and looked up at the expanse of the skies where the stars were twinkling in all their beauty. The Great Bear dancing to the north, dragging the Plough behind him. What an eternal job, with Andromeda sparkling high to the south like a cran of herring flung into the skies.

He went into the byre, where the cows snorted smoke into the air. Their dull eyes looked at him, knowing that it was still the middle of the night, and they lay their heads down again in the straw, waiting for the real dawn and the cockerel’s call which would come at the proper time.

Archie went back outside, suddenly realising that this was it: his life was to be made here, between the byre and the shore, between The Great Bear and Andromeda. He thought of that place – that institution – he’d been in for the past nine years: the school, and what it had all meant. A hot lunch each day – broth – and lots of things told him by the one teacher, which sounded magnificent, but made little sense.

How Richard the Lionheart – what a hero he was! – had conquered Jerusalem and tamed Saladin and had had his heart taken across Europe after his death by a singer called Blonden who had found his body abandoned in the Forest of Rouen. At least, that was the version Archie heard, well before the later versions emerged depicting The Lionheart as an unfaithful homosexual war criminal.

Like leaves of a book, the two things which lay before him were the land and the sea. The earth, from which came the few things which sustained life – potatoes and sheep and cattle – and the sea, from which came the sweet things – herring and cod and saithe and lythe, as well as death.

They were married, of course, the earth and the sea. Mating like the bull and the cow, which he’d seen so often in the rocky fields. The cow bellowing for days and then the bull rising high and thrusting that stiff red thing inside as they slithered forwards in the drizzly mist.

Without the sea the earth was dry and barren, and that morning he could see the spindrift wooing the earth, spraying it with its salty mist. Archie walked down through the winter fields to the edge of the machair, where the mating was remorseless, the huge Atlantic waves thrashing on to the shore, the beach strewn with the debris of the thrusts – tangle and seaweed and nets and bottles and fragments of broken timber.

This was no division between land and sea: such a choice was unimaginable. To survive on land was to rely on the sea, and Archie had long known that his adult life would begin here, gathering the sea’s jewels to fertilise the land for the spring sowing. So as the sun rose low to the east above Ben Mòr, he bowed to the task, back to the Atlantic wind.

‘Never wear gloves,’ had been the chant since childhood, ‘they make your hands soft.’ So Archie bent into the seaweed, striking at its roots with the curved sickle in his bare hands, beginning to build up the first real heap of his life. The heap which would grow and lengthen, then be carried inland on his back in a creel and spread thin on the ground out of which emerged the potato in early autumn.

But the real work was the tangle, each root like snatching a hair out of the giant’s head. The story was that the sea was merely the sky for the Fuamhaire Mòr – the Great Giant – who had been exiled beneath the waves for once having touched the sky above with his outstretched arms. The full story was that when the earth heaved into shape, dividing itself into continents, it rose up in giant form and stretched itself its full length, the fingertips which subsequently became China and America inadvertently touching the sky where the gods dwelt, disturbing their slumber.

In their anger, the giant was exiled back down to the bottom of the ocean, and as he fell from the sky back into the sea huge lumps fell off him which – of course – became the earth as we know it today, melted and moulded and forged by time and heat and tide.

‘The giant’s arse,’ they say, when someone mentions England.

‘His toe,’ when Italy is displayed.

‘A snot from his nose,’ when they see Iceland.

Though, of course, the giant’s parts are all moveable, depending on time and place and tribe and prejudice.

Archie knew all that to be nonsense, though that knowledge did not diminish the myth. The sea’s power was evident whether a giant stayed beneath it or not. The sky’s infinity was obvious despite the blue school globe which contained it all. The Earth’s ultimate willingness to be harvested, in spite of the frost and the blight and the hard soil, was proven year after year. Archie knew that life had always been a contest with the giant, and that to pluck a single hair from his head, or yield a corner of his toenail away, was a constant triumph.

But the cold! To sink hands into the freezing sea-water each morning, time and again, lifting the dripping stocks round your wrists. And the fumbling for the pen-knife and the hacking away, leaving the bare stalk which you split with both hands as if you were indeed the giant, separating main from main on your plunge into the freezing waters.

Again and again and again, breaking the stalks, one after the other, each winter morning. The 1St of January, bitterly cold with a north-easterly. The 2Nd of January, equally cold with a stronger wind from the north. The 3Rd of January, hailstones sweeping in from the north-east, hammering against the soaking oilskins. The 4Th of January, real snow falling on the sand; and on it went, forever, ceaselessly, as Archie walked down to the shore each morning, head bent into the wind, to his appointed task.

By the beginning of April the giant’s arm was bent. Archie had accumulated about a quarter-of-a-mile’s worth of tangle, stretching in a thin line above a row of barrels carried from the disused fish-curing factory which had closed before the last great war. The seaweed itself had already been spread on the fields, but the tangle was the magic profit margin: one of the few sources of surplus income available to an unskilled boy.

On the first Monday after Easter the boat would arrive and take the tangle southwards, in exchange for money. ‘You’ll get £5 for that,’ some of the other lads said, though Archie kept his mouth shut and listened to the older men who mentioned much higher sums – £20, £30, even £40.

John the Goblin – so-called because of his weakened leg – hirpled into view one day and sat down, rolling a cigarette. ‘Do you know something?’ said John the Goblin. ‘That stuff,’ – pointing to the tangle – ‘is used to make French letters.’ He inhaled his cigarette. ‘Just think of that. Stalks for stalks, eh?’

Archie had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Also,’ continued John the Goblin, ‘they use it to make toothpaste and hair spray and fireworks and cannons.’ He spat out fragments of tobacco. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it? Almost makes you think, eh? Would you like a fag?’

‘Sure,’ said Archie; and there, sheltering behind the tangle-bank from the gusting wind, clumsily rolled his first cigarette, taking five goes at lighting it in the face of the swirling breeze. Finally, huddled beneath his jacket, the paper caught light and the glow was like the glow of his granny’s tilley lamp in the early evening, signalling warmth and pleasure and a long night of stories.

Inevitably, he coughed at the first rough draw of nicotine, but John the Goblin merely smiled, saying, ‘It happens to all of us at the beginning. But by the time you’ve finished it, you can’t get enough of it.’ And it was true. So the Goblin divided his shredded tobacco in two, saying, ‘We’ll go halfers. And I’ll get you a proper tin later, to make a real man of you.’ He smiled. ‘Of course, you’ll need to pay me. A stalk for a stalk, as they say. What about going halfers on the tangle? Half the tangle for as much tobacco as I can supply?’

‘I’m not half as daft as I look,’ said Archie. ‘Why don’t I just buy my own tobacco?’

The Goblin laughed. ‘Aye! And where? Where do you think I get mine? Do you think I just wander out to that shitty shop at the pier to buy their overpriced rubbish? No way, José.’

The pier shop was the only shop in the place. That mythic establishment where you could buy everything from a needle to an anchor.

‘And if you did buy it, it’s like smoking horse-shit,’ said the Goblin. ‘God only knows where he gets that rubbish from. If I were you, I would just crush that tangle down and smoke it instead.’

‘So where do you get your stuff from?’ Archie asked.

‘Ah, but that’s a trade secret,’ smiled the Goblin, tapping his nose. ‘That’s what you would pay half your tangle for.’ He rolled another cigarette, lit it, and handed it to Archie. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘As you bend into that wind cutting the tangle, wouldn’t it be nice to look forward to a really good smoke every hour or so? Just you think about it!’ And John the Goblin hirpled off across the sand dunes, the tin in his back pocket glinting in the watery sunlight.

That turned out to be the actual day of An Siabadh Mòr, The Great Shaking. No sooner had John the Goblin disappeared out of sight beyond the sand dunes than the wind began to rise, shaking the very barrels on which Archie’s future rested. Behind him the sea began to boil, and to the west and north the sky turned dark purple as if someone in the heavens had spilt an inkwell. Archie immediately regretted not having accepted the Goblin’s offer. A fag would be great consolation now. It would give him time to think, as he huddled beneath the barrels, rolling it slowly. Instead, there was one less thing between himself and eternity. For not having a cigarette he was barer, more at the mercy of the coming storm.

He hardly got home before the wind was at its full hurricane strength. For the first time in his life his abject poverty was an advantage. Too poor to have ever moved beyond a blackhouse, the family’s low-lying stone house was their salvation. More underground than overground, they were like beavers huddled in the darkness beneath the chaos. They heard the wind, but were physically untouched by it. As objects flew by outside, Archie and his parents and brothers and sisters and aged aunt sat on stools round the fire, conscious of the need to be silent.

Death, they all knew, was outside, so this was no time for tea or scones or idle chat. Each sat quiet, listening to the great storm raging, knowing that this time round it would not call for them. They all remembered the old stories they’d heard, of how Death always came in disguise. The Grim Reaper was, of course, a joke, for who could be frightened of one so familiar as he travelled through the villages in his grey cloak and with his shining scythe over his shoulder? They had seen him so often that he seemed a permanent inhabitant with his own croft and boat, his own potatoes and milk. He even tipped his cap at them.

But the man was a master of disguises, according to the old people, and could turn himself into any shape or form, animate or inanimate. What else were the rocks against which the fowlers had fallen for all these years? Or the sea, into which so many had fallen, drowned? Or the Fever, which came as a yellow-spotted guest from the visiting ship which had called all these years ago?

‘He was beautiful,’ one old woman was heard to say, ‘when he came ashore. You should have seen him, swimming towards us in a yellow polka-dot bathing suit, glinting in the noonday sun. By evening, all the young people in the village had a raging temperature with their skins erupting all over with yellow spots. By morning, none of them were alive. And that’s the strange thing, the Fever didn’t affect anyone over the age of twelve. They were all buried in shrouds which turned yellow as soon as they touched the corpses. Am Galar Mòr Buidhe, The Great Yellow Fever we called it, on account of the shrouds.’

And the yellow-shrouded one was all-blowing outside, for all his strength. They could hear his lungs wheezing as he ran through the air, his heart beating strongly as he pounded against the stone, his tongue and fingers and toes and tail trying to squeeze in through each tiny chink which disfigured the crumbling stonework keeping him at bay.

Why didn’t we repair that tiny section by the window while we had the chance? they all thought, as they watched his sharp fingernail easing through the miniscule hole which they had all ignored too long. Archie moved to crumple an old cut of tweed into a ball which he stuffed into the small hole, crushing his fingernail.

They all listened as he raged outside, roaring with anger as he flung the universe to shreds. He breathed down through the chimney, adding black billows of smoke to the darkness. His nostrils smelt of peat as he crawled through the house, suffocating them. He was all wind and rain and hail and snow. He was rock and sea and river and bog. He was famine and hunger and sickness and poverty. He was sun and moon and light and stars. A family member and a terrible stranger.

Grandfather, taken in the broad light of day as he lay resting in the shade of the sun in his homemade wicker basket. Joanna, stricken down in the height of her youth, the morning of the day before her wedding. She had been trying on her bridal gown when the headache came, soft and dull and throbbing, as if he’d rolled himself into a spark of perfume turned sour, a great sweetness gone rancid.

I remember the man’s watch, Archie’s father thought. It was marked one minute after mid-day. And the sun was shining in all its glory, even through the smoke and fire and carnage.

‘Did you say something?’ Granny asked.

‘The Somme,’ Archie’s father answered. ‘July 1916. A bright summer’s day. A head flew past me. I thought it was a football, at first. Rags of flesh fell on me and when I looked down, this severed hand lay beside me with the pocket watch still held firm in the grip of the hand. He must have been an officer, for they were the only ones who carried timepieces. He must have been checking for the next advance.’

Maybe it was a minute past midnight, Archie thought. As if that made any difference.

‘And they tell me that snowdrops and pansies now grow there, as if nothing ever happened. Donald-John was there a year ago and he says it’s now like a meadow, with proper gravestones at the end and plaques and markers and signposts and tourist information, with bees buzzing round the clover the day he was there. He even brought back a pot of honey which tasted as sweet as our own potatoes when mashed with milk.’

And suddenly it was all quiet outside, as if the Somme Meadow had been rolled out, already bursting with clover.

‘He’s gone,’ muttered Granny, beginning once again to stir the pot which hung from an iron hook above the open fire. The sweet smell of soup filled the air, as if all the taste buds had been re-awakened, and Archie’s mother returned to kneading the bread on the long wooden table, raising up a storm cloud of flour about the room.

Archie and his father went outside to survey the damage. All was still. Not a breath of wind in the air. Not a single cloud in the sky. The sea electric blue on the horizon. All the winter hayricks in the village had been swept away. Not a single cart remained on its wheels. All the houses were roofless. Rocks which hadn’t moved since the creation of the world were gone. The entire landscape was translated, as if a giant’s hand had swept across the district, flattening raised things, lowering exalted things, moving immovable things. The hills, of course, remained, as did the river and the fields and the lochs. What had changed was the human landscape: people’s houses and byres and possessions, all swept away.

It was only afterwards that the real cost was counted, when funeral after funeral took place, each one paying his due to the great visitor.

Archie’s tangle was destroyed along with all other things. When he walked down to the shore in the evening stillness, it was as if he had never been there before, as if he had never spent these frozen morning hacking away at the stalks in the pre-dawn light, as if he had never – stoically and patiently – build up his great wall of tangle, single stalk by single stalk, to the quarter-mile length which had tempted John the Goblin along with his sweet weed, the taste of which Archie could still feel in the back of his mouth and nostrils, and now all gone like a dream overtaken by the morning light.

That was the day Gobhlachan came into his own. All things were broken, and the wizened man with the crushed balls was the only one in the area who could repair them. He had the anvil and the bellows, the fire and the tongs. A succession of widows and orphans made their way to him, carrying the remnants of a plough or of a kettle or of a cart and leaving them in separate bundles by his forge door.

There was so much destruction that Gobhlachan sent word for help and Archie was the first to call by.

‘Don’t worry, boy,’ Gobhlachan immediately said to him. ‘That Goblin isn’t the only one around here who can lay his paws on good tobacco.’ And he lit his pipe, handing it to Archie, who puffed and coughed and drew in the sweet nicotine. ‘And I won’t charge you half your tangle either,’ added Gobhlachan. ‘In fact, I won’t charge you any tangle at all. In fact, you will never have to go back to your tangle again. Plenty work here, son, if you want it. Hard work. Warm work. Right here by the fire.’

And he beckoned Archie over, telling him to lift the stoking shovel which lay by the oven door. And there, by the forge door, Archie learned all there was to learn about iron. How soft and fluid and watery it really was before it was plunged into the flames. How you could shape it into any form you wished – curved, opaque, translucent, hard, soft, thick, thin. How fast you had to be to control it, before it assumed a shape you had never desired or imagined. How impossible it was to reverse the curve or the fault or the crack once it hardened or set. Creation was irreparable.

The amount which ended up on the scrapheap! Hooves which turned out like bits of turd, shapeless pans, kettles which could not hold a thing, parts of ploughs which were as useless as a star on a summer’s day. But all that – that physical stuff – was the least of it. Gobhlachan’s lore was what really mattered: stories and trade secrets which were as fluid, or as set, as the iron itself. How iron protected you from the Fairies and safeguarded you from the dead. How a nail above the lintel of the door ensured that no evil ever entered; how a reaping-hook placed beneath the bed was a surefire guarantee that no mother or child died in childbirth. Gobhlachan never used the word ‘magic’, but that’s what it was: manifold ways of avoiding death and misfortune.

Iron itself was, of course, magical. With hooves, your steeds ran faster, across all kinds of terrain, than anyone else’s horses. With a reaping hook you harvested bread. With an iron plough you eased the goodness out of the earth. With keys you locked – and opened – chests. With swords you conquered. With a gun barrel you triumphed. With a knife you could skin and dismember the deer.

Gobhlachan had other, even more fantastic stories. How the Devil had tried to marry the most beautiful girl on the island. The time another Archie swam backwards up the Niagara Falls, watched by his rival. Why beggars were called Pilgrims of the Mist. How Donald was tamed by whisky in the well. How women made clay effigies. How you could travel all the way to America on a single wisp of straw. Transformation was everywhere. He said:

Long ago, there lived a king and queen and they had five lovely sons. Then late in life they had this wee daughter. And she was beautiful. And they all adored her. Every one of them, the boys and the king and the queen. And they were all so happy. And the boys used to take her out to play, you see, because there was a big meadow and parks and trees that led down to the water. And they had ample place to play.

So the mother says, ‘Mind you look after your wee sister now.’

‘Oh, yes, we’ll look after her, Mother.’

But you know what boys are. They like to climb trees and play with bows and arrows and things like that. So they would leave her – she was very young, you see – and tell her to sit and make daisy chains or something in the meadow while they rampaged through the woods.

But one day she’s sitting there trying to make daisy chains, when this white bull came making circles round about her. Wide circles at first. But every time it went round, it came closer and closer, you see.

And it says, ‘Hello.’

And she says, ‘Oh, hello.’

And the wee white bull says, ‘Why are you sitting there on your own?’

‘The boys are away playing,’ she says. ‘They’re coming back for me soon.’

He says, ‘Now, wouldn’t you like to have some fun as well as the boys?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Well, come on. You jump on my back and we can have a nice run around the meadow and you’ll love it.’

‘Oh no, no, I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘Oh, I’m frightened to go on your back. You’re too big.’

‘I’m not really big,’ the bull says. ‘And anyway, I’ll kneel down and then you can get on my back,’ he says. ‘You’ll love it. Come on.’

And after a while he persuades her – circling round about her in that way, he sort of mesmerised her, you see.

She says, ‘All right.’

So the bull kneels down, this white bull. And she got gets his back as he says, ‘Now hold on to my horns.’

She held on to the horns, but this bull took off with her. And it kept going and it kept going until it came to the shore. It was then that the boys noticed. And they ran and ran, thinking they would catch it, because they never thought it would go into the water, you see. But it did go into the water and it kept going into the water and it kept going. And she’s holding on to the horns and shouting, ‘Let me down, let me down, let me down.’

And this bull says, ‘No, you’re not getting down.’

And these boys, when they finally reached to the shore, the last thing they saw was their sister and the bull disappearing over the horizon, over the water. So they were terrified to go home and tell their father and their mother. But they just had to. So the king and the queen were absolutely hysterical about their wee lassie – and so were the boys. They all just loved her.

The king was getting on a bit by this time, you see, quite unable to go in search for her. So the three oldest boys, they say, ‘Look, Father, we’ll go and we’ll get her.’

And the oldest one, his name was Jack, he says, ‘I’ll not come back, Father, until I get her. I promise you that.’

So off the boys went.

Now they had been well taught with swordsmanship and all the things boys were taught at that time, you see. So they took their swords and things with them and away they went.

And they went from one place to another, from one place to another, till their money went down and their feet were sore with walking. The horses were worn out. They had to give them up. And they started walking and walking and their feet were terribly sore. Their hair was growing long. Now and then they would stop and have a shave in some old body’s house, because they would ask any old person if they needed wood chopped or whatever and get a wee bit of food and a bed for themselves in exchange, you see.

And this went on for years until the younger son says, ‘This is no use. We’re never going to find her. We may as well face the fact,’ he says. ‘I’m going home.’

So his brother Jack says, ‘Well, please yourself. I don’t blame you.’

So the younger one he went away home.

And the other two kept going on and on and on, across ferries and across water and into different countries and all over. But no word could they get of the bull or their sister.

Until the second oldest one, he says, ‘It’s no use, Jack, I’m going home too.’

Well, Jack says, ‘I’m keeping going on. I promised to go on till I found her. I’m going to do just that.’

So the second-oldest laddie, he went away home to his father and mother with the sad news. But Jack he kept on and on and on. And every day he always found a wee bite from somebody. And one day this old henwife that he was working for, when she was giving him a bowl of porridge and that, and a cup of tea, and he was telling her his story – you see, he told everybody that he met in case someone had heard of the bull.

‘No, laddie,’ she says, ‘I never heard nothing of a white bull or wee lassie. I never even heard mention of them no way,’ she says. ‘But see that mountain there?’

He says, ‘Yes?’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘up there in that mountain there’s a wind trapped into a hole,’ she says. ‘It’s trapped in there and it cannot get out. And they tell me it knows everything, no matter what you want to know, if you go up there,’ she says, ‘and look for a wee hole.’

And Jack says, ‘If there’s a hole why can he not get out?’

‘No, no, no,’ she says, ‘I’ve never seen the wind. Don’t you know that it can’t come up through a wee hole? Just look for a hole,’ she says, ‘and put your mouth to the hole and shout down into it.’

So Jack goes and he climbs and he climbs and he climbs and he climbs this mountain. And it was some mountain. And he’s looking all over and all over. It’s a long time before he spots this wee hole.

He says, ‘I wonder if that’s the hole she’s speaking about?’ So he put his mouth to the hole and he shouts down, ‘Wind, are you there?’

‘Ooooooooooooo.’

He says, ‘Well, listen, please. I’m looking for my wee sister that was stolen by a white bull years ago. And I’ve been tramping and walking and swimming and rowing all over the world trying to find her. And I’m really exhausted, Wind. Please tell me what happened to her.’

Then he put his ear to the hole, you see.

And he heard this:

‘Oooooooooooooooo.’

‘What are you saying? I can’t make you out,’ he says. ‘Try and speak a wee bit clearer.’

But all he could get was ‘Oooo the Coo!’

He says, ‘It sounds like “Follow the coo.” Is it “Follow the coo?”’

And he put his ear again to the hole. But there was no answer.

‘Ah,’ he says, ‘I’m off my head to listen to that silly old woman to take that road up this huge mountain and that silly wind that doesn’t know anything. All I could make out was “Follow the coo, follow the coo.”’ He says to himself, ‘What coo isn’t he speaking about?’ So he trudged down the mountain again. Hours and hours and hours it took him to trudge down. But when he got to the bottom, sure enough there was a cow. And this cow started to walk on. It was a-standin grazing when he came down. But it started to walk away, you see.

So Jack says, ‘Well, no harm done,’ he says. ‘I’ll follow it anyway. I’m sure that’s what that wind was saying: “Follow the coo.”’

So he walked after this cow and he walked after this cow for about two days. Till this cow stopped to eat the grass again, you see. And it ate away and it ate away and he’s standing looking at it and going round about it. And then the cow sat down and stared chewing the cud. And Jack he sat down too beside it, you see. And suddenly he heard this voice saying, ‘You might go and get me a drink of water.’ And he looked round. This was the cow speaking to him.

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘you can speak.’

‘Of course I can speak,’ she says. ‘Go and look over there,’ she says. ‘There must be water beside those rushes and things over there.’

He says, ‘I could do with a drink myself.’ So over he goes. And he’s looking about for something to carry water in, you see. And he’s kicking away the grass. And he takes his sword and he’s cutting down these rushes and things when this head comes, this huge beast, like a dragon, a great big mouthful of teeth. And he jumps back, terrified. And looking past in a cave – this dragon was in a cave – he sees this girl at the back of it.

And he says, ‘My sister! I’ll bet it’s my sister!’ But he’s too terrified to stand and look too much. And he goes back to the cow and says, ‘Oh no, no, no, you’ll get no drink of water here, neither me nor you. There’s a beast there and I never saw the like of him in my life,’ he says. ‘I’ve heard about dragons and that’s what it must be.’

‘Well,’ the cow says, ‘you’re a big young man with a sword in your hand. Are you afraid of a beast?’

‘You never saw the beast,’ he says. ‘It’s forty times the size of you.’

‘Away you go,’ she says, ‘Go on,’ she says, ‘laddie, go and kill the beast.’

‘Kill the beast?’ he says. ‘How am I going to kill a beast like that?’

She says, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what to do. When it opens its mouth, you jump into its mouth, and keep well back into its mouth so that it will not be able to get its mouth closed,’ she says, ‘and just cut the windpipe with your sword.’

So she gave Jack heartening, you see. So down he goes and sure enough this beast opens its jaws and he jumps inside the jaws and right enough he was so far back into its gullet, it couldn’t get its mouth shut. And he starts to hack and hack and hack and hack with his sword till all the windpipe is cut and the head slumps down. And he jumps out before the teeth could get him, you see. And when he looks into this cave, he says, ‘No, that’s not my sister.’

But the girl runs to him. She’s that happy she clings on to him.

And she says, ‘You don’t look very pleased to have come and rescued me.’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’m really looking for my sister.’

‘What happened to your sister?’

‘She was stolen away by a white bull,’ he says, ‘I can’t remember how many years ago. And we’ve never seen nor heard of her since.’

‘Well, that’s what happened to me,’ she says. ‘But I wouldn’t behave myself. Every chance I got I was running away.’ And she says, ‘If that’s what’s happened to your sister, she’s probably in the same place I have been in. This is my punishment, out here with this beast, for what I have done. I just wouldn’t stay, I was always trying to get away. Lots of girls try to get away and they’re badly punished for it.’

And he says, ‘Do you think that my sister could be there?’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘if she’s living, that’s likely where she’ll be. But you must take care. There’s a great fortress built,’ she says, ‘and an army of men you’ve never seen the like of. There’s no way you’re going to get in there. I’m warning you, if you go in there you’re going to your death.’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘if I’m going to my death, I’m going to my death. ’Cause I promised I wouldn’t come back without her anyway. And I’d be as well dead as wandering about this way for years and years and years.’

But anyway, he came back and he took the lassie with him. And they sat down and leaned against this cow, because she was sitting chewing the cud, you see. And the cow says, ‘She’s not your sister then?’

‘No,’ he says, ‘She’s not my sister. But she’s somebody’s bairn for all that.’

She says, ‘Aye!’

And Jack says, ‘She thinks my sister might be there. But there’s no way I’ll get her out,’ he says. ‘It’s a king that changes himself into a bull and goes and steals these bairns and lassies.’

And the cow says, ‘What do you mean, no way?’

‘Well, he has an army of thousands.’

‘But,’ says the cow, ‘you can have an army of thousands too, if you just listen to me. I’ll tell you what to do,’ she says. ‘Go with your sword to the dragon’s head and cut the gums away and pull every tooth out that you can get.’

He says, ‘Ah, there are thousands.’

‘Well,’ she says, ‘Pull them. And get the lassie to help. Go on, you, and give him a hand,’ she says. ‘Now go and do what I’m telling you.’

‘Might as well,’ he says.

But they got a drink of water anyway. The well was free now, you see, with no beast guarding it. So having this lassie, they pulled and pulled and they pulled and they pulled and he yanked and he cut and the lassie pulled them out and threw them in a heap, all these teeth.

And he went back to the cow. He says, ‘What am I going to do with that now?’

She says, ‘I’ll tell you. You’re going to stick them in the ground all round about you.’

‘Ah me,’ he says, ‘I must be mad listening to a cow, but I’ll do it anyway.’

So him and the lassie both, they stuck all these teeth and they kept sticking and sticking until it was pitch dark night and they couldn’t see to stick any more.

And the cow says, ‘Ah, that should do you,’ she says. ‘Go on and lie down and get a wee rest to yourselves.’

Jack says, ‘Aw, it’s all right for you lying there chewing the cud, but we never had a bite to eat. I know I never had a bite since yesterday – the meat I got from that old henwife.’

‘Ach,’ says the cow, ‘never mind, son. Put your hand in my ear, you’ll get plenty to eat.’ So he put his hand in the cow’s ear and sure enough this meat came up in front of him, and him and this lassie sat and ate. And then they slept up against the cow’s side.

So when Jack woke in the morning he gave himself a stretch and blinked his eyes like that and he looked round about him, there’s all this lying round about him. ‘What in the name of God is that?’ he says.

And he got up and he went and looked round about. And you know what it was? Men with armour, gold armour and they were in all stages. Some of them hadn’t their heads up out of the ground; some of them right up out of the ground; some of them as far as he could see round about him. They were all coming up, all these men.

And the cow says, ‘Aye,’ she says, ‘that’s your army. Now go and see if you can get your sister.’

So he got all these soldiers. And he had some idea what to do, being a king’s son, you see. So he led the army to this fortress where this king lived, and sure enough it was a big strong fortress, with thousands and thousands of soldiers. But this army Jack had, he never heard or saw fighters like them. And he went in there and there was a great battle and he beat them. And he rushed in and got this king. And he got hold of him and he tarred him and feathered him, he put a match to him and he says, ‘The world’s well rid of you. I have no qualms about doing this for what you’ve done to all these bairns and wee lassies and things.’

And sure enough, he found his sister. She recognised him right away. And he recognised her. And he took her out and he took her back to where the cow and this other lassie were.

Now for the first time he really took a look at this other lassie, you see. And she was as bonnie as a summer’s night. And he began to speak nice to her and asked her if she like to come back with him if she had no place to go now.

So he took her back and his sister back and, oh, the carry-on when they got to that castle where the mother and father was. And he married the lassie, so he brought back a wife and his sister and they lived happily ever afterwards.

Gobhlachan, of course, told the story in Gaelic and it was also, of course, a different version of the story, but this is the one Archie remembered, or thought he remembered and told or re-told or embellished a thousand and one times over the years.

He remembered Gobhlachan, sitting cross-legged astride the anvil, hammering the melting horseshoes into shape as he told of Jack and the cowardly brothers, the poor sister and the beast, the dragon and the cow. Somehow Archie knew that the actual magic was in the words themselves, not in the events. The stories were the iron, to be shaped and moulded. And as Gobhlachan hammered and smelted the fluid iron, first into a horseshoe, then into a poker, then into a gun barrel, then into a pot, then into the coulter of a plough, Archie saw that he was doing the same thing with words – turning glass into a mirror, an apple into a lake, a shoe into a boat, teeth into soldiers.

Who was this girl, he asked himself, taken away by this white bull and incarcerated against her will for so many years? And what, or who, was the bull? And the dragon, the cow, the soldiers, and that other girl rescued from the depths of the cave once the dragon was killed and his useful teeth removed?

It was at that point that Olga Swirszczynska arrived on the scene, like a woman out of one of Gobhlachan’s story, wild, unkempt and foreign, with a string of horses in tow. Was she the girl, Archie asked himself, taken captive years ago and still roaming the world in search of her lost parents? Were her horses human, or at least semi-human, like the cow in the story, and what dragon or beast or king kept her within his kingdom, guarded by thousand of invisible soldiers?

She turned out to be none of these things, but exactly what she said she was – a Polish exile, a former ballet teacher and musician whose back injury had forced her to alternatives, and who had fallen in love with the ways of horses and now wished to set up a riding school here on the great white beaches that ran for ever along the very edge of the Atlantic.

Where else could be better, where the horses could run free, in this marvellous combination of wind, water and air? Where else could be better than where earth ran out and only sea remained? What better for horses than the wind in their manes, their hooves on the sand, their burning feet constantly washed by salt water as they ran and ran and ran along the perfect beach?

That too was only a version, for so many things were missed out of the story.

Archie never heard it directly from Olga herself, but over the years Gobhlachan leaked out other versions of the story, much as you would add a window to a house, exposing an extra view, or sail a different way round the island to see the cliffs, or the mountains, or the caves on the far side. These clues had to be interpreted, of course, for Gobhlachan never told anything directly, as it were – he never sailed straight up the river, but carried his canoe of words on his shoulders, paddling up through creeks and streams, taking diversions, pausing, hesitating, turning back and resting, so that you always needed a personal compass to know where you were, or might have been. You always needed a non-existent map and dictionary to work out the country you might be going to.

She’d been a revolutionary in the Uprising, and a novice nun. Her father had been a count, and her mother an unknown gypsy girl. She had spent time at all the great courts of Europe, and had run away to China when she was twelve. She could speak a dozen languages, and read the moon and the stars. She had been forced to marry a former Russian prince when she was fourteen, but had escaped on a ship to Egypt, where she had trained as a dancer. She could speak to the birds, tame wild horses and divine unknown wells.

No wonder Gobhlachan fell in love with her. Unless, of course, it was the other way round: that she became all these things because of his love. But love it was, and gradually over time Archie was eased out of Gobhlachan’s life, as the sun extinguishes the clouds, or as the ocean erodes the land.

This coincided with a rapid decline in Gobhlachan’s trade. Once the initial effects of the Siabadh Mòr were dealt with – once the pots and pans were repaired, once the barns and houses were rebuilt, once the ploughs and carts were remade – the need for the smithy’s services faded away. All that was left were Olga’s horses and the needs of the few natives who clung on to the old ways, keeping a horse when a tractor would have been much more useful, using a plough when a combine was much more effective, repairing things when they could now as cheaply be bought brand new.

It seemed overnight – but of course it was years – that things changed. One day, horses were there; the next, none but Olga’s existed. One day, people walked to church; the next, they moved in rows on buses. One day, people would tell each other news; the next, they were all sitting in their living rooms, receiving news from places called Beirut and Baghdad.

It was just a different story, of course: the fantastic was now out there, rather than near, happening to strangers on television rather than to themselves in their own villages.

‘Did you see that man walking on the moon last night?’ they asked each other.

‘Did you see that young naked girl going up in flames?’

‘Did you see the mushroom cloud, rising and rising and rising?’

Because these picture-stories were told by educated men, most people believed them. After all, there were photographs and films to demonstrate their truth – that girl truly was burning; that former city was shown in all its ashen ruins; that man was heard speaking, as if from underwater, bouncing on the actual surface of the moon.

‘Aye, but they’ll never land on the sun!’ someone said.

Gobhlachan looked at him with pity. ‘Of course they will. At night. When it’s not so hot.

‘These are just the same stories as I told,’ he said.

Of course, people laughed at him.

‘What? That old fool? Aye, I always knew he was without balls, but that certainly gives a new meaning to be without marbles.’

But every time he saw a new horror, or a new marvel, he knew that it was just a modern version of his own old story, the story of the girl and the bull and the cow and the dragon and the king. He knew all along that kidnappings and rape and conquest and adventure and slaughter and victory were elements of the story, just as the fire and the flames and the bellows and the anvil and the hammer and tongs were the elements out of which he used to make pots and pans and horseshoes and axles and spades and ploughs.

He lived a long time, did Gobhlachan, latterly sitting on his ancient anvil outside the door, like a memorial of himself. The anvil, like the forge, was cold and unused and all the young people would pity him as they drove by, for ‘having that bit of cold iron sticking right into his arse’. But Gobhlachan himself was oblivious to the cold, as he watched the young people drive by.

And then one day, something happened. Planes deliberately flew into buildings, and folk began to shake as they watched it all unfolding before their very eyes. Only those who had already lived through The Great Shaking kept a sense of perspective, knowing that they’d seen it all before, somewhere else – where was it now? – in Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades, or at the Somme in the timeless sunshine, or when the young girl was taken away by the white bull and used and abused for years and years and years before she was finally rescued and taken back home to live happily ever afterwards?

Archie was one of those who both shook in his boots and remembered. Unemployed now for years – obviously there was no need of him at a smithy which no one used – and with the tangle market having long gone, conquered by plastics and technology and cheaper markets, he spent his time in that half-world between guilt and hopelessness which is the map of the unemployed.

‘Why don’t you move off your backside,’ his wife would shout at him now and then, ‘and get a job like everyone else?’ As if jobs were that easy to find in this wilderness. ‘That Gobhlachan messed you up is what I say,’ she would then mutter, ‘with his mad stories and his mad wife. Your problem is that you spent far too much time with that good-for-nothing eunuch when you were younger. Turned you into a useless dreamer instead of a man who can do a damn thing around the house.’

As with all stories, these were fabrications, of course. Hadn’t he built the house in the first place, concrete block by concrete block? Hadn’t he drained and fenced and ploughed and harrowed and harvested the land for over thirty years? Hadn’t he built the boat which lay dry-docked at the end of the house? Hadn’t he built the shed and the henhouse and the pigsty and the barn and the outdoor aviary which housed all their livestock, from cockerels to goats? Hadn’t he actually married her, against all his better judgment, in a moment of weakness, and fathered that useless son of hers, spoiled by her, who now lounged about every day watching television and trawling the inter-net as if nothing on earth or in heaven mattered except what came out of a screen?

When the smithy unofficially closed down all these years ago, Archie was devastated. By that time he’d been there for ten years – was now twenty-four years of age – and had known little else but the bellowing of the forge and the pouring and the moulding of ore.

Those freezing days cutting the tangle on the shore were an ancient memory and the ten years at the smithy had seemed both an instant and an eternity. Gobhlachan and Olga were, of course, living as man and wife, even though people muttered that they still didn’t know which was the man and which the wife. The initial great repairs done, in these years the smithy increasingly turned to the making of domestic furniture and car parts, all of which seemed – to Archie as well as to Gobhlachan and Olga – like the gods turning to croquet, or like making a puddle out of the ocean.

So Archie would spend hours welding a wing onto a car, or polishing the bumper of a lorry, or sawing wood for garden furniture, while his mind was ablaze with the former glory when the hot ore was poured like a waterfall into the mould to emerge, scalded then frozen, as a sword or a ploughshare.

But even the crumbs of the gods mouldered and faded, and within the ten years official garages were set up which undercut and outworked the old smithy. Domestic furniture was the same. Who now wanted a roughly crafted chair or bed or table from Gobhlachan or his man Archie, when a beautiful, smooth chair, at half the price and less, could be bought in the local store, or sent by courier through the post?

Latterly, Gobhlachan and Archie would just sit by the warm forge making nothing but stories which in the end proved more durable than even the iron, which now lies rusting in forgotten fields.

On his last day working with him, Gobhlachan took the burning tongs out of the fire and said to Archie, ‘Before you leave me, I have one thing to teach you, which may be even more valuable than the stories. Bring me that board of wood.’ And Archie fetched over an ancient board which had lain unused in the corner of the smithy for all these years.

‘Watch,’ said Gobhlachan, and plunged the burning tongs into the barrel of cold water. He began to make scratches in the wood, burning black marks deep and narrow, curved and rounded, large and small. ‘The alphabet,’ he said to Archie, proudly, staring at the eighteen Gaelic letters. ‘Do you know that out of these eighteen signs you can make the whole world?’ he smiled. ‘Not quite as good as pictures, but useful. And always remember that you’re from a disadvantaged culture – an oral one. After all, they tell me the English have twenty-six of these signs and the Chinese five thousand!’ He laughed, putting the tongs back into the fire, where they began again to simmer and glow.

‘Did I ever tell you the story about the magic of words?’ And while the tongs burned, Gobhlachan said this to Archie:

Once upon a time, there lived a man at Appin in Argyllshire and he took to his house an orphan boy. When the boy was grown up, he was sent to herd; and upon a day of days, and him herding, there came a fine gentleman where he was, who asked the boy to become his servant and said that he would give him plenty to eat and drink, and clothes and great wages.

The boy told him that he would like very much to get a good set of clothes, but that he would not engage till he would see his own master first. But the fine gentleman wanted him engaged without any delay. This the boy would not do, however, upon any terms until he had first seen his own master.

‘Well,’ says the gentleman, ‘in the meantime, write your name in this book.’ On saying that, he put his hand into his oxter pocket and, pulling out a large red book, he told the boy to write his name in the book. This the boy would not do. Neither would he tell the gentleman his name till he spoke with his own master first.

‘Now,’ says the gentleman, ‘since you will neither engage, nor tell your name till you see your present master, be sure then to meet me about sunset tomorrow, at a certain place.’ The boy promised that he would be sure to meet him at the place about sun-setting.

When the boy came home, he told his master what the fine gentleman had said to him. ‘Poor boy,’ says he, ‘a fine master he would make. Lucky for you that you neither engaged nor wrote your name in his book, but since you promised to meet him, you must go. But as you value your life, do as I tell you.’

His master gave him a sword, and at the same time told him to be sure and be at the specific place mentioned a while before sunset, and to draw a circle round himself with the point of the sword in the name of the Trinity. ‘When you do this, draw a cross in the centre of the circle, upon which you will stand yourself. And do not move out of that position till the rising of the sun next morning.’

He also told him that the gentleman would ask him to come out of the circle to put his name in the book, but that upon no account was he to leave the circle. ‘But ask for the book, saying that you will write your name in it yourself, and once you get hold of the book, keep it. He cannot touch a hair of your head if you keep inside the circle.

So the boy was at the place long before the gentleman made his appearance, but sure enough he made his appearance after sunset. He tried all his arts to get the boy to step outside the circle, to sign his name in the red book, but the boy would not move one foot out of where he stood. But at long last, he handed the book to the boy so that he would write his name therein himself.

The book was no sooner inside the circle than it fell out of the gentleman’s hand. The boy cautiously stretched out his hand for the book, and as soon as he got hold of it, he put it under his oxter. When the fine gentleman saw that the boy did not mean to give him back the book, he grew furious; and he transformed himself into a great many likenesses, blowing fire and brimstone out of his mouth and nostrils. At times he would appear as a horse, other times a huge cat and a fearful beast. He was going round the circle the whole length of the night. When day was beginning to break, he let out one fearful screech; he put himself in the likeness of a large raven and he was soon out of the boy’s sight.

The boy still remained where he was till he saw the sun in the morning, which no sooner he observed than he took to his soles home as fast as he could. He gave the book to his master, and that is how the far-famed red book of Appin was got.

Gobhlachan smiled again, taking the red-hot tongs out of the fire. He drew a huge, perfect circle round the eighteen letters of the alphabet, then handed the tongs to Archie, saying, ‘And remember, Archie, the circle can be as big, or as small, as you like. As big as the whole world, if you want. As small as a sixpence, if you choose.’

Archie remembered the globe he once saw in the school, which now seemed so small and far away.