6

NORTH STREET IN TORONTO turned out to be a figment, naturally. There had, of course, once been a North Street, which became Yonge Street, then Highway 11, and mythic references declare it to be the longest street in the world. ‘Sure, if you start walking from right there you’ll eventually end up at the North Pole,’ the saying went, from old liars who sat on the pavement chewing tobacco and remembering stories of the gold rush from scores of years ago.

Which was true of anywhere in the world. ‘Just start from here,’ they say in Dingle in the west coast of Ireland, ‘and walk straight, and eventually you’ll emerge at the North Pole itself.’ ‘From here,’ they say in Ankara – ‘actually, to be completely precise about it, from that exact spot over at that side of the broken bridge where the old market starts.’

From Edinburgh, you walk south, down the coastal road through North Berwick and on to Northumberland, or alternatively inland down through these lovely Borders towns – Galashiels, Jedburgh, Hawick and on to Carter Bar, – where you can see the whole of England – and therefore the whole of the world – before you.

Despite Ludo’s assertion, North Street – then Yonge Street, and now Highway 11 – was not one long, flat, straight road to the end of the cowboy film. It may one time have held the saloon and the leaning awnings and the girls in parasols waiting for their men to come back from the Yukon, but now it was a complex shopping centre with malls and escalators and lifts. A world going up-and-down as much as a-long.

No longer could men stand at the end of the long linear street shielding their eyes from the sun and see Ole Smokin’ Joe, or maybe Dingo Johnny Blue, or perhaps even Buckskin Bill himself come straight out of the north, loaded with gold. Now they came texting out of the glass lifts in the sky, laden with virtual gold from the global mines.

But since he was there now, Archie knew fine that this was the final road north. Through the shopping precinct, right along the pedestrianised mall, past the elevators and the glass buildings to the other side, where the coffee-shops and the university quarters began, then through that to the Viscount Park which brought you out on the edge of the northern suburbs, which then led out on to Highway 11 and from there to the very top of the world.

He knew fine other highways did the same – he’d checked them all on the inter-net. Route 37, known as The Cassiar Highway, which took you from British Columbia to the Far North, or the famous Dempster Highway, which took you from Dawson City in the Yukon Territories right to the Arctic Circle, but these were not his predestined ones. These were other routes, other lovers, other places.

On this road, which he now walked doggedly, emerging from the far side of Viscount Park into the thinning suburbs, his own friends walked with him, not strangers. He could see the huge Ontario prairie before him, the corn blowing in the breeze, the wheat ripening. Gobhlachan and Olga and John the Goblin striding and riding and hirpling up ahead: he could already see Gobhlachan sitting on the next milestone, his legs dangling between the legend ‘The North Pole: 580 kilometers’. John the Goblin stood by the roadside, rolling a fag, and out slightly west of him, right through the rolling prairies he could see Olga Swirszczynska with her string of horses weaving through the high wheat. There had never been any Clearances. Eviction never happened.

Others were on Route 37 and on the Dempster Highway, but here on Highway 11 was where Jewel was, her slim beautiful hands carving out a language of her own. He glanced behind him, where Angelina and Sergio and Ludo and Brawn walked, now wrapping their aquafoil Arctic Peak jackets around them, tightening them against the coming breeze, the sure onslaught which would come from the north once they entered the tundra and the cold wastes where nothing – absolutely nothing – lay between them and eternity.

Brawn, his bald head bent into the wind, passed him, racing onwards.

‘At the very least put gloves on,’ he heard Angelina say to Jewel, as the wind began to bite, and she pulled a pair of beautiful silk gloves out of the side pocket of her rucksack and slipped them on, continuing to gesticulate silently in the now falling snow. The flakes were diamond-shaped and fell in slow-motion swirls. They moved octagonally westwards, like fairies do in the early twilight, pretending not to hurry.

Their feet made no noise and left clear marks in the snow. Each of them gazed ahead at the beautiful whiteness. How could anything be so white? How could white produce so much other whiteness, white upon white upon white? Was there a factory producing whiteness up there, pouring it out from the assembly line, like steel or whisky or newsprint? Were these glittering snowflakes really the tears of God frozen on the descent to earth? This meteorological reality outwith the old smithy. This atmospheric vapour frozen into ice crystals and falling to earth in light white flakes, as the OED has it. And what is atmosphere? The gathered breath of all the angels of mercy, as old Angus Gunn of Lochinver once put it. This envelope of gases surrounding the earth, and other planet, or substance, as the OED again has it. And vapour? – that moisture or substance diffused or suspended in the air, and so the definitions went on and on and on, one tautology after the other, going round in endless circles mentioning ‘moisture’ and ‘substance’ and ‘air’, in ever-increasing druidic rings, as in the famous Book of Kells.

People passed by, going south – homewards – heads bent deep in their cagoules, burdened with loaded rucksacks. Jeeps and trucks and lorries and even buses roared by, smiling faces peering at them through the glazed windows. Brawn walked first, his head bent, his body straight, his feet sure. Always first, no matter the pace Archie went at, no matter how much Jewel and Angelina ran, no matter even that time Sergio found a pair of abandoned skis by the roadside and launched himself off into northern space at the speed of lightning. Brawn was still there ahead of them, marching onwards steadily, his huge body bent into the wind, cutting a furrow through it like an ancient plough, casting the snow banks to either side. All they had to do was follow Brawn.

One evening Angelina fell, exhausted by it all. She lay back in the snow, like the corpse of Ireland in history, like that time the millions lay in the ditches of Dingle and Kerry and Connemara, hallucinating about that last single potato, that last single wet and withered potato which was of course all rotten and non-existent inside, like the poison of nothingness which they still tried to eat, ravenously, to assuage the great hunger, where clay was the word and clay the flesh.

Somehow Archie managed to get down on his knees beside her and tried foolishly to persuade her to rise when she was beyond all rising. But he placed his arms behind her and raised her up and set her on his shoulders, convinced of the resurrection not just as a theology which would miraculously reassemble the dead from all the known and unknown quarters of the globe – those who had been atomised into a thousand million pieces at Hiroshima along with his grandfather, torn to shreds at Ypres – but as a truth which he could personally witness, if he could bear her long enough, far enough, to that place where all things could be made new. It had always been posssible.

Unexpectedly, there was a roadside motel right in the middle of that wilderness. It shimmered dark out of the white wasteland and they took it to be a mirage, even though Brawn stood in the middle of the whiteout pointing and shouting back at them, ‘Hotel! Fire! Food! Sleep!’

Sure enough, the window panes really rattled, the door really creaked and slammed. Inside, an old Indian woman appeared bearing steaming blankets and jugs of boiling water, guiding them into the Arctic saunas which stretched right across the back of the motel, where clouds of vapour enveloped them.

They all stripped naked and climbed into the perfect luxury of the hot tubs, lying back in ecstasy as the warmth invaded their bodies and made them remember home, and forget Janet Leigh. What a long way to have come to remember home. That time the new pillows came, the brand new duck-feather ones which curved right into the nape of your neck when you lay down and smelt like hay on an autumn morn, like fresh bread out of the oven. That time he – Brawn, that is – played his one tour of the west and walked the sun-scorched pavements of Paris after the garret-rehearsals releasing music, like jazzy pigeons, through the fully-opened windows.

Even the snow seemed warmer when they went back outside, Brawn leading with renewed vigour, as if the silence between the movements had reminded him of his purpose. Occasionally, he glanced back over his shoulder to beckon the others on: the deep cello movement of Archie, Jewel’s strings, Gobhlachan’s percussion, and Olga and John the Goblin and Sergio like flutes between the snowdrifts.

A bald man playing electric pipes stood by the roadside in the far distance. They all expected a lament, of course, but soon the gorgeous sound of marches and strathspeys and reels filled the sub-Arctic air, causing them to increase their speed through the drifts, like men floating across a universe.

‘I lost my breath,’ the bald man shouted to them as they passed by. ‘Don’t have the lungs any more, but this invention is marvellous. Permits me to play the great tunes without drawing breath.’

And he played on. Archie recognised ‘Father John MacMillan of Barra’, ‘Crossing the Minch’, ‘Dòmhnall Beag an t-Siùcair’ and ‘The 79Th’s Farewell to Gibraltar’, amidst the now fading glory.

John the Goblin came hirpling up from behind, tugging a man by the sleeve.

‘Archie!’ he shouted, through the rising wind. ‘Archie!’

Archie glanced round, and beckoned him onwards with his head, without stopping.

‘Archie!’ panted the Goblin, now beside him, ‘this is Joe – Yukon Joe, he calls himself. He got lost in the snow, but I said he could come with us. Will that be okay?’

Archie nodded into the snow and the three trudged on abreast, John the Goblin to his right, Yukon Joe to his left.

John the Goblin pulled a tiny machine out from beneath the sleeve of his jacket.

‘Brand new,’ he whispered to Archie – presumably, so that Yukon Joe on the other side couldn’t hear. But maybe he’d really shouted and the wind had just swallowed the whole world of his words. ‘See – you just press this button here, and the whole universe is at your fingertips. It’s a Berry, an Arcticberry. It works under any conditions.’ And he pushed and flicked several buttons and the tiny touchscreen lit up in an explosion of light. ‘Fifty pounds is all it would cost you. The RRP is £150, so it’s a real bargain. Tweets and all!’

Yukon Joe leaned over and instantly the Goblin, like a conjurer, made the palmtop disappear. But Yukon Joe now plucked out a beautiful gold pocket watch, which glittered in the blinding whiteness. With one tiny movement of his thumb, he flicked open the watch to reveal the magnificent face, with what looked like hands of pure silver within a circle of hour marks made of rubies and diamonds.

‘My real name is Albert,’ Yukon Joe shouted into the wind. ‘That was before I hit gold. This watch is worth five million dollars, but there is one tragedy in my life – I never learned to read, or write, or tell the time.’ He flashed the gorgeous watch up before Archie’s eyes. ‘So can you tell me the time? What time is it, my friend?’

Archie looked at the watch, which despite all its beauty was completely indecipherable to him. The hour hand appeared to be going forwards without ceasing, the minute hand going backwards, and the second hand swirling round to the point of invisibility. Archie, of course, had heard that magnetic fields sometimes shifted, sending compasses astray, so he connected the disarray to that geophysical reality, though (if truth be known) it was merely that the watch was broken.

Brèagha ach gun fheum – beautiful, but useless, as Gobhlachan might have put it – and as he often did when presented with a gashed plough, or a cracked cart, or a splintered shoe.

Gobhlachan had once repaired broken things, thought Archie. Once upon a time. A long, long time ago, which seemed like an hour ago, a second ago, as on Yukon Joe’s watch. When time had travelled backwards, not forwards. Was circular, not linear. Was he too merely going round in circles? Would he, in a minute, finally discover the North Pole, and actually only find Gobhlachan sitting there on a freezing anvil under a flag, hammering away? Were these folk with him mere hallucinations, mere memories or dreams? Brawn, striding ever onwards, up ahead. John the Goblin hirpling to his right, Yukon Joe flashing his iridescent watch to his left. Angelina over his shoulders. Sergio and Jewel and Ludo plodding on behind. Was he going crazy?

Really crazy, he meant. Not that metaphysic craziness connected to memory and imagination, but real woo-woo-wah stuff, real crying in the wind stuff, the bleating and empty chaos, the dissolution of all things, despair. The bedside clock clicking at 3.22Am time. And he would then plunge into the melting waters, drown in a sea of floating ice, having mistaken it for the imagined green lawn of Chelsea, where he’d once walked through Hyde Park on his way to the only football international he’d ever attended, that time Scotland beat England 3–2 with Jim Baxter scoring the winning goal, from a penalty, if memory still served him right.

‘There’s a band of gold round them islands,’ Gobhlachan used to say, referring to the fishing-grounds. ‘A band of gold plundered by pirates from the east,’ he would then add, referring to the east coast trawlers which had sailed in and swept all the fish in the world away. Always how they came, the pirates – from the east. The raiders from the far side. From some other place. From the far side of the island. From the other side of the mountain. From outside the song. From the story which didn’t belong to us.

‘All the gold is gone too,’ he heard Yukon Joe say. ‘The only gold that is now left is black. Black gold.’

And maybe that’s when it began to dawn on Archie that the hole to the north was connected to oil. Was an oil hole. A black hole. A golden hole. Maybe too that was the moment when that strange word ‘ozone’ came to him. The hole in the ozone layer. Maybe, he thought, the hole is actually up above, in the sky, and not down below, in the earth or snow?

So he began looking upwards, but of course the sky was as white as the earth beneath him.

What if the north wind came from out of a hole in the sky and not out of a hole in the earth? How could he then fling his jacket over it and cover it, as in the old story? Maybe it was out of his reach. Too high up for him. Too far away from him. Invisible and unattainable. In light inaccessible, hid from his eyes. And even if he were to fling his jacket so high, how could it ever cover a hole so big, and what would it hold on to anyhow? He could hardly expect a jacket peg or a coat hanger to emerge right out of the sky, could he? Oh to believe in the ram, even like Jacob, the deceiver. There’s the ladder. Reach out. One. Two. Jump. The great leap of faith. A giant step for…

In the old story, you see, Archie – tired of the incessant north wind – sought to extinguish it. So he left home and travelled for several days and finally found the wind whistling out of a small hole just to the north of the North Pole. So Archie did the sensible thing: he flung his jacket over the hole, saying to himself, ‘That’ll sort that!’

And he tramped back home, telling all the world that he’d fixed the north wind forever. And he lay that night in his bed listening to the utter silence until he fell asleep. And when he woke in the morning there it was again: that thin low whistle, coming, without any doubt, from the north.

So his neighbours all laughed and scorned him and mocked him: ‘Amadain – Fool,’ they called out to him, ‘I thought you said you fixed that north wind? Going around here boasting how you’d covered it with your Harris Tweed Jacket! What’s that then?’ and they all cocked their ears theatrically, as if they needed to do that to hear a wind which was roaring down on them, right from the bitter frozen north.

‘Ah but,’ said Archie, smartly, ‘you see, it was only an old jacket I had with me, and it had a few holes in it, and that will be what the wind is seeping through. If only I’d taken a new jacket with me – or even a coat,’ he would say, ‘that would really have done the trick. That would really have sorted it out. A brand new jacket or a great big overcoat. That’s what I ought to have had!’

And they were silenced by his audacity.

But now, here – now that it was real – Archie really feared. He knew fine that not even his aquafoil Arctic Peak jacket would be sufficient. Even if he found the hole and it was small enough, he knew fine that before he could even turn away his aquafoil Arctic Peak jacket (with all its quadruple-insulation and five-fold anti-freeze polytetrafluoroethylene lining) would be blown to kingdom come, become yet another miniscule piece of non-biodegradable rubbish floating about the universe.

Myth was one thing, he knew, this was another. Maybe Brawn had the answer. He might – he surely would – know what to do.

Archie shouted, but Brawn marched relentlessly onwards, without even turning his head. There was no point, he knew, in asking John the Goblin or Yukon Joe: all they would do would likely be to try and sell him his own jacket.

So he stopped and waited, till Sergio and Ludo and Jewel caught up with him, their heads buried deep inside their hoods, bent into the wind. Try as he might, Archie just couldn’t make out what Sergio and Ludo were saying, or trying to say, but Jewel’s gloved hands moved in the blizzard, slicing this way and that, pushing snowflakes up, pressing floating drifts down.

‘Don’t worry,’ she was saying, in her magic language. ‘You just have to believe the old proverb which says that a bird’s feathers grow as needed. If you’ll need a jacket, you’ll have a jacket, if you need a greatcoat, a greatcoat will be provided.’

Each moment has its solution, Archie thought. Is that what she’s saying? Nuair a thig latha, thig comhairle – when the moment comes, counsel will come – as Gobhlachan never tired of saying. Foolishness, others said. Lack of foresight. Laziness. Stupidity. Trusting in Providence. The something-will-turn-up philosophy, as if you could feed off hot air and vague hopes. As if magic genies really existed, ready to pop out at any moment to fix your own disastrous dreams.

There is no magic jacket, Archie thought to himself, still pushing onwards. No ram will appear out of the thickets of this whiteout. No magic lamp. No magic wand. No magic feather. No talking cow which will lead me to the cave. No dragon’s extracted teeth which will turn into an army of soldiers for me. Salvation from the outside. Miracle, not endeavour. Providence, not labour. Law. Grace.

How much the cèilidh house had been the inter-net cafe of the time. Walking to Gobhlachan’s forge to log-on to the stories. Click Gobhlachan stories. And news and speculation. The similarity between fact and fiction, between story and science. And how they would all sit round the open terminal of the kiln fire, trawling through the myths, that amazing website sourced in Gobhlachan’s head. In Gobhlachan’s heart. Though, of course, he too was just trawling from ancient resources, harnessing the past.

And here Archie was now, nearing the source of the web, trampling through the snow to reach the invisible, to see if he could catch a glimpse of that spider who wove the web, silently moving backwards and forwards above the ether, leaving that thin trail behind him which then sparkled beautifully in the sun as if it had been woven for pure pleasure, when in reality it was but the arachnidan trace simply designed to capture insects as food. Though even that was miraculous, Archie thought. Imagine. That a spider could invent that.

He felt a pair of freezing-cold hands slip inside his gloves next to his own. Jewel entwined her fingers round his, taking him literally by the hands and leading him gently onwards, to her vision of God. This was no Eve, Archie knew, for despite all that other stuff about Satan appearing in the guise of light, and about Eve the Temptress – that silky, slinking, sensuous, sexy serpent – this Jewel was pure light, ‘as pure as the light of the Gospel itself’, as Gobhlachan used to say when he wanted to emphasise the complete truth of any tale.

And all of a sudden, there it was, glittering ahead. The snow had stopped and the stars shone in all their glory in the endless sky above and Archie could see the perfect arc of the North Pole, just as it had always appeared in pictures, blue and limpid and translucent, and as perfectly shaped as in the globe he’d once seen hidden inside the glass-fronted book cabinet in the teacher’s study.

And then, out of the perfect silence, the noise started. The noise of motor engines and vehicles and machinery, up ahead, in this blue heaven. A vast convoy of cranes moved from left to right, followed by hundreds of articulated lorries on caterpillar tracks and thousands upon thousands of men driving backwards and forwards hauling all the world’s machinery behind them: cogs and chains and cables and pistons and tubes and hydraulics and all the rest of the magic equipment which drills down into the heart of the earth – even the frozen earth – to draw up the liquid oil.

A man with the facial features of a Chinese, but with a slow Texan drawl, came up to Archie, doffed his cowboy hat and said, ‘Howdy.’ Really. He smiled broadly, extending a large, ungloved hand. ‘Welcome boys,’ he said to Archie and John the Goblin and Yukon Joe and Sergio and Ludo and Brawn and, smartly noticing that Jewel, despite her aquafoil Arctic Peak jacket, was a woman, lowered his hat even further, adding, ‘And you too, Maaam. There’s no discrimination going on up here, Maam. No siree.’

He whistled sharply and loudly and a jeep bearing two medics raced across the snow. ‘Take that poor soul straight up to Med HQ.’ The Chinese-Texan indicated the almost frozen Angelina, still borne like a lamb across Archie’s bowed shoulders. ‘She’ll be right as right in no time.’

And off the medics sped with her, past the canteen and the sleeping-sheds.

‘No one’s ever died up here,’ he said, ‘and we don’t intend to start that bad habit right now. ‘My name’s Ted,’ he said, ‘and if it’s work you want, you’ve come to the right man, at the right time, in the right place. We start drilling in a month’s time and we can use as many hands as we can get. All hands to the deck, as they say. Many hands make light work, as others say. And that’s why we’re here – literally to make lights work! Without us, the lights would go out all over the world. Hah hah.’

And that’s what he really said – not a laughing sound, or even a kind of hah-hah-noise, but actually and literally, ‘Hah hah.’

‘That’s why they call me Ted Hah,’ he said without smiling, ‘though my mother really was Chinese. Her name was Li Ha. Hah hah.’

And he really laughed, even though it seemed well rehearsed to Archie.

He led them to their sleeping quarters, showing them each into their own room.

‘Comfort, folks,’ he said, ‘that’s what it’s all about. No crowded quarters here, folks. This is my motto: a bad sleep and work slips; a good sleep and work shifts. Compressed sleepers make crushed workers. We want you to be clean and free. Everyone with his and her own room. Even scented and with fresh flowers daily,’ he said, smelling the sweet air. ‘The flowers are flown in from California each morning.’

As he lay in his warm bed that night, Archie was aware of the dream. How comfortable this bed was. This was life, life in all its fullness. There was nothing like it. He would forsake the whole world for it. The laundered sheets smelt of pine.

Strange, how we always want to cage nature.

He could hear the sound of the drills going through the night. He had signed no contract, so why should he stay? He could depart – take his leave, as they put it in the old stories – in the morning. Surely he wouldn’t stay just for the comfort and warmth? He would tear the world for what? For central heating. For a car under his backside, a sweet little bedside lamp, a washing machine for his wife’s stockings?

But that was only a tiny part of it. The bourgeois conscience which had the luxury of choice. What about the poor of the world who had no choice? Was there any truth in the claim that they too were dependent on oil, upon the crumbs of the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table? Would the poor man starve twice over if the fat man grew lean?

But he knew that had nothing to do with it. The poor can do what they like. Let them starve twenty times over, as long as the lights glitter in Paris. No. They would ask him to sign a work contract in the morning, not for the sake of the poor, but for the sake of the rich. He would go a-drilling not for Africa’s sake, but for America’s. For his own sake. He would help find oil which would make gasoline for cars, and which would heat houses in Times Square. And Tiananmen Square. And every other square and hovel in the developed and undeveloped world.

And Archie’s brief contribution to it wouldn’t affect things that much: he would hardly make a wick for a lamp, when you thought about it. The harm – could you really call it destruction? – wouldn’t amount to much, after all. For who, or what, was he anyway, in the large scale of things? One small, weak man – one little Archie, even if he had Brawn and Sergio and John Goblin and all the others at his shoulders.

He walked over towards the window. He spread the curtains and looked out at the heavens. A large, white bear stood yards away, looking at him. An Arctic hare sat in the snow a little distance behind the bear. All the stars that ever existed blinked above. He thought he saw a row of penguins marching past till he remembered that was at the other end, to the south, at the different Arctic called the Antarctic. Just as they call South Uist one island and North Uist another.

Maybe the two had met. Maybe both polar ice caps had now melted and all was one. Norway without the fjords. The magnetic fields had shifted and all was now north, or south, or neither.

How vast it all was out there. How wide and white and long. Eternal even – one endless whiteness after the other. In such immensity, surely a little, or even a lot of drilling would do very little damage. A drop in the ocean really. Only the removal of a single star from the vast and limitless sky. Only the taking of a single flower from the machair, the removal of a single shell from the shore, the subtraction of a solitary letter from the cosmic alphabet. When the village postie took a notion for strong drink, he too would just dump the letters and parcels under the nearest pile of stones. Nobody really missed them. And if anybody wanted them, they knew where to find them. 

Archie could hear Brawn rumbling in the room next door. Apart from that, all was silence. The machinery had been set for the night and work was not scheduled to really begin till tomorrow. That much he’d learned from Ted Hah, who’d personally come round the sleeping quarters at bedtime, like Florence Nightingale: ‘The show starts tomorrow. Night-night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bugs bite!’ And off he went down the long hall, repeating his soothing words like a benediction.

The room was centrally heated and a brand new pair of pyjamas had been laid out for Archie on the heated rail beside his dressing cabinet. He was now still in his pyjamas, gazing out at the white world. Far to the north he could see the Pole Star itself, winking. False stars were stuck to the wall and ceiling which then illuminated for a while once you turned the light off.

Archie climbed back into bed and put the light out. The imitation stars were shining on the ceiling: stars with five points and crescent moons, all in different colours. An orange moon and a yellow one. A red one and a blue one. The Star of David. Archie lay back, his head on the downy pillow. Was this it – the source of the wind, the lion’s den, the giant’s awesome abode? In the warmth, beneath false stars?

How do you behave in the lion’s den, he wondered? What do you do at the giant’s table?

How do you sleep in the dragon’s bed? Do you pretend? All the images – all the stories he’d ever heard – raced though his brain in kaleidoscopic sequence: George and the Dragon, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

Do you slay, or pray, or run?

He had no sword. Had he faith? Could he run?

He was tired. And old. And lazy. And it was unfair to rely upon his friends.

Be wily, he told himself. That was always the chief virtue. The thing that was praised. Craftiness. The greatest skill. Courage. Courage certainly, but cunning was more important. Never attack a giant head on. You stood no chance. Always find his weak spot, his Achilles heel – wasn’t that the way they put it? Achilles, who found the tiny spot which made the invincible giant mortal. Right behind his ankle. The monster’s hidden weak spot. For every monster had a weak spot. Sex. Greed. Ambition. Pride. Sloth.

There was a king over Èirinn once, who was named King Cruachan, and he had a son who was called Connal MacRigh Cruachan. The mother of Connal died, and his father married another woman. She was for killing Connal, so that the kingdom might belong to her own posterity.

He had a foster mother, and so Connal went to live in the home of his foster mother. He and his eldest brother were right fond of each other, and the foster mother was vexed because Connal was so fond of her big son.

There was a bishop in the place, and he died. And he desired that his gold and silver should be placed along with him in the grave. Connal was at the bishop’s burial, and he saw a great big bag of gold being placed at the bishop’s head and a great big bag of silver at his feet, in the grave. Connal said to his five foster brothers that they would go in search of the bishop’s gold, and when they reached the grave Connal asked them which they would rather – go down into the grave or hold up the flagstone.

They said they would hold up the flag. So Connal himself went down into the grave and whatever squealing that they heard, they let go the flagstone and they ran off home. So there Connal was, in the grave on top of the bishop. When the five foster brothers reached the house, their mother was somewhat more sorrowful for Connal than she would have been for the five.

At the end of seven mornings, a company of lads went to take the gold out of the bishop’s grave, and when they reached the grave they threw the flat flagstone to the side of the further wall. Connal stirred below, and when he stirred, they ran, leaving their armaments and their dress. Connal arose and took the gold with him, and the armaments and dress, and he reached his foster-mother with them. They were all merry and light-hearted as long as the gold and silver lasted.

Now there was a great giant near the place, who had a great deal of gold and silver hidden in the foot of a rock, and he always promised a bag of gold to any being who dared to go down into the hole inside a creel and get some. Many were lost in that way: when the giant would let them down and they would fill the creel, the giant would not let down the creel more till they died in the hole.

On a day of days, Connal met with the giant, and the giant promised him a bag of gold if he agreed to go down into the hole to fill a creel with the gold. Connal went down, and the giant was letting him down with a rope. Connal filled the giant’s creel with the gold, but the giant did not let down the creel to fetch Connal, so Connal was stuck in the cave amongst the dead men and the gold.

When the giant failed to get any other man who would go down into the hole, he sent his own son into the hole giving him the sword of light in his lap so that he might see his way before him. When the young giant reached the bottom of the cave and when Connal saw him, he immediately grabbed the sword of light before he realised what was happening, and he took off the head of the young giant.

Then Connal put gold in the bottom of the creel, and he climbed in and then he covered himself with the rest of the gold and gave a pull at the rope. Up above, the giant drew up the creel, and when he did not see his son he threw the creel over the top of his head. Connal leapt out of the creel as it flew behind the giant’s great black back, laid a swift hand on the sword of light which he’d taken with him and cut the head off the giant. Then he took himself to his foster mother’s house with a creelful of gold and the giant’s sword of light.

After this, one day he went to hunt on Sliabh na Leirge. He was going forwards till he went into a great cave. He saw, at the upper part of the cave, a fine fair young woman who was thrusting the flesh-stake at a big lump of a baby. And every thrust she would give the spit the babe would give a laugh and she would begin to weep.

Connal spoke, and he said, ‘Woman, what ails thee at the child without reason?’

‘Oh,’ said she, ‘since you are an able man, kill the baby and set it on this stake so that I can roast it for the giant.’

Connal caught hold of the baby, and he put the plaid he had on about the baby and hid the baby at the side of the cave. There were a great many dead bodies at the side of the cave, and so he set one of these on the stake, and the woman began roasting it.

Then was heard underground trembling and thunder coming, enough to terrify the life out of any living soul. So Connal sprang in the place of the corpse that was at the fire, in the very midst of the bodies.

The giant came and asked, ‘Is the roast ready?’ He began to eat, complaining, ‘Fiu fiu haogrich. No wonder your body is rough, woman. This child of yours is tough to eat.’

When the giant had eaten that one, he went over to count the bodies; the way he had of counting them was to catch hold of them by the ankles and to fling them over his head, and he counted them backwards and forwards like that three or four times, and as he found that Connal was somewhat heavier than the corpses, and that he was soft and fat, he took that slice out of him that stretched from the back of his head to his groin. He roasted this at the fire, and he ate it, and then he fell asleep.

Connal winked at the woman to set the flesh-stake in the fire. She did this, and when the spit grew white after it was red, he thrust the white-hot spit right through the giant’s heart, and the giant was dead.

Then Connal went and he set the woman on her path homewards, and then he went home himself.

His stepmother sent him and her own son to steal the white-faced horse from the king of Italy, and they went together to steal the white-faced horse, and every time they would lay hands on him, the white-faced horse would let out a cry. Guards came out, and they were caught. They were imprisoned and their ankles put in tight, painful chains.

‘Hey you, you big red-haired man,’ the king said to Connal, ‘were you ever in such dire straits as this?’

‘Make the chains a little tighter for me, and a little looser for my comrades, and I will tell you,’ said Connal.

The queen of Italy was looking at Connal. Then Connal said:

  ‘Seven morns so sadly mine,
  As I dwelt on the bishop’s top,
  That visit was longest for me,
  Though I was the strongest myself.
  At the end of the seventh morn
  An opening grave was seen,
  And I would be up before
  The one that was soonest down.
  They thought I was a dead man,
  As I rose from the mould of the earth;
  At the first of the harsh bursting
  They left their arms and their dresses.
  I gave the leap of the nimble one,
  As I was naked and bare.
  ’Twas sad for me, a vagabond,
  To enjoy the bishop’s gold.’

‘Tighten his chains well, and right well,’ said the king of Italy. ‘He was never in any good place. He has done great ill.’

Then his chains were tightened tighter and tighter, and the king said, ‘You big red-haired man, were you ever in such dire straits?’

‘Tighten my chains even further, but let a little slack with this one beside me, and I will tell you,’ said Connal.

They tightened even further. ‘I was,’ said he:

  ‘Nine morns in the cave of gold;
  My meat was the body of bones,
  Sinews of feet and hands.
  At the end of the ninth morn
  A descending creel was seen;
  Then I caught hold of the creel,
  And laid gold above and below;
  I made my hiding within the creel;
  I took with me the glaive of light,
  The best thing that I ever did.’

They gave him the next tightening, and the king asked him, ‘Now, were you ever in such dire straits, in such extremity as hard as this?’

‘A little more tightening for myself, and a slack for my comrade, and I’ll tell you that.’

They tightened his chains, and loosened his comrade’s, and Connal said:

  ‘On a day in Sliabh na Leirge,
  As I went into a cave,
  I saw a smooth, fair, mother-eyed wife,
  Thrusting the stake for the flesh
  At a young unreasoning child. “Then,” said I,
  “What causes thy grief, of wife,
  At that unreasoning child?”
  “Though he’s tender and comely,” said she,
  “Set this baby at the fire.”
  Then I caught hold of the boy,
  And wrapped my cloak around him,
  Then I brought up the great big corpse
  That was up in front of the heap;
  Then I hear Turstar, Tarstar, and Turaraich,
  The very earth mingling together;
  But when it was his to be fallen
  Into the soundest of sleep,
  There fell, by myself, the forest fiend;
  I drew back the stake of the roast,
  And I thrust it into his maw.’

There was the queen, and she was listening to each thing that Connal suffered and said. And when she heard this final truth, she sprang and cut each binding that was on Connal and on his comrade and she said, ‘I am the woman that was there.’ And to the king: ‘And thou art the son that was yonder.’

Connal married the king’s daughter, and together they rode the white-faced horse home.

And as he lay there, telling himself that ancient story, Archie was encouraged. ‘Hah!’ he laughed to himself – and a real laugh it was, even though it has to be written down as ‘Hah!’ here, in just exactly the same way as Ted Hah’s very different ‘Hah!’

The giant was Capitalism, Archie knew, and the hole was where the bodies of the poor lay scattered in the Cave of Profit where all the gold lay. They were the ones daily sent down in creels to labour for the giant. They were the ones eaten alive. Roasted on the spits. Even their corpses consumed. And this, of course, was to be his job here: to go down daily in that creel to find the gold, and bring it to the surface. To dig for oil in this virginal landscape. To bring the fat baby up so that his blood could be used as fuel to feed the giant.

If he were Connal, what would he do? Run? Uh-uh. Forsake the contest? No way. Hide beneath the blanket, pretending the giant didn’t exist? What was it all but a story anyway, of little use nowadays? A foolish pastime which belonged to the olden days when folk believed such nonsense? Even though the smell of roasting flesh was in their nostrils, even though they could hear the giant’s rumblings, even though they could clearly see him on their computers? All that cynical blogging out there where no one believed anyone else.

And poetry! Remarkable how poetry caused Connal to be released. Believe that if you will, you fool. Dream on, MacDuff. As if that could happen! Oh aye. Pull the other one, son. You try that on the next time you’re taken captive by al-Qaida. Just stand there and start chanting this to them – ‘My love is like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June…’

Archie listened to Brawn breathing steadily in the next room: like the soft breathing of a child. How thin the walls between beings. As long as you could hear someone else, you were alive. He was talking in his sleep. ‘Snow. White. Soft.’

Archie recalled all the corpse-strewn caves he’d ever seen on television. Those earthquake-heaved streets of Port-au-Prince. The oiled beaches of Louisiana, and the long poisoning of the Niger Delta. The jutting elbows and knees and shoulders in Uganda. The black and white skeletons of Auschwitz. The giant’s creel suspended halfway down in the deep-cast mines of New South Wales.

But he had no sword of light.

‘Now, who had the sword of light,’ he asked, ‘in the story, I mean. Who had the sword of light?’ And, of course, he remembered that the giant’s son had the sword of light. Given him by his father. ‘Ah,’ said Archie ‘So it was the giant himself who first had the sword of light!’

‘What is it?’ he asked himself. ‘What is this sword of light?’

‘Iron or steel,’ he heard Gobhlachan say. ‘Remember, son – iron and steel were so hard to come by, so anyone who had them was already halfway to victory. Anyone who had a gleaming sword was already well on the way!’

‘But that was then,’ Archie said. ‘What is it now, though? What’s the material which gives the giant the advantage now? What is it, Gobhlachan?’

But Gobhlachan was silent.

Wasn’t that the entire point? Connal worked it out for himself. No manual. No exposition. No clues beforehand, except the stories he carried within himself. His mental knowledge of the giant. The death of his mother. A grasping foster mother wanting to kill him. Bereavement and fear. The bag of gold and the comfort and security it offered. A penitent banker laughing round every corner.

No clues as to the sword of light. Who made it, and how, and was there another of its kind? Was there a market for it, or was it kept secretly, hidden? Could you just download it? What could the sword do? That was the sword which could upwards and downwards, cutting the nine ties on its way across, and nine ties on its way back. It’s just that the giant had it. And Connal managed to get hold of it.

What was it? Oil? Wealth? Knowledge? Power?

And to grasp it, Connal had to enter the cave. The cave of gold. With all the danger and sorrow it carried. Into the darkness. Where the stench of death lay. Lazarus, come forth.

Connal didn’t just text or email the giant:

Dear Mister Giant – I hope you’re well, and I’m very sorry to bother you, but it would be really lovely if you could – please – release those people you have captive in your cave.

PS And the gold as well.

PPS Happy Christmas and a Guid New Year to yin an a’.

But he was so tired, exhausted after such a journey. And Angelina almost dead on his shoulders, where was she? How was she? And Brawn – big, beautiful, courageous Brawn – forever marching on ahead. And the bed now so sweet and soft, the room so warm, the flowers so bright.

Yet all he wanted to do was sleep and none of that sword up and down stuff, and then that hot shower in the morning and the bacon and eggs, and keep his mouth shut and stay quiet and mum, and just go out daily to dig or drill or extract – whatever was asked of him – without raising any awkward questions, without being difficult and bolshie, without making trouble, without putting himself – and, for that matter, Brawn and Angelina and Jewel and Sergio and Ludo and John the Goblin and Olga and Gobhlachan and Yukon Joe and all the rest of them – at risk. At risk of being sacked, thrown on the scrapheap, turned out into the blizzard and snow, to fend for themselves again or die, alone, unwanted, uncounted in these endless Arctic wastes.

And who would give a damn?

The whole circus would just roll on anyway, without their futile, deadly gesture. What was the point? He was no Connal. And he settled lower into the duck-feathered pillow. To sleep, he thought. To sleep. To sleep. Perchance.

‘Grip. Nail. Frost,’ Brawn was saying in his sleep next door and as he drifted off to sleep Archie remembered his own wife and son endlessly sitting in front of the television, also ceaselessly channel-surfing.

‘Maybe, really, I’m the giant,’ Archie thought, as he finally fell asleep. All night he dreamed that someone had taken his wife and son captive and they were being held prisoner in two creels suspended halfway between the earth and the grave, between today and tomorrow.