Fire Bringer

  When the mole pushed up his nose through the earth to find his friend the next morning, he saw Rannoch standing by the northern fence gazing up to the hills. To the south, the gate still stood open.

  ‘Are you all right, my friend?’ asked the mole.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Rannoch, ‘but it’s time. To be on my way again.’

  ‘To find your herd?’ said the mole delightedly.

  ‘Yes.’ Rannoch nodded. ‘To find my own kind once again. But first I must find the seals and see if they can help me to understand the Prophecy.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the mole, ‘you have been with the humans for a long while.’

  ‘I want to thank you,’ Rannoch said suddenly, ‘for telling me I was changing. The humans have a strange power.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the mole. ‘The Lera must guard against it.’

  ‘I shall miss you.’

  ‘And I you.’ The mole smiled.

  The deer dipped his head to touch the mole’s nose.

  Then he turned away. Rannoch pawed the ground and then, suddenly, he raced towards the fence. He pushed with his legs and Rannoch’s body and head, with his pair of three- pointed antlers, rose into the air and sailed smoothly across. He landed lightly and without once looking back, Rannoch began his quest.

  11 To the Sea

  ‘Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim: And straight was a path of gold for him, And the need of a world of men for me.’ Robert Browning, ‘Parting at Morning’

  Rannoch didn’t stop running until he had left the mole and the boy far behind him. It was a glorious feeling to be free once more and, as Rannoch went, he began to realize how much he had missed in the company of the boy. He breathed in the rich scents around him and marvelled at the beautiful, twisting shapes of the trees. He listened to the voice of the wind and stopped to look at every bird that darted by, or to examine the tracks of the Lera around him. Although he knew that winter was near and his heart was now filled with thoughts of the strange Prophecy and of what had become of his mother and his friends, for a time he simply revelled in the wonder of running where he willed.

  But after a while Rannoch’s mood began to change. He grew lonely and began to miss the mole. He wondered what on earth the seals could tell him of Herne and the Prophecy, and whenever he thought of the verses he felt angry and confused.

  Rannoch was travelling west now and he had just crossed a river when he noticed strange tracks in the ground. They were smaller than a deer’s and every now and then the ground behind them had been smoothed flat, as if the animal were dragging something behind it. Rannoch sniffed the place and though the scent was very strong, it came from no Lera that he knew. Rannoch decided to follow it.

  The trail took him up the bank of the river and then disappeared altogether at a place where a tree trunk had fallen right across the path of the water. Rannoch stopped and looked around, but he could see nothing. He was about to turn away again when he suddenly saw something flash through the water. At first he thought it was a fish but the shining trail it left behind it was so wide that it would have to have been a very big fish indeed.

  Rannoch paused, then he heard a dripping sound and suddenly a dark shape slid from the river and darted up the side of the tree trunk. It was on the top of the trunk now, in the middle of the stream, and Rannoch blinked at it in disbelief. It was smaller than a fox, longer and thinner, with sleek brown fur, a long tail and strange little feet. It had a pointed face, with bright, quick eyes.

  The animal looked around and then ran down the trunk straight towards Rannoch. When it got to the end it lifted itself on its back legs and rose like a snake. It hovered there in the air, peering at Rannoch, as the deer, who was hardly more than a large antler away, peered back at it in amazement. Then it turned again and, slipping back off the log, it disappeared into the water with hardly a sound.

  Rannoch stepped forward.

  ‘Hey there,’ cried Rannoch, ‘come back.’

  For a moment there was no sign of the creature. Then suddenly its little head popped straight out of the water, just below Rannoch.

  ‘Were you talking to me?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Rannoch.

  ‘How?’ said the startled animal, showing his teeth.

  ‘I’ve always been able to do it.’

  The creature disappeared again and then re-emerged on top of the tree trunk. He shook himself in a great spray of droplets and ran up close to Rannoch. Again he lifted himself, so that he nearly touched the deer’s nose with his own. Then he made a strange twittering sound and ran round in a circle three times.

  ‘What are you?’ he asked, as he came to a stop.

  ‘I’m a Herla,’ answered Rannoch, ‘a deer. What are you?’

  ‘I’m an otter,’ said the otter proudly. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I just wanted to say hello, that’s all. My name’s Rannoch.’

  ‘Well, hello. Now I can’t stand here talking to you. My mate is sick.’

  ‘Sick?’ said Rannoch, stepping closer. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered the otter sadly, ‘but she won’t eat.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ said Rannoch with concern.

  ‘What could you do?’ answered the otter disdainfully.

  ‘You may be able to speak my language, but what do you know about otters?’

  ‘Nothing, I suppose,’ agreed Rannoch, ‘but when we’re sick we go into the forest and find berries and bark that make us well again.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, of course,’ said the otter, ‘but there’s nothing here she wants. She says that the only thing she knows to make her well is the grass that grows from the sea. But I can’t very well leave her to go and get it, can I?’

  ‘The sea?’ said Rannoch, hardly believing his luck.

  ‘Yes. That lies at the end of the land.’

  ‘What is the sea?’ said Rannoch.

  ‘The sea is where the rivers go and where the salmon come from. The sea is the greatest thing in the world. Have you really never seen the sea?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, this is strange. First I meet a creature that can talk to me. Then I find he has never even seen the sea.’

  ‘I’ll go for you if you like,’ said Rannoch suddenly. ’To the sea, I mean. I’ll get your mate the grass.’

  ‘You?’ said the startled otter.

  ‘Yes. If you tell me how to get there.’

  ‘There’s nothing to it,’ said the otter. ‘And the grass grows all over the sea.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Rannoch.

  The otter eyed the deer carefully.

  ‘You really mean it?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Rannoch. ’Just tell me where to go.’

  ‘Go north-west and you’ll strike a large loch. It’s a sea lake. Follow its southern shores due west. You’ll soon hit the sea. The grass grows on its banks.’

  Rannoch nodded and he set off, promising to be as quick as he could.

  ‘By the way, my name’s Keela,’ cried the otter, as he watched him go. ‘I’ll be waiting for you.’

  It took Rannoch three suns to reach the loch Keela had mentioned and as he travelled the landscape became wilder and wilder. He traversed a high mountain and again felt the wind stirring the gorse grass. The contours of the land rose and fell more and more dramatically around him, and at last Rannoch saw it. The loch was huge, much bigger than the lake where Tharn lived, and north from its tip a river ran into the hills. As the otter had told him, Rannoch swung south along its edge before striking due west. He travelled for another sun, hardly pausing to sleep, stopping only to graze a while.

  When the next sun was high, Rannoch scented something on the wind. It came to his nostrils, strange and bitter. The loch suddenly opened, the land fell away, the trees on the southern edge came to an end and Rannoch’s eyes opened wide in wonder. Before him was a vast sweep of water that suddenly swallowed up
the lake. The wind tore at it, shaking its surface into curls of foam, so that it seemed for a moment to Rannoch that a herd of white deer was running ahead of him.

  It stretched to the north, where Rannoch saw land floating on its surface and beyond, great mountains rising into the sky. To the south Rannoch saw yet more land, for he was looking down the stretch of water that today is known as the Firth of Lorn and out towards the Island of Mull, but beyond that there was nothing – just water as far as the deer could see. Rannoch stood stock-still and felt the wind that hit him fill his nostrils with spume. He suddenly felt alive and strong. It seemed as though he were touching the edge of a great mystery.

  ‘So, this is the sea,’ he said to himself as he gazed and gazed at the moving water. Then he came down the slopes of the hill and Rannoch felt the ground turn from earth and grass to a strange, soft powder that his hoofs sank into as he walked. Rannoch stopped on the edge of the shore, scented the air for danger and then began to run forward across the beach.

  Gulls were circling high overhead, screeching on the ragged wind, riding the currents of air or diving suddenly into the foaming waves. As Rannoch went he noticed strange coloured rocks on the sand that were cupped or long and thin, with spirals on their sides. Then he saw that the sand was covered in snails, like the ones that lived on the trees in the forest. But when he turned them over with his nose he found they were empty or full of sand and when he stepped on them they shattered under his hoofs.

  Rannoch approached the edge of the water gingerly and saw it foam and fizz and crash against the beach. Many times the deer had seen the wind work on the face of the loch, making it move and spray and flurry, but this mighty loch seemed to be moving on its own, shrugging its shoulders against the land. As Rannoch came nearer, the scent that had hit him so powerfully before came again and he could taste it on his lips.

  Then Rannoch began to see brown stems, like weed, thrown up on the beach or washing back and forth on the waves. Some of this was thick and rubbery with long stalks like the stems of giant mushrooms, while some was thinner with no stem at all. Where it had been thrown up high on the sand where the water could no longer reach it, it had dried and it crackled underfoot. The deer sniffed it and it smelt like the wind.

  He nibbled at it and it tasted bitter but not altogether unpleasant. Rannoch knew immediately that there was something strong and wholesome in it that he sensed came from the water. But while the stag was standing there he suddenly heard a strange barking sound. He realized that the noise was coming towards him across the waves. It came from a large rock, lapped by the surf. The rock was covered with long grey stones and, as the deer looked on, one of these stones began to move forward and fell into the sea. It popped up again and Rannoch realized that the stone had eyes and whiskers. Rannoch stepped into the surf as the water foamed around his hoofs.

  ‘Are you a seal?’ he called above the wind.

  The seal’s head disappeared under the water again before re-emerging closer by. Rannoch nodded politely to it but the seal said nothing. At first Rannoch thought that it must be frightened of him.

  But this was not true, for Rannoch was looking at Rurl. Rurl lived in the sea and had seen and heard of far stranger things than a deer who could talk to him. He had heard the mighty blue whales singing to one another from halfway across the world and knew of the giant turtles that bury their eggs in the sand by moonlight. He had heard stories of the narwhals jousting in the wastes of the arctic, watched by men in their great carved trees until they stood amazed and thought that unicorns had abandoned the earth and gone to live in the water. He knew of the sea cows that moan as they rock their children in their arms and the plankton that blooms like a million forests in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. He himself had talked to the lobster and the dolphin, for the things of the sea have always understood one another’s song, carried in the waves and the wind and the currents that ride the world.

  He knew about the land too, because he was partly of the land and had travelled far up the estuaries and chatted to the salmon returning to spawn and die in the rivers that bore them. They had told him about the valleys, the forests and the mountains, and about the creatures of the land too; the wolf, the bear and even the red deer. They had also told him something about man, with his bright hooks and his great nets that meant death to their kind.

  But at this frightened talk of man Rurl had smiled a little inwardly, for he knew more of man than the salmon. He had seen him build his villages on the edge of the sea and cross the waves to settle on the islands that specked his home.

  Rurl was an unusually inquisitive seal and he had circled the shores of Scotia from the mull of Arran to the Isle of May. He had basked in the sunlight on the Summer Isle and wrestled the storms around Cape Wrath. He had tasted the waters of the northern sea and lain in the sands off Burghhead Bay. Coming round Rattray Head he had seen one of their crafts dashed into splinters on the rocks and had listened to the men wail in terror as they went to their cold graves. In Lunan Bay he had seen men set out with their nets and had stolen fish from them, while on Bass Rock he had eaten his fill as boys came down to the sands to pluck mussels from the shore in their wicker baskets.

  Rurl knew a little too about the crofters’ cold lives on the Islands of Lewis and Uist to the west, of their fires and their songs. Of the great carved trees that swept up the mighty Forth in the east to feed the settlements of Edwinburgh, and of the beacon lights that burned on the hills above Inverness. He also knew of the men from the north who came in their long crafts to Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles. Sometimes they came to load and unload but at other times, when they came the sea would turn red with blood and men would die in the sand.

  The seal knew now that more and more of them were journeying out of the cold lands and that something new was happening around the islets and coves where he slept on the slippery rocks or basked in the chill waters. But of this he cared little, for to him all men were the same. They were like whelks or molluscs that would cling to any rock they could find until the storms of life came once more to wash them away.

  From the beach Rannoch called to the seal again but still he did not answer. Rurl was indeed a wise creature, but by nature he was also rather disdainful and he only spoke when he felt like it. Rannoch snorted and lowered his head to pick up some of the seaweed in his mouth. He gripped a long strand and shook it. The seal suddenly ducked under the water and shot towards the beach, flapped out of the surf, barking and snorting, and lumbered up the sand, waving his flippers awkwardly. It was such a peculiar sight that Rannoch dropped the seaweed and almost laughed.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ said Rurl haughtily. He knew just how foolish he looked on land.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Rannoch, trying to hide his amusement.

  ‘I’ve come to get some of the grass that grows in the sea. It’s for Keela, the otter. His mate is sick and I promised—’

  ‘The otter?’ snorted the seal. ‘What do you want to have to do with him? They’re all silly creatures. Anyway, that won’t do any good,’ he added, looking scornfully at the seaweed on the ground. ‘If she eats that it will only make her worse.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Rannoch.

  ‘You want the other kind,’ continued the seal, pointing his nose to the dry seaweed that Rannoch had tasted before.

  ‘Over there.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you very much,’ said Rannoch. The seal snorted again and shrugged.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he answered. ‘If you’ll go out of your way to help a sick otter, I suppose it’s the least I can do.’

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ said Rannoch nervously, ‘that’s not the only reason I’m here.’

  The seal eyed him suspiciously.

  ‘You see, I need your help,’ said Rannoch quietly.

  ‘My help?’

  ‘Your advice. I was told that seals. . . well. . . that they know everything about everything.’

  The seal looked rather plea
sed.

  ‘And there are things I need to know,’ said Rannoch.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About this mark on my forehead.’

  Rannoch stepped forward and dipped his head towards the seal.

  ‘Very pretty,’ said Rurl a little coldly, when he had finished examining the fawn mark.

  ‘No, you don’t understand,’ said Rannoch suddenly, feeling embarrassed. ‘There’s a prophecy.’

  Rurl looked up at Rannoch. Any animal that has had a whale somersaulting over its head and lashing the sea to steam is very difficult to surprise and the seal wasn’t in the least bit thrown. But he loved to collect stories and the truth was he had seen so much of the world that he was often bored and a little lonely.

  ‘I think you’d better tell me everything,’ said the seal quietly.

  So Rannoch began. He told Rurl all about the home herd and fleeing Sgorr and the Draila, at which Rurl nodded, for he too had heard of Sgorr. He told him of how they crossed the bridge and lost Bhreac and how they met the strange deer in the park and came at last to the loch and settled under Tharn’s protection. He told of the chase and the snarling dogs too. But it was only when Rannoch got to the part about the boy that Rurl opened his eyes in sheer amazement.

  ‘So you’ve spent time with man?’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes.’ Rannoch nodded.

  ‘Very strange, very strange indeed. Were you frightened of him?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ answered Rannoch. ‘There were times when. . . when I felt a strange power there, a kind of. . .’ Rannoch paused. ‘Well, a kind of violence. But at other times, with the human fawn at least, I felt I almost understood him. Not his words, but what he was thinking.’

  The seal was quiet for a moment and he looked very serious.

  ‘So I want to know if there’s any truth in the Prophecy,’ said Rannoch, ‘and if it’s better for my friends if I never return to them at all. Can you help me?’