“And what’s that?”
“It’s what Simeon painted. The thing that built the Domus Mundi for Rukenau. A Nilotic.”
“Do you think Rosa’s one as well?”
“Who knows? I’m just trying to put the pieces together. What do we know? Well, we know Rukenau was some kind of mystic. And I’m assuming he found these creatures—”
“On the Nile?”
“That’s all the word means, as far as I know. It doesn’t have any mystical significance.”
“Then what? You think they literally built a house?”
“Don’t you?”
“Not necessarily,” Frannie said. “A church can be stones and a spire, but it can also be the middle of a field, or the bank of a river. Any place people gather to worship God.” It was plain she’d given the matter considerable thought, and Will liked her observations. “So the Domus Mundi could be,” he struggled for the words to catch the idea, “a place where the world gathers?”
“It doesn’t make much sense when you put it like that.”
“If nothing else,” Will said, “it reminds me not to be so damn literal. What’s all this about? It’s not about walls and roofs. It’s about . . .” Again, he struggled for the words. But this time he had them, from Bethlynn, of all people. “Working change and inducing visions.”
“And you think that’s what Steep’s trying to do?”
“In his screwed up way, yes, I think it is.”
“Do you feel sorry for him?”
“Is that what Rosa told you?”
“No, I’m just trying to understand what’s gone on between you.”
“He murdered Sherwood. That makes him my enemy. But if I had a knife in my hand now, and he was standing in front of me, I couldn’t kill him. Not anymore.”
“That’s pretty much what I thought you’d say,” Frannie said. She had come to a halt and now pointed across the road. “I spy a fish and chip shop.”
“Before we get to the fish and chips, I want us to finish this conversation. It’s important you feel you can trust me.”
“I do. I think. I suppose I’d prefer if you were ready to kill him on sight after what he did. But that wouldn’t be very Christian of me. The thing is, we’re just ordinary people—”
“No, we’re not.”
“I am.”
“You wouldn’t be here—”
“I am,” she insisted. “Really, Will. I’m an ordinary person. When I think about what I’m doing here it puts the fear of God into me. I’m not ready for this, not even a little. I go to church every Sunday, and I listen to the sermon, and do my best to be a good Christian woman for the next six days. That’s the limit of my religious experience.”
“But that’s what this is,” Will said. “You know that, don’t you?”
She looked past him. “Yes. I know that’s what this is,” she said. “I just don’t know if I’m ready for that.”
“If we were ready it wouldn’t be happening to us,” Will said. “I think we have to be afraid. At least a little. We have to feel like we’re out of our depth.”
“Oh Lord,” she said, expelling the words on a sigh. “Well, we are that.”
“I was hungry when we started this conversation,” Will said. “Now I’m ravenous.”
“So we can eat?”
“We can eat.”
There were delicious decisions to be made in the fish and chip shop. Fresh haddock or fresh scaithe? A glutton’s portion of chips, or one size larger? Bread and butter with that? And salt and vinegar? And, perhaps the most significant choice of them all: Whether to eat it on the premises (there was a row of plastic-topped tables along one wall, beneath a mirror decorated with painted fish) or to have it wrapped in yesterday’s Scottish Times and devour it al fresco, sitting on the harbor wall? They decided on the former, for practicality’s sake. It would be easier to study the brochures Will had been given if they were sitting at a table. But the brochures were neglected for the next fifteen minutes while they ate. It wasn’t until Will had subdued the ache in his belly that he started to flip through the Guide to the Islands. It wasn’t very illuminating, just a predictably fulsome description of the glories of the Western Isles: their unspoiled beaches, their peerless fishing, their breathtaking scenery. There were thumbnail sketches of each of the islands, accompanied in several cases by a photograph. Skye was “the island famed in song and legend,” Bute boasted, “the most spectacular Victorian mansion house in Britain,” Tiree, “whose name means the granary of the islands, is a birdwatcher’s paradise.”
“Anything interesting?” Frannie asked him.
“Just the usual patter,” Will said.
“You’ve got ketchup round your mouth.” Will wiped it off, his gaze returning to the brochure as he did so. What was it about the island of Tiree that kept drawing his attention? Tiree is the most fertile of the Inner Hebrides, the brochure said, the granary of the islands.
“I’m so full,” Frannie said.
“Look at this,” Will said, turning the brochure in Frannie’s direction and pushing across the littered table.
“Which part?” he said.
“The piece about Tiree.” She scanned it quickly. “Does it mean anything to you?”
She shook her head. “No, I don’t believe so. Bird watching . . . white, sandy beaches. It all sounds very nice, but—”
“Granary of the islands!” Will said suddenly, snatching the brochure up. “That’s it! Granary!” He got up.
“Where are we going?”
“Back to the car. We need your book about Simeon!” The streets had emptied in the time they’d been dining; the window shoppers returned to their hotels for a nightcap, the lovers to their bed. Rosa had returned too. She was sitting on the pavement with her back to the harbor wall.
“Does the Island of Tiree mean anything to you?” Will asked her. She shook her head.
Frannie had the book out of the car and was flipping through it. “I remember a lot of references to Rukenau’s island,” she said, “but there weren’t any specifics.” She passed it over to Will.
He took it over to the harbor wall, and sat down.
“You smell satisfied,” Rosa remarked. “Did you eat?”
“Yes,” he said. “Should we have brought you something?” She shook her head. “I’m fasting,” she replied. “Though I was tempted by some of the fish they were hauling in off the jetty.”
“Raw?” Frannie said.
“It’s best that way,” Rosa replied. “Steep was always good catching fish. He’d step into a river and tickle them into a stupor—”
“Got it!” Will said, waving the book. “Here it is!” He paraphrased the passage for Frannie’s benefit. Hoping to rediscover a place in Rukenau’s affections, Simeon had planned a symbolic painting, one that showed his sometime patron standing among piles of grain, “as befits his island.” “That’s the connection, right there!” he said. “Rukenau’s island is Tiree. Look! It’s a granary, just the way Simeon was going to paint it.”
“That’s pretty flimsy evidence,” Frannie observed.
Will refused to be deflated. “It’s the place. I know it’s the place,” he said. He tossed Dwyer’s book over to Frannie and dug the timetable out of his pocket to consult it. “Tomorrow morning’s sailing is to Coll and Tiree, via Tobermory.” He grinned.
“Finally,” he said. “We got lucky.”
“Do I take it from all this yelping that you know where we’re going?” Rosa said.
“I think so,” Will said. He went down on his haunches beside her. “Will you get back into the car now? You’re not doing yourself any favors sitting down there.”
“I’ll have you know some Good Samaritan tried to give me money for a bed,” she said to him.
“And you took it,” Will said.
“You know me so well,” Rosa replied wryly, and opened her fist to show him the coinage.
With a little more persuasion Rosa finally consented to be ret
urned to the car, and there the three of them passed what remained of the night. Will slept better than he expected to, doubled up in the driver’s seat. He woke only once, his bladder full, and as quietly as he could he got out of the car to relieve himself.
It was four-fifteen, and the ferry that would take them out to the islands in the morning, the Claymore, had docked. There were already men at work on deck, and on the quay, loading cargo and preparing for the early sailing. Otherwise, the town was still, the esplanade deserted. He pissed lavishly in the gutter, scrutinized only by three or four gulls who were idling the night away on the harbor wall. The fishing boats would be coming in soon, he guessed, and they’d have fish scraps to breakfast on. Before returning to the car he lit a cigarette and, begging the pardon of the gulls, sat on the wall gazing out into the dark water that lay beyond the harbor lights. He felt curiously content with his lot.
The cold smell of the water, the hot sharp smoke in his lungs, the sailors preparing the Claymore for her little voyage: All were pieces of his happiness. So too was the presence he felt in him as he sat watching the water—the fox spirit whose senses sharpened his, and who was wordlessly advising him: Take pleasure, my man. Enjoy the smoke and the silence and the silken water. Take pleasure not because it’s fleeting, but because it exists at all.
He finished his cigarette and went back to the car, slipping back into his seat without waking Frannie, whose face was lolling against the window in sleep, her breath rhythmically misting the cold glass. Rosa also appeared to be asleep, but he was not so certain she wasn’t pretending, a suspicion he had confirmed when he himself had started to doze again and heard her whispering at the very limit of audibility behind him. He could not grasp what she was saying and was too weary to think about it, but just as sleep took him, in one of those flashes of lucidity that come at such times, he deciphered the syllables she was speaking. She was reciting a list of names. And something about the fond way she spoke them, interspersing the list with a sigh here, or oh my sweet there, made him think these were not people she’d met along the way. They were her children. This then was the thought that carried him into sleep: Rosa was remembering her dead children as she waited for the day and was reciting their names in the dark, like a prayer that had no text, just a list of the divinities to whom it was directed.
III
It had always been Steep’s preference, when he was about the business of slaughtering mating couples, to kill the male first. If he was dealing with the last of a species, of course—which was his great and glorious labor—the dispatch of both genders was academic. All he needed to do was kill one to insure that the line was ended. But he liked to be able to kill both, for neatness’ sake, starting with the male. He had a number of practical reasons for this. In most species the male was the more aggressive of the sexes, and for his own protection it made sense to incapacitate the husband before the wife. He’d also observed that females were more likely to demonstrate grief at the demise of their mates, in the throes of which they could be readily killed. The male, by contrast, became vengeful. All but two of the serious injuries he’d sustained over the years had come from males that he had unwisely left to kill after the female and which had thrown themselves upon him with suicidal abandon. A century and a half since the extinction of the great auk on the cliffs of St. Kilda, he still bore the scar on his forearm where the male had opened him up. And in cold weather there was still an ache in his thigh where a blaubok had kicked him, seeing its lady bleeding to death before its eyes.
Both were painful lessons. But more painful than either the scars or the ill-knit bones was the memory of those males who had, through some failing of his, outmaneuvered him and escaped. It had happened seldom, but when it had he had mounted heroic searches for the escape, driving Rosa to distraction with his doggedness. Let the brute go, she’d tell him, ever the pragmatist, just let him die of loneliness.
Oh, but that was what haunted him. The thought of a rogue animal out in the wild, circling its territory, looking for something that was its like and coming back at last to the place where its mate had perished, seeking a vestige of her being—a scent, a feather, a shard of bone—was almost unbearable. He had caught fugitives several times under such circumstances, waiting for them to return to that fatal place, and murdering them on the spot where they mourned. But there were some animals that escaped him completely, whose final hours were not his to have dominion over, and these were a source of great distress to him.
He dreamed and imagined them for months after. Saw them wandering in his mind’s eye; growing ragged, growing rogue. And then, when a season or two had passed, and they had not encountered any of their own species, losing the will to live; fleabitten and bony-shanked, becoming phantoms of veldt or forest or ice floe, until they finally gave up all hope and died.
He would always know when this finally happened, or such was his conviction. He would feel the animal’s passing in his gut, as though a physical procedure as real as digestion had come to its inevitable end. Another dinning thing had gone into memory (and into his journal) never to be known again.
This will not come again. Nor this. Nor this . . .
It was no accident that his thoughts turned to these rogues as he traveled north. He felt like one of their pitiful number now. Like a creature without hope, returning to its ancestral ground. In his case, of course, he was not looking for signs of his lady wife.
Rosa was still alive (it was her trail he was following, after all), and he would certainly not mope over her remains when she passed away. Yet for all his eagerness to be rid of her, the prospect left him lonely.
The night had not gone well for him. The car he’d stolen in Burnt Yarley had broken down a few miles outside Glasgow, and he had abandoned it, planning to steal a more reliable vehicle at the next service station. It turned out to be quite a trek, two hours walking beside the highway, while a cold drizzle fell. He’d make sure he stole a Japanese car next time, he thought. He liked the Japanese, an enthusiasm he’d shared with Rosa. She’d liked their delicacy and their artifice; he liked their cars and their cruelty. They had a nice indifference to the censure of hypocrites, which he admired. They needed shark fins for their soup? They took them, and dumped the rest of the carcasses back in the sea.
They wanted whale oil for the lamps? Damn it, they’d hunt the whales, and tell the bleeding hearts to go sob on someone else’s doorstep.
He found a shining new Mitsubishi at the next service station and, well pleased with his acquisition, went on his way through the night. But his melancholy thoughts would not be banished; they returned again to memories of murder. There was a simple reason he kept his mind circling on these grim images; it kept an even grimmer memory at bay. But that memory refused to be dispatched to the bay of his skull. Though he filled his head with blood and despair, the thought returned and returned—
Will had kissed him. Oh God in Heaven, the queer had kissed him and lived to boast about it. How was that possible? How?
And why, though he’d wiped his hand back and forth across his mouth until his lips were raw, did they only remember the touch better with each assault? Was there some shameful part of him that had taken pleasure in the violation?
No, no, there was no such part. In others maybe, in weaker men, but not in him. He had simply been taken by surprise, expecting a blow and getting filth instead. A lesser man might have spat the kiss in his violator’s face. But for a man as pure as he, unmoved by doubt or ambiguity, the kiss had been worse than any blow. Was it any wonder he felt it still? And would continue to feel it, no doubt, until he had the slivers of his enemy’s lips between his fingers, pared from his face.
By six in the morning he had reached Dumbarton, and the sky was brightening in the east. Another day beginning, another round of trivialities for the human herd. He saw the morning rituals underway in the street through which he drove. Drapes drawn back to waken the children, milk collected off the doorsteps for the morning tea, a
few early commuters trudging to the bus stop or the train station, still half in dreams. They had no idea what their world was coming to, nor, if they’d been told, would they have cared or understood. They just wanted to get through their day and have the bus or the train deliver them home again, safe and sound.
His mood lightened watching them. They were such clowns. How could he not be amused? On through Helensburgh and Garelochhead he drove, the narrow road becoming heavily trafficked as the day proceeded, until at length he reached the town he’d long ago realized was his destination: Oban. It was seven forty-five. The ferry, he was told, had sailed on time.
IV
Will, Frannie, and Rosa had boarded the Claymore at six-thirty.
Though the morning air was on the nippy side of bracing, they were happy to be out of the car, which had become a little ripe toward the end of the night, and into the open air. And Lord, was the day fine, the sun rising in a cloudless sky.
“Ye canna ask for a nicer day to be sailing,” the sailor who’d stowed their car had observed. “It’ll be as calm as a lily pond all the way out tae the islands.”
Frannie and Will made for the ship’s bathrooms, to wash the sleep out of their eyes. The facilities were modest at best, but they both emerged looking a little more presentable, and went back on deck to discover Rosa seated at the bows of the Claymore. Of the three, she looked the least travelworn. There was a freshness to her pallor and a brightness in her eyes that utterly belied her wounded state.
“I’ll be fine just sitting here,” she said, like an old lady who wanted to be as little bother as possible to her companions.
“Why don’t you two go off and have some breakfast?” Will offered to bring her something, but she told him no, she was quite happy as she was. They left her to her solitude and, with a short detour to the stern to watch the harbor receding behind them, the town picture-perfect in the warming sun, they went below to the dining room, and sat down to a breakfast of porridge, toast, and tea.