There was no ferryman at the jetty. Only a small boat, hardly big enough for three full-sized men, tied to a tree trunk on the shore, twisted and half dead, and a bell beside it.
I sounded the bell, and soon enough a fat man came down the shore. I stood tall. I am not as big as other men are, but I have as much pride as any of them. The ferryman looked me up and down, then he scratched his beard. My eyes are not what they once were. I shall take you to the island.
I handed him a shilling. Nine pennies are a lot of money in this dark age. He untied the boat and hauled it, rattling, down the shingle to the water. We waded out into the cold water, and clambered inside. The splash of oars on seawater, and the boat propelled forward in easy movements.
I sat closest to the ferryman. It is good wages. But I have heard of a cave in the mountains on the Misty Isle, filled with gold coins, the treasure of the ancients. Calum was staring at me, lips pressed together so hard they were white. I reckon that the one can take care of the other. I see it in your face. Do not seek this cave. No good can come of it. We rode the rest of the boat journey in silence, though the sea became choppier, and the waves splashed into the side of the boat, such that I held on with both hands for fear of being swept away.
And after what seemed like half a lifetime the boat was tied to a long jetty of black stones. We walked the jetty as the waves crashed around us, the salt spray kissing our faces. There was a humpbacked man at the landing selling oatcakes and plums dried until they were almost stones. I gave him a penny and filled my jerkin pockets with them. A bonny girl, her hair fiery red, reminds me only of another hundred such lasses, and their mothers, and what they were as they grew, and what they looked like when they died.
It is the curse of age, that all things are reflections of other things. I say that, but my time on the Misty Isle, that is also called, by the wise, the Winged Isle, reminds me of nothing but itself. Calum MacInnes looked at me, half his size or less, and he set off at a loping stride, as if challenging me to keep up.
His legs propelled him across the ground, which was wet, and all ferns and heather. Above us, low clouds were scudding, grey and white and black, hiding each other and revealing and hiding again. I let him get ahead of me, let him press on into the rain, until he was swallowed by the wet, grey haze. Then, and only then, I ran.
This is one of the secret things of me, the things I have not revealed to any person, save to Morag, my wife, and Johnnie and James, my sons, and Flora, my daughter may the Shadows rest her poor soul : I can run, and I can run well, and, if I need to I can run faster and longer and more sure-footedly than any full-sized man; and it was like this that I ran then, through the mist and the rain, taking to the high ground and the blackrock ridges, yet keeping below the skyline.
He was ahead of me, but I spied him soon, and I ran on and I ran past him, on the high ground with the brow of the hill between us. Below us was a stream. I can run for days without stopping. That is the first of my three secrets, and one secret I have revealed to no man. We had discussed already where we would camp that first night on the Misty Isle, and Calum had told me that we would spend the night beneath the rock that is called Man and Dog, for it is said that it looks like an old man with his dog by his side, and I reached it late in the afternoon.
There was a shelter beneath the rock, which was protected and dry, and some of those who had been before us had left firewood behind, sticks and twigs and branches. I made a fire and dried myself in front of it and took the chill from my bones. The woodsmoke blew out across the heather. It was dark when Calum loped into the shelter and looked at me as if he had not expected to see me that side of midnight.
He said nothing, only stared at me. He nodded. We ate the trout, drank whisky to warm ourselves. There was a mound of heather and of ferns, dried and brown, piled high in the rear of the shelter, and we slept upon that, wrapped tight in our damp cloaks. I woke in the night. There was cold steel against my throat—the flat of the blade, not the edge. For our way is long, and our journey is not yet over. And if you left with me but return without me, there are those who will know the name of Calum MacInnes, and cause it to be spoken in the shadows.
I am a hard man to lose, Calum MacInnes, and it ill becomes a guide to do as you did today. Now, take your dirk from my throat and let me sleep. He said nothing, but after a few moments, the blade was removed. I forced myself neither to sigh nor to breathe, hoping he could not hear my heart pounding in my chest; and I slept no more that night. The mountains were black and grey against the white of the sky. We saw eagles, huge and ragged of wing, circling above us.
Calum set a sober pace and I walked beside him, taking two steps for every one of his. Perhaps two. It depends upon the weather. If the clouds come down then two days, or even three.
The clouds came down at noon and the world was blanketed by a mist that was worse than rain: droplets of water hung in the air, soaked our clothes and our skin; the rocks we walked upon became treacherous and Calum and I slowed in our ascent, stepped carefully.
We were walking up the mountain, not climbing, up goat paths and craggy sharp ways. The rocks were black and slippery: we walked, and climbed and clambered and clung, we slipped and slid and stumbled and staggered, and even in the mist, Calum knew where he was going, and I followed him. He paused at a waterfall that splashed across our path, thick as the trunk of an oak. He took the thin rope from his shoulders, wrapped it about a rock. I was scared for him, scared for both of us: holding my breath as he passed, only breathing when he was on the other side of the waterfall.
He tested the rope, pulled on it, motioned me to follow him, when a rock gave way beneath his foot, and he slipped on the wet rock, and fell into the abyss.
The rope held, and the rock beside me held. Calum MacInnes dangled from the end of the rope. He looked up at me, and I sighed, anchored myself by a slab of crag, and I wound and pulled him up and up. I hauled him back onto the path, dripping and cursing. They went, and they never came back. If a small fellow like you can kill a dozen Campbells.
I had picked them off one by one, like rabbits, as they came out to piss or to see what had happened to their friends: I had killed seven of them before my wife killed her first. We buried them in the glen, built a small cairn of stacking stones above them, to weigh them down so their ghosts would not walk, and we were sad: that Campbells had come so far to kill me, that we had been forced to kill them in return. I take no joy in killing: no man should, and no woman.
Sometimes death is necessary, but it is always an evil thing. That is something I am in no doubt of, even after the events I speak of here. I took the rope from Calum MacInnes, and I clambered up and up, over the rocks, to where the waterfall came out of the side of the hill, and it was narrow enough for me to cross.
It was slippery there, but I made it over without incident, tied the rope in place, came down it, threw the end of it to my companion, walked him across. He did not thank me, neither for rescuing him, nor for getting us across; and I did not expect thanks. Your wife: is she also small and ugly, like yourself? I decided to take no offence, whether offence had been intended or no.
She is a tall woman, almost as tall as you, and when she was young—when we were both younger—she was reckoned by some to be the most beautiful girl in the lowlands. The bards wrote songs praising her green eyes and her long red-golden hair. I thought I saw him flinch at this, but it is possible that I imagined it, or more likely, wished to imagine I had seen it. I did not give up. She said I was wise and I was kind, and I would always provide for her.
And I have. And I have done my best to raise my children. Who are also, if you are wondering, normal-sized. And then I stopped talking, and I remembered that long year, and also I remembered Flora when she was small, sitting on the floor with jam on her face, looking up at me as if I were the wisest man in the world. I ran away when I was a lad. I was twelve. I went as far as the court of the King over the Water.
The father of the current king. I saw him. He was a fat man, who spoke the language of the foreigners well, and our own tongue only with difficulty. But he was still our king. I was remembering every landmark—climb at the sheep skull, cross the first three streams, then walk along the fourth until the five heaped stones and find where the rock looks like a seagull and walk on between two sharply jutting walls of black rock, and let the slope bring you with it. I could remember it, I knew. Well enough to find my way down again.
But the mists confused me, and I could not be certain. We reached a small loch, high in the mountains, and drank fresh water, caught huge white creatures that were not shrimps or lobsters or crayfish, and ate them raw like sausages, for we could not find any dry wood to make our fire, that high.
We slept on a wide ledge beside the icy water and woke into clouds before sunrise, when the world was grey and blue. It was true. I had dreamed that Flora still lived. The mist seemed to thicken and fill with light, in the sunshine, but did not fade away and I realized that it must be a cloud.
The world glowed. And then it seemed to me that I was staring at a man of my size, a small, humpty man, his shadow, standing in the air in front of me, like a ghost or an angel, and it moved as I moved. It was haloed by the light, and shimmered, and I could not have told you how near it was or how far away. I have seen miracles and I have seen evil things, but never have I seen anything like that.
A property of the light. A shadow. A reflection. No more. I see a man beside me, as well. He moves as I move. And then the little glowing man in the air faded, and the cloud, and it was day, and we were alone. We climbed all that morning, ascending. Now it swelled in front of me, swelled and went red, but his pace did not ever slow, and if he was in discomfort or in pain, it did not show upon his face.
We will reach the cave, and then we will sleep for the night. In the morning you will go inside. You can bring out as much gold as you can carry, and we will make our way back off the island. There are no monsters in the cave. Nothing that will come out and take you in the night.
Nothing that will eat us. But you should not go in until daylight. And then we rounded a rockfall, all black rocks and grey half-blocking our path, and we saw the cave mouth. But they are too wise to come here, to take its gold. They say that the cave makes you evil: that each time you visit it, each time you enter to take gold, it eats the good in your soul, so they do not enter. The cave feeds on something else. Not good and evil. Not really. There is less beauty in a rainbow, less meaning in a sermon, less joy in a kiss.
I will wait for you out here. Do not be afraid. No monster guards the cave. No spells to make the gold vanish, if you do not know some cantrip or rhyme. We made our camp, then; or rather we sat in the darkness, against the cold rock wall. There would be no sleep there. You bought a house with it, a bride, a good name.
His voice came from the darkness. And they meant nothing to me, once I had them, or less than nothing. And if your gold pays for the King over the Water to come back to us and rule us and bring about a land of joy and prosperity and warmth, it will still mean nothing to you.
It will be as something you heard of that happened to a man in a tale. Your king will want more gold, because kings want more. It is what they do. Each time you come back, it will mean less. The rainbow means nothing.
Killing a man means nothing. Silence then, in the darkness. I heard no birds: only the wind that called and gusted about the peaks like a mother seeking her babe. I ran my hands over my dirk in the darkness, seeking the wood and center of the hilt, the steel of the blade. It was there in my hands. I had not intended to ever tell him, only to strike when we were out of the mountains, strike once, strike deep, but now I felt the words being pulled from me, would I or never-so.
The whistling of the wind. I would not kill a woman. No man of honour would kill a woman. If I said a word, I knew, he would be silent on the subject, and never talk about it again. So I said nothing. Only waited. Calum MacInnes began to speak, choosing his words with care, talking as if he was remembering a tale he had heard as a child and had almost forgotten.
So I went south, and never a cow was good enough, until on a hillside in the lowlands I saw the finest, reddest, fattest cows that ever a man has seen. So I began to lead them away, back the way I had come. But she was beautiful, even when angry, and had I not already a young wife, I might have dealt more kindly to her. I will definitely recommend this book to non fiction, autobiography lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download.
Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. I was intrigued by how the landscape had shaped the clans and Islam, the two paradigms that fostered insurgency. According to the official version promoted by Moscow, Chechnya had unified under the leadership of the Kadyrov family.
It first adopted this moniker as a garrison town during the nineteenth century Caucasian war, and has remained true to its name. Not that the word city applied at that point. Like most capitals of mountainous regions, Grozny is situated in one of the flatter areas, at an elevation of only feet. This made it easy to attack from the slopes above. The Russians destroyed nearly every building.
Half of the , residents had fled, preferring to squat in comparative comfort beneath tarps in refugee camps or in railway car shelters in the next republic, Ingushetia.
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