suffering I wondered if I had broken my back. As I forced my eyes open, I found I was looking straight down at the sea, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet below, smashing itself furiously over the rocky outcrops. Waiting for me, urging me into its arms, cheated by this ledge of the chance to suck my shattered body down into its seething darkness.
With an enormous effort I rolled away from the precipice and on to my back. I bent my leg at the knee, and somewhere in the fog of my distress I found relief at the thought that, after all, my spinal cord might still be intact. The ledge was narrow, two feet or less. Miraculously it had stopped my fall and held me there, cradled in the bosom of the cliff. I could see blood on my hands, panicking briefly before I realized it was the blood of the gugas we had been slaughtering in the minutes before my fall. The frayed end of a green plastic rope dangled just above my head, and some fifty feet higher up I saw the heads and shoulders of men leaning out into the void as far as they dared, peering down to try to catch a sight of me. Even in my state of confused semiconsciousness I could see that there was no way to climb down. The rock was sheer and smooth and coated with guano. If they were to reach me, someone would have to come down on the end of a rope.
They were still shouting. At first I thought it was to me. I saw Artair leaning right out from the cliff, his face pale and shocked. He was shouting, too, but I couldn’t make out his words. And then a shadow fell across my face, and I turned my head as Mr Macinnes pulled himself up on to the ledge beside me. He looked terrible. Unshaven, his face liverish yellow, eyes sunk deep in his skull. He was sweating and shaking, and it seemed it was all he could do to find a handhold to keep himself from falling, kneeling in that narrow space, pressed hard against the face of the cliff. ‘It’s going to be okay, Fin.’ His voice sounded hoarse and thin. ‘You’re going to be okay.’ And with that he grabbed the green rope, winding it several times around his wrist, before swinging out from the rock and turning himself around so that he ended up sitting on the ledge right beside my head. He pushed himself back against the cliff, eyes closed, breathing deeply. Somehow he had climbed up from down below to reach me. To this day I have no idea how he got there. But I could almost smell his fear. It’s odd, in that moment I can remember, even through all my pain, feeling sorry for him. I reached up a hand and he grabbed it and squeezed it.
‘Can you sit up?’
I tried to speak, but no words would come. I tried again. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘We need to get you sitting up, so I can tie the rope under your arms. I can’t do it on my own, I’ll need your help.’
I nodded. ‘I’ll try.’
With one hand still clutching the rope, he put his other arm around my waist to try to pull me upright. The pain that shot through my arm and shoulder was excruciating and I cried out. I paused for several minutes, gasping for breath, hanging on to him like grim death. He kept muttering words of encouragement, words that were just sounds blown away in the wind. But still, I took comfort from them. And courage. With my good arm I clutched his and held on, bracing myself with the leg I had been able to bend, and heaved with all my might until I had dragged myself up into a half-sitting position. I cried out again, but now I was propped against his legs, and he was able to thread the rope quickly under both arms, around my back, and start tying it in a big, secure-looking knot on my chest.
When he had finished, we both sat breathing hard, trying not to look down, and trying harder not to anticipate the moment when he would release me from his grasp and swing me free of the ledge. For then I would be suspended on the end of this length of frayed green plastic, my life dependent upon his knot and the strength of those above to pull me to safety. In some ways, I think I might have settled then for the fall, the few seconds the drop would take, a swift death on the rocks below putting an end to my pain.
‘You’re bleeding,’ he said. And even as he spoke I felt the blood running warm down my neck from a head wound somewhere above my ear. He searched for a handkerchief and wiped fresh blood from my face. ‘I’m so sorry, Fin,’ he said. And I wondered why. It was not his fault I had fallen.
He tipped his head back and shouted up to the others that he was ready, giving three sharp tugs on the rope. There was a responding pull, and all the slack was taken up.
‘Good luck,’ Mr Macinnes said. The rope jerked me up and I screamed again from the pain. He let go of me, then, and I swung free of the rock, spinning crazily in the wind, rising in a series of short, painful bursts. Twice I smacked against the cliff face before swinging out again into the updraught from the sea. And all the while, the gannets flew around my head, shrieking their fury, willing me to fall.
I was barely conscious by the time they got me on to the ledge I had fallen from, concerned faces crowding around me. And Gigs’s voice. ‘Hell, son, I thought you were a goner.’
And then someone shouted, and the alarm in his voice was chilling, commanding. I turned my head in time to see Mr Macinnes sailing through the air, arms stretched out like wings, as if he thought he could fly. It seemed to take for ever for him to reach the rocks below, where his flight ended abruptly. For a moment, he lay face down, his arms pushed out to either side, one leg bent at the knee, like a parody of Christ on the cross. And then a huge wave washed over him and dragged him off, white foam turning pink as he vanished for ever into its bottomless green depths.
There was the strangest hush then, as if all the birds had answered some call for a moment’s silence. Only the wind continued with its mournful whine until rising, even above that, I heard Artair’s howl of anguish.
TWELVE
I
The mountains of Harris rose up before them, piercing low black cloud, and tearing great holes in it to reveal startling shreds of blue, and ragged scraps of white. Fragments of sunshine fell upon the spangling waters of a loch that cut deep into the hills. At the bend, on the curve of the hill, they flashed past an old, abandoned shieling with a view as timeless as the island itself.
‘And some people choose to sit in traffic on the M25 for two hours every day,’ George Gunn said. ‘More bloody fool them, eh?’
Fin nodded his agreement and supposed that he was one of those fools. How many hours of his life had he wasted sitting in traffic jams in Edinburgh? The road to Uig, winding through some of the bleakest, most beautiful country anywhere on earth, was a reminder that life did not have to be like that. But as the mountains approached, wreathed in cloud and mist, blue and purple and darkest green, their brooding quality was infectious, and in the shadow of their sullen splendour Fin found himself sinking back into the depression with which he had awakened.
On his return to Stornoway he had stood under hot water in the shower in his hotel room for a long time, trying to wash away the memories of the night before. But stubbornly they had stayed with him, and he was haunted by the image of the young Fionnlagh, like the young Fin, troubled and unhappy at the prospect of his trip to An Sgeir. Shocked, too, by the change in his oldest friend. The fresh-faced Artair, once so full of life and mischief, overweight now, foul-mouthed and hard-drinking, trapped in a loveless marriage, with a crippled mother and a son who was not his. And Marsaili. Poor Marsaili, ground down by life and the years, weary and washed out.
Yet, in those few moments across the kitchen table, he had seen again in her the young Marsaili, still there in the flash of her eyes, in her smile, the touch of her fingers on his face. And that old, sarcastic wit that he had once adored.
Gunn was aware of his distraction, glancing across the car at his passenger. ‘Penny for them, Mr Macleod.’
Fin shook himself out of his reverie and forced a smile. ‘I wouldn’t waste my money if I was you, George.’
They turned into a long gully, cut through solid rock by the relentless force of water over millions of years. A once huge river reduced now to a trickle amongst the boulders. And as they emerged from the shadows, they caught their first glimpse of Uig beach through a cleft in the land. Acres of white sands. They could not even see the ocean.
Gunn swung away from the shore, following a single-track road over a cattle grid and up into the hills,
