“Let’s get some drinks,” he said, rising to his feet. We strolled to the nearest vacant table outside The Carronade. Fergal took our requests and disappeared inside.
“Who is that guy?” I asked.
Merrial favoured me with a slow smile. “You sound jealous,” she teased.
“Ah, come on. Just curious.”
“I’ve known him a long time,” she said. “Nothing personal. Just… one of us.”
“Well, I had kind of figured he was a tinker.”
Menial’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Yes, that’s it,” she said.
Fergal returned in a few moments, taking his seat beside me and opposite Merrial. I offered him a cigarette, which he accepted with an oddly ironic smile.
“Well,” he said, lighting it, “you know about the… concern, for the ship?”
I nodded. Tes, but Merrial said nothing about its being shared.”
He grinned. “Oh, it’s quite widely shared, I can tell you that. It’s a brave offer you’ve made, and—” he spread his hands “—all I can say is, thanks.”
I was more puzzled than modest about this reference to the bravery of my offer, so I just shrugged at that.
“Are you on the project too?”
He seemed amused. Tm not on site, but I am on the payroll, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “All of—” he glanced at Menial “—our profession are very much involved in the project as a whole.” He took a long swallow of beer, and a draw on his cigarette, becoming visibly more relaxed and expansive as he did so. “Its success matters a lot to us. We’re very keen to see the sky road taken again.”
“I like that,” I said. “ ‘The sky road’.”
“Yes,” he said. “Well, it took you people long enough to get back on it.”
“Back?”
“You walked it once.” Another glance at Menial, then a smile at me. “Or we did.”
“Our ancestors did,” I said.
“That’s what I meant to say,” he said idly. “But to business. I’ll have to get a piece of equipment that you—or rather, Menial—is going to need. That’s going to take some time, but I’ll manage it this weekend. You’ll have to book some time off and seats on the Monday train.” He smiled wryly. “Not much point trying to travel on the Saturday or the Sunday, anyway. No trains and damn slow traffic, even if you wanted to drive.”
I nodded. “And the University would have all its hatches battened anyway.”
Yeah, that’s a point. Still, can’t complain—the free weekend is one of the gains of the working class, eh?”
“You could call it that,” I said. “Mind you, whether what goes on at the University should count as work —”
We went on talking for a bit. Fergal was cagey about himself, and I didn’t press him, and after another couple of beers he got up and left. We had the evening, and the weekend, to ourselves.
Menial slept, leaning against my shoulder, all the way from Carron Town to Inverness. It seemed a shame for her to miss the journey, but I reckoned she must have seen its famously spectacular and varied scenery before, many more times than I had. Besides, I liked watching her sleep, an experience which, in the nature of our past three nights, I had hitherto not had much time to savour.
We had caught the early train, at 5.15 on the Monday morning. Each of us had separately arranged to have the first two days of the week off, by seeking out our different supervisors in the Carron bars on the Friday evening. It was to be hoped that Angus Grizzlyback would remember that I was not coming in this morning; but if he didn’t, I was sure my loyal friends would remind him, with predictable and—as it happened—inaccurate speculation as to how I intended to spend the day.
We had, in fact, spent the Saturday and the Sunday in just that way, very enjoyably, in bed or out on the hills. On the Saturday afternoon Merrial had guddled a trout from a dark, deep pool in the Alt na Chuirn glen; leapt up with the thrashing fish clutched in her hands and danced around, surefooted on the slippery stones. Again, something had moved in my mind, like a glimpsed flick of a tail in the water, which had—as soon as the shadow of my thought fell on it—flashed away.
The sun rose higher, the shadows shortening, apparently in the face of the train’s advance. We stopped at all the small, busy towns built around forestry and light industry and—increasingly as we moved east—farming: Achnasheen, Achnashellach, Achanalt, Garve… The electric engine’s almost silent glide surprised the short- memoried sheep, rabbits and deer beside the track, and set up a continuous standing wave of animals, sauntering or lolloping or springing away. I saw a wolf’s grey-shadowed shape at Achanalt; as we rounded the cliff-face at Garve I saw a wild goat on a shelf; and spotted an eagle patrolling the updrafts above the slope of Moruisg.
I didn’t wake Merrial for any of them.
I smoked, once, with a coffee brought around on a rattling trolley by a lass in tartan trews. Neither the sound nor the smell nor the smoke stirred Merrial at all, except to a few deeper breaths, long ripples in the spate of her hair across her breast and over my chest. I let her head nestle in the now awkward crook of my left arm, and alternated the cup and the cigarette in my right hand. It was a quiet train, for all that it was busy, with clerks and traders on their weekly commute from their coastal homes to their work in Inverfefforan or Inverness.
On Merrial’s lap, with her left arm—crooked like mine—protectively over it, lay a bulky poke of polished leather, fastened with a drawstring thong. It may have bulged a little larger, and weighed a little heavier, than the kind of bags that lasses tend to lug around, but it would have taken a close and sharp observer to notice. Inside it, concealed by a layer of the sort of oddments one would expect to find in such a poke—a cambric kerchief, cosmetics, smallbore ammunition and the like—was the complicated apparatus that Fergal had delivered to her house early on the Sunday evening. It was built around a seer-stone about fifteen centimetres in diameter, nested in neat coils of insulated copper wire. The strangest aspect, to me, of this device was an arrangement of delicate levers, each marked with a letter of the alphabet, queerly ordered: QWERTYUIOP… Probably, I thought, a spell.
“Grotty old place,” said Merrial, rubbing her face with her hands and looking around the damp, flag-stoned concourse of Inverness station. Her cheeks reddened, her eyes widened under the smooth friction of her palms. Her dress, this time of blue velvet, looked a bit rumpled. We were standing at the coffee-bar, having twenty minutes to wait for the 8.30 to Glasgow.
I looked up at the creosoted roof with its wide skylight panels and suspended electric lamps. “At least it doesn’t have pigeons.”
“Can’t say herring-gulls are much of an improvement.” She kicked out with one booted foot, sending a hungry, red-eyed bird squawking away. One end of the station opened to the platforms, the other to the main street. The arrangement seemed peculiarly adapted to set up cold but unrefreshing draughts. Despite its mossy walls and paving, the station was more recent than the buildings outside, most of which pre-dated the Deliverance, if not all three of the world wars.
I finished my bacon roll, smiled at Merrial—who was mumbling, half to herself and around mouthfuls of her own breakfast, some irritated speculation about the degenerative evolution of scavenging sea-birds—and wandered over to the news-stand. There I stocked up on cigarettes and bought a copy of the
I went back to the counter and, while Merrial finished off her breakfast, scanned the sparse snippets of national and international news that had managed to wedge their way in among the earth shak-ingly important football and shinty reports, fishing disputes and Council debates.
The Congress of Paris had ceremonially opened its ninety-seventh year of deliberations, and had immediately plunged into bitter controversy about a proposal to empower the Continental Court to adjudicate border problems between cantons and communes; the apparently more difficult matter of disagreements between countries having
