in it. You know I'm not one to get poetic, but compared to how I live my life now, I was dead before. Maybe that's where the meaning lies.'
'Maybe,' he answered noncommittally, but he knew what she meant.
'And I feel like my life's been enriched for knowing you and the others. I feel closer even to the ones I don't particularly like than anyone I knew before. Maybe when the rulebook was redrawn, the dictionary was too.' She laughed at her metaphor.
'What do you mean?'
'I know what friendship means now.' Her smile slowly faded until her features were sadly introspective. 'I don't know how to say this, but at this point, with all that shit lying ahead, it seems important.'
'So what does friendship mean?' He tried to raise the mood with a smile.
'It means being prepared to lay down your life for someone.'
'If we're careful, that's something we won't even have to think-'
'Church, be realistic. If we go into this, we're not all, maybe not any of us, going to come out of it alive. You know that. Don't insult me by pretending it's not true.'
He was hypnotised by what he saw in her eyes.
'You've changed too,' she continued. 'You've grown in a lot of ways, in just a few short weeks.'
'Yeah, well, you know how it is. Pressure is the catalyst for change.'
'It's a shame we have to lose our innocence.' Although she said we, Church felt she was talking about him.
'You can't stay innocent and face up to sacrifice and death and war. Those bastards killed my innocence when they arranged for Marianne to die. To forge my character,' he added with a sneer.
'You mustn't let it eat you up.'
'I won't. I let that happen before, when I thought I was somehow complicit in Marianne's suicide. It's not going to happen again. I'm going to find whoever killed Marianne and I'm going to get my revenge, but I won't be consumed by it. This is different. It's colder, harder.' He could tell she wasn't happy about what his words implied about the change in his character, but on this subject he didn't care. 'I'm not stupid. I've read the classics and I know how revenge destroys people. But for the kind of suffering that's been caused to all of us, there has to be some kind of payback.'
The fire was starting to die down and a chill crept across the campsite, belying the summer that was just around the corner.
'What's to become of us all?' Ruth said with a troubled smile.
It was a rhetorical question, but Church felt the need to answer it nonetheless. 'We'll do the best we can and damn the consequences.'
The morning was clear and fresh. The fires on the mainland had mostly burned themselves out, but there was still the occasional tendril of smoke snaking up into the blue sky. Shavi was the first to rise and he immediately went to the sea wall to survey the stretch of water that separated Skye from the blackened ruins that remained of the Kyle of Lochalsh. Returning to the camp as the others prepared breakfast, he announced that the serpent which had patrolled the waters seemed to have departed with the Fomorii presence. Only Ruth caught the glimmer of relief in his face.
After they had eaten an unappetising breakfast of muesli and water, they found a boat on the sea front and Tom steered it across the strait to where they had abandoned their van the previous day. By 10 a.m., they were on their way north along deserted main roads. Ten miles outside of the Kyle of Lochalsh, they saw a farmer attending to hedges away on a hillside, and the further they progressed the more signs of life they encountered, until it seemed the devastation they had encountered was just an aberration.
When they stopped at a pub in Achnasheen for lunch, they were chased away by the landlord and some irate locals. The explanation came at an old-fashioned garage further along the road. When the owner shuffled out to fill their tank, checked cap raised over a ruddy face, he told them of a rumour circulating in the area that the Government's imposition of martial law and the censorship of the media was to prevent panic because a plague was loose in the country; what kind of plague, no one was quite sure. He didn't believe it himself. The view among his own particular group was that the 'bastard politicians' had finally been overcome by their innate corruption and were using a manufactured crisis as a smokescreen to get rid of the democratic process. It had all started with the gun laws, he said. The tragedy at Dunblane was the excuse, but the weapons had really been controlled to prevent an armed uprising. But, he said conspiratorially, a few landowners had held on to their shotguns and were stockpiling them for use 'when the soldiers come.' At this, he decided he had said too much and took their money in silence before retreating to his dusty shack.
The further north they travelled, the more the people seemed to be untroubled by everything that was happening. They stopped at one farm for supplies of milk, bacon and eggs, only to discover the farmer's wife who served them knew nothing of the martial law. 'We don't have a telly,' she said in her thick Highlands accent, 'and we're too busy to listen to the radio.'
The final leg of the journey took them on a road that was straight as a die through the Beinn Eighe nature reserve, where pine trees and gorse clustered hard against the road. The wildness of this no man's land made them all uncomfortable; they felt as if humanity had been driven out by an angry, hateful nature for all the crimes it had committed; the new occupants were more respectful of nature's rules, and unforgiving of anyone who dared venture back into that dark, green domain. Sometimes strange movements could be glimpsed among the shadows beneath the trees; occasionally the quietness was disturbed by cries that came from no bird or animal they could recognise.
The oppressiveness eased slightly when the road took them along the banks of Loch Maree, which was so clear and still it looked like the sky had been brought down to earth. The scenery all around was breathtaking. Across the loch, the banks rose up sharply to soaring, rocky hillsides which were dappled by purple cloud shadows interspersed with brilliant patches of sunlight. From the top, white waterfalls cascaded down gloriously.
Soon after they arrived at Gairloch, a small fishing village perched on the edge of a sheltered sea loch. It was a balmy late afternoon with the seagulls screeching overhead and the smell of the day's catch mingling with the salty aroma of seaweed all along the harbour front. Boats sat up on trailers everywhere, but only the gentle lapping of the waves disturbed the lazy atmosphere.
After parking the van overlooking a tiny jetty, Veitch clambered out and stretched his muscles before turning to survey the thickly wooded slopes all around. 'I thought we were driving up to the bloody top of the world. Who the hell are we supposed to be seeing up here?'
Ruth turned her face to the warmth of the sun. 'Come on, Tom. You've kept us in suspense all day.'
'You know, the old git only does it because he knows if he tells us everything we'll dump him in the nearest rest home.' Laura adjusted her sunglasses, studiously avoiding Tom's fierce glare.
'You'll wait until the time's right,' he said icily. 'If you had a little patience and started listening a little more, you might actually gain a little wisdom. We won't be doing anything until sunset so you may as well make yourself busy.'
They unloaded the camping equipment and split it between them before setting off on foot along a valley that ran up into the hills. They walked for two hours until they were exhausted, continually scanning among the trees for any sign of danger. When they broke above the treeline they pitched camp on the sunlit, grassy slopes, admiring the amazing views across the wildly beautiful countryside. After lighting a fire Shavi cooked the bacon and eggs and prepared beans on toast for Laura, which they devoured hungrily after their exertion.
Tom avoided all their questions in his usual irritatingly brusque manner until the sun started to ease towards the horizon, and then he marshalled them and led them across the slopes and around rocky outcroppings where the only sound was the whistle of the wind. Finally they mounted a bank and looked down on the remnants of a stone circle.
It was only identifiable as a henge at close inspection; to the cursory observer the arrangement of rocks looked almost natural, an illusion that was added to by the few recumbent stones which had not survived the passing of the centuries. Set on the grassy plain, with a vista across the forested landscape towards the setting sun, they could fully understand why their ancestors had located it in that spot; there was a sense of awe from simply being there with only nature all around. A respectful silence came over them the instant they laid eyes on it and, automatically, they all bowed their heads in respect. When they were just a few feet away, Church dipped down and stretched out his fingers to the short grass. A blue spark leapt up from the earth to his fingertips and
