Sun Dance (43 page)

Its dying wisp of smoke curled around the perfectly formed statuette. This was not the day for such a tantalising exposure to come to his attention. Feeling himself gingerly, Sir Joshua winced.

Pouring a nightcap, he scowled. A faint recollection of classical history lessons at Eton became a painful memory, the mortar board and gown, the swish of a cane.

Bare buttocks and embarrassment, a group of sniggering sixth-formers; he groped towards some obscure fact. His mind drifted from a school day to the figure on an ash tray.

Apollo. Yes, the beautiful Greek Sun God, nude and mocking. Grabbing the ash tray he flung it across the room. Apollo snapped off his base.

“Bloody sunshine, bloody sunshine, the sun’s my only enemy.”

Tense and watching we stood in the yacht's cockpit braced against its wild rolling. The boom thrashed from side to side above our heads. Grabbing a hank of rope the man lashed it to a cleat. The peak of her mast careered across the sky, an arc so wide and violent I feared we'd be de-masted. Another ten degrees and she must founder. The engine ticked over. Every seventh wave is a giant; it came, a truly frightening beast, the roll buried her stern and exhaust pipe. A few chuffing coughs, the engine died. A red light glowed. Without comment the man bent and switched it off, his manner, calm and impassive. A choked engine; danger mounting, it tightened the sinews.

The closer to shore, the steeper the crests, from the peak of this mighty escalator I counted. Astern three waves powered ashore, their foam streaked backs separated us from the seal rocks. A white curtain of water detonated skywards, fell slowly into a massive hollow. Water streamed down black fangs of rock. We were close. To starboard heavy swell uncoiled into graceful arches of a moment's beauty before thundering onto the sand. A cross wind whipped spray across the beach in horizontal sheets. Seething torrents roared into the fragile dunes. The atmosphere spiralled about us, moist and salty, laden with sound. Loud is the beat which carries the note of doom, slender the umbilical of life. Two men, total strangers, waited; both aware should the anchors fail, the rocks would taste the timbers of a yacht.

No lover of the sea believes he will drown. If the keel were to smash down upon the rocks we'd be flung from the cockpit, washed powerless up ledges green with slime. Somehow I'd stop myself slithering back, dodge the next pounding, claw my way to safety. Eilidh stood high above the land devouring surf weighing our chances, a woman thinking of her baby, born by the shock of seeing its father's drown. An island girl, she knew. The sea has no belief, offers no idle hope, knows only the hovering ordination of fate.

Out of the darkness the flash of exploding plumes marked our drift towards the rocks. If she struck, abandoning the yacht was our only chance.. risk making for the jetty, let the wee boat take the storm beam on, maybe get swept up the beach, leaving the man was no option unless the yacht settled. I spoke at his ear, “There's good holding ground beneath us, the anchors should grip,” and in attempting to appear unconcerned after one extremely violent roll put her gunnels under, I ventured, “If you don't mind my asking, where are you bound?”

The bearded face looked straight at me. Deep grooves in thin cheeks were worn by exposure, if nothing else a hard- jawed ocean wanderer. Steel blue eyes carried an aura of calmness, a man unruffled by the clamour of running surf which might shortly grind his boat to smithereens. The reply didn't surprise me. A smile broke from a thick red beard, “Five months of hard thinking and a near drowning, my friend, I just follow the compass of the heart.”

The wind veered sharply north, stripping the wave tops and lashing us with spray. “D'you want to come ashore?” at once I regretted the question, intuition knowing the answer. It sounded an insult. His eyes were bright, those of a man relishing danger, “Me and this Valkyrie girl, we made us a bond.” He patted her gunnel, “We've put a bridle on the Atlantic seahorses before and if this lot buck us off, we go together.” I nodded approval.

The yacht's rolling shifted, she began to plunge and rear. We looked at each other, the anchors were holding. She buried her nose, waves swilled along the deck, poured over the stern. She reared and chain clanked taut on the stem head. Challenge turned to spray. Now embayed on a lee shore? Not the act of an experienced skipper, the mystery of the man about as mythical as the name of his yacht.

Anxious to reach Eilidh, I stepped out of the cockpit. He caught my arm and reaching into the hatch pulled out a lifejacket. “No thanks, I'll be fine,” not adding my thoughts,' it just prolongs a drowning'. Holding a stanchion and swaying to each dip the yachtsman held out a hand, “Thanks for coming aboard, you saved me a lot of bother. I'm Andrew Anderson.” Instinctively I liked him, liked the ring of his name. An iron grip said the rest.

Reluctant always to offer my name, I'd have parted happily without any such exchange. A shade woodenly, I told him. “That name doesn't surprise me none, I was aiming for an island called Halasay, my radar got blown to hell, reckon I've missed it some, but you kinda look what I expected about these parts.”

A swell lifted my boat level with the deck of Valkyrie. I jumped aboard, “You missed the entrance to the Sound,” I shouted up to him, “this is Sandray, just south of Halasay, if you've a mind, give us a call when this blows over.” Lifting a hand in acknowledgement, seamanlike he tossed a neatly coiled rope into the bow and cast me off.

The ability to handle a small open boat back across the bay in such vicious conditions had to be instinctive, in the blood, every move of the tiller felt the sea. I thrilled to the response of the boat, I wasn't fighting the storm. I revelled in its rawness, the soaring elements, the intoxication of danger.

A waiting Eilidh caught the coil of rope which snaked up to her hand. “Sorry, sorry leaving you alone, poor woman, that was really unkind of me.” “No need to be sorry, Hector, you did what a sailor would do,” she hugged a shivering man, “You did the right thing.”

Laughing with the exhilaration, I spoke before realising it wasn't funny, “I once heard a Prime Minister say that before he sanctioned a hundred thousand innocent deaths.”

All that morning the sea ran strongly. The Valkyrie rode it out beyond the seal rocks where she’d anchored. Neither boat nor man was in our thoughts. There could be no crossing the Sound to be with Ella, she would understand. Neither of us doubted our premonition. Eachan had died at the height of last night’s gale. We spoke more quietly. The old house felt it, not the cheery home of yesterday; not sullen, but respectful. An odd silence dwelt in each room, the essence of his being waited here on the island. An amorphous soul hooded by death awaited release, some token that all was not the end.

No religious contemplations nagged our thoughts, offering comfort as it did too many, his presence sufficed. Quietly I said to Eilidh, “I think Eachan foresaw his death, that prophecy of the raven leaving Sandray, perhaps they were symbolic words, maybe an omen. He seemed always to regard the raven as being the link to his ancestors and whatever was the horror he contemplated who would know, but almost his last words to me were, ‘Bury me on the headland.”

Eilidh listened with her head down. I spoke of the man she’d known since childhood, “He’d no orthodox religious belief, his mind ranged too wide for that, I remember him saying to me one night, ‘religions come and go, they change according to manmade concepts, today’s belief is tomorrow’s myth, God is just a bit of anthropomorphic imagination.” Deep down, perhaps subconsciously, he was highly superstitious, and since coming here I learnt why; the closer you live dependent on the whim of the elements the more credibility you give to the ominous supernatural and the need to guard against its wilful tripwires. Over a noggin one night, Eachan and I came to the conclusion that religion is just superstition in fancy dress.”

She looked at me steadily. There was no crying, just a dullness of eye I hadn’t seen before. “I believe all he said, there’s no logic in religion, only hope, nothing to replace a loss for those left, but I understand why Eachan wanted to be buried on the headland” She said no more than that, and knowing his reverence for his ancestors, I agreed.

The drabness of the sky awaited a clearance from the west to strip away the cloud. Taking spade and punch, that afternoon I walked over to the headland. The storm had died to a cheerless day, lacklustre seas slopped about the cliff. Eilidh had wanted to help. I shook my head. She watched from the door, reading my thoughts. I wanted to work alone. Delving into a monument sacred to the beliefs of another age was a task I approached with some misgiving.

What secret, if any, lay amongst the stones? A boat grave entrusted to the keeping of these silent guardians, a lone cairn set amidst sea, hill and sky, its aura of tomb and standing stone, dare I chance its defilement? I recoiled and stood looking about me. I was being watched, the sensation of crossing a divide from which there would be no return whispered sacrilege. What curse might befall the trespass of this desecration? On a slight mound, amongst the waiting stones, I marked out the shape of a coffin.

Suspecting it would prove difficult in finding depth for a burial I cut the first turf. It lifted with surprising ease. Down my spade went, brown clinging peat, its acrid smell of decay getting stronger at each level. Sticky earth piled above me on the bank. Although warm from digging, I began to shake. This ground had been moved before, maybe a thousand years or more ago, a sacred resting to believers in adventure and conquest. The heroic slain carried from battle by the Valkyrie to rise again, victor and vanquished to feast and carouse. Valkyrie, she lay in the bay below. My hands shook. This dank hole now surrounding me, the hallowed ground of departed spirits; I stood in a Viking Holy of Holies, The Ship of the Dead.

I rested against the walls of my digging, no wider than a coffin. Wet earth clung to my hands. Predictions invaded the grave, unbidden they surrounded me, curse like; transcendent mysteries of the fearsome Viking, the brave, the rapacious, the charitable. Odin, their Raven shouldered God who hung nine nights on a windswept tree and gave his eye to gain, not wealth nor worldly tribute, but the power of ultimate knowledge. The sun will grow dark, stars fall from the sky, the sea will invade the land; pursuing wolves will swallow Sun and Moon, Earth’s bonds will crack, the mountains fall. And overwhelmed by the forces of chaos, Doom will be the Destiny of all Gods, their ship alone the symbol of a journey from death and rebirth.

The walking dead arose from the soil, the stones they murmured to me, those departed elements in an atmosphere which clung to this, the shrine of their corporeal existence. Their curse was on me. I shuddered with an inner cold, that dread of a soul which knows no way out. I stood spade in hand. Would I dig more? The western sky opened. Far out, on the tip of the Atlantic the sun made circles, yellow rings of light on a grey sea. Eachan’s voice spoke in my head, strong as though he were beside me. I heard again the wish he’d imparted on the jetty of his croft. I would lift a last spade’s depth, for him.

A slight jarring; something solid, though not rock. Dropping on my knees I scrabbled with my hands. Working carefully, I touched the outline of an object. Scraping a little and a little, finger tips only, slowly, faintly glowing, a tall narrow forehead emerged. Hemmed by the walls of a grave, dank and lifeless, my breathing rapid and fevered, I worked on. Two empty eye sockets, black hollows out of stained whiteness gazed through me, theirs no unseeing stare.

I stepped back, knew again the awful power which cast that headland to be the afterworld of fate. I looked into hollow sockets. Slowly they filled. Unblinking eyes shone from the cavities, eyes that understood that which consumes all life at the moment of death; not fear nor exaltation but the peace which slips before us as a sea fog will drift before a voyaging bow which awaits the rising sun.

Sunshine called from above. I hastened to leave, bent to replace the dark ground. Yet as mysterious powers guide a diviner to the precious, I was drawn. I delved. A bone, small and crooked, the segment of a finger appeared. I touched it, moved a little more ground.

The merest glint in the dimness of a coffin space; on hands and knees I’d dug, brushed away specs of earth with finger tips. More bones were scattered in the small hollow. Apprehensive at disturbing the sanctity of a skeleton I cleared particles of earth as delicately as trembling fingers would allow. In the diffuse light, a faint glow. I shrank against the wet earth. There, clasped by a skeletal hand, a small, golden, solar disc.

For long I’d stood, chilled by the fear of portentous horrors unfolding before me in that pit of Viking myth. I heard their saga, their poetry, ‘Old forgotten far off things and battles long ago, the harp that once in Tara’s Hall.’ I looked out to the Hill of the Shroud, home of the raven; did I imagine their harsh croak? Was I the person the ancestral birds meant to find this token?