The Way to Babylon (Different Kingdoms) (8 page)

For Christmas, Doody and Nurse Cohen together got him a hip flask full of malt. ‘Keep you warm in the winter nights, sir,’ Doody said with a wink. Riven’s watercolours seemed inadequate in exchange, though the pair expressed delight over them.

Christmas Day, and Christmas lunch, and that boring Christmas afternoon with the Queen on television and patients happily dozing. Then a dark evening strolling into night, and it was over. One taboo time was behind him, and now crouched in waiting for next year. That night he lay quiet as a corpse in bed, and viciously beat back the siege of his memory; pushed it away until he had walled it off in a dark corner. In the morning the struggle showed in the tiredness, and the sombre set of his face.

The holiday deadness that would last until the eve of the New Year then set in. Doody and Nurse Cohen took their well-earned holiday. Riven watched them drive away together: Doody was getting a lift to the station. That left him to the tender mercies of Nurse Bisbee. He was glad, in a way. They were the ones who were drawing him back into the mainstream; something he did not yet want.

He had received Christmas cards from old friends, most of whom he had known at Oxford; and also from one or two of his colleagues in the army. He mulled over them for hours, not yet ready to believe that these people had any claim on him. The world outside was a lawn and a willow-fringed river; no more. If he began thinking about things beyond that, the wall began to crumble, revealing the darkness behind it.

He actually discovered a patient reading one of his books, on a wet morning as he hobbled through the recreation room on an expedition to the toilet. He felt a moment of pride and pleasure, then a weird panic, as if his den was being infiltrated, or his disguise being whittled away. That world, which had once driven and uplifted him, being brought here by others. Even here. First Nurse Cohen, and then this. How could he forget, or begin to heal, since Jenny was in that world also, in every word he had ever written, as surely as if her picture smiled behind every sentence? He stole the book when the old man left it behind for a meal, and took it back to his room.

Flame of Old.
The first one. The one I began as a boy, and left again; until I met her. The glad one. The story which believed in happy endings.

He opened it.

T
HE LAND WAS
hard, but good. In the Dales, there was fine soil, rich enough for barley in the more sheltered parts. Down there also there was kale, and the shimmering mouse-fair hayfields. But the hills clawed out of the valley like blind, blunt breakers of granite that foamed into serried patches of boulders, encrusted with moss, straddled with heather and humps of yellow grass. Thorn trees gnarled there, bent by the icy northern blast that men chose to call wind. They looked like leering cripples, hardy as the rock on which they perched.

And there the Rorim was. Ralarth Rorim, fortress of the southern Dales. It encircled a low hill that some said was made by man and others said had always been there. The ramparts overlooked a wide valley spangled with the bright circles of a deep stream, and in the valley were the crofts and huts of the Dales peoples. Fields were marked out in straight lines, and animals grazed in dotted herds. Ribbons of blue smoke rose up into the clear air from houses and inns, smithies and byres. The bustle of a market could be heard when the wind permitted. It nestled like a patchwork in the slopes below the Rorim itself, and there folk bought and sold, bargained and argued, their voices a mere murmur on the breeze.

Beyond the Dale of Ralarth the hills rolled in a sombre sea to a blur of mountains on the horizon. They were flecked with stone, drowned in heather and coarse upland grass; a tableau for kites and buzzards to wheel over, for wolves to roam, for deer to tread warily. To the south, a stain of forest darkened the slopes of the hills like a silent sea in the valleys and crested the stone-ridden heights with pine and fir, spruce and beech, occasional oak and a riot of ferns and brambles. Scarall Wood was its name; a home for wild things. And to the south of the wood, the land dipped sharply in grey cliffs, tumbling down past waterfalls to the rocky brim of the sea itself, that beat unceasingly against the ramparts of the earth in its ancient battle.

The troop of horsemen came riding out of the north, with the wind at their backs and the sun of a waning day to their left. There were ten of them mounted on tall, dark horses whose necks were pale with foam. They were dressed in metal-studded leather, belted with blue sashes. Swords rattled at their thighs and empty provision bags bounced from their saddles.

They halted within sight of Ralarth Rorim and stood in their stirrups to watch the great dip of the Dale cup the gathering twilight in its folds. A few fires twinkled like gems in a mine, and they could catch the distant lowing of cattle being driven in for the evening.

‘Home,’ the big red-beard, Ratagan, said with satisfaction. ‘I told you we could make it before nightfall if we pushed on.’

The dark, slight man with the sharp face who had reined in beside him nodded. ‘Though the horses have paid for it. But it will be good to be under a roof this night.’

‘And within walls,’ Ratagan added. He scanned the surrounding hills. ‘I had no mind to be staving off the hunting packs yet again. I’ve had enough of the wolf-folk to last me a long while.’

‘Then will you be steering clear of Murtach when we get back?’ the dark man asked with a grin that was like the flash of a knife in the twilight.

Ratagan laughed, his voice a boom of sound in his beard. ‘Those curs of his! They’re afraid of their own shadow. I think their dam must have been a strayed lamb. But they look the part, I’ll admit.’

‘Murtach says appearances can be everything,’ the dark man said.

‘Aye, and he would know—shapeshifter that he is. Ah, the beers he will ply me with tonight for the stories I have gathered!’

‘You are the one to tell them.’ The dark man smiled. ‘But come, we must be on. The wind grows cold, and we have a mile or two yet to do before dark.’

They spurred their weary mounts, and the little column set off once more on the descending slopes to where the lights of the Dale were burning in the deepening darkness.

A
YE.
B
UT FOR
some, the darkness comes too quickly for us to go any farther.

He closed the book and then his eyes, still seeing the evening hills of another world. Then he got up slowly, retrieved his stick and, making the laborious way to the recreation room, left his work where it was.

As Christmas was for the less lively of Beechfield’s inmates, so New Year was primarily for those who, as Doody put it, had less than five pinkies in the grave. Many patients went home for the holiday season, but a fair percentage remained, as did the staff who looked after them.

‘Well, sir,’ Doody said when he returned on New Year’s Eve, ‘I intend to party it anyway, whatever that old cow Bisbee says. Orange juice, my fucking foot! Anne and me are trying to get some booze in for the old boys who are up to it. You’d be surprised how many of them perk up at the mention of the hard stuff.’

New Year. It was always a big thing in Scotland. Should auld acquaintance and all that.

Nurse Cohen took him round the garden in his chair that afternoon. He listened to her as she talked about the New Year and the party, and Bisbee’s tyrannies, not so much aware of what she said as the way she said it.

It was cold, but it had stopped raining, and a fitful sun was drifting through a wrack of clouds. The river was full and noisy, throwing away sunlight as it broke over stones, and the willows were almost bare.

‘There will be snowdrops here soon,’ said Nurse Cohen. She imprisoned some hair that the wind had freed. ‘Then the daffodils come up in the spring, and this whole bank is covered with them. It’s quite a sight; sort of cheering.’ The chair halted. ‘Will you really not be here to see it, Mr Riven?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe. I’m pretty much put together again now. I’ve no excuse for staying any longer.’ And I have things to do. He forced a smile. ‘I’ll tell you next year.’

‘Next year. Well, I’ve no resolutions made, so I won’t be breaking any as I usually do. Doody promises to behave himself a little more, though I’ve never seen bacon with wings. I reckon old Bisbee could make a resolution to take that poker from up her backside.’

Riven laughed.

‘Mr Riven?’

‘Yup?’

‘You can call me Anne, you know, if you want to. Most of the other patients do.’

‘Okay. Anne it is.’

‘Good.’ She looked at the sky. ‘Rain. I’d best get you inside. Patients aren’t supposed to get wet.’ She wheeled him back towards the Centre.

The meal was not as big an occasion as at Christmas, but it was certainly livelier. The staff ate with the patients, and there was a good deal of merrymaking at Riven’s end of the table, where Doody and Nurse Cohen—Anne—had stationed themselves. In front of them sat several innocuous-looking bottles which housed rather fiery liquid. Hence the noise level, at which Nurse Bisbee shot more than one suspicious look.

Some electronic wizard had rigged up a system whereby Big Ben chimed on speakers set in the wall. As the meal ended, and the magical moment approached, it grew quieter. Riven wheeled himself away from the table and took up position near a window that looked out on to the garden, which was now lost in the dark.

A fine night for Hogmanay.

The stars were so bright that he could make out Sirius, even from inside. He wanted to be out, alone under the sky as he had so often been in his life. The lights in the room dimmed and the speakers began to crackle. A voice began telling of the crowds in Trafalgar Square and the antics in the fountains. Doody was dancing a jig with an old woman who was whooping with laughter. She looked as though she had not danced in decades. Nurse Cohen joined them, along with an octogenarian who on other days would be grumbling in his bed.

The chimes began to ring out, and the dancing stopped. Glass in hand, Riven stood up.

Nine, ten, eleven...

On the last stroke he drained his glass, and raised it to the ceiling.

For you, my bonny lass. A New Year.

As he limped out of the room he saw Nurse Cohen being kissed by Doody. The patients were giving each other elderly pecks.

Shaking arms entwined, and ‘Auld Lang Syne’ began. It followed him as he made his way outside into the still air and the cold stars, out to the lawn and the quietly churning river.

The grass was wet and slippery, and his progress was slow. He stopped to place the constellations. Orion with his shining belt. The Plough, and the North Star. Venus down near the horizon, and bright Jupiter. They had guided him in times before this. They guided him now, as though the time could be taken back and he was on Skye again with a heart that was whole and in the keeping of someone who loved him.

The river flashed back starlight and brimmed under the bare limbs of the willows. He sat down and fumbled with his shoes, hands quivering with tiredness. Then his socks; and the chill dew was wet on his bare feet.

The water was so cold at first that it burned, but then it merely tingled, glittering around his calves. He stood there and let it pour around him, and stared at the high arch of the sky. It seemed to wheel in a velvet immensity. He was its hub, the pivot on which it turned. He knew his time at Beechfield was over. It was time to go. Time to return to the mountains.

FOUR

R
IVEN WAS NOT
going back to Camasunary to write a book. He was trying to lay a ghost to rest, to heal himself. He thought that perhaps the writing would be a part of that, but he could not be sure. Whatever was to happen, he was here, now, on a train, his belongings crumpled in a rucksack at his crooked feet, Beechfield half a dozen counties to his back, and a new year opening out like a dark flower in front of him.

A night train journey. He never bothered to get a sleeper; it was a sort of tradition that he pass as uncomfortable a time as possible getting to Skye. It seemed to make the first sight of the Cuillins across the Sound of Sleat all the more worthwhile. Mind you—he peered at the blue gloom beyond the window—if it keeps like this I’ll see nothing but the usual drizzle.

Carlisle went past, and with it England. The motion of the train lulled him into a doze. He woke hours later from his cramped sleep to feel the pains in his legs and see dawn break out over high land. It was already spotted with snow. He wondered if there would be any on the islands; and for the first time considered the difficulties of getting to the bothy. There was no alternative to hoofing it over the ridge. He could hardly get someone to carry him.