***
The mountains between the rest of the world and the coast are gradual hills, visible from a distance as gentle, purple, hazy things, like clouds. They seem inviting. They are slow mountains, the kind you can walk up easily, like walking up a hill, but they are hills that take a full day and more to climb. We walked up the hill, and by the end of the first day we were cold.
I saw snow on the peaks above us, although it was high summer.
We said nothing to each other that first day. There was nothing to be said. We knew where we were going.
We made a fire, from dried sheep dung and a dead thornbush: we boiled water and made our porridge, each of us throwing a handful of oats and a fingerpinch of salt into the little pan I carried. His handful was huge, and my handful was small, like my hands, which made him smile and say, ‘I hope you will not be eating half of the porridge.’
I said I would not and indeed, I did not, for my appetite is smaller than that of a full-grown man. But this is a good thing, I believe, for I can keep going in the wild on nuts and berries that would not keep a bigger person from starving.
A path of sorts ran across the high hills, and we followed it and encountered almost nobody: a tinker and his donkey, piled high with old pots, and a girl leading the donkey, who smiled at me when she thought me to be a child, and then scowled when she perceived me to be what I am, and would have thrown a stone at me had the tinker not slapped her hand with the switch he had been using to encourage the donkey; and, later, we overtook an old woman and a man she said was her grandson, on their way back across the hills. We ate with her, and she told us that she had attended the birth of her first great-grandchild, that it was a good birth. She said she would tell our fortunes from the lines in our palms, if we had coins to cross her palm. I gave the old biddy a clipped lowland groat, and she looked at the palm of my right hand.
She said, ‘I see death in your past and death in your future.’
‘Death waits in all our futures,’ I said.
She paused, there in the highest of the highlands, where the summer winds have winter on their breath, where they howl and whip and slash the air like knives. She said, ‘There was a woman in a tree. There will be a man in a tree.’
I said, ‘Will this mean anything to me?’
‘One day. Perhaps.’ She said, ‘Beware of gold. Silver is your friend.’ And then she was done with me.
To Calum MacInnes she said, ‘Your palm has been burned.’ He said that was true. She said, ‘Give me your other hand, your left hand.’ He did so. She gazed at it, intently. Then, ‘You return to where you began. You will be higher than most other men. And there is no grave waiting for you, where you are going.’
He said, ‘You tell me that I will not die?’
‘It is a left-handed fortune. I know what I have told you, and no more.’
She knew more. I saw it in her face.
That was the only thing of any importance that occurred to us on the second day.
We slept in the open that night. The night was clear and cold, and the sky was hung with stars that seemed so bright and close I felt as if I could have reached out my arm and gathered them, like berries.
We lay side by side beneath the stars, and Calum MacInnes said, ‘Death awaits you, she said. But death does not wait for me. I think mine was the better fortune.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘It is all a nonsense. Old-woman talk. It is not truth.’
I woke in the dawn mist to see a stag, watching us, curiously.
The third day we crested those mountains, and we began to walk downhill.
My companion said, ‘When I was a boy, my father’s dirk fell into the cooking fire. I pulled it out, but the metal hilt was as hot as the flames. I did not expect this, but I would not let the dirk go. I carried it away from the fire, and plunged the sword into the water. It made steam. I remember that. My palm was burned, and my hand curled, as if it was meant to carry a sword until the end of time.’
I said, ‘You, with your hand. Me, only a little man. It’s fine heroes we are, who seek our fortunes on the Misty Isle.’
He barked a laugh, short and without humour. ‘Fine heroes,’ was all he said.
The rain began to fall then, and did not stop falling. That night we passed a small croft house. There was a trickle of smoke from its chimney, and we called out for the owner, but there was no response.
I pushed open the door and called again. The place was dark, but I could smell tallow, as if a candle had been burning and had recently been snuffed.
‘No one at home,’ said Calum, but I shook my head and walked forward, then leaned down into the darkness beneath the bed.
‘Would you care to come out?’ I asked. ‘For we are travellers, seeking warmth and shelter and hospitality. We would share with you our oats and our salt and our whisky. And we will not harm you.’
At first the woman hidden beneath the bed said nothing, and then she said, ‘My husband is away in the hills. He told me to hide myself away if the strangers come, for fear of what they might do to me.’
I said, ‘I am but a little man, good lady, no bigger than a child, you could send me flying with a blow. My companion is a full-sized man, but I do swear that he shall do nothing to you, save partake of your hospitality, and we would dry ourselves. Please do come out.’
All covered with dust and spiderwebs she was when she emerged, but even with her face all begrimed, she was beautiful, and even with her hair all webbed and greyed with dust it was still long and thick, and golden-red. For a heartbeat she put me in the mind of my daughter, but that my daughter would look a man in the eye, while this one glanced only at the ground fearfully, like something expecting to be beaten.
I gave her some of our oats, and Calum produced strips of dried meat from his pocket, and she went out to the field and returned with a pair of scrawny turnips, and she prepared food for the three of us.
I ate my fill. She had no appetite. I believe that Calum was still hungry when his meal was done. He poured whisky for the three of us: she took but a little, and that with water. The rain rattled on the roof of the house, and dripped in the corner, and, unwelcoming though it was, I was glad that I was inside.
It was then that a man came through the door. He said nothing, only stared at us, untrusting, angry. He pulled off his cape of sheepskin, and his hat, and he dropped them on the earth floor. They dripped and puddled. The silence was oppressive.
Calum MacInnes said, ‘Your wife gave us hospitality, when we found her. Hard enough she was in the finding.’
‘We asked for hospitality,’ I said. ‘As we ask it of you.’
The man said nothing, only grunted.
In the high lands, people spend words as if they were golden coins. But the custom is strong there: strangers who ask for hospitality must be granted it, though you have blood-feud against them and their clan or kin.
The woman – little more than a girl she was, while her husband’s beard was grey and white, so I wondered if she was his daughter for a moment, but no: there was but one bed, scarcely big enough for two – went outside, into the sheep-pen that adjoined the house, and returned with oatcakes and a dried ham she must have hidden there, which she sliced thin, and placed on a wooden trencher before the man.
Calum poured the man whisky, and said, ‘We seek the Misty Isle. Do you know if it is there?’
The man looked at us. The winds are bitter in the high lands, and they would whip the words from a man’s lips. He pursed his mouth, then he said, ‘Aye. I saw it from the peak this morning. It’s there. I cannot say if it will be there tomorrow.’
We slept on the hard-earth floor of that cottage. The fire went out, and there was no warmth from the hearth. The man and his woman slept in their bed, behind the curtain. He had his way with her, beneath the sheepskin that covered that bed, and before he did that, he beat her for feeding us and for letting us in. I heard them, and could not stop hearing them, and sleep was hard in the finding that night.
I have slept in the homes of the poor, and I have slept in palaces, and I have slept beneath the stars, and would have told you before that night that all places were one to me. But I woke before first light, convinced we had to be gone from that place, but not knowing why, and I woke Calum by putting a finger to his lips, and silently we left that croft on the mountainside without saying our farewells, and I have never been more pleased to be gone from anywhere.
We were a mile from that place when I said, ‘The island. You asked if it would be there. Surely, an island is there, or it is not there.’
Calum hesitated. He seemed to be weighing his words, and then he said, ‘The Misty Isle is not as other places. And the mist that surrounds it is not like other mists.’
We walked down a path worn by hundreds of years of sheep and deer and few enough men.
He said, ‘They also call it the Winged Isle. Some say it is because the island, if seen from above, would look like butterfly wings. And I do not know the truth of it.’ Then, ‘And what is truth? said jesting Pilate.’
It is harder coming down than it is going up.
I thought about it. ‘Sometimes I think that truth is a place. In my mind, it is like a city: there can be a hundred roads, a thousand paths, that will all take you, eventually, to the same place. It does not matter where you come from. If you walk towards the truth, you will reach it, whatever path you take.’
Calum MacInnes looked down at me and said nothing. Then, ‘You are wrong. The truth is a cave in the black mountains. There is one way there, and one only, and that way is treacherous and hard, and if you choose the wrong path you will die alone, on the mountainside.’
We crested the ridge, and we looked down to the coast. I could see villages below, beside the water. And I could see high black mountains before me, on the other side of the sea, coming out of the mist.
Calum said, ‘There’s your cave. In those mountains.’