You leave the way you entered, through the mouth of my home.
I stood there and did not move, but in my mind I was like an animal in a trap, questing and darting from idea to idea, finding no purchase and no solace and no solution.
I said, ‘I am weaponless. He told me that I could not enter this place with a weapon. That it was not the custom.’
It is the custom now, to bring no weapon into my place. It was not always the custom. Follow me, said the skeleton of my daughter.
I followed her, for I could see her, even when it was so dark that I could see nothing else.
In the shadows it said, It is beneath your hand.
I crouched and felt it. The haft felt like bone – perhaps an antler. I touched the blade cautiously in the darkness, discovered that I was holding something that felt more like an awl than a knife. It was thin, sharp at the tip. It would be better than nothing.
‘Is there a price?’
There is always a price.
‘Then I will pay it. And I ask one other thing. You say that you can see the world through his eyes.’
There were no eyes in that hollow skull, but it nodded.
‘Then tell me when he sleeps.’
It said nothing. It melded with the darkness, and I felt alone in that place.
Time passed. I followed the sound of the dripping water, found a rockpool, and drank. I soaked the last of the oats and I ate them, chewing them until they dissolved in my mouth. I slept and woke and slept again, and dreamed of my wife, Morag, waiting for me as the seasons changed, waiting for me just as we had waited for our daughter, waiting for me forever.
Something, a finger I thought, touched my hand: it was not bony and hard. It was soft, and human-like, but too cold. He sleeps.
I left the cave in the blue light, before dawn. He slept across the cave, cat-like, I knew, such that the slightest touch would have woken him. I held my weapon in front of me, a bone handle and a needle-like blade of blackened silver, and I reached out and took what I was after, without waking him.
Then I stepped closer, and his hand grasped for my ankle and his eyes opened.
‘Where is the gold?’ asked Calum MacInnes.
‘I have none.’ The wind blew cold on the mountainside. I had danced back, out of his reach, when he had grabbed at me. He stayed on the ground, pushed himself up onto one elbow.
Then he said, ‘Where is my dirk?’
‘I took it,’ I told him. ‘While you slept.’
He looked at me, sleepily. ‘And why ever would you do that? If I was going to kill you I would have done it on the way here. I could have killed you a dozen times.’
‘But I did not have gold, then, did I?’
He said nothing.
I said, ‘If you think you could have got me to bring the gold from the cave, and that not bringing it out yourself would have saved your miserable soul, then you are a fool.’
He no longer looked sleepy. ‘A fool, am I?’
He was ready to fight. It is good to make people who are ready to fight angry.
I said, ‘Not a fool. No. For I have met fools and idiots, and they are happy in their idiocy, even with straw in their hair. You are too wise for foolishness. You seek only misery and you bring misery with you and you call down misery on all you touch.’
He rose then, holding a rock in his hand like an axe, and he came at me. I am small, and he could not strike me as he would have struck a man of his own size. He leaned over to strike. It was a mistake.
I held the bone haft tightly, and stabbed upward, striking fast with the point of the awl, like a snake. I knew the place I was aiming for, and I knew what it would do.
He dropped his rock, clutched at his right shoulder. ‘My arm,’ he said. ‘I cannot feel my arm.’
He swore then, fouling the air with curses and threats. The dawn-light on the mountaintop made everything so beautiful and blue. In that light, even the blood that had begun to soak his garments was purple. He took a step back, so he was between me and the cave. I felt exposed, the rising sun at my back.
‘Why do you not have gold?’ he asked me. His arm hung limply at his side.
‘There was no gold there for such as I,’ I said.
He threw himself forward, then, ran at me and kicked at me. My awl-blade went flying from my hand. I threw my arms around his leg, and I held on to him as together we hurtled off the mountainside.
His head was above me, and I saw triumph in it, and then I saw sky, and then the valley floor was above me and I was rising to meet it and then it was below me and I was falling to my death.
A jar and a bump, and now we were turning over and over on the side of the mountain, the world a dizzying whirligig of rock and pain and sky, and I knew I was a dead man, but still I clung to the leg of Calum MacInnes.
I saw a golden eagle in flight, but below me or above me I could no longer say. It was there, in the dawn sky, in the shattered fragments of time and perception, there in the pain. I was not afraid: there was no time and no space to be afraid in: no space in my mind and no space in my heart. I was falling through the sky, holding tightly to the leg of a man who was trying to kill me; we were crashing into rocks, scraping and bruising and then . . .
. . . we stopped.
Stopped with force enough that I felt myself jarred, and I was almost thrown off Calum MacInnes and to my death beneath. The side of the mountain had crumbled, there, long ago, sheared off, leaving a sheet of blank rock, as smooth and as featureless as glass. But that was below us. Where we were, there was a ledge, and on the ledge there was a miracle: stunted and twisted, high above the tree line, where no trees have any right to grow, was a twisted hawthorn tree, not much larger than a bush, although it was old. Its roots grew into the side of the mountain, and it was this hawthorn that had caught us in its grey arms.
I let go of the leg, clambered off Calum MacInnes’s body and onto the side of the mountain. I stood on the narrow ledge and looked down at the sheer drop. There was no way down from here. No way down at all.
I looked up. It might be possible, I thought, climbing slowly, with fortune on my side, to make it up that mountain. If it did not rain. If the wind was not too hungry. And what choice did I have? The only alternative was death.
A voice: ‘So. Will you leave me here to die, dwarf?’
I said nothing. I had nothing to say.
His eyes were open. He said, ‘I cannot move my right arm, since you stabbed it. I think I broke a leg in the fall. I cannot climb with you.’
I said, ‘I may succeed, or I may fail.’
‘You’ll make it. I’ve seen you climb. After you rescued me, crossing that waterfall. You went up those rocks like a squirrel going up a tree.’
I did not have his confidence in my climbing abilities.
He said, ‘Swear to me by all you hold holy. Swear by your king, who waits over the sea as he has since we drove his subjects from this land. Swear by the things you creatures hold dear – swear by shadows and eagle-feathers and by silence. Swear that you will come back for me.’
‘You know what I am?’ I said.
‘I know nothing,’ he said. ‘Only that I want to live.’
I thought. ‘I swear by these things,’ I told him. ‘By shadows and by eagle-feathers and by silence. I swear by green hills and standing stones. I will come back.’
‘I would have killed you,’ said the man in the hawthorn bush, and he said it with humour, as if it was the biggest joke that ever one man had told another. ‘I had planned to kill you, and take the gold back as my own.’
‘I know.’
His hair framed his face like a wolf-grey halo. There was red blood on his cheek where he had scraped it in the fall. ‘You could come back with ropes,’ he said. ‘My rope is still up there, by the cave mouth. But you’d need more than that.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will come back with ropes.’ I looked up at the rock above us, examined it as best I could. Sometimes good eyes mean the difference between life and death, if you are a climber. I saw where I would need to be as I went, the shape of my journey up the face of the mountain. I thought I could see the ledge outside the cave, from which we had fallen as we fought. I would head for there. Yes.
I blew on my hands, to dry the sweat before I began to climb. ‘I will come back for you,’ I said. ‘With ropes. I have sworn.’
‘When?’ he asked, and he closed his eyes.
‘In a year,’ I told him. ‘I will come here in a year.’
I began to climb. The man’s cries followed me as I stepped and crawled and squeezed and hauled myself up the side of that mountain, mingling with the cries of the great raptors; and they followed me back from the Misty Isle, with nothing to show for my pains and my time, and I will hear him screaming, at the edge of my mind, as I fall asleep or in the moments before I wake, until I die.
It did not rain, and the wind gusted and plucked at me, but did not throw me down. I climbed, and I climbed in safety.
When I reached the ledge the cave entrance seemed like a darker shadow in the noonday sun. I turned from it, turned my back on the mountain, and from the shadows that were already gathering in the cracks and the crevices and deep inside my skull, and I began my slow journey away from the Misty Isle. There were a hundred roads and a thousand paths that would take me back to my home in the lowlands, where my wife would be waiting.