Archie and the North Wind (12 page)

Once they’d unloaded the cars from Marseilles and loaded the spices and rugs from Turkey and Afghanistan, the same thing happened in Istanbul as in Marseilles: everyone on board, except for Brawn and Archie, departed for the whorehouses, and while they were all gone the two of them sat on deck, this time under the shade of an awning of washed shirts.

‘Some heat in that sun,’ said Brawn, again expelling cigarette smoke all over the place. ‘Do you think,’ Archie began, ‘that the sun gets wet when she sinks into the water?’

‘No,’ said Brawn. ‘The sun is far too clever to drown herself.

‘The ocean is just as wise,’ he continued. ‘She just divides, as the Red Sea once did, and lets the sun safely though to the other side.’

Explosions went off in the distance. The sun glinted on the church domes and on the mosque minarets.

‘Brass or gold?’ Archie asked.

‘Oh – gold,’ said Brawn, ‘as in heaven itself. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘are you going to the North Pole?’

The question was so direct and simple that it frightened Archie. So he replied equally simply.

‘To find the hole. The hole where the wind comes from.’

‘The hole of death,’ Brawn said. ‘That’s what you’re trying to block up. And it’s worth trying. Oh, it most surely is.’ And he resumed the conversation broken the other day by the returning sailors in Marseilles. ‘Do you know, they had killed everyone by that time anyway. My parents and my two sisters. Not that another four made much difference amongst the fifty-four million. The hole was so big that it could have swallowed the whole world, and still you wouldn’t see the bottom. They didn’t like the music anyway, and so sent me north. North! Hah!’ he laughed. ‘And by the time I came back, everywhere was north.’ He paused, drawing breath. ‘But it’s worth it. Even though the hole was so deep that they couldn’t fill it, they had to stop eventually. And do you know why?’ Archie didn’t say anything. ‘Because the man with the spade finally fell in himself. The hole swallowed him too. Even though he left his spade.’

He lit another cigarette.

‘Do you know they used to make cigarette papers out of the prisoners’ skins? My smoke rings are only rings of remembrance. Dealing with grief through black humour. Famous as we are for our black cigarettes. There were so many of them. It’s like living at the bottom of a well, but unable to drown. Like the sun itself.’ He spat. ‘Bloody metaphors. As if they were any use. Though they’re all we have.’ He stood up, the sun glinting on his bald head. ‘I’ll be seventy-nine next month, but feel as strong as when I was nineteen. Stronger, in fact. I’ve swallowed so much water. My heart is now made of liquid. I think I am condemned to live forever.’ He laughed. ‘There was an old man in my village when I was small. It was snowing. Everyone was starving. And do you know what he did? Climbed the highest mountain nearby, made a snowball and rolled it down the hill. It caught one hundred and one rabbits on the way down, which kept the whole village alive that winter.’ He smiled. ‘No point in telling a lie for the sake of a single rabbit.’

And there, under the hot Istanbul sun, Archie wanted to gather up the fragments of the stars and create a new sun.

‘But your music,’ he said. ‘And all this.’ As if he could restore Brawn’s life with words. Or any of the other millions. As if by shouting ‘Hurrah for Kintail’ or ‘Abracadabra’ or rolling a snowball Brawn would stand once more on the orchestra podium, baton in hand, waiting for the graves to open. With a small pebble and a sling, David killed the Philistine.

The sun was setting and Istanbul was ablaze with its glory, the golden domes and minarets now all red. What better place for Brawn to settle down than here in this cradle of civilisation, amongst these Byzantine glories? But this was like every other port; this too was no country for old men: down in the tourist cafes in the squares Archie and Brawn could even then see the young in one another’s arms.

‘An aged man is but a paltry thing,’ Brawn recalled, ‘a tattered coat upon a stick.’ And because English wasn’t his mother tongue, it came out all broken and tattered, and ragged. Brawn looked out over the blazing city and said: ‘Istanbul, Constantinople. Constantinople, Istanbul.’ And releasing four perfect smoke circles from every orifice, said, ‘Byzantium.’ The rings rose into the evening sky like diminishing sacrifices.

The sun had now completely set and the city was suddenly bathed in that soft afterglow which brings on melancholy just before the night lights begin to sparkle. Archie watched Brawn standing by the ship’s rail, like a man being gathered into the artifice of eternity. He stood like a woodcut out of the
Arabian Nights
, all noble and numinous and far away, and Archie knew that he was looking at Byzantium for the last time ever.

‘Fire,’ Brawn said. ‘Look – pyres.’

Archie raised his eyes to the distant hills outside the city walls where Istanbul stretched into the mountains, where faint smoke could be seen rising into the night air from the small fires lit by the nomads who still survived in the old way out on the edge of the desert. Archie could smell peat smoke.

The brothel crew returned and the voyage continued, down through the Aegean and across to Port Said and the Gulf of Suez. In their off-hours they sat high in their bunks watching satellite television: news channels showing pictures of the very countries they were passing – the tented plains of Palestine, the severed oil-wells of Iraq, the thousands chanting in Enghaleb Square in Tehran. Tiger Woods was back on the seventeenth green discussing with his caddy whether he would use an iron or a wood for the approach shot. On yet another channel the Rolling Stones were playing, for the first time ever, in Red Square. ‘Little Red Rooster’, they wailed.

The voyage was both mundane and epic. That daily sea, and a different port every five days or so to discharge or upload all kinds of legal and illegal cargoes. It was routine and repetitive, even though the goods and events themselves were mind-boggling: transporting a whole group of young girls designated for prostitution, from Indonesia to Australia; fighting off pirates in the Sumatran Sea; rescuing fifty Nepalese off a raft in the middle of the Pacific; taking a band of guerillas from Bombay to Sri Lanka; guns and cocaine and all kinds of other weird and wonderful goods from one small corner of the earth to the other.

They became accustomed to it not because they were indifferent to the marvels nor because they were bowed into submission, but because the world they moved in was fluid. One day, this side of the International Date Line; the following day, forwards, or backwards, in time. One day, the sea boiling under the sun’s rays; the next, the sea heaving in the middle of a monsoon.

Nature itself was erratic, and what was human kind and their ways but a mirror of nature? Different nations, different ports, different oceans, different cargoes and different people, but the one boat, with Ludo in his uniform up ahead, Brawn on the capstan, and Archie and the crew on their knees, scrubbing, with one eye on the horizon.

They claimed it was a gift. The gift of song which had, supposedly, kept sailors alive since the days of Noah himself. One evening at the forge an old woman had arrived with a broken cradle. ‘I’ll repair it for a song,’ Gobhlachan had said, and as she sang the fragments of a lullaby the broken wood was transformed again into the Bethlehem crib, ready for the Christmas mass. ‘A coin can take you a short distance,’ the old woman had said. ‘But a song can take you across the world.’

How beautiful everything was in song. No island was lovelier than home, and how sweet the day of return. But meantime, farewell and adieu unto you Spanish ladies. How easy it was now, Skyping from the South China Sea, while the former sailors studied the headlands for favourable winds. ‘My, it’s calm today!’ ‘
Breac a’ mhuiltein air an adhar; latha math a-màireach
’ – A dappled sky today; a good day tomorrow. The highest mountain in the land is oftenest covered with mist. The owl is mourning, floods are coming. And a man had once said to him, ‘The North Wind is cold no matter which direction it comes from.’

But Archie knew this: by the time he had crossed the Pacific he’d never looked better. Brown and sinewy, with the proverbial muscles in those proverbial places which he didn’t even know existed, by the time they were sailing north-west through the Tropic of Capricorn he resembled a model old-fashioned sailor. If they could only see him now, these people back home, all brawny and tanned as he was, the very model of a man before the mast, even though the ship was all cylinders and hatches and electronics with not a mast in sight. Swarthy like Fionn MacCool himself, no one would recognise him now if they saw him:

‘Who’s that huge hero,’ they would say, ‘that giant over there felling all the trees with one sweep of his hand?’

How he would shame these part-time sailors now, these lobster and creel fishermen who all thought they were Neptune’s warriors just because they could don oilskins and haul a few fat oysters in a trawl. Worse still were those in the North Sea, being helicoptered backwards and forwards once a fortnight from Aberdeen then lying in air-conditioned bunks, pretending when they came home and scoffed their pints in the pub that they were out there daily battling the elements, single-handedly drilling for oil in the depths of the North Atlantic. If truth be known, as he’d always known, thought Archie, the only real work these guys did was to lift a teabag occasionally out of a mug while they watched the computer screen detailing where, at that precise moment, the crude oil was actually flowing down through the pipes to St Fergus.

Which was not to say that it hadn’t been heroic at one time: after all, someone had to be Buzz Aldrin. Someone had to be second, just as someone had to dive down at first to the very bottom of the sea with a helmet on his head and a tank on his back and dig beneath the rocks. But all that was a long time ago, before the heroes all died, and Archie knew fine that the oil industry now was a mere mechanical exercise, shifting keys on the computer, adjusting flows technologically, releasing or retaining oil according to the whims of the world’s financial markets. Though such could also be heroes, even at their computers: for there is no greater hero than the financial wizard, who can make the world flow or cease.

But the day will come, thought Archie, when we’ll all be back there, scrabbling around, trying to find a single peat for the fire, or a branch of twig from the shore, or some heather to light underneath a pot in which to make a bit of rabbit stew, and survive. How small his own peat-bank really was: twenty tiny sacks of crumbling moss on your back, and that was it. So he told himself this story.

There was a hero once. A king over Lochlann who had a leash of daughters. They went out one day to take a walk, and along came three giants and lifted the daughters of the king off with them, and there was no knowing where they had gone. Then the king sent word for the storyteller and he asked him if he knew where all his daughters had gone.

The storyteller said to the king that the three giants had taken them with him, and that they were in the earth down below, and that there was no way to get them but by making a ship which would sail on both sea and land. And so it was that the king sent out an order that anyone who could build a ship which would sail on both land and sea would get his eldest daughter in marriage.

In a poor corner of the kingdom there was a widow who had a leash of sons, and one day the eldest said to his mother, ‘Cook for me a bannock, and roast a cock. I am going away to cut wood so as to build a ship that will go and find the daughters of the king.’

His mother said to him, ‘Which would you prefer – the big bannock with my cursing, or a little bannock with my blessing?’

‘Oh, give me the big bannock,’ he replied, ‘for it will be small enough by the time I build the ship!’ So he got a bannock and went away.

He arrived where there was a great wood and a river, and there he sat at the side of the river to eat the bannock. A great monster came out of the river, and she asked him for part of the bannock. He said that he would not give her a morsel, that it was little enough for himself. So he ate the bannock and began cutting the wood, but every tree he cut down grew again instantly, and this went on till night-time came.

He went home mournful, tearful, blind sorrowful.

His mother asked him, ‘How did it go with you today, son?’

He replied, ‘Terrible. Every single tree I cut down grew back up instantly again.’

A day or two after this, the middle brother said that he himself would go, and he asked his mother to cook him a cake and roast him a cock, and in the very way it happened to his eldest brother, so it happened to him. The mother said the very same thing to the youngest one, and he took the little bannock. The monster came and she asked for a part of the cake and the cock.