Archie and the North Wind (7 page)

He would be careful. Oh aye, he’d be careful all right. No long-thighed lassie would entice him. No musical genius would draw him into his cave. No talons. No mermaids with glistening dresses. No coalitions. No deals. No compromises. No talking birds. Least of all ravens. And he would carry a piece of iron with him. Aye, that would be it. Not a huge bar so as to attract attention to himself. Just a small piece of iron on his person – a locket, or a key, or a nail on a string, or a penknife. A pot stoup from Gobhlachan’s old dump would do. Oh, and a circle – he would definitely draw a circle round himself, with a cross at the very centre and never, ever, leave that circle. Let them come and find him, if they could – let them enter the magic circle, if they dare. Let them hand him all their books of magic, and he would hold on to them – those books which gave them wealth and power and influence and beauty and all the rest.

The circle was endless, and he crossed himself amen.

But how to tell her and that son, lying there pressing buttons in front of the television? Well, really, he wouldn’t care anyway – he would likely shrug his shoulders, as if he was hearing something from a different channel which he didn’t want to watch. And he didn’t care, and he really did shrug his shoulders, as if the channel was in a foreign language, which it was.

How to approach her – how to tell her? Would he just blurt out the truth, that he was leaving, going on an expedition – God, how she would sneer and laugh at that word – expedition!

‘Expedition!’ she would say. ‘Who do you now imagine you are? Robert Bloody E. Peary? Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’

And he would be ashamed of himself and say, ‘No. Well, really… what I mean is, not so much an expedition as… as…’

As what? A journey? Phwa! A quest? An odyssey? Ha-ha-bloody-ha!

‘You’re what?’ she said, when it came to it and he came in to her all dressed up with a brown suitcase in one hand. She was sitting curled up in the corner seat of the sofa cutting her toenails with a large pair of scissors when he entered with the news. She looked up at him in absolute astonishment – that itself was a joy and a surprise – and almost dropped her scissors.

In the old stories, when the hero left the house the woman would invariably be baking – three kinds of bannocks, a large one and a middling one and a small one.

‘Would you like the small bannock with my blessing, the middling bannock with my indifference, or the large bannock with my curse?’ the woman would ask and the greedy eldest son, of course, would ask for the large bannock, no matter the consequence, the middle son for the middling bannock and the fair-haired young son (although often he was also the fool) would, of course, ask for the small bannock and the mother’s blessing.

But she just sat there laughing at him, half her toenails pared, the other half curled and thick and yellow.

‘Would you like me to bring anything back to you?’ he heard himself asking, as if he was just popping out to the pub or the village store.

‘What about a snowman?’ she asked, without a smile. ‘You know, one of those ones which are so perfect until they melt.’

God, he thought to himself, she actually has a sense of humour. Why had he never noticed it before? Or had she just discovered it, right at this moment when he was about to leave? Had his decision caused her to melt, as it were? Maybe, he thought, this woman is a completely different woman from the one I thought I knew. Maybe I don’t know the first thing about her.

Maybe she was the North Pole. From where the wind blew. The hole from which everything emerged. What if instead of going to find the source of the north wind, he was now actually standing at base camp preparing to walk away from the font? Going in the wrong direction, like a man blinded by the snow, walking in endless circles to his death? Captain Oates going out for some time.

She was now back paring her nails, so he lifted his suitcase and left, determined not to look back, not wanting to be confused by the marks of his own footprints going round and round in the swirling snow behind him.

Many had died that way. Instead of marching on, they had glanced back and mistaken the footprints in the snow for the footprints of someone else, and followed their own prints to an endless death. Or had fallen over precipices, or into ravines or glaciers. Or turned into pillars of salt.

He walked out through the village knowing that they were all standing behind the curtains gazing at him. Archie with his suitcase.

‘I wonder where he’s going?’

‘To the shop?’

‘With a suitcase? You must be joking!’

‘Away.’

‘Yes. Yes, that’ll be it. Away.’

‘Aye, but away where?’

‘Och, the usual! Glasgow. London. Away. Far away.’

‘And no wonder! How long would you have stayed with her?’

‘Or with him!’

‘Poor Bella! She’ll be thankful for it. Aye, she’ll be fine.’

And the bus disappeared north, Archie making a circle in the steamed window. His nose pressed to the glass, watching the fields and the rocks bump by. A brown cow stared at the bus. A seagull sat on a fence-post. Someone went by on a bicycle. A child sat cuddling a pet lamb outside a porch. The school travelled by, the church sat impassive on the high hill.

Through the villages the bus travelled. John and Donald and Wilma and Joina came on the bus and all came off at the hospital. Four young people with backpacks came on the bus at the pier and spoke to each other in a foreign language two seats behind Archie. He recognised the occasional English word – ‘iPod’ and ‘Michael Schumacher’, but the rest was indistinguishable.

Maybe ‘Michael Schumacher’ is not an English word – or words – he thought. German. Though Michael Schumacher was probably Michael Schumacher in any language. Even in Gaelic, Archie thought, though he would pronounce it
Mìcheal Schumacher
.

On the ferry, he recognised and nodded to various people he knew. He didn’t need to talk to them because they were all speaking to someone else on their mobile phones. He checked his own, which only had a Vodaphone message. Free weekend calls. Handy. He drank a pint of beer and ate fish and chips in the ferry cafe, and was soon on the mainland bus travelling south through Skye.

Strange. Going south to go north, he thought. The Cuillin shrouded in mist to his right. South, south. North. East. South. West. The school compass. North, nor-nor-east, nor-east, east-nor-east, east, east-sou-east, sou-east, sou-sou-east-east, south, sou-sou-west, sou-west, west-sou-west, west, west-nor-west, nor-west, nor-nor-west, north. I could have gone directly north. To Lewis. And then? There wasn’t a ferry from Stornoway to the Arctic, was there?

The Cal-Mac office: ‘A ticket to the Arctic, please.’

He could see that girl in the office – what was her name again – Joan? – with that cynical tongue of hers. ‘And would that be a Single, Archie, or a five-day Open Return?’

He could go via Shetland, of course. The bus to Inverness, train to Thurso or Aberdeen, and the boat to Lerwick, like the fisher girls –
clann-nighean an sgadain.
Another boat from there to the Faeroes, and Bob’s your uncle. A single step from there to the Circle. There was a Pole Hill in Sutherland, and a Polperro in Cornwall. Maybe even Polynesia came from the Gaelic word Poll, meaning mud.

But when he woke he was in Fort William. Just as well continue. I’ll get a plane from Glasgow to Sweden, or somewhere up there, he thought, see who’s cheapest.

Glencoe. Where the black Campbells murdered the innocent Macdonalds. Ben Dòrain sweeping by all bare to the left, without honour. And money! Good as the credit cards in his wallet looked, the bank balance itself was pretty dodgy. Especially since it was a joint account and good old Bellag would instantly have got a taxi out to the well and drained a few bucketfuls from it. Damn it. What the hell. Surely Fionn MacCool never bothered much about his bank account. Just what he had. His hound and his skill.

And he slept again, dreaming about anvils and flames and the whirling of the forge: the sound of the bus engine idling down at Buchanan Street Station. Everest base-camp. He walked down Sauchiehall Street, whistling for strength.

3

ARCHIE SPENT HIS
first night in Glasgow in a fine hotel.

He counted his money, and discovered that – really – he had plenty. This was not going to be a poverty-stricken, penny-pinching expedition, surviving on dead rats and old bits of hardened broken biscuits. Such deprivation had broken the spirits of greater men: Savonarola going mad for lack of air, Galileo dying for sight of the sun, Captain Scott for a deficiency of fruit.

This he knew: for want of a nail the world was lost. Archie fingered the nail he’d brought with him from the old forge, just in case.

On the other hand, he didn’t want to go to the other extreme either. Excessive luxury was just as deadly. Genghis Khan growing fat and corpulent on cheese and wine. Alexander the Great overdosing on women. Or was it men? He couldn’t quite remember. Not that it made much difference in the end.

In the inter-net zone in the lobby of the hotel Archie sat at his booth and Googled in the simple things. ‘Where does the wind come from?’ ‘What is the North Pole?’ ‘What is north of the North Pole?’ He sat studying the answers, which were almost as remarkable as Gobhlachan’s eternal puzzles.

There was the Geographic North Pole, of course. But also, apparently, the Magnetic North Pole and the Geomagnetic North Pole and the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility. But the only thing that remained with Archie was this: ‘Geographic North defines latitude
90
per cent. In whichever direction you are travelling from here, you are always heading south.’

‘That’s it!’ said Archie. To go forever south, even if it was west or east or north or south. But then again, he realised, these notions would be completely meaningless at the Pole itself. There would be no north or east or west – just south. Maybe that was the case everywhere. Perhaps there was no north or west or east or south anywhere. They were just ways of putting things, like the ways in which Gobhlachan would put things in a story, or in the smithy. Where this thing larger than yourself was called a giant, and this other thing smaller than yourself was called a dwarf, and this thing that took you away was called a bull or a horse or a fairy or a toad. And the thing that was dangerous was called an enemy, though sometimes too he was called a friend.

And if that was true of the Pole, must it not also be true of the wind? This thing that swept across the globe and had killed so many that day, taking every roof and outhouse, every cart and plough, every living being with it in its outstretched arms? Which then stroked your face on a summer’s day. Did it really have sinewy muscles and full-blown-out-cheeks as in the old illustrations, or was that just a way of putting things? Did it actually start somewhere – was there an oven, or a forge, or a smithy, or a hole, or a machine out of which it came, like a baby, or a foal, or a calf or a potato, which, after all, grew and grew and grew from a small seed? The great story of God and the seed of the wind.

He looked about him in the airless lobby, men all crouched over their laptops or terminals. A singular woman sat in the corner fanning herself with a newspaper. Flies buzzed about the rows of strip-lights above the computer booths. Through the thick double-glazed windows vehicles moved soundlessly outside. There must have been a wind, for suddenly a discarded chip-box flew through the air and a garage door opposite began to open and close haphazardly.

How it would come in the early spring, sprinkling the ground with blossom and flowers. And how it would serve as a magic carpet for the bees in May-time, moving them from one purple clover to the other. And how – during those hot days when he bent over the peat in the heather – the warm wind would come and relieve him instantly of the flies and midges and clegs which lay in their thousands all over his bitten body. And then there were those autumn days when he used to go fishing, and he had to literally push the boat out into the water because it was so still and calm and how he had to row out for miles beyond the Lighthouse Point (
Rubh’ an t-Solais
) before he could catch the wind which was trapped behind the high ridge, but once you hit the Point there it came, that old friend, softly touching your face and riffling his fingers through your hair and raising the collar of your cotton shirt before he punched the sails which all of a sudden filled with his spirit and flew, like a kite, across the water as you flung out the net behind, in the vain hope of catching the silver darlings.

And one night – oh, this was a long time before Bella – how he had lain with Christina in the barley sheaves, with the wind flinging the awns about their heads and the grain in their eyes and ears and hair as they lay twined in the stubble which neither of them noticed or felt till afterwards, when they lay back awkwardly staring up at the breeze moving the golden spikelets between them and the sky.

That was the day of the wren: the day the wren came and rested on Christina’s hand as she lay sleeping, with not a breath of air stirring in the whole universe.

So Archie typed in ‘wind’. Or, more precisely: ‘Where does the wind come from?’

And this marvel before him displayed an answer which convinced him.