Chaos Clock

The rising wind howled through the small trees at the water’s edge, flattening the grass between the village and the loch.

“Hurry. We don’t have much time.”

The Smith took no notice.

“The blade will not be hurried.” He raised the hammer and brought it down once more on the edge of the sword he was forging. “Are the children away?”

“Yes. The village is empty save for us four. Listen.”

Twisted into the noise of the wind were other sounds: voices, howling, roars, grinding.

The Chief caught the Smith’s arm as he raised it again. “There is no more time. Quench the blade.”

The Smith nodded shortly. “Go. Stand with the others. I will bring the sword.” He raised it from the great, blackened oak stump that served as an anvil and, his hand protected by thick layers of leather, dropped it into the tub of water. The water boiled as it cooled the metal and the air filled with the reek of hot bronze. Satisfied, the Chief lifted the deerskin, which served as a door curtain.

Outside in the twilight, two women waited: the Wise Woman and the Smith’s wife. They stood braced against the wind, looking around for the source of the howls and cries that it carried to them.

The Wise Woman handed the Chief a spear,
bronze-headed
with a shaft of rowan wood. In her right hand she held a bronze dagger with a hilt of polished bone. The Smith’s wife had a throwing-axe, also of bronze, jet-handled.

“Where is the sword?” The Wise Woman shouted over the chaos of noise.

“In the quenching tub. A few more seconds …”

The loch in front of them began to seethe. The Smith’s wife gasped and gripped the axe harder. Thunder growled behind the hill.

The Smith came out of the hut carrying the sword, with its deerskin grip and the piece of gold set into the pommel, as the storm broke over them.

Sheets of water so heavy it could scarcely be called rain beat at them, flattening the grass around them and bending the trees. Lightning cracked the darkening sky and thunder roared and growled.

Out of the storm rode the Lords of Chaos – beasts, horned and fanged, human forms and some figures that were both or neither. At their head were the Great Ones: the Queen of Darkness, crowned with stars, on a night-black horse whose eyes burned like coals; the Water Witch, rain pouring from her uplifted hands; the Hunter, horned and owl-eyed, daubed with blood; and the Lightning King, gaunt and dark, his robes whipping in the wind, blue eyes blazing, lightning splitting the air around him.

The four villagers drew closer together, impossibly fragile in the face of the onslaught of Chaos.

“Not yet,” called the Chief. “They must be closer.”

Without looking around, he held out his hand to the Smith.

“Give me the sword. Take the spear, throw when I tell you.”

“No.”

“Yes. The sword is for me to use. Take the spear.” He turned to look at the Smith. “You cannot play my part in this battle.”

The Smith smiled. “I know what your part is to be. The sword is of my forging. I will use it.”

“Fool! I must pay the price, not you.”

“Quickly! They are upon us.” The Wise Woman shouted to be heard over the storm, and then, truly, there was no more time. The Chief and the Wise Woman began to chant and suddenly the weapons blazed with golden light.

Far beyond the other side of the loch, the rest of the village watched the golden light battle the darkness and lightning across the sky, and the Smith’s children waited fearfully for their parents.

For the best part of an hour they watched, as the light and dark waxed and waned and the thunder roared over the hill, then, as suddenly as it had begun, the storm ceased and the lights died away, and the stars shone as they should.

And the people waited.

The empty village was silent. Outside the forge were four people, the weapons in their hands bent and broken and blackened. Of the Lords of Chaos there was
no sign. The Smith lay still and flat on the ground, the remains of the sword by his side. The others knelt by him.

“Was it enough?” he asked with an obvious effort.

His wife answered. “It was enough. They are gone and the village is safe.”

He spoke then to the Chief, turning his head a little to see him.

“You are needed more than I am. I am a willing sacrifice.” He was silent for some seconds then added, “It was a good sword.”

He did not speak again.

When his body had been burned with due ceremony and the mourning feast was over, they took the broken weapons and the oak bole down to the water’s edge, at a place where the loch bed dropped sharply away. All the villagers watched as the Smith’s children threw the weapons into the shining water. Then two of the young men heaved the anvil stump in after them.

“It is finished,” said the Chief. “For this time we are safe. The willing sacrifice has been made. Go to your own hearths and give thanks.”

As the people drifted away, the Chief and the Wise Woman were left alone on the shore.

“Why the anvil too?” she asked him.

“The power of the forging passed into it as well as into the weapons. It too must pass from our world. The power can be used for ill as readily as for good.” He
sighed, his milky blue gaze on the embers of the Smith’s pyre. “It should not have been him. I have known since the day that the hunters came back to the village and told us they had seen four spirits on the other side of the loch that Chaos was rising and that the battle was drawing near. I was ready.”

“But you said to the villagers – he was the willing sacrifice.”

“But the wrong one! It should have been me who died. I do not know what will come of this …”

The first time she found one of the little handprints, Mary Sinclair didn’t think much about it. She knew it wasn’t a child’s hand – it was too narrow, the fingers too long – so she assumed it must be from a toy; a very detailed toy, to be sure, for you could see the imprint of the lines on the palm and at the knuckles, that had been pressed against the glass as its owner let it look at the wolves, running through the trees.

She squirted it with glass cleaner, polished it away and forgot about it.

“Come on Mum, we’re going to be late.” Kate Dalgliesh stood by the front door, shifting impatiently from foot to foot and twirling a strand of blonde hair between her fingers.

“All right, all right, I’m coming. Where are the car keys?”

Kate rolled her eyes. “They’re here by the front door. I told you already.”

“I’ve just got to get Ben’s shoes on.” Her mother’s voice sounded muffled, as though her head was in a wardrobe.

It probably was, Kate thought. “They’re here too,”
she called.

“Oh. Okay.”

Ben came rushing round the corner, a toy plane clutched in one hand, making death-to-all-earthlings noises, closely followed by Ruth, Kate’s mother. She wrestled him into his shoes and picked up the car keys she had carefully filed on the floor by the front door so she couldn’t lose them.

“Ready?”

“Mum, I’ve been standing here for ten minutes.”

“Two,” said Ruth.

Kate grinned. “Five.”

“Okay, five. Now let’s go. David will think you’ve forgotten.”

The monkey wore a golden hat, collar and skirt. There was a bell on her tail and bracelets of gold on her arms. She held a handle, which looked as if it should turn an enormous wheel of rusty looking metal, linked in its turn to others. From behind the assembly of cogs and gears peered out a great bearded man, hung about with chains.

David stared and stared and stared, brown eyes wide.

“Well, what do you think?”

He’d been so absorbed that Kate’s voice coming from behind him made him jump, and when he turned to her, it was with a look of baffled delight on his face.

“It’s incredible. How long has it been here?”

“Since the New Year. It’s called the Millennium Clock.”

They both craned their necks upward looking at the top of the clock, almost two storeys above them.

“It’s like a rocket, or a church spire or something.”

“Wait ’til you hear it.”

“Does it chime?”

“Nothing as boring as that. Just wait. We’ll come back at three.”

David dragged his gaze away, pushing his dark hair out of his eyes. “I suppose we’d better go and start this project. What time’s your mum coming?”

“Ben’s show finishes at half past three, so just after that.”

They picked up their rucksacks and wandered away from the clock, talking, past the two rows of chairs with their high linked backs that looked like a whale’s rib bones.

On one of them sat a white-haired old man in a checked jacket, who watched them from milky blue eyes. There was an open sketch pad on his knees, with a half-done drawing of the clock. Immersed in talk, they passed him unaware, but he turned slowly to watch them until they were lost in a group at the doorway to the new part of the museum.

Kate and David had a lot of talking to catch up on. David had only been back from Houston for three weeks and they’d been apart for a whole year. They’d talked on the phone of course during that time and written and emailed each other, but it wasn’t the same as being together and just talking. Neither of them had realised
quite how much they’d missed each other until David came back and they started again.

Neither of them could remember a time before they’d been friends. They’d been together since they were just a few months old, starting nursery together.

They’d stayed friends all the way up primary school and even David’s time in Houston – where his father, who worked for one of the oil companies, had been sent for a year – didn’t seem to have changed anything.

They headed down the wooden steps towards the bottom floor of the New Museum (officially the Museum of Scotland, but they never called it that), where the oldest things were, the ones that would help them with “Scotland’s Early People”. Jamie Grieve, the self-appointed class clown, had said did that mean postmen and newsagents, and Mrs Henderson had looked at him, not very amused, while the rest of the class laughed much too loudly for such a feeble joke.

“Let’s go and look at the animals before we start,” said David, and they turned into the gallery with the long diorama of the animals that used to roam Scotland before people did: bear and wild pig, a beaver suspended mid-splash, wolves howling among the trees and the little lemming tucked up warmly beneath the snow.

David peered around the edge of the winter scene into the corner and gave a yelp of pleasure. “It’s still there. I thought somebody with no sense of humour would have taken it away by now.”

He’d been looking at a little snowman, hidden away
where you’d not see it unless you knew where to look.

They made their way between display cases to the screens that showed how the Iron Age people built their houses and settlements, and watched the whole sequence three times, sitting in silence on the dusty seat, writing and drawing.

David glanced at his watch. “It’s ten to three. I want to hear the clock striking – or whatever it does.”

They gathered their things and went back up through the layers of time to the ground floor.

Around the clock, a small crowd had already gathered as though waiting for it to explode out of the glass roof like a firework. As the hands reached the hour, the clock came to life.

First, music, as though an invisible church organ hung in the air. The monkey began to turn her handle and all the wheels and gears in the lowest section started to move. Bathed in red and blue light, the great chained figure behind her looked out from his prison.

Abruptly, the monkey stopped and the middle section of the clock took up the story with bells and wind chimes and grotesque automata bobbing and whirling; and the great convex-mirrored pendulum, a skeleton sitting on top of it, swung slowly, slowly, reflecting the distorted faces of its audience.

Deeper bells sounded now, tolling, not chiming and a circle of figures high above David’s head began to revolve. They were so high that he hadn’t looked at them closely before, but now he saw that they showed people suffering, in pain and frightened. He made out a figure swathed in barbed wire and another with a Star of
David round its neck.

The whole clock was in motion now, the monkey turning her handle, the donkeys shaking the bells in their mouths, red light glowing at the top of the spire.

The monkey stopped again, then the music. The lights died and the whole mechanism gradually came to rest, the last sound the sweet notes of the wind chimes.

When even that had died away, everyone who had been watching and listening was still for a few seconds.

David turned to Kate. “It’s amazing. What’s it about? It’s like a story, but I don’t know what it is.” He was walking around the base of the clock as he spoke, squinting up to the top of the spire, where the donkeys with the bells in their mouths looked out.

“Let’s go upstairs. You can see more of it from there,” suggested Kate, blue eyes shining.

As they started up the steps they heard their names being called and turned to see Ruth and Ben coming towards them.

“You’re early, Mum.”

“We came out at the interval. It was too noisy even for Ben, if you can believe that, and they’d have had to take me out in a straightjacket if we’d stayed until the end. I’ve promised Ben a drink. Do you want to come, or are you too busy with your project?”

“We’ve got time for a break,” said David quickly.

“Come on then.”

They turned away from the stairs to head for the café.

“Ruth, my dear. How good to see you.”

“Mr Flowerdew! How are you?”

It was the old man with the sketch pad.

“Very well thank you. And you and the family?”

“We’re fine,” said Ruth, trying to restrain Ben, who was pulling on her arm, anxious for a can of juice. “Ben’s four and a half now and Kate’s just turned eleven. So has David, of course. You remember David Fairbairn?”

“David, of course. Still like drawing?”

He smiled and nodded, suddenly shy but pleased to have been remembered. Mr Flowerdew had been a friend of Kate’s grandma Alice. David had met him a few times when Grandma Alice looked after Kate and him as she sometimes did when they were small. Mr Flowerdew used to draw for him – dinosaurs and dragons and soldiers mostly – and help him with his own pictures. He’d not seen him since Grandma Alice died when they were eight, but he looked just the same, even the jacket.

“We were just going to the café,” Ruth was saying. “Come and have a cup of tea. It’s too long since we’ve seen you.”

Mr Flowerdew pulled out an old-fashioned pocket watch. “I would love to, my dear, but unfortunately I have to be somewhere else in half an hour. Another time though.”

He shifted his gaze to the children. “I’m often here sketching. Come and find me next time you’re here to do your project and I’ll take you for an ice cream.” He put the watch back in his pocket. “I must be on my way. We’ll see each other soon. Goodbye.” He walked off towards the revolving door, waving over his shoulder as he went.

After they’d had their drinks, as they hurried to get to the car before the parking ticket ran out, David asked Kate the question that had been nagging at him. “How
did he know we were doing a project?”

“What?”

“Mr Flowerdew. How did he know we were here to work on our project?”

Kate frowned, trying to remember how the conversation had gone.

“We didn’t tell him and neither did your mum.”

“And Mrs Henderson only set the project last week and it’s ages since I’ve seen him.”

They thought hard as they went around the revolving door.

“He must just have guessed when he saw me carrying a folder,” said Kate, but she didn’t sound convinced.

On the pavement at the bottom of the stairs a small dog sat, looking up expectantly at the museum, as though waiting for someone to come out.

“Mummy, I want to pat the doggie,” Ben was saying.

“Oh, all right. He looks friendly enough.”

He was some sort of little rough-coated terrier, a Skye or a Border maybe. They all had a turn of
scratching
him behind the ears and under the chin, his bedraggled plume of a tail thumping on the pavement with pleasure.

“I wonder who he belongs to? He’s not wearing a collar,” said David.

“He wasn’t here when we arrived,” said Kate, “was he, Mum?”

“Well, I don’t remember seeing him,” said Ruth. “Anyway, we must go now. I’m sure he’ll be fine. Say goodbye to the doggie, Ben.”

They got to the car just before a traffic warden. As
they drove off, Kate and David looked back, to where the little dog sat, patiently waiting.

That night, David dreamed that he was standing on a beach of small pebbles. Before him lay an enormous lake, stretching into a distance lost in mist. Not a ripple disturbed its surface. It lay heavily and flatly silver like a pool of mercury.

In the dream, he’d been standing there for a long time, staring forward into nothing, afraid to turn his head, when from the corner of his eye, he saw something move on his right and automatically turned sharply to look at it.

He woke with a start, breathing hard and sat up, fumbling for his bedside lamp. Yellow light filled the room, familiar objects all around him. He listened to his heart slow to its normal pace, shivering. The room was cold and David realised he’d forgotten to shut the window. Pushing aside the curtains to reach for the sash, he saw that it was misty outside, the street lamp an uncertain wavering glow instead of the usual clear yellow halo beyond the garden. He shut the window firmly and tugged the curtains together. Before he climbed back into bed he looked at his alarm clock. Quarter past two. He pulled the covers round his ears and shut his eyes.