Fire Bringer (36 page)

She led them straight along the mountainside to the cave mouth. It was a narrow opening with a boulder lip, but inside it was unexpectedly large. It was dry too and comparatively warm. Crak hopped around delightedly while Bracken laid down by the entrance and closed her eyes. But as Rannoch entered the cave mouth he stopped and his ears came up.

‘What is it, Rannoch?’ asked Willow.

‘I don’t know,’ said Rannoch.

‘Man?’ whispered Willow.

‘Yes. But long, long ago. It’s. . . it’s like that place on the hill. Do you remember? Only much older. Much, much older. And. . . there’s something else. Something familiar yet. . . yet very strange.’

With that there was a cry from Bankfoot.

‘Come and l-l-look,’ he called.

He was standing at the back of the cave and Rannoch and the others joined him. Outside the snow had stopped temporarily and the clouds were suddenly punctured, letting through a shaft of bright moonlight that reached to the back wall. As their eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, they saw what had startled him. On the arching wall of the cave, faint but unmistakable, were the coloured images of running deer. The sight hushed the friends. They looked at each other in the gloom with their huge, startled eyes, but this was quite beyond their understanding.

‘Come on, let’s get some sleep,’ whispered Rannoch after a while.

‘Quite right. Quite right,’ cried Crak.

The deer and the bird settled themselves in the cave. It was a haunting place and as they listened to the screaming wind outside and thought of the god who was said to haunt the mountain and of the images on the wall, some of them wished they had never set foot in it at all.

A small pool at the back of the cave, fed by the steady drippings from the roof, had frozen up and when the draughts of air brushed across it they came to the deer chill and bitter; but the cave was considerably warmer than the world without.

Willow had sat down at Rannoch’s side and now she laid her head on his flanks and closed her eyes. Crak, who himself was quite exhausted, hopped to a corner of the cave and now he stood quite motionless, his head tucked low into his great, black wings.

As Rannoch lay there he suddenly felt angry and ashamed.

‘I’m sorry, Willow,’ he murmured. ‘If I’d lost you I don’t know what I would have done. I should never have tried to climb the Great Mountain, Herne or no Herne.’

But the young hind was already fast asleep.

The only sound in the cave now was the deer’s breathing and the moaning wind. Rannoch’s eyes strayed towards those images on the wall and then he looked towards the ice pool. He didn’t know why, but he felt as if something in that pool held a message. Rannoch closed his eyes and slept.

In his sleep Rannoch had the sense that he was coming closer to a great mystery. It had something to do with the cave and the mountain, and it lay in the real world around him.

In truth the deer had indeed come to a very mysterious place. For here, thousands of years before, the first men to inhabit the land of Scotia had lived and hunted, eaten and slept and painted their strange pictures on the walls.

But apart from man and his images, there was something else in that cave on the Great Mountain. Rannoch had sensed it when he first entered the place. Something that linked him and his kind to the land and the centuries. In that pool, down through the fissured ice, lay something discarded by time: a fossil. It had been changed into stone by prehistory, just as the cold had changed and hardened the form of the water.

At the pool’s bottom lay the fossilized remains of an antler. But it was no antler that Rannoch and the others would have understood. It was the beam of a creature named Megaloceros; a deer that had once stood six feet tall and whose antlers in turn rose six feet in height above its mighty head. It had belonged to the giant of deer, long since vanished from the planet, which, ten thousand years before, had been driven by the weather from its natural home on the plains to die up here on the mountain.

Rannoch woke. He had sensed a change in Bracken’s breathing. The deer sounded in great pain and she wheezed terribly as she struggled for air. But Rannoch didn’t wake her. He knew that the best healer now was rest.

The storm was growing worse and worse. In the valleys below, crofters and villagers looked up at the slopes of the Great Mountain and shuddered. They knew that the weather would bring death to any man or animal caught on its slopes. Indeed, when it cleared and the snow lay calm again on its sides, the broken bodies that were hidden under its icy shroud included both man and beast. High in the foothills a young man had been caught in the blizzard and now he lay buried, his once warm body as cold as stone.

Bird and animal had fallen into its clutches too. Sheep and ram were sealed in its winter tomb; a vixen that had strayed foolishly from her set lay hardening in the white, and even cattle had strayed too far into the foothills, never to return to their winter pasture. They lay trapped in the glistening powders, a mute testament to life and death.

All night the blizzard raged and the red deer slept fitfully in the cave. They heard the wind die in the middle of the next morning. Tain was the first to venture outside. The cave mouth was now completely blocked with snow and he was forced to carve through the snow wall with his antlers and push clear with his head. But when at last he had made an opening, the sunshine streamed through gloriously. The others began to help him and soon they were all outside on the crisp ground, enjoying the winter sunshine and the fresh air and thanking Herne they were still alive.

With Crak flapping above them, the deer began to thread their way slowly back along the path towards the spot where they had descended the night before. Some way beyond it the ground opened again and they found that the way was easier.

It was a strange sight. High on the side of the Great Mountain, moving in single file, seven red deer rising up and up through the winter white. Like the mountaineers in days far ahead who rope themselves together in moving lines, the deer followed carefully in one another’s slots, leaping now and then to free their thin legs from the deep powder.  As they went, Tain could hardly contain his excitement.

‘Just think of it,’ he kept saying. ‘The Great Mountain. Only Starbuck crossed it in winter and now I’m doing it. Oh, what a story this will make. I wonder what we’ll really find on the top.’

This made the others look at each other nervously. The morning and the bright sunshine had done something to dispel their night terrors, but now the thought of Herne made the mountain suddenly seem terrible and threatening once more.

Willow frowned at Rannoch.

‘Do you think He’s up there?’ she whispered.

Rannoch lifted his antlers. The sky was as blue as a crocus. The snow flashed and sparked in the sunshine and crunched pleasantly under the deer’s feet. Now and then gentle gusts of wind would lift its surface around them and whirl the snow into the icy air.

‘I don’t know,’ he said quietly.

It was close to afternoon when the deer neared the summit and found they had to traverse one last steep ridge. But when they finally reached the top, the mountain opened broad and flat in front of them. A southerly wind was blowing and, out of excitement and relief, the deer started to race through the snow. Rannoch looked up to see Crak circling above his head.

‘Goodbye. Goodbye,’ called the bird. ‘You’ve done it. You’ve climbed the Great Mountain in winter. That’s something to tell them. You’ve come to the highest place in the Great Land. Sgorr can’t touch you now. Perhaps deer really can fly. Crak, Crak.’

‘Thank you, my friend,’ called Rannoch. ‘We couldn’t have done it without you.’

But as the bird rose into the air something extraordinary happened. Tain, who was below him, realized that he could understand what the bird was saying too.

‘Good luck. You’re really in the High Land now,’ called Crak.

‘But, Crak. Won’t you stay a while?’ cried Rannoch after him.

‘No. No. Crak, Crak. I must get back to my own. But I’ll see you again, Rannoch. Farewell. Farewell.’

The raven circled higher and higher until he became a tiny black speck etched against the blue. Then he was gone.

Rannoch ran on, his heart suddenly expectant. The others were ahead of him now and when he came to a halt next to Willow, the deer were silent. Rannoch’s heart began to race as he followed their gaze. They could see right across the mountain top. But if they had expected to find Herne they were disappointed. There was no one there at all.

Instead the land of Scotia lay glittering before them, mountains and valleys, swathed in white, floating below like mighty clouds. They could see for miles across the deep blue sky. But what they saw made them question. None of the deer had really known what to expect but after Tain’s story each had associated the High Land with Herne and the forest. But now, as they looked north, they did not see mighty forests at all but bleak, treeless hills, rising and falling, and bare moors cut by huge lochs and rivers.

Thistle was the first to speak.

‘Well, Tain, Herne’s Wood, eh? A place where the deer may be safe? It looks more dangerous than any country I have ever seen. Look how exposed we shall be.’

‘That was just a story,’ said Tain coldly, but in his heart he was deeply worried too.

‘W-w-well, we can’t stay here,’ said Bankfoot.

He was looking towards the west and the others immediately realized what he meant. Great, heavy snow clouds were billowing before them. The weather was changing again.

‘We should get down the other side as quickly as possible,’ said Tain.

He looked over to Rannoch and the deer nodded. So, with Tain leading, the stags began to descend. Only Rannoch lingered, with Willow at his side.

‘Come on, Rannoch, we should be going,’ she said.

‘You go, Willow. I want to be alone up here a while. Maybe He’ll come if I’m alone. Don’t worry, I’ll join you soon.’

Willow nodded and set off after the others. There, on the top of the Great Mountain, Rannoch stood alone, and he felt bitterly disappointed. He suddenly let out a bellow.

‘Herne,’ he cried. ‘Where are you, Herne? I’d thought to find you here. Do you really exist except in dreams?’

But nothing returned to the deer except the aching silence of the world.

Rannoch began to move forward and then to run. But as Rannoch ran something overcame him. His eyes were open and yet he didn’t see the snow beneath his feet. It was as though he could suddenly see miles ahead of him, out onto the moors across the High Land. He could see herds of wild deer moving freely across them. Then images came to him from his dreams, and though he knew he wasn’t asleep, they were as clear as the day.

‘The forest. The forest is always with you,’ he heard himself crying, and there was triumph in that cry.

As Rannoch ran on in his waking dream his eyes began to mist over and when they cleared he saw a sight that made his head swim.

In front of him, in the snow, stood a mighty deer.

Its body was larger than a full-grown stag, with antlers that arced high above its strange head. But they were not like any antlers of this world. Two tines bore out straight ahead and above the strange palmed bez tines long hoops of bone flowered into brave coronets. The creature’s face was covered almost completely in fur, below its muzzle there billowed a mighty white mane, and its hoofs were black. Rannoch stopped and blinked and then his breath failed him as he realized that this was no vision at all, but as real as the mountain and the snow and the cold, cold air.

‘Herne,’ he gasped.’Herne. You’ve come at last.’

16 Birrmagnur

‘And now the leaves suddenly lose strength’. Philip Larkin

As Rannoch approached the deer god nervously it dropped its great, shaggy head and let out a low bellow that seemed to make the whole mountain shake. Rannoch froze.

‘Herne,’ he whispered again.

But at this the strange apparition pushed forward his muzzle and seemed to chew the air. His thick, wide lips began to quiver and, to his horror and then amazement, Rannoch realized that the god was laughing.

‘Why do you call me Hoern?’ the creature said suddenly in an extraordinary, singing voice.

Rannoch stared back in utter bewilderment.

‘Because I thought . . . I thought you. . .’

‘I see what you thought I was,’ chuckled the animal, still munching the air. ‘Most gratifying. But you are wrong. My name is Birrmagnur. I am flesh and blood, like you, I think.’

‘Yes. I can see that now,’ said Rannoch, feeling deeply embarrassed. ‘But what are you? I mean, I don’t want to be rude, you look like a deer but. . . but if I may say so, a very strange deer indeed.’

‘I could say the same for you,’ answered the animal slowly, chewing the air again as though ruminating on his thoughts. His expression was still very amused.

‘I am rangifer,’ he answered quietly. ‘A reindeer.’

‘A reindeer?’ exclaimed Rannoch, almost as amazed as if it had been Herne. Rannoch had heard tell of the reindeer in stories, but he had never actually seen one and he had always thought they only existed in fable.

‘That is right. Who are you?’

‘My name is Rannoch.’

‘Well, Rannoch, I am pleased to meet you,’ said the reindeer politely.

‘And I you. But tell me, what are you doing so high on the Great Mountain?’

‘Before you came I was trying to graze’.

‘To graze? Up here? But what about the storm?’

‘It was bad, but I am used to such weather where I come from.’

‘Where you come from?’

‘I am from across the northern seas. The reindeer call it Druugroot, or the Land of the Northern Snows.’

‘From beyond the seas? But how?’ said Rannoch, in even more amazement.

‘It is a long story,’ answered the reindeer rather sadly, ‘but I came with men in their carved trees and now I try to go home.’

‘You’ve spent time with man?’ asked Rannoch with surprise.

‘Yes,’ said the reindeer casually.

‘Are you alone?’

‘Now I am. I was separated from the others long ago. Seven bulls and twenty females. It’s the females I miss the most, but I doubt I shall see their antlers again.’