A Strange Scottish Shore Read online

  “Wait—you can’t just—”

  Hunter walked to the door, lifted the torch from the sconce on the wall, and knocked three times. The portal swung open, revealing a guard in armor, whose grim, heavy face I recognized as among those who had attended the wedding feast, seven months earlier.

  “Eric!” shouted Silverton.

  “Don’t waste your time, fool. He’s mine. Aren’t you, buddy?” Hunter struck the butt of his pistol against the guard’s leather shoulder. “Yeah, doesn’t talk much, but he can guard a damn door, all right.”

  “Wait! You can’t just leave us here!” I said.

  Hunter turned in the doorway. I couldn’t see his face, but his voice carried cheerfully into the room, as if borne by the light from his torch. “I know, right? Sucks to sit there in a room, dark as s , nowhere to go, nothing to do, no f ing clue when they’re going to let you out. If ever. Anyway. See you later, alligator.”

  “What about food?” Silverton demanded. “My wife’s got to eat something!”

  “In a while, crocodile.”

  The door slammed shut, leaving us in darkness.

  • • •

  For some infinite time, which was likely only a minute or two, we sat quietly. Adjusting, I suppose, to the absence of light.

  “Was this part of your plan?” I asked at last.

  “I suppose that all depends on what you mean by the word plan. One’s always prepared to improvise, should circumstances take an unexpected turn. But I believe we’re back on track now. Everything in hand.”

  I bent my head and tucked it into the soft hollow of Silverton’s shoulder.

  “All right,” he said. “All right. Shall I untie you?”

  “I don’t think it matters. I don’t even feel them anymore. Hands or feet.”

  “Well, you should. Come along.”

  He plucked at the loose end of the rope. My hands fell free, and he repeated the process with my feet.

  “What if he comes back?” I gasped.

  “I don’t give a damn if he does come back, at this point.” Silverton loosened his own bonds and rubbed the newly freed skin. “Anyway, he won’t. Not right away. He’s left us to stew in our juices. A classic technique.” He turned to me and began rubbing my ankles, my wrists. Asked if they felt any better.

  “Yes, a little,” I lied.

  “Come along, then. Up we go. You’ve got to move those legs and arms, my love.”

  He stood and helped me up, supporting me carefully as I rose and wavered on my feet. The room shimmered around me. I closed my eyes and concentrated on Silverton’s hands at my waist, his breath at my hair. The air still smelled of Hunter, of wine and blood. Or perhaps the blood was Silverton’s. I turned in his arms and rested there, thinking how we had stood like this only this morning, just before he took my hand and led me down to the feast below.

  “How is Magnus?” I whispered.

  “He took a few blows, I’m afraid. Still alive, so far as I know.”

  “If only he’d killed Hunter outright, three years ago. Why didn’t he kill him?”

  “Damned if I know for certain. I presumed he took pity on him. Or perhaps he recognized that the fellow came from another world, like his wife. Like me. Thought the fellow might somehow be the key to getting her back.”

  “As we are.” I looked up. “That’s why he took such care of us, isn’t it? Because we’re linked to her. To Helen.”

  “When a chap loves a woman like that, Truelove, the mother of his children, he’s liable to do any number of foolish, reckless acts to get her back.” His arms dropped away. He took my hand and tugged gently. “Come along. You need to move a bit. Loosen those stiff joints of yours.”

  We walked to the bed, but he wouldn’t let me sit. Instead we walked back and forth, back and forth, holding hands in the cold, velvet darkness.

  “I don’t suppose you happen to feel any of Max’s vibrations, at the moment,” Silverton said.

  “Not at present. Why?”

  “Because he couldn’t choose a more opportune time to flex those extraordinary muscles of his, don’t you think? Would solve our difficulties in an instant. Imagine Hunter walking back in to discover you gone.”

  I stopped and turned. “What about you?”

  “My dear,” he said softly, “I can’t possibly leave my friend Magnus in such straits as these.”

  “I’m not leaving without you!”

  “I don’t believe you have a choice. If Max gets hold of you, I mean.”

  “Neither would you.”

  “Can he do that, however? Two people at once?”

  I opened my mouth, and the words died in my throat. A gust of wind rattled the shutters and whistled through the cracks to strike my back. The faint sound of shouting seemed to carry along the air. Silverton gripped my hand.

  “It’s always seemed like a tremendous feat, to me,” he said. “One’s amazing enough. But two at once? How would he manage it?”

  I whispered, “All this time. Have you thought this all along?”

  “I didn’t want to dampen your enthusiasm.”

  I bent my forehead into his chest. “You knew we had no chance. You knew from the beginning.”

  “My dear, that depends on how you define the word chance. I thought I had a chance of heaven on earth, living here with you. I only regretted that my good fortune came at the cost of your own happiness.”

  “But I am happy. I have been happy.”

  “Your face said otherwise, when we stood on that damned windswept headland seven months ago, having lost any hope that Max would turn up and do his bit.”

  “That was before. That was only because I didn’t know yet.”

  “Know what?”

  I shook my head mutely. He sighed and took my face in his hands and kissed me.

  “Never mind, Truelove,” he said. “I understand what you mean.”

  I put my hands on his chest and stared at my fingers. “Besides, what if you’re the one he brings back, and I’m left behind?”

  He laughed. “I doubt that extremely. Max and I may be good chums and all that, but I can’t imagine he’d go to all that trouble to haul my amiable carcass back inside his century, instead of yours.”

  “It’s not necessarily his choice, is it? He didn’t choose to bring Tadeas through. He didn’t even know he could, or that Tadeas was there to begin with. The power—whatever it was—guided him to that spot, to that cliff. Max was only the instrument.”

  Silverton went still. His lips rested against my forehead, his hands still clasped the back of my head. He smelled of wool, of dirt and perspiration. I could hear his heartbeat, I could feel the whir of his blood as we stood there near the window on our aching feet, surrounded by night. The absence of light heightens all the other senses.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “Rules, Truelove. I was thinking about rules.”

  “Like a schoolroom?”

  “Like the universe. Everything’s guided by rules, isn’t it? Even the things we don’t understand. Our whole lives are spent trying to determine what the rules are. Whether to follow them, how to break them. Whether they can be broken at all.”

  “That’s a fascinating observation,” I said, into the hollow of his throat, “but apropos of what?”

  He stepped back. “Could we possibly manage to get this brazier lit, do you think?”

  • • •

  My notebooks were still in the chest we had brought from the hut. Silverton drew out the topmost one and thumbed through the pages. “To think all our troubles were caused by this damned little book,” he said. “If Hunter weren’t so seduced by its possible contents as to enter your hotel chamber in the middle of the night—God, the good old North British—”

  “I don’t know why. We knew so little whe
n I composed these notes.”

  “What’s this here?” He pointed to a page.

  I peered closely. We were sitting on the rug by the brazier, trying to read from its feeble light. “It’s a sort of diagram,” I said. “I was trying to come up with a possible chronology. To find a pattern. But I was looking at it the wrong way. This notebook is useless, really.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes. It was Hunter who gave me the necessary insight.”

  “That’s decent of him.”

  “He didn’t mean to, of course. But when he spoke to us in Thurso, he told us he was born in 1985, and suddenly it all came—”

  “I beg your pardon. Did you say he was born in 1985? Seven decades from when we first met him?”

  “Didn’t you know that? You didn’t blink when he mentioned the Olympics.”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I suppose I thought he meant 1884. Although that wouldn’t make sense, either, since they’ve only held the Games since—what was it—’96? I just never imagined . . . How extraordinary . . . Are you quite certain?”

  “Quite certain. He meant the 1984 Olympics, not 1884, which means he was born a year later. And that’s what he meant, back on Skyros, when he told Max that it wasn’t what he’d done, it’s what he would do, some day in the future. You see, Max is apparently going to write a book about all this, and Hunter’s going to read it—”

  “But wait a moment. Won’t we all be dead by then? By 1985?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  Silverton sat back on his heels and frowned at the notebook. “Well, it doesn’t make sense. If Hunter’s come from the future, when we’re all dead, then who did the hocus-pocus? Who sent him to us?”

  “I—I don’t know. I suppose I thought—somehow Max—”

  “Sent himself into the future, just to send Hunter back to plague us?”

  “Well, but Hunter’s necessary, in his way. None of this would have happened if Hunter hadn’t arrived in our time, starting things in motion. Tadeas would have died, falling off his cliff. So Hunter’s a necessary evil.”

  “Only if everything works out, however. But assuming that’s true, how does Max get to the future in the first place? Is it even possible?”

  I took the notebook from him and flipped through the pages, until I came to the drawing of the cliffs of Skyros. I touched my finger to the empty space that contained no sketch of a female figure. No embellishment, like the page we had discovered inside the chest from Hoy. “I’ve come to believe that anything’s possible,” I said.

  “Possible, then,” said Silverton. “But I’m afraid we’re going to have to consider another explanation entirely, and one that throws a wrench into all our philosophizing.”

  “What’s that?”

  Silverton stared into the meager fire inside the brazier and rubbed his bearded chin. “The possibility of another actor. Somebody else who shares Max’s power, at some point in the future. Somebody, it seems, who doesn’t wish us well.”

  • • •

  The hours fled without measurement, with no sign of food or company. The immediate crisis past, I became aware of a deep, almost painful hunger, and realized I hadn’t properly eaten since breakfast. My stomach growled angrily. I asked Silverton whether we should attempt to escape. Surprise the guard outside our room, overcome him, and flee before anyone could find us.

  “It’s too risky,” he said. “If we’re caught, God knows what he’ll do to us.”

  “We don’t know what he plans to do to us, in any case.”

  “Bide awhile, Truelove. You can’t rush these things. You have to strike when the moment’s right, when your chance opens.”

  “What if this is our chance? Our only chance?”

  “Then it’s a rotten one and not worth the trouble. Go to sleep. I’ll keep watch.”

  I wanted to say that I couldn’t sleep, not famished like this. But Silverton hadn’t eaten, either, had he, and he didn’t complain. There was a little water left in the pitcher. I swallowed a mouthful and we returned to the wall, where Silverton carefully retied our bindings and settled me into his lap.

  “I’m damned hungry, Truelove,” he said, stroking my hair. “Are you hungry?”

  “A little.”

  “A little. Well, I’d make love to you to help you forget your miseries, but I’m too damned bruised, and we’d only end up hungrier than before. Besides, I’ve already trussed us up again. Mind you, there are some who prefer it that way.”

  I laughed softly into his velvet tunic.

  “I shall get you out of this, Truelove,” he said. “I promise.”

  “We’ll get out of this together.” I said it with conviction, a little too loud, as if I were trying to convince us both. And maybe I did convince myself that we would escape this prison together, for I fell deeply asleep, there on his lap while his hand stroked my hair.

  I know this because when I woke sometime afterward, a faint dawn had just begun to creep through the shutters, illuminating the figure of a woman who must certainly have belonged to my dreams.

  I raised my head. “Helen?”

  She crouched down next to me, and her face was more ghost than dream: pale, drawn, lined, unbeautiful.

  “Come with me, quickly,” she said. “I need your help.”

  The Lady begged her son for mercy, but his soul was cold and empty, and her pleas fell upon indifferent ears. Her son handed her the suit she had once worn and said, ‘Take this and cover your nakedness, so that my father will not see your shame, and the body you have defiled in the squalor of an adulterous bed . . .’

  THE BOOK OF TIME, A. M. HAYWOOD (1921)

  Fifteen

  At the sound of Helen’s voice, Silverton startled awake, knocking his knee into my ear. “My God!” he exclaimed. “Who the devil are you?”

  “You must be Lord Silverton,” she said. “My name is Helen. Magnus’s wife.”

  “But what—the guard—”

  She held up a knife.

  “You killed him?” I gasped.

  “He may live,” she said, shrugging, “and if he doesn’t, it’s no more than he deserves. There’s a reason the punishment for sleeping on sentry duty is death.”

  I tried to rise, but the cords around my wrists and ankles hampered me. Helen leaned forward with her knife, but I waved her away and pulled the loose end, as Silverton had shown me. I still felt I was in a dream. My mind was slow and clumsy, and so were my hands. The brazier had gone out, the room was cold. My fingers were so frozen, I could scarcely feel them. “How did you get here? Max?”

  “Yes. I wish I could explain, but we haven’t any time.”

  Silverton had already slipped free from his bindings and helped me with mine. “You’re mad,” he said. “Have you got any idea what’s going on? A damned foolish—”

  “Yes, I know. Why do you think I’m here? I need your help.”

  “Our help? I thought you were helping us!” I said.

  “To do what?” asked Silverton darkly.

  Helen was rubbing my ankles—not out of sympathy, I suspected, but to get me on my feet as quickly as possible. “To free him,” she said. “To free Magnus.”

  “You realize he’s languishing in the dungeon right now, don’t you? Guarded by a dozen men, at least.”

  “Of course I do.” She straightened. “Why do you think I came to fetch you first? Now hurry, before someone walks by and discovers what I’ve done to that chap outside the door.”

  • • •

  Dawn lay chill and quiet about the walls of the castle as we stole down the corridor to the rear staircase. Silverton led the way, because he was the one who knew where to find it—a small, narrow set of steps that led down to the storerooms, through which the dungeons might be accessed.

  Though the eerie stillness allowed us to creep und
etected, it fed my anxiety. “Where is everybody?” I whispered to Silverton as we paused to turn a corner.

  “I expect they’re asleep,” he whispered. “Magnus’s men in the dungeon, Hunter’s chaps either drunk or exhausted, or both.”

  “They’re drunk,” said Helen, in disgust. “Every last man.”

  I wanted to ask more, but Silverton gave the all clear and we scurried painfully down the hall to the next corner. When we reached the relative privacy of the staircase, I whispered to Helen again.

  “What about Hunter?”

  “I haven’t seen him. I hope to God I don’t. I couldn’t bear it.”

  She spoke so coldly, I stifled any further questions, and in any case we had just reached the bottom of the staircase and entered the dark, dank space in the castle’s netherworld. Silverton paused at the corner and stretched out his neck. With one hand he motioned us forward, and we followed him down a narrow walkway, until he ducked to the right, into a small, windowless room filled with baskets, smelling powerfully of fish. Helen put her hand to her mouth.

  “I apologize.” Silverton drew the door in behind him, allowing a few inches of light. “It seems they use this space for storing the dried cod in winter.”

  I turned to the baskets and lifted the lid, and Silverton was right—it was half-filled with filets of white, dry fish. “Thank God,” I said, and put one to my mouth. It was like chewing leather, only it tasted of fish, but I was too hungry to care.

  Silverton watched me. “Do you know, I’ve been flung together with any number of unusual colleagues in my years of service, some of them more striking in their habits and persons than others. But I’ve never had the pleasure of undertaking a mission with two gravid women.”

  I handed him a filet. “Here. You’ll be glad for it later.”

  He frowned and took it, and after a certain mature consideration, Helen accepted another. I propped myself against one of the baskets, and for a moment we stood there, recovering our breath and our wits, while the air made clouds of our breath. I had slipped on a woolen overdress, and Silverton had done likewise. Helen’s costume was similar but too short, as if she had taken it from someone else’s wardrobe. Well, presumably she had.