“Just that there are those who have heard that there is a cave on the Misty Isle, and that you might know the way.” “How do I know you are who you say you are?” I did not know him then at all, and never knew him well, but his eyes became guarded, and his head cocked to one side. “And they say there is a king across it,” I told him. I pointed to the burn as it splashed its way between us on its journey down the hill. Go on.”Įxpressions crossed the boy’s face-puzzlement, hunger, happiness-and then he turned and ran back to the white house.Ĭalum MacInnes said, “Who sent you here?” “Tell your mother I said she was to give you some tablet. Then he said, “Calum, go back to the house.” There is a certain cave on the Misty Isle.” “For there are some who say it does not exist. “And where is it you would wish to be taken?” “What business would you have with Calum MacInnes?” If you are not he, tell me now, and I will be on my way.” He said nothing in return, only stared I am used to stares. There are no wolves in those hills, not any longer, and the bears have gone too. His hair was streaked with grey, his face was long and wolfish. I had thrown a hundred stones when the boy returned, accompanied by a tall, loping man. I have a good eye, and I enjoyed rattling the pebbles over the meadow and into the water. There were pebbles on the ground and I made a pile of them, and I tossed the pebbles, one by one, into the burn. It was a good-sized house: I would have taken it for the house of a doctor or a man of law, not of a border reaver. I sat by the burn and looked up at the house. I maintained the Campbells’ ownership of them had ended the first night the cows had come with me over the hills.” “It was a disagreement about the ownership of cattle. Then he said, “Why were the Campbells after you?” And they’d had me, and still I walked out the door and through their fingers.” “It was no boy,” I told him, “but me myself, it was. But nobody had told them that I was a wee man, or if that had been told them, it had not been believed.” They knew that I was a most dangerous person. And she said, ‘Young Johnnie, run down to the far meadow, and tell your father to come back to the house, that I sent for him.’ And the Campbells watched as the boy ran out the door. There was a night when the Campbells came knocking on my door, a whole troop of them, twelve men with knives and sticks, and they demanded of my wife, Morag, that she produce me, as they were there to kill me, in revenge for some imagined slight. “It’s not a bad thing to be small, young Calum. Man’s business.” And I saw a smile start at the tips of his lips. I said, “Because I have something to ask your father. “But I am a man, nonetheless, and I am here to see Calum MacInnes.” I said, “Your father, perhaps? Would he be Calum MacInnes as well?” The boy said nothing, just unknotted a thick clump of sheep’s wool from the clutching fingers of the thorn-bush. “Is there another of that name? For the Calum MacInnes that I seek is a grown man.” The boy nodded, drew himself up to his full height, which was perhaps two fingers bigger than mine, and he said, “I am Calum MacInnes.” I had walked many a mile, and had many more miles to go. He looked shocked, as if I had appeared out of nowhere. My mother would wash it, then she would make me things with it. Gather the wool from the thorn-bushes and twigs. He did not see me approaching, and he did not look up until I said, “I used to do that. First, there was the valley on the mainland, the whitewashed house in the gentle meadow with the burn splashing through it, a house that sat like a square of white sky against the green of the grass and the heather just beginning to purple.Īnd there was a boy outside the house, picking wool from off a thornbush. If you walk the path, eventually you must arrive at the cave.īut that was later. I would say that I found him by accident, but I do not believe in accidents. I had searched for nearly ten years, although the trail was cold. I hate myself for that, and nothing will ease that, not even what happened that night, on the side of the mountain. During that year I forbade her name to be mentioned, and if her name entered my prayers when I prayed, it was to ask that she would one day learn the meaning of what she had done, of the dishonour that she had brought to my family, of the red that ringed her mother’s eyes. But I will not forgive myself for the year that I hated my daughter, when I believed her to have run away, perhaps to the city. You ask me if I can forgive myself? I can forgive myself for many things.
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