Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

woman, I
didn’t add.
    She took it as a compliment, and thus paid me one by not
recognising the stiff-kneed priggishness that my remark
represented.
    ‘It’s the tinker way,’ she said, giving me
another small shock. ‘We talk as we please.’
    I couldn’t come back on that, so I ploughed on.
    ‘We have to understand the Possession,’ I
explained self-righteously, ‘to understand the
Deliverance.’
    ‘But do we understand the Deliverance?’ she asked,
teasing me relentlessly. ‘Do you, Clovis colha
Gree?’
    T can’t say,’ I said – which was true
enough, though ecological with the truth.
    ‘Good,’ Merrial said. ‘We would not
claim to understand it, and we knew the Deliverer better than
most.’ A sly smile. ‘As you know.’
    I nodded, slowly. I knew all right. Despised and feared though
they sometimes are, it is not for nothing that the tinkers are
known as the Deliverer’s children. They worked her will
long ago, in the troubled times, and the benison of that work has
protected them down the generations; that and – on a more
cynical view – their obscure and irreplaceable
knowledge.
    I had heard rumours – always disparaged by the
University historians – of a firmer continuity, a darker
arcana, that linked today’s tinkers and the Deliverer, and
that reached back to times yet more remote, when even the
Possession was but a sapling, its shadow not yet covering the
Earth.
    Her hand covered mine, briefly.
    ‘Don’t talk about it,’ she said.
    So we talked about other things: her work, my work, her
childhood and mine. The glasses were twice refilled. She stood
up, hefting the now empty jug. ‘Same again?’
    I rose too, saying, ‘I’ll get them –
’
    ‘I insist,’ she said, and was gone. I watched the
sway of her hips, the way it carried over to swing her heavy
skirt and ripple the torrent of hair down her back, as she passed
through the crowd and disappeared through the wide door of The
Carronade. My friends observed this attention with sardonic
smiles.
    ‘You’re in for an interesting time, Clovis,’
Jondo remarked. He stroked his long red pony-tail suggestively,
making his girlfriend laugh again. ‘Looks like the
glamour’s got you.’
    Machard smirked. ‘Seriously, man,’ he told me,
‘take care. You don’t know tinks like we do.
They’re faithless, godless, clannish and they don’t
settle down. At best she’ll break your heart, at worst
– ’
    ‘What is the matter with you?’ I hissed, leaning
sideways to keep the girls out of the path of mywrath.
‘Come on, guys, give the lady a chance.’
    My two friends’ expressions took on looks of insolent
innocence.
    ‘Ease off, Clovis,’ said Machard. ‘Just
advice. Ignore it if you like, it’s your
business.’
    ‘Too damn right it is,’ I said. ‘So mind
your own.’ I spoke the harsh words lightly – not
fighting words, but firm. The two lads shrugged and went back to
chatting up their lassies. I was ignored, as Menial had been.
    The late train from Inverness glided down the glen, sparks
from the overhead wire flaring in the twilight, and vanished
behind the first houses. A minute later I could hear the brief
commotion as it stopped at the station, a few streets away. The
clouds and the tops of the hills glowed pink, the same light
reflecting off a solitary airship, heading west. Few lights were
on in the town – half past ten in the evening was far too
early for that – but the houses that spread up the side of
the glen and along the shore were beginning to seem as dark as
the pine forest that began where the dwellings ended.
    Farther up the great glen the side-lights and tail-lights of
vehicles traced out the road’s meander, and the dark green
of the wooded hillsides met the bright green of the lower slopes,
field joined to field, pasture to pasture all the way to where
the haunches of the hills hid the view, and the land was dark.
Somewhere far away, but sounding uncannily close, a wolf howled,
its protracted, sinister note clearly audible above the sounds of
the town and the revelry of the fair.
    The square was becoming more packed and noisy by the minute.
The drinking and dancing would go on for hours. Jugglers and
tumblers, fire-eaters and musicians competed for attention and
spare cash,with each other and with the hawkers. The markets on
summer Thursdays were locally called ‘the fair’, but
only once a month did they amount