Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

back.
    Big bare feet stopped in front of her face, in a spreading
stain of water on the concrete tiles. Her gaze tracked up hairy
brown legs, wet stretchedtrunks, hairy brown chest, to a face.
Beaky nose, bright brown eyes, dark red-brown strandy hair swept
back. The man smiled down at her, nodded unconsciously to
himself.
    ‘Myra Godwin?’
    ‘Yeah?’ like, what’s it to you?
    He squatted. Big, white, irregular teeth.
    Jason Nikolaides,’ he introduced himself.
‘I’ve been asked to speak to you.’
    She felt slightly befuddled.
    You’re Greek?’
    He laughed. ‘Oh no. Not for generations.
American.’ He bowed slightly. Drops of water fell from his
hair. ‘CIA. We have a few things to talk about’
    Myra rolled over, swung her legs round, sat upright. Fumbled a
cigarette. She looked at him, eyes screwed up against the
sunlight and the smoke. She sighed.
    ‘It’s been a long time,’ she said.

 
9
The Sickle’s Sang
     
     
    I looked back at the pub door, shook my head, and then walked
along the side of the square and turned a corner to the street
where I lodged. I went to my lodging, ran upstairs and dumped my
bag, then downstairs and out again.
    Without taking thought, I turned right, in the opposite
direction from the station and the square. I crossed a pedestrian
bridge over the railway and walked along the road out of the
town, past the flood-plain of the Carron River and along the
southern shore of the Carron Loch. The railway line was on my
right, between the road and the sea. The sun was lowering ahead
of me, but not yet shining into my eyes. On my left the wooded
hills shouldered up. I walked past the hamlet and glen of
Attadale, and on beside and beneath the slope of Cam nan
Io-mairean.
    I’d walked about five kilometres before I stopped,
walked over the railway line and sat down on a rock on the shore
at Immer. The tide was high and the loch was still; I could hear
clear across it the fiddlerplaying at some revel in the wood at
Strome Car-ronach. The Torridonian hills, their rocks older than
life, older than the light from the visible stars, loomed black
behind the hills of Strome.
    In all that walk I’d met no one, and encountered few
vehicles. The whole landscape seemed to shut me out, and to
remind me that I was a stranger here, excluded from everything
but God’s terrible love. A couple of hundred metres away, a
man with a scythe was working the long grass of a meadow, as his
ancestors had done and his descendants, no doubt, would do.
Menial had, on Saturday up in the hills, recited a bit of tinker
doggerel that meant more to her than it did to me:
     
    The hammer rang in factory The sickle sang in field The
farmer proved refractory The hammer made the sickle
yield.
     
    No hammer, no factory had stopped this man’s scythe; its
rhythmic swing slashed the grass as though the centuries had
never been.
    Then the man laid it carefully aside, and jumped to the seat
of his tractor, and its methane-engine’s fart scared the
birds as he lowered the baler and set about raking up the
hay.
    I laughed at myself, and stood up, and walked back to the
town.
     
    She’d left, the barmaid told me, shortly after our
quarrel. I thanked the girl, avoided my mates and headed for the
tinker estate.
    ‘She isna here.’
    I turned from my futile chapping on Menial’s white door.
A small boy in shorts and shirt, both toobig for him, regarded me
solemnly from the path. I stepped over.
    ‘Do you know where she went?’
    He was very clean, as far as I could see in the low sunlight,
except for a red and evidently sticky stain on his chin, furred
with fluff. I resisted the urge to spit on my finger and wipe
it.
    ‘I canna say,’ he told me, with artless guile.
    ‘Well, can you take me to somebody who can?’
    As he shook his head I became aware of the crunching of gravel
around me and realised that I need not look far. A dozen tinkers,
young and old, male and female, seemed to drift in from nowhere.
They gathered in a loose semi-circle around me, none closer than
three metres away. Some of their faces Fd seen on my previous
visits to the camp; others were altogether strangers to me. All
of them were dressed in that mixture of simplicity and artifice
which I was beginning to recognise as a peculiarity of tinker
garb; it was as though the rest of us wore the cast-off finery of
some reduced aristocracy, while the tinkers alone cut their own
elegant