Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

he said.
    He turned right at the junction, up the glen. The evening
traffic surge had eased off and we made good progress at about
forty kilometres an hour.
    ‘Where are we heading?’ I asked, as he slowed for
the main street of Achnashellach. A small herd of Highland cattle
were being walked through the town, for God knows what
reason.
    ‘Ah, you’ll see when we get there.’ He
looked at me sideways. ‘You can smoke if you want, just
make sure the ash goes out the window, and the butt goes in the
ashtray.’ He hit the horn. ‘Ah, move yer fucking
arse,’ he advised a hairy beast, which looked back at him
as though it had heard, tossed its horns and plodded obliviously
in front of us for a further couple of minutes.
    Clear of the obstruction he speeded up for the long, slowly
rising road to Achnasheen, which we passed through about twenty
minutes later. The streets of that town climbed high into the
forestedhills, and its greenhouses across the floor of the
glen.
    ‘In my grandfather’s day this was all a fucking
bog, the way he tells it,’ Druin remarked. ‘The
station, and the hotel, and fuck all else. Aye, we’ve got
the land back and no mistake, just like the Brahan Seer
said.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Och, some prophet from the old time, he said the people
would come back to the glens. The Nostradamus of the
North!’ He laughed. ‘They say he looked at the future
through a hole in a stone, and that very stone is at the bottom
of a loch somewhere.’
    ‘A seer-stone?’
    Druin guffawed. ‘You’ve got tinkers on the brain,
Glovis! The Seer lived and died long before even computers. Which
he did not foresee. No, it was an ordinary wee stone with a hole
in it that he looked through.’
    ‘Do you believe that?’
    ‘I don’t think there was anything special about
the stone,’ Druin said. ‘But there may have been
something special to the eye or the brain behind it.’
    ‘The second sight?’ I said sceptically.
    ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Druin.
‘The Brahan Seer saw the future in his imagination, and so
do we all.’ He chuckled. ‘He was just better at it
than most.’
    Druin stopped at a wee place called Dark, and, leaving the
truck parked off the road, led me up through the pines on the
left.
    ‘No smoking,’ he said quietly. ‘And no
talking either.
    I nodded, concentrating on heaving myself and the increasingly
heavy rifle up the slope. The thickneedle-carpet made for slow,
if silent, progress. I had a bit of difficulty keeping up with
Druin, and decided then and there that smoking was indeed
unhealthy. At the same time, I was feeling a tension that only a
smoke could relieve. Something in Drum’s manner, and
something about our location, was bothering me, but I
couldn’t think what. We climbed steadily, away from the
road and up the hill.
    Druin reached the top of the ridge ahead of me, and there
paused, hands on one knee, while I caught up. He pointed down
through a gap in the trees to where the other side of the ridge
sloped back to the road. Looking down, I could see the road, the
railway line and a long, narrow loch.
    Loch Luichart. I recognised the place with a sudden jolt at
remembering that this was where – as Jeanna had told me
– Fergal worked and the tinkers made their strange stone
computers. The old power-station, at which Druin was pointing,
was a large, dark, block-shaped building at the foot of the slope
below us.
    ‘What’s this about?’ I asked Druin, as
quietly as I could.
    He grinned at me and began walking slowly up the ridge.
    ‘Thought you might want to hunt more than deer,’
he said. You’re after your man Fergal, and your lassie
Menial. Down there might not a bad place to look.’
    I gasped, and not with the exertion of keeping up with him.
‘We can’t just march in there!’
    ‘Why not?’ he grunted. ‘But anyway, we
won’t just „march in“.’ He stopped, and
took a few paces off to the right, into a clump of bushes.
‘Ah, here it is.’
    He’d arrived at a cylindrical structure of weathered,
creeper-covered ceramic, about a metre highand a metre across. As
I approached he leapt up on top of it and began scraping away the
overgrowth with the side of his boot. In a moment he’d
exposed a rusty hatch.
    Not so rusty it didn’t open, though. I looked in and saw
a series of rungs disappearing into the blackness. Druin dropped
a pebble in and cocked his ear.
    ‘It’s