Trigger Warning

I had picked them off one by one, like rabbits, as they came out to piss or to see what had happened to their friends: I had killed seven of them before my wife killed her first. We buried them in the glen, built a small cairn of stacking stones above them, to weigh them down so their ghosts would not walk, and we were sad: that Campbells had come so far to kill me, that we had been forced to kill them in return.

I take no joy in killing: no man should, and no woman. Sometimes death is necessary, but it is always an evil thing. That is something I am in no doubt of, even after the events I speak of here.

I took the rope from Calum MacInnes, and I clambered up and up, over the rocks, to where the waterfall came out of the side of the hill, and it was narrow enough for me to cross. It was slippery there, but I made it over without incident, tied the rope in place, came down it, threw the end of it to my companion, walked him across.

He did not thank me, neither for rescuing him, nor for getting us across: and I did not expect thanks. I also did not expect what he actually said, though, which was: ‘You are not a whole man, and you are ugly. Your wife: is she also small and ugly, like yourself?’

I decided to take no offence, whether offence had been intended or no. I simply said, ‘She is not. She is a tall woman, almost as tall as you, and when she was young – when we were both younger – she was reckoned by some to be the most beautiful girl in the lowlands. The bards wrote songs praising her green eyes and her long red-golden hair.’

I thought I saw him flinch at this, but it is possible that I imagined it, or more likely, wished to imagine I had seen it.

‘How did you win her, then?’

I spoke the truth: ‘I wanted her, and I get what I want. I did not give up. She said I was wise and I was kind, and I would always provide for her. And I have.’

The clouds began to lower, once more, and the world blurred at the edges, became softer.

‘She said I would be a good father. And I have done my best to raise my children. Who are also, if you are wondering, normal-sized.’

‘I beat sense into young Calum,’ said older Calum. ‘He is not a bad child.’

‘You can only do that as long as they are there with you,’ I said. And then I stopped talking, and I remembered that long year, and also I remembered Flora when she was small, sitting on the floor with jam on her face, looking up at me as if I were the wisest man in the world.

‘Ran away, eh? I ran away when I was a lad. I was twelve. I went as far as the court of the king over the water. The father of the current king.’

‘That’s not something you hear spoken aloud.’

‘I am not afraid,’ he said. ‘Not here. Who’s to hear us? Eagles? I saw him. He was a fat man, who spoke the language of the foreigners well, and our own tongue only with difficulty. But he was still our king.’ He paused. ‘And if he is to come to us again, he will need gold, for vessels and weapons and to feed the troops that he raises.’

I said, ‘So I believe. That is why we go in search of the cave.’

He said, ‘This is bad gold. It does not come free. It has its cost.’

‘Everything has its cost.’

I was remembering every landmark: climb at the sheep skull, cross the first three streams, then walk along the fourth until the five heaped stones and find where the rock looks like a seagull and walk on between two sharply jutting walls of black rock, and let the slope bring you with it . . .

I could remember it, I knew. Well enough to find my way down again. But the mists confused me, and I could not be certain.

We reached a small loch, high in the mountains, and drank fresh water, caught huge white creatures that were not shrimps or lobsters or crayfish, and ate them raw like sausages, for we could not find any dry wood to make our fire, that high.

We slept on a wide ledge beside the icy water and woke into clouds before sunrise, when the world was grey and blue.

‘You were sobbing in your sleep,’ said Calum.

‘I had a dream,’ I told him.

‘I do not have bad dreams,’ Calum said.

‘It was a good dream,’ I said. It was true. I had dreamed that Flora still lived. She was grumbling about the village boys, and telling me of her time in the hills with the cattle, and of things of no consequence, smiling her great smile and tossing her hair the while, red-golden like her mother’s, although her mother’s hair is now streaked with white.

‘Good dreams should not make a man cry out like that,’ said Calum. A pause, then, ‘I have no dreams, not good, not bad.’

‘No?’

‘Not since I was a young man.’

We rose. A thought struck me: ‘Did you stop dreaming after you came to the cave?’

He said nothing. We walked along the mountainside, into the mist, as the sun came up.