“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.
The mist seemed to thicken and fill with light, in the sunshine, but did not fade away and I realized that it must be a cloud. The world glowed. And then it seemed to me that I was staring at a man of my size, a small, humpty man, his shadow, standing in the air in front of me, like a ghost or an angel, and it moved as I moved. It was haloed by the light, and shimmered, and I could not have told you how near it was or how far away. I have seen miracles and I have seen evil things, but never have I seen anything like that.
“Is it magic?” I asked, although I smelled no magic on the air.
Calum said, “It is nothing. A property of the light. A shadow. A reflection. No more. I see a man beside me, as well. He moves as I move.” I glanced back, but I saw nobody beside him.
And then the little glowing man in the air faded, and the cloud, and it was day, and we were alone.
We climbed all that morning, ascending. Calum’s ankle had twisted the day before, when he had slipped at the waterfall. Now it swelled in front of me, swelled and went red, but his pace did not ever slow, and if he was in discomfort or in pain, it did not show upon his face.
I said, “How long?” as the dusk began to blur the edges of the world.
“An hour, less, perhaps. We will reach the cave, and then we will sleep for the night. In the morning you will go inside. You can bring out as much gold as you can carry, and we will make our way back off the island.”
I looked at him, then: grey-streaked hair, grey eyes, so huge and wolfish a man, and I said, “You would sleep outside the cave?”
“I would. There are no monsters in the cave. Nothing that will come out and take you in the night. Nothing that will eat us. But you should not go in until daylight.”
And then we rounded a rockfall, all black rocks and grey half-blocking our path, and we saw the cave mouth. I said, “Is that all?”
“You expected marble pillars? Or a giant’s cave from a gossip’s fireside tales?”
“Perhaps. It looks like nothing. A hole in the rock face. A shadow. And there are no guards?”
“No guards. Only the place, and what it is.”
“A cave filled with treasure. And you are the only one who can find it?”
Calum laughed then, like a fox’s bark. “The islanders know how to find it. But they are too wise to come here, to take its gold. They say that the cave makes you eviclass="underline" that each time you visit it, each time you enter to take gold, it eats the good in your soul, so they do not enter.”
“And is that true? Does it make you evil?”
“…No. The cave feeds on something else. Not good and evil. Not really. You can take your gold, but afterwards, things are,” he paused, “things are flat. There is less beauty in a rainbow, less meaning in a sermon, less joy in a kiss…” He looked at the cave mouth and I thought I saw fear in his eyes. “Less.”
I said, “There are many for whom the lure of gold outweighs the beauty of a rainbow.”
“Me, when young, for one. You, now, for another.”
“So we go in at dawn.”
“You will go in. I will wait for you out here. Do not be afraid. No monster guards the cave. No spells to make the gold vanish, if you do not know some cantrip or rhyme.”
We made our camp, then; or rather we sat in the darkness, against the cold rock wall. There would be no sleep there.
I said, “You took the gold from here, as I will do tomorrow. You bought a house with it, a bride, a good name.”
His voice came from the darkness. “Aye. And they meant nothing to me, once I had them, or less than nothing. And if your gold pays for the King over the Water to come back to us and rule us and bring about a land of joy and prosperity and warmth, it will still mean nothing to you. It will be as something you heard of that happened to a man in a tale.”
“I have lived my life to bring the king back,” I told him.
He said, “You take the gold back to him. Your king will want more gold, because kings want more. It is what they do. Each time you come back, it will mean less. The rainbow means nothing. Killing a man means nothing.”
Silence then, in the darkness. I heard no birds: only the wind that called and gusted about the peaks like a mother seeking her babe.
I said, “We have both killed men. Have you ever killed a woman, Calum MacInnes?”
“I have not. I have killed no woman, no girls.”
I ran my hands over my dirk in the darkness, seeking the wood and center of the hilt, the steel of the blade. It was there in my hands. I had not intended to ever tell him, only to strike when we were out of the mountains, strike once, strike deep, but now I felt the words being pulled from me, would I or never-so. “They say there was a girl,” I told him. “And a thorn-bush.”
Silence. The whistling of the wind. “Who told you?” he asked. Then, “Never mind. I would not kill a woman. No man of honour would kill a woman…”
If I said a word, I knew, he would be silent on the subject, and never talk about it again. So I said nothing. Only waited.
Calum MacInnes began to speak, choosing his words with care, talking as if he was remembering a tale he had heard as a child and had almost forgotten. “They told me the kine of the lowlands were fat and bonny, and that a man could gain honour and glory by adventuring off to the southlands and returning with the fine red cattle. So I went south, and never a cow was good enough, until on a hillside in the lowlands I saw the finest, reddest, fattest cows that ever a man has seen. So I began to lead them away, back the way I had come.