“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 forested hills, 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 thick needle-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 high and 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 only about twenty metres deep,” he told me.
“Good grief, man, you’re not talking about going down there, are you?”
“Aye, I am that,” he said. “It’s safe enough, so long as you hang on.”
“But do you know what’s at the bottom?” I looked at him suspiciously. “And how do you know about this, anyway?”
Druin sighed theatrically. “What’s at the bottom is a tunnel—I don’t know if it’s part of the original hydro-station or something that got added later. This whole hill has been tunnelled and mined; it was used as an underground base by the British army, and by the Republicans during the civil war before the First World Revolution—changed hands a few times, I think. As to how I know about it—” He laughed. “There’s a map and a diagram of it all in the museum at Jean town! Mind you, I guess the tinkers will have made yon diagram out of date, one way or the other.”
“Looks pretty dark,” I said.
“Ach, there’ll be some kind of lighting down there. And I’ve got a torch.”
“Was this on your mind all along?”
“Aye,” he admitted. “But I didn’t want to tell you beforehand, in case you got cold feet from worrying about it before we even got here. As it is, I’m just beginning to wonder if I was right in thinking you had a spirit of adventure. You’ve done nothing but raise objections this past five minutes. Do you want to go after this woman, or no?”
“Of course I do,” I said, stung into action—as he no doubt intended—by his hint at cowardice. I slung the rifle across my back and scrambled up and set my feet on the rungs as I lowered myself in. “You’ll be coming too, will you?”
Til be right above you,” Druin said.
For the next couple of minutes I concentrated entirely on descending the laddered steps. The rungs looked rust-free, as did their bolts—in fact, the metal and the ceramic of the shaft were both unknown to me. But I could not be sure that every rung had survived the centuries, so I tested each one before putting my full weight on it. The slung rifle made it even more awkward. One upward glance confirmed that Druin was following. Above him the hatch was visible as a small, bright hole.
After what seemed a long time my foot encountered empty air where a rung should have been. After a moment of fright I lowered the foot further, cautiously, and touched a floor. I grunted with relief and stepped down and away from the ladder, still taking care where I placed my feet. Druin completed his descent a moment later and we stood together in dark and silence.
On the descent my eyes had adapted to the diminishing light and even here, at the bottom of the shaft, it was not entirely dark. I became aware, without quite knowing why, that we were indeed in a tunnel and that it sloped fairly sharply. Looking around, I could see a brighter area lower down. I peered at Druin and gestured in that direction. The pale oval of his face made a bobbing motion which I interpreted as a nod. Together we turned and headed down the slope.
After a few steps I stubbed my toe on something hard. “Damn,” I muttered, pulling up short. Druin bumped into my back and we both swayed dangerously.
Tuck this for a game of soldiers,” said Druin. He undipped the torch from his belt and switched it on. A powerful beam of white light illuminated the tunnel in front of us. It revealed that the floor was indeed littered with obstacles—oddly shaped seer-stones of various sizes. It also revealed that the tunnel was full of people.
Druin yelped a curse and brought his rifle to bear in a surprisingly smooth and swift movement. The torch-beam wavered hardly at all. I was still stiff with shock; the instant I recovered from it I looked over my shoulder and saw more figures crowding behind us, dim in the backwash of the torch’s light. One such figure was apparently in the act of reaching out for me—I struck wildly at his arm, and almost fell over because my fist passed right through it. Druin whirled around at the same moment, and the torch-beam cast my shadow grotesquely on the figures before me. They responded neither to the shadow nor the light. Druin let out his breath in a gusty gasp, then laughed.