‘Ahl,’ she said, squinting up, not knowing if she’d done the right thing in stopping.
‘Ahl,’ he replied, as taciturn as the farmer he was supposed to be. Perhaps he was wary of their native language being spoken out in the open, even though there was no-one else around to hear it. Paint dribbled off the end of the brush he was holding, but, apart from frowning, he did nothing about it, as if Isserley’s greeting were some sort of mishap which must be stoically endured. He was wearing overalls and a cap, and paint-spattered green Wellingtons whose secret interiors had taken almost as long to design as Isserley’s shoes.
All things considered, he’d got off more lightly than she had, Isserley felt. He had no breasts, for a start, and more hair on his face.
She waved at the task he was busy with. Only a fraction of the building had been whitened.
‘Is this in honour of Amlis Vess?’ she asked superfluously.
Esswis grunted.
‘Quite a fuss,’ ventured Isserley. ‘Not your idea, surely?’
Esswis scowled and looked down at her in disgust.
‘Fuck Amlis Vess,’ he pronounced, very distinctly, in English, and then turned to continue painting.
Isserley wound up her window and drove on. One by one, feathery snowflakes started spiralling down from the sky.
4
IT WAS AS SHE was crossing a concrete tightrope, high up in the air, that Isserley admitted to herself that she absolutely did not want to meet Amlis Vess.
She was driving towards the midpoint of the Kessock Bridge, gripping the steering wheel in anticipation of fierce side-wands trying to sweep her little red car into space. She was acutely conscious of the weight of the cast-iron undercarriage beneath her, the purchase of the tyres on the bitumen – paradoxical reminders of solidity. The car might have been protesting how heavy and immovable it was, in its fear of being moved.
You-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou! jeered the atmosphere.
At intervals along the bridge were trembling metal signs depicting a stylized net inflated by the thrust of a gale. This, like all traffic symbols, had been a meaningless hieroglyphic to Isserley when she’d first studied it, long ago. Now it appealed directly to her second nature, and made her seize hold of the wheel as if it were an animal desperate to break free. Her hands were locked tight; she imagined she could see a heartbeat pulsing between the knuckles.
And yet, when she muttered under her breath that she would not let herself be pushed off course, no, not by anything, it wasn’t the side-winds she was thinking of, but Amlis Vess. He was blowing in from somewhere much more dangerous than the North Sea, and she could not predict the effect he’d have. Whatever it turned out to be, she certainly wouldn’t be able to negate it just by keeping a tight grip on her car’s steering wheel.
She was past the mid-point now, minutes away from the Inverness end. Burring slowly forwards in the outer lane, she flinched every time a faster vehicle roared past her; the wind pressure would drop away suddenly, then swing back with a vengeance. To her left, the air was swirling with seagulls, a chaos of white birds endlessly falling towards the water, then hovering just above the firth, sinking gradually, as if caught in sediment. Isserley returned her attention to the distant outskirts of Inverness, and tried to force herself to tread harder on the accelerator. Judging by her speedometer, she wasn’t succeeding. You-ou-ou-ou-ou-ou! cried the wind all the rest of the way.
Cruising safely off the bridge at the far end, she hugged the slow lane, tried her best to breathe deeply and unclench her hands. The pressure had died down almost at once; she could drive normally, function normally. She was on terra firma now, in control, blending in perfectly, and doing a job only she could do. Nothing Amlis Vess thought or said could change that: nothing. She was indispensable.
The word troubled her, though. Indispensable. It was a word people tended to resort to when dispensability was in the air.
She tried to imagine herself being dispensed with; tried to imagine it honestly and unflinchingly. Perhaps some other person would be prepared to make the same sacrifices she and Esswis had made, and take her place. She and Esswis had been desperate, in their different ways; might not other people be equally desperate? It was hard to imagine. No-one could be as desperate as she had been. And then, anyone new to the job would be inexperienced, untested. With mind-boggling amounts of money at stake, would Vess Incorporated take such a risk?
Probably not. But it was difficult for Isserley to draw much comfort from this, because the thought of being genuinely indispensable was troubling too.
It meant that Vess Incorporated would never let her go.
It meant that she would have to do this job forever. It meant that a day would never come when she could enjoy the world without worrying about the creatures crawling on its surface.
All of which, Isserley reminded herself irritably, should have nothing whatsoever to do with Amlis Vess. How could it? Whatever the reason for young Amlis’s visit, it must be a purely personal one, unconnected to Vess Incorporated. Just hearing the name Amlis Vess was no reason to get all excited.
OK, granted, Amlis was the big man’s son, but there was no sign of him inheriting the big man’s empire. Amlis didn’t even have a job at Vess Incorporated – he’d never had a job of any kind – and he couldn’t possibly have any power to make decisions on the Corporation’s behalf. In fact, to the best of Isserley’s knowledge, Amlis actually felt disdain for the world of business and was a big failure in his father’s eyes. He was trouble, but not for Isserley. There was nothing to fear from him dropping in, however inexplicably, on Ablach Farm.
So why did she want to avoid him so badly?
She had nothing against the boy himself (or the man? – how old would he be by now?); he hadn’t asked to be the sole heir of the world’s biggest corporation. He’d done nothing to offend her personally, and in the past she’d followed his exploits with amusement. He was always in the news, for the usual rich-young-pretender reasons. One time, he shaved all his hair off, as an initiation rite into a bizarre religious sect which he joined in a blitz of publicity and left, weeks later, with no comment to the press. Another time, he and his father were reported to be bitterly estranged over Amlis’s support of extremists in the Middle East. Another time, he made a public statement that icpathua, when used in small enough doses, was a harmless euphoric that should not be against the law. Countless times, some girl or other made a fuss, claiming to be pregnant with his baby.
All in all, he was just another typical rich kid with a colossal fortune hanging over his head.
Isserley’s second nature, alert while she’d been busy brooding, fetched her back into the driver’s seat to notice something important: a hitch-hiker standing in the distance, opposite the first of the many garish roadside diners between Inverness and the South. She listened to her own breathing, assessing whether she’d calmed down enough to take the challenge on. She felt she had.
At closer quarters, though, the figure at the roadside proved to be a female, harried-looking, grey-haired, shabbily dressed. Isserley drove straight past, ignoring the appeal to shared gender in the eyes. A single instant was enough to communicate injury and dejection, then the figure was a dwindling fleck in the rear-view mirror.
Isserley was all geared up now, grateful to have had her mind on something other than Amlis Vess. Fortuitously, another hitcher was standing only a couple of miles further on. This one was a male, and fairly impressive on first sight, but unfortunately positioned in a spot where only the most foolhardy motorist would consider stopping. Isserley flashed her headlights, hoping to let him know that she might have picked him up had he not made it so dangerous for her to do so. She doubted that a simple flash of lights could communicate this; more likely he would simply assume she was beaming out ill-will, a jab of mockery.