Archie and the North Wind (5 page)

Where else could be better, where the horses could run free, in this marvellous combination of wind, water and air? Where else could be better than where earth ran out and only sea remained? What better for horses than the wind in their manes, their hooves on the sand, their burning feet constantly washed by salt water as they ran and ran and ran along the perfect beach?

That too was only a version, for so many things were missed out of the story.

Archie never heard it directly from Olga herself, but over the years Gobhlachan leaked out other versions of the story, much as you would add a window to a house, exposing an extra view, or sail a different way round the island to see the cliffs, or the mountains, or the caves on the far side. These clues had to be interpreted, of course, for Gobhlachan never told anything directly, as it were – he never sailed straight up the river, but carried his canoe of words on his shoulders, paddling up through creeks and streams, taking diversions, pausing, hesitating, turning back and resting, so that you always needed a personal compass to know where you were, or might have been. You always needed a non-existent map and dictionary to work out the country you might be going to.

She’d been a revolutionary in the Uprising, and a novice nun. Her father had been a count, and her mother an unknown gypsy girl. She had spent time at all the great courts of Europe, and had run away to China when she was twelve. She could speak a dozen languages, and read the moon and the stars. She had been forced to marry a former Russian prince when she was fourteen, but had escaped on a ship to Egypt, where she had trained as a dancer. She could speak to the birds, tame wild horses and divine unknown wells.

No wonder Gobhlachan fell in love with her. Unless, of course, it was the other way round: that she became all these things because of his love. But love it was, and gradually over time Archie was eased out of Gobhlachan’s life, as the sun extinguishes the clouds, or as the ocean erodes the land.

This coincided with a rapid decline in Gobhlachan’s trade. Once the initial effects of the
Siabadh Mòr
were dealt with – once the pots and pans were repaired, once the barns and houses were rebuilt, once the ploughs and carts were remade – the need for the smithy’s services faded away. All that was left were Olga’s horses and the needs of the few natives who clung on to the old ways, keeping a horse when a tractor would have been much more useful, using a plough when a combine was much more effective, repairing things when they could now as cheaply be bought brand new.

It seemed overnight – but of course it was years – that things changed. One day, horses were there; the next, none but Olga’s existed. One day, people walked to church; the next, they moved in rows on buses. One day, people would tell each other news; the next, they were all sitting in their living rooms, receiving news from places called Beirut and Baghdad.

It was just a different story, of course: the fantastic was now out there, rather than near, happening to strangers on television rather than to themselves in their own villages.

‘Did you see that man walking on the moon last night?’ they asked each other.

‘Did you see that young naked girl going up in flames?’

‘Did you see the mushroom cloud, rising and rising and rising?’

Because these picture-stories were told by educated men, most people believed them. After all, there were photographs and films to demonstrate their truth – that girl truly was burning; that former city was shown in all its ashen ruins; that man was heard speaking, as if from underwater, bouncing on the actual surface of the moon.

‘Aye, but they’ll never land on the sun!’ someone said.

Gobhlachan looked at him with pity. ‘Of course they will. At night. When it’s not so hot.

‘These are just the same stories as I told,’ he said.

Of course, people laughed at him.

‘What? That old fool? Aye, I always knew he was without balls, but that certainly gives a new meaning to be without marbles.’

But every time he saw a new horror, or a new marvel, he knew that it was just a modern version of his own old story, the story of the girl and the bull and the cow and the dragon and the king. He knew all along that kidnappings and rape and conquest and adventure and slaughter and victory were elements of the story, just as the fire and the flames and the bellows and the anvil and the hammer and tongs were the elements out of which he used to make pots and pans and horseshoes and axles and spades and ploughs.

He lived a long time, did Gobhlachan, latterly sitting on his ancient anvil outside the door, like a memorial of himself. The anvil, like the forge, was cold and unused and all the young people would pity him as they drove by, for ‘having that bit of cold iron sticking right into his arse’. But Gobhlachan himself was oblivious to the cold, as he watched the young people drive by.

And then one day, something happened. Planes deliberately flew into buildings, and folk began to shake as they watched it all unfolding before their very eyes. Only those who had already lived through The Great Shaking kept a sense of perspective, knowing that they’d seen it all before, somewhere else – where was it now? – in Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades, or at the Somme in the timeless sunshine, or when the young girl was taken away by the white bull and used and abused for years and years and years before she was finally rescued and taken back home to live happily ever afterwards?

Archie was one of those who both shook in his boots and remembered. Unemployed now for years – obviously there was no need of him at a smithy which no one used – and with the tangle market having long gone, conquered by plastics and technology and cheaper markets, he spent his time in that half-world between guilt and hopelessness which is the map of the unemployed.

‘Why don’t you move off your backside,’ his wife would shout at him now and then, ‘and get a job like everyone else?’ As if jobs were that easy to find in this wilderness. ‘That Gobhlachan messed you up is what I say,’ she would then mutter, ‘with his mad stories and his mad wife. Your problem is that you spent far too much time with that good-for-nothing eunuch when you were younger. Turned you into a useless dreamer instead of a man who can do a damn thing around the house.’

As with all stories, these were fabrications, of course. Hadn’t he built the house in the first place, concrete block by concrete block? Hadn’t he drained and fenced and ploughed and harrowed and harvested the land for over thirty years? Hadn’t he built the boat which lay dry-docked at the end of the house? Hadn’t he built the shed and the henhouse and the pigsty and the barn and the outdoor aviary which housed all their livestock, from cockerels to goats? Hadn’t he actually married her, against all his better judgment, in a moment of weakness, and fathered that useless son of hers, spoiled by her, who now lounged about every day watching television and trawling the inter-net as if nothing on earth or in heaven mattered except what came out of a screen?

When the smithy unofficially closed down all these years ago, Archie was devastated. By that time he’d been there for ten years – was now twenty-four years of age – and had known little else but the bellowing of the forge and the pouring and the moulding of ore.

Those freezing days cutting the tangle on the shore were an ancient memory and the ten years at the smithy had seemed both an instant and an eternity. Gobhlachan and Olga were, of course, living as man and wife, even though people muttered that they still didn’t know which was the man and which the wife. The initial great repairs done, in these years the smithy increasingly turned to the making of domestic furniture and car parts, all of which seemed – to Archie as well as to Gobhlachan and Olga – like the gods turning to croquet, or like making a puddle out of the ocean.

So Archie would spend hours welding a wing onto a car, or polishing the bumper of a lorry, or sawing wood for garden furniture, while his mind was ablaze with the former glory when the hot ore was poured like a waterfall into the mould to emerge, scalded then frozen, as a sword or a ploughshare.

But even the crumbs of the gods mouldered and faded, and within the ten years official garages were set up which undercut and outworked the old smithy. Domestic furniture was the same. Who now wanted a roughly crafted chair or bed or table from Gobhlachan or his man Archie, when a beautiful, smooth chair, at half the price and less, could be bought in the local store, or sent by courier through the post?

Latterly, Gobhlachan and Archie would just sit by the warm forge making nothing but stories which in the end proved more durable than even the iron, which now lies rusting in forgotten fields.

On his last day working with him, Gobhlachan took the burning tongs out of the fire and said to Archie, ‘Before you leave me, I have one thing to teach you, which may be even more valuable than the stories. Bring me that board of wood.’ And Archie fetched over an ancient board which had lain unused in the corner of the smithy for all these years.

‘Watch,’ said Gobhlachan, and plunged the burning tongs into the barrel of cold water. He began to make scratches in the wood, burning black marks deep and narrow, curved and rounded, large and small. ‘The alphabet,’ he said to Archie, proudly, staring at the eighteen Gaelic letters. ‘Do you know that out of these eighteen signs you can make the whole world?’ he smiled. ‘Not quite as good as pictures, but useful. And always remember that you’re from a disadvantaged culture – an oral one. After all, they tell me the English have twenty-six of these signs and the Chinese five thousand!’ He laughed, putting the tongs back into the fire, where they began again to simmer and glow.

‘Did I ever tell you the story about the magic of words?’ And while the tongs burned, Gobhlachan said this to Archie:

Once upon a time, there lived a man at Appin in Argyllshire and he took to his house an orphan boy. When the boy was grown up, he was sent to herd; and upon a day of days, and him herding, there came a fine gentleman where he was, who asked the boy to become his servant and said that he would give him plenty to eat and drink, and clothes and great wages.

The boy told him that he would like very much to get a good set of clothes, but that he would not engage till he would see his own master first. But the fine gentleman wanted him engaged without any delay. This the boy would not do, however, upon any terms until he had first seen his own master.

‘Well,’ says the gentleman, ‘in the meantime, write your name in this book.’ On saying that, he put his hand into his oxter pocket and, pulling out a large red book, he told the boy to write his name in the book. This the boy would not do. Neither would he tell the gentleman his name till he spoke with his own master first.

‘Now,’ says the gentleman, ‘since you will neither engage, nor tell your name till you see your present master, be sure then to meet me about sunset tomorrow, at a certain place.’ The boy promised that he would be sure to meet him at the place about sun-setting.

When the boy came home, he told his master what the fine gentleman had said to him. ‘Poor boy,’ says he, ‘a fine master he would make. Lucky for you that you neither engaged nor wrote your name in his book, but since you promised to meet him, you must go. But as you value your life, do as I tell you.’

His master gave him a sword, and at the same time told him to be sure and be at the specific place mentioned a while before sunset, and to draw a circle round himself with the point of the sword in the name of the Trinity. ‘When you do this, draw a cross in the centre of the circle, upon which you will stand yourself. And do not move out of that position till the rising of the sun next morning.’

He also told him that the gentleman would ask him to come out of the circle to put his name in the book, but that upon no account was he to leave the circle. ‘But ask for the book, saying that you will write your name in it yourself, and once you get hold of the book, keep it. He cannot touch a hair of your head if you keep inside the circle.

So the boy was at the place long before the gentleman made his appearance, but sure enough he made his appearance after sunset. He tried all his arts to get the boy to step outside the circle, to sign his name in the red book, but the boy would not move one foot out of where he stood. But at long last, he handed the book to the boy so that he would write his name therein himself.

The book was no sooner inside the circle than it fell out of the gentleman’s hand. The boy cautiously stretched out his hand for the book, and as soon as he got hold of it, he put it under his oxter. When the fine gentleman saw that the boy did not mean to give him back the book, he grew furious; and he transformed himself into a great many likenesses, blowing fire and brimstone out of his mouth and nostrils. At times he would appear as a horse, other times a huge cat and a fearful beast. He was going round the circle the whole length of the night. When day was beginning to break, he let out one fearful screech; he put himself in the likeness of a large raven and he was soon out of the boy’s sight.