The Language of Bees (57 page)

Javitz dropped further, seeking protection from the wind, and followed the little island’s eastern coast. At the end of it, we passed over a brief stretch of sea to another, even smaller, island, then a landscape that indeed resembled mainland came up underneath us. He directed the nose west again, skimming above countryside that looked surprisingly like England—I don’t know what I expected of an island nation ruled by Vikings for seven hundred years, but placid green fields bordered by hedgerows was not it.

In a few miles, a dark steeple rose up in the distance: the cathedral in the centre of Kirkwall, on whose altar chemically liquefied blood had been splashed on the July full moon. Javitz began to examine the passing fields, in an expectant manner I had seen before. Soon, on the outskirts of the town, a length of pasture beckoned. He aimed at it, but it seemed to me he was high—too high, I started to exclaim, then realised that he was making a deliberate pass over it. It was as well he did: Three shaggy cattle grazed in the intended landing strip, solid as a dry-stone wall. As we roared forty feet away from the adjoining stone house, a small boy came running out. Javitz raised the nose and wrestled the ’plane back in a wide circle; when we aimed again at the field, the boy was driving the cows through a gap in a wall.

We hit the ground, rose up, then settled down into a landing as smooth as could be had on uneven terrain. Javitz ran the plane into a wide place at the end of the field, made a wide circle, and shut down the motor.

With quivering fingertips, I uncovered my watch: a quarter past two on Friday, 29 August.

The day before the sun would darken in the north.

“Captain Javitz,” I said, my voice loud in the echoing silence, “I am immensely grateful and in your considerable debt. But I hope to God I never have to fly with you again.”

He laughed, with more than a touch of manly hysteria in his voice.

And only then—because experience had taught me that some things are best done without permitting discussion—did I tell him what I wanted to do.

“This machine will attract a great deal of attention, I should imagine?”

“It’s sure to.”

“Our story is, you are offering joy-rides, and I took you up on one out of Wick. You must stay with the machine, talk to people about joy-riding, maybe even offer to take one or two up with you when the wind drops. Can you do that?”

“What about you?”

“I shall slip away, as I could not if you were with me.”

“You can’t go alone.”

“Yes, I can.”

“I’m not going to let you go by yourself,” he insisted.

I sighed: Sometimes I think I married the world’s only sensible male. Anticipating this, I had given my pilot the barest details of why I was here. “Captain Javitz, please don’t flex your chivalrous muscles at me. I assure you, I can do what needs to be done. I will go now, while you distract these people. I will come back for you tonight. Shall we meet here?”

That last was an outright lie: I had no intention of bringing him any further into danger. He, on the other hand, had no reason to think a young woman might prefer to face an enemy on her own. And the first curious residents were beginning to gather—constable and local newsman would not be far behind. Grudgingly, he agreed.

We climbed out, and I prepared to chatter like a brainless maniac about the thrill of flying, the speed and noise, the loops and deadfalls, how it was worth every ha’penny. But there was a slight hitch in the plans: It appeared that Cash Javitz was not a stranger here.

I heard him call a cheerful greeting—not to the boy, but to a
buxom, red-cheeked woman who came out of the kitchen door behind us.

“Hello, sweetheart,” he boomed, nearly knocking me over in surprise.

“Captain Javitz! I might have known it was you, dropping out of the mist and frightening the cows.” What she said was more like,
Ca’n Yavitz, Ah mait’ve knawn it war thee, drawpin’ fra’ the muggry an’ fleggin’ tha caws;
however, such dialect is as tiresome to write as it is to decipher. Still, the sound of it was a delight, a lilt more like a Scandinavian tongue than anything I’d heard in Britain, and impossible to duplicate on the page without musical notations.

“I knew you didn’t believe me, that I was a fly-boy, so I thought I’d drop in and prove it.”

“What, after five years you just drop in?”

“I was pining, couldn’t keep away from you any longer.”

“Don’t let my husband hear you,” she warned playfully.

“Plenty to go around,” he replied, and she crowed in delight. “Brigid Ross, meet Mary Russell. Miss Russell is my excuse for crossing the Strait.”

She came down the steps and took my hand, eyeing me sharply before deciding that the gold ring I wore indicated that I was no rival for the good Captain’s bantering affections.

I realised I was neither dressed nor wearing sufficient make-up to present myself as a Bright Young Thing out for a day’s lark, so instead I merely asked Mrs Ross where I might find a cup of tea.

She told me that the kettle was on, and although I demurred, I did not demur all that much. She and I went inside, leaving Javitz to his gathering crowd of would-be customers.

The tea was supplemented by thick slices of a chewy, slightly sweet soda bread slathered with fresh-churned butter, and my stomach, after a moment’s hesitation, woke to the aroma and savour. I ate three slabs, and only stopped there because the boy appeared at the door, panting slightly but beaming with excitement.

“May I have a ride in the Captain’s aeroplane?” he begged.

“Certainly not,” she replied. “But if you wash your hands, you can
have your tea. Will you two be stopping the night in Kirkwall?” she asked me as I rose and picked up my coat.

“We may, especially if the wind gets worse,” I said. “In any event, I think I’ll take a turn through the town. I’ve never been in Orkney before.”

“If you do get caught here and have trouble finding rooms, let me know,” she said, showing me to the door. “It’s the height of the season, and rooms were tight even before the hotel at the Stones burned down.”

I turned. “Do you mean at Stenness?”

“That’s the one.”

“When did this happen?”

“Two days past? No, I’m a liar, it was on Tuesday, so three days. Booked to the rafters with anglers, it was, and everything a smoky mess. The owner was a day in hospital, they’re staying with his wife’s family in St Mary’s for at least a fortnight.”

“But the place didn’t actually burn down?”

“Not down, no, just left a terrible stinking mess. They boarded over the windows and everyone’s moved into town until the floors dry and the roof is patched.”

“I see. Well, I certainly shan’t plan on staying there,” I told her with a smile, and set off towards Kirkwall, deep in thought. If Brothers and the child boarded a steamer in Aberdeen on Tuesday, how could he be in place to set a fire by the evening? But it could not be coincidence-no, he had help on Orkney, the same assistant who’d scattered cock’s blood in the cathedral whose spire I could see rising ahead of me.

As Mrs Ross had said, it being August, the facilities for tourist entertainment were laid on in strength. Shops sold knitted wear or cheese made from local cows, tea houses posted banners advertising their authentic Orcadian cakes, and coaches waited to transport visitors to the sites of Orkney.

One of these caught my ear, an enterprising coach driver trying to turn the waning day into a bonus rather than a disadvantage. “See the Ring of Brodgar in the rich light of evening, when the sun throws shadows far across the loch,” he was calling in a stentorian voice.

One glance at the sky drew his thrown shadows into question, but in fact, an evening trip was precisely what I required. An added benefit was the handful of tourists he had already attracted, three earnest Dutch couples and an adolescent belonging to one of them. I gave the man my coin, took my seat, and we were soon away.

The benefits of concealment in numbers had been suggested by my first look at the Ordnance Survey map, and was the reason I had carried a pair of field glasses in my bag all the way. As we approached, with our driver cheerfully shouting over his shoulder all sorts of misinformation about Vikings, Celts, and Druids, it became ever more apparent that my only options for concealment in daylight were to hide in plain sight among a group, or to dig a hole in the turf and pull it over my head.

From the hills down, the land was bare as an egg.

I could see at a glance why this remote site had been marked as holy by the early Orcadians. It was a between-place: neither sea nor land, neither Britain nor Europe, a stretch of solid ground between two wide lochs, one salt, the other fresh. For four thousand years, the residents had built temples in this low and brooding marshland, from the giant stone ring that capped a rise at one end of the causeway separating the lochs to the smaller but more dramatic circle nearer the road. Christianity, too, had a toehold, with a small church and cemetery laying claim to its ground in the midst of burial mounds and standing stones.

Even modern-day religion was represented, in the person of devoted anglers, scattered along the shores of the lochs.

The driver-guide pulled his coach over to a wide place near the smaller stone circle, whose dark granite slabs resembled shards of broken window-pane dropped by the gods, and informed us that these were the Stones of Stenness. On a low hill to the north-west, across the causeway, rode the Ring of Brodgar (where, he did not tell us but my telegram had informed me, cremated remains had been recently
scattered). To the north-east, beyond the church, was the pregnant belly-mound of Maeshowe, where a slaughtered sheep had been found on the May full moon.

The Dutch contingent were kept occupied translating and commenting upon what the guide had to say about the artefacts we walked past: first the Stones of Stenness, then a couple of pencil-thin pillars jabbed into the ground, and the now-destroyed Odin Stone (which had been one of those venerable objects that inspire courting couples, entertain amateur antiquarians, and infuriate the farmer on whose land they lie—hence this stone’s demolition). We crossed the causeway, passing farm buildings and more standing stones, until the ground began to rise, revealing the size of the lochs on either side. Ahead of us lay the wide, low Ring of Brodgar.

I left the others to their misinformed lecture and circumnavigated the ring on my own, feeling the press of ground beneath me. Many of the stones were fallen or missing entirely; those that remained were cracked and uneven; nonetheless, the original Ring had been perfectly round. Perhaps that was why, despite its wear, it retained the feel of a precise mechanism, a circle tightly calibrated to enclose and concentrate any worship carried out on this barren and wind-swept hillock. It reminded me of an ancient brass-work device in a museum, whose function remained unimpaired by the surface ravages of time.

Standing in the centre, I looked down to see traces of ash among the grass.

From the Ring’s heather-grown perimeter, which had once been ditched and banked to form a henge, I studied the countryside. Water stretched out before me and at my back; to my right, the peninsula between the lochs was littered with standing stones, brochs, and earthen mounds. To my left, peninsula narrowed into causeway before joining the road; on one side were the Stones of Stenness and Maeshowe; on the other lay the burnt-out anglers’ hotel. A brief spill of sun showed boards across its windows.

The Dutch were being led away by the guide, tempted after his conversational carrots that seemed to link Vikings and Druids—although
I might have been mistaken, I was not listening very closely. I dawdled among the stones, allowing the others to pull ahead, before following them down the causeway towards the Stones of Stenness.

Perhaps it was the approaching dusk coupled with the racing clouds and biting wind. Perhaps it was the knowledge that, somewhere near, a man with a knife waited to loose blood on the earth. In any event, I was aware of an atmosphere here such as I had seldom felt before: not at Stonehenge, a gloomy and isolated huddle of stones, nor even Avebury—what metaphysical authority it once possessed had long since been overbuilt by barns and homely cottages. This place held another kind of aura entirely: One could feel it brooding.

The Stenness stones had been a henge as well, although this site’s ditch and bank were more elliptical than the Ring, and what had once been a stone circle was little more than a collection of slabs. They were tall, one of them nearing twenty feet, and unbelievably thin—it seemed impossible that they had stood here for millennia without snapping off in the wind. One of them jutted out of the ground at an angle, then turned sharply back on itself, like a directional arrow for giants.

In their centre was the restored altar. According to a guide-book in Mycroft’s study, some twenty years ago a well-meaning enthusiast had decided that the half-buried stone in the middle of the circle had originally been an altar-stone, and had raised it, stretching it between a stone that lay to one side and a pair of stones that had been cracked and mounted upright with a gap between the halves.

Although the position of the cracked stone seemed to have a significance beyond that of a support—the gap between its halves would frame the mound of Maeshowe—the massive three-legged table was, nonetheless, most impressive. It did not require the imagination of a Sir Walter Scott to picture it as a sacrificial altar, longer than any man, fenced in by the towering grey granite shards.

My tour companions had been marched away to Maeshowe, our guide having clearly decided that I was unappreciative of his expertise. Alone, I made a slow circuit of the Stones, memorising the arrangement
of the upright rocks, letting my feet learn the low depression of the ditch-works and the ground-level bridge that had once passed through ditch and bank.

Under the guise of studying waterfowl, I took out my glasses and aimed them at the saltwater loch to the south. Three swans stretched their wings and thought about dinner; seagulls darted and cried on the wind. A pair of fishermen occupying the shallows between me and the hotel had begun to work their way back to the shore, no doubt with dinner on their minds as well; behind them, I could see where the flames had been doused before they ate into the fabric of the hotel. The windows on this side of the building showed the backs of curtains—the fire must have started at night.