The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod

Author:Ken MacLeod
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

9

THE SICKLE’S SANG

I looked back at the pub door, shook my head, and then walked along the side of the square and turned a corner to the street where I lodged. I went to my lodging, ran upstairs and dumped my bag, then downstairs and out again.

Without taking thought, I turned right, in the opposite direction from the station and the square. I crossed a pedestrian bridge over the railway and walked along the road out of the town, past the flood-plain of the Carron River and along the southern shore of the Carron Loch. The railway line was on my right, between the road and the sea. The sun was lowering ahead of me, but not yet shining into my eyes. On my left the wooded hills shouldered up. I walked past the hamlet and glen of Attadale, and on beside and beneath the slope of Carn nan Iomairean.

I’d walked about five kilometres before I stopped, walked over the railway line and sat down on a rock on the shore at Immer. The tide was high and the loch was still; I could hear clear across it the fiddler playing at some revel in the wood at Strome Carronach. The Torridonian hills, their rocks older than life, older than the light from the visible stars, loomed black behind the hills of Strome.

In all that walk I’d met no one, and encountered few vehicles. The whole landscape seemed to shut me out, and to remind me that I was a stranger here, excluded from everything but God’s terrible love. A couple of hundred metres away, a man with a scythe was working the long grass of a meadow, as his ancestors had done and his descendants, no doubt, would do. Merrial had, on Saturday up in the hills, recited a bit of tinker doggerel that meant more to her than it did to me:

The hammer rang in factory

The sickle sang in field

The farmer proved refractory

The hammer made the sickle yield.

No hammer, no factory had stopped this man’s scythe; its rhythmic swing slashed the grass as though the centuries had never been.

Then the man laid it carefully aside, and jumped to the seat of his tractor, and its methane-engine’s fart scared the birds as he lowered the baler and set about raking up the hay.

I laughed at myself, and stood up, and walked back to the town.

* * *

She’d left, the barmaid told me, shortly after our quarrel. I thanked the girl, avoided my mates and headed for the tinker estate.

‘She isna here.’

I turned from my futile chapping on Merrial’s white door. A small boy in shorts and shirt, both too big for him, regarded me solemnly from the path. I stepped over.

‘Do you know where she went?’

He was very clean, as far as I could see in the low sunlight, except for a red and evidently sticky stain on his chin, furred with fluff. I resisted the urge to spit on my finger and wipe it.

‘I canna say,’ he told me, with artless guile.

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