“I see by this that your king is in earnest.” High King Farlane was known to be quite sparing with his money. She turned to Ivar. “Run and fetch Ogo. Tell him just that you and he have to escort the Priest back to his fane.”
The Priest was coming with us, to my sorrow, as far as the hilltops where his religious establishment was. Donal went in front to show us the way to the small postern I had hardly ever seen used before. For a moment, I thought Donal was coming as well. But he was only making sure we found the four little donkeys waiting for us by the wall.
Aunt Beck clicked her tongue at the sight of them. “So much for secrecy. Who saddled these up?”
“I did,” Donal said. By the light of the lantern he carried, his teeth flashed rather smugly in his beard. “No chance of any gossip in the stables.”
“I was thinking rather,” Aunt Beck countered, “of the bags.” One donkey was loaded with four leather bags, very plump and shiny and expensive-looking bags. “Who packed these?”
“My mother did,” said Donal. “With her own fair hands.”
“Did she now?” said Aunt Beck. “Give her my thanks for the honour.”
Since no one could have sounded less grateful than my aunt, it was possibly just as well that Ivar came dashing up just then, and Ogo with him looking quite bewildered. They were to walk, as befitted an escort. The Priest mounted one of the donkeys and sat there looking quite ridiculous with his long legs nearly touching the ground on either side. Aunt Beck sat on the second. Ogo helped me up on to the third. I looked at what I could see of him – which was not much, what with the flickering lantern and the clouds scudding across the nearly full moon – and I thought that no one so puzzled-looking and so anxious to help as Ogo could possibly be a spy. Or could he?
“You don’t have to hold Aileen on to the donkey,” Ivar said to him. “Take the baggage donkey’s halter and bring it along.”
Donal raised the lantern, grinning again, as we all clopped off. “Goodbye, cousins,” he said to my aunt and me. “Have a good voyage, Ivar.” It was not quite jeering. Donal is too smooth-minded for that. But I thought, as we clopped down the rocky hillside, that the way he said it amounted to sending us off with a curse – or at least an ill-wishing.
The fog had gone, though my poor little donkey was quite wet with it. It must have been waiting for hours outside that door. All the donkeys were stiff and more than usually reluctant to move. Ivar and Ogo had to take a bridle in each hand and haul them out of the dip below the castle, and go on hauling until we were well set on the path zigzagging to the heights. There my donkey raised its big head and gave voice to its feeling in a huge mournful “Hee-haw!”
“Oh, hush!” I said to it. “Someone might hear.”
“It won’t matter,” said my aunt. In order not to trail her legs like the Priest, she had her knees bent up in front of her. It looked most uncomfortable and I could see it was making her breathless and cross. “It doesn’t matter who hears,” she said. “Everyone knows that the Priest must be on his way home.” And she called up to him ahead of her on the path, “I am surprised to see you lending yourself to this charade, Kinnock. Why did you?”
“I have my reasons,” the Priest called back. “Though I must say,” he added sourly, “I did not expect to have my house burnt over it.”
“What reasons?” said my aunt.
“The respect for the gods and for the priesthood is not what it should be,” he said across his shoulder. “My aim is to set that right.”
“You mean you think Alasdair is more god-fearing than his father?” my aunt asked. “If you think that, you’re doomed to disappointment two ways.”
“Gratitude,” retorted the Priest, “is not to be discounted.”
“Or counted on either,” snapped Aunt Beck.
They continued arguing with Aunt Beck getting crosser and more breathless at every sentence, but I have no idea what they said. I remember Aunt Beck accusing the Priest of trying to turn Skarr into Gallis, but that meant they had started to talk politics and I stopped listening. I was suddenly overwhelmed with a fear that I might not see Skarr again and I was busy trying to see as much of it as I could by the light of the repeatedly clouded moon.
The mountains were mere blackness overhead, though I could smell the heavy damp smell of them, and the sea was another blackness flecked with white over the other way. But I remember dwelling quite passionately on a large grey boulder beside the path when the moonlight glided over it, and almost as ardently on the grey, wintry-looking heather beneath the boulder. Where the path turned, I could look over my shoulder, across the bent figure of Ogo heaving the luggage donkey’s bridle, and see the castle below against the sea, ragged and rugged and dark. There were no lights showing. You’d have thought it was deserted. Of course the house where I lived with Aunt Beck was well out of sight, beyond the next rise of land, but I looked all the same.
It suddenly struck me that, if I never saw Skarr again, I would never again need to go down into the Place. You cannot imagine the joy and relief that gave me. Then I found myself not believing this. I knew Aunt Beck would somehow contrive that we gave everyone the slip. We could well be back home again by morning. I knew she was unwilling to go on this unlikely journey – unwilling enough that she might risk the displeasure of the High King himself. As the last and only Wise Woman in Chaldea, she had standing enough, I thought, to defy King Farlane. Would she dare? Would she?
I was still calculating this, with a mixture of excitement and hopelessness on both sides of the question, when we clattered into the deep road at the top of Kilcannon, where the stones of the fane lofted above the shoulder of hill to my right. I could feel them, like an itch or a fizz on my skin, and a tendency for the light here to seem dark blue to my eyes. The place makes me so uncomfortable that I hate going near it. Why the gods should require such uncomfortable magics always puzzled me.
A short while later, we were out to the flatter land beyond. There stood the Priest’s dark house, smelling of burning still, and around it the empty, moon-silvered pastures where Donal had driven all the cattle away. On the other side of the road was the long barnlike place where the novices lived. This was brightly-lit and – oh dear! – the most distinct sounds of roistering coming from inside. Evidently, the novices had not expected the Priest back until morning.
The Priest leapt down from his donkey and strode to the entrance. A sudden silence fell. Looking through the doorway around the Priest’s narrow, outraged body, I could see at least ten young men caught like statues in his glare. Most of them were guiltily trying to hide drinking cups behind their backs, though two were obviously too far gone to bother. One of those went on drinking. The other went on singing, and actually raised his cup in toast to the Priest.
“I see,” said the Priest, “that the demon drink needs exorcising here. All of you are to walk down to the coast with Wise Beck and see that she gets safely to her boat.”
Aunt Beck made a soft, irritated sound. I was right. She had been thinking of slipping off.
“What? Now?” one of the novices asked.
“Yes,” said the Priest. “Now.” He strode inside the dwelling and picked up a little barrel from the table, and calmly began pouring its contents on the floor. The scent of whisky gushed to my nostrils through the door, strong enough to make my eyes water. “Fresh air is a great exorcist,” he remarked. “Off you go. And,” he looked at us waiting outside, “I wish you a good journey, ladies.”
So we went down the rest of the way with twelve drunken novices. There was quite a strong wind blowing on this side of the mountains and, whatever the Priest said, it seemed to me to make them worse. They wove about, they staggered, they sang, they giggled and every ten yards or so one of them was sure to pitch forward into a gorse bush while the rest roared with laughter. Several of them had to leave the path to be sick.
“Gods,” Ivar kept saying. “This is all I need!”