Land-of-Mists

by Garry Kilworth

Genres: Horror; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

It was always Keito's destiny to lead the Polynesian armies against the Celts and the Picts of the Land-of-Mists. And now the time has come. The Warriors are assembled, the boats are ready, and the gods are preparing for the confrontation. Only Seumas, the Celtic warrior taken from his homeland years before, speaks out against the great adventure. But Seumas is an old man now, embittered by the loss of his beloved wife, Dorcha. Not even the love of his son, Craig, can console him. Soon the mighty army is on the move, crossing the sea towards the unknown land, and Seumas and Craig swell its numbers. They encounter storms, magic, monsters and tragedy even before they reach their destination - the cold, rainy land of muted colours that will decide their fate - and that of their gods. LAND-OF-MISTS is the thrilling climax to the wonderfully epic Navigator Kings series.

Release date: March 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 400

Sample

This is a work of fantasy fiction, based on the myths and legends of the Polynesian peoples and not an attempt to faithfully recreate the magnificent migrational voyages of those peoples. Other authors have done that, will do it again, far more accurately than I am able to do. This particular set of tales, within these pages, alters a piece of known geography, while hopefully retaining the internal logic of the story; my apologies to the country of New Zealand, which has changed places with Britain. (New Zealand and the Maori are not forgotten and appeared in Book II of The Navigator Kings). The gods of the Pacific region are many and diverse, some shared between many groups of islands, others specific to one set of islands or even to a single island. Their exact roles are confused and confusing, and no writer has yet managed to classify them to absolute clarity, though Jan Knappert’s book is the best. Where possible I have used the universal Polynesian deities, but on rare occasion have used a god from a specific island or group for the purposes of the story. Since the spelling of Polynesian gods and the Polynesian names for such ranks as ‘priest’ varies between island groups, I have had to make a choice, for example Tangaroa (Maori) for the god of the sea and Kahuna (Hawaiian) for priest. In short, for purposes of homogeneity I have taken liberties with the names of gods and with language.

For the facts behind the fiction I am indebted to the following works: The Polynesians by Peter Bellwood (Thames and Hudson); Nomads of the Wind by Peter Crawford (BBC); Polynesian Seafaring and Navigation by Richard Feinberg (The Kent State University Press); Ancient Tahitian Canoes by Commandant P. Jourdain (Société des Oceanistes Paris Dossier); Pacific Mythology by Jan Knappert (HarperCollins); that inspiring work, Polynesian Seafaring by Edward Dodd (Nautical Publishing Company Limited); Aristocrats of the South Seas by Alexander Russell (Robert Hale); the brilliant Myths and Legends of the Polynesians by Johannes C. Andersen (Harrap); and finally the two articles published back to back that sparked my imagination and began the story for me way back before I had even published my first novel, The Isles of the Pacific by Kenneth P. Emory, and Wind, Wave, Star and Bird by David Lewis (National Geographic Vol. 146 No. 6 December 1974).

Also: Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race by T. W. Rolleston (Constable); Dictionary of Celtic Mythology by Peter Berresford Ellis (Constable); and Celtic Gods Celtic Goddesses by R. J. Stewart (Blandford).

Once again, and finally, grateful thanks to Wendy Leigh-James, the design artist who provided me with a map of Oceania decorated with Polynesian symbols and motifs and the various windflowers which decorated each of the ten separate parts of each volume.

Amai-te-rangi: Deity of the sky who angles for mortals on earth, pulling them up in baskets to devour them.

Ao: God of Clouds.

Apu Hau: A god of storms, God of the Fierce Squall.

Apu Matangi: A god of storms, God of the Howling Rain.

Ara Tiotio: God of the Whirlwind and Tornado.

Aremata-rorua and Aremata-popoa: ‘Long-wave’ and ‘Shortwave’, two demons of the sea who destroy mariners.

Atanua: Goddess of the Dawn.

Atea: God of Space.

Atua: Ancestor’s spirit revered as a god.

Brighid: Celtic Goddess of smithcraft and metalwork.

Dakuwanga: Shark-God, eater of lost souls.

Dengei: Serpent-God, a judge in the Land of the Dead.

Hau Maringi: God of Mists and Fog.

Hine-keha, Hine-uri: The Moon-Goddess, wife of Marama the Moon-God, whose forms are Hina-keha (bright moon) and Hine-uri (dark moon).

Hine-nui-to-po: Goddess of the Night, of Darkness and Death. Hine is actually a universal goddess with many functions. She is represented with two heads, night and day. One of her functions is as patroness of arts and crafts. She loved Tuna the fish-man, out of whose head grew the first coconut.

Hine-te-ngaru-moana: Lady of the Ocean Waves. Hine in her fish form.

Hine-tu-whenua: Benevolent goddess of the wind who blows vessels to their destination.

Hua-hega: Mother of the trickster demi-god Maui.

Io: The Supreme Being, the ‘Old One’, greatest of the gods who dwells in the sky above the sky, in the highest of the twelve upper worlds.

Ira: Mother of the Stars.

Kahoali: Hawaiian God of Sorcerers.

Kukailimoku: Hawaiian God of War.

Kuku Lau: Goddess of Mirages.

Limu: Guardian of the Dead.

Lingadua: One-armed God of Drums.

Magantu: Great White Shark, a monster fish able to swallow a pahi canoe whole.

Manannan mac Lir: Celtic Sea God.

Maomao: Great Wind-God, father of the many storm-gods, including ‘Howling Rainfall’ and ‘Fierce Squall’.

Marama: God of the Moon, husband of Hine-keha, Hine-uri.

Mareikura: Personal attendants of Io, the Old One. His ‘angels’.

Marikoriko: First woman and divine ancestor, wife of Tiki. She was fashioned by the Goddess of Mirages out of the noonday heatwaves.

Maui: Great Oceanian trickster hero and demi-god. Maui was born to Taranga, who wrapped the child in her hair and gave him to the sea-fairies. Maui is responsible for many things, including the birth of the myriad of islands in Oceania, the coconut, and the length of the day, which was once too short until Maui beat Ra with a stick and forced him to travel across the sky more slowly.

Milu: Ruler of the Underworld.

Moko: Lizard-God.

Mueu: Goddess who gave bark-beating, to make tapa cloth, to the world. The stroke of her cloth-flail is death to a mortal.

Nangananga: Goddess of Punishment, who waits at the entrance to the Land of the Dead for bachelors.

Nareau: Spider-God.

Nganga: God of Sleet.

Oenghus mac in Og: Celtic Lord of Fatal Love.

Oro: God of War and Peace, commander of the warrior hordes of the spirit world. In peacetime he is ‘Oro with the spear down’ but in war he is ‘killer of men’. Patron of the Arioi.

Paikea: God of Sea-Monsters.

Papa: Mother Earth, first woman, wife of Rangi.

Pele: Goddess of Fire and the Volcano.

Pere: Goddess of the Waters which Surround Islands.

Punga: God of Ugly Creatures.

Ra: Tama Nui-te-ra, the Sun-god.

Rangi: God of the Upper Sky, originally coupled to his wife Papa, the Goddess of the Earth, but separated by their children, mainly Tane the God of Forests whose trees push the couple apart and provide a space between the brown earth and blue sky, to make room for creatures to walk and fly.

Rehua: Star-God, son of Rangi and Papa, ancestor of the demigod Maui.

Ro: Demi-god, wife of the trickster demi-god Maui, who became tired of his mischief and left him to live in the netherworld.

Rongo: God of Agriculture, Fruits and Cultivated Plants. Along with Tane and Tu he forms the creative unity, the Trinity, equal in essence but each with distinctly different attributes. They are responsible for making Man, in the image of Tane, out of pieces of earth fetched by Rongo and shaped, using his spittle as mortar, by Tu the Constructor. When they breathed over him, Man came to life.

Rongo-ma-tane: God of the Sweet Potato, staple diet of Oceanians.

Rongo-mai: God of Comets and Whales.

Ro’o: Healer-God, whose curative chants were taught to men to help them drive out evil spirits which cause sickness.

Ruau-moko: Unborn God of Earthquakes, trapped in Papa’s womb.

Samulayo: God of Death in Battle.

Tane: Son of Rangi the Sky God, and himself the God of artisans and boat builders. He is also the God of Light (especially to underwater swimmers because to skin divers light is where life is), the God of Artistic Beauty, the God of the Forest, and Lord of the Fairies. As Creator in one of his minor forms he is the God of Hope.

Tangaroa: God of the Ocean, who breathes only twice in 24 hours, thus creating the tides.

Taranis: Celtic God of Thunder.

Tawhaki: God of Thunder and Lightning. Tawhaki gives birth to Uira (lightning) out of his armpits. Tawhaki is also the God of Good Health, an artisan god particularly adept at building houses and plaiting decorative mats.

Tawhiri-atea: Storm-God, leveller of forests, wave-whipper.

Te Tuna: ‘Long eel’, a fish-god and vegetation-god. Tuna lived in a tidal pool near the beach and one day Hine went down to the pool to bathe. Tuna made love to her while she did so and they lived for some time on the ocean bed.

Tiki: Divine ancestor of all Oceanians who led his people in their fleet to the first islands of Oceania.

Tikokura: Wave-god of monstrous size whose enormous power and quick-flaring temper are to be greatly feared.

Tini Rau: Lord of the Fishes.

Tui Delai Gau: Mountain God who lives in a tree and sends his hands fishing for him when he grows hungry.

Tui Tofua: God of all the sharks.

Ua: Rain God, whose many sons and daughters, such as ‘long rains’ and ‘short rains’ are responsible for providing the earth with water.

Uira: Lightning (See Tawhaki).

Ulupoka: Minor god of evil, decapitated in a battle amongst the gods and whose head now rolls along beaches looking for victims.

Whatu: The God of Hail.

The Fijian war chief Nagata and his warriors were paddling up the Sigatoka River. They travelled cautiously, for the Sigatoka was the ancestral home of two particularly unpleasant gods: Dakuwanga the Shark-God and Dengei the Serpent-God. While both these deities were concerned mainly with the dead, they would quite happily destroy the living, if sufficiently annoyed to rouse themselves from their resting places.

‘Use your paddles smoothly,’ warned Nagata, ‘in case we waken those who sleep lightly.’

The chief and his warriors were on their way to their warclub tree. Warriors all over Oceania were arming themselves and making ready for a long voyage. The great Rarotongan ariki, the noble Kieto, was massing Oceanians for a long voyage to a place called Land-of-Mists. There would be fleets from distant Hawaii, from Rapanui, Samoa, Tahiti, Aitutaki, Tonga and many, many others throughout the blue watery world of Oceania.

Along the murky river swirling with brown mud went the canoe, battling upstream against the sweeping flow of the Sigatoka, avoiding dead floating trees taken from the valley’s edges. On all sides were stone-walled hill forts, for the Fijians were mighty warriors and their various clans were forever battling against one another.

Suddenly as the canoe rounded a bend it snagged a fishing line. The line went taut and halted the canoe. The hands of the fisherman on the bank were obviously very strong.

Nagata was annoyed and indignant. The paddlers had just got a good rhythm going and it was upsetting to have that brought abruptly to a dead stop. The war chief was particularly incensed as on this part of the river the current was so strong it was difficult for his warriors to build up any speed.

‘Whose line is this?’ cried Nagata, angrily, as the thick sennit continued to hamper the canoe’s progress. He reached over and wrenched a massive pearl-shell hook from the bows. ‘Whose hook and lure are these? Come out and be recognized. I shall brain the person to whom this fishing tackle belongs with my gata waka club.’

The leaves of an hibiscus tree on the bank parted in response to this shout. Two large hands appeared, one holding the line, the other forming a shaking fist. Nagata was suddenly appalled to see that no body was attached to these hands.

He knew immediately to whom the severed bodily extremities belonged.

Tui Delai Gau, God of the Mountain, was a giant who lived in a tree. He sent his hands fishing whenever he was hungry. He could also send his head up into the air, to spy on trespassers.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Nagata to the hands. ‘I – I did not know I was speaking to you, my lord …’

There was, of course, no reply, for hands cannot speak. However, a head appeared over the rainforest, some distance inland, and a loud moan escaped its lips. The hands began walking down the bank on their fingers in response to this cry. They entered the water. Then they began swimming towards the canoe with funny fish-like movements. The thumbs stayed above the water, as if guiding the hands in the right direction.

One of the paddlers shouted in fear, ‘I have a wife and child – it was not my fault!’

He dived over the edge of the canoe and began swimming towards the opposite bank. One by one the other men dived over the side of the canoe and did likewise, leaving Nagata to deal with Tui Delai Gau’s hands on his own. The god’s hands gripped the end of the canoe and pulled downwards quickly. Nagata, at the other end, was shot high into the air. His precious club went flying and he himself landed on his head and shoulders in the mud of the shallows ahead of his swimming comrades.

When they reached Nagata, they rescued him, pulling him out of the clay bottom.

In the meantime Tui Delai Gau’s hands were destroying the canoe, ripping it apart. They tore the gunwales from the hull, the sennit stitching ripping like cloth. They wrenched the prow from the bows. Finally they broke the back of the canoe, sending the debris floating back down the river towards the sea.

When the hands had finished their work, they swam back to their fishing spot and pulled in the line. The awed men watched as the hook was baited with something that looked suspiciously like a man’s liver and was then cast in the deep middle part of the River Sigatoka. They nodded in admiration as the bird’s-feather lure was played on the current, so that it skipped and danced like a live thing on the river’s ripples.

Within a few moments Tui Delai Gau had caught himself a handsome fish.

‘What are we going to do now?’ asked one of the men of their chief. ‘We have no boat to reach the weapon-tree.’

‘We must walk,’ grunted Nagata. ‘How else will we be able to arm ourselves with war clubs?’

So they crept through the rainforest, but this was a dangerous business in Fiji. Since they were visiting the warclub tree, they were not heavily armed. They needed to arrive empty-handed to carry the weapons home. And not only were there old clans of Fijians established in territories along the Sigatoka, but recently some Tongan clans had arrived.

These were fierce people who had been banished from their own islands for being troublemakers. The Tongans had quickly established hill forts and ring-ditch forts of their own. Once a clan was embedded in a fortification of this kind, it was almost impossible to root out and destroy. From this strong base they would raid less fortified villages and prey on passing travellers.

Within each village was the dreaded Killing Stone at which the clan would slaughter their prisoners as offerings to the gods, and afterwards cook and eat them.

At this moment the Fijian group was passing through the land of the Waiwai clan who owned just one of the hundred ring-ditch forts along the Sigatoka. They were a terrible people. Their village was surrounded not by just one moat, but three, plus a loopholed stone wall. Once you were taken prisoner and carried beyond that wall, those ditches, you were lost for ever.

‘Keep close to me. Make no noise,’ whispered Nagata, promising himself that next time they selected a warclub tree, it would be much closer to home.

The trouble was, one needed a young nokonoko tree for such a purpose, and the nokonoko grew in only a few locations.

Finally they were through the land of the Waiwai and they could see their sacred tree, up on the bank of the river. It was protected by magic charms – wicker sharks, dangling from its branches – and no other tribe would dare steal from a tree which was protected by the magic of a priest. Their skins would blister, their eyes would pop out completely from their heads and their tongues would swell and grow pustules.

A warclub tree is certainly a wonderful sight.

When a clan selects such a tree, it does so with a view to growing its weapons over the long term. Each branch, each bough, is trained in a particular killing shape from the time when the tree is supple enough to be bent and twisted easily. Sennit cord, stones and logs of wood are used to make the shapes around which the branches are bound. In time the nokonoko wood becomes harder and tougher than rock. From a distance one could recognize all the different varieties of club: the i wau, of which there were eighty different types, and the i ula, the lighter, more personal throwing clubs. These merely needed to be detached from the tree to become a weapon to wield.

Indeed a warclub tree, bristling with such weapons, looks like a festival tree hung with gifts for warriors.

‘Quickly, cut some weapons from the tree,’ said Nagata. ‘We must not linger.’

He was not only worried about the other clans, there was still Tui Delai Gau to worry about. The god might send his head up high above the forest again, to see where they were. Sometimes these lesser gods brooded on things and decided at a later time that a little mayhem, destruction and murder would not go amiss. The minor gods were less secure than the greater gods, and insults festered in them.

‘Quickly, quickly!’

The clubs were cut down with small flint axes, gathered in bundles, strapped to the backs of the warriors. Finally, everyone had as much as they could carry. Nagata led his men back through the rainforest along the valley towards the sea. His was a coastal clan, a people who felt themselves quite superior to those hot musty peoples living in the sweltering villages of the hinterland.

Nagata’s people had fresh sea breezes to cleanse their huts, light-bright sunshine to lift their spirits, clean sand for their floors, pretty decorative shells on their hut walls, laughter, gaiety, the soft sound of the surf on the reef and the cry of the seabirds over the ocean. The tribes of the hinterland had mud, thick dank jungle and still, stale air. They were definitely inferior peoples to those who lived on the coast.

But dark places breed dark thoughts, and dark thoughts make savages of men. Thus the interior tribes were fearsome, bellicose creatures who would rather crush a skull with a battle club than remember the birthday of a loved one.

When Nagata and his men were creeping through a tunnel formed by strangling fig trees and she oaks in the land of the Waiwai, they suddenly saw a pair of hands before them. In one of the hands was a sokilaki barbed fighting spear. In the other, a sobesila mountain club.

‘Tui Delai Gau!’ cried one of Nagata’s men.

But he was wrong. The hands were human and belonged to a warrior of the Waiwai. In the darkness of the rainforest, behind him, were twenty other warriors. They had heard the commotion on the river earlier and had found Nagata’s men’s footprints in the soft sand at the river’s edge. Now they had caught the trespassers sneaking back.

‘Thieves! Plunderers! Pirates!’ yelled the first Waiwai warrior, with a snarl.

Nagata felled him with a quick strike to the throat.

A brawl ensued, with several blows falling on heads and shoulders, and many spears being exchanged. There was much fierce yelling and scuffling, but in fact the area was too hemmed in by trees to allow the fight to develop into anything more than a restricted skirmish. Finally, Nagata’s men managed to fight their way through the Waiwai, with the loss of only one warrior and two wounded. The Waiwai were satisfied. They had their feast for that night. Nagata’s men were not pursued.

When Nagata finally reached the mouth of the Sigatoka River, he fell on his knees and kissed the sand. Mangoes and breadfruit were picked from the trees. Fresh coconut water was extracted from the shells. The people rejoiced at the safe return of their chieftain, mourned the loss of the one warrior, whose widow was instantly compensated. A necklace of shark’s teeth was given her by a deputation of great woolly-headed Fijian warriors with glum round faces.

Sacrifices were made to Tui Delai Gau and hung on a lantern tree. There were many-coloured fruit doves, orange-breasted honey-eaters, black ducks and white-collared kingfishers. A cloak made of the skins of ocean geckoes and green tree skinks was draped over one of the branches. Mats with strong geometrical patterns woven by women were laid around the base of the tree covering the root area.

That night there was feasting and dancing in the village of the Naga. Drums beat healthy rhythms, scented leaves sent up heady fragrances from the fires, kava was drunk into the small hours. Warriors walked on white-hot stones to prove their manhood, for this was the land of the fire-walkers. They were seemingly careless of the heat, a trick of the mind learned over the centuries.

They had their weapons of war, with which they would follow the mighty leader of their expedition, Kieto, to the Land-of-Mists. There these weapons would be put to good use, slaying a people with red hair and white skins known as the Celts.

Later that night, when the village was asleep, tipua came to the lantern tree and stole the cooked birds and the beautiful lizard-skin cloak with its shiny green scales and small tight stitching. Giggling they went back into the forest with their treasures, knowing that the tribesmen would wake in the morning and believe the Mountain God had been appeased.

Goblins are like that: they care for no man’s honour.

Mist drifted low over the heather, falling down the sides of deep gullies, over the lintels of rockhangs of the glen. The man who tramped resolutely through this mist, scattering these vapours with his walk, was in the fifth decade of his life. He strode on thick red legs, his feet bound with rags to keep them from the cold, along a ridge towards a needle of rock. He was a Celt, a Scot from the kingdom of Dalriada, sworn enemy of Angles, Britons, Jutes and, above all, Picts.

The Celt’s hair was dark and as shaggy as the mane on a mountain steer. His neck was thick and bullish. The width and muscle of his shoulders were a testament to his great physical strength. In his right hand he held a roughly forged, wide-bladed sword with a rusting trailing edge. In his left fist was a wooden targe with the bark still gripping it.

The granite monolith which appeared to be his destination pierced the late winter sky like a black twisted tree. This rock was riven with dark magic, which was why the old crone sat at its base, the smoke from her fire curling around its tortured shape. The Celt hailed her as he reached the snowline and stamped along its edge to where the shrivelled hag was hunched.

‘Old witch,’ he growled, ‘what have you for me?’

‘Ah, Douglass Barelegs. Do ye bring me gifts? Even a woman with powers needs her wee surprises.’

He threw her a lump of something wrapped in a dirty rag. Whatever it was, it sweated grease in thick patches. She took it with a claw-like hand and sniffed it noisily, making appreciative sounds afterwards.

‘Is it a dead man’s heart ye bring me, laddie?’

‘Whatever it is,’ he replied, ‘you’ll eat it, so why bother with its identity. Have you news for me, woman? Someone told me you had something to tell.’

‘Was it a corbie told ye so, eh, laddie?’ she cackled, stirring her little fire with a stick then placing the bag of offal on a hot stone beside it. ‘D’ye listen to sich creatures?’

‘Don’t play games with me, old hag,’ he said, sweeping his sword-arm backwards as if about to take her head from her shoulders with the honed edge of the blade, ‘or I’ll chop your neck off at the roots.’

She screwed up her features. ‘No need to get testy on me,’ she snarled. ‘I can keep things to myself if I wish it.’

He gripped the oakwood handle of the sword, its two halves bound with sweat-stained cord around the hilt-spike, ready to deliver the blow. She looked along the iron blade, the light dancing erratically over the hammered surface where it was pitted and flawed, and knew she was a second away from death. Her sneer turned to a look of pathetic terror.

‘Don’t …’ she said. ‘He’s coming.’

The Celt stayed his hand, letting his arm fall down by his side. His face registered a look of mixed hope and disbelief.

‘He? You mean Seumas-the-Black is finally on his way back to his homeland?’

‘Aye,’ she laughed, ‘but whether he’ll reach here is a matter for the gods.’

The Celt chose not to indulge in the same doubts as the crone. He preferred to imagine Seumas stepping from a boat while he himself waited to take his head from his shoulders. Douglass wondered whether his mother would be with the Pict. He did not dare ask the witch for this information, in case her answer was not the one he wanted.

The hag drew her ragged shawl around her thin shoulders and peered at him through the smoke of the fire.

‘The man who killed yer fether has a son,’ she croaked.

His head came up quickly. ‘What? He and my mother, the Dark One?’

She smiled, enjoying the fact that he was shocked by this news. ‘Nay, laddie – his spawn from another base union. The young whelp is a mongrel. I see his name written in the smoke. Craig, it is. The Man of the Crag. He comes too.’ The witch stared into the middle distance. ‘It is of great importance that ye kill him quickly, for he is a Man of Two Worlds. The prophecy says that sich a man will open the tower and destroy my kind for ever …’

‘Damn you and yer prophecies, you old crone – who cares whether your kind is gone?’

‘Ye will, Douglass Barelegs, when there’s nay magic for ye to draw on and work yer schemes, yer sedition, yer betrayals. Ye dream of power, ye have great ambitions locked in yer breast, Douglass, but ye cannae get onything wi’out the likes o’ me. Ye have to kill this Craig the moment ye set eyes on the man, or we’ll bayth perish. We’ll bayth vanish in the mist.’

The face of Douglass twisted into a mask of hatred and he raved into the wind. ‘I’ll kill the two of them! I’ll kill them all! At last my fether’s death will be avenged. I’ll kill fether and son – and that wipperjinny of a mother too if she’s with them. I was ten years old when she ran away with that murtherin’ bastard – took off with some sea raiders from the outer islands I’m told. Gone to Yell, Fetlar or Unst, to soil his blanket with their greasy union.

‘That wipperjinny ran off with her dead husband’s murthurer, to fill his bed with her slattern’s body. If I had not been with my grandfether on a raid, I would have killed her then. Now the bitch will die with him. My only regret, my only shame, is that they’ve lived so long. A whole life together. My fether had none. He was struck down in his prime by a cowardly cur …’

The old witch stirred the fire again, looking at him through the veil of black smoke with narrowed eyes.

‘It was said that yer fether taught ye how to beat yer mither wi’ a heavy stick in them far-gone days. Maybe a tween the two of ye she couldna stay? She drudged for ye and ye rewarded her wi’ nothing but hurts and bruises. I think I micht have run away ma’sel in sich circumstances.’

The sword arm came up again.

‘Watch your tongue, you old bitch, or I’ll cut it out and hang it from a bush.’

The witch wisely kept her counsel after that while the greybearded man raged about how he was going to stomp faces into the ground, break bones, sever heads. While he was talking he put the end of his sword in the fire, leaving it there like a poker heating itself. From down below in the glen came the blast of a horn, which echoed around the mountainsides. Douglass stopped ranting and stared down into the trees. His clan was being attacked, but it was useless to hurry down there, for it would finish before he arrived. Raids tended to be swift, merciless and all over in a short while.

Douglass picked up his sword again. The end of it was now glowing red. Without any warning he placed the hot part against the bare skin of the crone’s withered arm. The spot sizzled, sending up a rank smell of burning flesh. The witch screamed in agony, jerking her arm back. She sucked the spot where the shrivelled flesh had been burned with her toothless mouth, moaning in the back of her throat as she did so.

‘That’s just a taste of what you’ll get if I find you’ve lied to me, you bag of bones. Next time it’ll be your eyes.’

With that he strode back along the ridge, leaving her whining against the face of the stone tor. He could not hear what she was saying but he knew it would be bad. She would be asking the demon of the stone to suck his brains through his eyesockets while he was asleep. Douglass was not afraid of threats of this kind from the witch. She was good at seeing the unseeable, but not so good at persuading the forces of evil to destroy her enemies.

‘May yer heart rot in yer ribcage, Dark Douglass,’ she shrieked after him. ‘May yer testicles shrivel like kernels in auld nutshells! May yer …’

And so they went on, while he found his path down the mountainside, to the pine-scented glen below.

Azure skies, blue seas, white sands. It did not seem right having a funeral on such a bright day, in such a colourful place. There were multi-hued shells on Rarotonga’s beach as he walked: sea combs, green turbans, scarlet tops, textile cones. Dorcha had loved the sea shells. Back in Albainn the whelk and mussel shells had been terribly dull by comparison. Dark shells out of dark seas: almost black seas on some grey stormy days.

Seumas suddenly remembered he had companions: his son, Craig, and the ageing Boy-girl.

‘I was thinking how much your adopted mother loved the colour of these Oceanic isles,’ said Seumas to Craig. ‘She was a dar