Chapter 64 The Stone on Odhar Isle

They went north by water in the first week of May, with a sea like hammered pewter and a wind that had decided to be reasonable, and the coast unreeling past the bow in long gray paragraphs of cliff and shingle and the occasional white house crouched in a geo as if hiding from the sky. Odhar Isle lay a mile off the mainland, low and green, with the ribs of its ruined blackhouses showing along the shelf above its one beach like the carcass of a whale that had once been a village. The crossing took twenty minutes and the landing took an hour of Callum's whole art, and when they were ashore and the boat was anchored off, the silence of the place came down over them like weather. Gulls, tide, wind in the thrift — and under all of it nothing, the particular nothing that abandoned places manufacture and export. The stone stood where Iris's bead-mark had promised it would stand, if you read her sheet as a chart and allowed for eight hundred years of grass: in the burial enclosure at the island's landward end, half-sunk, tilted, a slab of grey-green schist taller than Neve and carved from crown to base. They cleared it with hands and shells and the soft brush from the tracing roll, and the work went slowly because none of them could hurry. Columns ran down the face in the old bark-book script, generation deep, and at the head of each column sat the cluster, the title-mark, opening each list the way a word opens a door. "It's a station roll," Iris said. Her voice was not steady and she did not try to make it so. "Carved. We've only ever seen the script carried — in bark, on paper, in paint on a boat's strakes. This is the practice building itself a monument. A ledger you can't lose in a fire." "Unless you can lose it to the grass," Neve said practically, already kneeling with the tracing paper, "which is why we're here in May instead of never." It was the small recurring marks after the names that stopped Lila. She had seen them in the photographs of the bark sheets all winter — little status-strokes, Iris called them, lost, returned, carried, whatever they were, to be wrestled out over years. Here on the stone one stroke-shape recurred down the columns with a frequency that looked less like notation than like refrain, and when she pointed it out, Iris compared it against her drawings for a long time with her lips moving, and then sat back on her heels in the wet grass. "That's the one I'd been calling returned," she said. "On the bark sheets it turns up now and again. Here it's most of the column." She looked down the slab, at all those deep-cut names each followed by the same small sign, and her voice dropped as if the enclosure were a church, which in every way that mattered it was. "Lila — this isn't a list of the taken. It's a list of the given back. The sea returned them — bodies, boats' gear, things found on tides — and the women recorded the returns in stone so nobody could ever say the asking hadn't been answered." They stood with that a while. The tide worked at the beach below; somewhere inland a corncrake ran its dry ratchet through the ruins, keeping the only time the island had left. Neve finished her tracing as the light turned, and lay the sheets side by side on the flat top of a ruined wall, weighted at the corners with shells, and the three of them stood over them like women reading letters that had taken eight hundred years to arrive. The columns were not identical. Different widths, different rhythms of stroke — hands, generations of hands, each keeping the roll in its own carriage the way families pass down a story and change nothing but its breathing. And down near the foot of the slab, added later by a shallower cut, ran a single line in what even untrained eyes could see was a later script, the lettering half-worn: *prayd for* — and then names gone past recovery. "Someone patched it," Neve said softly. "Centuries on. Someone who couldn't read this writing anymore still knew what the stone was for, and put their own kind of words at the bottom of it. Prayed for them the best way they had left." "That," said Lila, "is the whole history of the asking in one line. The form wears out. The keeping doesn't." The crofter came out to them before noon — uninvited, then indispensable. Marsaili Gillies kept forty sheep and one boat on the mainland shore facing the isle, a widow of sixty with forearms like mooring rope, and she had rowed across because she had seen the strange boat standing off her Odhar and made it her business to know why. She listened to their explanation with open skepticism, walked to the slab, laid her palm flat on the columns exactly as Ailsa had laid hers at Carrowhead, and grunted. "Aye," she said. "That one. My mother brought me out at every Quarter Day to lay a ribbon on it, and her mother brought her, and when I asked what for, my mother said, because we do, and that was the whole of the catechism." She looked round at them, defying comment. "I've kept it up since she died. There's red wool on the top corner yonder from Lady Day, if your scholarship wants to mock it." "We don't mock it," Lila said. "We keep a lamp lit for the same reason." Marsaili studied her for a moment, deciding something. Then she jerked her chin at the slab. "There was words said over it, in the old days. Not speech — sound. My grandmother did it at the lint-wringing, when the women were tired and past minding themselves. A humming, under the breath, going up and down." And there, there in the graveyard of an emptied island, without being asked or planning it, Neve began the hum — low, unhurried, the tones passed hand to hand from dead mornings to living throats — and Marsaili Gillies went still as the stones, and her eyes filled and she let them, and when Neve ran out of breath the older woman nodded once, sharply, the way Callum countersigns a contract. "My grandmother's tune," she said. "Or near it. Near enough to be the same thing." She rowed them back at evening, refused payment with contempt, and pressed into Lila's hands a lump of her own cheese for the road, and at the slip, holding the painter while they climbed out, she gave them their next direction as casually as giving directions at all. "If you're for Invercorrie," she said, "you'll hear the weans' rhyme. The mothers count it with them at the shore when the boats go out. My mother said it came up the coast with the names in the old time." She coiled her rope, not looking at them. "Mind, I don't hold with your book-learning. But a thing my mother knew, and her mother, that nobody taught them — that I'll believe in any court in Scotland."