Chapter 70 Begin Again

They copied for six days. The trestles stood against the east gable under a canvas lean-to the fish farmers rigged without being asked, and Kilvane organized itself around the work the way villages organize themselves around a harvest or a wreck: Flora keeping the kettle and the visitors' book; Alasdair Banntyne turning up each morning with his truck and his gruffness and, by the third day, his own notebook, in which he was teaching himself, badly and stubbornly, to draw strokes; Raouline installed on a kitchen chair like a small dark magistrate, humming under her breath whenever the copyists faltered, as though she could hear where the tune of the carving went wrong. And down at the bottom corner of the slab, below the last column, set apart like a signature after a letter, ran lines that were not lists. Iris found them on the second day and did not tell anyone until she had checked them eleven times; then she called them all together at the trestles at noon, with the tide out and the light straight on the stone, and translated as she went, slowly, in the voice of a person walking on ice that holds. "It's a colophon," she said. "A scribe's ending. It says—" and she read it out, piece by piece, her finger moving along the old strokes while Neve took it down in fair hand: *We were few, and the water was wide. We could not hold what we loved, so we held their names, and taught the holding.* *Keep the rolls. Cut them where hands can reach and feet can honor. Sing the sounds, for song survives when stone does not.* *When the breaking comes — and it will come — keep the roll in the mouth, and pass it low, and wait.* *When peace comes, cut again. Sing again. Carry again. What we began is not ours to finish, only to hand on. Begin again.* The silence afterward lasted long enough that the tide had time to turn. It was Lila who broke it, kneeling at the stone's edge with her palm flat on the colophon, feeling the sun-warmth of it rise into her hand. "Eighty years ago a woman opened a box in a front room in Thornhaven," she said, half to herself, half to the stone, wholly to whoever was listening both ways along the centuries, "and everything we have done since — every letter, every wall, every child taught the hum — has been us answering her. And now it turns out we were also answering this." She looked up at Iris, and there was something in her face between laughter and tears that had nowhere better to go. "*Begin again.* They wrote us instructions before the English language came to this coast. We've been following directions we didn't know had been left for us." On the Friday they laid the doorstep back. The township voted on it first, properly, in the hall — Alasdair Banntyne himself moving the motion, on the grounds that a thing guarded underfoot for a thousand years was evidently safer than most things standing in daylight — and the lifting and the bedding-down were done with the same ropes and the same care and, at the last, with the same barefoot gentleness, Raouline insisting on laying her palm flat on the turf when it was rolled back over, twice, once for each direction of time. That evening, with the light going long and gold across the bay, Raouline sang them the cart-song entire, standing on the strand where the whole township could hear, because songs kept secret too long go stale, she said, and hers was due. Her voice was thin as wire and absolutely steady. The verses told of a load carried careful over moor and ford by men paid in meal and silence; and the refrain came round and round like waves: *Hold it from the wet, lads, hold it from the flame, Nothing in the kirk-yard kist goes out the way it came—* —and the last verse, the one her grandmother had made her learn twice over, pointed like a finger: *West of where the sunrise walks, north of where the herrings run, Over by the fire-hill green, under it the cold dark one; Leave it with the keepers there, them that mind the second door, Tell no priest and tell no clerk — only them that ask, and more.* "Second door," Iris repeated afterward, around and around it, pacing the wet sand with her arms folded. "The socket here is one door — one keeping-place among stations. There'll be another. A place where the practice kept its deepest things, somewhere west and north, on an island with—" she waved a hand at the horizon, furious with wanting a gazetteer "—fire under it. There are islands like that. I *will* find the list of them." It was then, with the dusk almost full and the first stars trying their hands over the cape, that Callum's boat came back into the bay from the supply run to Achmore, running its dark length up the shallows with more aboard than it had left carrying. He grounded the bow and held it with the painter while a young woman stepped down onto the wet sand — mid-twenties, wind-burnt, traveling bag in one hand and in the other, wrapped in cloth and held the way you hold a bird, something square. "Says she's seen our paper," Callum called, by way of entire explanation. "Pinned up on the Achmore quay-board since May. Read it forty times, she says, before she could afford the crossing." Her name was Katrin, and she came from the out-isles beyond the Monachs, two days' weather away west-northwest — the bearing, though none of them said it aloud just then, of the drowned road. She had heard the hum from her grandmother, who died last winter at ninety-four. And after the storm two springs past, when the sea took the croft house, her family's keeping-box had gone into the water with everything else — except that Katrin, sixteen that year, had watched from the headland and marked where it settled. She stood on the strand in the last light with her bundle in her arms, an island girl reporting for duty in the only language either of her grandmothers would have counted as real. "I've brought what my grandmother left me," she said. "And I know where the sea put yours. If you're the ones who answer letters—" her chin lifted, exactly as Tomas's had at Saltwick, exactly as Ailsa's had at the ladder-head, the whole coast's ancient defiance arriving one more time in one more pair of shoulders— "then I'm asking."