Chapter 75 The Fire Hill

Ewen took them up the hill on Friday morning, before any talk of opening anything, because he said you did not go through a person's front door before you had shaken their hand on the step, and the hill, in his account, was a person. The track left the township behind the kelp-store and climbed gently through fields starred with thrift and bog cotton, sheep watching them pass with the insolence of livestock on holy ground, and the higher they went the greener the grass grew underfoot, deeper and sweeter than anywhere else on the island, fed by something the ground remembered. "This is the hill that cooked," Ewen said, when they reached the broad flat crown. He stamped once, and the earth returned a sound that was not quite the sound of ordinary ground — duller, denser, a note with weight behind it. "Burnt stone, my father called it below the sod. Cracked and cracked again, millions of the wee red pieces, all through this top foot of the world. The old folk boiled water here in great wooden troughs, stones made hot in a fire and dropped in, drop after drop after year upon year, until the whole hill was built of the doing of it." He looked round the summit, at the view that took in the whole of Tarskay, the sea roads north and south, and — on a clear day, he said, and today was clear — the faint blue line of the Monachs, and beyond them, invisible but present to every islander the way a relative off-screen is present, the direction of the mainland coast. "Feasting, some say. A sauna, say others, and laugh. My grandmother said neither. She said it was where you brought water to boiling for the washing of the dead, and that the hill is green because grief is the best muck there is." Below the crown, on the landward side where the hill rooted into the cliff above a raised beach, the mouth of the cave opened in the rock like a doorway in a wall that had decided to keep one. Low, square-cut at the edges — deliberately cut, unmistakably — with a lintel of grey stone bearing, when Neve knelt and brushed the lichen from it with the tenderness she otherwise spent on boat-work, a single cluster-mark worn nearly to shadow. Before it lay the door itself: a slab of close-grained schist taller than a woman, fitted to the opening with a precision that had outlasted every earthquake of fashion, and hung — Iris saw it first and made a sound like a struck bell — hung on pivots, top and bottom, real hinges of stone in stone, so that it had swung once, and might swing yet, instead of merely being dragged aside by force. Through the gap at its edge, when the wind laid itself flat for a moment, came air. Cold, dry, utterly still, smelling of nothing at all — the smell of a place where nothing had rotted or grown or died for a very long time. A place the weather had never reached. "It breathes cold," Ruaridh said, crouched at the gap with his cheek almost to the stone, professional interest warring visibly with the hair rising on his neck. "There'll be a chamber behind running deep under the hill. Dry as a sermon, I'd judge." He straightened, blowing out his breath. "And I'd judge we're the first faces it's seen since my four-times-grandfather dressed the wax." The council was held that evening in the schoolhouse — the same room that served as hall, polling station, ceilidh-floor and church on rotation — and it was unlike any meeting Lila had sat in on this coast, because there was no argument to win. The island had known about the door the way children know about the attic: completely, and without needing to open it. What the council turned over, slowly, with the lamps hissing, was order. Who should stand at the opening. Who should enter, and in what company, and carrying what, and — Ewen raised it, plainly, because it needed raising — what was to be done if the contents asked to be taken somewhere else. "For I'll tell ye what I'm afraid of," he said, huge hands loose between his knees. "Not robbers. Not professors. I'm afraid we lift that door and find a thing so heavy that Tarskay spends fifty years arguing about whether it holds it or hands it on, and the arguing does what the storm couldn't." He looked across the room at Lila, level. "So I'll put the question the custom puts it. Keeper. If it's yours to take away, will you?" "No," Lila said, and heard her own voice arrive at the answer from somewhere older than her planning. "What can stay, stays. We copy, we sing, we seal it better than we found it — and the strong-room stays the strong-room. That's the instruction, uncle. Theirs and hers." She nodded at the folded letter lying on the table, at the shaking hand that had asked only for a key left hanging and somebody, someday, who knew the weight. Mrs. Enright moved the motion, seconded by her own reflection in the window, that the door be opened on Monday morning after the asking on Sunday evening, "in proper order, kirk and custom both satisfied, and anybody that wants both a psalm and a hum shall get them in that sequence." It passed by the usual island method, silence first and then every hand in the room, including — Lila marked it, and saw Neve mark it too — the hand of Ruaridh's nephew Donald, aged seventeen, who had dived the box with his cousin and had not spoken in public in two years. Katrin said nothing at the council at all. Walking home after, the four of them strung out along the lane under a sky still bruised with light at eleven at night, she stopped where the fire hill shouldered up black against the stars, and looked at it for a while. "My grandmother used to walk up there on the equinoxes," she said. "Rain or shine, midnight, alone. I asked her once what she did up there, and she said, *I mind the door.* Just that." She started walking again, then added, half to Lila, half to the hill: "Monday, I mind it with witnesses. She'd have liked the witnesses part least and most."