第69章 What the Threshold Held

The township came to the hall on the Tuesday evening in numbers that surprised everyone except Flora Macneill — crofters and boatmen, the post-woman, two families of fish farmers in company jackets, children folded into the back benches where all important business is transacted. Lila stood at the front with the tracing of the doorstep unrolled beside her like a skin of the thing itself, and made her case simply: what the stone was; what it held; who had walked on it and why that had been keeping and not treading-down; what she proposed, which was to lift it once, record it whole, copy every mark, and lay it back where it had lain for a thousand years if that was the township's will. An objection came at once, as objections should. Alasdair Banntyne — young, broad, third-generation fish farmer, arms folded like a locked gate — said his piece from the middle of the room: "You'll lift it, and copy it, and then it'll be in a book, and then there'll be coaches." He looked round the benches, gathering the nod of the room. "We've seen what wanting-to-look does to coasts." And it might have ended there, one man's gate against one visitor's case, except that a small shape rose from the front bench and stood, and Kilvane went quiet the way it goes quiet when Raouline does anything at all, which is rarely and with consequence. She was tiny and ancient and brown as a peat finger, with a shawl over her head and eyes that seemed to have been looking at something slightly further off than the walls her whole life. She had come down from the Point for the meeting, which Flora whispered was itself unprecedented within living memory. "Ask me," Raouline said, in a voice like wind through wire, "what I sing for." The hall waited. Lila asked her, gently. What did she sing for, all those evenings at the Point? "For them that the kirk has and the ground has not," the old woman said. "My grandmother learned me the sounds before I could speak straight, and told me: these are for the names you will never see written, and someday somebody will come asking what they are, and when they do, you will know the road's still alive." She turned her head slowly and found Lila with those far-sighted eyes. "Fifty years I've hummed at the Point wondering was I the last of it. And now here's three women standing where I can see them, with my own grandmother's sounds drawn out fair on paper yonder, note for note." Her chin came up. "I say lift the stone. And I'll stand at the lifting." Alasdair Banntyne looked at Raouline, and at the tracing, and at his own boots, and unfolded his arms. "If she says so," he said gruffly, "then it's not your book we're minding after all, is it. It's hers." Which was, though he perhaps did not intend it so, the truest sentence spoken about the practice in that county for a hundred years, and Neve wrote it down word for word. The vote, when the hall's elder called for it — Flora having declined the chair on the grounds that she had relations on both sides of every question — went as such votes go in small townships: by silence first, and then by hands, one after another around the benches like lamps being lit along a street. Alasdair's own came up last and highest. They lifted the doorstep on the Thursday, at the big low water, with half the township hauling on ropes and the other half watching from the burial-ground wall and Callum superintending slings he had no boat to rig them from and refusing all advice. The children were given the outermost rope, all eight of them together, because Flora ruled that the young should have a hand in anything they would spend their lives telling; and when the slab came up out of its bed of centuries with a sound like a long-held breath let go, it was the smallest of them who shouted, and the shout was taken up along the ropes, and Kilvane discovered it had a memory of lifting things together that went back further than any of its arguments. The stone swung slow on the spars, was walked down the turf on rollers and planks, and was lowered face-up onto trestles built against the chapel's east gable — and the whole township pressed in around it and went silent. Columns ran from edge to edge. Clusters opened them at intervals like chapter-headings. Status-strokes followed name after name down the page of it — lost, returned, carried — and the carving was crisp under a thin rime of soil-stain, protected by its own face and its covering turf, legible almost everywhere, worn only along one margin where, in some vanished century, a footfall had crossed before the turf sealed it. It was Iris, moving along the columns with her lips shaping silence, who found the thing that changed the day's arithmetic. She counted the cluster-headings twice, and then again with a fingertip actually touching each, and straightened up very slowly. "Eleven headings," she said. "Eleven stations' rolls gathered here — that's why the script differs column to column, different hands, different generations, *brought* here. This wasn't one station's stone. This is the archive. Every station sent its roll here, to the chapel, to be kept under the feet of the whole parish." She turned around, and her voice shook on what came next. "Lila — four of these headings aren't on our sheet. At all. The map shows eleven beads; this roll knows fifteen stations. The map isn't incomplete by damage or by wear. There were always more stations than the sheet holds. The road runs past the edge of everything we've got." "And the box," Lila said quietly, looking at the empty socket waiting in its plinth ten feet away, wax-red in its corner like a signature. "The box went north," said Raouline, from the front row, as if reporting weather. "The song says so. My grandmother sang me the cart-song entire. It tells where they took it." She looked round at their faces, mild and terrible. "You'll want it sung right, mind. Not spoke. Sung. Songs keep the words honest."