A History Maker

TWO PRIVATE HOUSES

THE RED CROSS put the dead soldiers into pure white vaults below their homes where useless things were made good again. Women who had most loved them washed the bodies, laying them neatly between their belongings and the weapons and armour returned by the gangrels. Later the whole family came down for a last visit. Sisters, nieces, aunts wept and clasped each other. Children mooned around looking woeful or puzzled until grannies helped them choose an instrument, ornament or video to remind them of a favourite brother or uncle. The living left and the vault was sealed. Clear liquid welled from the floor until it covered everything inside. The liquid turned black and frothy like Irish stout, sank back through the floor into the roots of the powerplant and left the vault perfectly empty and clean.

On the day after the funeral a morning service was held in the stalk room of Dryhope house. Smooth, milk-white and six feet wide the stalk grew like a tree from the floor and out through the ceiling. All who remained of the family were gathered round it except three members of the Boys’ Brigade: these were at the Warrior house watching replays of the recent war with other junior cadets. In a few days they would return with solemn faces and expectations of being more thoroughly served by women, but now their sisters, aunts and grannies sprawled, reclined or squatted about the floor on rugs and large cushions. The four greatest great-grandmothers were enthroned in chairs. The only two adult males also had raised seats. Joe, smoking a good cigar, lay in a wheelchair with attachments supporting the stumps of an arm and leg. Wat, lightly bandaged, sprawled on a chaise longue.

A stately woman of fifty was mother that day and stood at a crystalline table, the top patterned with coloured points of light which flowed from her finger-tips and continually changed as she played a Sanctus which had preceded the miracle of transubstantiation for centuries before. The Sanctus ended and two sturdy girls of twelve stood facing her, one on each side of the stalk. Silencing the organ she attended to the orders of the day. Nurses asked for flasks of cell serum and protein to help the growth of Joe’s new arm and leg, an ointment to ease Granny Tibs’s rheumatic knee, and Elastoplast for the medical chest. The mother struck the organ. With a low humming the objects appeared as diagrams on the stalk, each inside a circle. There were clicks, twangs and gurgles as the outlines received colour and tone. With sharp detonations the images became solid things in round cavities. The acolytes lifted them out and gave them to the nurses. With heavy thuds the cavities became grey blotches which faded from the stalk leaving it an unblemished, delicate shade of palest pink. The mother had made the sound sequence easier on the ear by blending it with chords from the Agnus Dei by Carver, Palestrina, Bach and Berlioz, covering the last thuds with a loud Amen which faded with the blotches fading from the stalk.

Then the teachers ordered disks, paper, pencils, paint; the cooks milk, cheese, flour, sugar, coffee beans; the henwife ordered a sack of meal, a sack of corn, a first edition of Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus; the joiner ordered parts for a new orthopaedic bed she was making for Joe; weavers and embroiderers asked for many different colours of yarn and silk. When all were delivered the stalk was flushed rose red, a throbbing was heard from the underground roots and the room was colder, sure signs of plant exhaustion.

“A light order now,” said the mother. “Granny Tibs?”

Granny Tibs was one hundred and twenty and ordered a doll for her two-year-old great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter. It had to be exactly like a doll she remembered playing with herself at that age, a china girl doll with curly yellow hair, blue eyes, a matching silk dress with a big bow at the back. When the diagram appeared she remembered that the hair had not been curly but smooth, and twisted in two long plaits tied with bows at the ends. The dress had also been of a historical kind called dirndl worn by the women of Bolivia or California — that should be a clue — the dress was illustrated in a book called Heidi Grows Up which had been published she thought in the eighteenth or perhaps nineteenth century. The doll was also made of cloth, not china at all. It took a long time to get exactly the doll Granny Tibs remembered and by then the colour of the stalk and temperature of the room were normal again. The children now spoke out. A young jeweller wanted two hundred grammes of silver wire and was persuaded to accept a hundred of copper. A young sculptor who asked for six kilogrammes of clay was told to collect it from Mountbenger where some aunts had a pottery; she said she hated Mountbenger because of a boy there, so was given a four-page geological guide to help her find her own supply of clay. A very young wood-worker wanted a sharp new chisel but the joiner said she would show him how to sharpen his old one. This answer caused outcries which the mother drowned with a blast of cheery sound.

Finally she faced the men and said, “Cigars, Joe?”

“I’ve all I need, Auntie,” he answered, blowing a smoke ring. She said, “Wat, you have a wanting look.”

“Have I? Then give me something that stops memories.”

“You can have Paxil, Zoloft, or Prozac, Gilbey’s London gin, The Macallan, Courvoisier or a thousand other derivatives of alcohol, opium and cocaine.”

“I want nothing that changes my chemistry,” he said coldly, “Give me a history book — not a statistical one — a book that reads like somebody talking.”

“What period?”

“A period of excitement when folk thought they were making a better world.”

Only the mother looked straight at Wat but a new alertness in the room seemed shared by everyone except the boys, the oldest great-granny, Kittock the henwife and, apparently, Joe.

“There were many such times,” said the mother. She pressed the organ and a table of names and dates flowed onto the stalk.

“The foundation of Israel, A.D. or B.C.?” she suggested, “The rise of Islam? Children’s Crusade? Peasants’ Revolt? French Revolution? More books have been written about each than there are brands of alcohol.”

There was a silence in which Wat reddened with embarrassment. Everyone seemed to be watching him. A calm, monotonous yet oddly sing-song voice said, “Have you read Ten Days That Shook the World, Wat?”

Kittock the henwife had spoken without lifting her eyes from the novel on her lap.

“Never,” said Wat thankfully.

“Well, that’s the book for you.”

So Wat ordered Ten Days That Shook the World, Reed’s account of Muscovite politics in 1917. The plant substantiated it. A girl gave it to him.

“Come outside, Wat” said Joe setting his chair in motion, “I need to see some hills.”

Wat started following but paused when the mother said, “Wat, you have lost a father, brothers, friends. We have lost brothers, lovers and sons in a war we never wanted.”

“I pity you of course,” said Wat, shrugging,

“But a circus will be here in a few days. Men will be coming from all over Scotland and even farther. Make the most of them.”

He strode out.

On this sunny spring day the projecting eaves of Dryhope house neatly shadowed the surrounding veranda. Joe sat here watching the view with the intense frown of a starving man who cannot quite believe in the meal before him. From under the veranda a flow of pure water fed a series of pools linked by waterfalls. The nearest held trout and cresses and a marble bird table shaped like a twentieth-century aircraft carrier. The second was a play-pool where infants splashed and shouted in sight of two ten-year-old aunts who lay gossiping on a nearby lawn. The third was a fishpond in a vegetable garden stretching all round the house. The last was a duckpond from which Dryhope burn flowed down through a glen planted with fruit trees and berry bushes. On the right bank stood Dryhope Tower, an ancient keep used by the henwife. A steepening of the hillside hid land immediately beyond but not Saint Mary’s Loch half a mile away. Today the calm surface exactly reflected the high surrounding hills with woods of pine, oak, birk, rowan, reflected also three houses by the shore. Oxcleuch, Cappercleuch and Bowerhope resembled Dryhope: large, low-walled, broad-eaved mansions, each with the slim white inverted cone of a powerplant stalk growing dim and invisible after the first hundred feet. The summits appeared at cloud level, each a disc of bright vapour from which a line of vapour flowed east with the wind. More than fifty such discs patterned the sky. The remotest over powerplants in Moffat, Eskdale and Teviot, looked like tiny flecks in the wedges of blue air between the hills. Lines of vapour from these and many more in the west ruled the heavenly blue into parallel strips. The lines were more emphatic today, as always after big funerals.

Joe pointed to the view with his only foot and said wistfully, “There’s a lot of goodness out there.”

“But ye cannae feel it,” said Wat, who sat cross-egged and reading on a rug beside him.

“No yet.”

“Maybe you’ll never feel part of that goodness again. I lost the feeling with my first battle.”

“Pessimist. I’m no like you. I’ll feel as good as ever when I get back my arm and leg.”

Joe glanced wistfully down at the crystalline cylinders extending from his right shoulder and right thigh. Tiny atomic motors among the pinkish-brown broth inside were nudging together cells of new limbs, but a month would pass before outlines of bones appeared. Joe sighed then said, “You made them very tense in there. You should keep ill-sounding words for me or the Warrior house.”

“Dryhope women are stupid,” said Wat coldly,

“They think I’m mourning the Dad — that daft old prick.”

“It should be possible for you to mourn the Dad,” said Joe gently, “I’m mourning him and he loved you most, loved you more than anyone because you’re our bonniest fighter and always argle-bargled with him. He liked contention. Are you mourning the bairns?”

“Rage not sorrow is my disease. Why did our fucking old progenitor con nearly all Ettrick into dying round a pole with a tin chicken on top? Why did he want us to fight after the decent chiefs of Teviot and Eskdale, Liddesdale and Galawater had surrendered? I’ll tell you why. He was past his prime and knew he was fighting his last war. He wanted to take our whole army into the roots with him. Our bairns were slaughtered because our Dad feared age and loneliness.”

“He made sure we’ll be remembered! The lot of us! Living and dead!” said Joe with a small firm smile, “The bairns too, in fact the bairns most of all. ‘All my fledglings have turned into eagles,’ he said. O he was right. Wee lads of fourteen have never chosen to die like that before — not since the dawn of television. If history wasnae a thing of the past I would say Ettrick made it two days ago. The strategy was the Dad’s but only you had the spunk to get the standard to the cliff top and kill the man you passed it to … What’s wrong?”

“I’m remembering his face,” muttered Wat after a moment. He had dropped his book and was biting his nails. Joe said softly, “A cigar?” and offered one.

“No.”

After a minute of silence Joe said mildly, “You’re wrong about Dad wanting us all to go out with him. He saved me by falling on me when Dodds’s butchers were hacking us both, that was no accident. But nothing you say upsets me, Wat — you arenae normal. You’re a hero. I’m proud of what you did. And I don’t care if all this …” (he waved his only hand at the view) “… never seems sweet to me again. Pride will keep me going, like it keeps you.”

He looked down at Wat who was reading again, or pretending to. Joe said, “How can a soldier who thinks our last war too bloody forget it by reading about dark ages when men fought wars without rules, and burned bombed looted peaceful houses, and killed raped enslaved whole families of women children and old ones — and boasted about it in their filthy newspapers! I hated history when I was wee. When Granny Pringle showed us films from those days I had nightmares.”

“I’m reading about folk who struggled to stop all that,” said Wat, “They were the greatest heroes.”

“Well, mibby, but it was the powerplants that stopped all that.”

For a while the only sounds were sparrows twittering on the bird table, infant shouts and splashes, a dull distant boom from Oxcleuch where something metallic was being synthesized. Joe said, “How would you like to die, Wat, if not in a battle folk would replay for centuries?”

“By heart failure while weeding a cabbage patch.”

“Aye, only dafties despise gardening,” said Joe thoughtfully, “But soldiers like us have no patience for it.”

Wat pocketed his book and stood up.

“You’re no fool, Joe,” he said, “You’re also brave, honest and good-natured so you’ll be our next general.”

“Me? General Joe of Ettrick? Why not General Wat?” said Joe grinning shyly, “You’re our hero.”

“I’m moody — a Hamlet type — good for sudden sprints and useless in the long run. I’ll go now.”

“Aye, a ride will help ye relax. Arrange one for me.”

Wat went down to the lawn, showed the larger of the little aunts his bandaged palms and said politely, “Lend me your hands Auntie Jean, these arenae much use.”

She jumped happily up and trotted beside him through an orchard with beehives under the trees. They entered a stable with a backdoor onto the common on the far side of the deer fence and went through it, collecting saddle, bridle, sugar lumps and whistle from the tackroom. On the common several horses grazed within sight of a water trough.

“I need an experienced old pony,” said Wat,

“Sophia will do.”

He blew three notes on the whistle. A sedate dapple grey with long mane and tail moved nearer without ceasing to crop grass.

“I know where you’re going! I know where you’re going!” shouted Auntie Jean excitedly. Wat threw the saddle onto the pony, offered it sugar and held the head while Jean’s strong little hands slipped on the bridle and tightened buckles on that and the girths. Wat inspected the buckles, set foot in stirrup, thrust most of himself over the pony’s back and with some groaning arrived upright in the saddle.

“I’ll lead you!” shouted Jean skipping about,

“I’ll lead you to all the randy aunties of Craig Douglas!”

“You willnae,” said Wat, “Give me those.”

With a pout of annoyance she handed up the reins. He gripped them clumsily with his thumbs and said, “You don’t know where I’m going, Jean. Clap her and goodbye.”

Jean turned the pony to face east and downhill and clapped her rump. Sophia, liking her rider, set off briskly although he turned her uphill and north.

By easy slopes he headed for Hawkshaw Rig but later turned right into a glen between that and Wardlaw, then crossed a fast-flowing burn and descended into woods behind Craig Douglas house, hoping to enter the grounds unseen. He failed. The backdoor in the deer fence banged open as he neared and four boys ran out, jostling for priority in helping him dismount and stable Sophia.

“If Jean clyped on me she’s a sleekit wee bitch,” he told them. They said nothing. Leaving the stable for the garden he saw all the Craig Douglas children and adolescents standing to left and right of the path, staring. Even babies in the arms of older sisters were gazing at him in silent wonder. He paused and said, “When I last came here you were a lot noisier.” Nobody spoke.

“Have you no tale for me Annie?” he asked a tall girl with a humorous cast of features. She said faintly, “We’re glad you’ve no come back like our uncles, Wat.”

He shrugged, went on to the house and found a mother waiting on the veranda. A week before she had been pleasantly plump; now there were dark hollows under her cheekbones and red-rimmed eyes. He said gruffly, “You look twenty years older, Mirren.”

She said coldly, “You’re the same as ever. Have you come to see your pals?”

He thought for a moment. The outer walls of the house and most of the inner ones were transparent just now. Only the dark-walled infirmary and the room of the woman he wanted to see allowed no glimpse of their interior. He sighed and nodded.

And followed the mother inside and across floors where only young women looked straight at him. Grannies, matrons and even a girl suckling an infant ignored him or looked away: this disturbed him far more than the silence of the youngsters outside. He was brought into the infirmary where five big translucent boxes lay, each containing what seemed pink fog with a complicated shadow inside. The mother pressed a stud. The infirmary darkened but the shadows became the well-lit bodies of young, naked, badly dismembered men, each with limbs and organs floating beside their torso and linked to it by threads like cobwebs. Only one body exhibited movement: eyes which slowly blinked in time with a mouth opening and shutting like the mouth of a fish. The face had no intelligence in it. Wat abruptly turned his back on these things. The ceiling went clear and admitted sunlight again.

“You can mend them?” he asked in a voice shrill with unbelief.

“Mibby. Perhaps. It will take years but they’re just lads.”

“Mirren, most of Charlie’s head is gone.”

“He’ll grow a new one if we can restore the heart. The new brain will have his character if not his memories.”

“Our memories are our character, Mirren.”

“Then the mother and sisters who love him will restore his memories, Wat Dryhope. We’ll give him back all the good things the war sliced away, but you won’t be one of them, Wattie! When he starts thinking again we’ll only remind him of what’s harmless!”

“You’re so maddened by grief that you’re blethering, Mirren. I know it’s a cruel injustice that I’m almost unhurt and your lads are nearly dead, but I’m the man who argued for what would have saved them. They refused it. And have you forgot that bloody Daddy Jardine was born and bred in this house by Craig Douglas women? Our general’s obstrapulous conceit wasnae nourished by the aunties of Dryhope.” “No woman on earth nourished Jardine’s conceit!” cried Mirren, “He got it in the Warrior house. We never scorned him for his wee-ness but other soldiers did until he showed he was spunkier than them and could take knocks without squealing. So they made him their pet, then elected him boss, and after that Craig Douglas never saw him again — except through the public eye — until two days back when the Red Cross gave us his remains with sixteen other corpses and the pieces you’re feart to turn round and see. Women had no part in making a bloody hero of Jardine Craig Douglas. Yes, he fathered weans in half the houses along Yarrow but he only wanted women for one thing. Like all soldiers the only folk he really loved were men!”

Wat heard this with bowed head then said, “All true, Aunt Mirren, but women arenae wholly innocent of the war game. You don’t take to fighting like we do — the world holds hardly a dozen tribes of professional Amazons — but many girls, aye, and many women are daft about soldiers. I’m a graceless brute so when I came home from the stars few women outside Dryhope house would look at me — not until I fought for Ettrick and showed some talent.”

“I cannae be fair to you, Wat,” the mother said drying her eyes, “Go to Nan.”

He walked swiftly to the other opaque-walled room, looking ceilingward to avoid eye-contact with anyone before reaching it. A teenage girl scampered out as he was about to enter, followed by another. He went in and shut the door by pulling across a heavy tapestry curtain. Then he faced the woman inside and said, “See me Nan! I’m a rare animal now, an Ettrick warrior with nothing obvious missing. But I cannae move my fingers and I feel nine tenths dead and as sexless as a neep. Do you still like Wat Dryhope?”

She smiled and beckoned.

Next morning she wakened Wat by prising his arms from around her and saying, “You neednae hold so tight, I won’t run away.”

She slipped out of bed and pulled on a long loose shirt. He raised himself by an elbow to watch. Playing a keyboard invisible to him she made a clear round window in the wall before her and raised it until it framed a hawk perched on the top branch of a Scotch pine and the summit of Whitelaw against a pale sky. By light from this Nan opened elegant boxes holding the materials of a meal and made breakfast.

She was nearly forty with short dark hair and a lively, clever face which appreciated everything she saw. While poaching an egg her frown of concentration left a small smile at the corners of the mouth, a humorous look which had been inherited by her daughters. Nearby was a loom where she wove rugs, door curtains, pillows with patterns that made this room different from any other, also the screen she used to design new patterns or play music. She had a talent for every worthwhile art, handling utensils with swift ease which soothed Wat’s mind as much as her fingers had soothed the rest of him the night before. He said, “I want to stay with you, here, in this room, till all the seas run dry, my dear, and the rocks melt in the sun. Can I do it for a week or two?”

“War fatigue?” she said, looking hard at him.

“No. I’m afraid of news from Geneva.”

“Are you feart they’ll disqualify the draw with Northumbria?”

“No. I hope they disqualify that draw. It will discourage suicidal heroics that have become the bane of honest warfare, especially in Scotland.”

“Then what are you afraid of?”

“Did ye see our last battle?”

“Certainly not. No decent woman who’s borne a son watches battles.”

Slowly, almost unwillingly, Wat told her that someone he knew had struck a blow which had the appearance of being foul and might be condemned as such.

“Who was that?” said Nan, looking at Wat more closely still.

“If Geneva condemns him you’ll soon know,” said Wat drearily, “If it doesnae I’ll try to forget about it. Let me stay here for a fortnight Nan.” She said firmly, “Not possible. An hour from now I become mother and I cannae mother a whole household with you waiting round to be served. Sit up.”

She placed a closed mug of coffee where his mouth could reach a tube sticking from the top, then she sat on the bedside with a plate on her lap and fed him slices of poached-egg-on-toast. She said, “Go to Annie’s room — she’s mad about you and has no responsibilities. Stay there as long as you like. It will teach her something. Craig Douglas needs more bairns now and I don’t want to carry another.”

He groaned and said, “I think of Annie as a wee sister.”

“Aye, because you never look at her. Do it. Dick Megget was her dad. The Meggets havenae fucked with Dryhopes for three generations, there’s no fear of incest.”

He said wistfully, “With you, in this room, I feel better, more sure of myself than anywhere else in the world.”

“I doubt it. Annie says you looked bloody sure of yourself in that last battle. She plays it six times a day. She says you’re magnificent. Why are you no magnificent with me?” He scowled. She said, “Cheer up! You were my favourite soldier long before the rest got chopped. I liked you most because you didnae act the big hero. Yet in battle you’re better than others. Why?”

“Easy told,” said Wat drearily, “I’m usually clumsier than other men because I don’t like life as much, so danger speeds this body without upsetting this brain. Most soldiers only enjoy battles when looking back on them — while fighting they’re too excited to think so do it automatically. I think cooler and hit faster while fighting so I enjoy it at the time. Afterward the memory depresses me. I wish I had another talent.”

“I remember you six years ago as a queer lanky clever lad who wanted to seed the stars and got accepted for it. Were you useless there?”

“No, I could do the work but I hated the narrow places in the satellites, hated that every gramme of air we breathed or green thing we looked on had been contrived by human skill. I didnae hate it all, of course. A good thing about satellites is their lack of nourishment for our kind of powerplant, so men and women earn their living room by working together as equals. The men have no time for warfare. They sometimes fight duels, but hardly ever to the death. Many couples live as husband and wife and think of earthmen as lazy lecherous belligerent primitives. I agreed with them but I couldnae stand the enclosed spaces they lived in. Anyway, for me the satellites were just stepping-stones to the universe where immortals are making new worlds — and I hated that universe most of all. I could hardly face the deserts of dead rock and frozen stoor between the domed craters. The stars are fearsome out there, white, steady, and intense. Look at any two of them and if, like me, you’re cursed with good sight, you soon see a hundred between. Look hard at any two of those and the same thing happens no matter how close they seem. I lost all sense of darkness between them. It was not the vast darkness but the endless lights, the millions of starlights that made me feel less than a grain of stoor myself — I felt like zero. I trudged across one of these deserts with Groombridge who was testing my fitness for immortality. He said immortality would madden me unless I had a good reason for it and the only good reason was in the grains of dirt under our boots, the millions of stars over our helmets. He said the silence of these spaces did not appal minds in the network conspiring to bring them to life, but generations of mortals would die and be forgotten before Mars, Venus and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn had the ground and air to support freely evolving plants and intelligences. This was why people who chose immortality must prepare to live almost completely in the future. The main difference between neo-sapience and proto-sapience (that is what immortals call themselves and us) is, that the longer neo-sapiences live the more they know of their future, the longer we live the more we know of our past. Groombridge said mortals cling harder to the past as they age, so our lives have a tragic sweetness neo-sapience lacks, a painful sweetness got from memories of lost childhood, lost love, lost friends, lost opportunities, lost beauty et cetera — lost life, in other words. He said, ‘Our rejuvenation treatment still retains an embarrassing wealth of early memories but in two or three centuries we’ll overcome that. If you become immortal, Mr. Dryhope, by your five thousandth year the first fifty will have been erased by more recent, more urgent, more useful experiences, most of them gained through a virtual keyboard and scanner or their future equivalent. By your five thousandth year it is possible — and by your five millionth inevitable — that you will work in another galaxy in a body whose form we cannot now predict. By then, of course, the planet of your origin, like a myriad other worlds you’ve helped reshape, will have ceased to be even a cipher in your calculations. Perhaps I repel you, Mr. Dryhope?’ Yes, he scunnered me like a creature I once saw in an aquarium. It was harmless but I couldnae watch it because it breathed, ate and ejaculated through holes which, to my mind, were in the wrong places. From feeling zero he had made me feel minus, an absence with an ache inside. I had to return to things as bonny and temporary as you and those.”

He pointed to the green hilltop and the bird on the branch, then began biting his nails. She stopped that by putting down the plate and kissing him.

Later she washed, dried and dressed him in clean garments saying, “Don’t play the helpless wean too much with Annie, she’s had none of her own. Your hands will soon heal if you work the fingers.”

He said, “Nan, is there a kind, experienced body in Craig Douglas who would visit my brother Joe who’s short of an arm and leg? Three of his other limbs are in working order — four if you count the tongue.”

Nan said she would consider this.

“And Nan,” he muttered, looking away from her, “There is no kinder or more experienced body in Craig Douglas than you, but please get someone else to go.”

She stared, laughed then said, “Mibby you would have been happier in the bad old historical days when it was a man’s duty to be jealous, but I doubt it.”

Survivors of great slaughters knew they must help the women of their clan replace lost comrades so duty, not desire brought Wat to Annie’s room. Apart from a homo-erotic affair in the Warrior house all Wat’s lovers until now had been older than him so the childish furnishing in Annie’s room almost made him walk away. Shelves were crowded with cuddly toys, romantic videos about historical lovers and comic ones about talking animals. A typical young girl’s collage covered the walls; it showed Annie in many moods and dresses from babyhood to teens mingled with pictures of her mother, aunts, grannies, pets, girl friends, boyfriends and popular icons. Wat recognized Donald Duck, Botticelli’s Venus, Robert Burns, Alice in Wonderland, Krishna among the Cowgirls, King Kong, Rodin’s Kiss, Dracula, Marilyn Monroe and modern stills of famous soldiers from their most violent battles. Over her bed was a life-size cut-out of himself on the edge of the cliff shouting “No!” when asked if Ettrick would surrender. His heart lurched — was Scottish Wat now a legend like the African Inongo, American Winesburg, Chinese Pingwu? — then he felt sick. After that shout he had stabbed a man who thought the battle over. It was a filthy way to enter the erotic fancies of a sixteen-year-old girl. However, he let her undress him and entered her bed.

Before nightfall he was amazed to find he liked Annie better than her mother. Though less experienced in love and coffee-making she had Nan’s sensuality, humour and intelligence in a more slender and playful body. She made him feel powerful and wise. She also liked to sleep with her ceiling clear as glass. He opened his eyes early next morning and looked straight up at a full moon between banks of hurrying cloud. Not quite awake he felt Annie snuggle warm at his side, her arm across his chest. He thought he was lying with her on the floor of a roofless cottage in a wilderness far to the north. He seemed to remember escaping from a shameful disaster which had befallen but at least Annie and he were safe. Glad of this he fell asleep again.

Later she wakened him by singing, “A hero, a hero, a hero in my bed, the first man to fuck me is a heeeeero.”

Wat said, “You’ve fucked with others.”

“Only with laddies. Lads don’t count. Stop interrupting and listen!

A hero, a hero, a hero in my bed,

the first man to fuck me is a heeeeero.

I stole him from my mammy,

he wanted me instead,

O the first man to fuck me is a heeeeero.”

“Your mammy sent me here.”

“Aye but it’s good to pretend. Try it. You’ve fought three wars, right?”

“Aye.”

“And seven battles, right?”

“Aye. Your bloody uncle Jardine made the last war continue for three.”

“Seven bloody battles and never once wounded!” shouted Annie, “A miracle!” Wat showed her his hands. She shouted, “Seven bloody battles and never once wounded by the sworrrrrd! UNSCATHED HERO JAGGED BY JEALOUS WHINBUSH AFTER GLORIOUS LAST-MINUTE MIRACLEDRAW AGAINST OVERWHELMING ODDS! That’s how the public eye should have announced it. If I was wee Wattie Dryhope,” she said, kissing him sweetly, “I would pretend somebody was saving me for something gloriouser.”

“Which somebody? Jesus MacGod or Accident MacDestiny?”

“MacGod of course. God orders you to conquer the universe for him but you say, ‘No, sorry God, no till I’ve fathered a hundred lads on Annie Craig Douglas.’ But I say, ‘Go! I wilt never embrace thee nae mair until thou hast done God’s will.’ So you go conquering the universe till you’re an old bald done dry withered wee man, and return to find me as sweet and sappy, young and perjink as ever. ‘Nooky time!’ you wheeze, ‘Get them off.’ ‘Avaunt, Snotface!’ I graciously retort, ‘Or Wat or Julius Caesar or whatever you cry yourself. I cannae be thine, I am being shagged continuous by a greater than thou.’

‘Who?’ croaks you. ‘God,’ says me, ‘He sent you conquering to get ye out of my short hairs ha ha ha.’ … Is something bothering you Wattie?”

“Aye — your joke about me being kept for something great. I once used to believe that, Annie, but what great thing could it be? Modern wars arenae great affairs. The only greatness nowadays is in the folk building new satellites and immortals creating new forms of life.”

She kissed his ear and whispered, “I’ll tell you a great thing you can do. This is my best time of the month, you’ve been deep inside me, I’m sure I’ve got my first bairn — what better new thing can there be than that? And if it’s a lad promise you’ll like him Wattie. And if he joins the Ettrick warriors promise to be kind to him. I’ve heard awful tales about how young laddies get treated by older ones in the Warrior house.” “Don’t believe all ye hear,” said Wat, embracing her, “The old soldiers keep an eye on things. I’ll protect him if I’m still about.”

They were silent for a while. This was the third day of their honeymoon. Wat feared Annie would soon be bored and want to go and gossip about him with her mother and sisters and cousins. Wat was not bored. His queer dream had given him an idea though he had been shy of mentioning it till now. He said suddenly, “Do you want your son to become a soldier, Annie, and probably die before he’s thirty? Or do you want him to go to the stars and live till he forgets you existed? Or would you rather he joined the public eye and became a glib commentator on other men’s courage? Or left the clean homes of Ettrick and lived dirty with the gangrels?”

“It isnae a mother’s business to want things for her weans — it’s the weans’ business,” said Annie, puzzled, “Mothers who try to manage their weans’ lives always hurt them. Aunt Mirren tried to stop her sons becoming soldiers after Highlanders killed her first three at Stirling Moss. She tried to make them starmen by cramming them with physics and biology, so they ran to the Warrior house as soon as they could and came home hacked to pieces five days ago. No wonder she’s bitter. What are ye trying to tell me Wat Dryhope?”

“I’m trying to tell ye about a new way of living which hasnae been tried for centuries, Annie. I want us to pretend there’s nobody alive but you and me …” (Annie sat up looking interested) “… I want us to load a couple of ponies with a tent, food, seeds, a cross-bow, an axe and handy tools. I want us to ride far far to the north where the homes are few and the commons so mountainy that even gangrels seldom pass through. We’ll find a broken old stone house, mibby a hunting-lodge built when there were no commons and the whole land was owned by a few plutocrats. We’ll repair enough rooms to make a wee house of it. I’ll get food by hunting and gardening, you’ll cook it and make and mend our clothes.”

“Go camping and play husband and wife?” cried Annie, smiling, “I played that game with my first laddie when I was twelve but only for a night. The alfresco shitting scunnered him in spite of the nooky — he called wiping his bum with dockens alfresco shitting. It’ll be more fun with you.”

“It wouldnae be just fun if you played it with me, Annie, it would be a way of life. I’d contrive a hygienic latrine and hot-water system. We wouldnae come back.”

“But surely we would feel lonely after a few weeks!”

“Aye, very. We would hate it at first. Then the hard work of making an old-fashioned house together would teach us to depend on each other and love each other more than other men and women love each nowadays. Then the weans would come.”

“Who would deliver them?”

“Me. I’m no stranger to blood and screams, Annie, I’ll make sure nothing goes wrong.”

“That’s very cheery news, Wattie, but they’ll be sad wee weans with only me to love — no aunties and grannies — no cousins to play with — no neighbours!”

“They’ll have me as well as you.”

“Bairns don’t love dads.”

“They would have to love me because they’d have nobody else — apart from you. I’d be always sleeping in the same house, bringing in the food you cook for us, teaching them how to hunt and plant and chop firewood and clean the latrine.”

“But no neighbours, Wattie! The husbands and wives of historic times were so desperate for neighbours that they crowded into big huge ugly cities.”

“Right!” said Wat, growing heated, “And the cities bred poverty, plagues and greedy governments! So a few brave men and women — pioneers they were called — left the cities for the wild in couples and made clean new lives there like we can make.”

“Where and when did they do that?”

“In America three or four centuries ago.”

“I’m sure they’re no in America now. How long did they last?”

“I … I don’t exactly know.”

“Well, Wattie,” said Annie in a friendly voice,

“I’m sorry we’ve no plagues, poverty or governments to escape from, but I’ll be your pioneer wife as long as you can bear it.”

She shut her mouth tight to stop the smile at the corners becoming a grin. Wat saw it; she saw him see it, grinned openly and said, “But will wee me be able to content you when you’ve had big Rose of Cappercleuch and those Bowerhope twins and Lizzie of Altrieve and my mammy? Will you never want to see my mammy again? And have you forgot you’ll grow old and die in that wilderness, Wattie? I thought men fought battles and became heroes because they were afraid to grow old.”

He suddenly saw he had been a fool and the knowledge changed him. His face and neck reddened. With a sudden fixed smile, in a singsong voice unlike his usual gruff one, he asked if she knew why he hated women. Annie, aghast, stared and trembled. He said, “I hate women for their damnable smug security and for always being older than me, always older and wiser! Even a kid like you, Annie Craig Douglas, has stripped me of my self-respect by knowing more about me than I know about myself. And when I’m dead you’ll have lovers and babies and lovers and babies till you’re a great-great-granny telling stories to wee girls. And I’ll be one of your stories, the first warrior who fucked you — a daftie who wanted to run away and live alone with ye forever!”

Tears streamed from her eyes at this. She tried to embrace him. He pushed her away saying, “Keep your pity! I want the bad old days when wars had no rules and bombs fell on houses and men and women died together like REAL equals! Equal in agony and mutilation!”

“You’re sick, Wattie. Your head’s sick,” said Annie, weeping, “You’re worse than mad Jardine, your daddy.”

His rage stopped at once.

“True!” he said, ruefully touching his brow, “And it’s the only head I have. I’m sorry I lost my temper.”

“As mad as his father,” she muttered, pressing her hand to her womb, “O I’ll have to ask about this.”

She jumped out of bed and pulled on her dress. “Come back, Annie! Let’s have another wee cuddle. I’m all right again. I said I was sorry.”

“I don’t want a mad baby, Wat.”

“There is no such thing as a mad baby.” She slipped on her shoes without looking at him. Wat said, “Done with me, have you?”

“I’m too young to say, Wat. Bowerhope men never come here now because twice Craig Douglas women got weans with diseased blood by Bowerhope — and the disease was curable. I don’t know if daftness is, and my mammy is your dad’s second cousin. The grannies will know what’s right. But O Wat,” she wailed, tears flowing down her cheeks again, “I liked you fine before this! I wanted a bairn by you!” He said, “Aye,” and got up and started dressing. She lingered by the door, drying her tears and watching.

“I’ll be in the Warrior house if your grannies want to test my sanity,” he said abruptly, “They might want that before deciding you shouldnae carry our bairn. But I’ll no come back to Craig Douglas unless invited — tell everyone that. Tell Nan. Say goodbye to her for me. I never much liked the Warrior house but now it seems the one place where I’ll be welcome — though mibby no for much longer.”