Sacrament

CHAPTER VI

With the map in front of him and Rosa, like a living compass, on the seat behind him, it quickly became apparent to Will where they were headed. To Ceann a' Bharra, or Kenavara, a headland at the southwestern tip of the island, described in the over-wrought language of the guidebook as 'a precipice that rises out of the ocean sheer on either flank, and sheerer still at the headland itself, from the heights of which the Skerryvore Lighthouse may be spied, marking the last sign of a human presence before the mighty Atlantic rolls away to the empty horizon'. It was, the booklet warned, 'the only spot on our glorious island which has been a scene of tragedy. The great profusion of birdlife on Kenavara's crags and ledges has drawn the attention of ornithologists for many years, but regrettably the crags are dangerous to even the most expert of climbers, and a number of visitors have been killed in falls from the cliffs while attempting to reach inaccessible nests. The beauty of Kenavara's best appreciated from the safety of the beaches that flank it. Venturing on the headland itself, even in broad daylight and fine weather, carries with it risk of serious injury or worse...'

It certainly wasn't the easiest of places to reach. The road carried them through a tiny cluster of houses, maybe ten in all, which were marked on the map as the village of Barrapol, and then on down towards the western shore of the island, where it divided, about a quarter of a mile short of the beach, the good road making a right turn towards Sundaig, while the lefthand fork became a track over the bumpy grass. According to the map even this disappeared after a few hundred yards, but they took it as far as they could, as it ran parallel to the shore. Their destination was less than half a mile ahead: an undulating peninsula, its flanks scored and gullied, so that it looked not to be one continuous spot of land, but three or four hillocks, with fissures of naked rock between, falling away into the sea.

The track had now petered out altogether, but Frannie drove on towards the headland, cautiously negotiating the increasingly uneven turf. Hares bounded ahead of the car, making preposterous leaps in their alarm; a sheep, grazing on the machair far from the flock, dashed away, bug-eyed with panic.

The ground was getting progressively sandier, the wheels turning up fans of earth behind the car.

'I don't think we're going to be able to drive much further,' Frannie said.

'Then we'll go by foot,' Will said. 'Are you all right with that, Rosa?'

She murmured that yes, she'd be fine, but once she got out of the car it was clear that her physical state had deteriorated in the last quarter of an hour. Her skin had lost all its gleam, the whites of her eyes become faintly jaundiced. Her hands were trembling.

'Are you sick?' Will said.

'I'll get over it,' she said. 'It's just ... coming here again ...' She let her gaze stray towards Kenavara; reluctantly, Will thought. The bright, smiling woman who'd strode back towards the car on the Crossapol road had been cowed; he didn't exactly know why. Nor was Rosa going to tell him. Despite her sudden frailty she set off towards the cliffs, striding ahead of Will and Frannie.

'Let her lead,' Will whispered.

So they wove their way through the machair towards Kenavara, the reason for the headland's fatal reputation becoming more apparent as they approached. The waves were beating hard against the shore to their right, but their violence was nothing compared to the fury with which they came against the cliffs. And rising out of the spume as though born from the waves and given wings, tens of hundreds of birds, their din a raucous counterpoint to the boom of the water.

Not all of them claimed the cliffs as their home. A solitary tern approached overhead, sniping in a bitter voice at these intruders, and when they didn't retreat swooped down as though to peck at them, veering off a few inches short of their scalps. Frannie sniped back, waving her arms to shoo the tern away.

'Bloody bird!' she yelled up at it. 'Leave us alone!'

'It's just protecting its territory,' Will said.

'Well I'm protecting my scalp,' Frannie snapped. 'Go on! Bugger off! Damn thing!'

It continued its attacks for another five minutes, until they were almost at the slope of the headland itself. Rosa was still leading the way, not even glancing behind to confirm that Will and Frannie were still following.

'I wonder where she's going,' Frannie said.

There was no sign of any human presence on the headland whatsoever; not a fence, not a cairn; not even a sign to warn people from straying where they could come to harm. And yet Will didn't doubt that this was Rukenau's home (and, most likely, Thomas Simeon's resting place). He didn't need Rosa to confirm it; he could feel it in his own body. His skin was tingling, his teeth and tongue and eyeballs ached, his blood thumped in his ears, its rhythms audible through the din of sea and birds.

Now that they'd emerged from the protective troughs of the machair the wind came at them off the ocean, gusting so strongly that all three were staggering, heads down.

'You want to hang on to me?' Will yelled to Frannie over the bluster. She shook her head. 'Just be careful,' he shouted. 'The ground's not very safe.'

That was an understatement. The whole headland was a mass of traps, the lush, springy turf suddenly dropping away, sheer, into a darkness filled with the booming of the sea. The grass itself was slick with the mist that rose from these gullies, squeaking beneath their heels as they went in pursuit of Rosa. She seemed to move more sure-footedly than her companions, for all her frailty, the gap between the two parties steadily widening as they proceeded. On more than one occasion Will and Frannie lost sight of her altogether, when the route brought either they or she to a dip in the ground. The sides of some were extremely steep, and Frannie preferred to negotiate them on her backside, clinging to fistfuls of slippery grass for purchase. All the while, the birds wheeled overhead. Gulls and guillemots, fulmars, petrels and kittiwakes, even a hoodie-crow, up to see what the hoopla was all about. None of them made any attempt to attack, as the tern had done. This was so assuredly their terrain, what did they have to fear? These pitiful people clinging whiteknuckled to rock and clod were no threat to their sovereignty.

At last Frannie caught hold of Will's arms, and pulling him close enough that she could be heard over the din of the birds, said: 'Where the hell's Rosa gone? We haven't lost her, have we?'

Will scanned the land ahead. There was indeed no sign of Rosa. They were no more than five hundred yards from the end of the headland, but there were still dozens of places she could have disappeared: spots where the ground sloped away into marshy hollows; rocky outcrops marking fissures and crevices.

'Stay here a moment,' Will said to Frannie, and retraced their steps to the highest vantage point in the vicinity: a lichen-covered boulder fully ten feet high. He proceeded to scale it. He was no great climber at the best of times, he was too gangly; and by now a succession of sleepdeprived nights was taking its toll on both his strength and his coordination. In short, it was a laborious attempt, and by the time he reached the top he was panting and sweaty. He studied the vista before him as logically as his giddy head would allow, looking for some sign of Rosa, but could see none, and was about to scramble down again when he caught sight of something pale, half-hidden in the dark rocks a hundred yards ahead.

'I see her!' he yelled to Frannie, and slithering down from his perch with even less dignity than he'd had climbing it, led Frannie to the place. His eyes had not been playing tricks. Rosa was lying on the ground, her face completely ashen, her teeth chattering. The yellowish colour in her eyes had become almost golden. When she raised her eyes to him her gaze was no longer entirely human, and some profound repugnance in him - an animal fear of something that was not natural - kept him from coming too close to her.

'What happened?' he said.

'I slipped, is all,' she said. Was her voice subtly changed too? He thought so. Or was it the fact that she seemed to be speaking close to his ear, in a whisper, when she was lying three yards away? 'Get me up,' she demanded.

'Is he here?' Will said.

7s who here?'

'Rukenau.'

'Just yet me up.'

'I want an answer first,' Will said.

'It's none of your business,' Rosa replied.

'Look. You wouldn't even be here- Will began.

She gave him a look that, had she not so plainly been in a severely weakened state, would have shaken him to his core; a salutary reminder that though he'd seen half a dozen Rosa McGees in the last two days, some of them almost gentle, they were all fabrications. The true thing she was - the thing with aureate gaze and a voice that spoke in the bones of his head - that thing didn't care how it had come here or what civilities it might owe those who'd brought it. All it wanted now was to be in the House of the World, and it was too weak to waste its time with a show of courtesy.

'Get me up,' she said again, reaching out towards Will.

He didn't move to help her. He simply studied her face, waiting for her impatience to betray her. And so it did. She could not help but look past him to the place she wanted to be, demanding again to be helped up.

Will followed the line of her gaze, past the rocks that lay between them and the sward at the crown of the cliffs, to a spot that seemed from this distance quite unremarkable: just a patch of marshy ground. She caught his trick instantly, and began to harangue him afresh.

'You don't dare go there without me!'

'Don't I?' he said.

She turned her fury on Frannie. 'Tell him, woman! He dare not enter that House without me!'

'Maybe you should stay with her?' Will said to Frannie. She put up no argument. By the expression on her face it was apparent the atmosphere of the place had unsettled her deeply. 'I promise I won't step inside without you.'

'You'd better not,' Frannie said.

'If she tries anything tricky, yell.'

'Oh you'll hear me, don't worry,' Frannie said. Will glanced back at Rosa. She'd given up her protests now, and was lying back against the rock, staring up at the sky. It seemed her eyes were mirrors at that moment, waves of sun and shadow moving over them. He looked away, distressed, and said to Frannie: 'Don't go near her.' Then he was off, towards the place between the rocks.