Where the World Ends: Chapters 5–7

The red-cheeked, plump face was agitated and that quite altered it, because John was generally as placid as a pillow.

But John had broad hips and bandy legs, so took a powerful long, lizardy stride up any rock face, and kept level.

But when Quill tracked him down, Murdo was shirking work to sit on a mucky ledge and throw rock chippings into the sea.

For both of them, this revelation quite dispelled the pain and fear of the blackback attack. Murdo felt wiser for knowing something Quill did not, and Quill felt he had mastered a magic he never knew of before.

Whenever things went awry for Kenneth—disappointed, scared or thwarted him—he filled up with unmanageable temper.

As the party scrambled home across the Stac, picked on by the bullying wind and burdened with a great netted ball of dead puffins, Lachlan clambered nimbly past ponderous, bulky Kenneth.

Lachlan was so much smaller and younger that Kenneth seemed unsure whether the boy was serious. Or perhaps Lachlan’s jibe had pierced some painful part of Kenneth’s soul.

So, when Quill was sent yet again to find Mr. Farriss, he dawdled, and found himself a level place to sit that gave some relief to perpetually aching knees and hips.

The skin of his face seemed to have cleaved tight to his skull.

Quill thought of sidling away, so the man could weep in private.

But the garefowl suddenly began preening herself, cracking open her stubby wings; shaking herself so all her plumes stood out.

“Just Hirta. But she’s always cheery—and a marvel with the corner of a pinafore. Even our sheep have clean ears.”

She simply muttered to herself—like the Owner's Steward when he visited Hirta to collect the rent: always making calculations under his breath and noting down numbers in his little ledger.

Quill realized that, like Fearnach Mor, he had been pleading inwardly for some different outcome, all the time hoping for a reprieve.

Euan lent his sweet piping voice to Cane’s hymn, but it did nothing to quell the rising tide of fear in the cave.

“It did once, man. Once, when the sea was dryer and there were lanes across it where the ground showed through, the Amazon Queen came driving her chariot, all the way from Ireland.” And he saw their stampeding thoughts swing away from the precipice and trot to a stillness, mesmerized by the familiar music of storytelling.

But the self-appointed Minister was too full of outrage to appreciate a supper of coddled eggs. “I dunna wonder this lout defiled the Lord’s altar!”

The summer was sliding away as inexorably as an outgoing tide.

Like the miser saving for his old age, he could think of nothing but providing for the dark and unknowable days to come.

He was Hirta’s master craftsman: his big, strong hands could as readily build a stone wall as carve driftwood into spoons or knit a jerkin from the wool of his sheep.

Every time the wind shrieked, it gave voice to some ghost stranded on a cliff edge or under a waterfall or down a ravine until its sins had been purged away by the weather.

But a frisson of fear went through several who had overheard the whisper. Unlike Lachlan, they were easily scared by talk of ghosts.

The face was too close to focus on, but Quill took in tears and an awful ashy pallor.

“Women bleed that way once a month,” he suggested tentatively. “Or so Murdo says, ’s natural. They dunna come to harm from it, far as I know.”

John colored with pleasure. “Had you guessed already, then?”
“Nooo! Well...I had an inkling, maybe—you being so...wee and fragile.”

His jowls turned purple, and he threw down the bird he was plucking.

But why did they have to keep asking him? Irritability had beset them like an outbreak of ringworm, and Quill was as riddled with it as everyone else.

But why did they have to keep asking him? Irritability had beset them like an outbreak of ringworm, and Quill was as riddled with it as everyone else.

His nose ran incessantly, making his top lip hideously sore.

How do you build a raft on a spike of rock where nothing grows bigger than lichen and limpets?

The sea delivers up all manner of things: flotsam. Splinters of disaster.

However much Kenneth made fun of his “holy vision,” his belief in angels, his gathering of flowers for the cleit-altar, and his hymn singing, Euan kept doggedly on, praying for Kenneth and everybody else, too.

Finding the Little Angel lying prostrate in front of the altar one day, arms outstretched, face pressed out of shape by the chilly rock, Kenneth stood on Euan’s back and said, “Can you walk on water? Walk on water, can you? Can you? Got enough faith and y’can walk on water. Read it in the Bible, I did.”

The bully was in fact declaiming, in mock, shocked tones, “Never knew you were such a mouse, Euan! Can’t believe you’re such a worm, such a girl, such a Doubting Thomas. Such an unbeliever."

“Just teasing, I was! Just joking!”
Just trying to make the child cry and grovel.