Where the World Ends: Chapters 12–15

As for her greatest fear, that, too, abated when Cane continued to call her “lad” and “boy,” continued to talk politics...

Scurrying after the shreds of her clothes, sobbing bitterly, John looked abjectly guilty—felt it, too.

“Are you a temptress? Sent to tempt me out of the paths of righteousness?”

Cane was hard put now to remember more about her than the fishhooks and a lingering smell of lye soap.

He would marry John, and they would live like Adam and Eve in the Rock Garden of Eden, away from the men who showed him no respect and the noisy and noisome boys down below, who plainly had no souls at all.

John was wearing a blanket holed at the neck and cinched in at the waist by a plaited straw belt.

There again, all of them were keeping warm the best way they could contrive.

Cane was wearing a string of gugas threaded onto horsehair and slung around his neck. This mildly ludicrous figure turned, looked, then bumbled on, gugas bump-bumping, short trousers flapping, John following on behind.

Cane was wearing a string of gugas threaded onto horsehair and slung around his neck. This mildly ludicrous figure turned, looked, then bumbled on, gugas bump-bumping, short trousers flapping, John following on behind.

“Always a mouthy boy. You may tell the others that I am risking my life for their sake. For their good. For the greater good. We shall dwell in the Hermit’s House on Boreray, and pray for deliverance, as the saintly men did in times gone by.”

Murdo was dumbstruck. Cane shot him a glance, checking to see if he already knew. “John confessed her womanliness to me and offered to be my helpmeet.”

“Keep off! ’s too small! ’Twill carry two and no more!” he yelped. “I’ve had ma bellyful o’ scurvy boys! Get away!”

They rubbed the cold out of her with an assortment of woolen caps. There were a great many volunteers, once the wet plaid blanket was off her and there was proof incontrovertible that John really was a girl.

Back at Midway Bothy, Domhnall Don was a man bereft.

Instead of joining the hue-and-cry to Raft Bay, he had climbed, instead, to Upper Bothy—despite his burns, despite his fatigue—and salvaged the still-burning stumps of two petrel-lanterns, fetching them tenderly down again to light the place he thought of as home.

Cane had taken the sack of feathers with him to Boreray, but in the middle of the floor, amid the bones of cooked gugas, still lay the under-mattress Col had made himself out of a dozen woven egg baskets, their delicate craftsmanship crushed by Cane’s body weight into nothing but a pile of chaff.

Calum’s boots went to Lachlan, and Lachlan gave his to Niall. The exchange played out like a ritual, somberly, momentously, because a pair of boots is a precious possession and hard to part with.

Seated beside Murdo, John gave a small squirm of surprise as an arm crept round her waist. She looked down at the errant hand as it spread its fingers across her rib cage. Then she glared at Murdo. The hand withdrew faster than it had come.

Murdo, meanwhile, had picked up the crab shells littering the floor and begun surrounding himself with the small, pink carapaces.

And then, in a voice so clarion clear that it filled the cave as ringing fills a bell:
“In the name of Christ Jesus, please go away.” The words came from Euan.

“I am going after nests for kindling,” Farriss called back, as he moved with brisk efficiency along the cliff face. Gone was the sleepy listlessness, the bleary-eyed blankness of the man.

Though his skin was still an unhealthy, porridgy yellow, and his hair a blotchy sepia, the incident with the “ghost” had imbued Mr. Farriss with new energy.

Every furlong or so, Farriss turned and told Quill to head back.

He was making for the Overhang, that lime-slathered fist of rock that jutted out over deep water and was home, in the summer, to a seething gallimaufry of seabirds mating, laying, squabbling and squitting from dawn till dark.

Eventually, the rope would either break under Farriss’s weight or time would simply sap him of his last morsel of strength so that he fell to his death in the water below.

With the sun smothered by low cloud, there was no dazzle, and they could see as deep down as daylight reached—not to the seabed itself far below, but to arches and plinths of rock under the water.

They could almost be seeing a drowned city—some sunken ruin of a previous civilization—a mermaid castle, a citadel of the Amazon Queen.

Though his eyes were shut, Quill felt every part of the man go by him—head gasping, limbs sinewy as dried bird-meat, a missed stone in one of his pockets, the arch under the man’s rib cage, hollow from hunger, the joints moving in their sockets.

Farriss was hauling him up. Where he found the superhuman strength to do it, God alone knew. The guilty fear of causing the death of a boy in his care? Or perhaps the whales had lent him some of their leviathan strength.

But Kenneth said it was All Saints’, for all there was sleet on the ledges, and icicles formed overnight along the lintel of the doorway.

“Suppose we began to...fret around the turn from summer to autumn...” he said, and counted out the wizened, tiny feet like a man counting his savings.

“By my reckoning the year has turned already. Some nights this arm keeps me from sleeping. The days dawned earlier this week than last. The year has turned already.”

The younger ones saw only the ice of January and February floating toward them, ready to congeal the blood in their veins.

Though Quill’s shoulder did not much relish a climb to Upper Bothy, the rest of him thought it the surest route to finding an omen. “Sure to be a page or two o’ Cane’s Bible caught in some cranny.”

They passed Mr. Farriss standing within an alcove of rock, like a statue in a church wall.