The Silver Bough (8 page)

G
rant paid no attention to Andie's excitement, for the skeletons and their disposition fascinated him. On his knees he peered, knowing enough to realise that they were those of a mother and child, a growing child, perhaps of four or so. The mother had been laid to rest on her right side, with her knees tucked up, and in the bay of her body her child had been placed. The sight affected him even at that moment in the exultation of his find. The skulls were fine and fragile; the bones slender; a grace was in this slenderness like an immortal story. Then he noticed specks like blackened oats. He bent right down but did not touch. Jet beads from a necklace. His eye caught a faint gleam from under the edge of the pelvis, and his heart hurt him, for it was the gleam of gold.

He got up and Mrs Mackenzie said, “He was just excited.”

“What's that?” But he wasn't interested. Very few people liked skeletons. Many found them depressing. Mr Grant, however, had met some beautiful skeletons in his time. He came back with his camera and drawing board. He was excitedly preoccupied and fiddled about with the drawing board trying to reflect some extra light into the cist. Far from satisfied, he nevertheless got Mrs Mackenzie to hold it in a certain position while he first lightly dusted the bones and then worked his camera through a variety of angles. When he had taken three photographs he said with great earnestness, “Now you watch here and let no one near it until I come back.”

“I'll do that,” she promised.

But when he had gone a little way, he turned back. “Come along!”

“Go with him,” said Mrs Mackenzie to her son, and he went.

The archaeologist was already moving at a brisk speed and Andie seemed tied to him by an invisible string. Andie took long low strides, the edge of his heel hitting the ground first, in the peculiar motion of a rocking horse that could only rock forward. Gradually, however, he began to overhaul his employer and presently Grant was aware of the face beside him, excited and smiling and obviously saying that things had come to a mysterious pass. Grant agreed. Andie was delighted with the agreement and became a trifle more expansive. “Yes, yes,” said Grant. “I want you to carry a box for me.” The sounds seemed so good to Andie that his small twinkling eyes disappeared for a laughing moment.

At the gable-end, Grant said, “You stop here.”

Andie stopped, followed the hand, saw the spot of ground to which it happened to be pointing, and sat on it. The eyes twinkled upward.

Mrs Cameron was at the door.

“I have come back for some things,” Grant explained, “and I was wondering if you had a big board . . .” They disappeared into the house.

Presently they came out. Mrs Cameron called to Andie, “My word, but you're the important man now! Do you think you can carry this?” It was the large lid of a wooden chest. His arms went out and caught it. “No, no,” she said and put it on his back. “He has fairly taken to you, and it's not to everyone that happens,” she called to Mr Grant, as he walked away, a longish rectangular box under his arm which he had taken from his wooden crate. She stood watching them until they had passed from sight, then laughing softly to herself she looked about the landscape.

The shining silver paper, which Grant pinned to the lid of the chest, winked at Andie so effectively that they had some trouble in getting him to give way to his mother in the matter of holding the lid so that it reflected light into the grave while Grant once again took photographs, including a couple of snapshots with a small pocket camera.

The discovery of a mother and child in a single short cist was rare enough for him to work with the utmost care and precision. The skulls, the ancient and fragile bones, he handled with great delicacy and close attention, before depositing each on a tray in his rectangular box; then, and only then, he lifted out the gold ornament. It was a bracelet, of, to him, the familiar penannular shape of the Bronze Age; rounded and thick as a slim pencil, but it was not hollow, it was solid, and its terminals were not flattened into any kind of trumpet shape, one indeed was rounded into a slight boss. He examined it with minute care, for he knew that already, some hundreds of years before Christ, cunning craftsmen could cover bronze with finely beaten gold and thus deceive the unwary with imitation jewellery. There was no doubt in this case, however, that the Highland goldsmith had worked the pure metal. He fondled it delicately in his silk handkerchief and when it appeared again, it so shone that Andie made a commotion. Grant turned his head and laughed. “You would like it, wouldn't you?” With loving care and a beating heart he slid it into one of his brown paper bags and placed it in the box. Then he started the lengthy process of recovering every small seed of the jet necklace, finally combing the dust of the empty cast with infinitely patient fingers.

It was a great day's work and enough for a day. When he had got the stone lid replaced on the cist, he turned his back for a moment, fumbled in his pocket book, and, going to Mrs Mackenzie, slipped a pound note into her hand. “You have brought me luck,” he said.

Her silence was more than speech, for he added, “Shush! That's nothing.” Then he stamped about a bit. “He has worked like a Trojan, grand! Haven't you, Andie?”

“Whu—whu——”

“That's the lad! And, by the way, Mrs Mackenzie, you needn't say anything about what we find here. We don't want anybody poking their noses into our affairs. We get on nicely together. Mum's the word!”

“Thank you, sir. You're very kind.”

“Poof! Nothing. And now we'll be off.”

She had even contrived to suppress her emotion with dignity, a decent simple woman, who had borne her burden in a way that the great might emulate to their advantage, he concluded with no less precision in thought than he had just exhibited in action.

But that night he could not go to bed. Once more the story of the Silver Bough had been told in a way that set him dreaming before his day-book in front of his sitting-room window, the gold bracelet beside him. It would be exciting to get the child a real Silver Bough, just to see the reaction! A catspaw of mirth invaded his face. His eyes chimed. He began a conversation with a man he knew, a craftsman who had a workshop behind a little shop of great disorder in a side street. It was really a dirty little shop with an acrid smell, but now he saw that it was a fabulous shop and that dirt was its mask. He suddenly understood why so skilled a man could spend hours repairing a silver ornament for a silly rich woman; or, worse, doing the repair for a front-street jeweller who himself could make nothing but money, especially out of the rich woman. He saw it all with the revelation of a grotesque medieval story. Beyond that! beyond that! he saw that the grotesque story was
true
. His urgent chest moved the small table to a squeak. Any little hollow brass rod—so long—would do, and you could bend it slightly, very slightly (he explained to the craftsman) and then paint it silver; the nine hollow balls, about as big as little apples, but each one with a different note of the scale in it and you would paint them gold and hang them along the bough. You understand? . . . And the scene in the little shop faded to the scene “ben the house”, and the child was looking at the Silver Bough, but could not yet stretch out her hand for it, so great was the magic, and then he tapped one ball here and one ball there with a finger-tip and lo! the lullaby chimed its own song sweetly in the great silence of the kitchen.

He glanced behind him, but there was no one in the room to overlook his childish phantasy, so he laughed silently at himself, and said he had a good mind to write a letter to the craftsman there and then, and his eye landed on the gold bracelet. He picked it up and once more went over it with his magnifying glass. So far as he could recall, its terminal finish at least was something new, and indeed the boss looked like a flattened head, even a primitive attempt at a serpent head, while the other terminal perceptibly tailed off. What! Was he deceiving himself? or could this possibly be a fumbling after the serpent motif? And suddenly, his mind taking a leap into myth, he asked himself; why
did
women (men too) in the first instance wear a bracelet? . . . Decoration? But what
was
decoration? . . . Sex appeal? But what
was
—wait a minute, just you wait a minute, said Simon Grant . . . .

When his argument, after winding its way through spells and charms, had finished its subtle traffic with primitive forces or gods as elusive and potent as the nuclei of the physicists (for his reading was varied and he knew that the mention of physicists made even argumentative archaeologists hesitate) he came back to the gold. Once on a northern trip to have a look at the cairns and brochs in Caithness, he had dropped off the train and gone up the valley of Kildonan in Sutherland to inspect the old gold diggings. In living memory, nuggets had been found there . . . .

When his mind came back to the stone cist he wondered why there had not been certain grave-goods, even a pigmy food vessel . . . and wondered how it had happened that just these two had been buried like that. The bones showed no signs of violence. How together? At the same time? Had the child died—and then the mother gone to keep the child company in that afterworld where there would be no one to look after the child properly? Had the mother asked to be despatched? Had she—despatched herself? Or had the mother died, and the child been sent . . .?

His questioning raised human values of so profound a nature that his ghost wandered through all his anthropological knowledge for some material point to fasten on, and suddenly, and quite on its own, it found itself regarding Anna and her child, as he had first come upon them, asleep in the shadow of the rock. The very attitude, to the disposal of the limbs, was the same! Time, the cameraman, faded out the bones in the stone cist and faded in the sleeping figures by the rock. That was all. Simply—that was all.

A cold catspaw went wandering about his spine, stopped his breathing, and made him listen as though he might overhear the ineffable meaning of what he had seen.

For what he had seen seemed in that moment all of man's story under the sun. And instantly it was strangely close to him and valiant. They fell asleep and they woke again. The overarching sky and the plain of the world, and the human story moving over that plain. Moving over that plain, light upon the faces, on a journey with no known end and no meaning, and because there was no known meaning intimacy and valiance came in warmth about the heart. The journey from the far past into the farther future; and however the gods of the sky or the demons of the underworld contrive to beset it, the journey continues to no known shrine; and always because there is no known shrine, the warmth deepens and the valiance grows precious with understanding one of another. Faces taking the light in warmth and courage and understanding, and creating in that very act, on this mysterious journey, that with which the unknown may be faced, may be challenged; for what can be contained in the utmost essence of the unknown that could of its nature surpass this? The woman frolicked with her child on the earth . . . . The skeletons fade out in the cist and Anna and Sheena fade in. . . . There came upon him a faint beating like the slow beating of a heart, the heart of the earth, beating more firmly, like a padding of feet . . . and Anna passed his window carrying a pail of water from the well.

Breath packed his chest, then eased away, and he decided that myth is an extraordinarily potent business. Time and space are its plastics which shape and dissolve in essential meanings, like movements from the Creator's hands. The Creator's hands, as the local folk said. For you could talk of the Creator in a natural way, but not so of God, who was religious. But already his mind was fumbling and disconnected. The thing behind was too much and too big. He got up.

The light was growing green outside and fading away in the room. Things were settling down for the night, rocks and stones and the little pathway. The fowls were silent. The cat jumped up on the garden wall, turned its head slowly with an inscrutable air of dominion, sat down and folded its tail around its haunch. It looked bored with its own mastery. But he noted that the tip of the tail moved up and down in a quivering life of its own. For no reason, quietly, softly, the cat arose and jumped out of sight. Grant went up to his bedroom.

Presently he heard Anna come up the stairs. Sometimes the child, half-wakened, whimpered petulantly as she hushed and carried her. Tonight, too, there was drowsy protest, but Anna's hushing voice was soft as a wind-rhythm, rising and falling in the lullaby of the Silver Bough, ignoring the protest and carrying it away. Her door closed.

Noiselessly he took the long box out of the tiny dressing room and placed it on the floor of his bedroom. He lit two candles and his electric lamp, then opened the lid of the box. With gentle care he placed all the bones in position on the floor till the two skeletons lay extended side by side, and went downstairs very quietly for his measuring tape.

During the night he dreamed so vivid a dream that it wakened him and for a few moments he still saw the two figures moving in the grey light, but even as he blinked they dissolved, though he still heard the little one's cries—until they passed into Anna's room. Sheena had merely wakened up; that was all. He looked about the vacant floor and listened. The grey still light of the morning was in the window and he had the odd feeling that it was watching him.

“
I
hope Sheena did not disturb you last night?” said Anna as she removed his porridge plate.

“Me? No! Why, was she restless?”

“Yes. She must have been dreaming.”

“Do they dream so young?”

“I think so,” she answered smiling.

“Interesting. Did she tell you what she was dreaming about?”

“No. I think she just thought that I had left her. She was calling me so loud that I was afraid she might have wakened you.”

“Even if she had done—what of it? We were all that age once!” He liked Anna's voice. “I suppose she just clung to you and explained nothing?”

“Yes,” said Anna.

In the afternoon, while he was directing a new opening into the cairn on the southwest side, Mrs Sidbury appeared. She moved with a wind-blown erratic lightness that had its grace, but in an instant he knew that he hated visitors on the site.

She greeted him, went and spoke to Mrs Mackenzie, and had a few words for Andie. There was obviously no slightest trace of snobbery in the woman. But he knew that already he was becoming over-sensitive to place and atmosphere, and so to people. She suddenly struck him as a gay woman who had once been nearly strangled.

“No, nothing much yet. It may take a little time,” he explained. The cist had been covered over.

She peered about the stones, balancing lightly. “We should like very much if you could come to dinner tomorrow night.”

“Thank you,” he replied, confused by his momentary hesitation. “I shall be very pleased.”

“Donald hasn't been to see you?”

“No.”

“He was going to, I think.”

“At least we could show him we are trying to be tidy! All these stones out there will be put back.”

Her dark eyebrows arched. “But won't that be a lot of extra trouble?”

After a little while, she left.

Later the schoolmaster appeared. Grant glanced at his watch. In half an hour they were due to stop work anyway; but he gave no order. Better bear it for half an hour.

He had been told that the schoolmaster was a clever man who knew all about everything in the place, including the olden days, and had spent an interesting evening with him, for the man had a considerable amount of Celtic scholarship of a kind. In fact it was made clear that he had come to the small Clachar school, which had but a handful of pupils and in which he was the only teacher, in order to pursue his studies along certain empirical lines. There were times when Grant thoroughly enjoyed theories, and to an enthusiasm he naturally responded, but this was not one of the times. Mr McCowan was tall, thin, dark, with spectacles and a deep impressive voice.

After five minutes, Grant was objecting: “But these Neolithic people were not Celtic. This cairn was already ancient before your Celts or Goidels appeared on the scene.”

“You are quite certain of that?” Mr McCowan had a way of holding his smile.

“Quite certain,” replied Grant without any smile.

When the discussion became involved, Grant swept the whole of Scotland clear of all humans in the last Ice Age in order to start from scratch. Then he introduced man as the ice receded, and in particular he brought Azilians to Oban who lived in caves, had barbed harpoons of red deer's antler or bone for spearing fish, had hammer stones, bone fabricators, some flints; who hunted seals, boars, otters, wild cats and deer; who lived on crabs, oysters, winkles, limpets, and cockles and mussels alive alive-o, concluded Grant suddenly on a lighter note, for he had been growing earnest and lengthy.

“And these Azilians?”

“Come before the Neolithic Age. Fishing folk to the West Coast. It even sounds familiar!”

“And where did
they
come from originally?”

“Perhaps up from England,” answered Grant with a sly twinkle, refraining for the moment to bring them in slow stages from France. Ten minutes later, he said, “Upon this scene your Gaels were mere newcomers, parvenus—of whom I have the honour to be, perhaps, a somewhat mixed sample.” And his eyes considered Mr McCowan's head.

Mr McCowan helped him home with his gear, still arguing, and they parted with smiling heat. It had been a dry day. They hadn't even struck the peristalith on the southwest side. These silly racial arguments, said Grant to himself, were exactly like the cracking of cairn stones hurled by an idiot, not forgetting the diffused smell of brimstone.

But he grew calmer in the evening as on a square of plate glass he began to build up the necklace with the pieces of jet. Soon he was entirely lost in this fascinating jigsaw puzzle, of which, however, the final picture was clear in his mind. It was that of a crescent moon whose horns were pulled together to fasten in a point at the back of the neck. The shape was defined in the main by three circles: the outside circle of the crescent moon, the inside circle, and a circle that ran midway between; and all three circles were made up of these small barrel-shaped beads of jet strung together; the very smallest, for the inner circle, had looked to him in the cist like black oats, the largest were about an inch long. These circles were kept apart by beads of the same shape placed diagonally and spaced out. Four large lozenge-shaped pieces gave a stiffening and dignity to the whole, while two triangular pieces linked the circles together to meet in a catch behind the neck. It was not only a pretty pattern but, as he knew, for even these ancient days, a distinctively native one. A Scottish contribution to the Bronze Age. Again, the material was not true jet, but lignite such as would have been found among the Sutherland coal measures (coal-mine today at Brora; gold diggings yesterday at Kildonan). As he lifted one of the large lozenges and examined again its geometric pattern of lines picked out in dots, he suddenly remembered that it should have its electrical properties, like amber. After rubbing it quickly on his sleeve he brought it near a tiny piece of paper. The paper stuck.

What magic this power of attraction must have been to them of old!

As he stared through the window, wondering how they explained it to themselves, he quite suddenly became one with them. He had indeed a flashing memory from early boyhood of a piece of chaff being picked up by the amber mouthpiece of a pipe. Two boys' faces and his own, in wonder, laughing. It had felt like some magical trick; and not until he had carried out a surreptitious experiment with his father's expensive silver-mounted pipe was he convinced, with an even profounder wonder (for he was now alone), that it was not a trick. He had put the pipe (after a few empty sucks at it) back in the ornate smoker's cabinet and stolen from the room, and the yellow transparency of the amber in the curved mouthpiece was still one of his clearest colour memories.

No doubt, he now thought, it was from this simple boyhood experience that he was able long afterwards to get some notion of primitive man's
apprehension
of an invisible spirit. It was like the potency in the amber rather than any
shaped
thing. And, quite literally, it had power. Between the spirit in man and the potency in the amber there was an unsearchable communion; an attraction in wonder, a repulsion in fear.

And beyond attraction and repulsion, what did man know today? He might coin electrical names for the potency (though even then
electron
was merely the Greek word for
amber
) but the
why
? was hidden as ever. What he gained in names he lost in the old
apprehension
. Equations were the chambered cairns wherein the ancient magics were buried. He was nodding with pursed lips when Mrs Cameron knocked.

When he had her seated, he sat down himself, saying cheerfully, “Yes, I wanted to see you about—well, you know, my first week is up and we haven't yet settled what I owe you.”

There were a few reluctant, friendly remarks, and then she said, “I'll just tell you what happened with Mr McArthur, who was here two years ago. I asked him if twenty-five shillings would do and he insisted on paying me thirty. I hope—”

“That's fine,” said Mr Grant. “That's grand. Of course things have gone up a bit since then.” He turned to the mantelpiece and then placed his payment in her hand. “And I am very pleased here; delighted, in fact. So that's all right.”

But she stared at the three pound notes and then at him.

“Not a word,” he said. “Shush! Wait till this tourist business gets properly going and then! . . . Oh, and by the way, I wanted to tell you, too, that I'm going out for dinner to-morrow night. But as it's Saturday, I'll be home for lunch. Must give my employees their half day!”

“It's too much,” she said quietly, sitting still.

“If you're satisfied I am. Could anything be more perfect than that?” He laughed and rallied her.

When at last she was going out, she said, “If you're late tomorrow, or any night, you'll always find the door open.”

“I do believe it's that kind of door,” he replied. “But I shan't be late. I'm only going to Clachar House.”

There was a perceptible arrestment, a momentary steadying of her eyes on his face, then “Good night, Mr Grant,” and she was gone.

He stood in thought for a little while, then turned to his beads.