‘I don’t know. I don’t know what maukit is.’ I refused to be abashed, because I was sure he was doing it on purpose and the glint in his eye told me I was right.
‘It means filthy. Dirty.’ Lachlan ate the last of the apple. ‘You look all right to me there, but you’ve only just arrived. And I have to admit that I’m starting to think this shirt could do with a wee rinse.’ He plucked at his coat, pulling it away from his body to reveal the ghastly jumper and, peeking out beneath, the neck of a T-shirt. ‘I think it’s starting to make a noise when I turn round.’ He gave me another grey-eyed twinkle.
‘It would be good for morale,’ I said sturdily, not wanting to think about the disgusting state of his clothing.
‘Why not? Shall we give it a go?’
‘What,now?’
He smiled again and wiggled his eyebrows. ‘No time like the present, three hundred years ago. Come on, lass.’ He stretched out a hand to pull me up, as he had done last night. His hand was warm and slightly sticky with apple juice. ‘Mal, Kaylinn – Pax and I are off to check something out. Stay together and we’ll be back. Hopefully.’
Kaylinn whipped around from her raiding of the apple baskets. ‘You can’t leave us, Lachlan!’ Panic was stacked behind her words and she reached out to grasp at my sleeve. ‘We agreed. We stay together.’
Her fear was catching. Mal joined in too. ‘We can’t split up, Lachlan.’
‘You’re not worried about Davey going off,’ Lachlan said. ‘Why is this different?’
‘Because… because it just is.’ Mal put down the bag he’d swiped off a passing cart. ‘You are the only one of us who isn’t going to pieces here,’ he said. ‘We’re relying on you to keep us from falling into screaming hysterics.’
‘Look.’ Lachlan spoke slowly and carefully. ‘I’m only going to check out an idea that Pax has had. I’m not going far. It’s going to be all right, Mal.’
Mal gave a sharp-edged laugh. ‘Well, obviously, because it’s so totally fine at the moment, isn’t it?’
‘But we have to dosomething,’ I put in. ‘What’s the alternative – we all just sit here? Forever? Waiting for people in the twenty-first century to rope themselves together and come in after us?’ It was clearly a fear that they all had, because the entire group went quiet. I saw Kaylinn’s lip start to wobble. ‘Look,’ I went on in a slightly softer tone, ‘I’m sorry. But wecan’tdonothing. We can’t just exist here in some weird kind of stasis. We either have to work at getting ourselves home or make ourselves new lives here.’
I marched away from the group with my back straight, not quite sure where I was heading, but cursing myself under my breath. Talking the talk was one thing but I wasn’t entirely sure about how to go about walking the walk. Their inertia, however, was grating on my nerves. Shock and fear were all very well, but they couldn’t rule us forever.
Lachlan caught up with me. ‘You can be scary when you want to be, can’t you?’ he observed.
‘I’m a teacher. They drum it into you during the PGCE.’ I still had a bubble of anger pushing at my stomach. ‘Lesson planning, educational theory and how to put the fear of God into people.’
A hairy cow being driven by a young boy with a stick gave me a lowered head and tilted horn of threat, but as the cow was small enough for me to have pushed it over had it been able to touch me, I ignored it.
‘Well, it was impressive,’ Lachlan said at last.
‘I’m used to dealing with groups in a state of panic,’ I said. ‘Well, school trips anyway. Sometimes you have to act as though you have a handle on what’s going on just to keep things calm.’
Another pause. Over at the stables, Fergus was reshoeing a horse. The tap-tap of the nails in the hoof took me right back to pony-owning teenagehood. ‘They’re scared,’ Lachlan said, not looking at me. ‘We’re all scared. It makes us – we’re not behaving normally.’
‘While I am completely fine with what’s going on and am thoroughly enjoying living through a textbook illustration of “life in a castle”,’ I said. ‘Everyoneis scared. But sitting back and doing nothing, waiting for rescue – it’s just sopassive.’
Lachlan smiled, but not at me. It was a grim sort of smile. ‘Sometimes keeping everything on an even keel is good enough, you know,’ he said.
I didn’t reply. We had reached the end of the caravan of moving people and arrived at a small archway over a gap in the headland wall where the ground sloped down. Beyond the archway the road seemed to have been carved into the rock like a tunnel, and my cautious exploratory sidle into this revealed that the track emerged onto a precipitous way down the cliffside and could be locked by a huge iron gate, which was currently hanging open. The path was slippery with dung and vertiginous and I began to doubt my own idea.
‘Maybe we should…’ I hesitated but Lachlan grabbed my arm and pulled me through the gate and out onto the cliff. Far, far below us the sea moved like a beast just waiting for prey to drop into its mouth.
‘Come on. Like I said, I don’t think we can die.’ He transferred his grasp to my hand and held it as we inched our way along the edge of the track, trying to avoid the larger dung piles and the slippery trampled middle.
‘I cannot stress how much I don’t want to test your theory.’ I kept my back firmly against the side of the track that sloped up towards the walled-in headland because the other side was too terrifying. There were seagulls flying below us. Although the track was wide enough to accommodate a wagon and the beasts pulling it, the drop from the edge was vertigo-inducing and the sea at the bottom looked deep and sinister.
‘Ah, come on, now. We’re going to go skinny dipping, surely that’s worth looking forward to?’ He wiggled his eyebrows.
I, who had been going to wade into the water fully dressed, resolved not even to take my coat off and was working on where to put my face if he stripped naked, when Lachlan stopped suddenly. ‘Oh.’
He’d jerked my arm, his halt had been so abrupt. ‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. Here, you try.’ A tug on my hand brought me up alongside him, both of us balanced on the path like two people sharing a tightrope. I tried to take a step further forward – and couldn’t. It felt as though the air had become too thick. Nothing solid prevented us going on, but it felt like trying to walk against the pressure of an inflated balloon.
