On the Edge of Darkness. Barbara Erskine

beneath the wild white rim of hair.

      Brid shook her head. Covering her face with her hands she fell on her knees. Adam could see tears trickling from between her fingers. ‘Brid?’ He had stopped struggling, shocked by her abject terror.

      It was Gartnait who stepped up behind her. He rested his hands gently on his sister’s shoulders and spoke to the tall man, his voice calm and clear.

      Adam glanced from one to the other. Both men, he noticed, were wearing silver bracelets on their arms. Gartnait had a sort of necklet around his throat and beneath his cloak the short sleeves of his tunic showed that he too had intricately coloured tattoos on his arms and an intricately wrought golden band above his elbow. It made him look exotic and foreign. Very glamorous. Adam found his eyes going from one man to the other. His father disapproved of jewellery. He thought it an abomination, as he thought so many things were which were clearly nice or fun or beautiful. His mother owned none save her wedding ring. He had never seen a man wear jewellery save for the tinkers in the village who sometimes wore earrings, and Lord Pittenross who owned the estate and wore a gold signet ring with a carved crest on the little finger of his left hand. Adam, in spite of his fear, was impressed.

      The tall man’s grip had slackened slightly as he stood listening to Gartnait and Adam snatched his arm away. He rubbed it defiantly, squaring his shoulders, feeling braver now. He gave Brid a quick grin but she was still kneeling with her hands over her eyes.

      It was the turn of the tall man to speak now. He gestured at Adam, sweeping the boy with a withering look which took in his open-necked shirt, his shorts, his bare brown legs and his dusty sandals. It was then that the man pulled out a knife.

      Adam gasped. Nearby, one of the watching women groaned. Gartnait went on talking calmly as though nothing had happened, but his fingers on his sister’s thin shoulders had tightened until the knuckles went white.

      Brid took her hands away from her eyes. Her face was very pale. ‘Run, A-dam!’ she cried suddenly. ‘RUN!’

      Adam ran.

      He turned like an eel beneath the man’s flailing hand and diving through the crowd fled as fast as he could back the way he had come. His sudden movement had taken them all by surprise and it was a moment before the tall man started in pursuit. But he gave up almost at once. No one else had moved.

      Adam did not wait to see what happened. He pounded up the track, jumping over stones and heather, leaping from rock to rock across the burn and slithering down a gully which took him out of sight of the village. At the bottom he lay still, gasping for breath. His heart was hammering somewhere in his throat and his legs were trembling with exhaustion and shock.

      When at last he raised his head and looked around he half expected to see the tall man there again standing over him. There was no one there. The gully was deserted. Nearby he could hear a stonechat calling, its metallic voice an eerie echo of the sound of Gartnait’s hammer, and the distant slithering cascade of scree in the wake of his passing. Nothing else. He raised himself up and peered round carefully before climbing slowly up to the top of the rocks and looking behind him. There was no sign of the village. It was out of sight behind the shoulder of the hill and the heather and rocks were empty of any signs of pursuit. And of any landmarks he recognised.

      He knew that to find his way home he needed to go south-east. He glanced at the sun, though he knew already which way he should go from the lie of the distant hills.

      Not until the sun had set behind the shoulder of Ben Dearg did he admit at last that he was lost. He could feel the fear crawling in the pit of his stomach. The hillside looked familiar, but he could not see the stone. He could see no sign of anything he recognised. Feeling for footholds as silently as he could amongst the blaeberries and sliding scree he crept up to the rim of the gully and peered over the edge. The outline of the distant hills was the same as always, as were the contours of the glen below, but he could not see the cross-slab. In the distance he noticed suddenly the curl of smoke against the sky that showed the location of Brid’s village and he calmed himself down with an effort. After all, he had been exploring these hills with his friends since he was old enough to slip away from the village. What would his heroes do in these circumstances? Men like Richard Hannay or Sexton Blake, Alan Breck or the Scarlet Pimpernel? He didn’t have a compass but he would use his watch with the sun. With new determination he set off in what he hoped was the right direction, his back resolutely to Brid’s village, hoping that whatever was happening there she would not get into any further trouble because of him.

      Wraiths of mist were curling through the trees when he at last found the stone cross again. It was the copy, the one that Gartnait was working on. He rested his hand on it, touching the sharp-edged carving of the looping intricate designs with his fingertips. Gartnait had stopped halfway through incising a broken spear. He could feel the shallow punch-marks outlining the design.

      In the east, the deep amethyst dusk was beginning to hover over the valley. It hid the distances from sight, wrapping the whole area in darkness.

      He stepped away from the stone, looking round for the older original, the landmark which had stood on the hill for fourteen hundred years. There was no sign of it. The air was very still.

      Frowning, he moved a few paces forward, overwhelmed suddenly by a strange dizziness. His head was spinning. He had been running too fast. He stumbled, shaking his head from side to side, trying to rid himself of the slight buzzing in his ears. Then the moment had passed and his head cleared. Below him the mistiness had drifted away and in the distance he could see the grey stone roofs of the forge and the post office, the lights from the main street, and the shoulder of hillside above the waterfalls which hid the manse from his view, while behind him the old cross caught a last shaft of slanting light from the sun as it slid over the horizon.

       3

      ‘A-dam?’ The hand on his shoulder was as light as thistledown. He started and sat up. ‘Brid?’

      It was the spring. The Easter vacation. Ten whole days of freedom stretched before him. Adam had come back several times in the autumn but there had been no sign of Brid or Gartnait, no trace, though he cautiously searched, of the shabby cottage or the village. Frustrated, he pored over maps and books in the library for signs of the place, but to no avail, and when the snows came to the mountains he gave up looking and concentrated, much to his father’s satisfaction, on his school books.

      He had also given up hoping for a message from his mother. He no longer raced to meet the postie or hid on the stairs peering through the banisters, his heart thudding with hope when there was a knock on the door.

      Sometimes, at night, he cried for her, secretly, his head under the pillow to drown his stifled sobs. His father never mentioned her and he did not dare ask. He was not to know that there had been letters; four of them. Enclosed in the missives she sent to her husband, pleading for forgiveness and understanding, the lonely, frightened, desperate woman’s declarations of love for her son went unread into the waste paper basket and slowly, miles away to the south, her despair of ever seeing Adam again grew greater. Once she had come on the bus and stood, hidden by a hedge, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, but her fear of being spotted by someone from the village, or worse still by her husband had been too great, and, in tears, she had caught the next bus back to Perth and then the train south. She did not know that that day Adam had been far away on the hillside, lost in dreams.

      Jeannie Barron knew no more than Adam did. Her heart ached for the boy as she saw his white face and the tell-tale red-rimmed eyes in the mornings. When school started he would cycle off while it was still dark to the bus stop in Dunkeld five miles away and there he would catch the bus to Perth, leaving his bicycle hidden behind a hedge. When he returned from the long day, his books in his satchel, it would be dark once again and there was no question of going anywhere but, after supper, to his own room. When the snows came he would stay in Perth during the week, lodging with Jeannie Barron’s