A History Maker. Alasdair Gray

For a while he thought he was looking down on his drowned body. Aches in every muscle soon dismissed that idea. He was dangling on the cliff-face over a partly solid and partly yielding projection. When his hands gripped it sharp spines jagged the palms and fingers. He groaned but held tight, trying to turn sideways.

      “Is this the last of the Ettricks?” asked a face in a globe three inches from his nose.

      “Fuck off,” he muttered, then yelled it with the full force of his lungs.

      “Wat Dryhope, eldest son of the slaughtered general,” said the face, “And clearly a reader who likes the robust language of twentieth-century fiction.”

      “Hello, can I give you a hand?” asked another voice. Wat wrenched himself round and saw grey rock split by horizontal cracks. His torso lay on a clump of whins rooted in a crack above a narrow ledge. Twisting his face upward he saw the cliff top a few feet above with a figure kneeling on the edge. It was General Shafto, stretching an arm down and saying, “Come on — let’s have you.”

      Wat raised a bloodstained right hand whose fingers, he knew, could now hold nothing, but Shafto gripped the wrist and dragged Wat up and over the edge as he fainted again.

      He wakened a minute later with the neck of a flask between his teeth and a mouthful of burning fluid which set him spluttering.

      “My aunts say this stuff does more harm than good,” said Shafto taking a swig, “I don’t believe them.”

      “Thanks,” said Wat and propped himself up on an elbow. Judging by the sun less than an hour had passed since Ettrick had lowered the standard and charged downhill, yet the only signs of battle on the moorland slopes were some gangrels collecting scattered swords, helmets, shields of the dead and badly maimed. Three or four groups of Northumbrians stood or sprawled in small groups awaiting transport. Departing trucks in the distance showed where the rest had gone. The hospital ship still hung between clouds overhead; all dead and wounded bodies except his own had been lifted into it. A Red Cross aircraft was settling on the ground a hundred yards away; he saw nurses with a stretcher preparing to come for him.

      “You were lucky it was me and not old Dodds who found you,” said Shafto affably, “He’d have pushed you into the sea. He says you got that draw by a trick — a filthy trick.”

      “He’s right. Attacking after pretending to surrender is warfare for weans. When Dad gave his orders we were too feart and excited to think.”

      “You’ll feel better when the medics have put more blood back into you,” said Shafto, “Your dad was a genius. He saw a loophole in the rules and made it work for him. People are tired of the old strategies — that battle will be disked by millions. In a month or three you and me should put our heads together and see if we can work out other new strategies — within the Geneva Conventions of course, always within the Conventions. I want you for an ally one day.”

      As Wat was carried to the aircraft he said harshly, “Am I the last? Are all the rest of Ettrick dead?”

      “No no no!” said a nurse soothingly, “Fourteen are living and most of them can be mended. Your brother Joe will mend.”

      “Good,” said Wat and wept, covering his face with his hands. The public eye floated above it saying, “Goodbye Wat Dryhope, a hero of our time — a brave, nervous, tricky hero obviously shaken to the core by what may be eventually voted The Battle of The Century, a surprising last-minute draw between Ettrick and the five clans of Northumbria United.”