LOST PATTERNS

A heat haze drifted over the high heather moor known as Ard Marabay. In contrast to the ripple and shimmer of the heat, very little moved in the landscape. A red and white cow grazed at tether; a small calf lay in its shadow; a girl of fourteen, dressed in dark blue with a white pinafore, sat knitting on a clump of heather. The name of the girl was Ishbal Macaulay, and on a day yet to come she would give birth to Annie Macdonald, but right now she was intently studying three moorland flowers and creating images of them with worsted and fine steel needles. She was pleased with her work, but regretted that she had no means of capturing the delicate shades of the flowers. She had only one yarn, a similar colour to her dress, and so she had to content herself with texture and form. With the swatches finished to her satisfaction, she lay back in the heather and looked into the infinity of the sky, thinking of the bright fabrics and threads that she would one day use. She could not foresee that by the time they came within her grasp, they would no longer be the objects of her desire. Meanwhile she daydreamed, the flowers clutched gently in her hand. She felt sad that she had to pick them, but they grew beside one of the deep bogs of liquid peat that cluster in a low part of the moor, and her duty as shepherdess would not allow her to lie beside them, and neither did her native caution.

The cow settled down to doze; the girl closed her eyes and drifted. Even the gulls seemed seduced by the heat and their cries were absent from the afternoon. Only the sound of the skylark drifted sporadically across the glowing moor. At its edge were the cliffs of Ard Marabay, and beyond them the open sea. Or not quite open, Ishbal noted, for a few miles out lay a bank of dense summer mist, like an island on which it was possible to land and explore. She imagined walking through hills and glens of solid vapour. The hot weather fog will cause no danger to the fishermen of Marabay, she thought, for the simple reason that they are working the grounds of the western mainland and will not return until the weekend. The lone steam vessel that Ishbal saw earlier was not local and could no longer be seen or heard.

It would have been a lonely time for any girl other than Ishbal Macaulay, with the men and older boys at sea, and her peers out at the summer grazings. She had to remain behind to tend the weakling calf, which was being allowed to suck milk from its mother, against all usual practise. The calf was doing well and putting on weight. Ishbal did not mind the solitude and lay thinking of her flower patterns. She intended to panel them around a gansey the like of which no-one had ever seen before, and she would wear her handiwork with pride. She saw her stitches dancing in her closed eyes as she fell into a light sleep. Her flower patterns formed, then melted in the heat, then formed again. They were graceful and delicate but with a deep inner strength. Above all, they were beautiful. So very beautiful.

Ishbal Macaulay was wakened partly by sound and partly by cold. The cold emanated from the massive wedge of sea fog that had ridden up over the cliffs and across the moor. She still lay in bright sunshine but she could feel the chill of the fog bank that cut her off from Marabay as effectively as a mountain range, which it did indeed resemble. The sound came from the cries of the calf which was being tied at forelegs and rear by a man of about middle age. He wore coarse dark trousers and shirt, and a seaman's smock was tied about his waist. He was tanned but pale of hair and eyes, and he stared at her while he finished tying the calf.

Ishbal felt a sharp sear of pain as her stomach tightened, and she tasted bile in her mouth. The whole of her insides heaved, but then the world pitched and jolted, and she was suddenly very far away in space and time yet still a part of the here and now. She was detached from herself, but there inside her own head, looking out through the windows of her eyes. She felt peacefully relaxed, with reflexes blade-sharp.

Time stretched, sagged and dwindled into nothingness. There was no time, yet there was all the time in the world to see every tiny detail of what lay around her, caught in frozen motion against the glacial white of the rearing fog bank. Here was a heather bell of exquisite shape and form; there was an insect with sunlight refracting from lacy wings. Everywhere there were patterns, in moor and sea and sky, and in the dark trousers and shirt worn by the seaman. She knew with calm certainty that he came from the vessel she had seen earlier. It was not unknown for passing ships to filch the odd beast, but such poaching usually occurred in remote stretches of moor, well away from the villages. On this occasion she knew that the seaman had taken advantage of the fog bank that cut her off from Marabay, and she even knew the most likely spot for his rowing boat to be beached. Above all, she knew with diamond clarity that she could expect help from no quarter whatsoever, and that the danger she was in had to be faced entirely on her own. Ishbal Macaulay watched passively, and waited.

There was little sound in her timeless bubble. She could see the eyes of the frightened calf, but could hear neither its frantic lowing nor its mother's concerned response. She could see the seaman look at her and say something, but she could hear what came from his moving lips apart from a distorted blur of far-off sound. He seemed to drift towards her like the fog. He materialised beside her, on his knees, and though he was obviously laughing as he began to pull up her skirt, the sound did not reach her ears. Instead, her senses were overcome with visual detail: the flecks of grey in the man's pale hair and beard; the red veins on cheeks and nose, and the gap where a front tooth was missing. She could feel the pressure of his hands upon her thighs, but compared to the overwhelming barrage of images, it was a distant, meaningless sensation.

The bubble of silence burst as one of Ishbal Macaulay's steel needles pierced the seaman's veined cheek, with the full, whip-like force of her arm behind it. His shriek broke skywards as Ishbal slipped from under him and flew across the moor along the edge of the fog bank. The shriek mutated into a bellow as the seaman blundered after her with one hand clapped to the point on his face from which blood was dripping. Instead of feeling coccooned, Ishbal now felt free and almost weightless. She hitched her skirt and pinafore and ran, confident that the strange lightness and strength she felt in her legs would carry her away across the moor to safety. She knew the enraged seaman was following but did not dare to look back. It was a new sound that brought her to a stop, for although it was uttered in no tongue she could understand, the panic and fear it contained were universal. Her attacker had found the place where the wildflowers grew, and was caught in a trap of liquid peat. The bog had its own sinister beauty, being the colour of blue-black ink with oily rainbows at its edges. There was a halo of green grass and rushes, shot through with her special flowers. The peat went down an unplumbed distance, and the seaman had but a matter of minutes before he joined the preserved bodies of anonymous beasts and the odd benighted or fogbound villager garnered over the centuries. His head, shoulders and arms were visible, and his eyes were like those of her frightened calf. Blood still flowed from the wound on his cheek, and dripped onto the surface of the bog where its colour was quickly overwhelmed by inky black. Trapped and slowly sinking, his eyes met Ishbal's across the wildflowers, and he babbled in his unknown tongue. Ishbal froze completely, and she was back inside her head looking out through her own eyes. Gradually her body loosened and backed away, poised for further flight. She could feel the power coiled in the pit of her stomach, ready to unleash its force and carry her a mile or two miles over the heather. Right to the next village if necessary. Anywhere would do: anywhere away from the desperation on the face of her wounded attacker. She took one step away, and another, but then stopped.

No, she told herself from an unknown point somewhere inside her mind. No. Ishbal Macaulay made herself walk steadily and deliberately towards the tethered cow and equally steadily, she drew the iron stake from the moor. Then she untied the rope from the cow's neck and walked back to the bog, where she threw the loose end of rope to the seaman and drove the staked end into the moor with her foot. The frightened seaman took the strain on the rope and the iron stake held, firm as an anchor. Only then did she turn and make her way back to the cow and calf, which she loosed from the rope that the seaman had put on its legs. The beasts nuzzled both her and each other while she made a new collar for the cow, and led them towards the bank of fog that still shielded Marabay. She turned just once to see that the seaman was only slightly raised from the bog. If his panic subsided and if he didn't waste his strength, then he would escape. Ishbal did not look back again. Leading cow and calf, she did what she knew to be sheer folly in a place of abrupt cliffs and treacherous bogs, and slipped into the chill of the fog bank.

It was a place of danger and wonder: a world of pale, golden diffused light through which she felt she could swim. Her clothes dampened and chilled but she didn't mind. She just held the tethers of the beasts and talked to them gently while walking in what she believed to be the direction of Marabay. The tears came gradually at first, then in a trickle, then in a flood. She stopped and the beasts stood patiently while she sobbed. Her breath came in gulps and gasps as the sobs became more and more convulsive in that place of swirling light and bitter cold. She sobbed at the memory of the acrid taste in her mouth and at the stab of fear that had pierced her body. She sobbed at the memory of that terrible pressure on her thighs, and the thought of what she had escaped. Then she sobbed for the legions of those who had not escaped and for the evil she now knew was in the world, and might come at any time in any form, even on the sunniest of days to those who least deserved it. Her tears flowed for her world that had been and the for reality of the world that now was.

The calf nuzzled and licked her hand; its mother lowed, impatient to be home. The sea fog soaked her skin and washed her face clean. The swirls of vapour took hold of her fears and memories and wreathed them in a grey blanket that became ever more solid. She began to move once more, with confidence, for after all, did her father not constantly praise her sense of direction and say that she could probably walk the moor blindfolded. Thy footsteps shall not be straitened. I have led thee in right paths. The memories continued to recede and fade, until they were hidden in a far corner of her mind; wrapped up tightly and tied with navy-blue worsted. By the time she stepped shivering and soaking into the light, within sight of the houses of Marabay, there was nothing left of them. There was nothing to say, nothing to tell, nothing to remember. Ishbal Macaulay greeted the sun and talked excitedly to cow and calf, patting their wet, glistening coats. What happened on the far side of the fog bank was gone. Instead, stretching out before her was the road that led to home, family and the rest of her life.

Of her swatches, quietly rotting under the heather, she had no recollection whatsoever. The only trace of the day that Ishbal Macaulay carried with her was a vague sense of loss. Had she lost some thing or things that she valued? Try as she might, she could not put her finger on what they might be. Even that faint impression vanished as weeks and months passed by, and many other patterns came into her thoughts and onto her needles. She was destined to see her lost patterns just once again, on a day in 1977 as she lay dying. They jumped into her mind with such power and clarity that she sat bolt upright in bed and said in Gaelic to her daughter, "Ah, Annie! They were so very beautiful." Annie Macdonald often wondered ­ but never found out ­ just what her mother's last words had meant.