by Francis - TO THE HILT

I left as little to chance as I could. I traced the direction of each line in my mind until I could see the effect, and that could take ten minutes or half an hour. The result might be a sweeping stroke that looked spontaneous and inevitable, but in nerving myself each time to scrape down to the grey I was cravenly aware that a mistake couldn't be put right.

It was a cold day, and I sweated.

By five o'clock the shape of Zoл Lang's old face was clearly established over the inner spirit. I put down the meat thermometer, stretched and flexed my cramped fingers, took the portable phone with me and went for a walk outside.

Sitting on a granite boulder, looking down on the bothy, looking away down the valley to the tiny cars crawling along the distant road, I phoned my mother. Bad reception: crackle and static.

Ivan, she assured me, was at last and slowly shedding his depression. He had dressed. He was talking of not needing Wilfred any longer. Keith Robbiston had paid one of his flying visits and had been pleased with the patient's progress. She herself felt more settled and less anxious.

'Great,' I said.

She wanted to know how the meat-thermometer picture was coming along.

'Medium rare,' I said.

She laughed and said she was pleased Himself had insisted on a phone.

I told her the number.

She was calm, cool and collected, her normal serene self.

I said I would call her again on Sunday, the day after tomorrow, when I had finished the picture.

'Take care of yourself, Alexander.'

'You too,' I said.

I went down again to the bothy and ate the remaining half of the paella, and sat outside in the dark thinking of what needed to be done to the picture to complete its meaning; and chiefly I thought of not muddling the outlines by too many more strong grey scratches but of not going down so deep, not nearly down to the canvas, but only as far as the ultramarine blue layer, so that the wrinkles and sagging areas of old skin would be gentler, though still unmistakable, and I would end, if I could manage it, with a blue-grey mist-like top portrait, so that the eye could see both portraits separately, the outer or the inner, according to the chosen focus, or could see both together as an interpretation of what all life was like, the outward relentless change of cell-structure decreed by the passing of time.

I slept only in snatches that night and dreamed a lot and in the morning again watched the light grow on Zoл Lang, and spent the day with rigidly governed finger muscles until my arms and neck ached with tension, but by late afternoon I had gone to the limit of what I could understand and show, and whatever the picture might be judged to lack, it was because the lack was in me .

Only the eyes of the finished portrait looked blaz-ingly young, whichever other aspect one chose to see. I put suggestions of bags under the lower lids with a few blue lines, and drooped upper lids in faintly, but that unchanging spirit of Zoл Lang looked out, present and past identical.

I couldn't sleep. I lay for a while in the dark wondering what I could have done better, and coming to a realisation that I would probably go on wondering that for weeks and months, if not for my whole life.

I would wrap the picture in its sheet and put its face to the wall, and when I looked at it again, when I'd forgotten the strength and direction and feeling of each individual brushstroke or scratch, when I could see the whole with time's perspective, then I would know if I'd done something worth keeping, or whether the whole idea had been a mistake and beyond me.

Restlessly I got up at about four in the morning and, locking my door behind me, took my bagpipes up into the mountains, seeing my way by starlight, humbled by the distance of those flaming unvisited worlds, melancholy with the insignificance of one self in the cosmos and thinking such unoriginal thoughts as that it was much easier to do harm than good, even unintentionally.

As always the melancholy drifted away into space and left acceptance. Some people clung to angst as if it were a virtue. I let it go with relief. Optimism was a gift at birth. Bottles were half full, not half empty. When I took up the pipes in the dawn and blew the bag full of air, it was marches and strathspeys I played into the brightening silence, no longer the sad regrets of the piobaireachd.

Zoл Lang, the real Zoл Lang, now lived in an old body. Through all her ages, persisting into her fanaticism, the essence of Zoл Lang had triumphed. The shell was but a crab's carapace, grown, hardened, shed and grown again. I played marches for her this time as a salutation.

She would never find the Kinloch hilt if I could prevent it, but I would pay my foe the most intense respect (short of capitulation) that I could.

I never counted time up there on the granite heights. The grey dawn turned to a brilliant blue sparkling day and I reckoned I would go down to the bothy only when the lack of breakfast gave me a shove. Meanwhile I played the pipes and marched to the beat and filled the whole optimism bottle slowly with uncomplicated joy at being there in that wilderness, alive.

Too good to last, I supposed.

I was aware first of a buzzing noise that increasingly interfered with the drone of the pipes, and then a helicopter rose fast over the ridge of the mountain at my back and flew overhead, drowning out all sound but the deafening roar of its rotor.

I stopped playing. The helicopter swooped and wheeled and clattered and circled, and while I still half-cursed its insistent penetrating din and half wondered what on earth anyone would be looking for in that deserted area at that early time on a Sunday, the helicopter seemed like a falcon spotting a kill, and dropped purposefully towards its prey.

The prey, I realised in dismay, was the bothy. I sat down and folded the pipes across my knees, and watched.

The helicopter made a sort of circuit and approached the bothy from in front, hovering unsteadily over the small plateau there, sliding through the air to one side of my parked replacement jeep and finally settling onto the ground the longitudinal bars of the landing support.

The noise of the engine faded, and the speed of the rotor fell away.

I watched in extreme apprehension. I sat as motionless as the mountain itself, aware that unless I moved or put my head above the skyline I was invisible from below against the jumble of rocks.

If the four robbers had come…

If the four robbers had come they wouldn't catch me up in the mountains, but they could again break into my house.

They could destroy my painting.

I felt as if it were a child I'd left there. A sleeping child. Irreplaceable. I wondered how I could bear it, if they destroyed it.

After what seemed time for several deaths the rotor blades came to rest. The side door of the helicopter opened and one man jumped out. A small figure, far below.

One.

Not four.

He looked around him then walked forward out of my sight, and I knew he must be trying the front door of the bothy. He reappeared, looked into the truck, stuck his head into the helicopter door as if talking to someone there, and then in obvious frustration walked to the edge of the plateau and stood looking down the valley towards the road.

Something about the set of his shoulders as he turned back towards the helicopter brought me recognition and floods of relief.

Jed , I thought. It's Jed.

Blowing a scant lungful of air into the bag on my knees I squeezed it and played four or five random notes on the chanter.

In the clear silent air Jed heard them immediately. He whirled and looked up towards the mountains, shading his eyes against the eastern sun. I stood up and waved, and after a few moments he spotted me, and made huge circular movements with an arm, beckoning, beseeching me to come down.