Iain Banks - The Crow Road

"Beauty," I whispered to myself, smiling despite the pain in my head.

Then suddenly the buzzard burst and sprayed across the sky; it fell plummeting, limp and trailing feathers, to the ground. A double crack of sound snapped across the field.

The bird fell out of sight behind me. I blinked, not believing what had happened, then rolled over, looking through the mask of branches at the trees edging the field where the sound of the shots had come from. I saw a man holding a shotgun, just inside the trees, looking to one side then the other, then running out into the field. He wore green strapped wellies, thick brown cords, a waxed jacket with a corduroy collar, and a cloth bunnet. One more prick in a Barbour jacket, but this one had just shot a buzzard.

He gazed down at something in the grass, then smiled. He was tall and blond and he looked like a male model; enviable jaw line. He stamped down on the thing in the grass, looked around again then backed off, finally turning and walking smartly back into the woods.

I should have shouted, or taken the bird to the police as evidence — buzzards are a protected species, after all — but I didn't. I just watched the Barbour disappear into the trees, then rolled over and breathed, "Fuckwit."

He was at the firework party the following night, laughing and talking and sharing a dram from Fergus's hip flask. I watched him, and he saw me, and we looked at each other for a few moments before he looked away, all in the furious, writhing light of the pyre that I had put together, and which contained — pushed in near its now blazing centre — the corpse of the bird he had killed.

We stood beside the observatory dome, on the battlements of Castle Gaineamh, facing into a cool westerly breeze. Lewis, in cords and a grease-brown stockman's coat, looked through the binoculars, his black hair moving slightly in the wind. Verity stood at his side, face raised shining to the winter blue sky, bulky in her thermal jacket, her ski-gloved hands clasped thickly under the bulge of her belly. The plain beyond the woods below, holding Gallanach and cupping the inner bay, was bathed in the deep-shadowed sunlight of late afternoon. Wisps of cirrus moved high above, tails trailing up, promising clear weather. A two-coach sprinter moved in the distance, on the viaduct at Bridgend, windows glinting in the sunlight. I took a deep breath and could smell the sea.

The unopened air-mail packet from Colorado, lodged next to my chest between shirt and jacket, make a crinkling, flexing noise, giving me a funny feeling in my belly. "No sign?" Verity asked.

Lewis shook his head. "Mm-mm."

Verity shivered. She hunched her shoulders, bringing them up and in towards her neck. "Brr," she went. She linked arms with Lewis.

"Ah," he said, protesting, still looking through the field glasses, though now at a slight angle.

Verity tutted, and with a gorgeously pretended scowl moved away from her husband and stepped over to me. She slid an arm round my waist, snuggling. I put an arm round her shoulders. She rested her head against my arm; I looked down at her. She was growing her hair a little. The sides of her head weren't actually shaved any more. She smelled of baby oil; Lewis had what sounded like the enviable job of smoothing it over The Bulge, in an attempt to fend off stretch marks later. I smiled, unseen, and looked back to the north.

"Is that what-do-you-call-it?" Verity said, nodding.

"No, that's thingy-ma-bob," Lewis said, just as I said,

"Hey; well remembered."

"Dunadd," Verity said patiently, ignoring both of us. She was looking at the small, rocky hill a kilometre to the north. "Where the footprint is."

"Correct," I said.

Lewis glanced at us, grinned. He lowered the binoculars a little. "Can't see it from here, but that's where it is."

Dunadd Rock had been the capital of Dalriada, one of the early and formative kingdoms in Scotland. The footprint — looks more like a bootprint, actually, just a smooth hollow in the stone — was where the new king had to place his foot when he made his vows, symbolically — I suppose — to join him to the land.

"Can I have a look?" Verity said. Lewis handed her the glasses, arid she leant against the stone battlements, supporting her belly. Lewis stood behind her, chin lowered onto her shoulder.

"Right at the summit, isn't it?" Verity asked.

"Yep," Lewis said.

She looked at Dunadd for a bit. "I wonder," she said, "if you had one of your feet planted there, when you gave birth…»

I laughed. Lewis went wide-eyed, drawing up and back from his wife. She turned round, grinning wickedly at Lewis and then me. She patted Lewis's elbow. "Joke," she said. "I want to be in a nice warm birthing pool in a nice big hospital." She turned back to the view. Lewis looked at me.

"Had me fooled," I shrugged. "Runs in the family, after all."

"Can you see that stone circle, too?" Verity said, lifting the binoculars to gaze further north.

Earlier that day, Helen Urvill, Verity and Lewis and I had been behaving like tourists. The land around Gallanach is thick with ancient monuments; burial sites, standing stones, henges and strangely carved rocks; you can hardly put a foot down without stepping on something that had religious significance to somebody sometime. Verity had heard of all this ancient stoneware but she'd never really seen it properly; her visits to Gallanach in the past had been busy with other things, and about the only place she had been to before was Dunadd, because it was an easy walk from the castle. And of course, because we had lived here most of our lives, none of the rest of us had bothered to visit half the places either.

So we borrowed Fergus's Range Rover and went site-seeing; tramping through muddy fields to the hummocks that were funeral barrows, looking up at moss-covered standing stones, plodding round stone circles and chambered cairns, and leaning on fences staring at the great flat faces of cup-and-ring marked rocks, their grainy surfaces covered in the concentric circular symbols that looked like ripples from something fallen in a pond, frozen in stone.

Did I ever tell you about the time I used to be able to make televisions go wonky, from far away?"

It was a bright and warm day, back in that same summer Rory had come out to the Hebrides with us. Rory and I were walking near Gallanach, going from the marked rocks in one field to the stone circle in another. I remember I had a pain in my side that day and I was worrying that it was appendicitis (one of the boys in my class that year had almost died when his appendix had ruptured). It was just a stitch, though. Uncle Rory was a fast walker and I'd been intent on keeping up with him; my appendix waited another year before it needed taking out.

We had been visiting some of the ancient monuments in the area, and had started talking about what the people who'd built the cairns and stone circles had believed in, and that had led us on to astrology. Then suddenly he mentioned this thing about televisions.

"Making them go wonky?" I said. "No."

"Well," Rory said, then turned and looked behind us. We stood up on the verge as a couple of cars passed us. It was hot; I took off my jacket. "Well," Rory repeated, "I was… a few years older than you are now, I guess. I was over at a friend's house, and there was a bunch of us watching Top of the Pops or something, and I was humming along with a record. I hit a certain deep note, and the TV screen went wavy. Nobody else said anything, and I wondered if it was just coincidence, so I tried to do it again, and after a bit of adjusting I hit the right note and sure enough, the screen went wavy again. Still nobody said anything." Rory laughed at the memory. He was wearing jeans and T-shirt and carried a light jacket over his shoulder.