“Can I sit up now?” asked Kirsty from her prone position on the back seat (Boudica was sitting up front).
“No. Stay where you are,” he commanded in a sharp voice. “The Morityaro might be on their way back by now. Let’s not take any chance that they may see you.”
Kirsty put her head back down with ill grace. How could they see her from a car travelling in the opposite direction and at the speed they were doing, she thought crossly. Although conversant with the need to stay hidden, she had informed Bob that if she wore her sunglasses the Morityaro could not possibly recognise her, and there was a chance, however faint, that she might catch a glimpse of her mother. He had not been persuaded.
“They have very good eyesight,” said Bob, explaining, “and we don’t know how long they have been watching Dundonald Road and your mother. They might know my car and have connected me with your mother. I visited her for coffee and cakes yesterday.”
Boudica looked back, a sympathetic look on her hairy face but Kirsty, trying to hold back the tears that were beginning to trickle down her cheeks, didn’t see it.
Bob kept driving.
Somewhere, as they drove up and over the uplands known as the Fenwick Moor, Kirsty fell asleep.
Bob glanced at her in his rear-view mirror.
“I hope I’m doing the right thing, taking her to the Rannoch gate and not Dunfermline,” Bob said to Boudica. “But I’m almost sure they must have come through Dunfermline, the fact that there is a gate at Rannoch is known only to a few. Marian only told me of it a few months ago,” he said.
“But how did they know how to find us?” asked Boudica. “They knew exactly where we lived. They knew where the house was,” and added apologetically, “you’ll have to stop the car for me to have a pee soon, my bladder is not as accommodating as yours.”
They drew in to a service station once they were north of the city. They sat outside the buildings on a grassy knoll where Boudica had her pee, a long drink of water and a chicken meal (minus the salad and the carrots, the latter being a food of intense dislike).
Kirsty ate some sandwiches and drank a cappuccino coffee. Bob had a pot of tea and ate a duplicate of the meal Boudica had eaten, plus the salad and the carrots.
Bob left them sitting in the sun while he went into the shop where he bought a bundle of sandwiches, a six-pack of diet coke and two large bottles of still water, grimacing at the exorbitant prices. What made it worse he thought as he handed over a twenty-pound note, was that he had left bottles of perfectly good water and coke sitting on the fridge shelves in his kitchen at home. It was galling to have to pay almost twice the price that supermarkets charged.
Three quarters of an hour later and they were on the road again, this time Kirsty sitting in the front wearing her dark glasses as a precaution.
Boudica was relegated to the back, where she sat, looking frequently back along the way they had come, alert for any signs of pursuit. Being in the back didn’t upset her in the least. There was more room to stretch out and it was far easier to keep her balance.
* * * * *
The drive should have taken approximately another two hours, but Bob was taking his time. The roads were narrow, hilly and treacherous to those not used to driving along them and he didn’t want to have an accident. The thought of being stranded on the quiet roads that meandered through these sparsely populated areas of Scotland filled him with trepidation, especially as he didn’t know if the Morityaro were following.
He felt tense; he was tense.
Beside him Kirsty sat, still wearing her sunglasses. She gave the appearance of being quite unconcerned about the situation in which she found herself but he knew she was as taut as a drum.
Boudica was watching the road behind. He knew that she would warn them if she saw danger approaching but they had very little with which to defend themselves if the Morityaro did catch up with them. At least he had remembered to bring his sword and fighting knives.
“Do you think Mum is all right?” asked Kirsty in a small voice, removing her sunglasses for a moment to rub her eyes.
Bob snuck a glance at her.
She was white, her green eyes dilated and full of worry.
“If you mean do I think she is alive? Yes, as I said before, yes I do. Where she is though, that’s another matter. How you feeling?”
“I’ve got a bit of a headache,” she admitted.
“Close your eyes and try and get another spot of sleep,” he advised.
From the back seat Boudica whuffled in agreement.
Kirsty closed her eyes and to all intents and purposes appeared to be dozing.
They drove on in silence.
She opened her eyes as Bob was carefully negotiating the hill that led down to the village of Kinloch Rannoch.
“Are we here?” she asked.
“Almost,” he answered. “Do you know where the holiday lodges are? I’ll need to find the reception area, see if they’ve got any vacancies.”
“It’s in the village, turn right before you get to the bridge and there should be a sign on the left. Least that’s where the office was when Mum brought me here on holiday.”
Bob found it without any trouble. The white sign ‘Loch Rannoch Highland Club’ beckoned and he turned the car into the lane and parked outside the modern building with a glass door labelled ‘Reception’.
He turned off the ignition.
“I’ll just be a moment,” he said as he opened the car door and swung his right leg outside.
In the back Boudica tensed, then growled.
“What is it?” asked Bob, instantly alert.
Boudica cocked her head to one side. “I don’t know,” she answered. “I thought I felt something, a shadow.”
Bob got out of the car and scanned the area looking up at the sky.
Kirsty saw something glint in his hand and wondered what it was. It had looked suspiciously like a knife.
He leant in.
“I don’t see anything,” he said to Boudica.
Boudica shook herself. “I was probably imagining things.”
“Let’s hope so,’ said Bob as he slammed shut the door and went up to the reception door. Light spilled out from inside when he opened it and went in.
He was back ten minutes later with a smile on his face.
Sitting back in the driving seat he told them, “I’ve managed to get us a one-bedroom apartment. number sixteen. Booked it for two nights but we have the option to stay longer if we need to. It’s on the upper floor too, which is good.”
Why it was good Kirsty was too weary to ask. She supposed, when she thought about it later, that an upper floor was probably safer, because anyone looking for them, and finding them, would have stairs to climb to reach them. There was an escape route too, out the back and over the rear wall on to the wooded mountain slope at the rear.
He turned the ignition, put the car into reverse and let out the clutch.
They didn’t meet anyone as they made their way along the single-track road round the bottom of the loch and into the club complex.
“The apartments are just there on the right,” instructed Kirsty as the car chugged up the incline to the white buildings, passing some lakeside apartments on the left. “You park underneath. The parking bays are numbered.”
Bob found their spot without any trouble and negotiated the car into the tiny space.
“Good thing I’m not driving a big, fancy car,” he said in an attempt to lighten the mood.
His attempt at humour fell on deaf ears.
“Right,” he added as he killed the engine. “Let’s go up.”
Boudica didn’t like the stairs. They were steep and her legs weren’t very long. She was panting when they reached the top.
The apartment was just as Kirsty remembered, with a hall, a twin-bedded bedroom on the left, then the bathroom. The door at the end gave entrance into the living area and there was a kitchen area jutting out of the inside end. Sliding doors led to the co
vered-in balcony with a view of the loch.
“Said it slept four,” said Bob, confused.
“That wardrobe there pulls down to make a double bed,” Kirsty informed him from her stance as she gazed out over the dark waters of Loch Rannoch.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll sleep in here and you take the bedroom. You two stay here and I’ll go down to the car and get the stuff. You could put the kettle on.”
Kirsty assented with a listless nod and went into the kitchen area.
Boudica settled down on one of the chairs, (strictly against the rules) placed her head between her paws, and closed her eyes. Her ears, however, remained alert.
* * * * *
CHAPTER 6
‘Full many a glorious morning have I seen,
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.’
(Sonnet XXXIII)
(William Shakespeare (1564-1616))
KINLOCH RANNOCH
Bob reached into his case and brought out a small hemp bag. “Your father left another gift for you. I was to give it to you when the time came.”
He handed it to Kirsty. “I think the time is now. Use them well. I believe they could be very important.”
“Do you know what’s in it?”
“Arovan never told me and I never asked. He did tell me to keep it safe and to destroy it if I couldn’t hand it over and it was going to fall into the wrong hands.”
“The Morityaro?”
Kirsty took the bag and opened the tie. From it she extracted a small leather-bound book and a dagger in a sheath.
“A dagger,” she exclaimed, putting the book to one side for the moment and pulling it out. The blade, she noticed when she pulled it from its sheath, was all swirly and its hilt was covered in blue leather. “Why, it’s beautiful!”
“Leave the dagger for now,” Bob instructed, regarding it with admiration. Bob knew a well-made dagger when he saw one. “Open the book. Perhaps he will have left a message telling us where the Rannoch gate is. He said the book was the key.”
Kirsty put down the dagger and picked up the book. She flicked through its thick pages and exclaimed. “Why! It’s a book of poems and quotes! Handwritten too.”
She showed one of the open pages to Bob.
“It is your father’s hand,” he informed her after scrutinising it. “Now, I’ll go get us a bite to eat, I saw a shop in the village. You stay here and read it. There might be clues inside about what we need to do. Boudica will stay on guard.”
Once he had gone Kirsty settled down and began to read. Each entry, she realised, was numbered, in the Roman way. Some of the poems were written in the old language of the Lowland Scots, those who had predominately lived south of the Forth, some in the old language of the English, and others in more modern English. She recognised a few of them but not all, not by a long shot. She had studied early languages at university but these languages had been mostly Classical and Mediaeval Latin, Mediaeval French, and Anglo-Saxon.
The words were written in strange coloured ink, a sort of purple-brown, ink like none she had encountered before. A few were written in a dull, green ink but the purple-brown was predominant.
The first page held the first few lines of a poem in Latin, written in the purple ink. She rather thought its author was the poet Catullus, who, she remembered, had originated in the Roman province of Gaul in the first century BC. She recognised the poem as one that she had translated as part of the required curriculum for her first year Latin course at St. Andrews.
She read it aloud.
‘(I) Cui dono lepidum novum labellum arida modo pumice expolitum?’
She then correctly translated it as ‘To whom do I present this lovely new little book just now polished with a dry pumice?’
Now why had her father written that?
The next three words brought a smile to her face. Obviously her father had a sense of humour.
It should have read, ‘Corneli, tibi,’ which translated as, ‘Cornelius, to you,’ but instead her father had written, ‘Kirstvan, tibi’.
She presumed that Kirstvan was the elfish form of Kirsty.
After this he had written four words in Modern English.
‘Kirsty, use it well’
He had signed it with a strange looking symbol that Kirsty had never seen before. She thought perhaps it might be his signature in his own language.
So the book was for her. He had written it to her, for her. She hoped there would be something in it that might tell her where exactly this blasted gate was. Marian hadn’t told Bob it’s precise location.
She turned the page.
It was a rhyme and it was written in the green ink. She smiled as she read it.
‘(II) The king sits in Dunfermling toune, Drinking the blude-reid wine: ‘O whar will I get guid sailor, To sail this schip of mine?’’
“Dunfermling?” she said aloud. “Dunfermling must be the old way Dunfermline was written, before place names were standardised, and Bob did say there was a gate there. I wonder if Father is telling me where these gates are.”
Her supposition was, she believed, proved correct on the next page where she read a poem, also written in what she was beginning to call the odd, green ink, about their present location, Loch Rannoch. Like the previous one it was written in Old Scots, or Auld Scots as some called it.
‘(III) Now fair weill Raineach, with thy loch and ile, to me thow wes richt traist baith evin and morne thow wes the place that wald me nocht begyle quhen I haue bene oft at the kingis horne yit may thou ban the houre I wes borne for vncourtuuslie I quite thee thy hyre that left the birnand in ane felloun fyre.’
“These two quotes must relate to the gates,” she said to Boudica, who wagged her tail. “Though it doesn’t tell us exactly where they are. I wonder if it’ll tell me on the next page.”
She was doomed to disappointment. The next and following pages didn’t say anything more about Dunfermline or Rannoch, except that the Dunfermline one was repeated, twice.
“It is your task to find the Rannoch gate,” said Boudica.
“You don’t know where it is?”
“My Lord Oropher and I came through a gate to the south,” she answered, “a long way away.”
“But why wasn’t Lord Arovan more specific?” she asked.
“Perhaps he was worried that the book might fall into the wrong hands,” she said answering her own question. “You told me he knew he was being spied on, hunted by these Morityaro elves. Perhaps he couldn’t be more specific? You might not have been able to destroy it in time. It’s a sort of insurance policy if you like, just in case. He had to make it obscure so that, if the Morityaro got it, they wouldn’t be able to decipher it, at least not without a lot of effort. That knowledge doesn’t, however, help us with our present dilemma.”
Boudica cocked her head to one side.
“I seem to remember that there is something called the Internet,” she suggested.
“Of course,” exclaimed Kirsty. “I’ve got my laptop in my rucksack. I’ll take it out and plug it in.”
She flicked through the pages again but to no avail. There were no more clues. In fact, it looked as if her father hadn’t finished writing the book. The last few pages were blank.
Kirsty sat back in her chair and within a few seconds was lost in thought. She felt as if her brain was bursting asunder with the amount of information it had assimilated that day.
Boudica jumped up on to her lap and settled down whereupon Kirsty began absently to stroke behind her ears. However, Boudica still kept both cocked for sounds of danger although it looked as if she was sleeping and the very picture of a relaxed, contented dog.
* * * * *
“I got Sweet and Sour Chicken for you,” said Bob, flourishing a white plastic bag, “I seem to remember that’s what you ate last time we had Chinese.”
“Boiled rice?” queried Kirsty, “and more importantly, is it hot or do we have to cook it?”
“Hot, the shop had a mic
rowave and they let me use it, couldn’t remember if one was provided in the kitchen here and the oven would take too long,” he replied, “and also an egg fried rice and an ordinary fried rice. I wasn’t sure so I got one of each.”
“Good,” said Kirsty, placing the book on the coffee table.
“Me?” asked Boudica, sitting up and sniffing.
“Lemon chicken.”
“Lemon chicken!” Boudica sounded outraged.
“Keep your tail on,” said Bob with a laugh, “the sauce is separate.”
Bob went into the kitchen and Kirsty listened to the sounds of him rummaging in the cupboards and drawers for plates and cutlery. She supposed she should offer to help but she simply didn’t feel like it. She didn’t feel like doing anything much. She felt numb inside. So much had happened today that she didn’t quite know if she was coming or going.
A steaming plate appeared in front of her accompanied by a fork.
“Tuck in,” ordered Bob.
Kirsty picked up the fork and began to eat. Surprisingly, she felt hungry and it was delicious, as she realised after her first mouthful. Boudica also received her meal, on the floor and minus the fork.
“What have you got?” Kirsty asked Bob between mouthfuls.
“Same as you,” he answered, adding, “I like the pineapple.”
“Don’t they have pineapples where you come from?”
“Nope, wish they did though.”
They ate their meals in companionable silence. When they were finished, Bob got up from his chair to gather up the plates. He didn’t bother washing-up, just plonked them in the sink to deal with in the morning. Bob hated washing dishes.
Once back in his seat he stretched out his legs and looked at Kirsty.