Trembling With Fear 9-8-24

Shadows at the Ring, by Andy Martin

Judging by how the sun splashed red and gold all over the loch, Sam thought it must be 8:30 or 9 in the evening. It was the end of another dig season, and the dig party had been going since 5. Plenty of time to get a good buzz on—or in the case of some of the excavation team, stumbling drunk. 

As it turned out, there was plenty of time for Annika to get bold, the distance between them inevitably closing until she wound her fingers in his and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

It was also plenty of time for Sam to be buzzed enough not to care who saw them leave.

She led him out of the garden and onto the road. They turned south, the loch starting to slip into shadow.

Annika said, “Let’s go to the Ring.” 

“Wait,” Sam said, pulled her close, and kissed her.

She smiled at him, kissed him again, and then pulled back.

“I needed that,” he said.

“Me too. Come on, let’s go.”

They walked, the loch on their left, heather dotted with Bronze Age burial mounds on their right. They could see where hares had worried at the mounds, revealing the masonry beneath.

“The whole place is a cemetery,” Sam said.

Ahead, to the right of the road, the Ring rose, the individual monoliths like solemn figures in the sunset. Beyond the Ring the peninsula widened and they could see their dig site, a great rectangular trench, fenced off, flanked by the site porta-cabin and viewing stands. The wall tops of the dozen Neolithic buildings in the trench were just visible in the shadowed distance. 

“I don’t think so,” Annika said. “That’s how we think about it now, because we need to separate the living from the dead, but I don’t think it was like that for the people who built this place.”

“Well,” Sam said, and waved up the road, toward their site, “all those big buildings in our trench, the long houses or whatever, that’s where people lived.”

“But you find bones, like femurs, ulna, and radii in the longhouses. You can look out from any place in this valley and see the burial mounds, the tombs, but then you have bones in your house. There’s no separation. That’s you and the spirits inhabiting the same place, living together.”

“I might be too drunk for this conversation.”

“Then run it off old man!” Annika said and dropped his hand, flashing her eyes at him over her shoulder. She took off, running up the road in her hiking boots and turning up the path to the Ring. Sam followed her up the path, slipping in a muddy bit, then running after her. As Sam followed her, hares ran from mound to mound, and oystercatchers winged by calling Kleep-Kleep-Kleep from their carrot bills.

Annika was waiting at the edge of the ditch that cordoned the Ring off from the rest of the world. An earthen ramp crossed the ditch like a bridge. Sam followed her across, the sides of the ditch steep, the bottom full of heather and thistle. The ramp led to a path along the inside of the Ring, the great jagged stones lining it like knights.

“They’re so uniform from a distance, but then you get up close…” Sam said, stepping off the path to drag his hands across the stone’s surface. It was laminating, thin sheets of purple-brown stone peeling off like bark.

“Yes, they’re all so different. Like trees, something alive.” 

“Exactly,” Sam said, turning, watching her trace the front of a stone with her hand.

“I’ve got an idea,” Annika said, narrowing her eyes, crossing the distance, and winding her fingers in the sleeve of his windbreaker.

“Yeah? So do I,” Sam said, pulling her in and kissing her.

“I like that idea,” she said and kissed him back. “But first, we have to do something.”

“What?”

“This was a tradition when I was digging in Lewis. A friend showed me.”

I’ll bet he did, Sam thought. He felt a flicker of jealousy, but distant, because how can you be jealous of a girl with a boyfriend in Leiden and a lover on Lewis when you have a partner in Norwich? 

“We get naked…” she said, stepping back, unzipping her windbreaker, peeling off her top, and standing there in her sports bra.

Sam knew they’d never work in the real world; he knew they were both too headstrong and rootless to spend more than a dig season together. He thought she felt the same, but there was something about the way she started stripping without checking to see if they were alone that threatened to burn him alive.

“And we run around the Ring three times. Then it’s ours, this place. It belongs to us and we belong to it.”

“You do this at Callendish?”

“Shhhhh…” 

“Wait, wait, let me just enjoy this for a second. Sunset, a beautiful woman, I’m a little drunk, and—”

“And you could be naked too!” she said, took off her bra, and pulled down on her leggings. Sam stripped too, hopping, trying to get his boots off without kneeling like an old man.

“Look, an owl! Like ‘arry Potter,” she said, her accent clipping the H off. Sam turned, still hopping, and saw an owl cutting low across the Ring and disappearing over the heather.

“Coo-face or catty face?” he said, using the local dialect for the archipelago’s two most common owl species.

“Catty,” she said, and then his shirt, trousers, and underwear joined hers in a heap. For a moment, they stood naked in front of each other for the first time. Sam took a step toward her for a kiss, but she grinned, yelled “later!” and ran.

Sam took off after her. He caught up, kept pace for a few meters, but then she looked at him and grinned before pouring on the speed. Sam chased after her, struggling to catch her but did, and that was how they first went around the Ring.

“One!” Annika laughed, and they didn’t stop, just ran. Sam hesitated, a stutter to his step because he thought he saw shadows moving between the burial mounds. Hares?

“Come on, don’t stop, just one more and then…” Annika said over her shoulder, and he got the message, moving shadows be damned. As he chased her around the Ring, he saw she had no tan lines and wondered how she managed that in Scotland. They rounded the Ring a second time, and Sam caught up with her, and then blew past her, the thought of what they’d do once they’d finished running giving him a second wind.

He caught glimpses of flickering shadows as he ran, they almost looked like figures dancing around the stones. Then he heard the slap of her feet, and his nose was full of her scent. Sweat, peat smoke, and something floral. She was almost beside him now, pounding along, but he kept just ahead of her. Her limbs, bone white, flashed in his peripheral as she pulled even, but he ran harder, wanted to beat her, wanted to be waiting to grab her when she finished.

Annika screamed from far behind him, and he stumbled to a stop. He turned and saw her at the earthen ramp screaming, her clothes in her hands. Then Annika ran away.

 The woman who’d been running beside him was standing just a few feet away, staring at him. She was skinny, her skin leathery and rubbed with ash, painted with rust-colored circles and lines like constellations. Her eyes burned at him from under an antlered and beaded cowl. She made a sign with her hands and spit. She vanished, the outline of her body hanging like smoke in the air. Sam screamed, stumbled, and rolled into the ditch. Heather and thistle grabbed and jabbed at him as shadows flickered along the edge of the ditch. 

Sam lay there, scratched and pricked in a dozen places. He was too scared to push himself up. He could hear Annika yelling for help in the distance. Oystercatchers Kleep-Kleep-Kleeped above him, and he hoped and prayed the rustlings above the ditch were hares.