Chapter Text
And am I born to die?
To lay this body down!
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown?
-“Idumea” (Sacred Harp 47b), Roud Number 6678
Hob Gadling is a man of good fortune.
Nay - great fortune. There are plenty of men of good fortune. But he has wine to drink, women to swive, and friends to drink them with. Swive with. Something like that. Doesn’t matter. He’s got a full belly and a full cup, and the whole tavern is pleasantly hazy ‘round the edges.
Jordy takes a bit of the softness away with a skinny elbow between his ribs.
“Oi, what was that for?”
“Our man here said he’s got twenty quid for anyone who can make it up Stac an Armin.”
Hob snorts. “I’ve gone up the stack plenty for gannet and gairfowl.”
The visitor is narrow faced, with bright dark eyes and fine white shirt. Hob thinks he looks half like a seabird himself. “Have you now?” he asks.
“Any Hirta man has.”
Jordy thumps him on the back. “Aye, but you’re the stupidest.”
“Not what your sister said yesterday.”
“She would swear the wind through a cleit were angel’s voices if she thought it’d serve her.”
“Aye, and she’d say it so sweet I’d believe her too.”
“And could you do it without the rope?” asks the visitor.
Jordy, mouth already opened in retort, closes it abruptly. He starts laughing. Hob doesn’t join him. Oh, he’s soused and filled with the warm contentment of the night, but underneath it there’s a sober certainty. He knows already what happens next, before he says it, before Jordy turns and exclaims, Christ, Hob, he’s not serious.
“I could.”
They leave from town in the morning and row to Boreray. The sky is blue as the grass is green, and the sea starts calm. He just needs to get an egg, and he’ll be paid. Easy enough work, on a long summer’s day. Easy enough work, with a rough rope in your hands. He has neither, and he makes it some ten fathoms up the cliff before the weather turns. Saltspray pricks his face raw, driven lashing by the wind. If he weren’t so high already the waves would catch him and tear him off. His hands smart from the cold. His face smarts from grinning.
The blackstone reaches out over the sea here, but he’s looked before, climbing up and down. There’s places to hold. He never needed the rope. He heaves himself up, a shout of pure exuberance bubbling up in the back of his throat.
The rock cracks and comes away in his hand. He swings out wildly from the cliff, and has the barest moment, at the apex of his one-handed flight, to think: what a waste. Then all the weight of his body makes its unreasonable demands to his remaining hand, and he cannot answer. His path continues backwards, and he goes tumbling as free and stupid as a dropped pebble. Sky and sea and cliff wheel around him, and the wind laughs like a bird.
Then, the only thing that he knows awaits all men: nothing. A nothing as black as a starless winter sky.
Nothing, but he’s still falling and falling and falling, and before he can properly panic about what that means, before he realizes he can’t even draw breath into his lungs to really begin panicking, the nothing finally swallows him up too, and he can no longer be afraid. He can no longer be at all.
§
A man, supine and utterly still, in what might have seemed like a deep sleep, draws in a long slow breath and opens his eyes. He smiles up at the sky, for he knows not much at all, but he knows this:
Hob Gadling is a man of good fortune.