7.3 The Shetland Witch, or, Atropos Wants Her Shears Back
In which weather gets real
When Hazel was walking back along the track the wind was still battering at her, but it was not strong enough to do more than flip her hood and jostle her occasionally. She was busy thinking about the bird, and the egg’s chances of survival. She felt oddly grounded on the rock and soil under her boots, a comforting feeling.
But the wind began to gust more strongly about her feet, and again Hazel felt the sensation of shoving, an angry wind forcing itself against her body. Hazel concentrated on treading heavily and deliberately, step by step, keeping a long way from the edge of the cliff.
She had been watching her feet and focusing on the ground for so long that she found she had overshot the turn in the path and was heading inland to a boggy patch. Sheep watched her impassively through a wire fence. When she turned to walk in the right direction the wind also veered and slapped her in the face. She stopped with the shock of the blow and looked about her. The clouds were boiling in the sky, creating a huge iron-grey thunderhead in the east, blocking the sun. The air felt dense, as if it was carrying too much moisture. The sense of waiting was a heaviness in every breath she took.
Hazel ran. If a storm was about to make landfall she wanted to be under cover, not blown out to sea.
When she reached the witches’ chairs Ishabel was regarding the sky. ‘Is this him?’ she asked.
Maggie was looking at Atropos, and touched Ishabel’s arm. Atropos was looking out to sea, standing as stiffly as a mast. She had pulled off her woolly hat, as if it were too hot, and the strands of her hair that were not coiled in the shining black plaits around her head rose in the air, waving like snakes. Her hair was crackling. Hazel could hear the sound in the air, like the spitting of water on oil.
Then she turned and her eyes were black, with a point of red in their centres like two coals beginning to smoulder.
Hazel opened her mouth to scream. Atropos flung her head back and gave a sudden yell of anger.
And then, there was pandemonium.
Atropos disappeared. A streak of brown and white feathers was flying into the vast grey cloud hanging over the excavation site.
Maggie had dropped her binoculars. In a dizzying instant a black-backed gull was following the falcon, flapping its long wings strongly.
Ishabel stiffened, and said quietly to Hazel, ‘He’s here.’
Hazel could feel a vast pressure moving in from the sea behind her, a sense that a monstrous hand was pressing down on the atmosphere, making it thick and gluey. She tried to turn, to look towards the Hill, but she couldn’t move. Ishabel was crumpled in her chair, looking irritated.
<Focus on your breathing. Don’t do anything else.> Ishabel instructed her, and Hazel stared at her, unable to move, held in place by the increased air pressure that surrounded her.
And then there was release, like a fist plunging into risen dough. The pressure all around her altered, quite suddenly, and Hazel staggered. Then Ishabel was no longer there, and Hazel started to run up the track back to the site, watching the white fulmar far ahead of her. It was flying high and fast into the cloud.
When Hazel reached the top of the rise and could see the perimeter tape, and the tools and boxes and the tarpaulins in their accustomed places, nobody was there, and nothing looked right. The light was all wrong, and when Hazel turned to look back at the sea, she saw why. A sky full of ice was emptying towards her.
Every weather instinct she had screamed, and she dived for the nearest edge of blue tarpaulin on the ground. When the hailstones crashed to the ground out of the heavy grey sky Hazel was almost under cover, tugging the tarp over herself and wriggling to get as much of her body underneath the tough blue plastic as she could. The violent noise in her ears was the crash of ice thudding against rock. Her hand stung sharply, and she twitched it further under the tarp, but there was barely room for all of her body: the boxes must be weighing the rest of it down. She concentrated on keeping her skin and face protected, but involuntary grunts of pain escaped her as balls of ice drove into her legs and her back at high velocity. The noise was too loud for her to hear herself counting the seconds aloud. She was terrified and clamped down on a scream.
And then the rain of ice stopped.
Hazel waited, and then pushed nervously at the tarp. When she crawled out she dislodged a crust of white ice that had mounded up over her body. She looked around in a panic. Where were the others? Frail Ishabel, caught in that terrible storm, and Atropos too, not used to Arctic temperatures … She looked up.
Two large birds were being blown about in the sky, a gull and a hawk. The cloud was turning from grey to blue, and the storm edge above her head was rolling back. The sea was surging in response. Hazel could see a tiny red tanker, far away on the horizon, shining in sunlight.
The plastic perimeter tape on the cliff edge was suddenly ripped from its fastenings, and it sheared across the sky like a whip. The birds dodged it, and then the falcon vanished. A gull landed close to Hazel, heavily but sturdily, and Maggie yelled silently at her.
<Get back! Get away from the stone!>
The mound was beating heat out at them like an oven in an ice-box, and Hazel stumbled away from it, chilled by the impossible cold that beat out from the hailstones littering the yellow grass.
Thunder cracked overhead, a shocking thunderous boom that rolled about the sky, echoing off the cliffs in the neighbouring bays.
Episode 7.4 will follow.
The Shetland Witch © Kate Macdonald 2024.
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