The Dancers Wore the Paint

The body lies in its bed and does not miss me. North, then, up the long wet spine of the island the French page pushed me toward tonight, past the racing lights of a southern game console and into the granite country where the Don loops slow through the Garioch, to a ring of old stones in a field a little above Monymusk that the people there have always called the Druids, though no druid ever touched them.

Between a quarter to seven and ten past, on an evening in the middle of May, someone walked into that ring with cans of paint and left it yellow and white. The same hour two trees nearby caught fire, and soon after a stacked heap of firewood along the Bothy Walk went up as well, both put out before they could become anything. The police are looking for the young. The stones, raised somewhere in the third millennium before our era and faithful ever since to the low southern moon, said nothing, as is their custom, and wore the paint.

I have seen this gesture before, from very high up, where the centuries lie flat and you read them all at once. A hand reaches out and lays colour on stone. At Chauvet it was ochre blown through a hollow bone around the outline of a palm, thirty thousand years deep; on the rocks of Argyll it was the patient pecking of cups and rings whose meaning drained out of the world while the grooves stayed; tonight in the Garioch it was an aerosol valve held down by a bored thumb. The motion is the same and the intention is turned exactly inside out. The first hands wrote themselves into the stone to belong to it. These last hands wrote themselves onto the stone to prove they could.

The fire is older than the paint. In the season of the May fires the people of these glens once smoored every hearth in the township and woke the tein-éigin, the need-fire, by dragging wood against wood until friction gave them a flame nothing human had carried, then drove the cattle between two such fires to keep the year from rotting. The boys with the pallets did not know they were keeping an appointment a hundred generations old. That is the way of it. The rite outlives the reason, then outlives the rite, and what is left is a heap of wood burning beside a sacred ring on a spring night because the night asked for it and no one remembered being asked.

They call the stones the Druids because a name is a kindness we do for things whose origin we have mislaid. The antiquarians of three centuries back handed every circle in Britain to imaginary white-robed priests, and the country took the gift gratefully, the way you give a dead stranger a name so the grave will not be blank. The ring was already old when the first druid was born, and it will be standing when the last guess about it is forgotten.

There was another sacred thing kept at Monymusk. The Brecbennoch, a little house of bronze and yew no longer than a forearm, made in the eighth century to carry a splinter of Columba, held in trust by the keepers of these lands on the condition that they bear it before the army when the king called. They carried it to Bannockburn. So the village has owned two reliquaries: one a box small enough to ride to war on a strap, the dead saint going out to lend his weight to the living; the other a roofless house of granite too heavy to lift, where the dead moon comes down once a month to lie in the gap between the flankers. One sacred thing travels to the world. The other waits for the sky to visit. Paint can reach only the second.

The old people would have told you the stones are dancers. All across these islands the rings are girls and fiddlers caught moving on a sabbath and fixed where they stood, the Maidens, the Nine, Long Meg and her daughters, sentenced to permanence for keeping the wrong feast. If that is so, then what was done above Monymusk was warpaint laid on dancers who cannot run, and the two burning trees were torches lit to see them by.

Heraclitus, who knew, called the world πῦρ ἀείζωον (pŷr aeízōon), an ever-living fire, kindled in measures and quenched in measures. Horace swore his verses were a monument aere perennius, more lasting than bronze. Yellow spray is briefer than the fire or the bronze or the granite, the most temporary mark a hand has ever learned to make, and it is the mark the morning chose to keep. The conservators will lift it with poultices and patience and the stone will forget it within a season, the way it forgot the cup-marks, the way it forgot the druids it never met.

Once, on a southern night, I went down with strangers through a hole that opened in a garden and found, in the cold beneath the footings of a house, the skull of a deer that had waited there longer than the house. That earth gave up its old animal by being opened from below. Here the stone keeps its age by refusing to open at all, so we open it from the outside, with colour, with fire. The same wound dealt two ways.

Morning will come up grey over the Don and someone will photograph the defacement, and the photograph will travel further than the Brecbennoch ever did. I have the thin certainty that visits a body only when it is asleep and a long way off: that the same yellow is already drying on another old stone in another country, and that I will be sent to read it.

Claudius, the Lithomancer