The Kingdoms

as if that had always been obvious. ‘But … everyone’s gone up to Stornaway for the winter. I’m just shutting away the last few things.’
‘Do you know how I can get back to the mainland?’ Joe asked. It was a strange struggle. He felt foggy, like a cloud had come to sit inside his skull, and it was hard to make out the shapes of his thoughts. He rubbed his temple. This was how he’d felt at the Gare du Roi. He wanted to punch himself in the head.
‘The mainland! You can’t. You’d have to walk. Even if all the ice is solid, which it won’t be – you’d freeze before you got halfway.’ The landlord paused, impatient now. ‘Look, you can’t stay here, just go out to the lighthouse and rough it. Have some rum.’
‘Thanks.’ Joe sat with it and waited for the foggy feeling to go away. He gave his memory a poke, to make sure it was still there. Yes. He’d come from Londres, Lily was with Alice, and he had run out of the lighthouse, scared. He took off the heavy coat and put it on the bar stool beside him. It was warm in here, too warm after the frozen sea.
After a while, he couldn’t remember why he’d been so spooked. Thinking about it, he couldn’t really bring to mind the lighthouse at all. Empty rooms, maybe; and he’d done something with the door handles. There’d been a strip of red light, somewhere. What had he said to the barman just now? Ghosts? Christ, what bullshit. He must have been having epilepsy hallucinations again. Trust him to walk for miles over ice before he realised that what he was scared of was imaginary.
He scuffed the back of his hair, so frustrated he could have yanked it out. Of all the times to have a recurring bout of amnesia, after two years of remembering well, this was absurd. He wondered if there was just some belligerently unadventurous part of his brain that switched off if he tried to go further than twenty miles from home.
No, said the quiet voice in the cellar of his mind. It wasn’t that.
He had no idea why it would say so.
The landlord must have felt sorry for him, because he put a wrapped packet down in front of Joe at the bar. ‘Lunch,’ he said. ‘For your way back.’
Joe smiled and thought, not for the first time, how basically decent humans were. ‘Thanks,’ he said.
The memory of the lighthouse came back, more or less, once he was inside. Yes; he did remember the spiralling stairway up to the lamps. And the door handles – he’d changed them because they were wooden, because metal ones would burn you in this cold. The lamp room was familiar, now he was here. He pushed up the main switch handle, and the great lamp crackled as it came on. Soon the carbon rods were brilliant, and the light sang out.
Which was odd, because he felt sure he had left the lamp on when he left before. It would have been stupid to try and cross the ice in the dark.
Someone had been here. He looked around the room again, properly, and then he saw the gold coin on the floor by some playing cards. He picked it up slowly. Someone had been here and poked about in the little time he’d been away. Someone had come in with a friend, had a nice card game, shut off the lamp, and vanished.
But when he looked round, there was nobody here. He had a strong sense that he’d lost something important, but he couldn’t think what it was.

13
Something banged a long way away. Joe thought at first that it was a lightship firing a gun for a fog signal, but it came again too soon for that.
With his ear to the window he heard it more clearly. It was drums. Winding on his scarf, he leaned out onto the lamp gantry. The drumbeat wasn’t fast – it was a march, and it was coming from somewhere so close he should have been able to see something, but there was nothing. The islands were empty.
He listened and felt more and more uneasy. It wasn’t like anything he had heard before, none of those cheery army tattoos with their hollow piccolos. It was deep, and heavy, and he could feel it in the iron railing.
He saw the bowsprit first beyond the next island, and then the figurehead. It wasn’t a woman or a sea nymph but a man, with a plumed helmet and shield. Part of its side had been blown to pieces, a while ago, because even the torn parts of the wood had weathered. When the rest of the ship glided into view, it was the size of a church, but the only sound it made was the drums, and the wing noise of the sails catching the wind. It cut the forming ice slower and slower, turning so that it stopped side on to Eilean Mòr’s tiny wharf. The rail was so high above the waterline that the men had to climb down on netting and let themselves fall the last few feet. Ice crusted the rigging. In the glare of the lighthouse lamp, the ropes cast spider-web shadows right across the deck.
It took a long second to notice that someone had seen him. On the quarterdeck was a woman. She was looking right at him. She had dark hair, very long, and loose because it must have been as good as another scarf in the frozen air. He stepped back from the rail and inside, then ran down the stairs. The first of the men from the ship met him at the door.
‘What’s going on?’
Two of them caught his arms. He didn’t ask what they thought they were doing. They plainly knew what they were doing. When he tried to wrench away, one of them punched him in the ribs.
Someone else