Free A History Maker by Alasdair Gray Page B

pawkie, couthie and earthy was once thought characteristic of the Scottish peasantry but Wat isnae a peasant and we’re naething but wrecks. What says Wardlaw?”
    Tam Wardlaw said violently, “We’ll do it and be done with it.”
    Wat nodded, told them to be ready in five minutes then went to a table where Jenny had laid a tumbler of milk and plate of sandwiches, his first meal that day.

    The starry film of frost vaporized and drifted up leaving the wall transparent. A section of it opened onto a roof garden over the porch. Wat sent the veterans and boys’ captains out with drinks in their hands to sit where they liked, then he and the cripples followed, wending through the tables to the rail that served as parapet. He put a chair between Wardlaw and Deuchar and sat with arms folded on the rail, waiting.
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    This informal arrival drew little attention. The cloud had broken letting afternoon sunlight through. The crowd, much bigger than when he arrived, was now in a holiday mood. Picnic parties sat chatting on the turf; groups surrounded fiddlers, wrestlers, singers, debaters. The kind of alcohol and snuff no housemother would synthesize was being traded by gangrels in return for wristcoms and items of clothing. Some people in bright outlandish garb were advertising the cloud circus. He noticed a woman on twenty-foot-tall stilts covered by red and white striped trousers. She wore a star-spangled top hat and tail coat, and stepped about over the heads of the crowd waving in a comically threatening way a parasol shaped like a nuclear bomb cloud. Children on the verge of the crowd raced ponies through bracken and heather. The only solemntouches were groups of horsemen who had been waiting since morning, some mounted, some standing at their animals’ heads. One thing that worried him was a public eye a yard from his face. No open-air meeting as big as this had met in peacetime for a century so public eyes would intercut his speech with film of leaders haranguing huge crowds in the late historical era. Since he and his comrades were not standing in formal groups he would look, as well as sound, very different. He glanced at the tiny microphone on his chest and decided to speak seated, with folded arms.
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    Suddenly he noticed part of the crowd he had overlooked. On the ground before the porch the Boys’ Brigade stood in six straight ranks. Feet apart, arms clasped behind them, faces tilted up toward Wat, the exact stance of each one made him a childish replica of the rest. Captainless, ordered outside by a servant to hear the new colonel’s speech, they had chosen this way to show the discipline that divided them from civilians. Wat stood up, smiling, and bent toward them. He muffled the microphone with one hand, saluted with the other and called down, “Break ranks, men, this — ”
    He had been going to say is not a military occasion but a huge hollow woofing drownedhis words: the microphone was more sensitive than he had known. He stood erect and saw everyone was now attending; the only sound was the fading drone of a bagpipe and the rustle of folk turning or standing to see him more clearly. He said quietly, “This is Wat Dryhope about to speak to friends. Will the public eye please shift from between us?”
    The eye moved slightly aside. His voice had carried to the back of the crowd without manic-sounding reverberations but he sensed an immediate excitement, a hunger for the emotional unity that had greeted his descent from the hillside. This excitement gave him a feeling of righteous power because, unlike dark-age politicians, he was going to dissolve that mindless unity by the calm delivery of sensible information. He said, “I havenae much to say but most of you have been waiting here for hours so I’ll sit here and say it. If you’ve any sense you’ll follow my example — that’s a suggestion. The junior cadets will