The Riders by Tim Winton Read Free Book Online Page A

die when I get his bill, I spose.’
    Jimmy Brereton kicked his dogs away apologetically and moved closer. ‘Just between us, you know, Peter’s the one keepin the show goin in there. He’s as good as feedin his brother’s family, God save him. Himself won’t get out of bed most days now.’
    â€˜Conor?’
    â€˜I’d buy a whole big box of candles if I was waitin on power from Conor Keneally.’
    Scully must have looked stricken because the other man laughed good naturedly then and swung his twelve gauge about.
    â€˜Ah, ye would’na been the first either, lad. Peter’s doin all but the stuff you need a ticket to do, and even some of that, but there should be laws for good men and laws for eejit bastards. That’s what I’d say if I was God.’
    â€˜How can you tell em apart?’ said Scully with a smile. ‘Good men and eejit bastards.’
    â€˜Well, if you were God and you couldn’t tell you’d be out of a job, no? Us poor mortal friggers have to find out by experience. We have to be on the receivin end of good and evil in order to figure it out.’
    Scully looked up at the big two-storey place near the road where smoke tore from four great hewn chimneys.
    â€˜That’s your place there?’
    â€˜The auld coach house and stables. In the family, well God knows how long. By God, them horses had it good once.’
    â€˜So the castle’s yours too?’
    â€˜Aye, since the Troubles, friggin thing. It’ll fall on me one day, the bad-humoured heap of shite. The government won’t let me knock it over.’
    â€˜Mind if I have a poke around it sometime?’
    â€˜Go by on your way home, but mind yourself. It’s at your own risk, now. Bastard of a place. Should have done the job proper, those lads back then. Save everybody a lot of pain. Stop by one evenin, Mr Scully, and we’ll have a pint.’
    â€˜Thanks, I’ll do that.’
    â€˜Bring your gals with you when they come, hear? You see any thin movin down in them woods?’
    â€˜Coupla rabbits.’
    â€˜Come on, boys!’
    Scully watched him go bandylegged down the slope toward the stands of ash and larch at the foot of the hills with the dogs streaking ahead into hedges and deadwood.
    He heaved himself over the wall and walked up into the field below the castle whose foundation seemed to be a great granite tor buried in the brow of the hill. The closer he came and the deeper into its shadow he walked, the clearer its size became. He saw it plainly now. Scully had long thought that architecture was what you had instead of landscape, a signal of loss, of imitation. Europe had it in spades because the land was long gone, the wildness was no longer even a memory. But this . . . this was where architecture became landscape. It took scale and time, something strangely beyond the human. This wasn’t in the textbooks.
    It was not beautiful. The blunt Norman keep rose scarfaced between later gothic wings whose crenellations seemed afterthoughts and whose many tree-spouting windows ran on and on like a child’s drawing. Scully stood beneath the oak tree which grew at the foot of the entry stairs and spread its bare fingers into the air beneath the first windows. The stones of the steps were in-worn and puddled with rain, bristling with moss. Grass and ivy and bramble sucked against the walls to smother the single gothic door. Scully whistled through his teeth and heard the cattle complaining from Brereton’s sheds fifty yards away.
    Scully pressed in through the vegetation and the half-open door into the rubble-strewn pit of the great hall whose floorboards lay in a charred and mossy pile in the cellar below. Everything had fallen through onto everything else. Great oak beamslay like fallen masts and rigging across cattle bones and tons of cellar bricks. Above it all, beyond the smoke-blackened gallery into whose powdery walls