THE ISLAND

She’s dreaming of the pines outside her window in the palace, the way the night wind turns them into a black sea that tumbles and breaks against the stone wall below the sill. She’s dreaming of the summer sound of trees being felled farther up the mountain, the hollow tock, tock, tock of the axe, the slow cracking of the trunk and that final thump, all that splintered yellow, still damp with life, the smell of fresh resin in the air and columns of midges rising and falling in the angled sunlight.

She’s dreaming of the wood being split and planed and toothed home into a curved keel that will cut an ocean in half. She’s dreaming of this morning, standing on the prow with her husband-to-be, the oars churning the waves to foam and the fat sails slapping in the wind, over the horizon his city where they’ll marry, behind them the home she’ll never see again.

She’s dreaming of the wedding, flames dancing in the sconces of a great hall. Flames multiplied in a hundred golden cups, painted plates heavy with roast meats and chickpeas, quinces and saffron and honey cakes.

She’s dreaming of the bridal suite, a snowfall of Egyptian cotton on the bed. Hanging above the pillows is a tapestry, the work so fine she could be looking through a window. In the centre of the picture is a woman weeping on a beach, and far out, in the chop and glitter of the woven sea, a single ship sailing steadily towards the border and the world beyond.

She moves a little closer so that she can see the woman’s face, and then it hits her like a punch. She’s looking at herself.

She comes round like a drowning woman breaking the water’s surface, thrashing and gasping for air. The light hurts her eyes, her throat is dry and the world is foggy from drink, or drugs, or fever.

She rolls over and finds herself in an empty bed. He must be awake and making preparations for today’s journey. She stands with difficulty and realises that she can hear nothing except the cry of gulls and guy ropes humming in the wind. She staggers to the door, uncouples the four leather ties which bind the canvas flaps and steps outside to find herself in a ghost camp, five squares of flattened, yellow grass, fishbones, a single sandal, the torched circle of last night’s fire and far out, in the chop and glitter of the sea, a single ship.

She tries to scream but there is a weight on her chest which stops her filling her lungs. Her mind bucks and twists, searching for ways to make this right. He’s coming back. The crew have mutinied and kidnapped him or left him somewhere nearby, tied up, beaten, dead. Then she looks down and sees, beside her feet, a jug of water and a loaf of bread, and on the loaf is the ring she gave him as a sign of their eternal love. He has abandoned her.

The sky revolves, she vomits on the wet grass and the world goes dark.

When time begins again she’s skidding down the scree on bloody hands and knees towards the beach, then stumbling over the slip and clack of pebbles to the surf. She yells into the wind and her cry echoes round the rocky cove. Her heart thrashes like a netted bird.

The boat shrinks. She has become the woman in the tapestry.

He is the only man she’s ever loved, and he has dumped her like ballast. She needs to find an explanation that does not make her a fool and him an animal, but every thought of him is a knife turning in the wound love made. She wants to hurl a stack of figured bowls across a room. She wants to weep till someone comes to comfort her. She wants to find a man who’ll track him down and break his neck or make him realise he’s wrong and bring him back.

She turns to take it in, this godforsaken place, bracken and sea pink, rye grass jerking in the wind, slabs of basalt rusty with lichen. Lying in a shallow pool, she sees the bloody head of a seal pup hacked off by the men last night then hurled off the cliff before they cooked the body. Its blind eyes have turned white.

She crouches on the hard, wet stones and hugs herself. No one has any idea that she is here except the crew of the departing ship, and no one else would give a damn. She does not know the name of this island. She knows only that this is the place in which she will die. She is off the heart’s map and her compass is spinning.

Minutes pass. Water breaks and fizzes on the pebbles. The wind sings and the cold begins to bite. She stands and starts the long climb to the bed they will never share again.

She is a princess. In twenty years she has never been alone, never cooked a meal, never cleaned a floor. She has bathed in clean, warm water every morning. Twice a day newly laundered clothes have been laid on her bed. She realises that this will be hard. She does not know the meaning of the word.

She enters the tent and sees his body’s imprint on the sheets and has to turn away. She eats the bread and drinks the water, then lies down and waits, as if an easy death is one more luxury some nameless servant will provide.

She cannot believe that anyone is able to bear this kind of pain. She thinks of shepherds sleepless in the blue snow, their furs pulled tight around their shoulders, waiting for the wolves, armed only with a slingshot. She thinks of the soldiers who come back from every summer’s campaign with legs and arms missing, the stumps like melted wax. She thinks of women giving birth in stone sheds with leaking roofs and mud floors. She thinks about what it must take to lead such lives, and she starts to understand that wealth has deprived her of the one skill that she needs now.

The light begins to die and the dark thickens slowly to a colour she has never seen before. Then the shearwaters come, two hundred thousand birds returning from a day at sea to run the gauntlet of the black-backed gulls, and suddenly the tent is inside a hurricane of screams, the noise that makes young sailors think they have drifted near the mouth of hell. She dares not go outside for fear of what she might find. She covers her ears and curls into a ball in the centre of the single rug and waits for claws and teeth to tear the flimsy canvas walls and shred her body like a deer’s. She waits, and waits, and when the silence finally comes it is worse, for she has been stripped of everything that used to shield her from a hard world where every action has a consequence. She has no one else to blame. This is her punishment. She helped him kill her brother. Now it is her turn. When her bones are picked clean the scales will be level once again.

She should have listened to her maids and walked around the palace grounds, but she had walked around the palace grounds a thousand times. She knew in tedious detail every carved fountain, every lavender bush with its halo of bees, every shaded bower. She wanted the bustle of the quays, those overflowing baskets of squid and mackerel, the stacked crates and coiled ropes, the shouting and the knock of tarred hulls, that childhood fantasy of walking up a gangplank, casting off and slipping through the cupped hands of the breakwater into the white light of a world outside her family’s orbit.

They came at every summer’s end, a war-price Athens paid to keep the peace, just one more ceremony in a calendar of ceremonies, the Leaping of the Bulls, the Festival of Poppies. Twelve young men and women taken from their ship and housed in the barn above the orchard while this year’s pit was dug beside the last, then led out and lined up to have their throats slit and die on top of one another. They were human cattle, and they knew this, shuffling with heads down, already half dead. She gave them no more thought than she gave the enemies her father and her cousins killed in battle.

But her eyes locked briefly with the eyes of the one man who held his head high and she realised that there were many worlds beyond this world and that her own was very small indeed.

Later that night she woke repeatedly, thinking he was standing in the room or lying beside her. She was terrified at first, then disappointed. She felt alive in a way that she had never felt alive before. The cold flags on the floor, the cicadas, the pocked coin of the moon, her own skin…She had never seen these things clearly until now.

Shortly after dawn she slipped past the maids in the outer room and walked round the orchard to the stables. She told the guards she wanted to talk to the prisoners and they could think of no adequate reply to this unexpected request. The last of the night was pooling in the big stone rooms, the window slits no wider than a hand. There was sand on the floor and the sound of breathing. She felt the stir her presence caused, warm bodies shifting nervously in the dark. It was a small thing to be brave about but she had never needed to be brave before and mastering her fear was thrilling.

His face materialised behind the bars of the little window. “You came.”

She had spent her whole life waiting for this moment and never realised it. She thought stories only happened to men. Now her own was beginning.

“My father is the king,” he said. “In time I will become king. If you save us I will make you my queen.”

She gave him her ring and he told her what to do. She slid her hands between the bars, let him grip her wrists and cried out for help. When the guard came running and reached through to free her the prince grabbed him. He wrapped one hand around the man’s mouth and the other around his neck. He put a foot on the bars and heaved as if he were pulling a rope. The man kicked and thrashed for a long time before he sagged and slid to the floor. She took the keys from his belt and unlocked the door. She had never seen a man being killed. It looked no different from the games her cousins played when they were young.

He took the man’s sword and met the second guard running in. He swung it into his belly and lifted him on the point to force it deeper, then let him drop. He put his boot on the man’s chest and pulled the blade out with a sucking gurgle. By this time his friends were pouring out of the stables, the men arming themselves with makeshift weapons from the walls—staves, pitchforks, iron bars.

He told them to take her to the harbour and treat her well. For a moment she thought he was going to murder her parents. He laid a hand on her cheek and told her that they would be safe.

He chose two men to accompany him and they ran towards the palace.

They said her mother had been raped by a bull and had given birth to a monster who lay chained and snarling in a nest of straw and dung at the centre of a maze beneath the palace, waiting for the young men and women from Athens to be offered to him as fresh meat. Let the peasants keep their stories, her father said. They had precious little else. And it was safer to be feared than to be pitied.

There was some truth in the story for her brother sometimes seemed like a monster, his bloated head, his rages, the way he lashed out at the men who went into the cellar to sluice him with buckets of water every week, to carry off the foul straw and fill his trough with the same food they gave to the pigs—kitchen scraps, greasy bones, wine gone sour.

They thought he could not speak. They never asked him a question so he never gave them a reply. But she knew. She went down to the cellar most days and sat with him in the light of that single, guttering torch and held his hand. He would lay his head on her lap and tell her about the things the men did to him for their amusement. She gave him fruit and bread which she had hidden under her skirt and while he ate she told him about the world outside, about the ocean that was like the water in the bucket but deeper and broader than he could possibly imagine, about boats that were like floating houses, about music that was sound shaped to make you happy, about the pines outside her window and the woodcutters in the summer.

He wept sometimes but he never asked for help. When he was younger and she was more naïve she suggested that he try to escape, but he did not understand what she was saying for he had never seen anything beyond these damp walls, and thought her stories of oceans and boats and music were simply games to make the darkness bearable. He was right, of course. He could not live outside. The sun would blind him. He would be mocked and taunted and stoned.

Her mother, her father, her cousins, they put him out of their minds, but she could not. She felt his presence constantly, like the distant rumble of thunder, and when she felt the weight of his deformed head in her lap and ran her hand through his patchy hair, the kindness flowed both ways, for he was easing her discomfort as much as she was easing his.

They reached the harbour to find that the Athenians had already hoisted six small barrels of pitch out of the hold, set them on fire with flints and torn cloth and slung them onto the decks of the other ships so that the sailors on watch were too preoccupied with trying to extinguish the flames to concern themselves with anything but saving their own vessels.

She was petrified. She could see what it meant to be in the middle of a story, and why the men protected them from this. It was a mistake. She understood that now. A moment’s weakness had caused this horror, the way a single spark from those struck flints bloomed into the fires that surrounded her. Metal struck metal, planks split, the air was so full of smoke she was finding it hard to breathe.

Then she saw him running along the quay with his two companions, carrying a sack, pursued by palace guards, and he was a hand reaching down to pull her from the hole into which she had fallen and if only he made it to the boat in time she would be safe and happy. They pushed off and the men jumped the widening gap between the hull and the harbour wall. A guard leapt behind them and was struck in the face with a sword and dropped into the water, his blood spraying the man who killed him. A second leapt and clung briefly to the rail of the boat before his fingers were broken under heels and he fell onto his companion. Then they were too far away for anything but angry yells which were soon drowned in the roar of the fires.

He turned to her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pulled her close and she could no longer hear or see the flames, she could only feel the warmth of his body and smell the sour tang of his sweat. Then she looked down at the deck and saw the mouth of the sack fall open to reveal her brother’s head.

She is woken by the biting cold and the sound of two hundred thousand birds taking flight. Waking to anything solid is a relief after the murky, cycling panic of her dreams. She walks to the door and sees the creatures that petrified her the night before emerging from their burrows and climbing into the air like ashes above a fire, black backs turning into white bellies, the whole flock becoming a cloud of grey flakes drifting out over the ocean.

When they have gone the air is washed and white and she is able to hold the events of the previous day at a distance for a few minutes, as if they happened to someone else, or happened to herself many years ago. Then it all comes back, raw and real, and there is a spasm in her guts. She crouches behind a rock and relieves herself, and the sight of her own excrement sickens her, doubly so when she finds that the earth is too thin to bury it and the handfuls of grass she rips free just blow away in the wind and she is forced to use a stick to push it under the lip of the rock where she will not see it.

She drinks from a muddy pool of rainwater, retches and makes herself drink again. She wraps herself in the rug from the tent floor and walks round the perimeter of the island, a figure of eight with two stony beaches on either side of its narrow waist. It takes her two hours. There are no trees, only clumps of low thorn bushes bent flat by the wind, green cushions of mossy thrift, bracken and sea campions, razorbills and butterflies. The greater part of the coast is sheer cliff, though in places the grass falls away to great slabs of cracked and toppled stone, stained with an orange crust above the waterline and shaggy with weed beneath it. She catches a movement in the corner of her eye and thinks, for a moment, that she is not alone, but it is a group of seals lying beached on a thin promontory, half-fish, half-dog, their wet skins like mottled gemstones. The only signs of human presence are the remains of an ancient stone circle about which there hangs an atmosphere that scares her.

She returns to the tent pitched in the low saddle between the two halves of the island and sheltered from the worst of the wind. She is hungry but has no idea what she can eat. She wonders how long it takes to starve. She knows nothing about such things.

He held her till her sobs began to die down then wiped her cheek and looked into her eyes. “I have to command these people. They need to look at me and see someone who has powers they do not possess. They need to know that I can kill monsters.” He was not angry. He did not need to be angry. “Your father killed twelve of us every year for ten years. Those people had sisters, they had mothers. Your father was planning to bury us in a ditch. I killed your brother. I could have done a great deal more.”

She had no choice. She had to embrace this man and put her brother out of her mind. She had to throw away her old life and become a new person. She wondered if this was what it meant to love someone completely.

The second morning, hunger wakes her before dawn. It is like a broken bone. Her body is not going to let her starve.

A cold drizzle is falling. She wants to stay in the tent but the pain in her stomach is worse than the prospect of getting wet, so she makes her way down the scree again to the little beach. She stands at the top of the shingle slope and looks around. She does not know if there is anything edible here. Her food has always been cooked and prepared. She has little idea of what this involves. She is accustomed to eating grapes and pears and quinces but she has seen no fruit on the island. To her left is the seal pup’s head but that would need cooking and she has no fire and she cannot look at the object without thinking of her brother.

She tries to chew some seaweed but it is leathery and gritty and covered in a layer of slime. She finds some shells stuck to the sides of a rock pool but they prove impossible to remove. She wades into the shallows. The water is like shackles of ice around her ankles. She bends down, turns the pebbles over and pushes aside the fronds of shaggy weed, nervous of what she might find beneath. She wades a little deeper. Already her sense of danger is being overridden by an animal need which obscures all other thoughts.

She is up to her thighs in the freezing waves now, the stones under her feet are harder to see and searching among them requires her to put her face into the water. Her fingers find a cluster of something sharper and more geometric than the surrounding rocks. She pulls and breaks it free and retrieves a cluster of shells, speckled with stony mortar. She walks out of the water and discovers that the temperature of the ocean makes the air seem warm. She tries to prise open the shells but splits a nail, so she goes up the beach to a flat shelf. She puts the shells down, takes up a large pebble and cracks the shells open. There is a kind of meat inside. She picks away the shards of broken shell and scoops some out. She puts the contents in her mouth. It is like salty phlegm. She waits and swallows. At least she does not need to chew. She eats a second. Then a third.

The air is no longer warm and she is beginning to shiver uncontrollably. She has five more shells. She carries them back up the scree towards the grassy saddle. She goes inside the tent, thinking that she must get warm and dry, but there is water dripping through the roof onto the bed and she has very little energy. She removes her clothing and wraps the deerskin blanket round her and lies down in the dry half of the tent.

She cries and rocks back and forth and manages to descend into a half-sleep that calms her a little. Then the stomach cramps begin. With no warning, she is sick onto the ground in front of her. She rolls over so that she does not have to look at it. The cramps ease a little.

He ordered one of the women to bring a cloak from below decks and sat her on a bench to one side of the boat then returned to the other men, commanding them to trim sails and watch for rocks and stow the ropes, sending them to the rowing benches when these tasks were done, to maintain as high a speed as possible. When they were out of sight of land he altered course to throw off any following ships.

She had never been on a boat before. The cleanness and the coldness of the air and the spray coming over the prow took her by surprise. The way the deck yawed and pitched terrified her at first, though everyone else on board seemed oblivious. She tried to pretend it was a child’s game, like swinging on a rope, or being thrown into the air and caught by her father.

It was the sheer size of the ocean which unsettled her most. She wondered how deep the water was beneath the hull and felt a nauseous tingle in the back of her legs as if she were standing on a high tower and looking over the edge. She thought of how they were supported by a wooden platform no bigger than a courtyard floating across this sky of water, how none of them could swim and how they were all less than ten steps away from death, and she began to understand how brave sailors were, or how stupid.

The thought of her brother was like a pounding headache. She moved as little as possible and watched and listened hard to what was going on around her and tried to distract herself from the pain.

Finally the rowers broke off and a basket of provisions was brought up from below, olives, salted fish, fresh water and dry biscuits of a kind she had never seen before. He sat beside her but addressed her directly only twice. She liked the way in which she had so rapidly been accepted into the magic circle from which the others were excluded. He had to maintain a public face, she understood that. She was flattered that the private man belonged to her alone.

They anchored in the bay of the island shortly before nightfall. A small boat was lowered on ropes and three men rowed ashore to reconnoitre. They returned with the news that the island was uninhabited and began ferrying boxes and packets and bundles to the beach, taking passengers only when several tents had already been erected on the grassy ridge.

Nightfall frightened her. The firelight at home had always illuminated a stone wall, painted plaster, a woven hanging. She had never seen darkness eat up the world like this. She was losing her bearings a little, and times and places began to overlap. She remembered the stories she had heard as a child, how Chaos gave birth to love and hell, how Kronos castrated his father with a sickle, and these things now seemed no more or less real than her cousin Glaucus nearly drowning in a barrel of honey, or her cousin Catreus trying to ride a goat and breaking his arm.

They ate more of the salted fish and the dried figs which had been compacted into discs like little millwheels. Some of the men found a young seal on the beach and chased its mother away so that they could kill it. They roasted chunks of the flesh over the fire but several of the women found it inedible so she declined, deciding that she could easily wait another two days for proper meat. The sweet wine, in any case, had taken the edges off her hunger.

So novel and so consuming were all these events that she forgot entirely about the one waiting at the evening’s end until he drained his final glass and took her hand and led her towards his tent. She knew almost nothing about what he would do to her. She had been told little by her mother and less by her cousins. She had gained more information by overhearing the maids’ gossip, and they seemed to find it comical, though the things they described were both repellent and unnerving. She consoled herself that they were talking about men of a kind very different from the one she was marrying.

He closed the door flap and kissed her, for longer this time. She wondered if he would hurt her but he simply slid a hand inside her dress and held one of her breasts. It felt odd and clumsy and wrong. She did not know what she was meant to do in return, if anything. Earlier in the day she trusted him to protect her. The stakes seemed higher now, the rules less certain. Her life depended on remaining inside the magic circle, and to remain inside the magic circle she had to please him. She had already become a different person this morning. She would have to do it again. She pulled her mouth away from his and said, “What would you like me to do?”

He laughed and lifted her dress and turned her round and bent her over the bed. The maids were right. What he did to her was indeed repellent and unnerving, but oddly comical too. She should have felt adult and sophisticated but it reminded her mostly of being a child again, wrestling, doing handstands, turning cartwheels in the dust. It was demeaning at first, and dirty, then it was good to be a child, to have no responsibilities, to forget everything that had happened today and concentrate only on the present moment.

When he was finished he rolled onto the bed and pulled the deerskin blanket over them. Within minutes he was asleep. She was unable to move without detaching herself from his embrace and she did not want to wake him so she lay listening to the voices outside getting fewer and fainter as everyone made their way to bed and the fidgety orange light of the fire faded. Every so often the wind flicked back a tongue of canvas at the top of the door and she could see a tiny triangle of sky that contained three stars hanging in a darkness that went on forever.

Sometime after midday the rain stops, the pain in her stomach disappears and her mind is returned to her. She hangs her sodden clothes on the guy ropes outside the tent so that they will dry in the sun. She does the same thing with the bedclothes and ties back the door of the tent in the hope that the breeze might evaporate some of the water from its muddy floor. She is naked. She cleans up the vomit, scooping it into her hands and carrying it outside, then wiping her fingers clean on the grass. She does this without thinking and, in the middle of doing it, she sees herself from the outside and realises how far she has travelled in such a short time.

She finds a shallow pool of brackish water gathered on the concave top of a mossy rock and drinks, and the coldness of the water makes up for the earthy, vegetable taste.

She begins to think, for the first time, that surviving here might be possible, but that to do so she must become like a fox, hunting constantly and never thinking about tomorrow.

Wrapped only in her blanket and wearing her sandals, she makes her way back to the area of the island where the thorn bushes were thickest and finds that her memory is correct and some of the plants are indeed covered in small red berries. She does not want to repeat the mistake of this morning, so she picks just one and puts it into her mouth. But when she crushes it between her teeth the taste is shockingly sour and she has to spit it out.

She makes her way down the scree to the beach, determined to master her feelings about the seal pup’s head. But it has begun to rot and the smell is overpowering, and when she gets close she can see something moving inside.

She has to make a fire. If she can make a fire then she can perhaps cook the shellfish and make them edible. She used to watch her cousins doing it many years ago with tinderboxes stolen from the kitchen before they were caught and beaten. The boxes contained two stones and a wad of lint. She has no lint, but she has an endless supply of rock. She begins searching the drier, top half of the beach, picking up pairs of stones, turning her back to the wind, striking one against the other and watching for that tiny scrap of lightning. She does this for a long time with no success.

She climbs back up to the grass. She is exhausted. Her clothes are dry but she does not have the energy to put them on. Instead she lies in the mouth of the tent watching the shadows of clouds slide across the surface of the water. There is a seductive comfort in doing this and she knows that the longer she spends without eating the harder it will be to find food but she can neither bring herself to stand up nor think of what she might achieve if she did.

He was right. Her father had done worse. She thinks of the bodies in the trench. She wonders if any of them were still alive when the earth was shovelled on top of them, and imagines mud in her mouth, that unmovable weight holding her down.

Her father was doubtless privy to events and information of which she knew nothing. Perhaps, from his perspective, these cruelties were simply the price that had to be paid to keep his people safe. She will never know.

She has not talked for three days. She has not heard another human voice. Her thinking is becoming simultaneously clearer and more confused. Those concentric rings of the royal apartments, the public rooms, the gardens, the town beyond the palace walls, seem to her like a beehive or an ants’ nest, some beautifully structured object whose working must remain forever mysterious. There is a picture of her father which comes back to her throughout the day. He is standing at one of the big windows looking down towards the harbour. She is sitting at his feet, playing with a set of ivory jacks. His face is lit by the sun coming off the sea. He is not looking at her but he knows that she is there. She must be three, four, five years old. She feels completely safe.

Later she saw him strike her mother. She saw him bring his fist down on an earthenware plate and shatter it, so angry that he did not notice that his hand was bleeding. She saw him send men to be hanged and watched them weep as they were led from the room.

She can see now that her father, too, had a magic circle around him, and that she loved him less on account of who he was than for allowing her inside that circle when so many others were kept out.

The following morning she combs the beach again looking for stones that will strike a spark. This time she selects two of every type then ferries them up to the tent where the air is drier and there is no sea spray. She bangs them together in turn and her spirit leaps when she sees that a tiny star is born with a loud crack between two of the stones. She tears a corner from her dress and picks at it with her dirty nails until it is a wren’s nest of cream fibres.

Only then does she remember that she has no wood. She feels stupid, and scared by the realisation that she is losing the ability to plan ahead. She thinks of the effort involved in finding that wood and begins to cry. But crying is pointless so after a few minutes she stops. She wraps the deerskin round her once more and walks a circuit of the island.

There are no logs because there are no trees, but she succeeds in gathering an armful of dry branches. She is walking beside the cliffs on the way back to the tent when she sees movement in the waves. She turns and watches two dolphins break the surface, curve through the air and enter the water again, then break the water a second time, as if they are riding the rim of some great, hidden wheel. They are heart-stoppingly beautiful, like long, silver bottles or wingless, grey birds.

But they are mocking her. She cannot swim. She would die out there, whereas they can travel to ten kingdoms and back. For a moment she dreams of having their freedom, then realises how little it would profit her. She would not be wanted in Athens. She would not be wanted at home. Here is as good as anywhere.

The dolphins have gone. She returns to the tent, piles the twigs on the ashes of the last fire and rebuilds the little circle of stones the men built around it. She fetches the two stones and the little nest of cotton lint.

It does not work. The stones spark one time in twenty, and when they do she has no way of directing that spark into the lint. She tries a hundred, two hundred times. Her hands are bloody and bruised. Her arms are exhausted. The lint refuses to catch.

She is too tired to remain awake but too uncomfortable to sleep. She drifts halfway between the two states, clipping the edge of nightmares and coming away trailing nameless fears that snap her briefly awake. She thinks she has fallen overboard or is running up an endless slope of shingle, chased by a nameless, seal-faced creature that is and is not her brother.

When dawn comes she lies listening to the shearwaters taking flight. When there is only the muffled sound of the waves left she stands and walks down to the beach, climbing round the rocks at the side of the cove until she is looking down into deeper water. She sits on a rock with her legs dangling. A jellyfish swims below her, a ball of light in a white bag with a charred rim, trailing ragged tentacles. It pulses in the slow wind of the current. She watches, transfixed. She is no longer able to measure time.

The jellyfish is gone. The translucent green water flexes and wobbles like flames dancing in a grate.

There is a rash on the back of her left hand where the skin has reddened and begun to peel away. She runs her fingers over it. There is pain but it does not belong to her.

Clambering back up the scree she hears women’s voices and a high metal chime like tiny bells ringing. She climbs faster but by the time she reaches the curved, grass saddle the voices have stopped and there is no one there.

Her bowels clench. She does not bother to find shelter. She squats and relaxes and what comes out is a foul, orange liquid so that she has to clean herself repeatedly with clumps of torn grass.

She walks aimlessly towards the highest point on the island simply to postpone her return to the tent. She does not want to look at the vastness of the sea so she keeps her eyes fixed on the ground. It is peppered with the burrows out of which the shearwaters emerge. She stops and stamps her feet and realises for the first time how hollow the earth sounds and how it must be honeycombed with little tunnels. She gets down on her hands and knees and begins to tear at the mouth of the nearest hole. The earth is woven thick with pale roots and she has to search for a sharp stone to cut through the toughest of them. She digs farther, making a deep furrow. She feels something scratching and flapping at the ends of her fingers and excavates the last two handfuls of earth to find two fat, grey chicks huddled in their subterranean chamber. She had hoped to find eggs but it is too late in the season. She picks up one of the birds, a puffball of dove-coloured fur. It pecks her with its hooked black beak. She stands up and crushes the head of the chick with the heel of her sandal. She hacks at the chest of the tiny bird with the edge of the stone until it peels back. There is blood all over her hands and tiny feathers stuck to the blood. She bites into the warm innards, chewing at the gristle and swallowing what she can tear off. She is eating feathers along with the meat. She gags but carries on eating. Three mouthfuls. The bird is finished. She gazes down at its brother. It is looking back up at her with its mouth open, waiting to be fed, the black jewels of its eyes glittery in the sunlight.

She walks away, wiping her mouth on the deerskin.

She cannot remember her mother’s face. She can remember the faces of her brother, her cousins, her father. She can remember the faces of the men who sat around the council table. She can remember the faces of the four male servants who were trusted enough to work in the royal apartments. But she cannot bring her mother’s face to mind.

This is the woman who brought her into the world, the woman her father loved. Yet every time she turns her mind’s eye in her mother’s direction she sees only the men she is talking to, the children she is playing with, the maids to whom she is giving orders. She begins to realise how little her mother did, how rarely she offered an opinion, how the family revolved around her without ever making contact, how small an effect she had on the world.

How alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white paper under the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning.

She realises that she can no longer remember what her own face looks like so she leaves the tent and makes her way to the shallow pool on the rock. She puts her back to the sun and makes a canopy of the deerskin cloak to shield the surface from the glare. She stares down into the water and sees her brother’s sister staring up at her, hair matted like his hair, skin filthy like his skin, cheeks sunken, eyes dark, the skull starting to come through.

There is a storm at night. The thunder is like buildings coming down, and after every explosion the tent is flooded with a harsh blue light that sings on the back of her eyes for minutes afterwards. She wills the lightning to strike her directly, for everything to be over in an instant, but this does not happen. The canvas bucks and cracks and after several hours she is woken from her half-sleep by the rough cloth smacking her face as the tent collapses around her. The wind fills the canvas like a sail and drags her along the ground. She has lost all sense of direction and is terrified that she will be hauled over a cliff. She does not want to die, not now, not like this. She does not want to lie on rocks with shattered bones or drown like a dog in a sack but she does not possess the strength to wrestle herself free, so she lies flat and prays for the wind to slacken. Eventually a gust hoists her free of the ground, she is swung hard against a boulder, the tent comes to a halt and she can do nothing but block her ears to the roar and the whipping of the canvas so that she can nurse the pain in her side.

Morning comes and the wind dies away. She frees herself and rolls what remains of the tent into a heap behind the rock that anchored her through half the night. She looks back towards the square of dead grass where it had been pitched. All but two of the pegs have gone. Putting the tent back up is impossible now. She drinks some water then begins the painfully slow process of dragging the torn canvas sheets down to the head of the beach where there is some protection from the wind and she can wrap herself up at night.

There is now a constant throbbing in her head and a churning anger in her guts that she has no way of expending. She lies down and closes her eyes and tries to get some of the rest she should have got last night. As she slips out of consciousness she hears the women’s voices again and that distant tinkling, but when she opens her eyes she can hear only the surf. She descends into vivid, fitful dreams. She is in the bridal suite once more, standing by the bed and examining the tapestry of the weeping woman and the receding ship. This time, however, she sees a part of the picture she had not noticed before. In the lower left-hand corner of the great, woven square, on the green of the island, she can see a band of figures. They are walking towards the weeping woman. She does not know whether they are coming to help the woman or whether they are hunting her down. She steps forward to examine them more closely and the dream evaporates.

The sun is overhead and the air is warm again. She decides that she must make use of what little energy she has left to find some food. Picking up the sharpened stone she climbs to the grassy plateau where the shrubs grow. Half of her is in her body, half hovers in the air above. She moves fluidly and for once walking is easy. She can smell the perfume of the small blue flowers and see two gulls hanging on the breeze.

She finds the largest plant, breaks off the straightest, toughest branch then uses the sharpened stone to whittle a point at one end. She walks to the place where she first saw the seals. She has no idea how many days ago that was. She simply assumes that they will still be there and indeed they are, three adults and a pup. She sits on the grassy ledge and looks down. There is a drop, perhaps twice the height of a man, to a slab of rock that slopes smoothly down to the little channel beside which they are lying. Holding the makeshift weapon in her teeth she turns, lowers herself as far as she can then lets go.

She feels, briefly, as if she is flying, then she lands badly. The pain is so bright and sharp that she cannot breathe, only cradle herself and moan till it dies away, before rolling onto her back. She examines her left hand. The little finger is bent backwards and will not respond to any commands. She cannot bear to touch it. She is sweating profusely.

She looks up to the grassy ledge. She can see no way of getting back. She looks down. The seals are still there. They seem unbothered by her presence. She tells herself that this is good. They are tame. She can do what she came to do.

Her stick has slid down the rocks. She stands up, intending to walk over and retrieve it, but as she does so a flock of tiny, white insects swarms across her field of vision. She sits and waits then shuffles sideways, using her one good hand until she has the stick in her possession again.

She begins moving towards the seals. Two of the adults are watching her. She is fifteen paces away now. They are bigger than she had thought, their bodies as bulky as the bodies of oxen. One of the adults nudges the pup into the water then slips through the surface after it. She is ten paces away now, and she can see, for all their ungainliness, how strong these animals are and how much they weigh. She realises that what she is about to do is dangerous. She cannot remember precisely why she is doing it but changing her mind and doing something different seems like the hardest thing of all. She is five paces away. One of the seals lumbers towards her, rears up, opens its mouth and barks. It sounds like the bottom of a great jar being scraped. It is talking to her and no one has talked to her in a long time. She almost says something back. These animals are going to save her. She wonders why she did not come here sooner. It would have made everything so much easier.

Putting her right hand flat on the ground she gets slowly to her feet. She is a little giddy but there are no stars this time. The seal rears and barks again. She grips the stick tightly, steps forward and shoves the point into the flesh of the seal’s head. It moves with surprising speed, flicking the stick away and swinging immediately back to sink its teeth into her ankle, then swinging its head a third time so that her leg is yanked out from underneath her. The seal lets go and she is tumbling towards the channel. She puts out her hands but the stone is slimy with weed and she cannot get sufficient grip. She crashes into the water, her arms flailing. She’s hunting desperately for handholds but there are none to be found. Her head goes under, she breathes a mouthful of salty water and coughs it out. She grabs two hanks of weed and pulls her head above the surface. She looks round, thinking the seal is going to attack again, but they are all gone. She wonders if they are circling beneath her, biding their time. She looks down but she cannot even see her own feet. What she can see is the pink froth and clouds of blood in the water.

She holds the weed tight and breathes as slowly and as calmly as she can then hauls herself sideways along the channel to the point where the bottom rises and she is standing in waist-deep water. Everything hurts. She is cold to her bones and unable to stop herself shivering but getting out of the water means lifting herself onto a seaweed-covered shelf. It is all of a hand’s breadth above the surface of the water but even that effort is beyond her imagination.

The world slips out of focus then comes back. She sees her stick a little farther up the rock, the stripped wood of its point still red with the seal’s blood. She remembers eating a baby bird. Was that yesterday or the day before? It is hard to be clear about these things. Why did she not dig another bird out of its nest instead of coming down here to kill an animal ten times her size? She has no answers to these questions.

With no warning, the water rises around her and a seal breaks the surface only a few feet away and lunges at her. She has no idea how she does it but she is suddenly out of the water and crawling up the rocky slope. She collapses and looks back, panting. The seal is no longer there. She examines her leg. There is a deep gash on her ankle. Inside it she can see something white which might or might not be bone. She looks away.

She went down to the cellar one time and found her brother’s head covered in blood. She asked him what had happened, but he would say nothing at first. She fetched some water from the bucket and washed the wound, then tore a strip of cloth from her skirt and bandaged it. She put her arms around him and asked if one of the men had done this to him. He shook his head. She pulled back and looked into his eyes.

“Tell me.”

“I did it.”

“You did it?”

“I did it.”

“You hurt yourself? How?”

“Wall.” He nodded to one of the arches of the brick vault and she saw the bloodstains.

“Why?”

“I want it to stop.”

“What do you want to stop?”

“Everything. I want everything to stop.”

She pretended not to understand. She can see now that she was a coward. She can see now that if she had been braver, if she had really loved her brother, she would have taken a knife down those dark stairs and slipped it between his ribs and let him die in her arms.

Night comes and in the darkness, after the shearwaters have flown ashore, she hears animals that are neither seals nor birds. She hears lions and leopards and wolves. She hears the clanking of chains. She hears drunken shouting and the crackle of a fire and something large breathing close to her ear. She hears the air going in and out of its nostrils and smells the rot of its yellow teeth. She feels the heat of its breath.

Grey light. Intense cold. A fine rain is falling. She cannot move her leg. She cannot move her hand. The world is a tiny, bright thing, so small she can hold it in her hand.

She looks up to the fringe of green grass high above her head. That was the place she had come from. There was a bed somewhere up there. But if there is a way back she is unable to see it from here. She can move her other leg a little. She thinks about trying to stand so that she can find a route but this rock is a kind of bed, too, and she has a memory of the other bed blowing away. She can smell the ammonia on her breath. She looks down at her damaged hand. One of the fingers is the wrong shape. It looks like a badly drawn picture of a hand.

She is in a garden. There are fountains and lavender bushes covered in bees that rise in angry, humming clouds when her cousins hit them with sticks before the nurse drags them away. She trod on a bee once and her foot swelled to twice its size. There are bowers, too, where she can sit out of the heat of the sun. From her favourite she can look down over the wall to the quays and to the ships entering or leaving the harbour. She likes to imagine the countries from which they have come, the countries the old men talk about, countries made entirely of sand, countries where the people have skin as black and glossy as plums, countries where there are water lizards as long as a rowing boat.

She is playing with a hoop made of stripped willow branches, the ends tapered and bound together with little spirals of fibre. If no one gets in the way she can run alongside it, batting it with a stick to keep it rolling, and do a circuit of the entire garden.

It is the most beautiful garden in the world. She never wants to leave. If only she could remember where it is.

There is a high wind and the sea explodes on the rocks below. The moon is full and the waves come in like black hills with a crest of blue snow, swelling and flexing and dropping onto the rocky shelf where they turn to freezing spray which falls on her like rain. She thinks how calm it must be out there, under those waves, in that dark that goes down and down, where the dolphins swim and the jellyfish drift on the current and the forests of seaweed swing back and forth, so much better than up here where everything hurts.

Dawn comes. Her throat and mouth are dry and she cannot generate enough saliva to swallow. Her lips are cracked and bleeding. She can see nothing but fog through her right eye.

There is a flock of gulls standing farther down the rock, all looking out to sea, preening their grey wings with their orange beaks and shaking out their feathers. Their eyes are little yellow stones with black holes drilled through them. The ocean is beaten silver. The seals have come back.

She can hear the cymbals again, a distant, high ringing that comes and goes on the breeze, now louder, now quieter. She wonders if there is something wrong with her ears. Then she hears the faint but unmistakable sound of a big animal growling, that lazy rumble like a barrel on cobbles. The gulls scatter and the seals slip into the waves, leaving only circles of wash behind them.

Everything is briefly still and silent. Then she sees him. He is a big man, naked except for a ragged cloak of red cloth, taller than she remembers from the boat, and more muscular. His head is too large and there is blood on his face. A leopard pads at his side. Behind him are six naked men and six naked women. Some have made themselves crowns and belts of creepers and green branches, some are carrying freshly killed animals—rabbits, foxes, pheasants.

He stands in front of her, breathing heavily. His chest and shoulders are covered with wiry black hair and she can see now that he has horns. There is dung on his legs and his penis is thick and erect. He bends down and picks her up. She can smell wine on his breath and the rot of his teeth. He licks her. She recognises him from somewhere. She does not feel frightened. No one can hurt her anymore. There is no longer enough of her to be hurt.

He turns her over and lays her down and pushes himself into her. The movement back and forth inside her is the movement of the waves back and forth against the rock, the coming and going of the birds, the pulse of day and night, summer turning into autumn, to winter, to spring to summer again, the heart squeezing and releasing, the pulse of the blood.

Then they are on top of her, the men and women, biting, tearing, ripping her skin, pulling out her hair, breaking her fingers, gouging her eyes, hacking out the fat and muscle, pulling free the greasy tubes and bags of her innards till she is finally free of her body. Rising now, she looks down at the skeleton lying on the rocks, gulls picking at the remaining shreds of meat and gristle. She sees the grass blowing in the wind, the fringe of restless surf, the island shrinking till it is no more than a lump in the fastness of the sea, the sea an azure tear on the surface of the globe itself which shrinks rapidly in the haze of the sun as she floats into the great, black vault, becoming a buckled ring of seven stars, Corona Borealis, the northern crown.

She is immortal.