Eyeless, the white face mooned and slid towards me through the water, and hearing somebody’s shrieks I woke from the stench of nightmare, climbed the island, and searched the sea again, quarter by quarter.
The tide was lifting, the boat bumping, so I carried the anchor further up. The sun had moved around while I slept, the skin on the backs of both legs hot and tight. I took my breaker to the waterhole under the toppled wall, then remembered and ran to examine Ennish’s stores.
The first flax basket was filled with dried whale meat, smoked herrings, and a great loaf of bread, enough to have lasted us several days. At the thought of Ennish smiling to himself, the warmth in his grey eyes, I burst into tears, hammered the side of the boat, and struck sharp barnacles. Snivelling, gulping, sucking my stinging knuckles, tasting the furry blood, I embraced the planks where his body had scraped on its long plunge.
“I wasn’t there when you needed me …”
Again, it was the humdrum that brought me back to myself: I chewed a piece of black whale meat, broke off a crust of bread, and thought I must not give in to self-pity, not if I was to save my brothers. I made myself grin at my seriousness, just as Ennish would have done, and brought the boat a bit further up on the tide.
It was one of the village’s fishing boats, newer, stronger, and more seaworthy than my smaller one, but too heavy to drag up the beach. That was a nuisance, but the longer boat had already saved my life with its speed.
Two full water breakers, shovel, axe, two more knives. Leather pouches of hooks and lures, fishing lines, rolls of cord. Several kegs of oats and barley, and another filled with pouches of vegetable seeds. A leather bag with flints and steel, burnt-cloth tinder, and a ball of teased-out rope. Needles and awls.
“You always were thorough,” I told Ennish.
A barrel of whale oil in the bows, the net — ready for use, coils of rope, and, under them, great wooden pulley blocks with iron sheaves and hooks. I could pull the boat up the beach after all.
The fishing gear would have been aboard for the next day’s work, but Ennish must have smuggled down the rest in the dark. Was that when he was seen?
Then I thought of the relief everyone would have felt at the thought that all evil was driven out with me, the village cleansed. I remembered feeling it myself after other banishings. Those women — Tilsa, Ulseb, Larish — would have slept heavily. Perhaps that was when Ennish had loaded his boat and sailed, but somebody was still on watch.
No. Had he died then, his body would have been much more decayed. He must have waited several days, trying to find the boys, then been shot by the lookouts on the Horns as he sailed to meet me. Did that mean Tobik, Peck, and Patch were prisoners, or something worse?
Death to us in Hornish was a thief of memory, a sort of forgetting. Once the dead had been returned to the depths, it was the duty of the living to give them back their memory so they could live for ever, telling stories with the gods beneath the sea. Tide now dropping, the boat safe, the rest of that day I sat on the sand beside it, telling Ennish his story.
“We were born the same year, within a few days of each other …”
We grew up playing with the other children in the golden sand under the red-flowered mercy trees, splashing in the shallow, warm water of the bay that opened towards the sun. We swam before we walked, sailed toy boats, searched for scallops and mussels, set our little nets and lines, made fish traps from sticks, and shrieked at a shrimp or a herring caught as the tide dropped.
We played, learning to row and sail our small boats. A child of Hornish must know the sea, how to handle a boat, to fish and preserve the catch.
We followed our fathers and mothers in their digging and planting, begging seeds and plants for our little gardens. In the orchards, we climbed and picked fruit from the top branches.
We copied our mothers, learning to cook, to grind the oats and barley we had helped plant and harvest, how to milk the goats and make cheese, to feed the pigs in their strong enclosures. Pigs are clever creatures, quick to find weakness in a wall. And we learned how to kill and butcher the animals, to cure their skins, and preserve the meat.
So I told Ennish how we grew up in Hornish, two small people like brother and sister. I told him how Hulsa laughed and said that where one was, she would always find the other. Then I became the Selene, learning the whale songs from two old women each of whom had been the Selene until her powers waned like the dying moon.
I repeated everything I learned to Ennish, the secret songs and dances, those I sang alone in the Great House and as I swam. Nothing of that seemed wrong. As we explored the world about us, we explored each other, in thought and flesh. All this I told Ennish beside the boat on Rabbit Island, my words travelling through the water to where he now lived with the gods beneath the sea. And I told him the history of our village, because death would have stolen that memory, too.
Long before we were born, life changed at Hornish. Each autumn, herrings shoaled in a bay one full day’s sail south down the west coast. Women and children were landed on a beach behind a reef at the old fishing camp. As we re-thatched torn roofs and rebuilt walls damaged by winter storms, the first boat would come in awash with netted herrings that we scaled, gutted, and strung on lines between poles on the beach. While the first catch dried in sun and wind, we salted the next in barrels bound tight with split supplejack; the next we smoked, a treat for winter feasts.
When the shoals disappeared, we sailed the herrings home, boats low in the water, praising the gods for their gifts. The children cried and waved goodbye to the fishing camp because it was a happy time for us, playing in the warm lagoon behind the beach, climbing and jumping in the sandhills, collecting driftwood for the fires, yet we always greeted the Horns with songs, running up from the jetty, shouting to those left behind, finding a neglected toy on a bed, running to tell the pigs we were back.
I chanted the old story to Ennish of that summer when the herrings were so plentiful the boats had to return for a second load, and how halfway back to Hornish the last two were caught in a storm. The men tried to make the fishing camp behind its protective reef, but were driven south past the bay, so they hove-to. As the gale whipped the crests off the waves, they lowered their masts and dribbled whale oil from the barrel always carried in the bows. The waves were still as high, but the crests smoothed and no longer broke into the boats, and the men chanted thanks to the gods.
They drifted south, keeping the boats together so the one barrel of oil smoothed the sea for both. Gale followed gale from the north, and they ran before them, finding shelter at last beneath mountains surrounding a deep bay where they refilled their water breakers, and tried to catch fresh fish, a change from the dried herrings. To their surprise they caught nothing, then at the top of the bay they saw smoke. Curious, they sailed closer and found a great town.
The people of Lador were neither fishermen nor sailors, but rich traders who spoke several tongues, one of them like ours. When they saw our cargo, the merchants offered good things in return for the herrings, including round discs of yellow, red, and silver metal, a few of which came home at last, ornaments for the women and children. But the Hornish men asked for something they coveted more than Lador’s other marvels.
All this I told Ennish so he might tell the gods, and slowly the seagull-ravaged eye socket, the bloated flesh, the stench and sounds of nightmare vanished, and I saw his body hard and lean again, his shy smile, the little scar on his left cheek where I once threw a shell and cut it in some childhood argument.
“You must not cry,” I told myself aloud. “Tell Ennish his story. Tell him the story of Hornish.”