From well out, I put the tiller over and closed with what I hoped was the coast. A peak menaced black through cloud and disappeared before I could name it. Had I come too far south? So long as I was not seen from the Horns again …
A long reef lifted and spilled water off its sides, sank as the swell covered it again, and a hillside emerged through swarming mist, a huddled shape I recognised — the headland south of Hornish’s fishing camp. I stroked the side of the boat and thanked it.
“You brought me here. And you,” I cried to the gods.
Four days out of sight of land, and the first part of my plan successful.
“You can be as clever as you like,” I told myself, “but you must have luck as well.”
Feel my way around the reef into protected water, take down the mast, lay driftwood on the sand for rollers, anchor the block and tackle to a mercy tree, and pull up the boat. Tired but excited, thinking of the boys, I heaped more driftwood to hide the hull’s shape from the sea. Above the high water mark, there were blurred footprints and, half-filled by wind-blown sand, the deep groove of a keel.
The boat that hunted me had not just checked the fishing camp, they had burned our old hut. That is what they would have done in Hornish, too, destroyed our house because of my banishment. My father always described the practice as superstitious.
“It’s not the house’s fault,” he said and laughed at people’s stupidity. Perhaps that is why Telak and his family hated Palik, I thought.
On a bunk in one of the other huts, I lay and dreamt my mother and father were alive again. I woke and made a swag of a sack, putting another inside it, and some of Ennish’s dried herrings and whale meat, and by evening was halfway up the first spur towards a clouded ridge parallel to the coast. I knew the ridge was there because of an old story about the time a fishing boat was lost, and the survivors made their way to Hornish overland.
Several days later, I dropped through bushed hills. Our golden bay spread calm on my right, the wild west ocean left. Hornish must lie on its isthmus somewhere below. Next morning I crawled out under ground-hugging mist, heard voices, and spotted two figures scratching for leftover potatoes in the gardens. Luck was with me once more.
They screamed, dropped a flax kit and ran when I called their names. I called again, and they ran a few more steps before Peck turned back and flung himself upon me: “Selene. Selene.” Then Tobik, too. I felt them all over. Scratched, bruised, beaten, skinny. One side of Tobik’s neck was red, the ear swollen, the other side of his head cut.
“Where is Patch?”
“Dead.”
I gasped.
“They killed him,” Tobik nodded, and Peck stared as I gulped and held my breath.
“I thought you were a ghost,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”
“I will tell you. Bring your kit.” With the light growing, there would be others coming up to the gardens. “Brush over your tracks as you come.” Bending low, I scuttled through the thinning mist and dived under the scrub.
We crawled through its spiky tangle, got on our feet, and ran deeper into the bush, Tobik limping.
“Does anyone know where you are?” Tobik shook his head. Peck just stared. “Good.”
They crushed handfuls of dried herrings into their mouths, chewing, swallowing while I looked at Tobik’s leg, the cut on his head.
“It’s all right,” he said, being Tobik.
“I will rub oil on them when we get back to the boat. What did they do to Patch?”
Tobik looked at Peck. “You know how he wouldn’t ever shut up? He said something, and they went mad, Tilsa, Ulseb, and Larish. They beat and beat him. It must have been a couple of days after they dragged us out of the Great House, the last time we saw you. Patch kept answering back. In the end, he just lay there silent, but they went on kicking his head, then they looked at us — we were tied up, so I couldn’t do anything — and disappeared.”
“Let us get away from here.”
I gave them some dried whale meat to gnaw on as we went, added their potatoes to my swag, and led them uphill. Where I’d turned down fern fronds as markers, I bent them back into place. The silver back of the last frond blazed against a dark trunk. I bent it so the green side showed again. It would be hard to track us. We went straight up a steep face on to a spur that climbed to the ridge. Tobik let me help him up the worst bit.
That night, surrounded by leaning trees in a blind gully down the back of the ridge, I got a fire going with flint and steel, cooked potatoes in the embers, and gave the boys more herrings and whale meat. I cuddled Peck and rubbed Tobik’s leg as they bolted the food, looked at their sunken eyes, dirty faces, Tobik’s blood-encrusted. Although they wanted to talk, I pressed more food on them until they were full, and slid them into the two sacks, where mumbling questions they fell asleep, Peck with a baked potato half-eaten in one hand, Tobik looking like our father.
I built up the fire. Several times in the cold night, I threw on more wood and lay hugging them, thanking the gods for helping, grateful for luck. Peck twitched in his sleep, whimpered, and called out, but I said, “It is all right. Selene is here.” Tobik slept heavy.
We ate, drank from a trickle, and put out the fire before dawn. Following between ferns and trees along the ridge, Tobik and Peck told me again how Patch had died.
“We wriggled over and tried to keep him warm, but he got cold and stiff, and he wouldn’t wake up after they kicked his head. That’s how we knew he was dead,” Peck said. “Blood came out his nose and ears and dried.”
“After dark that night somebody undid our ropes, threw some bread on the floor, and left the door unbarred,” said Tobik. “We ate as we sneaked through the village, up the orchard into the scrub, and drank out of a stream. We lived there several days, digging with sticks for potatoes, and eating them raw.
“One morning, we saw Ennish in the gardens, but heard voices shouting at him. He dropped on his knees, as if he was scratching for potatoes. We didn’t see any more because we hid in the scrub.”
“He would have been looking for you,” I said. “We were going to meet out at sea.”
Towards evening of the next day, we were about to drop down the back of the ridge for water and another campsite, when Tobik pointed through a gap between trees. Well out to sea, a black sail was pressing north up the coast. The three of us crouched.
“They will reach Hornish long before we could get back and warn anyone,” I said. “Let us just hope the lookouts see them coming.”
We stared at each other. “Do you think they saw us?” asked Peck.
The thought of them seeing us at that distance was so ridiculous, the three of us laughed until both boys burst into tears, and I held them gulping, trembling, as the boat from Lador drew north.
“Will they kill everyone?” Peck whispered.
“They said they would.”
“I’m glad I’m here with you, Selene, but I wish Patch was here, too.”
Over the back of the ridge, on a tiny flat by a seep of water, we lit a fire, cut ferns with my knife, and made a huge heap into which the boys crawled in their sacks. I sat staring into the flames, telling Patch his story, waiting for the potatoes to roast.
Wherever he was, I told Peck and Tobik, he would hear us and tell his story to the gods. After we ate, we talked about our mother and father till the boys fell asleep. I rolled them together, heaped ferns over them, and kept the fire going again.
We dropped down on the fishing camp two days later. Tobik had not complained but was dragging his sore leg. I lifted him onto a bunk in the same hut, rubbed his leg with whale oil from a barrel kept there, washed the clotted blood out of his hair, and he fell asleep with Peck. I built the boat’s driftwood screen higher, and thought they had kept up well.
“You have been lucky,” I told myself. “But you must be clever also.”
After dark, I stewed dried whale meat, oats, and barley in a cooking pot left in the hut, went down the beach to make sure no light showed, brought two pots from other huts, stood one beside the fire, and filled it with water. There were sacks and old clothes in several huts, and after I woke and fed Peck and Tobik they fell back into the same deep sleep, well-covered.
Before dawn, I bathed both boys in the warm water, and spread oil over their cuts and bruises again. The swelling on Tobik’s neck and ear had gone down, the cut on the other side of his head was clean and healing, and his leg was a little better. Long before the light came up, we ate and put out the fire.
Peck talked all morning, Tobik joining in from time to time. What they described was a village insane with panic. They slept in the afternoon after another meal of stew and the fleshy-leaved spinach and soft thistle that grew wild behind the beach.
That night, I told them how I was banished without trial, without a vote, and how I found Rabbit Island. When I told them how Ennish died, Peck asked if I buried him at sea. Tobik nodded, and Peck said, “That’s all right then.”
Peck screamed about noon the following day. We crouched and peered through the driftwood screen till the black sail sank south, and we all slept with relief.
In the early morning, we filled our three breakers with fresh water, took the flints and steel and the boxes of tinder left in the huts, the cooking pot half-filled with stew, the two others, the barrel of whale oil and another net Tobik found, all the sacks and old clothes, tools, everything that might be useful. We picked a kitful of the wild spinach and soft thistle, climbed the hill behind the beach to make sure the sea was empty, and sailed north. I thought of heading straight for Rabbit Island, but wondered if we should look at Hornish first.
Towards evening, from where he had shinned up the mast, Tobik spotted something closer in. I clutched the tiller, ready to put about, but it was a boat in trouble under the cliffs, sails in disarray, somebody sprawled in the stern. A boy was trying to straighten out the sails and get the boat moving before it was thrown upon the rocks. A smaller boy stood and shrieked my name. A little girl sat unmoving. Tobik dropped our sails as I came alongside, jumped aboard and scrambled astern. The man was dead, his body still warm.
Jenek and Ruka were the same ages as Tobik and Peck. Even when I cuddled their little sister Gulse, she did not respond. I lifted her across to Peck and Tobik, and her head drooped like a baby’s so I had to slip my hand under and tell Tobik to support it as he took her.
Like ours, their mast was hinged with an iron pin at the level of the forward thwart. I undid the forestay, and Jenek helped me lower it, lash everything down, and lift the rudder.
Their boat in tow, we rowed out far enough to pick up the wind. Jenek and Ruka ate hungrily from the stewpot, but Gulse would not even open her mouth. I wrapped her warm in a sack, held her tight, and got well clear of the coast before heaving to for the night.
All of us sitting in the bottom, I listened to Jenek and Ruka telling Tobik and Peck how, when the boat from Lador appeared, their father hid them in one of the orchards, how he came for them in the night, bleeding from a gash in his side. They found a boat and slipped out with the tide before putting up the sails, but their father weakened and died just before we came in sight. Perhaps because they were so close in, they had not seen the Lador boat put out to sea. They did not know what had happened to their mother.
Three of us might have survived on Rabbit Island, I thought; six was more than it could support. At the edge of my mind was Palik’s idea, riskier but much better than the arid little island still too close to Hornish for comfort.
No challenge from the lookouts, no gongs as we ran in under the Horns next morning. Bodies lay half in the water and on the rocks. We searched the burnt ruins of the houses, but all we saw were the dead, too many to bury. Jenek and Ruka found their mother’s charred corpse, and we sank her with their father outside the Horns, chanting their story as we rowed back. Gulse lolled against me, silent.
The pigs, sheep, and goats had vanished from their paddocks and enclosures. We scoured the gardens, taking everything, mainly beans, spinach, and potatoes, and lit a fire outside the ruined village that night. As we sat around the cooking pot and ate, I felt myself being watched and looked up. A girl of about five stood smiling on the edge of the light, behind her a boy younger than Tobik, and shoving them forward, ready to whirl and run, a girl about my age. “Lorne,” I called the little girl and held out my arms. “Ansik. Larish.”
I thought of Larish slashing with her nails at Ennish’s face in the Great House, of her exulting dance in the frieze of shrieking hysterics on the beach, of how she had helped kick Patch to death. Her own face looked stolid now, as she pushed her younger brother and sister between us.
“Come and eat.” I heard my own voice say the words and wondered where was the violence I had felt, the need for vengeance.
Ansik and Lorne edged forward. I smiled at them, knowing that Tobik and Peck were watching.
“There is plenty for everyone.” I pointed at the cooking pot.
“It’s good,” Peck told them.
First Lorne ran and squatted beside me. Ansik hung back a little longer, then knelt by Lorne. Larish came forward at last, and squatted heavily on the other side of the fire, Jenek between her and Tobik.
They crammed down the thick gruel before I would let them talk. I tried to get control of my feelings by helping Lorne and Ansik with the wooden spoons Jenek and Tobik had roughed out with their knives.
Forget it, I told myself. It is different now. If we are to survive, we need every person we can find.
What they remembered of the massacre was Tilsa and Ulseb hiding them in an empty food pit, telling them not to make any noise, and dropping a wooden lid over the hole. A little light came through where it was propped open for air, and Ulseb threw a heap of branches over the top. They heard terrible shouts and shrieks, so stayed in the pit all that day. After dark they climbed out and ran for the scrub on the other side of Hornish, living on bread Ulseb had given them, drinking from a stream. They had seen the Lador boat leave, but did not dare come down until they saw our fire and crept to its light.
Three more, I thought. Nine of us and two boats. I said nothing aloud, but the idea in my mind grew clearer, its details hardening.
Although we built up the fire and called late into the night, nobody else came. In the morning I described Rabbit Island. The others listened, silent.
“Why don’t we stay here, Selene?” Lorne asked.
“Because the Lador soldiers are coming back,” Jenek told her.
“What about the fishing camp?”
“They will find that, too,” I said. “We are unsafe anywhere here.” Jenek nodded. “The soldiers will come back, settle Hornish, and search everywhere within a couple of days’ sailing. We need to start a new village somewhere they will never find.”
We discovered a pitful of potatoes the soldiers had missed, and Tobik and Jenek crawled under an old hut in one of the orchards and found somebody’s private cache of dried peas and beans. The others carried it all to the boats, while Tobik and Ansik helped me search through the village again for anything useful.
The most unpleasant job was stripping the dead, but our need was greater than our distaste. Most of the clothes had to be rinsed of blood and worse, but we kept at it and dried them on the smooth boulders beside the stream where our mothers had always rubbed and beaten and washed.
Tobik and Ansik helped me scratch among the ruins of the Great House; of the enormous tree that once supported the rafters and the roof, there were only ashes. It was Tobik who spotted the ancient iron knife of Selene, its handle burnt away. I wiped the worn blade with whale oil, folded it in a clean piece of sacking, and hid it in my tunic.
“We are going to find another tree, build another Great House.”
“You said there are no trees on Rabbit Island.” Tobik looked at me. “Is it far enough away from Hornish?”
“We have to go somewhere.”
Get them that far, I thought to myself. It is a start.
Though the soldiers had smashed and burned every boat, Ansik found some useful lengths of rope they had missed, several sails, and a couple of nets hung to dry. Both our boats already had a barrel of oil aboard, and two water breakers. The soldiers had thrown bodies down the village well, but Ruka and Peck found three unsmashed water breakers that we filled from a stream. That gave us three in our boat, four in the other. We divided the food and gear: nets, cooking pots, axes, knives, flint and steel firelighting pouches, sacks of clothes, seeds.
“Take everything useful. There will be no coming back.”
I thought with regret of our stolen pigs, sheep, and goats, the horses, of the fowls that had vanished, then laughed at myself for dreaming. Even if there had been room, we hadn’t the food or water to spare for them on the journey ahead.
Then Ruka and Peck, fossicking amongst the ruins of the boats, found two barrels of shenam that hadn’t been smashed in. We drew up both our boats and spent the last day scrubbing their hulls below the waterline and daubing the planks thick with the creamy mixture of burnt shell lime and whale oil, to keep off weed and the sea worm. All day we sent up a tower of smoke, and that night we built a great bonfire and took turns calling into the dark, but nobody came.
Nine of us. Enough to start a village. Four in one boat, five in the other. If one sinks, the others would still have a chance. I gave a last call into the night, threw wood on the fire and slept with the rest.
The wind was from the west, as we rowed between the Horns, out of the clinging stench of Hornish and into clean air. I had Peck and Tobik in my boat, and the two little girls, Gulse and Lorne. Gulse was still silent, but I had got her to eat and drink a little. She was unresponsive to the others, even to her brothers, just let herself be put to sit beside me.
Jenek and Ruka sailed in the other boat, with Larish and Ansik. I watched them check their rigging, tighten the stays, pull up the sails, and cleat the halyards. Larish was slow, but she always had been. Jenek took the tiller and they followed us north.
The main thing, I had explained, was to stay together. We had plenty of food and water, and we could troll for fish as we sailed. Last night and again this morning I drew a map in the ashes of our fire, showing them where Rabbit Island lay and how to find it even if we got separated. Jenek nodded when I said to start looking for the cloud to the north-east after a couple of days and sail towards it, how they would see gulls flying from the island in the early morning and towards it in the evening, how they would notice a difference in the feel of the waves against the bottom of the boat.
“You feel it through your feet.”
Jenek nodded. I liked his lively face, something about his eyes. We could rely on him, even if he was often a bit quick to act. Larish stared back wooden-faced. She would probably forget most of what I said. I wanted to give her a good shake, but knew I must not even think of it.
Things are different now, I reminded myself. We need everyone we’ve got.
That first night we hove-to, lashed the boats together using sacks of old clothes as fenders, and sat in the one boat and told our parents their stories, even Lorne joining in with her memories.
“Don’t cry,” I heard her telling Gulse. “I’ll be your friend. And Selene will look after us. She’s old.”
I took Gulse in my arms and told the children about the island, the rabbits, the tumbled walls of the fishing camp there, the waterhole.
We slept well-wrapped in spare clothes and sacks. I woke towards dawn, Gulse cold in my arms, lifeless. Telling her the story of her short life, promising she would be taken by the gods to meet her mother and father beneath the sea, I slipped her body over the stern as we sailed into the light.
Eight.
Jenek sailed the other boat well. When Larish took the tiller, they slowed so Tobik who was steering our boat spilled wind. Ansik did better than I expected but looked askance at me several times. After that, I was careful not to let him see me watching. Larish, I thought, seemed to have forgotten anything of what her family had done at Hornish. In fact, she seemed intent on making eyes at the two older boys, who took no notice.
On the third day, we saw birds working, sailed through them, and landed five karfish. We sucked the liquid out of their eyes, heads, and bodies, filleted and handed around strips of raw flesh. Because we hove-to and lay lashed together each night, it took four days to reach Rabbit Island.
The children splashed ashore and scampered up and down the sand. Rabbits sprang about their feet as they ran up to the top of the island and back. I listened to their yells and wild laughter and realised that was what had been missing.
Tobik and Jenek rigged blocks and tackle, anchored them to a log, and we pulled up the boats, and made a shelter of the sails spread over oars. Peck, Lorne, and Ruka tried to catch rabbits, and Ansik was already gathering mussels. He would see something that needed doing and do it without being told.
That night, I reminded the others of the old story of how our ancestors came from the north.
“Three days west and twelve days south they sailed. And they came to Hornish.”
“Why are you telling us this?” asked Jenek. He and Tobik had searched the island, and I had seen their disappointment.
“I think we should sail back to the old land to the north, as my father said. Follow the old sailing directions in reverse. Twelve days north and three days east. But we must do it at once, get settled before winter.”
Jenek and Tobik agreed; Ansik, too.
“Why don’t we stay here?” said Larish. I felt a sickening flare of hatred for her, but tried to ignore it.
“No timber, no shelter, no firewood,” Jenek told her.
“Not enough water,” said Tobik. “Not enough food. No decent soil for gardens. And rabbits. They’d eat anything we tried to grow. Besides, once Lador settles Hornish, the soldiers are going to find this place.”
“Just stay here for winter.”
“And die?” asked Jenek.
Larish turned away, looking unconvinced. As for the children, they decided sailing north would be an adventure. Despite being cooped up in the boat to Rabbit Island, they had little real idea of the longer journey.
While a southerly blew over, we netted fish and speared flounder to keep us going, and boiled oats, beans, and barley into a porridge each day. We dried all the mussels we could collect, rabbit meat, and any fish we didn’t eat; the children told stories of what they saw happen in Hornish; and I tried to prepare them for the journey.
I was surprised by how easily everyone had agreed to my suggestion. Even Larish had fallen silent. Then I realised it was because they wanted somebody to decide it for them, and that person had to be me. I still had the power of the Selene.
“We can do it,” I said. “But we must be clever and lucky.”
“I’m clever,” said Ruka.
“I’m lucky,” Peck told him. They rolled over and over, shoving, punching each other, yelling. Lorne looked at me and smiled.
“I’m lucky, too,” she said, and I hugged her. Since that night when she appeared out of the dark, I had become fond of Lorne.
Be careful, I thought to myself. Do not offend Larish. She is her sister.
I almost said again that sailing north was what our parents were going to do anyway, then thought it better to say nothing of them. In their curious way, the children were forgetting ever having had any other family.
You are going to have to do the same thing, I told myself.