THE LIGHTS OF THE SEVERN BRIDGE were just starting to glimmer as Ralph helped Marion and her father push their surprisingly obdurate boat into the rising tide. Ralph, as he heaved, was no longer the frail greatgrandmaster-to-be of other years. With his ragged clothes, with his browned skin and sun-bleached hair, he’d come to look more and more like the other figures who wandered the shore. So did Marion, although she was merely slipping back to a natural state. Soon, dark-haired, barefoot and swiftly busy, both full-grown but still impossibly young, even their appearances had grown somewhat alike. The other shorefolk who waved and chatted to them would sometimes ask if they weren’t perhaps related?
Mud slipped under his feet and knees, and then, with a sucking rush, the keel slid from them. Ralph, as he attempted to catch and climb into it, was surprised by the sudden lightness with which the boat skipped away from him, and fell headlong into the deepening water. A momentary panic as salt-bitter water rushed into his mouth and throat, then Marion was helping him up.
‘Can’t swim, eh?’ Her father chuckled. ‘And I thought you said you’d been on lots of boats.’
More carefully, as Marion helped steady the boat, he climbed in. He was soaked, but the air and the water were too warm for any discomfort, and it hardly seemed worth explaining that the ships he’d sailed in had possessed ballrooms and promenade decks. This was a different kind of sailing entirely, just as it was another kind of living, and it was amazing how easily the weathertopless sail filled even on a night this still.
Each day now had an easy rhythm. In the mornings, Marion and Ralph often investigated the rocks on the seaward of Durnock Head. Apart from its geological significance, it was a marvellous landscape for climbing, and for Marion, much as for Ralph, this summer was a chance for her to experience the freedoms of a childhood she’d scarcely known. As the air across the Bristol Channel grew impossibly clear and the ships became toys you could cup in your hands, they would begin to unprise the shale, each layer breaking with that sense of newness which only the chink of a hammer could create. Sometimes, they would discover a scatter of shells, some would be recognisably like the ones they found every day on the shore, whilst others would be strange. Or they would find worm-casts, or odd things which looked like giant woodlice. Ocean drawn back to ocean, they wetted the facets in nearby pools, and Ralph imagined he was moving beneath the waters of some lost sea.
They often went to Clyst at lunchtime, but the other Prices scarcely saw the vast distance which Ralph had travelled to sit at their kitchen table. Ralph’s skin was tide-marked with salt and sunburn, and he had a decent knowledge of the shore, even if he did give some of its creatures the strangest names. He’d even absorbed a little of the western accent. Only Denise asked the sort of questions which you might expect to have answered by someone high-guilded. But London was a shrug. Paris was a smile and a vague shake of the head.
By mid-afternoon, the heat drove them to the fragrant shade of the citrus grove, or they headed down Invercombe’s dimming stairways to the cool alcove of its reckoning engine. Once oiled and brushed of dust and rust, and peeled of their cobwebs, the device’s tumblers and levers still moved with the slick ease of all good machinery as Ralph and Marion attempted to input the information they’d gathered about life on the shore into punch-cards. The work was considerable, but he was sure they were making progress.
Now, the evening had settled into glowing night, and they were reaching deeper waters where the air changed its moods and scents. Ralph glanced at Marion’s father—her dad, as he’d come to think of him—who was nudging the wooden tiller with his calloused fingers. Marion, meanwhile, was holding the boom rope. They both had this careless manner when they were doing the work of shorefolk, although Ralph had known long before tonight’s dunking that this was deceptive. The skills they possessed were as complex as any of the Great Guilds, and considerably more fascinating. He’d been out with Marion’s brother Owen on a mudhorse to help clear and collect the salmon traps. He’d helped Mam strip willow switches, and he’d headed with the whole village on magical nights when everyone went eel-trapping, pushing the fizzing chemical lights beneath the thigh-deep water and steering the sleek, undulating bodies into whispering nets. Ralph had done all of these things, and rejoiced in them. And soon, it would be Midsummer, and he already knew this Midsummer would be marvellous and entirely different, for the plans and the preparations were enormous. Even tonight’s voyage was part of them, although he still didn’t know quite how or why.
There was darker water now, so clear you could see right down into bottomless nothing. Marion’s dad was murmuring instructions, checking the distant landmarks. The Temple of Winds was just a glint of moonlight. Lights scattered north towards Avonmouth clustered as if drawn on strings towards the tiara of the Severn Bridge. Big ships hung tall across the waters, sleepy-still as they waited at anchor with lights at their topmasts, or churning ablaze through the main outer dredge-ways as they went about the business of the guilded world. You could see inside the lit windows of their cabins, and breathe the smoky rush they bore from their weathertops and engines.
Marion tugged the boom. Laying a quick hand on Ralph’s knee, which sent a warm shudder through him, she squeezed past to take the rudder. Dad leaned over the side, peering into the depthless waters. He then began to stir a stick of driftwood and mutter something until threads of faint luminosity started to form. Was this some phosphorous effect? But Dad was still muttering, almost singing, words too quick and slurred for Ralph to catch. A glass float—sparkling blue, a mirror of the night—bobbed up. Dad lifted it into the boat. A thin strip of tether, then a thicker stream of rope, followed.
Ralph helped pull whilst Marion coiled and stowed, with the exquisite press of her forearm coming and going against his back until the rope lay coiled wyredark on the floor of the boat in the gaining light of the rising moon. He’d just witnessed, he realised, the casting of a spell. But now a crate was emerging and he was too absorbed in getting the thing over the side. He had to lean so far back against its weight that he feared they’d be capsized. Then, in a final rush, the crate was on board.
Gushing slats revealed the green shapes of bottles. Dad gave a wide grin. ‘Nothing but the best for this Midsummer, eh? Now—let’s get back to shore and have this stuff hidden before we run into the bloody Excise Men …’