‘Wow,’ Mat said, stopping to catch her breath as they reached the top of the steep hill. ‘It’s massive.’
‘Yup.’ Gruff looked at the Weeping Stone. He knew the whole island inside out, but this rock never failed to be a surprise whenever he saw it, as though he was not expecting it to be there.
It towered above them, three times as tall as the tops of their heads, pitted and rough and solid with a base so wide that five people could not have quite touched fingers round it. Mat ran forwards and scrambled up it like a monkey, slipping and scrabbling for foot and hand holds, but so determined that before Gruff had put the rucksack down she was standing on top of the rock, turning a slow, careful circle to see the island and sea stretched out beneath her.
‘There’s Trefynys,’ she pointed. ‘And look, there’s your farm. And I can see John in our garden! And there’s the fishermen’s cottages. And there’s the Sleepers.’ She crouched and ran her hands over the rock. ‘I can’t find any water.’
Gruff unearthed the sandwiches and came over. ‘That’s because there isn’t any. It’s just another story. Anyway, it’s only meant to weep when the island’s in danger.’
‘Good,’ Mat said cheerfully. ‘We can’t be in any danger then!’
‘I hope not,’ Gruff muttered. He waved the wax-wrapped sandwiches at Mat. ‘Catch.’ He threw the parcel and Mat caught it and placed it on the rock, then bent down and stretched her hand to him as he climbed up towards her.
Gruff took Mat’s hand and his world changed shape.
The sea surged in a roaring wave through Mat’s fingers and up Gruff’s arm; it burst in his chest and slapped against his ribcage. He could not breathe. He was drowning on dry land.
Gruff tore his hand out of Mat’s and leapt back down to the ground, landing heavily and dropping to his knees. He gripped the grass and took deep, shuddering breaths. The sensation of the sea within him was gone, vanished the instant his hand left Mat’s. His heart was beating much too hard, but no waves pushed against it now. Gritty soil rucked under his nails.
‘Gruff?’ Mat’s voice seemed to come from a long way away. A second later the ground juddered beneath him as she jumped down from the rock. He felt her hand on his shoulder and flinched away, but this time the touch brought nothing. No leaping waves invading his chest.
‘Gruff, are you okay?’
Gruff rocked back onto his heels and looked at Mat. She had her phone in her hand and was staring at him, wide-eyed and anxious. ‘Do you want me to call your dad?’
‘No,’ Gruff managed to say. He pushed himself to his feet.
Mat ran to the rucksack and returned with the bottle of water. Gruff took it, careful not to let their fingers touch.
The water washed the last of his shock away and his brain began to work again.
Mat was carrying the sea inside her.
Gruff eyed Mat sideways. She saw him looking and gave him a worried grin. ‘Better?’
‘Yeah, sorry.’ Gruff handed the bottle back to her. ‘I just – I thought I was going to faint … head rush, I guess.’
They clambered back up to the top of the Weeping Stone and shared cheese sandwiches. They ate in silence, Mat’s attention focussed on the long sweep of the beach and the Sleepers marching out from it and Gruff tracing the intricate patterns of the lichen on the rock and trying to think of a way to ask Mat about the rushing waves inside her.
He finished his sandwiches and began on one of the apples Dad had packed. As he did so, he found that his finger was no longer tracing the natural sprawl of the lichen but a defined line that the lichen seemed to follow. A cut in the rock, straight enough to be made by hand. Graffiti. There were patches of graffiti all over the Weeping Stone – names, dates, initials. Gruff loved trying to decipher it.
He scratched carefully around the line, trying not to disturb the slow-growing lichen too much. He just wanted to see if this was a date and if it was older than 1647, the current record for earliest date that had been found on the Weeping Stone.
It wasn’t a date; it was a letter. He had found the second downward stroke of a capital H. He put his apple core in the empty wax wrap and shifted position, squinting down at the lichen-covered surface and trying to discern the rest of the word.
The letters were all capitals. They were carefully formed: deeply cut with a knife and with extra little lines at the ends of the staves. From the handwriting of the dated graffiti Gruff had seen, he guessed whoever had cut this had done so sometime in the 1700s. Over three hundred years before, someone had painstakingly carved a word into the Weeping Stone.
H I R A E T H
‘What are you looking at?’ Mat asked.
‘Graffiti,’ Gruff said. It seemed strange to say such a modern-sounding word after reading this long-ago person’s letters.
‘Is that an ‘h’?’ Mat twisted round and squinted at the rock. ‘What does it say? I woz ’ere?’
Gruff laughed. ‘It says hiraeth.’
‘Is that a name?’
‘No.’ Gruff thought for a moment. ‘It’s a feeling, I guess. There isn’t really an English word for it, but it’s like a sense of longing and belonging and…’ He paused, searching for the word Nain used to describe this. ‘Yearning. For a place, usually. Or an idea of a place.’
If Gruff had to leave the island, hiraeth is what he would feel for it. In a way, he felt hiraeth for it now – an almost painful feeling of belonging that was bittersweet and buried deep in his heart. It seemed an odd choice for a piece of graffiti. Perhaps its author had had to leave the island and this was their anchor to home. The thought made him sad.
Mat fiddled with her plaits and stared out towards the Sleepers. Without looking at Gruff, she asked, ‘Can you feel hiraeth for somewhere you’ve never been?’
Gruff shrugged. ‘Yeah, I guess so.’
The mournful whoop of a humpback whale came from Mat’s pocket and Gruff jumped. Mat laughed and answered her phone. ‘Cześć, Mama.’ She slithered down the side of the Weeping Stone and paced the top of the hill, talking in what Gruff guessed must be Polish.
Gruff stuffed the wax wrap into his pocket and braced his hands on the rock to start his climb down to the ground.
Liquid trickled under his palm and ran over his fingers. Surprised, Gruff pulled his right hand away. Glistening water sprang from a jagged cleft in the rock where his hand had rested, running away down the side of the stone like a tiny river.
The stone was weeping.
No. Shut up, Gruff told himself.
There was a perfectly ordinary explanation. Springs bursting from rocks weren’t that uncommon – it was just ground water, bubbling up from underneath. And if it only happened occasionally at the Weeping Stone, that would explain the legend.
It was exciting, really. He bet the water was really fresh and sweet, meeting the air here for the first time after a long, secret journey underground. He cupped his palm under the bubbling spring and sipped.
Salt danced across his tongue. Gruff spat the water back out. That wasn’t fresh. It must be contaminated to taste so salty. It tasted like –
‘The sea,’ Gruff whispered. It tasted like brine.
In the centre of the island, at its highest point, the Weeping Stone was crying salty tears.
Water seeped out from under his trainers, springing from a different crack in the rock. Gruff jumped to his feet, flailing his arms to keep his balance. He saw another spring, and another: rivers of water gushing from the stone, the lichen turning dark beneath them. Now the whole crown of the Weeping Stone was running with the sea and Gruff half slid, half fell to the ground amid a sudden, slick waterfall.
He turned round to face the stone again and bit back a scream.
A woman was crouched at the top. Her hair was grey-silver and wild and her face was young, smudged by something dark that stained her clothes as though she had been down a chimney. Her clothes were out of a storybook: loose brown trousers, soft boots, a beige tunic tied with a belt from which hung two pairs of different-shaped metal tongs. A stained, weather-worn cloak was clasped around her neck. Her eyes burned with desperation.
She put her hand out to him and Gruff stared at her and the Weeping Stone’s seething surface, grappling with fear.
‘A welwch chi fi?’ she said. Are you seeing me?
Gruff’s tongue would not cooperate. He nodded.
Shock and hope flashed across the woman’s face. ‘Finish the sword,’ she said.
‘What?’ Gruff had to force his mouth into the shape of the word.
The woman stretched her hand down towards him. ‘Finish it, or he’ll kill us all.’