Gruff stood before the Weeping Stone and let his breathing slow after the steep climb up the hill. The small rock in his hand seemed to quiver with energy, making his fingers twitch, but maybe that was just his nerves.
All was quiet. The calm determination that had carried him across the moonlit island ebbed slowly away into uncertainty. What was he supposed to do now?
‘Er…’ he began, his voice sounding flat against the night. ‘Helo? Gof? ’Dach chi yma?’ Hello? Blacksmith? Are you here?
Silence. Nothing moved near the Weeping Stone.
Gruff stepped towards the mass of rock, dimly grey in the moonlight. He brought his sea-soaked hand up and balanced the little wet stone on one of the jagged protrusions. A trickle of water ran down from it. Gruff stepped back and craned his head to see the top of the Weeping Stone, but there was no figure.
‘Hello?’ he called again. ‘I want to know what’s going on.’
Another gleaming trail of water sprang from the Weeping Stone, far away from where he had placed the little rock. Gruff’s heart thumped in his throat. Another rivulet, and another, and then the stone burst with water like a fountain; it whispered down the sides and bubbled into the silver grass at its foot.
Gruff raised his eyes back to the top of the rock. A figure crouched there, hand held out to him.
‘A welwch chi fi?’ the blacksmith said. Are you seeing me?
‘Ydw,’ Gruff said. I am. He tried to steady his breathing. ‘What happens if I take your hand?’
The blacksmith stretched further towards him, clearly desperate for him to make contact. ‘You cross halfway.’
Halfway? Halfway to what? The line from Nain’s song about the Sleepers flashed into Gruff’s mind: bridging is their work. Perhaps the blacksmith was on the other side of that bridge.
It was all connected but none of it made sense. But then this was what he had come here for. Answers.
He reached up and took the blacksmith’s calloused hand.
The sun came out.
Gruff yelped as the ground plunged from under him, replaced by slapping blue waves. He was instantly soaked up to his chest and his shoulder jolted painfully as it took his weight. The blacksmith gripped his hand tighter and hauled him up to the top of the rock. He sat there, dripping, and stared.
The Weeping Stone stood in a calm blue sea under a dazzlingly bright early-morning sky, the sun newly-risen and already hot. Behind the Weeping Stone, the six Sleepers led towards the shore where an unusually high tide hid the beach. Gruff looked automatically for the farmhouse and instead saw a cluster of round stone huts with shingle roofs.
‘What’s happened?’ Gruff asked.
‘What’s important,’ the blacksmith replied in a hard, determined voice, ‘is what is about to happen.’
‘Why is this stone in the centre of the island now?’
‘An angry man moved it.’ The blacksmith lay full length on the stone and plunged her arm into the water. ‘Ever since then, the Sleepers have mourned the loss of their own.’ She closed her eyes and fished around in the waves with her hand.
Gruff began to wonder if there were going to be any proper answers to his questions. ‘Why was the man angry?’
‘He believed Annwn to be wicked. He broke the bridge by moving the Seventh and now nothing can reach Dylan.’
‘Who’s Annwn? Who’s Dylan?’ Gruff snapped, feeling totally lost and more than a little annoyed.
‘Annwn is a place, not a person. And you will soon see Dylan.’ To his surprise, Gruff saw tears bright in her eyes. He paused, beginning to link things together.
‘Is Dylan the person you said would kill us all?’ he asked.
A single tear tracked through the soot on the blacksmith’s cheek. ‘He does not mean to,’ she whispered.
She pulled her arm out of the water and stood in one swift movement. In her hand she held the hilt of a sword.
Finish the sword. Was this the one? Gruff stepped closer, fascinated. The hilt held in the blacksmith’s hand was blue-silver and covered in interlacing patterns, similar to the sword in the museum. These patterns, however, writhed and wriggled as though alive. Tiny, impressionist seals and gaping whales, eel-like fish and serpentine sea-dragons, all slithering amongst tendrils of sinuous seaweed in constant movement. The hilt was formed of fluid, quivering, impossible water. Gruff reached out and tried tentatively to touch it, but his finger passed right through as though it was a hologram.
‘Weird,’ he breathed. He glanced up at the blacksmith. ‘If you have it, can’t you finish it?’
The blacksmith ignored him and crouched at the edge of the rock, taking a block-headed hammer from her belt. It seemed to be made entirely of stone, its handle finely carved with animals and plants. Something in the back of Gruff’s mind missed a step. She hadn’t had a hammer before, had she? Just two sets of tongs.
Gruff crouched beside her. ‘Why can’t you finish it?’ he asked again. The blacksmith showed no sign of having heard him and Gruff had the sudden impression that she did not know he was there. He waved a hand in front of her face but she did not flinch. He sat back and shivered in his cold, wet clothes, wondering what to do now.
The blacksmith plunged the sword hilt into the water. She pulled it out and thrust it back in. She kept doing this for a while, then brought the hammer down whilst the hilt was underwater and beat the space just below the hilt. Instead of passing through the swell, the hammer connected with something hard. Gruff heard a clear, sweet note carry to him through the water, followed by another and another as the hammer beat down again.
The sun was hot and the breeze warm and Gruff slowly began to dry off as the blacksmith repeated these movements. After the first couple of rounds, he realised that the sword hilt took the same number of duckings and hits each time – seven. Seven ducks, seven heavy, hard swings with the hammer. Each blow fell a little further away from the hilt as though the blacksmith was beating out the long, broad length of an invisible, wide-bladed sword. Sweat bristled on her frowning, concentrating face. She never once looked at Gruff and he was certain now that he was only a witness to this scene. As the sword gained length and his clothes dried, tacky and salt-stained, a creeping foreboding spread through him. The sword must be nearly done now, surely? But she would not finish it; the blacksmith’s command had told him that. So what would stop her?
He counted, watching the blacksmith’s hands with half-unfocused eyes. Seven ducks, seven blows. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven ducks.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven blows.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven ducks.
One, two…
A movement broke the calm surface of the water nearby. Gruff looked towards it, expecting a seal.
It was not a seal.
A lithe, man-shaped form dipped up and down through the slight swell like a playful dolphin. The figure had two arms and two legs but Gruff saw tough webbing between the fingers and toes and skin covered in scales that flickered slate-grey and rainbow bright as the light caught them. The neat slashes of gills showed dark on his neck. There was a smile that was almost a laugh on the figure’s open, interested face and Gruff could not be fearful of what he was seeing, unexpected as it was. He smiled, too, and glanced at the blacksmith. She was in the midst of the ducking and did not look up.
The man-fish dived below water, heading for the seventh Sleeper, and the blacksmith raised her hammer high for the first of the next seven ringing blows.
Gruff saw, with awful certainty, what was going to happen.
‘Look out!’ he shouted. He grabbed for the blacksmith’s arm but she could not hear him and his hand passed through her as though she was not there. Down came her hammer, plunging through the water with the full force of her powerful swing.
Instead of one of the sweet, clear notes, that must have carried far beneath the sea and brought the smiling man to see what was happening, there came a terrible, bubbling scream of pain. Blood spread through the water.
The blacksmith’s mouth pulled wide with horror. ‘Dylan!’
The soft swell round the seventh Sleeper turned into sudden, jagged waves. Gruff saw the man-fish flailing and thrashing through the spray. Gruff stretched towards him, slipping on the slick surface of the stone. Beside him, the blacksmith was also reaching out desperately, but the man-fish slipped further away from them, back out into the bay. The sea howled and groaned, a storm rising from nowhere.
The man-fish was gone and the waves clawed at Gruff, dragging him towards the edge of the rock. The sea yelled and thrashed like the wounded man-fish had done, and Gruff tipped towards it.
The blacksmith grabbed his arm and pulled him back. He turned on her, angry and scared. ‘You couldn’t see me!’ he shouted. ‘You couldn’t hear me! You hit him!’
Her face was running with tears. ‘I can’t change what’s already happened.’
There was a yawing hole in Gruff’s chest. ‘Will he be okay?’
‘No.’ The blacksmith’s face twisted as she held back a sob.
‘He’s not – he’s not going to die?’
‘No. He will live on and on in agony, and the island will pay.’ She raised her voice to be heard above the roar of the buffeting sea. ‘Finish the sword. It was forged to break waves. Finish the sword, or he’ll kill us all.’
The sun was the moon and the day was night, and Gruff stood alone and sea-soaked on the bone-dry surface of the Weeping Stone.