Gruff looked at Nain’s hands, clasping and unclasping. She seemed defeated already, as though there was nothing to be done – and coming from his brave, determined Nain, who had looked after him and scolded him and teased him and always been the strong one, that scared him. But if there really was no hope, why had the blacksmith spoken to him?
‘I met the blacksmith, Nain,’ he began, ‘and she told me – us – to finish the sword. I saw her hit Dylan with her hammer, but it was an accident. And now Mat’s pulled the sword out of the sea, so all we need is the hammer, and we can finish it. And maybe that’ll put things right.’
Though I don’t see how, he thought. How would finishing the sword stop the storm?
Nain looked at him with slightly unfocussed eyes, still dwelling on her own memories. Slowly he saw her come back to herself, her fear giving way to bafflement. ‘Would you like to try a different language?’ she said at last. ‘I’m not sure I know the one you’re speaking.’
Mat grinned and held up the sword hilt still clutched in her left hand. Nain’s eyes grew big and round behind her thick glasses and she reached towards it.
‘Careful!’ Gruff and Mat yelped as one, but Nain’s fingers went straight through and came away wet. Gruff smiled a little. It wasn’t only him who couldn’t touch it, then.
‘Explain,’ Nain said softly.
When they had finished, Nain sat back in her chair and looked up at the sky, tapping the tip of her nose. ‘Well,’ she murmured, after a while. ‘Well.’
‘All right then,’ she said, looking back at them, and Gruff saw a gleam in her eyes that he knew was hope. ‘There hasn’t been a blacksmith on the island for over a hundred years, but the last one was on this farm. Start in the toolshed. We’ve kept all great-great-great-great-uncle Aled’s tools, so if he had the hammer that’s where it would be.’
Nain returned to her accounts with new vigour. There was little use in her looking for something she had never seen and, storm or no storm, if the accounts didn’t get done the farm would be sunk anyway.
Gruff led Mat to the toolshed and they peered into the cool, dim interior of the small stone building. A line of square windows marched across the back wall, but they were grimy with cobwebs and there was very little light. Gruff ran to the farmhouse for torches and he and Mat began picking through the boxes of dusty, rusty tools of generations past. Hoes and trowels, pokers and saws. In one corner stood a huge, weighty anvil, piled high with boxes of shapeless metal lumps, horseshoes, sheep bells and nails, and an entire crate of hammers, none of which was the right one. Gruff couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that they were looking in the wrong place, but he couldn’t think where else to try.
‘What will happen if I put the sword down?’ Mat asked.
Gruff looked up from the ancient mouse nest he had just found under a pile of flowerpots. ‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s hurting my arm. Shall I try?’
Gruff watched as she carefully placed the hilt down on the shed floor and released her grip.
The hilt melted instantly away into a puddle of water. Mat gasped. ‘Oh no! What if I can’t get it back?’
‘I … I don’t know.’
‘I’ll be back,’ Mat said, already on her way out of the toolshed. Gruff watched her run across the farmyard, heading for the nearest bit of sea, and then carried on his search. He opened boxes and poked down the back of shelves. He picked gingerly through the contents of rotting canvas bags. He glanced occasionally at the puddle of dirty water in the middle of the floor. He hoped Mat could recall the sword.
Gruff couldn’t move the anvil, even with all the boxes off it, but he climbed on top and shone his torch down behind. There was something there, a leather pouch hanging from a nail. He unhooked the bag and pulled open the drawstring, shining his torch into it.
Inside was the hammer.
Gruff made a sort of excited hiccup. But when he pulled the hammer out, his relief turned to disappointment. This hammer was too small, too light. He tapped it with his fingernail and realised it was made of wood, stained grey to resemble metal or stone. It was only the length of his hand, a toy. But in all other respects it was exactly like the hammer he had seen hanging at the blacksmith’s belt. It had the same blocky head and thick handle, carved with plants and animals – a snake-bodied, dog-headed beast, a bird, a bear. Everything was perfect in miniature. Gruff ran his finger carefully over the beautiful carving, knowing that if he wasn’t so disappointed he would be impressed by the workmanship.
He carried the hammer into the daylight and perched on an upside-down bucket to inspect it more closely. The person who’d made this had seen the real thing. The proof was there, in every painstakingly carved line.
Gruff had hung the bag over his arm by its drawstring; now he turned it inside out, to check he hadn’t missed anything. A scrap of folded paper fluttered to the ground. He pounced on it as the wind tried to whip it away across the yard. It looked old – slightly grey and very thin. Very carefully, he unfolded it. It was covered in Welsh, written in pencil in a looping but untidy hand, as though the writer had once been taught a beautiful cursive but had never really used it. The spelling was old-fashioned, and Gruff had to read it slowly to get every word.
The hammer of the blacksmith.
Last seen in 1549 by Gareth ap Ifan, then a child. The jetty was swept away the next day and many lives were lost. Gareth carved the hammer, and when he was a master blacksmith himself he gave it to his apprentice to preserve, along with a legend that the hammer will be needed to finish a sword.
I do not know whether the hammer in the legend is this one, or whether this wooden toy is just a replica. Perhaps the whole thing is simply a story.
I have no apprentice to pass the hammer on to. I am writing what I know about the hammer here, and I will put it somewhere safe in the hopes that a blacksmith comes after me to continue the tradition. Whatever the truth of the story, the wooden hammer is a beautiful thing.
The inscription was added by fisherman Tomos ap Rhys sometime in the 1760s. I don’t know why.
Aled ap Owain, 3 June 1886
Gruff read the note three times. It gave him the same strange feeling he sometimes got from listening to Nain and Taid and Iolo’s island stories – the feeling that he was simply a pinprick of life, a moment in time, on this tiny rock in the immeasurable ocean. Such a feeling might have made him feel lonely and insignificant, but it did not. It was more like a warm, strong embrace of time and memory, aligning his heartbeat with that of the island.
Gareth ap Ifan had seen the ghostly blacksmith, over four hundred and fifty years ago. She had given him the same warning, the same instruction, that she had given Gruff. Finish the sword. Gareth had carved the hammer, perhaps to help him remember. To help him look.
He can’t have finished the sword though. Because over four hundred and fifty years on, the blacksmith had appeared to Gruff.
Why now?
Finish it, or he’ll kill us all.
Had the danger got worse?
The jetty was swept away the next day and many lives were lost.
Would the next storm destroy the whole island?
Gruff shivered and picked the hammer up again, turning it over in his hands and marvelling at its age. What had Uncle Aled meant by someone adding an inscription in the 1760s? Did he mean the animals? But surely they were part of the original carving.
Then Gruff found it. An inscription in careful, neat block capitals on the underside of the hammer’s head, the letters small but clear.
HIRAETH.
Hiraeth. The feeling of belonging and yearning and love for a place. He’d seen that somewhere, really recently…
The Weeping Stone! Gruff shot to his feet and the wind grabbed the abandoned paper and raced with it across the yard. Gruff ran after it, excitement hammering in time with his heart. Everything led back to the Weeping Stone – to the seventh Sleeper. He checked his pocket for the rock from the geology cabinet as he ran. When he caught the paper, he grabbed it with salt-wet fingers.
He folded the paper and replaced it in the bag with the replica hammer. He hung them behind the anvil and closed the shed door. He returned the torches to the house.
He pulled the small rock out of his pocket and the sea swelled in his fist.
‘Gruff!’ Mat came running into the yard. ‘I can get it back! I tested, loads of times. It doesn’t matter where I put it down, it’s always back in the sea!’
‘That’s great,’ Gruff said, distracted.
Mat looked down at his hand and frowned. ‘You’re dripping.’
Gruff opened his fist and showed her the stone on his palm. ‘I think I know where the hammer is.’
‘Matylda! Babcia Marysia’s on the phone – come now or you’ll miss her!’ Zosia called, appearing round the corner from Blacksmith’s Cottage.
Mat shot an anguished look from her mother to Gruff and back again. She itched at her neck. Gruff saw that there was a red, raw mark there. ‘Tell me about it after,’ she said, and he could hear what the words cost her. She went to her mum, and Gruff began to run.
He raced across the tussocky bumps of Evan’s cow field and scrambled up the hill, a completely different journey in the afternoon sun from the early morning moon. Urgency pulsed through him, and excitement, and fear that he was wrong. The wind seemed first to run with him then turn and hinder him, playing with him as though he were a storm-blown leaf.
Gruff crested the summit of the hill. The Weeping Stone – the seventh Sleeper – was dry and empty. No blacksmith, no picnickers. Gruff clambered up it and traced his finger over the letters he had found the day before.
H I R A E T H
The shape of the letters matched those of the inscription on the replica hammer. They must both be the work of Tomos ap Rhys, fisherman on the island in the 1760s. Was it a clue to the whereabouts of the real hammer?
Hiraeth. A yearning, a belonging.
The Weeping Stone wanted to return to the sea, and the small rock wanted to return to the Weeping Stone. Gruff felt sure of this, although leaving it perched on top of the Weeping Stone last night had not worked, as it had turned up in his room again. What if the stone needed to be returned to the exact crack it had originally been chipped from?
Gruff slid back down to the ground and eyed the Weeping Stone. It was big, and it was pitted and jagged as all the Sleepers were. He held the small stone out towards the rock. ‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘You can move, so show me where you want to be.’
The stone remained innocently still in his palm.
Gruff moved slowly round the Weeping Stone, waving his hand up and down near it as though he was metal detecting. With each fruitless step, his heart sank. Was he really going to have to find one crack amongst so many? He wouldn’t finish checking over the whole stone before his birthday next year, let alone before the storm. He came full circle to where he had started, and climbed back up the stone so he could reach the higher bits. He’d really hoped this would work.
The stone in his palm twitched.
Gruff gasped and looked down at it, but it was still again. He ran his fingers over the surface of the Weeping Stone where his hand had stopped, and found a crevice. A crevice that seemed to be the right size, the right shape.
Taking a deep breath and preparing himself for disappointment, Gruff leant over the edge of the Weeping Stone and carefully pushed the small, brine-wet rock into the hole.
It slotted in like the final satisfying piece of a jigsaw puzzle. In an instant, the crack around it fused as though it had never been there. Crouched on top of the Weeping Stone, Gruff waited on tenterhooks, not sure what to do next.
A tremendous, ear-pulsing CRACK rent the air. Gruff flinched and lost his balance. As he began to fall he saw the blacksmith’s hammer, resting snugly in the surface of the Weeping Stone as though it had always been there. He flung out his arm and scrabbled at it as he slipped, stubbing his fingers and just managing to get a grip on the handle.
He was on the ground, the breath knocked out of him. He lay on his back and gasped quick, noisy gulps of air, triumph pounding through his veins and the blacksmith’s hammer clutched tightly in his hand.