Gruff stared at the midnight glow of his ceiling. Dad had been as good as his word, and Gruff now knew everything there was to know about the farm’s finances.
It didn’t look good.
Dad had told him about the accounts, the running costs of the farm and the dent in income from losing the wool through the leaking roof last year. He had told Gruff how the gift shops were struggling themselves, and the hotel that had asked for wool runners was considering getting them from a big commercial company instead. He had told him that he didn’t know what else he could do.
Gruff had planned to exchange information for information and tell Dad about everything that had happened with him and Mat – but after Dad finished, Gruff just sat and stared at the patterns in the hearthrug for a long, long silent while, until Nain forced a game of dominoes on both her son and grandson to try and save the mood.
Gruff couldn’t tell Dad what had happened. Dad was worried enough as it was. And Gruff also couldn’t quite bring himself to admit to Nain that he and Mat had nearly been lost at sea (again). So he kept his own news tightly locked inside his head, where it battled for space with everything Dad had told him, and a deep suspicion of Nain’s made-up dominoes rules.
He put one hand out from under the duvet and felt for the hammer on his bedside table. He wrapped his fingers round the handle and held it up in front of him so that it was a dark silhouette against the ceiling. A slice of moonlight through the curtains told him it was another bright night outside. He itched to go and see it, to climb the Sleepers and watch the sea. They called him. He thought of little Prem, climbing the first. Of Rosie dropping her bucket and heading for danger. Of Mat, constantly drawn to their lure. If the Sleepers called to them in their beds, would they go?
He pushed himself up and leapt to the window, fear gripping him. Pulling back the curtain, he saw to his relief that the Sleepers were empty – and to his amazement that they were high and dry above the sea.
‘Wow.’ Gruff grinned. The lowest tide he had ever seen was silently sucking the sea away into the darkness. Every one of the six Sleepers reared up from glistening sand, the sea beyond a gently lapping fringe to the world.
And there was a seventh stone, and upon it a tall, cloaked figure.
Gruff was out of the house with a jumper pulled on over his pyjamas, his wellingtons dragged onto his bare feet and the hammer in his hand before he had consciously made the decision to move. He stumble-ran in the chill air, his ankles rubbing in his wellies.
‘Blacksmith!’ Gruff slap-thudded down the wet sand and drew up beside the seventh Sleeper, the Weeping Stone. ‘Blacksmith!’
The blacksmith did not seem to hear him. She stared out to sea. The moonlight showed the smudges of soot on her clothes and face, her calloused palms, the empty loop for the hammer at her belt. A wind that was not in Gruff’s night lifted the cloak on her shoulders and ruffled her hair.
‘Please!’ Gruff stood on the thin stretch of sand between the stone and the quiet waves and craned his neck back to see the blacksmith, waving his hands up and down as though he was trying to hail an aeroplane. ‘I need to know how to finish the sword – we’ve tried, me and Mat, but we can’t make it work. What do we need to do? Please! Blacksmith!’
No response. The sand sucked and squelched under Gruff’s wellies, the sea already on the turn and beginning to lap at his heels.
‘Please!’
He put his hand out to the seventh Sleeper but instead of meeting the rock, his fingers passed straight through as though the blacksmith and her stone were ghosts. Or maybe I’m the ghost, Gruff thought, shivering. One pinprick of time in the millennia the blacksmith had watched pass by.
Not knowing what else to try, Gruff brought the hammer up and touched it to the seventh Sleeper. It made a connection, stone on stone. There was a dull crack, like the sound of an explosion a long way off, and the impact jarred back into Gruff’s elbow and sent him stumbling into the small, hungry waves. He heard a gasp and snapped his head up. The blacksmith was gazing at him as though she had never seen him before. As though she had been sleeping and woken to find herself in a strange place. Her eyes flicked to the hammer in his hand.
‘Cwblhewch y bont!’ she said. Complete the bridge.
The bridge? Nain’s old song said the Sleepers were bridging something. Did the blacksmith want him to put the Weeping Stone back on the beach?
‘How?’ Gruff called. ‘I don’t know how!’
The blacksmith touched the empty hammer loop at her belt. ‘They want to be together.’
Gruff looked down at the hammer in his hand. What did she mean? That the hammer needed to be back with her? He reached up and tried to hand it over, but the blacksmith made no move to take it – and a moment later, she and the stone were gone.
‘Come back!’ he shouted. ‘Come back!’ He kicked the soft sand where the stone had been. The sea bubbled up to fill the hole and still he was alone. How could he return the hammer to her if she didn’t even try to take it?
Unless … unless that wasn’t what she had meant.
The hammer was carved from the Weeping Stone itself, the lonely seventh Sleeper that had been moved so many years ago. Was the blacksmith telling him that the hammer wanted to be with the Weeping Stone? But if that was the case, how come Gruff had been able to pull the hammer free in the first place?
‘Oh,’ Gruff said softly, and he stepped forward into the space where the seventh Sleeper had once stood. They want to be together. It wasn’t an instruction to give the hammer to the blacksmith, or to take it back where he had found it. It was a fact. The seven Sleepers wanted to be together, and the hammer was the key.
Gruff ran his thumb over the decorated stone of the hammer’s handle. A piece of the Weeping Stone, of the seventh Sleeper itself. ‘You belong here,’ he said. ‘This is your home.’ He touched the head of the hammer down to the wet sand and an almost painful sense of excitement, intertwined with loneliness and longing, hit him so strongly he nearly let go. He took several careful breaths, hope bringing a grin to his face. Then he wrapped his other hand round the hammer’s handle and walked in a wide circle, dragging the hammer through the sand and leaving a trail behind. The sea bubbled and bloomed into the track. Yearning rocked him, the emotions of someone else – something else.
He completed the outline of the place where the seventh Sleeper ought to stand and lifted the hammer from the line with difficulty, the desperate homesickness now coming over him in physical waves that made his legs tremble and his arms weak. He stood in the centre of his creation and watched the sea creep nearer.
The circle looked complete but didn’t feel it. It was as though he had missed something, like forgetting to dot an i in a sentence. Like an electrical circuit without any power, ready to spark to life but unable to do so. He’d outlined the body of the stone, but not its heart.
He dropped to his knees, swinging the hammer round and down. The stone head thudded into the soft, sucking sand in the very centre of the circle.
A desperate, aching shock of need and want. Gruff stayed on his knees, the wet sand soaking into his pyjamas and the sea running into the tops of his wellies. He couldn’t move; his hands seemed glued around the handle of the hammer and the hammer was too heavy to lift. His whole body shook with the emotions coursing through it.
He knew, with a wild, moonlit clarity, that the Weeping Stone was on the move.