by Joan Aiken
In a couple of minutes Gran returned.
“Gran?”
“Yes?”
I balked at the question I had really meant to ask and said instead, “How long does the crossing take?”
“Four hours, with a favoring wind and tide. Much longer, in contrary weather.”
“So we should get to the island by dawn.”
In reply she simply grunted. I was reminded of Lu-Lyn.
Gran had brought on board a great armful of seaweed—there were huge heaps of it all across the dockside, flung over the breakwater by the storm—and now she fetched out from her carrier-bag the casket containing Lu-Lyn’s ashes, and began wrapping it in seaweed and binding it with twine, until she had a ball about the size of a pillow.
To do this, she sat out in the stern of the boat, where there was light from the harbor lamps. And when she had finished she remained there, brooding, with her chin on her fists.
“Gran?”
“Go to sleep! Geordie won’t be back for a great while yet.”
“Gran, why did they poison the island?”
“I’ve told ye. It was a scientific experiment, to see which things survived. Birds, beasts, plants. They didna ask the views of any folk living there—just told them to pack up sticks and go! Superior accommodation was offered elsewhere.” Gran’s voice was loaded with sarcasm.
“Do you think the island is still poisoned?”
“I do not. My dreams tell me different. And this three-day blow—gales of a hundred-and-fifty, all that spray and spume and surf—I reckon that may well have rinsed the last bane and blight from the plants and stones. For those that dare I reckon it will now be safe to go back.”
“But will they be allowed?”
“That we shall see! But times differ now from what they were. These days folk stand up for their rights more boldly.”
“Gran?”
“Well?”
“You had a job on the island, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“What were you? What was the job called?”
“I was the Ridder. When folk asked me, I rid their crofts of pests—rats, it would be mostly. Or mice. One time ’twas mink, swum over from Panna, where they’d a mink farm.” She sniffed with fine scorn. “Killed all the puffins, those mink did. But I soon sorted them.”
“Do all the islands have a Ridder?”
“Many do. But in some the art is dying. ’Tis a pity …”
“Gran?”
“Well?”
“Why are you telling me all this now. Why not before?” was what I wanted to say. The words stuck in my throat. But Gran answered them unspoken.
“Why did I not speak to ye of these matters before?”
“Umm.”
“Mostly, the craft will be handed from mother to daughter. Or granddaughter. ’Tis in women’s hands.”
“So it should have passed from you to Lu-Lyn.”
“Aye. But then—first—I had to leave the island. And that pulled all amiss. Lu-Lyn was born on the island, and when your father moved to Kirkbrae after she was born, it clogged her spirit. Turned her twistways.”
“Yes,” I said. “It did that.”
“Then there was the accident.”
I remembered every minute of that ride. It was just before Gran’s move to Kirkbrae, the last month she’d spent in her cottage on Muckle Burra. Lu-Lyn had gone to spend a week with her. When we went to fetch her in Dad’s car, Lu-Lyn had raged and stormed.
“Why can’t I go and live with Gran? Why, why?”
“She won’t be there herself,” he said patiently. “She only has one more week in that croft. Then she’s moving to a flat in Kirkbrae. She’ll be near us. You’ll see her often.”
“It’s not the same! It won’t be the same!”
“No,” said Dad sighing. “But it may be better. New things may happen.”
“I don’t want new things. I want to go back there—now! I want to be with her that last week.”
“You can’t do that,” Dad said. “School, for one thing. And Gran’s busy. She has a deal to do, with her move.”
“If I can’t go back,” said Lu-Lyn, “if you won’t turn round and take me back now—this minute—I shall scream!”
“Scream away,” said Dad.
But Lu-Lyn’s screams were something else. When she screamed, Dad lost his concentration fatally, just for a second—she was screaming right in his ear, don’t forget—and the car went under an articulated truck.
When I came to, later, in hospital, Dad was dead and Mum was dead and I was told that, due to a spinal injury, I would never be able to command the use of my legs again.
Gran had moved to Kirkbrae and Lu-Lyn was living with her.
I would, too, as soon as I came out of hospital.
“Gran?”
“Well?”
“What happened to that silver necklace?”
“Mrs. Bateman brought it back. Said she was sorry. Found it lying on the earth on the vandalized grave. Took it, but then felt bad about it. Said would we forgive her and her son. I said, forgiveness was no trouble, but forgiveness was no help with healing. He and his mates did leave the pool of oil. Lu-Lyn did die because of that. Done is done. A curse does not die away. In fact it grows, like an avalanche. If the sorrow came from Bry himself, then he may be healed. Or will learn to live with his trouble. As you have learned to live, Davey.”
“Gran?”
“Yes, Davey?”
“Will the craft—the power—be handed on to me, now?”
“It may be so. Things are telling me that it may. Despite the fact that ye are a lad.”
“What is it that frightens creatures? So that they run off into the sea? How does this happen?”
“All ask that,” said Gran. “And the answer is, I don’t know. I believe what happens is that you put into the creatures’ minds the one thing they fear most in the world. Who knows what that may be? For mice, perhaps a cat. For rabbits, an eagle, for people, different things. So then they run. What do you fear most in the world, Davey?”
Something unknown—dark, powerful—perhaps the Wendigo, the great ghostly creature of the northern forests … The Bean-nighe, washing my shroud. Some huge being from the lost continents of prehistory?
“I’m not sure, Gran.”
“Whatever it is, it’s there, waiting. And that’s what I have the power to make them see, when the moment comes. Perhaps it is what Lu-Lyn saw, when she took that last leap. Perhaps it is what all people see when they die?”
“Is that what you think?”
“We’ll not ken that,” said Gran, “till we come to our ain leave-taking. Who knows, it may not be so for all? Some may welcome what they see. But that is the power that you may have, Davey, when I’m gone.”
I shivered. Like the thump and boom of the great waves outside the harbor-mole, it seemed a greater power than could or should be controlled by any human.
But Gran seemed quite calm about it.
9. The Laird
GEORDIE BROUGH CAME BACK AFTER long, cold hours of darkness, and handed over a flask of tea and a bundle of scones.
“Maggie sends her best respects.”
Then he grumpily set himself to starting the engine of the Bonny Mary and steering a carefully judged course between the lights of the twin piers. Gran watched him hard for ten minutes. After that, satisfied that he was sober, and had not lost his former skill, she came and sat by me under the canopy.
“My mother, my grandmother, her mother, her grandmother, going hundreds of years back, are all buried on the island,” she said. “So it seems the best for Lu-Lyn. I’ve a notion that the island wants her back. That’s why she pulled herself out of the grave.”
What about me? I wondered. I was not born on the island. Wi
ll it reject me? Will it be angry?
Gran echoed my thought. “I dinna ken,” she said, “if the island is fashed with me or if it wants me back. I am waiting to hear that.”
Once we were past the arms of the harbor and into the channel between the mainland and islands, we could feel the difference, but the sea was not so rough as I had expected. The waves had flattened, and the surface of the water looked like a huge silk quilt, inky black or steel blue, every patchwork square bigger than a giant’s meadow, all of them at different levels and different angles. The Bonny Mary seemed to be feeling her way through them like a tiny blind mouse, groping slowly across an endless floor covered by rugs of different sizes and shapes, all in motion, all slipping about in different directions.
The sky above was clearing. Acres of brilliant dark blue showed between torn rags of black cloud, and there were more stars than I had ever seen before, blazing in the rifts between the clouds, which rushed across the upper sky from west to east. But down here at water level it was calm enough.
“Lucky the wind is up there, not down here,” said Gran. “Crossing the Firth is not to be thought of when there’s a west wind at water level.”
“Why is that, Gran?”
“It sets up a whirlpool. Black Tam’s Pot. Any ship that gets pulled into that is lost for sure.”
“Aye, Black Tam’s Pot,” said Geordie gloomily, spitting over the side as he maneuvered Bonny Mary from one level of inky sea to another. “Folk say it’s so deep that it goes right through the waurld and comes out in Australee.”
“But there’s a west wind up there now, blowing those clouds?” I suggested.
“Ah, wind up at that level has a different effect …”
That news reassured me. I looked ahead hopefully to see if the outline of Muckle Burra could yet be spotted in silhouette against the pale band of greenish light that lay across the northern horizon, but not a thing could I see, and yet the lights of the harbor we had left were now tiny, dwindled into the far distance.
We seemed to be in the huge middle of nowhere.
“You had best take a nap,” said Gran.
“Oh, no!”
But my eyes kept closing. At last I levered myself off the box and curled up on the damp bottom boards. Gran draped something over me, an oilskin.
I slept.
When I woke, it was to the sound of low voices; I felt I had been hearing them for a long time. Gran seemed to be giving Geordie a history of why we needed to travel to Muckle Burra on Leap Year Dawn.
“But why bring the lad?” he grumbled. “And him in a wheelchair, forbye.”
Gran went into some lengthy, low-voiced explanation. She seemed to be defending herself—and my spirits sank very low. I felt I was nothing but a nuisance, a drag; what possible use could I be when we reached the island? Did Gran have some secret plan to go ashore? She must know there was no chance of taking me. Without my chair I could not move, except by dragging myself painfully along the ground—and I couldn’t keep that up for long.
“The lass took a wrong turning,” said Gran, low-voiced to Geordie. “I’m thinking her luck ran crossways against her. It’s a black unchancy thing to use that power for your own purposes. That’s no’ how it was meant to be used. And I’m in fault maself—I should never have advised her.”
I coughed, to show them that I was awake, and Gran offered me a dram from the flask of tea, and one of Mrs. Brough’s scones. The tea was fortified with something that shot straight to one’s fingertips, and the scones were solid, stuffed with juicy raisins.
“Look,” said Gran after a while. “Ye can see the island now.”
I wriggled out into the cockpit and saw a whole row of inky-blue hills up against the turquoise-colored band of light. The sky above us was still dark, but the number of stars in it was much reduced.
I could see my ally Venus though, still blazing with green luster over to one side. And, out of habit, I fell into my old jingle:
Star light, star bright, last star I see tonight … What should I wish? Rest and sweet dreams for Lu-Lyn? An easing of her cares for Gran? Something for myself?
In the end I whispered, “You choose, Venus, you decide,” and, when next I looked at that patch of sky, Venus had vanished.
“Which of those hills is Burra?”
“Burra’s a low-lying island. The higher mountains of Screigh and Unst behind are hiding its shape at present. Soon though you’ll be able to see the Saddle.”
“What is the Saddle?”
“Just what it sounds like. A grassy curve between the two highest hills on Burra. Your sister loved it. It was her favorite place. You can lie in it and not see the sea. She used to roll from the top into the center. She said it would be a grand place for skateboards.”
I was surprised. Skateboards? My sister Lu-Lyn? She never had a skateboard.
“’Tis supposed to be an ancient burial ground of kings,” remarked Geordie disapprovingly.
Well, I thought, I don’t reckon the ancient kings buried there would mind if their descendants rolled or tobogganed down the slope above their heads. And I felt suddenly sorry for Lu-Lyn. She never had much fun. I could remember her saying, of her three trips to the island, “Those were the best weeks of my life.”
And she never got to go back there.
Well, she is going back there now.
Gran and Geordie were talking about other hazards of crossing the channel between the mainland and the islands.
“Whiles, there’s the Laird.”
“What’s the Laird?” I asked.
“A grand sight it is,” said Gran.
“It will come, sometimes, after a two- or three-day blow, the likes of what we’ve just had. Some water gets driven down into a narrow gully at the bottom of the channel, the wind keeps it there by pressure on the surface and then—’tis said—if there’s a pause in the wind’s blowing or a lapse in its strength up comes this giant wave from the bottom of the Firth and rolls right along the channel from west to east. But I mean a giant wave—high as a five-story house.”
“And the skirl of it!” said Gran. “Like all the woe in the world.”
“I’d like to see that!” said I.
“Best seen from well inland.”
It was much lighter now. We came within view of a pleasant rounded bay, with the ruins of a dozen little houses at the back of its sandy beach, and a solid, stone-built jetty at one side.
I wondered which of the little houses had belonged to Gran. But something in her look stopped me from asking. They seemed neat and sad, in the dark clear light that comes just before sunrise.
Geordie Brough steered away from the bay, though, and headed Bonny Mary eastwards, keeping well out to sea from the rocky point.
“That point is the Kelpie’s Ness,” Gran told me.
“Why the Kelpie’s Ness?”
“I suppose somebody once saw a Kelpie there. Not in my time.”
“You never had to get rid of any Kelpies?”
“No,” said Gran gravely. “And it is not a thing to joke about.”
I apologized. Kelpies are water-demons, very hostile to humans, very dangerous. Before the time of electricity, radio, motors, long-range missiles, aircraft, people thought seriously about such things.
Beyond the Kelpie’s Ness—a ness is a headland—a narrow creek ran far back into the hillside. A splash of white, high up, showed where it began as a waterfall.
A second headland, making the eastern side of the creek, had a natural scooped-out hollow in the rock close to the end of the point; it was easy to see why it had its name of the Silkie’s Cradle.
“There’s a story about it,” said Gran. “A man from the village came by here one night, and saw naked men and girls dancing. When they saw him, they quickly put on their sealskins and dived back into the water. But one girl was
not quick enough; he grabbed her sealskin and would not let her have it back. So she had to marry him, and they had several children. But she was always homesick for the sea, and one day one of the children found her old silkie-skin where her husband had hidden it under a corn bin. So she gladly put it on and dived into the creek and was never seen again as a human. But she used to come back at night to feed her last baby, and that was its cradle.”
“Is that a true tale, Gran?”
“As true as such tales ever are,” she said, laughing.
It occurred to me that it was the first time I had ever seen Gran laugh. Was that because she was so close to her old home?
“Look, Gran, I can see rabbits up on the hillside.”
“Aye, and a roe deer. Yon poison will have lost its potency, I reckon,” said Geordie. “Right, now, mem! I’ll edge in as close as I can to the rock and idle the motor—will ye be able to toss yon bundle into the hollow from here?”
“I’ll give it a good try,” said Gran.
“Tie a line to it. Then, if ye miss the mark, first try, ye can haul back and throw again.”
Gran did so.
Geordie edged the boat as close as he dared to the rocky slope of the headland. The waves heaved us up and down. Gran, standing with her knee pressed against the gunwale and her lips tight together, hurled the seaweed-wrapped bundle towards the hollow in the rock.
Twice, she missed. The bundle fell short, rolling down the rocks and splashing into the water of the creek. Twice she dragged it back on board.
“Shall I have a try, Gran?” I suggested, but did not see how I could make anything but a poor hand at it from my huddled position on the bottom boards; and Gran shook her head.
“This is for me to do, boy,” she said. “I owe it to your sister.”
She flung the bundle a third time, making a huge effort, and this time Lu-Lyn’s ashes landed fair and square in the rocky basin. There was a puddle of water in the hollow, from rain or spray, and some splashed up.
“Weel done, Mistress!” called Geordie, and then suddenly his tone of approval changed to one of utter consternation. “Save us, mem, look yonder!”
