A Stranger Came Ashore

by Mollie Hunter

  Tam had sensed the truth from the very beginning, he told himself then, and that was why Finn Learson had needed to get the creature into his power. If only, if only they had all paid more attention to Tam’s warning growls that night!

  But maybe it was not yet too late … With hope beginning to warm him a little, Robbie waited impatiently for Yarl Corbie to speak again, but the schoolmaster was also thinking his own thoughts and his mind seemed to have drifted far from the present moment.

  He had picked up a knife from his desk, Robbie noticed; a long knife with a thin, sharp blade that glittered in the candlelight. With his fingers stroking this blade, he sat for a while longer staring at nothing in particular, but at last he did look at Robbie again.

  “It has happened before,” he said then, and this was so exactly an echo of Old Da’s dying words, that Robbie felt himself gasping.

  “There was another time when a stranger came ashore to this island, and the story was that he persuaded a girl to marry him. But he was not a man at all, of course. And he was not young, as he seemed to be. He was the old one, the cunning one, the Magician who is also the Great Selkie. And so, of course, he had a different name that time. ‘Aeigirson,’ he called himself then, ‘Aeigir’ being another name for the god of the sea; and the girl who married this stranger, Aeigirson, was never seen alive again.”

  Yarl Corbie’s gaze went back to the knife. His fingers returned to stroking the shining blade. Almost as if talking to himself, he said, “The girl was young – a bonny girl with golden hair. Her name was Anne.”

  There was a silence. The blade glittered. Yarl Corbie’s fingers moved steadily back and forth along its length.

  “Is that the end of the story?” Robbie ventured at last. Yarl Corbie looked up. “Not quite,” he answered. “There was a young man of the islands this girl would have married, and after she was stolen away, he shipped aboard a whaler – to earn money, he said, but his real purpose was to search for the Great Selkie and to kill him. The whaler sailed north; and there, on the coast of Greenland, the man found the Great Selkie in his natural form of a great bull seal. The man drew a knife, and struck out with a blow that was meant to kill; and although he did not succeed in this, he managed at least to give the Great Selkie a sorely-wounded shoulder.”

  “Once on the shores of Greenland, I was hunted by a man who came at me with a knife to till me – see, I carry the mark of his knife to this very day, in this long, white scar of the healed wound in my shoulder …”

  The echo of Finn Learson’s voice sounded in Robbie’s mind, and once again he saw Finn Learson turning a smooth brown shoulder to show the mark of a long knife-wound.

  “How do you know about all this?” he asked curiously, and was astonished to see Yarl Corbie rise to his feet, his face suddenly all twisted with rage. The hand holding the knife went up as if to strike, and Robbie shrank back in alarm, but the blow was not intended for him.

  “Because this is the knife that made the wound,” Yarl Corbie said harshly. The upraised arm brought the knife hard down towards the desk, and as the point stabbed into the wood, he added, “And I am the man who struck the blow!”

  Robbie stared at the blade quivering in the wood. It was hard to imagine Yarl Corbie as a young man, be thought, and even harder to imagine him as a jealous young man in love with a golden-haired girl. But there was one thing at least he could grasp in all this, and surely that was the very thing that mattered now! Triumphantly, Robbie spoke his thoughts aloud.

  “You hated the Great Selkie! You still hate him!”

  Yarl Corbie leaned forward, glaring. “I know what’s in your mind,” he snapped. “You think that’s reason enough for me to help you now. But you’re wrong. I know the things they say of me, here in Black Ness, and I am not going to give them cause to say more.”

  “But no one would know,” Robbie pleaded. “Not from me, at least. And what’s to become of Elspeth if you don’t help? She’ll be like that other girl – Anne. And that will be your fault.”

  Yarl Corbie frowned at this, until his eyebrows almost met above his beaky nose. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and began striding up and down, his tattered black gown flapping with every step. He looked more like a big, ungainly raven than ever, thought Robbie, and felt the same old dread seizing him again. There was no way of going back on what he had done, however, and he was impatient now, as well as afraid. Biting his lip, he watched the tall, striding figure, and at last Yarl Corbie said, “I was young and foolishe cannot return to his kingdom under the seah when I went after the Great Selkie with a knife, but I am old enough and wise enough now to know that he cannot be killed with any mortal weapon. He cannot be defeated either – not when he has his natural form of a selkie, at least. But there is one way of making sure he can do no harm while he has a man’s shape; one way only.”

  Yarl Corbie halted in his stride, and shot one of his knowing looks at Robbie. “I cannot see any hope of your carrying that out,” he went on. “But nevertheless, you might as well know something about it – which means that you must first of all discover where he hid his selkie skin when he shed it to come ashore. If you do that, you will have a hold over him that could bend him to your will; for, without that skin, he cannot return to his kingdom under the sea.”

  Robbie stood staring at Yarl Corbie, his heart racing suddenly so fast that he could hardly speak. “But,” he managed, “but I –”

  Yarl Corbie held up a hand. “I know,” he said. “The search for it would be a hopeless one. There are so many places around the coast of the voe where it could be; so many caves –”

  “But I know where it is!” interrupted Robbie, shouting. “I know!” And still breathing hard, he rushed on to tell Yarl Corbie about the cave in the geo where he had gone to count the selkie pups.

  “So you see,” he finished triumphantly, “it must be hidden there, or Finn Learson would not have bothered to keep me in sight from the clifftop that day. He only did that because he was afraid I would go into the cave and find the skin. And that was what he meant when he said he had a feeling I might get into trouble in the geo!”

  A wicked gleam came into Yarl Corbie’s eyes, making them sharper and brighter than ever. With one long hand stroking his chin, he murmured, “You could be right, boy. A cave like that – so handy for reaching Black Ness and yet so well hidden from the houses there – would be a perfect lurking-place for him. He could shed his skin and take human form quite safely there when the time came for him to do so. And from there also, he would find it easy enough to swim ashore as if he had just come from a wreck!”

  “Of course,” Robbie agreed eagerly. “And the chance came when the Bergen was wrecked with all hands drowned, so that there was nobody left to say he was not a survivor. Moreover, he knew he would need money of some kind on the island, and the cave would give him somewhere to store his gold, all ready to take ashore with him.”

  “Yes, yes, that could be the way of it,” Yarl Corbie nodded. “Gold from the treasure ships sunk around this island was something he could dive for at any time, but he still needed somewhere to keep it in readiness. And as for the trousers and money-belt he wore that night they would have been only too easy to acquire, what with so many poor drowned sailor men floating in the voe then.”

  Robbie felt a cold shiver at the picture this brought into his mind, but he still pressed on with the rest of what he had to say.

  “There’s one last thing,” he told Yarl Corbie. “When Finn Learson pulled me out of the water that day, he told me, ‘It’s high time you learned to leave the deep waters to those who can swim in them.’ And he warned me to keep out of the geo in future.”

  “Did he indeed!” Yarl Corbie exclaimed. “Well, that proves it, boy. The skin must be in that cave. And we had better lay hands on it soon – this very night, in fact – or we may lose the chance it gives for getting a hold over Finn Learson.”

  “We?” Robbie asked uncertainly, and Yarl Corbie looked
suddenly taken aback.

  “Well …” he began, then he walked away from Robbie and stood looking at the knife in the desk. One hand went out to pull it free, and he turned to Robbie again, with the wicked gleam once more lighting his eye.

  “Yes, we,” he said softly, “because I never thought I would live to be revenged on the Great Selkie, and revenge is very sweet. But mark this, Robbie Henderson. It will take magic to defeat the Great Selkie’s magic – and you know what our minister is like! You heard the way he raged against superstition on the day of your Old Da’s funeral. And so what do you think he would do if he heard I was indeed practising the unholy arts that people say I do practise? One word, one hint of that, and he would seize on it to have me banished from the island, or jailed – or maybe something even worse!”

  “He’ll learn nothing from me,” Robbie said earnestly. “Nobody will!”

  “That had better be a promise,” Yarl Corbie assured him, “or I will be revenged on you also! Now get off home, but be down at the voe at midnight, and we will go together to find that skin.”

  13. The Skin

  Robbie needed no second telling to get off home. He was out the door and away like a shot from a bow, and every step of the way home he was telling himself he would never have the courage to be alone in a boat with Yarl Corbie at midnight. In spite of that, however, he was still powerfully attracted by the thought of finding the Great Selkie’s skin, and it was this attraction which finally stiffened his nerve that night.

  Long after everyone else was asleep, he was still lying wide-eyed in his box of darkness. His ears were alert for the chimes of the grandfather clock in the but end, and on the first stroke of midnight, he slid open the door panel of his bed. Silently he stepped out on to the cold floor. Silently he bundled into his clothes, and crept barefoot into the but end.

  With his shoes still in his hand, he stole past the door that led through to the barn where Finn Learson lay sleeping. Carefully he eased up the latch of the front door, slipped outside, and latched it as carefully behind him.

  Above him, the sky was black with the deep, velvety blackness of northern skies in winter. A million stars had burned holes of frosty silver in the velvet black. Frost licked like silver fire over the grass underfoot. Robbie shivered as he bent to put on his shoes; but a frosty night meant there would be little wind, even at sea, and he was glad of that. Running fast and lightly, he headed for the beach, and saw the tall stooped figure of Yarl Corbie waiting for him.

  The schoolmaster was standing beside the Hendersons’ little boat, and without a word as Robbie arrived beside him, he gave a hand to push it out. The two of them clambered aboard, and Robbie bent to the oars. Yarl Corbie sat opposite him, hunched up into the tail-coat he wore now instead of his black gown, and he spoke only once before they reached the geo.

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  “No one,” Robbie answered, thankful he could speak truthfully.

  They reached the narrow entrance passage to the geo – too narrow to allow even a reflection of starlight from the water. Robbie backed the boat in, feeling mortally afraid of what just might happen in the darkness of this roofless tunnel; but they came out into the wider water beyond, with Yarl Corbie sitting as silent and motionless as before.

  The boat touched the shingle, and he shipped the oars, then leapt ashore. Yarl Corbie came clumsily after him, and they pulled the boat up on to the beach.

  “Up there – right at the back of the rocks,” whispered Robbie, pointing to where the cave lay; and reaching inside his coat, Yarl Corbie brought out a piece of candle and a tinderbox.

  “We’ll need these,” he remarked, then motioned Robbie on.

  Robbie had forgotten it would be quite dark inside the cave, and this reminder was enough to make him determined he would not be the first to enter it. He clambered on over the rocks, hearing Yarl Corbie following close behind, and at the mouth of the cave he turned to say nervously,

  “We’d better light the candle now.”

  A sound that might have been a chuckle came from Yarl Corbie. “Afraid of the dark, are you?” he jeered, and the next instant Robbie felt a large hand grasping him by the scruff of the neck and forcing him forward into the cave.

  Darkness stole his eyesight, smothered him, ate him up. He cried out, gaspingly, then tore himself free of Yarl Corbie’s grip and backed until he hit the wall of the cave. A laugh echoed hollow in his ears. The laugh was followed by the sound of Yarl Corbie striking the flint of his tinderbox.

  A spark leaped golden through the darkness. The little red flare of the tinder came next. Then at last, as Yarl Corbie lit the candle from the flare, there was a small, but growing pool of real light. The beaky dark face of Yarl Corbie loomed into the light, his eyes searching out the cowering figure of Robbie.

  “You did that just to frighten me!” Robbie accused him shakily, and Yarl Corbie smiled the smile that was not pleasant to see.

  “That’s right,” he answered. “There’s nothing like a taste of fear to remind you of what could happen if you break the promise you made me!”

  The light flickered for a moment as he raised the candle high. He waited till the flame steadied, then turning slowly about, he let its light spread through the cave.

  The sealskin was there, lying spread right out to cover a wide rock shelf a few feet from the floor of the cave. The fur of it was the colour of Finn Learson’s hair – dark, almost black, streaked with silvery grey – and it shone so richly that it seemed to turn the whole pool of candlelight into gleaming black and glittering silver.

  Yarl Corbie and Robbie stood staring at it, both of them struck quite dumb at the sight. The empty sockets of the head on the selkie skin stared back at them, and after a few moments of this, Robbie found he could no longer face the eeriness of that empty stare. He turned his head away, and the movement broke the spell of silence in the cave.

  “Well, there it is,” Yarl Corbie said triumphantly. “The Great Selkie’s skin. And we two are the only two in the world who have ever seen it like this!”

  Robbie nodded, and asked nervously, “And what do we do now?”

  “You take this,” said Yarl Corbie, handing him the candle.

  Then, much to Robbie’s horror, he reached up and pulled the skin down from the shelf as casually as he would have pulled a blanket off a bed. “And I take this!” he added, as the skin came tumbling off the shelf.

  Bundling the great pile of it into his arms, he was about to turn away from the shelf, but Robbie’s eye had caught a sudden glimpse of something else there.

  “Look!” he exclaimed, pointing to the back of the shelf, and Yarl Corbie looked where he pointed.

  There was a gleam of gold there, a gleam from a scatter of golden coins that had lain hidden under the skin.

  “Fetch one down and let me have a look at it,” Yarl Corbie commanded.

  Gingerly Robbie stretched a hand out to one of the coins, and one glance as he passed it to Yarl Corbie was enough to tell him it was the same as the gold coin winking on the mantelpiece at home.

  “So you were right all along the line,” Yarl Corbie remarked, turning the coin curiously over between his fingers. “And to think how bold he was all along the line too, with all the hints he gave you of the truth behind it!”

  “… something I picked up on my travels … take the gold, for it may still cost more than you think to have me here … A keepsake of me when I have gone back to my own country … remember it did not seem half as bright to me as the gold of your daughter’s hair …”

  The hints Yarl Corbie had mentioned raced through Robbie’s mind again, and he wondered how long it had taken Old Da to make sense of these. Not long, he realised, remembering the hard look Old Da had given on the day he asked Finn Learson.

  “And what do you think I should tell Robbie about selkies?”

  Yarl Corbie tossed the coin back among its fellows. “We’ll have to leave them here,” he said grimly, “for even one
of them taken ashore could trace this night’s doing back to us. And so weep no tears for lost riches, my lad!”

  Robbie took a resentful glance at him. “You’ll not catch me shedding tears for selkie gold,” he declared. “And there’s no need for you to tell me we could buy nothing but trouble with it. I knew that as soon as I guessed we would find it here.”

  “Well, well,” said Yarl Corbie, staring at this look and the tone of voice that went with it. “You’re quite a spirited lad after all, it seems. But considering how much is going to depend on you on Up Helly Aa, that’s just as well – isn’t it?”

  Turning on his heel then, he marched out of the cave carrying the skin, and Robbie followed him down to the boat wondering what this last remark had meant. Once started on the return journey, too, he felt his curiosity about it growing sharper with every stroke of the oars; but when at last he did venture a question on it, Yarl Corbie told him curtly, “It’s too soon to talk about that. But this much I can tell you. Before we part tonight, I’ll give you some of the instructions you’ll need to carry out your part on Up Helly Aa. Tomorrow – once you’re sure you haven’t been missed from home this past hour or so – I’ll give you the rest of these instructions. And meanwhile, the important thing for us is to find some other hiding-place for the selkie skin.”

  “That’s true,” agreed Robbie, his thoughts flashing to other caves he had seen in other geos. “But where can we hide it?”

  “Nowhere at sea,” said Yarl Corbie, as if guessing these thoughts, “because that is the first place Finn Learson would search for it. Nowhere on land, because that is the second place he would search. We will hide it in a place that belongs neither to the sea nor to the land, a place that is open to every eye, but secret from all; a place which Finn Learson may enter as a man, yet which he cannot leave again except as the Great Selkie.”

  Robbie stopped rowing to peer at the hunched figure opposite him. “There’s no such place,” he said wonderingly. “How can there be?”