by Jane Yolen
Sule Skerry
MAIRI ROWED THE CORACLE with quick, angry strokes, watching the rocky shoreline and the little town of Caith perched on its edge recede. She wished she could make her anger disappear as easily. She was sixteen, after all, and no longer a child. The soldiers whistled at her, even in her school uniform, when she walked to and from the Academy. And wasn’t Harry Stones, who was five years older than she and a lieutenant in the RAF, a tail gunner, mad about her? Given a little time, he might have asked her dad for her hand, though she was too young yet, a schoolgirl. Whenever he came to visit, he brought her something. Once even a box of chocolates, though they were very dear.
But to be sent away from London for safekeeping like a baby, to her gran’s house, to this desolate, isolated Scottish sea town because of a few German raids—it was demeaning. She could have helped, could have at least cooked and taken care of the flat for her father now that the help had all gone off to war jobs. She had wanted to be there in case a bomb did fall, so she could race out and help evacuate all the poor unfortunates, maybe even win a medal, and wouldn’t Jenny Eivensley look green then. But he had sent her off, her dad, and Harry had agreed, even though it meant they couldn’t see each other very often. It was not in the least fair.
She pulled again on the oars. The little skin boat tended to wallow and needed extra bullying. It wasn’t built like a proper British rowboat. It was roundish, shaped more like a turtle shell than a ship. Mairi hated it, hated all of the things in Caith. She knew she should have been in London helping rather than fooling about in a coracle. She pulled on the oars and the boat shot ahead.
The thing about rowing, she reminded herself, was that you watched where you had been, not where you were heading. She could see the town, with its crown of mewing seabirds, disappear from sight. Her destination did not matter. It was all ocean anyway—cold, uninviting, opaque; a dark-green mirror that reflected nothing. And now there was ocean behind as well as ahead, for the shore had thinned out to an invisible line.
Suddenly, without warning, the coracle fetched up against a series of water-smoothed amphibious mounds that loomed up out of the sea. Only at the bump did Mairi turn and look. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a quick scurry of something large and gray and furry on the far side of the rocks. She heard a splash.
“Oh,” she said out loud. “A seal!”
The prospect of having come upon a seal rookery was enough to make her leap incautiously from the coracle onto the rock, almost losing the boat in her eagerness. But her anger was forgotten. She leaned over and pulled the little boat out of the water, scraping its hull along the gray granite. Then she upended the coracle and left it to dry, looking for all the world like a great dozing tortoise drying in the hazy sun.
Mairi shrugged out of her mackintosh and draped it on the rock, next to the boat. Then, snugging the watch cap down over her curls and pulling the bulky fisherman’s sweater over her slim hips, she began her ascent.
The rocks were covered with a strange purple-gray lichen that was both soft and slippery. Mairi fell once, bruising her right knee without ripping her trousers. She cursed softly, trying out swear words that she had never been allowed to use at home or in Gran’s great house back on shore. Then she started up again, on her hands and knees, more carefully now, and at last gained the high point on the rocks after a furious minute of climbing that went backwards and sideways almost as often as it went up. The top of the gray rocks was free of the lichen and she was able to stand up, feeling safe, and look around.
She could not see Caith, with its little, watchful, wind-scored houses lined up like a homefront army to face the oncoming tides in the firth, with Gran’s grand house standing on one side, the sergeant major. She could not even see the hills behind, where cliffs hunched like the bleached fossils of some enormous prehistoric ocean beast washed ashore. All that she could see was the unbroken sea, blue and black and green and gray, with patterns of color that shifted as quickly as the pieces in a child’s kaleidoscope. Gray-white foam skipped across wave tops, then tumbled down and fractured into bubbles that popped erratically, leaving nothing but a grayish scum that soon became shiny water again. She thought she saw one or two dark seal heads in the troughs of the waves, but they never came close enough for her to count. And overhead the sky was lowering, a color so dirty that it would have made even the bravest sailor long for shore. There was a storm coming, and Mairi guessed she should leave.
She shivered, and suddenly knew where she was. These rocks were the infamous Sule Skerry rocks that Gran’s cook had told her about.
“Some may call it a rookery,” Cook had said one morning when Mairi had visited with her in the dark kitchen. Cook’s cooking was awful—dry, bland, and unvaried. But at least she knew stories and always imparted them with an intensity that made even the strangest of them seem real. “Aye, some may call it a rookery. But us from Caith, we know. It be the home of the selchies, who are men on land and seals in the sea. And the Great Selchie himself lives on that rock. Tall he is. And covered with a seal skin when he tumbles in the waves. But he is a man for all that. And no maiden who goes to Sule Skerry returns the same.”
She had hummed a bit of an old song, then, with a haunting melody that Mairi, for all her music training at school, could not repeat. But the words of the song, some of them, had stuck with her:
An earthly nourrice sits and sings,
And aye she sings, “Ba, lily wean!
Little ken I my bairn’s father,
Far less the land that he staps in.”
Then ane arose at her bed-fit,
An a grumly guest I’m sure was he:
“Here am I, thy bairn’s father,
Although I be not comelie.
I am a man upon the land,
I am a selchie in the sea
And when I’m far frae ev’ry strand
My dwelling is in Sule Skerry.”
A warning tale, Mairi thought. A bogeyman story to keep foolish girls safe at home. She smiled. She was a Londoner, after all, not a silly Scots girl who’d never been out of her own town.
And then she heard a strange sound, almost like an echo of the music of Cook’s song, from the backside of the rocks. At first she thought it was the sound of wind against water, the sound she heard continuously at Gran’s home where every room rustled with the music of the sea. But this was different somehow, a sweet, low throbbing, part moan and part chant. Without knowing the why of it, only feeling a longing brought on by the wordless song, and excusing it as seeking to solve a mystery, she went looking for the source of the song. The rock face was smooth on this side, dry, without the slippery, somber lichen; and the water was calmer so it did not splash up spray. Mairi continued down the side, the tune reeling her in effortlessly.
Near the waterline was a cave opening into the west face of the rock, a man-sized opening as black and uninviting as a colliers’ pit. But she took a deep, quick breath, and went in.
Much to her surprise, the inside of the cave glowed with an incandescent blue-green light that seemed to come from the cave walls themselves. Darker pockets of light illuminated the concave sections of the wall. Pieces of seaweed caught in these niches gave the appearance of household gods.
Mairi could scarcely breathe. Any loud sound seemed sacrilegious. Her breath itself was a violation.
And then she heard the moan-song again, so loud that it seemed to fill the entire cave. It swelled upward like a wave, then broke off in a bubbling sigh.
Mairi walked in slowly, not daring to touch the cave walls in case she should mar the perfection of the color, yet fearing that she might fall, for the floor of the cave was slippery with scattered puddles of water. Slowly, one foot in front of the other, she explored the cave. In the blue-green light, her sweater and skin seemed to take on an underwater tinge as if she had been transformed into a mermaid.
And then the cave ended, tapering off to a rounded apse with a kind of stone altar the height of a bed.
There was something dark lying on the rock slab. Fearfully, Mairi inched toward it, and when she got close, the dark thing heaved up slightly and spoke to her in a strange guttural tongue. At first Mairi thought it was a seal, a wounded seal, but then she saw it was a man huddled under a sealskin coat. He suddenly lay back, feverish and shuddering, and she saw the beads of dried blood that circled his head like a crown.
Without thinking, Mairi moved closer and put her hand on his forehead, expecting it to burn with temperature, but he was cold and damp and slippery to the touch. Then he opened his eyes and they were the same blue-green color as the walls, as the underside of a wave. She wondered for a moment if he were blind, for there seemed to be no pupil in those eyes. Then he closed the lids and smiled at her, whispering in that same unknown tongue.
“Never mind, never mind, I’ll get help,” whispered Mairi. He might be a fisherman from the town or an RAF man shot down on a mission. She looked at his closed-down face. Here, at last, was her way to aid the war effort. “Lie still. First I’ll see to your wounds. They taught us first aid at school.”
She examined his forehead under the slate-gray hair, and saw that the terrible wound that had been there was now closed and appeared to be healing, though bloody and seamed with scabs. But when she started to slip the sealskin coat down to examine him for other wounds, she was shocked to discover he had no clothes on under it. No clothes at all.
She hesitated then. Except for the statues in the museum, Mairi had never seen a man naked. Not even in the first aid books. But what if he were hurt unto death? The fearsome poetry of the old phrase decided her. She inched back the sealskin covering as gently as she could.
He did not move except for the rise and fall of his chest. His body was covered with fine hairs, gray as the hair on his head. He had broad, powerful shoulders and slim, tapering hips. The skin on his hands was strangely wrinkled as if he had been under water too long. She realized with a start that he was quite, quite beautiful—but alien. As her grandmother often said, “Men are queer creatures, so different from us, child. And someday you will know it.”
Then his eyes opened again and she could not look away from them. He smiled, opened his mouth, and began to speak, to chant, really. Mairi bent down over him and he opened his arms to her, the gray webbing between his fingers pulsing strongly. And without willing it, she covered his mouth with hers. All the sea was in that kiss, cold and vast and perilous. It drew her in till she thought she would faint with it, with his tongue darting around hers as quick as a minnow. And then his arms encircled her and he was as strong as the tide. She felt only the briefest of pain, and a kind of drowning, and she let the land go.
When Mairi awoke, she was sitting on the stone floor of the cavern, and cold, bone-chilling cold. She shivered and pushed her hand across her cheeks. They were wet, though whether with tears or from the damp air she could not say.
Above her, on the stone bed, the wounded man breathed raggedly. Occasionally he let out a moan. Mairi stood and looked down at him. His flesh was pale, wan, almost translucent. She put her hand on his shoulder but he did not move. She wondered if she had fallen and hit her head, if she had dreamed what had happened.
Help. I must get help for him, she thought. She covered him again with the coat and made her way back to the cave mouth. Her entire body ached and she decided she must have fallen and blacked out.
The threatening storm had not yet struck, but the dark slant of rain against the horizon was closer still. Mairi scrambled along the rocks to where the coracle waited. She put on her mac, then heaved the boat over and into the water and slipped in, getting only her boots wet.
It was more difficult rowing back, rowing against the tide. Waves broke over the bow of the little boat, and by the time she was within sight of the town, she was soaked to the skin. The stones of Sule Skerry were little more than gray wave tops then, and with one pull on the oars, they disappeared from sight. The port enfolded her, drew her in. She felt safe and lonely at once.
When Mairi reached the shore there was a knot of fishermen tending their boats. A few were still at work on the bright orange nets, folding them carefully in that quick, intricate pattern that only they seemed to know.
One man, in a blue watch cap, held up a large piece of tattered white cloth, an awning of silk. It seemed to draw the other men to him. He gestured with the silk and it billowed out as if capturing the coming storm.
Suddenly Mairi was horribly afraid. She broke into the circle of men. “Oh, please, please,” she cried out, hearing the growing wail of wind in her voice. “There’s a man on the rocks. He’s hurt.”
“The rocks?” The man with the silk stuffed it into his pocket, but a large fold of it hung down his side. “Which rocks?”
“Out there. Beyond the sight line. Where the seals stay,” Mairi said.
“Whose child is she?” asked a man who still carried an orange net. He spoke as if she were too young to understand him or as if she were a foreigner.
“Old Mrs. Goodleigh’s grandchild. The one with the English father,” came an answer.
“Mavis’s daughter, the one who became a nurse in London.”
“Too good for Caith, then?”
Mairi was swirled about in their conversation.
“Please,” she tried again.
“Suppose’n she means the Rocks?”
“Yes,” begged Mairi. “The rocks out there. Sule Skerry.”
“Hush, child. Must na say the name in sight of the sea,” said the blue cap man.
“Toss it a coin, Jock,” said the white silk man.
The man called Jock reached into his pocket and flung a coin out to the ocean. It skipped across the waves twice, then sank.
“That should quiet en. Now then, the Rocks you say?”
Mairi turned to the questioner. He had a face like a map, wrinkles marking the boundaries of nose and cheek. “Yes, sir,” she said breathily.
“Aye, he might have fetched up there,” said the white silk man, drawing it out of his pocket again for the others to see.
Did they know him, then? Mairi wondered.
“Should we leave him to the storm?” asked Jock.
“He might be one of ours,” the map-faced man said.
They all nodded at that.
“He’s sheltered,” Mairi said suddenly. “In a cave. A grotto, like. It’s all cast over with a blue and green light.”
“Teched, she is. There’s no grotto there,” said blue cap.
“No blue and green light either,” said the map-faced man, turning from her and speaking earnestly with his companions.
“Even if he’s one of them, he might tell us summat we need. Our boys could use the knowledge. From that bit of parachute silk, it’s hard to say which side he’s on.” He reached out and touched the white cloth with a gnarled finger.
“Aye, we’d best look for him.”
“He won’t be hard to find,” Mairi began. “He’s sick. Hurt. I touched him.”
“What was he wearing then?” asked blue cap.
The wind had picked up and Mairi couldn’t hear the question. “What?” she shouted.
“Wearing. What was the fellow wearing?”
Suddenly remembering that the man had been naked under the coat, she was silent.
“She doesn’t know. Probably too scared to go close. Come on,” said Jock.
The men pushed past her and dragged along two of the large six-man boats that fished the haaf banks. The waves were slapping angrily at the shore, gobbling up pieces of the sand and churning out pebbles at each retreat. Twelve men scrambled into the boats and headed out to sea, their oars flashing together.
Three men were left on shore, including the one holding the remnant of white silk. They stood staring out over the cold waters, their eyes squinted almost shut against the strange bright light that was running before the storm.
Mairi stood near them, but apart.
No one spoke.
It was a long half
hour before the first of the boats leaped back toward them, across a wave, seconds ahead of the rain.
The second boat beached just as the storm broke, the men jumping out onto the sand and drawing the boat up behind them. A dark form was huddled against the stern.
Mairi tried to push through to get a close glimpse of the man, but blue cap spoke softly to her.
“Nay, nay girl, don’t look. He’s not what you would call a pretty sight. He pulled a gun on Jock and Jock took a rock to him.”
But Mairi had seen enough. The man was dressed in a flier’s suit, and a leather jacket with zippers. His blond hair was matted with blood.
“That’s not the one I saw,” she murmured. “Not the one I . . .”
“Found him lying on the rocks, just as the girl said. Down by the west side of the rocks,” said Jock. “We threw his coins to the sea and bought our way home. Though I don’t know that German coins buy much around here. Bloody Huns.”
“What’s a German flier doing this far west, I’d like to know,” said map-face.
“Maybe he was trying for America,” Jock answered, laughing sourly.
“Ask him. When he’s fit to talk,” said blue cap.
The man with the white silk wrapped it around the German’s neck. The parachute shroud lines hung down the man’s back. Head down, the German was marched between Jock and blue cap up the strand and onto the main street. The other men trailed behind.
With the rain soaking through her cap and running down her cheeks, Mairi took a step toward them. Then she turned away. She kicked slowly along the water’s edge till she found the stone steps that led up to her gran’s house. The sea pounded a steady reminder on her left, a basso continuo to the song that ran around in her head. The last three verses came to her slowly.
Now he has ta’en a purse of goud
And he has put it upon her knee
Sayin’ “Gie to me my little young son
An tak ye up thy nourrice-fee.”
She shivered and put her hands in her pockets to keep them warm. In one of the mac’s deep pockets, her fingers felt something cold and rough to the touch. Reluctantly she drew it out. It was a coin, green and gold, slightly crusted, as if it had lain on the ocean bottom for some time. She had never seen it before and could only guess how it had gotten into her coat pocket. She closed her hand around the coin, so tightly a second coin was imprinted on her palm.
