by David Bell
It was mid morning before the island they sought came into view, fine on the starboard bow and, Potyr judged, about as far away again as the distance they had covered since leaving the strait. He gave the change of heading to Typhis. As yet, the sun, though hot, had not cleared the bank of haze that veiled the head of the bay and the lower slopes of the mountain. The cargo-ship skipper had said mist had slowed his approach to the bronzesmiths’ island. It was clear enough in view now, which made Potyr wonder why the haze still hung over the other shore.
The island was a crescent of steep cliffs curving round an almost circular small bay and joined to another hilly island by a neck of low-lying land, so that together they looked like a hand gripping a sickle. Sharesh was the first to sight the bronzesmiths’ settlement, a cluster of huts set back from the shore near the end of the rocky causeway that formed the handle of the sickle. There was a wooden pier of sorts, but it was too small for the Davina to tie up. No one came out of the huts to watch the ship arrive; no children ran along the beach waving and shouting. There were no ships anchored in the bay and only a single small boat drawn up on the white sand near the jetty. The only sounds were the plaintive echoing cries of seabirds soaring to and fro past the cliffs. Potyr looked across at Kanesh.
“As the captain said, deserted.”
“He said nothing of a boat,” replied Kanesh. “Someone has returned. “Luzar will find out. Namun and Sharesh can follow and bring back the boat for others to follow if need be.” He turned to the Captain of Archers. “Have your men string their bows and be ready.”
Luzar slipped over the stern and swam underwater to the side of the pier, waited a moment, listening, and then ran up the beach to the foot of the cliff and disappeared behind the huts. He soon reappeared and went from one hut to another, peering cautiously through each open doorway. He spent longer looking inside the last one and finally turned and waved to the ship. At a look from Kanesh, Sharesh and Namun dived overboard and swam ashore. They dragged the boat into the water and Namun paddled it back to the Davina while Sharesh went to see what Luzar had found.
A man wearing the scuffed and scorched leather apron of a smith sat motionless on the beaten earth floor, staring vacantly through the doorway. Sharesh opened his mouth to speak but was stopped by Luzar’s upheld finger.
“He cannot hear, will not speak.”
Sharesh looked round the hut. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed: dead ashes lay on the stone hearth, a water jug and some bowls beside it; a cot covered with rough blankets lay along one wall and a low table with simple wooden plates on it stood against another; there were some baskets and wide-mouthed jars half filled with wheat and lentils; in a cavity in one wall was an unlit lamp, a few dead flowers and a carving of a goddess with the full figure of a mature naked woman wearing a tall crown; a woman’s woollen apron hung from a wooden peg and a child’s toy, a roughly carved doll, was clutched in the hand of the silent man. As he came up the beach Sharesh had seen the smiths’ furnaces and piles of red and black slag some distance from the huts. No smoke or fumes rose from them. All were cold and their fires dead.
“What happened to him? Where is everybody?”
Kanesh appeared in the doorway with Kerma and Namun behind him. He looked intently at the man on the floor who seemed not to see him or anyone else.
“Go outside and see what you can find in the other huts. Signal to the captain to drop anchor. Leave the man to me,” said Kanesh quietly and sat down on the floor in front of the smith. When the others had left, he took the man’s hand in the smith’s secret grip, looked steadily into his face, and waited. After a long while he saw the smith’s eyelids flicker briefly and felt a slight movement of the hand. He gently released his grip and, raising both hands, made the sign of the hammer in front of the man’s face. The eyes blinked, slowly at first, then rapidly, then lost their empty stare and looked back at him. Still the man did not move. Kanesh spoke to him with his hands, forming the words carefully with his lips as well as his fingers. What with the noise of the hammers on the anvils and the blast of bellows and the fumes of their furnaces, many smiths lost some of their hearing as they grew older and had to learn some hand speech, but this man could hear nothing and knew only a few hand shapes. His hearing had left him in an instant, leaving him in a frightening, silent world. Slowly, Kanesh drew the painful words out of him.
It happened because he would not listen. The Lord Potheidan had shaken the earth, warning them not to go. If you must go somewhere, go to the cave on the hill where the mad old goat woman sits and ask her what must be done, said his wife and the other women. He would not listen. There were knives and axe heads, cauldrons, bowls and mattocks to sell to the farmers and ladles and bracelets for their women, all the work of the winter. They would bring good prices. Your greed is greater than your need, his wife said but he would not listen. Some of the others were persuaded when he said they would sink a cauldron out in the bay to placate the Lord Potheidan. The ground is still now, he said, we must not delay or others will be there before us. They loaded the ship at night and sailed at dawn. It was a calm and peaceful morning. He remembered the birds, great flocks of them, land birds as well as seabirds, flying out to sea. They anchored, where they always did, on the coast near the mountain with two peaks. It was the middle of the afternoon and very hot. There were no farmers to meet them but that was no surprise. It was a hot day and there was work to do in the fields and with the goats and sheep. They would be there in the cool of the evening. They did not come. Tomorrow morning they’ll be here, he said; we can wait. They made a fire on the beach to roast the fish they had caught in the bay. After they had eaten, they talked but not for long. It had been a tiring day. He fell asleep. In the dream he was a boy again. It was a big noise like the one in the cave when everything shook and the roof fell in. He felt his head being squeezed, like that other time when he dived down too deep to grab the big shell from the bottom of the sea. When he sat up it was daylight but foggy. He knew he must be dead because everything was different. The others had gone. The ship had gone. He shouted in the fog and he couldn’t hear his own voice, so he knew he was dead, although it wasn’t dark like it was supposed to be. Can you go mad when you’re dead? He did. He flung himself on the sand and tried to beat his head against it but it was too soft, so he thought of drowning himself in the sea but he couldn’t find it in the fog and he couldn’t hear the waves. He couldn’t hear anything. Anyway, why try to drown yourself when you’re already dead? In the land of the dead there must be other dead people, so he set out along the shore to find them. The fog made him cough a lot but he was used to that, breathing in fumes from the furnaces that smelled a bit like that. He walked all day, slipping and stumbling over loose white stones until his feet hurt. When he sat down to rest he saw they were bleeding, so he knew he wasn’t dead after all because in the land of the dead surely nobody can bleed? It was nearly dark and he was too tired to walk any more, so he lay down and must have slept because the next thing he knew it was getting light again and lighter that the day before. The fog was thinner, more like a mist, and it was moving and getting clearer, blowing inland. The wind was strong. He watched it sending great rolling clouds tumbling over the slopes of the mountain. He could see the sea now and the beach stretching away in front of and behind him. He recognised where he was, so he wasn’t dead and he wasn’t mad either. There was something black on the white beach, back the way he had come. As he got closer he saw it was a boat. He must have walked past it in the fog without seeing it. There was a paddle in it and nothing else. How long did it take him to paddle back home? A long time, days and nights; he was too weak to paddle for very long at a time. When he stopped for a rest, out in the bay and looked back, he saw that the wind must have blown all the clouds away because there was only a bank of fine mist left over the coast and the mountain peaks were clear. He wished he had never come back. Everybody was gone, his wife, his little girl, all his mates and their wives, all gone. The p
lace was empty. All he had left was this little doll he’d made for the child and his wife’s apron hanging over there. He daren’t look at the Mother. He knew it was wrong to go, but he wouldn’t listen. Now he’d never listen again because he would never hear again. That was his punishment.
The smith refused to leave with them but Kerma picked him up and carried him bodily to the boat, and held him down while Sharesh brought a few of his things and the doll, all wrapped up in the apron. Namun put them beside the smith and poled the boat back to the ship. Kanesh watched as the smith was bundled kindly but firmly onto the ship by Kerma.
“The sound we heard that night after we passed the Pelos cape was the same sound that burst his ears. He was too close to where it came from.” Kanesh looked past the ship, across the blue waters of the bay, towards the twin-peaked mountain. “He believes he has lost everything because he committed the grave sin of indifference against his Lord Potheidan. We must show him that he was merely unwise to do what he did by taking him to find his people, or news of them. It will serve our purpose, too: we must decide our course and there is no one here to ask. His mind is in too much turmoil to be of any help with that.”
As Kanesh spoke, Sharesh was also looking at the mountain. Above the diaphanous apron of milky-blue haze, its dark slopes were beginning to redden in the slanting rays of the late afternoon sun. He remembered looking at the two peaks as the ship sailed across the bay and thinking that they formed the shape of a crescent, like the sacred horns. Had the captain thought the same? The Lady Mother was never far from his thoughts. Sharesh felt instinctively inside the pouch at his belt. The first thing his fingers touched was Pasipha’s sealstone.
Crewmen were hauling on the dripping anchor ropes as the boat bumped against the Davina’s side. Kanesh went first to the stern deck to speak to Potyr and then down onto the main deck where Kerma explained to him that he had tied the smith to the thwart he was sitting on to stop him jumping overboard. Kanesh waved him away and sat down beside the man. Sharesh watched him take the smith’s hands in his own and look long into his eyes. The anchors were hauled on board and Typhis shouted out the orders to turn ship. The Davina’s bow swung round until she was pointing towards the mountain. A white cloud stretched away from the near-side peak, like a banner streaming in the wind. The smith got up from his thwart, walked between the seated oarsmen and climbed onto the bow deck to stand next to Namun.
“Are you ready!” bellowed Typhis. It was a command, not a question. “Dip oars! Pull!”
The Davina picked up speed and sliced through the waves, the smith’s boat swaying and bouncing in her wake like an excited dog prancing on its lead.
It was the strangest place. What had seemed from a distance to be mist near the coast was the sea itself steaming and even bubbling in places like water in a pot over the flames. The air was warmly damp and pungent with a faint smell of the furnace. When a breath of wind cleared the steam away for a brief moment, the land was seen to be a mass of clustered low hills and curved ridges like old broken yellow-streaked walls with, here and there, small round lakes. Beyond one of the ridges more white steam clouds were rising lazily into the sky.
“It’s the end of the world,” said Namun in an awed voice.
“How many more ends of the world are we going to find?” said one of the archers sarcastically.
The smith signalled for a change of course to starboard, much to the relief of the crew, and the ship eventually came to a stop, standing off a point of land where a jumble of yellow-walled houses stood a short way up from the beach. A wooden pier as rickety as the one they had left earlier in the day jutted a short way into the sea. A small boat was tied against one of its posts. Water was slopping over the sides of their own boat, crowded with Kanesh, Sharesh and the smith, as Namun poled it towards the point. Showing his first quick movements since they came across him, the smith had already vanished inside the nearest house by the time the others had crossed the beach. He came out again and dashed into the next, then all of them in turn. He found no one. Kanesh seized him by the arm, pointed to the pier, cupped his hands round his mouth and indicated he and the other two would stay inside one of the houses. The smith nodded vigorously and went into the first house, emerging a moment later with a large seashell. He went and stood at the end of the pier and began to blow the long booming notes that signalled a ship approaching.
They had been suspicious at first when they saw the strange-looking ship nearing their village but the sound of their own horn and the way it was blown had reassured them somewhat, so they came back cautiously to see who was sounding the signal. The two men knew the smith. He had been there often, trading his metal for their corn and goats. They started talking to him but he put his hands to his ears and shook his head. When he tried to speak himself, his words made no sense. They understood and looked at each other, wondering what to do next. The women came forward with their children hanging onto their smocks and touched his arm. When he saw the children, he hung his head and tears began to run down his cheeks. At last he looked up and pointed towards the house where Kanesh, Sharesh and Namun were waiting out of sight.
The two men started at the sight of the big bearded man with the sword at his belt and looked on the point of running away to the fields again but the women held them back, obviously intrigued by this imposing stranger. Before long everyone was trying to talk at the same time, eager to tell of the strange things that had been happening. Namun soon had the children trying to better him at skipping flat pebbles across the water while Sharesh strove to understand the chatter but gave up, realising it was in a tongue unknown to him. Kanesh held up his hand and silence fell. The women watched his lips intently as he began to ask his questions.
The noise? Yes, they had heard the noise in the night, greater than any thunderclap that woke everybody up: the Mother had sounded a warning. Warning of what? Why, the storm that came lashing the mountain, of course, lifting great clouds of dust out of it, turning the ground to warm mud when the rain came. The people? Took the warning, most of them, and ran away with their children and their things on their backs and in carts, those that had carts, and herding their sheep and goats and pigs in front of them. Everybody ran away before the storm came. Except here: some went, some in boats and some running. Some stayed because the old goat woman in the cave had said they would be safe and they were, as anybody can see. Two people, a man and his daughter, stayed too long and the dust clouds must have choked and buried them when they tried to get away. The storms have gone now and the ground is still. Lord Potheidan has ridden his horses somewhere else. Some people are coming back, over there where their houses were. There are footmarks all over in the dust the storm carried so a lot of people must have come back to see what they can find. The other smiths from the island came here after the great noise and said one of them had been lost, and they were going home to tell everybody to get in the ships and sail away to join the others before the storm came. Yes, they went to the place where the lagoon is, near the sea, half a day’s sail, less for that fine ship out there. Where is it from? Take him on the ship. He’ll find his family there, if he’s lucky, though they say it was his fault, not listening when everybody else knew the Lord Potheidan was angry about something. What? Nobody knows why he was angry. You never know. Where is that fine ship heading? Here, this man knows the sea lanes. He was a mariner when he was young. No, Shardana is where she should sail. Never get where that fine ship wants to sail if she keeps to this coast. It goes on forever and they say there are pirates on the copper island. Is that all? Is there any salt to spare, or olives, or cloth?
Potyr refused to stay in the bay or attempt a night passage of the strait that opened onto the coast where the smith’s people had taken refuge. There was safe anchorage off the bronzesmiths’ island and that was where the Davina would stay. She would sail again at dawn and be off the lagoon before midday, if what they had been told proved right. The men and children stood on the jetty, watching the ship
pull away and raise sail. She was soon well out to sea.
“Wasn’t he big?” said one of the women, “big and handsome as a god.”
“The way he looked at you,” said another, shivering a little. “Pity they hadn’t stayed in the fields,” she added with a smile, nodding towards the men on the jetty.
“That young one had a look about him as well, said a third. “Did you see how the children kept touching his skin? I wonder what it felt like.”
“What about the other one with the pipes? He had all the children sitting round listening to him.”
“Maybe he was a god, that big one, coming on a ship like that. And he had that sword; did you see it? Long and sort of silvery grey, it was. Gods have swords like that.”
“I wasn’t looking at his sword,” said the second woman.
“Well, he’s gone now, and the young one. You’ve had your chance, and now it’s gone.”
They watched the ship growing smaller and smaller as it sailed away, all of them wondering what might have been. They all knew the stories about gods.
It was early morning, There were people there, lots of them with the sun hardly three fingers up from the horizon astern when Namun sang out that he could see the lagoon fine on the starboard bow. Typhis leaned on the tiller and the ship turned and began to close on the shore. Some people came running towards the beach, others stayed by the rough shelters they had set up, shading their eyes as they looked out to sea. Trails of smoke from cooking fires rose into the sky. Children were skipping about, scattering the goats and sheep. The smith, up near the stem post, began waving frantically and trying to shout.
