The Click of a Pebble

by Barbara Spencer

  Copyright © 2019 Barbara Spencer

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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  ISBN 978 1838590 888

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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  the British Library.

  Cover design by Katie Beltrami

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  BOOKS BY BARBARA SPENCER

  For Adults:

  The Year the Swans Came

  Children of Zeus Series:

  Book 1 – The Click of a Pebble

  Book 2 – An Ocean of White Wings (2019)

  Book 3 – The Drumming of Heels (2020)

  Age and the Antique Sideboard

  Broken

  For YA’s:

  Deadly Pursuit Series:

  Book 1- Running

  Book 2 – Turning Point Point

  Time Breaking

  Kidnap

  For Children:

  The Amazing Brain of O C Longbotham

  Legend of the Five Javean

  The Jack Burnside Adventures: A Dangerous Game,

  The Bird Children, The Lions of Trafalgar

  Scruffy

  A Fishy Tail

  A Serious Case of Chicken-itis

  The Click of a Pebble

  Bay of Biscay, Autumn 1934

  Throwing open the door, the priest paused on its threshold, a brisk wind teasing out the edges of his long cloak, whilst dry leaves scuffled around his feet like acolytes eager to carry out his every wish. For a moment no one noticed, the air opaque with smoke, its noise level rising and falling as someone tossed out an ill-tempered word, mimicking the ocean from which the men in the room earned their living. A living that demanded six days out of seven, excluding saints’ days when an absence from church spelled eternal damnation, forcing them to ignore their empty pockets and bellies.

  Someone raised his head. Catching sight of the robed figure he elbowed his neighbour, a large man, roughly dressed and unshaven, a pewter tankard grasped in his fist.

  ‘You sent for me?’ The priest’s smooth tones, accustomed to probing nooks and crannies in a church, easily penetrated the corners of the low beamed room. It was a large room too, although its width exceeded its height by some measure. Once very much taller, over the centuries the building had settled, similar to the human spine on encountering old age, its walls and floor sagging beneath the weight of roof tiles.

  ‘Aye.’ The man got to his feet hitching up his trousers as he did so, as if bolstering his resolve. ‘Jean-Pierre is what I was baptised; only I’s called Jean now. They asked me to speak.’

  He swept his arm round the men lounging on wooden settles. Roughly dressed, with boots worn down at the heel and shabby from long use, their roll-neck jerseys were hand- knitted and smelled of sweat and brine, with matching woollen bonnets, as if the town had bought a job lot of navy wool to save on cost. Fishermen, plain and simple, man and boy, yet very different from one another; tall, short, both old and young, fat and thin; although, to a stranger, they may well have appeared identical, cloned from the same mould with their matching garments and suspicious faces.

  The tavern equalled its customers for scruffiness, the room they frequented swathed in a smell of poverty – sweat and cheap wine, stale and acrid. A dilapidated place that had lost heart years ago, its taproom was lit by a pitiful array of oil lamps that emitted a feeble smoky light, scarcely sufficient to count out coins into the bartender’s expectant hand, let alone read newsprint. Drips of solidified oil clung to their ceramic reservoirs, obscuring a pattern of coloured starfish and, where wicks guttered and burned unevenly, the flame threw monstrous shadows onto walls or skulked in corners like a blowsy spider feasting on a fat fly.

  Ducking under the lintel, the priest latched the door behind him, the boisterous wind creeping through the gap below, as if wanting to eavesdrop on their conversation. Clad in the stern robes of a military order, with a large white cross woven into the fabric of his hooded cloak, his gaze passed across the faces of his flock, making a tally of who was there and who missing, the deep rim of his hood shielding his face. He made no attempt to remove it, even though the room was heavy with heat. Indeed, it seemed part of him, welded to his body like a second skin, and making him instantly recognisable. Without it, he might well have passed unnoticed, his congregation familiar with pale cheeks gaunt from fasting and a long elegant nose that would grow both longer and narrower with age; very different from the bulbous extremities of the majority in that room, even though several could have given him twenty years. A young man then, although the nose that sneered down on the world was ageless, mounted over an upper lip stretched as taut as a body put to the rack. His manner of speech was also different from that of his flock. It was soft, a word almost unknown among men more used to bellowing full-throated across the roar of the waves. With his mouth scarcely moving, the sinuous sounds that emanated from it had more in common with old men that had suffered a stroke and lost their power of speech. And his eyes? If asked, his congregation would have sworn he possessed two and they were black, most definitely black. They would have been wrong; it was the closeness of his hood that gave his pale orbs their colour, shielding them and obscuring their expression exactly as it was doing now.

  ‘Why not wait for morning and speak to me after Mass?’ ‘This bain’t for no church.’

  The fisherman put down his mug and jerked his thumb. ‘It’s them.’ He held up his hand as if the priest had spoken. ‘We knows you warned us. You told us often enough they was creatures of the devil and worshipped false gods.’ His accent was strong and uneducated, his lips cutting off the end of words as if they were currency to be dispensed prudently. ‘An’ we never believed you. Now we does. Pietro ’ere ’e lost his missus to them.’

  ‘My girl’s gone too. I took a stick to ’er mother for not locking the door. I won’t take ’er back, however much she begs. Unclean she is now.’

  The priest looked down his long nose at the table nearest the door. Promptly the men shuffled up to make space. Swiping his hand across a wooden stool, he wiped it clean again with a linen handkerchief before sitting down. ‘What do you wish to do about it?’

  ‘You said, get rid of ’em.’ A man called from the back of the room. ‘Drive ’em away. That’s what we want to do.’

  ‘Look at us.’ Another staggered upright, swaying slightly under the influence of strong liquor, his face brick red and sweating, beads of alcohol oozing through the pores of his skin. ‘When did any of us last see fish? The driest bloody summer we’ve ever known … even the sea has shrunk back.’ ‘Aye, that it has,’ came the obedient murmurs as
if the men were speaking in chorus, repeating lines from a play.

  One man lifted his tankard in salute.

  ‘And them birds … them swans … not natural, they ain’t,’ the fisherman continued, grasping the edge of the table to keep him upright. He spat. ‘Them’s fresh-water birds. Devil’s spawn that’s what they are. Their muck has drove the fish deep, too deep for our nets.’

  ‘An’ what about our women?’

  Another voice. ‘We daren’t keep ’em locked away when we be at sea. Yet if we leave the door open, they pollute our women just as they done the fish.’

  The man spat a second time, a gob of saliva landing on the sawdust floor. ‘Who cares about your women? If you can’t control ’em, you’m no business taking a wife.’

  Ribald laughter greeted his words, and someone called out: ‘That’s fine coming from you, Enri. You don’t like women. I have children. How do I feed them?’

  Jean thumped the table. No one took any notice, their ribaldry switched to sharp anger, drowning the room in noise. He slammed his heavy pewter tankard down onto the heavy oak table, the men gradually falling silent. ‘See,’ he grumbled, ‘this is what them creatures ’ave driven us to, rowin’ every time we meet up. You said God would send a sign. Hasn’t ’e done that?’ He gestured wildly with his tankard, cheap wine spilling over its edges. ‘’Ee even gave us a road to walk on.’

  ‘Aye, that he has,’ came the chorus of shouts.

  ‘You say we should walk across the causeway? Then what?’ the priest called out, his voice as sharp as a dagger piercing flesh. The room cowered low, its occupants exchanging furtive glances. He linked his fingers in prayer, adding, ‘You bow politely and ask them to leave?’

  ‘If they don’t leave thens we deals with ’em.’

  ‘Aye, skip the askin’, I say. Get rid.’

  ‘Once an’ fer all.’

  Several of the men rose to their feet, cudgels and nets in their hands.

  ‘No,’ the landlord shouted out. He dropped the dirty cloth he’d been using to wipe spillages from the bar counter. ‘They’ll be gone again shortly. Winter is approaching.’

  ‘Aye, meybe.’ Enri, still sweating heavily, waved the men at his table onto their feet. ‘Yet not all leave. Only the men; never the females. Nor those in spawn.’

  ‘No! Not women and children,’ the landlord protested, trying to make his voice heard above the hubbub.

  ‘Spawned by the devil himself.’ The priest’s words slipped effortlessly through the noisy outburst, a triumphant smile on his tightly clasped lips. ‘Take heed, landlord. It is not your livelihood that is suffering but that of these good men. Were you not to sell any wine for six-months, how would you say then?’

  For a brief moment, the landlord seemed prepared to continue his protest. He caught the sharp gaze of the priest and cowered away, busying himself behind the bar counter. ‘It is still wrong,’ he muttered, picking up his cloth again.

  ‘You said?’ The priest rose to his feet, raising the small cross hanging at his belt into the air.

  The landlord dropped his gaze, assiduously polishing a glass, watching out of the corner of his eye as the priest lifted the latch on the door, the men collecting their jackets and bonnets from the hook next to the door, before filing out.

  Following the white cross emblazoned on the priest’s cloak, the group passed along a rough pathway towards the causeway, the island a dark shadow in the distance. A long walk lay before them and not one they would normally have taken. After a full night’s roistering, their steps would lead them in the opposite direction, towards the port where their boats lay. Here, after a cheerful, ‘God speed,’ they would let go the bowlines, anxious to clear the channel between mainland and island before the night sky had lost its dark colour. Ignoring their burning throats, they would manhandle sails into place, conscious, despite occasional lapses of memory from drinking too readily, they had rent to pay and children to feed.

  Volubly cursing the uneven ground, they continued along streets that were both dark and narrow. A gothic archway opened into a tiny garden, in which a solitary peach tree grew and blossomed, yet bore no fruit. Behind it stood the presbytery, a plain building, dark and forbidding, its windows mere slits like the eyes of an ill-sighted beggar. A second archway framed its stout wooden entrance, a heavy iron latch and lock keeping both brethren in and the world out. Further on, where the narrow promontory pushed out into the sea, was the church itself, its tall spire pointing towards the heavens, an ever-present reminder of the one sure route to salvation. To disbelievers, its glittering interior displayed a greed equal only to that of the Minotaur, whose demand for sacrifice entailed human flesh rather than silver and gold.

  As the clean night air began to undo the poisonous work of the alcohol, several of the younger men faltered and slowed. Perhaps blessed with second sight, the priest swung round. ‘I sense a weakness of will creeping among us. Yet what choice do we have? Is that not why we are placed on this earth, to do God’s bidding and fight evil?’ He spun on his heel pointing towards the shadowy silhouette of the island, its white cliffs glimmering faintly in the moonlight. ‘There lies the greatest of all evils; unnatural beings that worship false gods. If we let them live—’

  ‘You said we was to make them leave,’ a young voice, not yet broken, protested. Sensing the priest’s withering gaze, the boy lapsed into silence.

  ‘Is that what you want? Tell me.’ The priest’s voice dropped to a whisper, yet in the boy’s ears it sounded as loud as a trumpet blasting the walls of Jericho. He hung his head, shuffling his feet in the dirt.

  ‘Most certainly, if that is what you wish. If it pleases you, we will wait a further year until the offspring of these heathens has been born, while starvation overtakes the homes of the righteous and denies food to their children. Is this what you want?’ he repeated, his voice so soft, his followers were obliged to crane forwards to hear, ‘for them to live and you to die?’ He lifted the small silver cross, the black cord attaching it to his belt a line of faith, its silver surface reflecting fragile strands of moonlight. ‘What was it that Jean said? God has sent us a sign – a sign that we will return safely.’ He brandished the cross, pointing to the trickle of water that covered the causeway. ‘As God promised Moses, he has withdrawn the waters that we might pass dry shod.’ His voice rose, berating the sky. ‘We ignore God’s gift at our peril.’

  It had been the driest summer anyone had ever known; even so none of the fishermen had heard of the causeway drying out before. Not even in the lifetime of their parents or grandparents. It had to be God’s will. Normally covered even at low tide by a good metre’s depth, tiny pools of water still lingered, and the men trod carefully, one behind the other, testing the firmness of the ground before placing their feet. The knowledge that the creatures they faced were fierce, the birds capable of breaking an arm or leg if threatened, kept them silent, and they swallowed down exclamations of pain whenever they stumbled or slipped off a seaweed-covered rock. The more timid among them kept to the rear, frequently glancing back over their shoulders at the beckoning spire of the church to bolster their courage, conscious that excommunication and eternal damnation lay ahead for the doubting Thomas. Those immediately behind the priest, their nets and cudgels prominently displayed, obviously suffered no such misgivings, the memory that their family had eaten nothing except bread and olives that day urging them on.

  To where? None had ever visited the island except for one man, whose father had once camped overnight and told him about it. The rest were familiar with its coastline from the deck of a boat. Now they gathered round the elderly man, listening intently, although who to say if he was telling it right? His father’s visit had happened several years before the newcomers had taken possession. Standing alongside the priest in pride of place, he directed the posse where to walk, where to avoid, especially the swamp with its treacherous quicksand. ‘My father said the north wind whips across that island something chronic, so it’s li
kely they ’ave built their huts on the leeside of the wood. And watch out for them sand dunes … south they are. All the paths blind-ended save for one. Don’t know which though.’

  The priest described the sign of the cross in the air. ‘Go silently in the sure and certain knowledge that God is on your side.’

  Hats off, the men bowed their heads, the last of the liquor burned away in the fresh air, leaving only fear behind.

  1

  Yöst listened to the darkness unsure what had woken him. In the distance, surf stirred restlessly and wind soughed through the tops of pine trees. Yet that wasn’t it. Those were sounds he heard every night since he’d come to live on the island, five years previously. This was more the click of a pebble against a glass window. He and his mother had had glass windows in their tiny house on the mainland. Once he had broken a pane throwing a stone against its brittle surface. He stared into the darkness listening to the quiet breathing of his five companions. Older than him, two were from the great continent of Africa, their skins the colour of aubergines ripening in the sun. Geography was good, Yöst decided, grateful that his mother and grandmother had insisted he attend school, crossing the narrow gap between the island and mainland by boat.

  ‘Learning will take you places,’ his grandmother’s voice chided him, invading his thoughts as she did almost every night, her voice ringing out as plainly as it had when she was alive. That had been her speciality, nagging, when all he wanted was to play with the other boys. Going on and on about learning how to gut a rabbit and build a fire, ‘so that you can care for yourself when I am no longer about.’

  ‘Why should I bother?’ he had retorted impatiently. ‘None of the cobs do that sort of work.’

  ‘That’s no excuse. Just because someone else is lazy and stupid. If they stuck their arm into a fire, would you do that too?’ she countered. ‘I want you to do more than read and write.’