Zande’s lip trembled and he hid his face in the sleeve of his jersey. ‘We must wait. Mother made me promise. Until I call you, she said.’
Yöst leant forward. Picking up the last piece of fish, he offered it to the little girl.
‘No, TaTa, no. Milk.’
He passed it to Zande. ‘She doesn’t like fish, you eat it.’ He dipped the beaker in the bucket, its rim scraping discordantly across its metal base. ‘Tatania won’t survive a winter outside on milk alone.’
‘I forgot.’ The ready tears brimmed and Yöst heard him swallow convulsively.
‘How—’
‘I’ll swim across as soon as the tide is low enough and steal a boat.’
Once, for a dare, he had tried to walk across the causeway, tempted by its outline of rocks at low tide, and received both a soaking and a beating for his efforts. ‘That sand will swallow you up in an instant,’ his grandmother had thundered, first pulling him out of the deep pool into which he’d slipped, before chasing him around the village, breaking the birch twig she was carrying against his backside. The cobs had laughed, joking that if she waited a few years he could fly across. ‘Even if you did reach the mainland, your boots would have been too muddy to wear in school. And how would you get back, eh?’ she had chastised him. ‘You’d have been drowned for sure.’ Yet those men hadn’t been drowned or swallowed by sand; they had crossed dry shod.
‘Leave us? No!’ Zande’s words burst out on a gasp of anguish.
Yöst forced his face into the semblance of merriment. ‘Hey! Stop that! You worry something can happen to me? Maybe I will drown, eh? How can I possibly do that, I’m part swan, remember? We float good.’
Zande was right, he decided, watching the wildness of the waves break onto shore, conscious his suggestion had been both impractical and foolhardy. With water that rough, he might easily drown. ‘Not today, though. There’s a storm brewing. We’d better hurry and gather that wood before it breaks. Take TaTa with you and pick up anything you can find.’
He pointed towards the marsh that lay beyond the sparse green of the vegetable patch, its edges thick with reeds, their tall, brown seed pods as upright as soldiers. That was another problem, with their milk supply dependent on finding food for the goat, the ground in every direction was already mostly bare, the animal munching at one of the last remaining zucchini plants. How would they manage during the long months of winter? ‘Gather up any broken stems. Once they’re dry, we can burn them. I’ll go the other way.’
The small boy’s face changed, his mouth once again uttering a wail of protest.
‘Zande,’ Yöst’s voice cracked with intensity. ‘I promise I will never run off and leave you.’ He held up his hand, his face expressing his pain, struggling to sound carefree. ‘How could I ever leave TaTa?’ Unsure, Zande waited. ‘See,’ Yöst tugged at the little fingers gripping his jacket. ‘She is welded to me. It would be better to name her limpet.’ Twin blue eyes stared up at him over the edge of her beaker. ‘You like the name limpet?’
‘TaTa,’ she repeated patiently, burying her face again.
Zande’s face broke into a grin and Yöst gave a silent sigh of gratitude.
He’d often seen the boy around the village, although they’d never spoken. His mother didn’t mix. Their leader’s woman and a carinatae herself, she wasn’t part of the group of women who crossed to the mainland to work in its factories. They left early, before townspeople were awake, which made good sense. Paid work was difficult to find and easily lost if an employer discovered the woman came from the island. Cobs rarely worked. It was they who changed at nightfall into the angelic shape of the celeste, filling the night-time skies with their calls. People living close to the shoreline believed their cries to be restless spirits and took their fears to the church, asking the priest for deliverance.
‘If you get back before me, will you dig us some crabs? We can eat them for lunch and have fish again tonight.’
Placing Tatania on the ground, he sped along the sandy path, his sense of guilt almost overwhelming. However, staying put or dragging two small children with him would serve no purpose. What needed to be done, he must do alone.
In the past few days, they had scoured every inch of the island except for the cliffs and the beach that lay below, even though it was the obvious place to find driftwood, each high tide depositing a rich harvest on its shore. That first night, unable to sleep, Yöst had trawled through their options, his fear of encountering death’s fierce stare overriding every other emotion. Common sense argued they could shelter in the cave, where he and Willem and the other boys had sometimes hidden, to watch the cobs perform the celeste. That had been dismissed, Yöst considering the cliff too dangerous to climb with the little girl in his arms. If the men returned, then and only then, would he risk it.
Even that decision irked, with the days growing colder, shelter was becoming of paramount importance. Clothing, even more so, since everything flammable had been consumed by the flames, apart from the jacket he was wearing and Zande’s tatty old sweater. Only from the beach was it possible to replenish their wardrobe – something he could no longer avoid.
Slowing his pace, he cut across the central clearing where families had once congregated. They hadn’t been a particularly gregarious bunch. It was the menfolk who knew one another intimately, flocking together in a glorious celebration of white wings. In the morning light, the clearing appeared strangely desolate as if people had abandoned the village years before rather than days, the timbers of the central hut collapsed inward. Yöst didn’t go near, not even to pick up stray lengths of partially burned wood, a cloying stench that made him want to retch still pervading the air.
When alive, the clan had smelled of many different things, the most memorable being kindness and tolerance. A scent he associated with Willem, although both his mother and grandmother had smelled of lavender. His grandmother had planted a lavender bush by the entrance to their hut and, as they passed, they had rubbed their fingers over it. The cobs also smelled of salt water, although when the Black deigned to stroll around the village, Yöst scented both impatience and condescension. And that night, when he had run the gauntlet of those giant bat wings, he had scented sulphur, the same smell as rotten eggs. He knew that smell well; greedy gulls that snatched eggs from an abandoned nest, on learning their error had dropped them again onto rocks. That smell made him think of the devil.
Only death was accompanied by a single smell.
He broke into a run again making for the cliff, its craggy limestone face offering a resting place for seabirds, the narrow ledges alive with kittiwakes and terns, plus a sprinkling of cormorants. The intense black of their feathers made for a startling contrast against the flocks of grey and white, augmented in summer by puffins that made the long flight to raise their young on the lower slopes of the cliff, their colourful beaks as startling as an orange dress among a bevy of black-clad mourners. As Yöst approached, a flock of guillemots landed gracefully in the shallows, their presence a forewarning of storms at sea. His mother had owned a book about birds. The winter before she died, she had taught him how to read, its colourful illustrations providing a welcome escape from spelling out difficult words like albatross and migration.
Abruptly, he stopped. A man was picking his way across the pebbles. The men that visited previously, they were big and burly, and they had used the silence of night and carried lanterns and cudgels, nets and knives. This man was tall although not especially so and his hands were empty. As he watched the man rubbed his hand across both cheeks. The men that had come so stealthily, they had not cried.
Still!
As Yöst made to retreat, the man glanced up. ‘Someone is out there?’ he called, his voice slicing through the silent air. Yöst twisted on his heel. He needed to reach the others, to keep them safe. ‘Wait! I won’t hurt you. I’m a child of Zeus, same as you.’
The breeze picked up his words and blew them in the boy’s direction. He slowed, hear
ing them repeated, ‘I’m a child of Zeus. I wanted to find out. It was too dangerous to come before.’
The man followed him to the edge of the pebble bank, his arms held out pleading, his face a mask of raw pain. ‘I knew your father. We were friends.’
‘My father’s not among them.’ Yöst dug his toe into the fine grit rimming the beach, unsure whether to take a step or not. ‘He flew south after my mother died.’
He felt the man’s gaze on his face, his pixie eyes shining like the green of a winter sea, his cheeks, by contrast, the colour of a summer-ripe apple. ‘Were many killed?’
Yöst shrugged the truth unable to speak it aloud … all.
The man stretched out his arm, beckoning. ‘Come home with me. At least you will be warm and well-fed this winter.’ With the approach of the storm, the temperature had dropped, and away from the shelter of the cliff, the wind was tipped with ice. Gusting sharply against Yöst’s bare legs, it swept on across the beach lifting the garments of the corpses, flapping them back and forth as if, joining in with applause for the man’s suggestion, they were waving their goodbyes.
Yöst eyes filled with shameful tears. He had come with the sole intention of stealing their clothes. It was the sea that had decided otherwise. Overnight, a strong tidal surge had carried away most of the bodies. Or, maybe it was Zeus himself who had interceded, wishing his people to be given a decent burial. Now, only those dumped beyond high water remained, both swan and human, their broken shapes almost indistinguishable.
Yet if Zeus had intervened, why had he not carried away all the bodies, why had he left some behind? Yöst stared about him, for the first time acknowledging that all his friends, Tast and Rue as well, they were all gone.
‘I’m not alone,’ he burst out, ‘there’s two others; Zande, the son of our leader, he's perhaps four or five, and a girl. I don’t know what age she is.’
The man covered the distance between them in a couple of steps. Yöst flinched but held his ground.
‘Thank God I came. I told my wife yesterday, I could not skulk at home any longer, I had to know.’ He bowed in a gesture Yöst had never seen before. ‘I am Albert Meijer.’
Making up his mind, Yöst gave an awkward grin and held out his hand. ‘And I am Yöst.’
‘Yes, yes,’ M. Meijer fussed, his pixie face taking on a purplish tinge in the cold. ‘Now, please gather the children before … well … before we all freeze.’
Yöst swivelled on his heel retracing his steps, conscious Monsieur Meijer had meant to say something different … that his visit might well trigger others. As they crossed the central clearing, the man slowed. Immediately the pernicious stench caught up with him, and he hurried on, increasing his pace again. Yöst overheard his muttered words and ignored them. He had already said his prayers for the dead. Reaching the sand dunes, it was automatic to swing into the track that led to the beach, the yellow gorse flowers brushing against his jacket sleeve leaving a dusting of pollen. Hearing the footsteps behind him stop, he swung round.
M. Meijer was staring about him. ‘They found the boy’s home?’ He sounded baffled. ‘It was so well hidden too. All of a dozen paths to choose from.’
Yöst shrugged. What was the point in asking a question if you already knew its answer? That one of their killers had visited the island before and had learned its secrets. ‘Zande thinks his mother is coming back. She made him promise not to move until she did.’ His voice broke, betraying his pain. ‘And he saw the bodies.’
4
Zande was digging for crabs and didn’t notice them at first, their feet making barely a sound on the soft sand.
Yöst called gently so as not to startle him. ‘Someone has come to rescue us.’
He jumped to his feet. ‘Mother?’ His voice sounded joyous, and a smile of hope, love, relief and happiness in equal measure poured into his face, fading immediately as he spotted the figure.
Albert Meijer hurried into speech. ‘I am a friend of your mother’s and would like you to come and live with me and my wife until spring.’
‘Do you know my father? He’s the Black.’
‘Yes, I know both your parents.’
Nodding, Zande ran over to Tatania who was sat on a ridge of sand, well away from the water. Ignoring the newcomer, she had been scraping up handfuls of loose sand and letting it trickle slowly through her open fingers. ‘Plop.’ She gurgled down at the tiny mounds.
Picking her up, Zande washed her sandy fingers in the sea. ‘All right. Can TaTa and Yöst come too?’
‘TaTa?’ M. Meijer enquired.
‘Tatania.’
‘Of course.’ The elderly man glanced up at the sky, the sun sulking behind a steep hillock of brown cloud. ‘You are all coming.’ Stretching out his hand, he pantomimed someone waiting for raindrops to fall. ‘We must hurry before the rain comes,’ he spelled out the lie again. ‘May I take her?’
Zande nodded solemnly, and passed Tatania across as if she were a trophy awarded to the winner of a competition, his now empty hands burrowing into Yöst’s for comfort.
‘You won’t make Yöst swim, will you? The water is very cold.’
‘No one is going to swim.’ M. Meijer wrapped the edges of his jacket around the child, shielding her from the wind. ‘I have a boat. This way, I left it on the far side of the cliffs.’ He swung round on Yöst. ‘Is there anything …’
The boy met his scrutiny without flinching. ‘Only the fire and that will soon burn itself out.’
Grasping Zande’s hand, Yöst retraced his steps through the sand dunes. Swinging away from the village, he ducked into a narrow track that led west, bordered by buddleia and scrub elder. Ignorance had dogged his heels that first day. Unaware they were too green and too full of sap to break, he had wasted both time and energy in his struggle to harvest them for firewood, his bungled attempts leaving split branches drooping disconsolately from the main stem.
The track emerged on the grass-strewn slopes of the cliff, its soft stone pitted with holes, where land crabs and birds as well as rabbits had dug their burrows. They were there now feeding on spikes of wiry grass, the ground all about littered with their droppings. On sensing humans, they bolted, their white scuts vanishing down the nearest hole.
Yöst hadn’t forgotten about the colony of rabbits, although lacking the most basic of tools he hadn’t bothered to go down that path. Even if he’d managed to snare one, he had no way of skinning it. Besides, snaring animals was never something he’d been much good at. His first attempt, years ago, had resulted in a couple of scrawny birds. Feeling sudden tears, he sniffed them away, recalling how his grandmother had shouted at him for wasting an entire morning. That night, once he had finished plucking away their feathers, there’d been little flesh worth eating and they had made a poor dinner. Even so, roasted on a spit, birds would prove a tasty dish for Tatania. But rabbits? There might well have been hundreds, yet without tools to skin and cut them, they were of no use.
Where the cliff face began to fall away, it had been split open to reveal a tiny inlet, fronting a sandy beach. A small sailing dinghy rested on the shore, pulled up high, out of reach of the breakers, the gleaming amber sand scarred by a line of footprints. From the sea the beach would prove invisible, shielded as it was by a jagged curtain of rock. Yöst grimaced ruefully, acknowledging their rescuer’s obvious familiarity with the island. Even he had discovered the cove only the previous year, and he had once boasted to his grandmother that he knew every square centimetre of the island.
‘This is called a boat, Tatania.’ M. Meijer lifted her into the stern. ‘And we are going for a ride in it. You sit next to her, Zande. Yöst, I will need your help.’
Together, they dragged the light craft round to face the water, its keel gouging deep grooves in the wet sand. As it began to float, bouncing and bucking over the incoming waves, Tatania’s laugh pealed out, the child clapping her hands with excitement; the sound as joyous as the first shaft of sunlight on a frosty morning.
/> Holding the boat steady, Yöst waited for the older man to climb in first. He edged clumsily round the two children, patting Zande on the back as he struggled to climb over the seat, making the sail boat sway alarmingly. ‘Come on, lad.’
Yöst pulled himself up on his arms, swinging lightly over the side. ‘Once we’re clear of the island, I’ll hoist the sail.’
Nodding cheerfully at the three huddled figures crouched in the stern, M. Meijer picked up the oars. Fitting them into the rowlocks, he dug their blades into the water, edging slowly away from the beach. ‘When we arrive home, my wife will make you some food.’
‘But we left the goat and TaTa only drinks milk,’ Zande shouted in a panicky voice. Leaping to his feet, he made to climb out, his one leg already over the side.
Yöst grabbed him. ‘Sit down.’
‘I want to go back and fetch it.’ The small boy glared, his expression wavering between tears and anger.
‘It will be all right. Goats are tough.’
‘But we left it tied up,’ Zande protested, wriggling even more strongly.
Tatania, frightened by the noise, pulled her lip, uttering a tiny wail of sympathy.
‘You can’t bring the goat,’ Yöst shouted.
‘Why can’t I? It’s my goat. My mother bought it for me. She told me so.’
Yöst raised his eyebrows in appeal.
Resting on the oars, Albert Meijer twisted round, scouring the briny reaches of the open sea, the little craft plainly visible beyond the concealing rocks.
Yöst caught his nervous frown. ‘I promise I won’t be above a moment,’ he offered reassurance.
The older man checked behind him once again and heaved a loud sigh. ‘Yes, very well. But please hurry.’
‘Zande, if you stop making a noise I’ll go back and free the goat.’
‘And bring it?’
M. Meijer gave a tiny shake of his head, urging Yöst once again to hurry with a flick of his fingers.
‘No. Goats are used to living wild. It would be cruel to take it with us. When we come back here in the spring, it will be there waiting for us.’
The Click of a Pebble Page 4