Secrets of Carrick: Merrow

by Ananda Braxton-Smith

  Honour Bright, I never smelt anything like it, not even that time I found the fallen cow up the gorge. The Prior’s Hell with all its brimstone and corruption would have to work hard to match it.

  Near the water the stink thinned out somewhat and I could breathe again without gagging. Today the sea was blue and out in the cove the whitecaps tossed out ribbons of lacy spray. Further still, and ripples broke against hidden rock and tiny reef but, up close to the shore, all was flat as a board and clear. I could see down to the white sand-bed, its stones and shells, and all the darting schools sheltering there. I stood still in the shallows and let the tiny fish nibble my toes. If you let them they will have all the dead and hanging skin right off you. To them, it’s dinner.

  I was alone. Every other living thing on the beach was hiding from the sun. Crowding gulls and all the rock-pool creatures seemed to have been taken from the world overnight, and all I could hear were ripples and far, faraway a hum of insects. My head was surging and the path home suddenly seemed too long and too rough, the cliff, too steep and rocky, and I saw only obstacles and breathless heat that way. Giving up, I dropped the moult-sack on the rocks and waded into the big, cool sea.

  It was a strange thing to stand in water exactly the colour of the sky; strange not to be able to see a horizon. The unending blue stretching before, above, and to each side of me made me light-headed. Without edges the middle disappears. I felt myself floating there inside the blue, everywhere and nowhere at one time. It made me dizzy so I looked down at my feet. My brown toes spread like fingers into the earth and gripped like roots. The sand was still solid, if shifting, and the nibbling fish at least were real.

  I splashed pleasurably forward, sighing aloud as each water-drop hit my skin, and the fact is I was so taken with the coolness I forgot to look where I was going. In spite of being a noticing sort of person, I didn’t see the ground fall right away just before me. Not only had the shoreline and cliffs changed their face in the earthshake, but now the undersea parts were changing too. I hadn’t taken ten pleasant, cooling steps with eyes half-closed before I fell off the new drop-edge.

  Before this day, the drop had been a fair way out and could always be trusted to be where it was last time. A line of waving kelp marked a spot ten paces beyond where the ground fell away, and you could walk safe up to its very edge. The drop moves about now, and on that day it had moved closer to the shore. Without warning I stepped into nothing. As I sank I glimpsed only the mess of weed and the pit of dark water beneath me.

  I wasn’t scared at first, just surprised. Straightways I kicked up into the light and toward what I thought would be the shore but when I breached I wasn’t anywhere near the cliff-path. I didn’t know where I was. The moult-sack had gone. I couldn’t see the shattered beach at all. I was in a storm of water, wrack and grit, rolling toward the far cliff and out into broad-water, travelling fast. The new drop had delivered me right into the undertow.

  The world and all its parts slowed. I struggled against the tow’s terrible drag, but every thrash and strike just sucked strength from me while doing nothing to move me one span closer to still-waters. Every time I was spat to the surface I sucked in air like a gale before being pulled back into a slow boil of foam and strangling weed. I was rolling and flipping, wrapped and unwrapped in flotsam, but slow, slow like in dreams. The kelp streamed by, graceful as water snakes; the foam forming itself into shapes in the water just as clouds do in the sky. I even had the time to admire them. My own hair wrapped itself around my face, blinding me, or wriggled and twisted upward around my head like a meadow of glass-eels.

  At last the tow pushed me to the seabed and pinned me there. Spreadeagled under countless weights of water, flayed by the shell-grit then scoured by stinging salt, I felt myself finally run out of puff. I was done-in. It was over. I stopped fighting.

  It was a relief to do so. As I watched with interest the water above me dapple and dim, I wondered what was to happen next. I had always thought of death as something that happened to old people, or the sick, or those whose job it was to kill and die, such as raiders or soldiers. Stories, of course, were filled with folk dying but that was just part of the fun. It was something that happened to other people. Now here I was; dying. There was nothing to be done and so I did that. The world flowed away from me, there was a rushing and then I noticed and wondered no more.

  I was dragged along a tunnel toward a soft light, where somebody was waiting for me, and I expected to find myself in a glowing crystal cave or some such holy place filled with sweet smells and harmonious chanters — but I was spat out in a cow-byre. They say paradise and earth are only three feet apart and now I saw what they meant. What I supposed to be my own paradise was very like home; darkish and sizeable, and smelling strongly of dung, straw and warm cow. And why wouldn’t it, because at the far end was the biggest cow I’d ever seen. Her head was twice the size of other cows, even the breeds up the Cronks, and I guessed she stood over me by one whole grown man. Her hooves were as foundation stones and her udders as a giant’s bagpipes. She was plainly filled with milk and lowing irritably, so I grabbed the stool and bucket and started milking her. It seemed like a good idea, in spite of being dead.

  That mountainous cow filled the bucket easily and then was done with me, turning her back and chewing her cud as though I weren’t there. A door behind her swung open and stone steps circled downward into the earth. I didn’t have to think about what to do — a door opened and I went in, a cow turned up and I milked it, and now these stone steps fronted me. There was nothing to do but follow them, so I did. I carried the bucket without spilling a drop until I reached the very bottom. And there, in the soft light of a forest of slender and glowing mushrooms, waited for me a shrunken and ancient woman.

  She reached only to my elbow but when she came closer I saw that she was bent sharply from the hips and that was the reason for her lack of height. With her eyes brown as new-tilled earth, and fat as a goose like she’d never known hunger, she had the air of content all over her. Her skin was as warm wood, ringed and scored with great age, and her chest was bigger than the baker’s Cushie; although plainly not under the rule of the world anymore, I was still a bit disgusted when she reached out with both arms and clutched me into it. The Ancient-one held me there and laughed like bells, not tinkling bells but ships’ bells or church bells. She pealed and tolled; loud and important. ‘Give me my due, Mortal Child,’ she clanged. ‘And we’ll see what’s to be done with you.’

  Seeing me casting about for what she could possibly mean, the little woman waved her hand toward the far wall. There, almost hidden by drooping fern, was the stone bowl from Ma’s altar. It was empty and carved in spirals and knots. I knew what I needed to do now. Lifting the bucket I poured the giant cow’s milk into the stone bowl.

  At once the room below the byre flooded with light. Breeshey, for that was who it was, came to the bowl and smiled up at me. Taking a stone mug, hollowed out with great skill and worn on one side from an endless progress of mouths, she scooped and drank deeply from the still-warm milk. Then she gave me the mug and I did the same. The Ancient-one dipped her fingers into the bowl, then, and marked my brow with the same spiral as the stone bowl. The quiet room, the old woman, the warm milk; they all lulled me into a kind of senselessness. Then, out of nowhere, she took up a bright and curved blade.

  My senses returned in a moment. ‘No!’ I started back from her but Breeshey grabbed my hand and held it over the stone bowl. She drew the blade over my palm and with a sharp pain the blood came.

  ‘Yes. Yes, yes…’ She hummed and stroked my cheek as the blood dropped into the milk, and stained it with red ribbons. ‘There. It’s done.’ She poked me in the ribs, hard, and the room filled with her laughter. It was a charm and I couldn’t help myself; I had to laugh too. It all suddenly struck me as deeply comical, though I couldn’t have said what or why. She thumped me on the back, once, twice, and then with one last backbone-breaking thump I was burstin
g, laughing face-first into the light and spray of Marrey Cove.

  I wasn’t dead anymore. I was alive — but still dragging away in the undertow. There were dead fish raging all around me and I felt like something in one of Ma’s stews. And I was still being thumped upward from underneath. I tried grabbing at whatever was thumping me but whenever I gripped at it my hands just slid off.

  Each of these thumps nearly broke a rib and I set my mind to thumping it back the very next time it rose. Instead, as it rose under my belly I gripped around its broad neck, thinking to stop it diving again, and I just held on like a limpet. The slippery creature dipped its head, flipped its tail, and was away. I got my arms around its neck and clung on with little hope, every instant expecting to be stolen away into the wide sea. We moved through the water-storm like the lightest and sleekest of the raiders’ ships. I rode on its back, casting wakes on each side and my nose stinging from salt and wind. Straight and true we cut through the undertow, and then I was dumped, gasping for breath, choking, puking, into the clear shallows of the little inlet. When I could, I looked to see what it was that had carried me from my death back to my life.

  The mother seal rolled in the shallows only a few steps away, nodding and blinking in the light. She heaved herself over to me and for one moment she gave me the eye, face-to-face. Her gaze was sharp, part amused and part troubled. It was the same eye I’d seen her give her pup. It was the same eye Ushag gave me when listening to me talk story. Not this summer’s stories, they had proved to be mostly troubling, and not very comical, but the stories before this summer, the stories of my childhood. The mother seal rolled onto her back and barked. From the mazy rocks came her pup, out of nowhere.

  ‘Thank-you, sea-girl,’ I said, as she turned her speckled back to me and greeted him. Then they were away through the weed and swelling water. I watched their bubble-trails move into the cove, and then I turned to see how I was placed.

  My heart had been cherishing that little inlet. I was the only one who had truly seen its perfection, and for a long time I had longed to claim its white and silver perfection for myself. But now I was here and it was just another beach, and even messier and dirtier than Marrey Cove. Its dangling vines had dried out and hung to the cliff-walls like smoked eels in a lean-to. Its white sands, pocked by rubble, were now grey. The tidal dead blotted the sand. My dream of the little inlet was finished. Now I just wanted to go home.

  Just out past the rocks the undertow thundered on, all foam and spit. I would not get home that way. I turned to the cliff face.

  It was as if some child-giant had taken its hammer and battered at the rock in a temper. It was more holes than cliff now. Rocks the size of houses had fallen to its base, and the mountain’s insides were plain to see. Winding tunnels burrowed through its body, like the trails left by wood-ants in bodge, and hived into countless tiny cells, like a lump of honeycomb. Just above my head, a gap as tall as oaks had been shaken out of the rock and beyond that, a cave opened up into ledged walls and a soaring roof. It looked big enough to hold all sorts of things, perhaps even a way out.

  First, though, I had to clamber up and over all the fallen rock. It was over-hot, as I think I’ve mentioned before, and I was trembling all over from my rough swim; not to mention the events of Breeshey’s byre. There was no mother seal to help me here, and no Ushag. I was going to have to save myself.

  Some of those boulders were smooth as eggshells and I had to search for the tiniest of toe-holds and grips to climb them; others were sharp as flints and if I was to go on I just had to let myself be cut. There was nothing else to do. My sweating body slipped often but I found that if I breathed very slowly and didn’t think of anything beyond this grip, this toehold, I could do it. Pulling myself up over the last rim of the last rock, I lay still for some time waiting for my heart to settle. I’d been scared of being stuck in the inlet until Ushag noticed I was gone; a thing she might not have done for a whole day and night or more, in that we don’t live in each other’s shadows. I stood and limped over to the opening, where my heart leapt like a hare and I couldn’t hold back from laughing. I knew this cave.

  It was the cave of the merrow-bones; well, that is, it was and it wasn’t. The gap did lead into the cave but somewhat up the height of its walls, and so I was looking down into it from a deep shelf. It was the same cave in spite of the changes wrought by the earthshakes; I could see the dark pool at its far end, and the pit of dead things with its flies. I sat on the edge of a rock-shelf and let myself drop into the sand. Straightways the burning started and I ran on my toes to the pool, where I rested and watered my feet.

  There’d been a big fall of rock and the pit of shoes was gone under rubble. I couldn’t see any sign of the merrow-bones. It was now just an ordinary cave.

  I was going to have to swim the tunnel by myself, and hope that I hadn’t grown much in the last few days. There hadn’t been much room last time, and my aunt was fond of pointing out that lately I grew more like a heifer than a human. The water of the dark pool was still, cold and sour, and I gazed into it waiting for my belly to catch up with my head. My head was sure and set in my course, my belly was all but and what if.

  My own face stared back at me from the pool and I wondered for the first time whether I was well-grown or not. I couldn’t tell. The words of the market-women troubled me. Not that I cared, but I didn’t think I looked anything like a wood-violet. I’m small and dark like Ushag and Ven, and violets come to think of it, but I think I look more like a fox or a longtail. I don’t know why those women in Shipton have to turn everything into a romance. Ushag said the only thing a body might need to look like a wood-violet for is getting a certain type of man, and for everything else it just gets in the way. She said women don’t like other women who look like wood-violets, and that decent men look for more than indecent measures of floweriness in their women. She said it takes so long to cultivate the violet in a body that there was no time to fill the pot or see to the yard.

  She also said I should look at a wood-violet’s life before I got myself set on becoming one. I did; they live in the dark their entire lives, and weren’t good for much apart from adornment. I closed my eyes and splashed my face. After all the salt, even that sour water felt good.

  When I opened them there was a new, white face staring up at me. Its lips were pulled into a snarl; I could see all its teeth. I scrabbled backward, away from the pool and it, and hid behind a rock to see what the white face was going to do. I watched but nothing came up out of the water, and after some time waiting I crept back to the pool and looked over its edge. The face was still there, but it hadn’t moved. I started to think it must be dead, and stirred the water a bit with my hand, and then I saw the truth. It was not in the water but was reflected in it from behind and above me.

  Now, I spun on my heels with my breath turning to ice in my throat. The beastly face was staring at me from the shelf above. Its eyes were hollow. I felt around for some weapon and put my hand to a rock.

  Letting out a savage scream, which shook the rubble further and showered me with dust, I hurled that rock like my aunt hurls the gillnet. It went straight and true and hit that face full in its nose. There was a hollow clatter and the face, along with the whole head belonging to it, fell into the pool. I had knocked the thing off entirely. Now I was filled with a different sort of horror and scrambled backwards out of the pool, away from the head. It bobbed in the water with its black eyes staring. Then I stopped. Its eyes were not just black and empty but really hollow; that is, it had no eyeballs.

  It was a head, but it wasn’t alive. It wasn’t even a proper head. It was just a skull; a human skull.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bones

  I DID THINK ABOUT GETTING OUT of there right then, before that skull could do something like talk. I didn’t want to hear anything it had to say even if its head was now brimful with wisdom and help for such as me. Before any of Ma’s walking dead could prove themselves to me, or the Other
s came swarming like jellies, I wanted to be out in the common world under a regular sun.

  I didn’t want to meet any of the drowned crofters who walked the undersea-paths. I didn’t want to see their sad, swinging lanterns, nor have any of them choose me as a companion. I wanted no broken-hearted cave-dwelling ancestors to find and hold me there to warm their cold, cloven hearts. I didn’t want to hear the banshee Scully told me about. Suddenly I didn’t feel proud to be a Marrey, stuck in our cove of bafflement. I just wanted to get out.

  I could have wriggled through the tunnel and been away down the gorge, safely back in our yard before another stone could drop in Carrick, before another great tide could wash in or another hot cloud of dust settle. I was stuffed to the gullet with the gods, water-spirits and cave-ghosts, sea-folk, faery, and all their kind. I just wanted something to be real. With my fear turning to anger, I fished the skull from the dark pool.

  Where there was a head there was bound to be a body. There was no running away from that fact. My reckless legs were scrambling up the rubble before my craven belly could stop them. As I did, shocks of clattering stone ran around the cavern and sounded through all its chimneys and chambers.

  The skull had brought with it an Otherwise humour. Anything could live in that beehive underworld for a lifetime and never be found. I half expected tribes of bloodless cave folk, dwarfish men and pale, hovering women, to swarm over me like ants and carry me off to tend their slug-like offspring. Or a giant spider to take me delicately between his feet and wrap me in white web and hang me like our rabbits in his larder. Or at the very least, a blood-hungry landlocked eel to rise from the pool and eat every part of me. But there was nothing; just the sound of dripping damp and my own sliding footfalls, and sometimes the dark pool bubbling a little. As I cleared the rock-slip, though, all the ghouls of my mind’s eye melted away.