Treasures of the Deep

by Andrew McGahan

  She had not been sure what to expect, here at what must surely be one of the remotest corners of the Kingdom of Leone, or indeed of all the eleven Kingdoms. Torrento, from which she had set out, was no great metropolis to begin with, already a long way from the city, up in the wilds of the north-western highlands. And in the long walk between there and here, always descending through stony, wind-blown valleys, she had come across no inhabitation greater than a few rare hamlets by the roadside, some of them quite wretched, without even an inn to welcome a traveller.

  But in fact, though small, Shallow Corner at least looked snug and neat at first sight, especially on this cold and wind-threatened evening. This was explained perhaps by the fact that it was a fishing port, earning its living from the sea, not from the hard land behind it. There was a large stone building that must be an inn, fronting onto a paved square that led down to a stony beach, where a dozen fishing boats and more were drawn up neatly on the shingles, their nets strung out for repair on poles nearby. Sheds lined the other sides of the square, no doubt used for the drying and smoking and pickling of the daily catch, and behind those was a semicircle of cottages and huts, some nestled into the lower slopes of the hill. No one was in sight in the square or in the several streets, but lights shone bright and welcoming in many windows.

  Optimism warmed her as she paused a moment on the road verge, staring down. Yes, yes, she would find him here.

  Her gaze lifted to look beyond the village. It was protected by a long, low headland of bare rock that reached out from the coastline here and curled almost fully around on itself, and so created a harbour – but waiting beyond this spit was the grey, heaving vastness of the open ocean, the horizon black with bands of rain. And oh, how good it was to behold the sea again! It had been so long, a year and more since she had been sent to the Home. True, this view was very different to the one she had known in the busy docks of Westhaven. There were no great ships moored here, no forest of masts and spars rising, no crowds of small crafts busily plying the waters, no piers and warehouses teeming with sailors and dockhands, no din of humanity and shrieks of scavenging seagulls. But still, it was the sea, and how she had missed it.

  The wind buffeted anew, and a few spatters of cold rain hit her before dying away. She turned from the view, hurrying down the last few turns of the path to the village. In a strange manner she was even pleased, in her weariness, with the chill and the gloomy weather. For after all, according to the old tales, wasn’t this just the sort of evening upon which Dow Amber first arrived at the village of Stromner, far away on New Island, at the very dawn of his adventures? True, by all accounts Stromner had been a much harsher-looking place than Shallow Corner appeared to be, but still, in her own way Lucy was following in the great Dow Amber’s footsteps.

  And that was surely a good omen.

  She was passing the outlying cottages of the village now, the path had become a cobbled street, leading down the last incline to the main square. The inn reared there, two storeys and solid stone, the sign of a spouting whale swinging above its door. And finally, a sign of life. Even as Lucy came near, the door of the inn was flung open, a warm glow from within casting out onto the wet cobbles, and two men emerged, buttoning up their coats. Fishermen, by the look, both of them old and sturdy and bearded.

  ‘Excuse me!’ said Lucy.

  The men, who had already taken a few steps towards the beach and the boats drawn up there, turned in surprise.

  ‘Why, hello there, young lady,’ said one. ‘Where did you spring from? I don’t think I’ve seen your face before.’

  ‘I’m from Montilla,’ Lucy replied, careful to name the wrong town, and waving a hand back towards the highlands, grey in the darkness and cloud. ‘Can you help me? I’m trying to find someone who lives here.’

  The men were gazing about the square, as if in search of someone else, an adult perhaps, who should be accompanying this stranger of a twelve-year-old girl. ‘Oh yes,’ said the first man, ‘and who might that be?’

  ‘His name is Rolly Fish.’

  The two men’s friendliness seemed to cool as they studied her. ‘And what do you want with him?’ the second said at last.

  ‘I …’ Suddenly Lucy was unsure what to answer. But what else was there but the truth? ‘I just want to talk to him.’

  The men were frowning now. ‘Yes,’ said the first, nodding, ‘and I can guess why. But listen to me, girl. Rolly is an old man who likes best to be left in peace. He doesn’t need to be bothered by children pestering him for stories about all that old craziness. You should leave him alone.’

  ‘Better you head on back to your home,’ agreed the second.

  An abrupt despair gripped Lucy. Suddenly the night and the wind and the coming rain did not seem romantic at all, she felt only alone and small and cold, a long way from any friendship or help. ‘But I can’t go home,’ she said, voice breaking and tears starting. ‘I came all the way here.’

  ‘You’re on your own?’ asked the first man.

  Lucy nodded and it all came out. ‘I ran away and came all this way to see him, and now you won’t tell me where he is …’

  The first man raised a hand. ‘All right, child, no need to cry. Just go up there along the beach. The last little house you come to, set up on the spit there, is Rolly’s. You can’t miss it. Just knock on his door.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean he’ll let you in, though,’ said the second man, still frowning. ‘Still less that he’ll want to talk to you.’

  ‘But in any case,’ added the first, ‘once you’re done with him, you come back here to the inn. You can’t be out alone on a night like this, with the weather coming on. My wife works there in the kitchen. You come back here and ask for Carly and you say I said to give you a hot meal and a bed for the night. Tell her I sent you. My name is Rafael. You hear all that?’

  Lucy sniffed. ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got some boats to check and secure. Quite a storm coming, by the feel. So best get on your way, girl.’

  Lucy went, shuffling off hesitant in the direction the men had pointed, which was westwards, towards the ocean side of the harbour. She felt their silent gazes on her back for a time, but when she finally glanced behind they were walking off towards the boats, talking between themselves.

  She paused, stared ahead over the cobbles to the far side of the square and dark rise of the spit beyond. It seemed amazingly foolish now to realise that she had not considered, until this moment, that she might not find Rolly Fish at the end of her journey, or that he might not want to talk to her. The notion of coming here had just seemed so right, from the instant in which she had overheard Miss Quill talking with the buyer.

  Blindingly right. Yet from the way the two fishermen had spoken, the old man might not even agree to see her!

  But he had to see her. There was no one else in all the world who had actually met Dow Amber and Ignella of the Cave in person, who had beheld them after their mysterious disappearance, had spoken with them.

  And yes, that was quite impossible, as Miss Quill had said. The war, and all Dow and Nell’s adventures, had been an age ago, whole lifetimes ago. A hundred and sixty years and more had passed since then, since Dow and Nell and their two ships had vanished into the Barrier Doldrums, with the infamous Diego of the Diamond in pursuit, none of them ever to be seen again. Obviously the story of Rolly Fish was a nonsense and not to be believed. Miss Quill indeed had been scornful as she talked with the buyer.

  I wonder why he bothers with such a wicked fraud. You know that he was forced to flee his home all those years ago and come here to Leone and to Shallow Corner, just to escape being thrown in prison? Of course, it was meant to be a secret that he had fled here, but people knew it then, and people still remember it now. And really, what else did he expect for making up such lies?

  And the buyer had nodded in sage agreement.

  But Lucy, listening behind the curtain, had straight away known differently, had felt it in her
bones. Somehow, the fantastic story – which she had never heard before, even from her mother – was true. And amid the loneliness of her life in the Home, it was a siren call to her, irresistible.

  Shallow Corner by the sea. Lucy had never been there, but she knew that it lay at the end of the road that ran past the Home. To see the ocean again, and to speak with a man who had known Dow and Nell, who had the answer as to what had happened to them after they had vanished – how could she not go? It was meant to be, surely. It was fate that she had overheard Miss Quill telling the tale, and as the legends all said, fate ruled everything, didn’t it?

  Yes, it did. So as soon as everyone was safely asleep that night, Lucy had crept from the dormitory, stolen food from the kitchen, broken through a window, and by daybreak was already five miles down the road.

  It was the most reckless, daring thing she had ever done.

  And yet now … now it might have all been for nothing?

  No. No, that couldn’t be.

  She moved on finally, passing from the cobbled square to a track that ran behind the beach. It wound by the last houses on the west side of the village, then turned towards the rocky shore of the spit. The natural sea wall was low, no more than fifty feet high at any point, and Lucy could now hear the ocean waves crashing on its far side, and glimpse occasional clouds of spray lofting, whipped by the wind, which was rising still and whistling in her ears.

  She shivered. Here in the lee of the spit the wind was less no doubt than out upon the open ocean, but it was still biting and cold. But there, she could see it now ahead, her destination. Dug into the rocky shoreline at the point where the spit broke away from the beach was a final cottage, a little house that seemed half buried in wall behind, overlooking the harbour. That must be the place. A dim glow filled the building’s single window, curtained.

  Abruptly rain was falling, heavy, and the last light seemed to vanish from the day. Lucy hurried forward, climbing up the little path, a narrow ribbon of trodden sand. Just before it reached the house, the track split in two, and one leg descended again to a tiny beach hidden between two great boulders. A fishing boat was drawn up there, but Lucy gave it no more than a glance, her face bent in the rain. She took the other path and so came to the cottage’s door – there was no porch, and only a tiny eave – and hammered on it.

  Again, the sense came to her strongly that she was reliving Dow Amber’s first night in Stromner. According to the legend, he too knocked on a door in the darkness and rain, only to be greeted by a raving madman, an old fisherman drunk and consumed with grief for his son and grandson, lost in the infamous Maelstrom of New Island’s Rip. Lucy held her breath, wondering what awaited her. Then, as the rain pelted down, she knocked again.

  The door was pulled open at last, slowly. A tall figure reared dark against the lamp glow behind, then leaned forward to peer at her.

  ‘Who on earth are you, girl?’

  Lucy stared up at a thin face, narrow and old, topped with disordered, sandy-coloured hair. It was not a warm or handsome face by any means, there was too much bone and severity in it, but to her relief she heard no drunken madness or hostility in the question, only curiosity.

  ‘My name is Luciana,’ she stuttered. ‘I mean, just Lucy. Please, do I have the right house? Are you Rolly Fish?’

  The old man pulled back a little. ‘Well, that’s what I’m called sometimes. But I prefer just Roland, if it’s all the same to you.’ His tone was light, but there was a reluctant wariness in his gaze.

  ‘I …’ Lucy began, at a loss now. ‘I wanted to …’

  The old man started suddenly, glanced skywards. ‘But look, it’s raining. Come in under the door at least. Where did you come from, anyway? I know you’re not from the village. Are your parents with you?’

  Lucy moved forward gratefully, just enough to escape the rain, and so that she could look up at him without water in her eyes.

  ‘I don’t have any parents. I came here alone, from Torrento, from the Girls Home. I walked all the way here to see you, because I heard, I mean, is it true? You really met them, Dow Amber and Ignella?’

  In answer, the old man first only stared at her with a measuring eye, one long hand rubbing at the stubble on his chin.

  He was, Lucy saw now, certainly old – but he was not really old, she realised with a pang. She had seen truly old people before, people who were a hundred years old, or close to that, and this man did not have the kind of frailty and thinness of skin that those people had. He was gangly and thin, and somehow awkward in the way he stood, as if he did not fit rightly in his own frame, but he was hale for all that. Why, he couldn’t be any older than Mr Adelpho, the kindly janitor at the Home, and Lucy knew for a fact that Mr Adelpho was only seventy years old, because she and some of the other girls had attended a secret birthday party for him just this month.

  But if this man was only seventy years old, then how could his story be true? He had to be much older than that. By his own claim (as Miss Quill had reported it anyway) he was meant to be nearly two hundred!

  ‘I think …’ said Rolly Fish at last, ‘I think you’d better come in and dry off by the fire, until we sort all this out.’

  He stood back to usher her inwards, and Lucy went without hesitation, because whatever else she sensed from this rather disappointing figure, there was no threat in him. His voice was unusually high and strangely accented, and there seemed to be no natural friendliness in him, but she could detect, all the same, a deliberate civility beneath his reserve. It was not warmth, no, but rather a formal style of consideration, as if it was something that he had studied and forced himself to learn.

  His house, however, was another matter. It was tiny, but cosy and immediately welcoming. A fire burned warm in an iron stove, with an old armchair to one side, and a small table on the other. The table was set with a bowl of soup that was still steaming, matched by a pot atop the stove. Beyond was a small kitchen, its shelves neatly packed with foodstuffs and utensils, and across from the living space a bed waited, draped in a bright blanket. The walls were of stone, but were mostly covered with thick woven hangings. It was the space of a man who lived alone, no mistake, with just the one stool at the table, and the single armchair, but it was neat and well tended.

  ‘Take the chair there,’ her host instructed. ‘I was just sitting down to dinner. Did you really walk all the way from Torrento? On your own? Have you eaten, then? There’s a little left on the stove.’

  Lucy was indeed hungry, and the soup smelled delicious, so she nodded, and for a time the old man set to fussing about in the kitchen to find a second bowl and spoon. Obviously, he rarely entertained guests.

  ‘Am I to understand,’ he asked in his oddly stilted speech, ‘that you ran away from the Girls Home? You didn’t leave with permission?’

  She nodded. ‘I snuck away in the night. I hate it there.’

  ‘I can imagine you do. I’ve heard a few stories about that place. Torrento Charity Home for Wayward Girls – it sounds all very fine. But I gather that you in fact provide a lot of unpaid labour, sewing and the like.’ He was ladling the soup now. ‘So how did you become wayward?’

  ‘My mum died.’

  ‘And you had no father? Where was this?’

  ‘We lived in Westhaven, near the docks. I never had a dad. It was just Mum and me, and the rooms we had.’

  ‘So you’re from the city! And what did your mother do?’

  ‘She went on dates with men, sailors from the ships, to keep them company, and they paid her for that.’

  ‘Ah. Yes, I understand.’

  ‘But then she got sick, and when she died the landlord wouldn’t let me stay, and there was no else. The city watchmen said I had to go to Torrento and the Home. I’ve been there more than a year … but I’m never going back there, no matter what happens, I swear.’

  ‘Well, don’t worry about that for now.’

  The old man handed her the bowl and a rough slice of bread. Lucy began to eat
immediately. The soup was delicious, thick and red and creamy and tasting of fish; she hadn’t eaten anything so wonderful in years.

  Her host sat himself at the table and resumed eating his own soup. ‘And I take it you like tales about Dow Amber and Ignella of the Cave?’

  She nodded, swallowed a mouthful down. ‘Mum used to tell me all the stories, about Dow and about Nell and about the Chloe and about the Whirlpool and the Ice and the Doldrums and even about the others like Diego of the Diamond and Fidel. I know Dow and Nell weren’t on our side in the War, but I don’t care, I think they were wonderful anyway.’

  ‘Well, you’re not alone there.’ Rolly Fish was dunking his bread. ‘Dow Amber always had his supporters, even here, during that fool of a War. He still does, for that matter. But that’s the point, isn’t it. Lots of children love the tales from those days, just the same as you do, but they don’t go running away from home – even a home they hate – to chase after some crazy old man and his claims about Dow and Nell that can’t possibly be true. So what makes you so different? Why are Dow and Nell so special to you in particular?’

  Lucy squeezed her lips, then blurted out her deepest secret. ‘Because I want to be like them! I want to be a sailor and go to sea! I always have! Since I was a baby! I know it’s meant to happen! I just know it!’

  Which was nothing but the truth: to go to sea had been her only wish ever since she was a child, watching from her little window, high in their tenement block, as the big ships came and went from the harbour. Everything about seafaring fascinated her, but it was the moment when a ship cast off that entranced her most: the last flurry of the crew hurrying aboard; the lines being let loose and the great vessel warping from the dock into the deep water; the raising of the sails, men busy in the rigging; the breeze filling the canvas; and then, as if by magic, the gliding of the massive hull smooth through the water. She would watch each ship all the way to the harbour mouth, and then beyond as they forged out across the open ocean, raising more sail and beginning to roll and plunge into the swell.