by Ines Thorn
ALSO BY INES THORN
The Whaler
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Ines Thorn
Translation copyright © 2018 by Kate Northrop
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as Die Strandräuberin by Aufbau Verlag in Germany in 2017. Translated from German by Kate Northrop. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2018.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542048958
ISBN-10: 1542048958
Cover design by PEPE nymi
CONTENTS
PART 1
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
PART 2
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
EPILOGUE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
PART 1
PROLOGUE
THE NORTH FRISIAN ISLAND OF SYLT, 1711
Autumn had begun. The sailors’ wives stood on the dunes at dawn, watching for the Dutch smaks, the coastal transport ships from Amsterdam and Hamburg carrying those men who had been aboard the whaling ships: husbands, brothers, lovers, and fathers. They had left Sylt in February on Petritag, Saint Peter’s Day, after the Biikebrennen festival, and had sailed all spring and summer, as far as Spitsbergen and Greenland, searching for whales. They had braved storms and drift ice. They had hunted the enormous creatures in small rowboats, risking their lives to cast harpoons at the behemoths. They had towed the slain whales back to the mother ship, balancing precariously on top of the creatures’ carcasses to cut away the blubber. They had sweat, laughed, cursed, endured freezing temperatures, and now they were elated to be coming home at last. There was a buoyant, joyful atmosphere on board the smaks. The men had money in their pockets and their sea chests were full of gifts, and they were looking forward to spending the winter by warm hearths with their wives and children.
At least that’s what the women waiting on the dunes hoped. Some had Bibles in their pockets or clutched little wooden crosses for luck. None of them knew if their man would be among those coming home. If a hundred men left in February, perhaps only seventy would return, and every woman dreaded the thought that she might have a funeral to plan.
The storm, heralded by powerful swaths of sheet lightning earlier that day, was tearing over the island. Wind swept sand into the air and flattened the dune grass. The swells were topped with seething whitecaps and raced toward the beach, throwing huge breakers past the high-tide line and up to the fishing boats tied with pegs and lines at the foot of the dunes.
By twilight, the wind moaned so loudly that it drowned out every other sound in the village. Niels Thaken, the beach overseer of Rantum, pulled on his oilskins and a worn sealskin cap. He put a piece of bread and an apple in his pocket and walked to his neighbor’s house.
“It’s going to be bad,” he told his neighbor, looking with concern at the sky. “Two men should keep watch on the dunes tonight.”
Everett scratched his chin. “Won’t be any pleasure in it,” he grumbled. “It’s cold, wet, and dark. And my wife is soft and warm.”
The overseer nodded. “True, but remember: if there is a shipwreck, you’ll be the first one there.”
Everett nodded thoughtfully and called his dog, a large animal with curly black fur. He, too, put on his oilskins, and soon both men were lying in the sand, seeking what protection they could find in a rut between two dunes. It was bitterly cold. The wind whipped sand through the air, stinging their cheeks and ears. The storm howled like a pack of hungry wolves, and the sea roared so loudly they could barely hear themselves speak.
Niels Thaken pointed to the left. “See that dark spit of land where the bluff drops into the sea? Many a ship has foundered there on the rocks. The past few nights, I’ve seen flickering lights there, dancing lights. They say when the lights dance, a ship will sink. Noon today, I saw a huge brig to the southwest. If she sails with the wind, she’ll hit the rocks here tonight.”
“I know that, overseer,” Everett replied. “They say that this corner of the island attracts ships like a magnet. Over the years, that’s proven to be true. When a ship founders, this is where it happens. My father tried to grow wheat here, but the sea just swallowed it. But the sea is just and fair; it’ll make up for my family’s loss. If it takes, it also gives.”
The beach overseer glanced sideways at Everett. “Yes, the sea is just. As are the laws of this shore. Anyone who acquires the spoils of the sea must also contend with the arm of the law.”
Everett laughed softly. “The arm of the law isn’t all that long. Most beachcombers are poor. If you jail them near winter, they’ll dance with joy. At least in jail they’ll have something to eat and drink, and a dry place to sleep.”
Suddenly the dog sounded an alarm, his barking almost drowned out by the blustering storm.
“It’s time,” the overseer said. He rose partway out of the depression and peered down at the beach. In the scant moonlight shining between racing clouds, he saw dark forms scurrying across the beach. “They’re already here. They know as well as we do there’ll be a wreck tonight.”
Everett had been peering ahead with narrowed eyes, and now he pointed. “Look, something’s coming. There, in the spray, I can see the outline. A ship.”
The beach overseer peered out into the darkness. He cupped a hand to his ear, searching for sounds and finding them. With a loud crash, the ship’s hull cracked against the rocks, and a single scream rose into the air like a bird. Both men heard wood shatter and sails groan, and the next big wave tossed flotsam onto the sand.
The dark figures on the beach stood still. One had a coil of rope over his arm, to pull things out of the water. Terrible cries cut through the night, the shrill screams of desperation. One man grabbed the other’s sleeve. “Not so fast,” he said. “We should wait until the screamers have gone quiet. It’ll be one or two more waves, and then the ship will break into pieces. The sailors who are still alive after that will drown, and the rest will be for us.”
“What about the beach overseer?” asked the other, peering into the darkness all around.
“Don’t worry. Niels Thaken is hiding behind the dune over there with his neighbor Everett. But you know him, he’ll never hear anything but his own voice.
” He chuckled softly and glanced at the dunes. The two men went quiet for a moment, and the wind continued to roar. “You can’t hear it over the storm, but the ship will be filling with water now.”
Then they heard a piercing human cry, and a figure let go of the tilting brig and fell into the icy water, reappeared briefly, and sank under the crashing waves.
One of the men rubbed his hands together. “Won’t be long now, then we can start.”
Suddenly a large man rose from the water right in front of them and dragged himself onto the beach.
The beachcombers hesitated. “I thought they were all dead!” one of them called above the wind. “If anyone lives, the ship’s cargo belongs to him.”
“We’ve waited long enough,” the other replied. “We have a right to it. Let’s just wait a moment and see if any more are coming.”
They watched the man collapse on the beach, facedown in the water. They could have gone to him and turned him over. They could have saved him. They only stood and stared. One of them began to shiver, but the other watched impassively as the sailor raised his head a little, one last time, and fell face first into the water again and stopped moving.
“Now!” one of them cried, and fell on the motionless figure. He tugged off the man’s boots, made of fine calf leather, while the other pulled off his jacket and fingered the hem to see if there were coins sewn into it. After they’d robbed the man, they bragged about their haul.
They were so absorbed by their greedy pleasure that they didn’t notice another figure crawl out of the icy surf. It was a large, heavy man who carried a thick piece of wood. With it, he struck the beachcombers in the head one after another, and watched with satisfaction as they sank to the ground.
In the meantime, the beach overseer and his neighbor Everett had come down from the dunes. They recognized the man standing in front of them: Cornelius Hagendefeldt, a sailor from Rotterdam, thirty years old and the captain of a ship laden with silk and cotton, attempting to make passage from the south around Denmark to the Baltic Sea.
“What happened?” the beach overseer asked, glancing at the prone forms of the two beachcombers.
“We were hit by a rogue wave,” Hagendefeldt said. “It swept almost the entire crew overboard, all but two men.” He turned and pointed at the body on the beach. “That was my watchman. Now that he’s dead, I’m the sole survivor.” With a grim expression, the Dutch man glared at the two beachcombers, who lay unconscious in the wet sand. “Quite a warm reception for us.”
The beach overseer frowned. He didn’t answer but turned to Everett instead. “Bring him to my home. Ask my wife to give him something to eat and drink, and to give him some dry clothes of mine, if they fit. Then come back here. First, let’s tie up these criminals.” He took a thick calving rope from his pocket, pulled a knife from his boot, and cut the rope in half.
A few minutes later, both beachcombers had their hands bound behind their backs. They were conscious again, but dazed. Niels Thaken forced them to their feet and drove them through the dunes to the village with a cudgel. Finally, he locked them in the Rantum church of Saint Peter. The two of them begged for leniency, but the overseer knew he couldn’t grant any pardons if he wanted to retain his authority.
For a few hours, the beach was left to the forces of nature. The storm tore at the wreck, loosened planks, and tossed them to shore. Gradually, the wind and waves dwindled. A young woman, a girl really, approached the water and peered around cautiously. She slung a coil of rope over her back, raised her lantern to shoulder height, and walked into the sea. Her dress clung wetly to her skin, and a heavy leather belt with tools hanging from it dragged her down, but she ignored it. With long, slow strides, she made her way out to the wreck, lying on its right side. She climbed nimbly onto the hull, the light of her lantern dancing over the deck like a will-o’-the-wisp, and lowered herself to the outer edge and evaluated the damage. The cookhouse lay in ruin, and a few barrels were rolling around freely. A basket of carrots had spilled, and flour was seeping out of a large bag. She carefully opened the deck hatch and felt her way through the darkness into the cargo hold. The water was already knee-deep. On one side were soaking-wet bales of linen, and on the other, wooden planks, the kind used to build houses. She wrapped her rope around one of the fat bales of cloth, climbed back to the tilted deck, and heaved the wet bale up through the hatch. She pushed it into the water, jumped in after it, and towed her prize back to the deserted beach. Broad bands of purple light had started showing in the sky, announcing the dawn. Two gulls flew screeching above her, but otherwise all was quiet. She gazed at the barely visible moon and tried to calculate how much time had passed. The beach overseer would return soon. Did she have time to retrieve one of the barrels? She decided to risk it. She waded back to the ship, climbed the hull, wrapped her rope around a barrel of unknown goods, threw it into the water, and quickly brought it ashore. She had just rolled her catch behind the first dune when she heard voices. She quickly lowered herself into a depression in the sand. The beach overseer had returned, and his neighbor Everett with him. Both of them walked along the water’s edge, and the beach overseer bent down to examine footprints in the wet sand near the waterline. They disappeared where the water became deeper.
“Again!” Niels Thaken cried angrily. “Someday I’ll catch her!”
Everett laughed softly. “No one has been able to do that. She’s clever.”
By noon that day, the storm had receded and the sky was a brilliant blue. Both beachcombers had been put into stocks in the middle of the Rantum village square, across from the tavern. A bailiff tore the men’s shirts from their bodies and let his whip speak for him. Twenty-five lashes each, and at every stroke, their shrieks echoed through the village. Then they were released from the stocks and collapsed, and would probably bear scars for the rest of their lives. One panted and wheezed, and the other lay as still as death. Two women had been watching with their hands pressed to their mouths, as though they were trying to keep themselves from screaming. One trembled, supported by the other, whose legs were shaking. She sobbed loudly. A little girl ran desperately to one of the men, threw herself down beside him, and gently stroked his bloody back. She wore a faded dress with a frayed hem. “Father,” the child whispered. “Father, can you hear me?”
Then four men arrived, tall and broad shouldered. The smith was among them, and the others were fishermen. They lifted the flogged men off the ground and carried them to their meager huts, which clung crookedly to the sides of the dunes. The two women followed them, supporting each other and moaning. “What shall become of us now that our men are crippled?” one cried.
No one answered her. The villagers were silent, some of them regarding the punished men with indifference, others with sympathy. No one noticed the girl who stood at the edge of the square. No one saw that she was trembling, or that she’d winced with every stroke of the whip, her face twisting in agony as though the lash were striking her own flesh. She knew she would receive the same punishment if anyone ever caught her. So far she’d been lucky, but she couldn’t count on that luck forever. She would much rather make a living some other way, but on Sylt, there was little paid work for women. And the women who had no husbands were all poor, every single one of them. And so she went to the sea the night of every shipwreck. She just wanted to live, and have enough to eat and drink. Not extravagantly; just enough to survive. She had neither father nor mother nor brothers nor sisters. She had only her grandmother, no one else. The problem was, the law didn’t differentiate between poor women who took from the sea to survive, and cruel land pirates who stood by and watched sailors drown.
CHAPTER 1
Anyone who could recite all twenty-four ancestors of Brigid of Kildare by heart would be protected day and night. Protected from the threat of the Devil and all earthly enemies. At least, that was what they said in Iceland.
Jordis knew only Saint Brigid’s parents, but she wasn’t a rune master like her grandmother Ett
a or her late mother, Nanna, had been. Maybe that was why so many bad things happened to her. Maybe that was why she seemed to be completely unprotected from earthly enemies. But maybe she was lucky anyway, because once again, she hadn’t been caught. She was exhausted: she’d spent the entire night down on the beach. She had climbed onto the wreck and dragged an entire bale of wet cloth and two small barrels home. The cloth was spread out in the shed to dry. In one barrel, she’d found smoked ham, and in the other, packed with wood shavings, she’d found beautifully colored ceramic dishes. Later, she would sell the cloth, not at the market, but one piece at a time, for a low price. She planned to share the ham: half of it she’d keep for her own larder, and the rest she’d distribute among the village widows. But she still had no idea what to do with the dishes.
It was Jordis’s birthday. She was sixteen years old, and her grandmother would read the rune oracle for her for the first time that night. Jordis had never longed so much for evening. She’d spent half the day sitting on the crest of a dune, watching the beach overseer and the men of Rantum salvage cargo from the ship. On the beach, dripping bales of cloth lay next to piles of planks, which some of the men hoped to claim. But they didn’t have much chance of getting them; Jordis knew that. This shipwreck had a survivor. That meant that the cargo belonged to him, and the people of Rantum would have to settle for the salvage fee, which wouldn’t be very much, divided among the many who were contributing to the effort. A few men crept around the piles of salvaged cargo and had to be chased away by the beach overseer. One of them was Crooked Tamme. He was a cripple and wasn’t able to do any honest work. Everyone in Rantum knew he scraped by as a beachcomber, but only Jordis knew his methods. He came after everyone else was gone, climbed the wreck, cut down the sail and ropes, and took anything that wasn’t nailed down. He often waited on the beach the whole night for the corpses to wash ashore. He took their boots and trousers, jackets and caps, emptied their pockets, yanked gold chains off their necks, and took knives from their belts. But then, after he’d taken those things they no longer needed, he buried them properly in the dunes. He dug trenches in the sand, laid the bodies in them with their hands folded over their chests, filled in the graves, and said a prayer for every one of the dead. That day, he hovered near the wreck, eyeing the villagers and keeping close track of who had salvaged what from the ship. He would return that night, when the villagers and the beach overseer were sitting in the tavern drinking away their meager salvage fees. Tamme had seen her, and he waved. Jordis smiled and waved back.