It was a bright, blue day, cooling now as the sun sank towards the south west, its beam a silver ribbon across the Sound to the Mainland, as they called it, even though it was actually just another island, albeit bigger than all the others in the archipelago.
A boat was heading towards Whale Island. It passed into the stream of glitter thrown down across the water by the sun and emerged within a few moments out the other side. Such rapid movement no doubt meant it was being swept along on one of the formidable tides that helped or hampered the sailors in these waters so much. It sometimes seemed to Rian that fishermen, like Gessan, Shadow’s husband, never talked of anything else.
The vessel carried a big sail the reddish colour of well-tanned hide and above it was a smaller top sail like the one Manigan flew on Bradan when the wind was light. Rian took a sharp in-breath and stood watching the boat, staring and staring as if wild hope and a determined gaze might be enough to materialise what she longed for.
The cow eventually nudged her with its forehead. She pushed it away. It paused to munch again, lowed to its calf, then lumbered off in the direction of home.
Rian turned back to the sea. It was Bradan, its approach fast enough to confirm that leap of wishing. There could be no mistaking its narrow form, pointed prow, tall mast and dark-haired helmsman.
She didn’t feel her bare feet carrying her across the springy grass. She forgot the huge bulge of her pregnant belly. She was oblivious to the chill insinuating itself inside her unbuttoned coat.
At the line of seaweed thrown up by the most recent storm she stopped. The boat bore on as if drawn towards her. The top sail came down. The main sail was turned, wind spilled from it to slow the boat’s progress, and then, at the moment the hull touched pebbles on the shore, it was bundled down and one after another three men clambered over the side to haul the vessel up out of the water. She didn’t recognise the other two men. From nowhere, it seemed, although presumably from the broch, other people appeared, jogging along the shoreline to help carry the curragh. They heaved it up away from the danger of waves.
Manigan said something to the others and separated from them, striding up the beach towards Rian. She stood, arms stretching downwards, legs frozen to the spot until he pulled her out of her daze into the hug she had been dreaming of for months: that smell of seals and walrus, her selkie mariner, his oceanic smile, the ripples of his laughter.
‘Green eyes.’ He stroked her hair with one hand, the other around her waist. Leaning back, he dazzled her with his sea blue sparkle.
She could only grin, tongue-tied. Eventually she mustered, ‘You’ll be hungry.’
‘Ravenous!’ He laughed an open-mouthed guffaw of delight and her cheeks ached with the pure joy of seeing him.
‘I’ve got a plan. I’m going to take you to Ictis.’ He patted her belly. ‘Once you’re ready, the two of you. You’ll be safe there. The Queen Bitch won’t get you there, the Keepers will make sure of that. What do you think?’
She beamed back at him. ‘Where’ve you been?’
He laughed again. ‘Put me by a warm fire. I’ve got stories for plenty of long nights. These boys…’ He gestured down towards the boat. ‘Do they know how to handle the tides?’
‘Who are they?’
One of the strangers was approaching.
‘They belong here. Stron, they’re called. Father and son. Couldn’t wish for better crew. I found them on the Long Island and they volunteered to come up here with me while Badger and Kino went home for the winter.’ He detached himself from Rian and turned towards the short, bearded man. ‘Is there a noust free we can lay her up in?’
The man nodded. ‘So we’ll empty her?’
‘Every last thing. Take it all off. I’m not going anywhere for a while.’
‘Right.’ The bearded man turned back to the boat.
Manigan pulled Rian closer in to him and kissed her. ‘I’ve got a barrel of oats and bags of nuts and mushrooms for you.’
She didn’t think it could be possible to grin more broadly. For months she had been feeling guilty about eating Shadow’s winter supplies.
‘I thought you’d be missing the woods by now.’
She felt she might burst. ‘Not as much as I’ve been missing you.’
He kissed her again. ‘Where did your cow go?’
She giggled. ‘Home, I hope. To Shadow’s.’
‘Will I be welcome?’
‘A barrel of oats, you said?’
The bearded man was back. ‘Are you going to put her down and help us with the boat, or what, skipper?’
Manigan stuck a lewd finger out and carried on kissing Rian.
She made a half-hearted effort to prise herself away. ‘You’d better help them, surely.’
He squeezed her tight to him. ‘I’ve waited months for this.’
She shuffled sideways a little to give the baby space. She could feel it kicking as if it wanted to get out. It was sure to come soon. A memory intruded of Pytheas, that thin foreigner whose offspring it was, and then she dismissed him from her mind. Her breath filled with Manigan’s sea scent instead.
She hugged him fiercely. At last, after all that she had been through, Rian could embrace the freedom she’d been longing for.
Author’s Note
The Stone Stories trilogy is set in 320 BC, around the British coastline, north into the Arctic and east to the Baltic Sea. It takes as its trigger the journey of a historical explorer and scientist, Pytheas of Massalia, who made an epic voyage of discovery from his home in one of the western Greek colonies. He is credited with being the first Mediterranean person to circumnavigate and map the island of Alba (Britain), and he coined the phrase Ultima Thule for the northernmost land he reached. This intrepid traveller encountered a land of monumental coastal architecture built by matriarchal tribes who worshipped liminal spirits. He was in search of the origins of certain high-value materials in short supply in the Mediterranean (tin, amber and walrus ivory) and he travelled with traders of these goods and other commodities, including slaves. He was awed by the northern ocean and those who sailed and hunted on it.
The book Pytheas wrote of his travels, On the Ocean, is lost, so where exactly he travelled is something of a mystery. However, his book was widely quoted, and from these fragments of text academic historians have pieced together the outline of his voyage, although many details are contested or simply unknown. Yet from one fragment we can be sure that Pytheas travelled up the west coast of Britain and made landfall at the latitude of Clachtoll Broch, an impressive Iron Age building in Assynt, which was at the heart of a sophisticated maritime society between the Western and Northern Isles and northern mainland.
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