by Fiona Faris
He roared in anger and frustration, aiming a kick at the next wave. The currents were too strong, he realized; they would drag him helplessly beyond the skerrie and out into the tempest. It was hopeless; he too would be drowned, and that would be no help to the lassie.
He scowled north along the beach, from where the storm blew. An idea occurred to him. He turned and strode back towards the cottage.
“A line, woman,” he cried to Mairi. “The longest you have. Quick now!”
Mairi disappeared into the cottage and returned with a thick coil of hempen rope hefted over her shoulder.
“Come with me,” Duncan commanded, taking the rope and striding off up the beach and into the wind.
Mairi ran after him. After fifty yards, he stopped by a boulder and uncoiled the rope. He tied one end around his waist and wound the other around the boulder, handing the end to Mairi.
“Sit down and brace your legs against the rock,” he said. “The rock should take nearly all of the strain; your task is to make sure it doesn’t slip.”
Mairi looked at him in horror.
“You’re no’ meaning to go in again?” she said in disbelief. “The sea will take ye. The lassie’s lost,” she added. “There’s nae sense in you gaein’ after her.”
“I can’t stand by and watch her drown,” he snapped. “I must try and save her, even if I drown in the attempt. And, what if I do drown? I wouldn’t be able to live with myself otherwise in any case.”
“Dinna dae it, maister,” Mairi pleaded.
“Wheesht, woman! And hold on tight. I can always pull myself back to safety with the rope. What I’m hoping is that the storm will blow me around in a big wide arc and onto the rocks, and then back onto the shore once I’ve grabbed the lassie.”
Tears streamed down Mairi’s face, mixing with the rain and spray.
“Ye’ll droun, maister! And, forby, I’m feart I’ll no be able to haud ye.”
Duncan placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“You’ll do fine, Mairi, a fine strapping woman like yourself. Christ, if you can carry your man to and from his boat, and haul that same boat up onto the strand, you can hold the weight of a wee bit chiel like myself.”
Mairi sat down in the sand behind the boulder, placed her feet firmly on the rock, and took the strain with her powerful arms and legs.
“Be quick then, maister,” she said. “Thon lassie doesna ha’e muckle time left.”
Duncan looked out towards the skerrie. The waves were by then breaking over the top of the rocks and dragging at the girl like voracious hounds.
He ran into the surf and let the sea take him. It quickly sucked him out into its seething tumult, tossing him around among its heaving waves like a piece of flotsam. He swam into its arms, far beyond the line of the skerrie, until the rope tautened, and its fibrous sinews creaked and squealed around the rock.
Mairi wrapped the end more tightly around her fists, leaned back, and pushed against the boulder with all her might.
The current caught him, and Duncan began to swing in a long arc towards the skerrie. He fought with every ounce of strength that his arms and legs possessed to keep his head above the water.
Suddenly, the line went slack. The tide was carrying him in towards the shore. With a sinking heart, he realized that he was going to pass short of the skerrie. The strength seemed to drain from his limbs. If he missed his mark, the girl would be lost for sure; he would not have time, nor the energy, to start again and make another pass. Gritting his teeth, he kicked and paddled with his weakening arms against the flow of the tide that was taking him shoreward. But it was no use. His strength was all but gone, and the reserves he did have were no match for the power of the sea. He watched helplessly as the skerrie seemed to sail away from him.
Then he felt the sand beneath his feet. A shallow sandbar must have been deposited by the flow of the incoming tide in the lee of the skerrie. He scrabbled with his toes, plunging them deep into the sand and levering himself laboriously forward against the powerful current.
He leaned into the tide, the waves tumbling over the lassie’s head and then over his head and shoulders. Slowly, inexorably, he was making progress up the sandbar towards the rocks. Soon his chest was clear of the water, and he only had a few yards to go. He could see the girl clearly now, a small, frail figure with red hair plastered to her scalp and shoulders, clinging desperately to a rock with deathly-white fingers, her eyes wide with terror, but also – he saw – with a stubborn determination. He suddenly felt glad that he had matched her stubbornness and persisted in his rescue; it would not have done to be outdone by a lassie.
But all at once the line grew taut. He was only feet away from being able to seize her, but he had run out of line. He tugged and pulled and bent all his weight into stretching those last few feet, but to no avail. The sand was beginning to fall away from his feet, and he was sinking inch by inch, further and further away from her. The waves were by then cascading over the skerrie and crashing like a shield attack into his chest. The undertow was dragging at his legs and hips, threatening to tear him away and continue him on his arc back towards the shore.
The girl’s eyes met his. Her lips moved.
“Please,” she implored, silently mouthing the word.
He began to wrestle with the knot at his waist. It was a hitch knot, and it came away easily. Grasping the end of the rope tightly with one hand, he stepped forward and clutched the shoulder of the girl’s robes with the other, drawing her to his chest. He carefully shifted his grip until he had her clamped against him with his arm, and then pushed off the skerrie with his legs. He looped the line around his forearm, and holding both their heads above the water, he let the tide and the wind push them south until the line completed its arc and tumbled them both onto the beach.
As soon as they were landed, Mairi released the rope, sprang to her feet, and raced down the sands to them. She helped Duncan to pull the girl up beyond the high-water line, where they collapsed in an exhausted heap.
“Here, lassie,” Mairi said, slipping the shawl from her shoulders and wrapping it around her small thin body.
Beside them, Duncan lay coughing and retching on the shingle.
“Mother of God,” Mairi exclaimed in alarm. “The poor lassie is as cold as a corpse. We need to get her out o’ the storm and in beside the fire.”
The girl was shivering uncontrollably. Her hands and lips were blue, and her face was as white as a ghost’s.
Duncan hauled himself unsteadily to his feet and helped Mairi raise the girl between them. He was surprised at how light she felt, even in her sodden robes. She was just a wee wisp of a thing. He was amazed that she’d had the strength in that slight frame of hers to cling fast to the rocks, against the powerful suck of the tide and the pounding of the waves. Shouldering an arm each, they half-carried her along the shingle beside the stinking bank of rotting seaweed towards the low door of the cottage, her feet moving but mostly dragging across the stones.
She is so delicate and pretty.
Duncan could not shake the thought from his head, nor the surge of protectiveness that shot through his veins, boosting the strength of his tired limbs as they bore her into the cottage, more dead than alive.
Who is this girl? And why has she been brought thus to me?
Chapter Two
Cruden Bay
Mairi and Micheil Cullen’s Cottage
Duncan and Mairi sat Elizabeth down on a low stool by the hearth, and Mairi dropped another couple of peats onto the fire along with some driftwood. She eased the old banked peats up with a stick to let the air seep underneath, and the fire suddenly flared into life, sending long tongues of yellow flame up towards the roof beams and filling the room with billowing waves of scented smoke.
She fetched a faded yellow kirtle and a plain woolen shawl from a kist by her sleeping place against the back wall and crouched in front of Elizabeth. Duncan sat down on the other side of the hearth and began to peel o
ff his wet shirt and hose. Elizabeth noticed that a baby lay asleep in a small wooden crib by the sleeping place, wrapped tightly in a snowy-white christening robe.
“Come, lass,” Mairi murmured, “let’s get ye out o’ thae wet claes.”
Elizabeth’s cloak was already gone, ripped away by the clawing sea. Mairi drew off the now wet shawl she had given her on the beach and began to tug Elizabeth’s gown over her head.
“No,” she protested, clutching the sodden cloth to her breast, her eyes round with alarm and glancing nervously through the smoke and flames to where Duncan was stripping himself.
“Come now, lassie,” Mairi insisted, sweeping Elizabeth’s arm aside and pulling the gown over her shoulders, “or the cauld will draw a’ the heat frae your blood and you’ll shiver awa’.”
She peeled off Elizabeth’s chemise and braies, until the girl sat bare on the stool, her stark white skin gleaming in the firelight, covering her small breasts with her arms and shrinking forward over her nakedness. Mairi drew across a sack of charpie and began rubbing Elizabeth’s limbs and body vigorously with handfuls of the woolen lint.
“There,” she said. “That will dry you off and draw the hot blood back up to the skin again.”
Once Elizabeth was dry, and a glow had been restored to her pale flesh, Mairi slipped the kirtle over Elizabeth’s head and pulled it down to her ankles.
“It’s a wee bittie big for you,” she observed, “but it will dae the turn until we can get your ain robes dried.” She laughed. “It’s no’ like you’re going to be wearing my auld duds to a ball.”
Duncan, meanwhile, had stripped his clothes and huddled shivering in a rough woolen plaid. Mairi gathered up the wet clothes and pegged them on a line that had been strung across the width of the one-roomed cottage, just next to the hearth in the middle of the floor. The storm was blowing the smoke from the fire back through the smoke hole in the turf roof, and the whole cottage reeked with pungent peat smoke. Down by the floor, where Elizabeth and Duncan each sat on their low stool, the air was relatively smoke-free.
Mairi set a blackened kettle of water on the peats and reached a clay bottle down from the rafters.
“A hot toddy is what you’ll be wantin’.” Mairi smiled.
When the water had boiled, Mairi poured hot water into a pair of wooden beakers and splashed each with a generous measure of uisge beatha, the water of life.
She handed a beaker to each of them. Duncan immediately took a long sip of his and shuddered as the warm draught shot its fire through his veins. Elizabeth took a more tentative taste and swallowed. The fiery liquid burned her throat but spread a welcome golden warmth through her chest as it went down.
Mairi hunkered down and tended the fire with her stick. Outside, the storm raged against the sod walls and whistled through the turf thatch, swirling the smoke with its violent gusts. The steady patter of heavy rain drummed on the shingle beyond the door, and in the distance, the sea boiled and roared in the kettle of the bay.
“I must be getting back,” Elizabeth said, making to rise from her stool.
Mairi placed a firm hand on her shoulder and pushed her back down again.
“You’ll bide where you are,” she told her. “At least until your robes are dry an’ the storm’s past.”
“But they will miss me at the castle,” Elizabeth protested weakly. “They will be worried.”
“Then let them worry.” Mairi laughed. “The thing is no’ to gi’e ocht to the worry. I’m sure they’d rather find you safe and sound in the warm and dry than lyin’ droun’d at the foot o’ the cliffs. That would be a greater worry indeed.”
Elizabeth sank slowly back onto her stool. Across the fire, she could feel Duncan’s eyes upon her, and she gave another little shiver, conscious of the ill-fitting kirtle that hung off her like a sack and her nakedness beneath. He was, she admitted to herself, a fine handsome man, with dark curly hair and a shadow of stubble on his cheeks and jaw. She was suddenly conscious too of his nakedness beneath the plaid he clutched tightly around his throat, and she blushed, feeling a warmth rise in her chest that made her swallow.
She became aware that Mairi was watching the pair of them with an amused look in her eye.
“Aye, Maister Comyn,” she addressed Duncan, “are ye no’ feart that you might ha’e caught yourself a selkie?”
“A selkie?” Elizabeth inquired.
Being an inlander, born and brought up so far from the sea, she had no idea what a selkie might be.
Mairi grinned at her.
“Aye, a selkie; one of the seal folk. Whiles, a selkie maiden will come ashore and hide her selkie skin. Then a man will come along and find a bonnie naked lassie on the seashore and compel her to be his wife. But the wife will spend her time in captivity longing for the sea, her true home, and will oft be seen gazing longingly at the ocean. She might bear her human husband several bairns, but short or lang, she will retrieve her skin from where it is hidden and return to the sea, abandoning the man and the children she loves.” She turned and addressed Duncan. “The trick is, maister, to discover the whereabouts of the skin and keep it from her. Then she will be bound to him always.”
Duncan looked up with a wan smile.
“And is that what happened to you, Mairi Cullen, for your man is surely the master of you.”
Mairi raised her eyebrows in a knowing look.
“Oh, I ha’e my selkie skin laid by safe,” she assured him, “Don’t you ha’e any fear o’ that.”
A stuttering cry arose from the crib and Mairi went to lift the bairn. Cradling it in the crook of her arm, she slipped her kirtle from off one shoulder to uncover a heavy swollen breast. The baby fastened onto the teat and snuffled contentedly.
“Where is your man?” Elizabeth asked.
Mairi jerked her head in the direction of the sea.
“My Micheil’s out there, hopefully, amang the shoals of herrin’, fetching a fishie for me to turn into milk for this wee hungry mannie.”
“In the storm?” Elizabeth gasped.
“Aye, in the storm,” Mairi confirmed, her brow creasing with worry. “But he’s a cannie boatman,” she added. “I trust he will be safe.”
On the other side of the fire, Duncan stirred and shifted on his stool.
“And what about you, my selkie lass, do you have a man?” he asked.
Elizabeth’s eyes grew round, and she swallowed down a smirk.
“Heavens, no,” she replied.
Duncan tilted his head back and appraised her curiously.
“And why would that be such a strange idea?”
She raised her face nervously and ventured him a glance.
“Who would have me?” she murmured.
Aye, she thought; who would have me.
She was nineteen years old but still had a girlish look about her. She was as thin as a stick, with unruly red hair and tiny dimples for breasts. Her thin body was marked with scars and welts from the many beatings she had taken as a child, and she was not even a virgin – and had not been for many a year.
“Och, dinna say that,” Mairi objected. “You’re a winsome wee thing. True, ye’d never be able to haul a boat up the strand nor carry a creel fou o’ silver darlings on your back around the country, but you’d still break a chiel’s heart. Wouldn’t she, maister?”
Duncan did not reply. He just continued considering her thoughtfully across the flames.
Elizabeth considered him too, out the corner of her demurely downcast eye. Who was he, she wondered, and what was he doing here in this fisherman’s cottage? From his demeanor and bearing, she could tell he wasn’t of the class of men who worked; nor was he one who prayed. He must, therefore, be a warrior. So why was he here, in this humble shack, amid the squalor of ropes and nets, breathing the fetid air of an open hearth and of damp cloth and of a bare dirt floor?
And then she suddenly remembered herself.
“I haven’t thanked you for saving my life,” she said with a start.
Duncan looked away modestly.
“I could not stand by and watch you drown,” he said simply. “It would have been against my nature.”
“But you risked your own life,” she insisted, looking him full in the face and meeting his look.