Calling the Gods Read online

  “If we swamp, or tip over, you are part of the boat now,” I told the mast and sails, lashing them down. “You cannot break away.” It helped saying it, telling myself what I was doing and why, even if I couldn’t hear.

  “Now knock out the peg and pull the tiller out of its hole. Hold the rudder head, silly. That is right: lay it in the bottom, then lean over and lift the pintles out of their lugs. Of course it does not want to come. Wait for the wave to let go. There. Swing it up, quick. Now lash it and the tiller under the stern thwart.

  “Sails, mast, tiller, rudder, all fast. Well done,” I told myself. “He said to lay off and wait; that is what I am doing.” And a voice inside me asked, “Will Ennish bring the boys?”

  The boat worked its way over the waves. I sat on the middle thwart, oars ready to take a stroke, turn head on into the seas which were now crumbling, tops breaking, spray flinging off them, fretted by the gale. For the second time I found that the boat managed better without my help, lay at an angle to the line of the waves, lifting itself up this one, sliding down its back, and climbing the next.

  As the bow rose, the masthead over the stern almost dipped beneath the water.

  “Better than rigging it over the bow.”

  The words were torn from my lips again, as I checked the lashings. A wave licked up behind till I thought it must grip the mast, hold the boat loggy with its dead grasp, but the stern always lifted, so I sang brave words into the wind, something about not being afraid.

  About evening, I realised my discomfort was hunger. I had swigged at the water breaker last night and again this morning. I bent over to shelter the other little barrel, took out one piece of twice-baked bread, and knocked the top back on at once.

  The taste brought back the memory of my mother’s bread. I cried, at first a little jerky, then loud, hammering my fist against the bottom, raising myself to look about to make sure nobody was watching, grinning at such stupidity, then throwing myself down and giving in to despair until all I could think of was Ennish’s: “Lay off. Wait there.”

  Chapter Six

  Selene and the Sacrifice of the Gods

  The curve of our bay looks east and, under the tuck of its long northern arm, when the mercy trees stain the golden sand red with their flowers and the sun is almost at its height, I tell the people, “The gods are near.” The thatched roofs of Hornish peep over the stockade, the lookouts stare from their platforms as I thump the first stroke on the drum. From now until the sacrifice it must never miss a beat.

  All night under the wooden map, I lead the dance; all day I dance and sing in the warm sea, diving, surfacing, spouting water until I flounder in the shallows, the waves withdraw, and the people praise and laugh and carry me up the beach.

  And all day and night, the gods are dancing towards us, rising to blow, sinking and swimming again, answering my songs with theirs, dreaming of their people as we dream their dreams all night.

  At last the lookouts beat the wooden gongs and cry, “The gods are home.” The drum’s boom shakes air, earth, and water until the world trembles with joy.

  I brandish the red torch, plunge it into the dry grass, watch ladders of blue-green flame climb heaps of driftwood white as bone, listen to the fire’s shout, sniff its salt breath.

  Line after line of dancers stitch darkness and light, weaving smoke and flame, crossing and recrossing, undoing the boundaries of earth, air, fire, and water until the children of the gods come swimming out of the deep. And welcoming we sing their praise, help them up the beach, glossy, slick, and black in the leaping red light, gasping their message of love as the sea withdraws.

  Louder, faster, the drum fills the world, stops, and into that silence I plunge the sacred knife. Under the mercy trees, the golden sand turns red as I drink the first blood, eat the first flesh of the gods’ sacrifice, their children sent to save us.

  Chapter Seven

  Rabbit Island

  Two days I lay off, eating and drinking little, looking for Ennish’s sail. Towards evening of the second day the gale dropped, and I stepped the mast and sailed east, crying as mountains and then hills rose out of the sea. I recognised their shapes, and worked out where the Horns lay under the horizon. Long after the sun sank, when we could no longer be seen against any light in the western sky, I closed in till Skull and Dis loomed. By morning I was safe, back over the horizon and out of sight.

  I knew now I could keep my position by watching the clouds over the hidden mountains, and lay off thinking of Ennish, wondering about Peck, Patch, and Tobik. Was somebody feeding them?

  The southerly came up, a storm this time. I wore my woollen hat, dropped the mast, made everything fast, and all that day and the next tried to keep an idea of how far we were being driven north. For as long as possible, I slowed our drift with the oars.

  I caught enough rain in the sail to fill the breaker. Salty, leathery, it kept me going until a second shower washed the salt off the sail, and I refilled the breaker and gorged fresh water, laughing, singing.

  There was bread for only another day. I looked long, then turned and ran before the dying southerly towards a cloud that hung unmoving in the north-east. Night came, and we kept on. If there was land beneath the cloud, there would be food and water. And I kept saying aloud, “Sail back south and east two to three days, and you must see the mountains behind Hornish. And Ennish. And Peck and Patch and Tobik.” I said it often enough to believe it must be true.

  At first there was something still amongst the waves, a dot that broke the perfect line of the horizon, that grew into a brown hilltop at which I whooped and set the gulls spinning. My laughter turned into tears, and then I was sailing off a beach on the south-west corner of a dry-looking island. No smoke lifted; no sign of people; just the storm’s aftermath thundering on the cliffs. Around the north end of the island, I dropped the sails, ran out the oars, and picked my way between long reefs to smooth water under a bluff.

  I tore mussels off the rocks, smashed them open, and gobbled several whole before reminding myself to chew the rich flesh. There were sea eggs, but it was the wrong time of year, their roe mean and bitter. I ate more mussels.

  Not a trickle of fresh water in the dry cove. I rowed along and brought the boat up on a strip of sand. Tide going out, it would be safe; even so, I tied a rock on the rope for an anchor before exploring.

  Rabbits scuttled, so many the air reeked of their piss. Much of the soil was nibbled bare. I was too slow with the spear, but hit a rabbit with a stone, whacked it dead across the back of the neck with the side of my hand. Still there was no water, and then I found the tumbled stone walls of what looked like a fishing camp. Under one of the walls, grass sprang where rabbits had been unable to reach. I shifted a flat rock like a lid, and found water, musty but drinkable. The round hole was too small to take my breaker, so I dipped water in a scallop shell, drank a single mouthful, and filled the breaker, tipping each shellful carefully, wasting nothing. The hole was nearly empty when I ran to check the boat.

  I searched for anything useful. An old fishing line crumbled rotten between my fingers. I shifted rocks from the walls, poked with the spear then, on a ledge by what had once been a fireplace, saw a couple of rusted hooks. Perhaps I could undo a strand from one of the ropes and make a line from that.

  Bay by bay, cove by cove, gully by gully, I went over the island, but it was eaten out by rabbits. What I had been hoping to find was flax. Old nests on the cliffs held only bits of eggshell. Although it was the wrong time of year, I poked the spear into several burrows, feeling for young muttonbirds.

  My stomach had not been upset, so I drank again from the waterhole. I did not risk eating the rabbit raw. Some looked sickly, probably lack of food. The tide now creeping up the beach, I hunted among the rocks for more mussels and saw the dim outline of a flounder drawn on the sand in shallow water.

  Slowly, I reached out the spear, but the flatfish darted off, its trail of sand hanging in clear water. “You tried too hard,
” I told myself and waded silently, found another and speared it, holding it down, slipping my foot underneath, toes parted around the spear. The shock of its wriggle ran up my arm as I forced a finger into its mouth, ripping but holding it secure, and then I was tearing the moist flesh with my teeth, sucking out eyes and fluid, swallowing the delicious juice. I was surprised by a feeling something like anger, and thought again of Larish and her family.

  “It is not your fault,” I told the flatfish and remembered a man blown far out to sea, who survived several days on raw fish before sailing east and back to Hornish.

  I killed a second rabbit, joggled them both open with the spearhead, skinning and gutting them, slicing the meat with a mussel shell, spreading it on rocks to dry.

  The waterhole refilled overnight. Five more flatfish, a heap of live mussels wet and shaded under the stern seat, rabbit and mussel meat spread to dry on the centre thwart, the breaker full, I drank the last drop in the waterhole, and put off into a west wind.

  “South and east two to three days.” I had drawn a map on the beach and carried it now in my head. “South and east two to three days.” When I had to sleep, I hove-to and hoped we would not drift too far.

  On the second day, the wind went into the south, and I worked up into it, trying to keep each tack about the same length. Clouds lay east on the third day. High mountains revealed themselves, peaks I named tipsy with delight.

  “I know you. And you. Harsh. Skeleton. Scry. It is me. Selene.”

  I lay off again till dark, looking from the mountains towards Rabbit Island hidden to the north, thinking of the winds and currents I had got to know, and of Ennish.

  “Patch, and Peck, and Tobik,” I said. “Tobik, Peck, Patch.”

  I opened a couple of mussels on the spearhead and ate them. If Ennish hadn’t brought lines, the boys would be hungry, but there was the dried rabbit meat and mussels, tough but better than nothing.

  The breaker was still nearly full because I had chewed the flatfish for their juices, but they were finished. Gulls were working close by. With a line, I could troll through them and take a fish. I had the two old hooks and could make a lure from a mussel shell. The arrows were no use without a bow. I rowed across and tried spearing, but the shoaling fish dived, the gulls disappeared.

  In the first light of morning, I saw the tips of the Horns, and turned back before the lookouts could see me. It was as the boat came about that I saw something that rose and fell dully with the waves. It had a mast. I tacked and ran down on it. Would Ennish have the boys with him? Water? Fishing lines?

  Chapter Eight

  Selene and the Time for Feasts and Stories

  By morning, the whale meat is sliced in sheets, draped on long poles, drying crisp as leaves. The blood is mixed with ground oats and barley, cooked with chopped blubber and flesh, salted, and stuffed into washed intestines, long sausages. Soon the store sheds are filled with barrels of oil, guts buried to nourish the soil, nothing of the sacrifice wasted. The dried fenks of blubber, the oil boiled out of them, warm us with their clear flame.

  Every house has its rustling baskets of whale meat hanging from the rafters, its rows of sausages smoking brown up the chimney. We spend the rest of summer stacking driftwood, digging and harvesting our crops. And all summer, the boats bring back the fish that we dry and smoke and store.

  Stacks of oats and barley wait for thrashing and winnowing. Racks of apples are stored in the fragrant sheds, dried pears, peaches, grapes, plums: knots of summer sweetness to come undone in our mouths during the grey days when the old sun is dying. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbages, carrots, onions we bury in pear-shaped pits dug into a dry ridge above the village, safe from the white monster that comes creeping out of the south.

  Snow comes first to the mountains rimming the southern side of our golden bay, licking grey peaks to white fangs, pranking white-flecked the blue slopes below. Death is one of our words for winter, yet we welcome it like an exciting, dangerous stranger. It is the time for feasts, for meetings in the Great House with its carvings of the ancestors, and the labyrinth of airy passages between the roots holding up the roof. The long dark when night eats day is the time for dancing, singing, for eating the flesh and blood of our gods, anointing ourselves with their oil. The time for telling the stories of our people, how we came to be here, the time for our young men and women to choose their partners.

  And just as we build warm walls for winter, so we wall our bodies in wool tunics and the skins of seals that the gods send to haul out on the rocks of our other coast, for ours is the village of Hornish, blessed on its isthmus with two coasts. East the shallow bay of the gods with its golden sand, and on the other side a deep cold-water cove and stone jetty from where we sail to fish the herring-crowded western sea.

  Chapter Nine

  Ennish and the Gods

  Sails and rigging dragging over the side, the other boat heaved sluggish.

  “Ennish.”

  I came up into the wind, dropping my sails, running alongside.

  “Ennish.”

  I tugged his shoulder, the swell lifted, and he lurched over, nose and cheek creased by lying face down on the bottom boards, one eye pecked out by seagulls. The stump of an arrow broken, ugly in his chest. Alone on the great shifting waters, he had looked for me; Ennish, my handsome one.

  I felt for his heartbeat, cradled him, rocked with the boat, shook and tried to warm him to life.

  “Ennish. Oh, Ennish.”

  Nothing made sense, my mind not right: if I had waited; if the storm had not blown me north; if I had risked running out of water and food; if I had not looked for Rabbit Island; if I had returned earlier. In long misery I held him hard, trying to ignore his smell, his bloat, that I must bury him.

  At last, I worked the anchor rock across from my smaller boat, sat it on the forward thwart, and tied it to his feet. I heaved him up, got his legs over the side, and pushed the rock. His tunic ripped; there came a grunt from his belly, a waft of decay. His white face slid and disappeared down the water to where the gods would find and carry him to their deep home.

  I wept, wondered if I should have tied myself to the rock as well, and slept until my boat knocking alongside wakened me. I cried “Ennish” again, looked into a light-filled wave that lifted and passed beside the boat, and ordinariness took over. I held on to a stay, hung over the side to empty my body and, as I washed myself, felt a sudden hunger.

  I chewed dried rabbit and mussel meat, rinsed my mouth from the breaker, swished the water inside my cheeks before swallowing.

  “Tobik, Peck, and Patch.”

  I took down my mast, threw the sails into the bigger boat with the oars, the spears and arrows, and the last of the dried rabbit and mussels, climbed back into Ennish’s boat and took mine in tow.

  “Tobik, Peck, and Patch.”

  I checked the halyards, tightened the stays, washed and scrubbed the blood from the floor-boards, and bailed Ennish’s boat dry. There were barrels, tools, and stores, an anchor, and what might be a net in a sack, but I would look later: the sun was high, the tide setting us in towards the coast. Years before, they had sent out a boat and killed an outcast who had made the mistake of heaving to off the Horns.

  Even as I thought of that, there came a wild cry. A gull? Like a nightmare, a boat was coming fast from Hornish, sails goose-winged before the wind.

  Fumbling, I yanked at the halyards, having to undo and refasten the main. “Get it right. That is it. Now, hoist the jib. Gather the wind. Cast off the tow.”

  Ennish’s bigger boat wasn’t as responsive, but picked up speed as I pulled mainsail and jib in and out, balanced them, got them drawing well. Once sailing, it was much faster. When the Hornish boat came to beside my abandoned one, I risked leaping forward.

  “Tighten the jib halyard. Dive back to the tiller. Careful. There.”

  The boat came back on course and sailed faster still. I was getting the feel of it. Shouts after me again. Out here they no
longer feared my power.

  West we ruled a line straight out to sea till the mountains behind Hornish sank out of sight, and we flew on. The sun ruddied, dipped to the western horizon, and still we drew our long wake towards it. The sea darkened and hid the other boat as I sailed into the night, course as straight as possible. Without something ahead, I could only judge by keeping the wind on the back of my neck, the feel of it in the sails, until a group of stars came clear, and I fixed them ahead of the mast.

  In the darkness, we seemed to speed uncannily. Again and again the slap of waves scared me. One day’s sail to the south was the village’s fishing camp, but even if I shook off my hunters they would search for me there. I put the tiller across, set the group of stars square on my left and headed north, hoping the other boat would keep on west.

  It was not usual for Hornishers to sail by night, but they had killed Ennish, and they would kill me. Still holding the tiller, I reached for my water breaker.

  A whoosh, a stink of fish, and I shrieked. Another, and another — dolphins, messengers of the gods, swimming at my bows, guiding me north. I called my name to them, sang one of their songs, thanked them. Main sail and jib tightened, the boat tilted and sped on its best point of sailing. So we ran on through the night, my world shrunk to what little I could see: the inside of the boat, the foot of the mainsail, the lower mast disappearing up into the dark, the group of stars in the west.

  Dawn and the light strengthening, I searched behind, west, and east, came up into the wind, stood on the thwart, one arm around the mast, scoured the line of the horizon for the nick of a sail, and found it empty. We held on north through the day.

  When I saw seabirds whirling, climbing, and diving, I felt under the stern seat and found several carefully coiled fishing lines with iron hooks lashed to bright strips of shell, green, blue, and silver. I let one out over the stern, felt the coarse throb through the line, then we were among the shoal: the sea jobbled grey and white, herrings leaping clear and pattering back in a running shower. Deep below, dim shapes drove the herrings up. Red-billed gulls and terns squawked, hovered, snapped; gannets plunged like a shower of yellow-tipped spearheads.