The Brides of Rollrock Island Read online

  We barely spoke, beyond a muffled cry here and there, a little laugh, a gasp. What was there to say as we did what we did, or even as we floated in its aftermath, curled around each other in the fire’s warmth, in the night’s cold? Exultant, I watched as my life tore free like a kite from its string and flung itself up into the windstorm that was the future. I had been so small, and stuck so fast in my little round, my puny terrors! Why had I cared so much for people’s opinions – people even smaller than myself? Ha! It hardly mattered why, did it, if I cared no longer? Look what I could have! Look what I could do!

  The stars teased cloud-veils across themselves and twinkled out brightly again afterwards; the ample air of spring spread above, salty, green, teeming with life; the sea lipped and popped at the rock’s rim, sighed farther out in its swells and tides and darkness. I turned in my lover’s arms and pulled his mouth to mine again.

  At last we reached what I knew was our end. He had given me a new body, modelled and magicked it up with his hands and mouth and manhood. For the first time in my life I had been beautiful, and lovable, whether Potshead people thought so or no. I felt cleansed of the rage and misery that had made up so much of me in pettier company, in prettier. I felt freed to please myself, to find my way as I would, in a world that was much vaster than I had realized before, in which I was but one star-gleam, one wavelet, among multitudes. My happiness mattered not a whit more than the next person’s – or the next fish’s, or the next grass-blade’s! – and not a whit less. How piddling I was, in the general immensity! And how lovely it was to be tiny and alone, to have quickened to living for a moment here, to be destined soon to blink out and let time wash away all mark and remembrance of me.

  We went down together to the cold, stinging sea and swam there; I rinsed his seal-ness from me, and he my earthliness from him. He came to me and stood against me; I reached barely to his chest, and he held me, and played my hair about my shoulders, wringing the sea from it and scattering it with his big hands, beautifying its messy wet masses by only touching and looking. He kissed me once more, a deep, long, drinking kiss upon my sore lips, involving my aching tongue.

  And then he let me go. Naked I followed him, through the seals, up onto the rocks. His skin lay there, all the magic asleep inside it. For a moment as he bent, it trembled below him, and was indistinct in the wash of upflying life. He reached for it, and it woke and leaped to him. He hoisted it up, and it thickened and sagged, and the first lights went from his fingertips into the seal-flesh. He fell to his knees, the skin clapped down, and the man was gone. How had he ever been? Aghast, I watched the rearing blubber-mass tip itself off the rock, into the crowd of crying mams.

  Shivering, still bathed in upflowing magic, I went back to the fire and crossed myself with my bandage. Peace fell around me, and I was alone at Crescent Corner with the sea and the moon- and starlight playing upon each other, and the seals sinking back to their rest. Slowly I hid my new self in my same old blouse and kirtle and boots, kicked over the embers and crushed the heat out of them. I walked, warm now and thick-shod, across the rocks and up the sandy path. At the top of the cliff I stood in the grass under the stilled stars that had so dithered and streaked above me before. I had been ugly once; I must remember that, remember how to be ugly again now that I knew I was beautiful, remember how to be ordinary now that I’d seen the wonders inside me.

  I walked home through the unmagical night. I changed into my nightdress in the privy and went into the house, and my old life greeted me there, ready to box me straight back in, to pack me tight among my old chores and irritations. My new eyes looked around at the shadowy kitchen; it would never hold me again as it had. I was here, but I was no longer trapped here.

  As I went along the hall, Mam grumped from behind her door. ‘What’ve you been so long for? Have you the squitters, or what?’

  ‘I fell asleep there.’ I shuffled onward as sleep-clumsily as I could pretend.

  ‘A person could lie here bursting,’ she said.

  ‘You should have followed and knocked,’ I said mildly, and caught back a laugh into my throat, at the thought of what her knocking would have led to.

  I closed my door, undressed and laid down my clothes, and put myself to bed. I did not want to sleep, to see the end of this night, to wake into the humdrum tomorrow and think it all a dream. But as I’d seen, lying beside the seal-man on the Crescent rocks, what did my wants count for? Nothing and less than nothing. I watched the ceiling’s swirling shadows, happy to matter so little. When my thoughts ran down at last, with a sigh I wrapped my own arms around myself, and stroked my own damp hair as I sank to sleep.

  Life went on as before. The feeling of the seal-man’s hands faded from my skin, and the sight of his face from my memory. One day after midsummer it struck me that life had gone on, for quite a time, without its usual monthly event, and that he had left me more than my torn virtue and my new peacefulness.

  I looked coolly on this realization. The town would condemn me, and Mam would rant and rail, but I would still have this bab, half-magical, entirely mine.

  Now that I had admitted it, I felt the child growing inside me. But I did not become spectacularly ill, as both Grassy and Bee were now, embarked upon their next babs – as they had been for every bab, trying to outdo each other with their suffering. I did not have to sit about green with a puke-bowl by me, fighting to keep food down. Sometimes a vague wisp of sickness floated through me, and once or twice the smell of fry-fat brought a lump to my throat; any but the weakest tea tasted foul to me, and the house sometimes had so close a fug that I must go and gasp on the step if I were not to faint away. But Mam did not notice these small discomforts, and no one else watched me closely enough to remark the difference.

  And then the discomforts went away, and there was only the knowledge, the growing weight right deep down in me, the occasional fluttering movement. I waited for someone to notice, for voices to snap and eyes to turn on me. But there had always been a lot of me, and I was not much larger, only firmer. The outward change was hardly to be remarked, beyond what Mam always carped about, beyond what men like Garter O’Day watched sidelong when they had the chance. The months went on, and the weather closed in, and I sat by the fire curiously unfrightened. I would go back in my mind to the night I had had with the seal-man, to the dark of the spring moon; I would listen to the movements of his child in me, and it would all make a sense of sorts. There was no need to tell it, to surrender it up for gossiping, to cheapen it so. Let people realize when they would; it was no concern of mine.

  Deep in the winter when the ice knocked in the harbour and Potshead pulled in its elbows under the snow, Grassy and Bee both were brought to bed of their babs. Mam went up to stay with Grassy, so as to tend to them both without having to take that slippery hill every time, leaving me at home with doddering Dad trapped in his bed unable to speak, or possibly even to think. Then only, with the larder as full as it could be and no reason to venture from the house and be seen, out popped my belly, and for a few days I was clear as clear a mam-to-be. And no one came, and Dad did not care. And then, one afternoon while he slept, in my own room I paced back and forth, and held to the bedpost and exclaimed myself through the pains, and after not very long a labour, I brought forth the being that had swum and somersaulted in me these last months.

  I wrapped it and lifted it and held it against my own heat. It was corded to me still; I crouched over the chamber pot and waited for the followings to follow when they would. I stared at the bab’s face in a wondrous terror, as it pinched and frowned and then gasped up a breath. The shock of that, of having a life of its own, woke it, and it opened sticky eyelids. I thought it must be blind; I had never seen eyes of that smoky, stormy blue.

  I unwrapped it to see if it was well-formed, to count its fingers and toes, and I discovered that I held a boy child. There, now, I thought. There’s two good men in your life. I covered him quickly, to stop any more of his warmth escaping.

&n
bsp; I gasped and rocked there and held him fast against me; if I could, I would have taken him back in through my bosom, and carried him about there warm and next to my heart. This was not the child I had planned, as separate from me as a badge or a brooch. I wanted to hide him, to keep him from harm; no one yet was aware of him, and I wished that no one ever need be. Must I let Potshead at him, as they’d gone at me? Must Mam pass her judgements on his tiny head, and my sisters gape and prod at him, weigh him in their practised arms, hope aloud that he would grow up handsomer than I had? Could he not grow entirely himself, unharassed and unshaped by their scorn? How could I watch as they pressed and pummelled him, as he shrank under their blows, and grew extra flesh, as I had, thinking to protect himself but only offering them an easier mark? How could I engineer for him to find his own shape – small, slender and fragile as it might be, or wild and fierce and rude? Already I could feel his purposeful working inside the cloth, his feet bracing against my arm. His face knew nothing and yet he was discovering already how to breathe, how to yawn – and sneeze! – how to surrender to sleep, one hand resting its little warmth against his cheek.

  Dad made his noises in the other room, needing me. I woke from the spell of the bab, rose, and laid him in the hollow of the bed. I pinned cloths around myself and dropped my skirts to cover my drizzled legs. And I went out to Dad; it was toileting he wanted, and my new body went slowly about the tasks of that. I was glad to care for him, and to have tended him so long; now, no one was better equipped than I to serve that bright tiny being in the other room, so helpless, so entirely mine to help.

  If it had not been winter, and if I’d not been so ugly and friendless, I would not have been able to keep the bab hidden. But no one visited, except Mam once or twice, to fetch more sewing things and to leave me laundry that she could not manage up at Grassy’s in such volume. She only cared whether Dad was clean and quiet and taking food, and the house in good order; whatever else I did was my own business. And my boy, while Mam visited, was whisper-quiet, or the squeak he uttered was straight away followed by a cat’s outside the window, and my secret stayed close.

  My son did not flourish, though. I could not think where the milk went in him. I fed and fed him and he took and took of me, but the work of breathing, and of filling breech-cloths and of grasping the air and his own face and my finger, seemed to consume all that he drained from me, and leave none for growing. He slept well, he cried little, he grew to see me and to smile and make movements of joy when I came to him. He learned to lift his head on his narrow stalk of a neck, and catch my eye and laugh at my congratulations. I bathed and wrapped and carried him about and sang to him; I encouraged his every little move or murmur. But he stayed small. First he shrank a little, then he grew back to what he had been at his birth, but he did not grow much beyond that. He would be round-bellied with milk when I put him down to sleep, and slender as ever when next I picked him up.

  One day I dared the hill myself, leaving my boy sleeping milk-sodden in the house, and Dad, the other great bab, full of dinner in the next room. I visited both sisters, and neither was pleased to see me, and Mam bristled when I walked into Bee’s.

  ‘You have shrunk to nothing, girl! Have you forgotten how to cook? I hope your dad’s in better flesh, or I’ll have something to say, I will.’

  I saw both babs, Bee’s girl and Grassy’s boy. Great pale lumps they were, flushing with rage and distress. Their hands could tear your ear off, or your lip, or whatever they took a hold of, they were so strong. But mostly their weight impressed me; my arms ached after only a few minutes holding them.

  I tottered and slithered back down the hill, my ears ringing with the racket of those houses, the older children fighting to be heard and the sisters and Mam hectoring, and the cries of those two monstrous babs.

  I went past sleeping Dad to my room. My little one lay there small and saintly, with his ghost of black hair on his pale brow, mauve shadows painted around his eyes with the kindest and most delicate brush. He was nothing on the bed compared to the babs I had just seen and held. Even awake, even laughing to see me, he was not half as alive as they, and he was not half their size.

  ‘Fairy child!’ I crouched beside the bed, and watched him sleep. Everything about him was delicate, and very nearly transparent, where Gladys and – what was his name? – Horace, where Gladys and Horace had been solid as clay. Like cream forced into sausage-skins, they were. My boy was finely made, far and away finer than them. I stood and picked him up, and sat with him on the bed, searching his lax lovely face, the creases of his tiny mauve hands. He was fine, and foreign, and he did not belong here. I held him close, not crushing, not waking him, letting him sleep, and I suffered. I had never felt such feelings before. I would do anything for him; I would do anything. Anything that was asked of me, that would increase his happiness or health, I would do, and willingly. So I told myself, rocking him, the winter sky white at the window.

  The spring thaw began. Mam stayed away uphill. My little one – I called him Little Prince, and sometimes Ean, hardly a name at all, not much more than a smear of sound – grew older, but no larger, and now he seemed to be in pain, squirming and struggling in his wrappings. He began to cry, not lustily like Horace and babs of that make, but softly, as if each bleat were forced out and he were apologizing for this little noise he made.

  Some nights I was sure people in other houses must hear him crying, though his voice was so soft. I took him out and away, and round about the cold country we would go, the sog of it and the snow-patches, the black earth splashed with the white of the moon, the sea turning in its sleep. Always by the time I reached Crescent Corner he was stiller, and one night as I walked back and forth with him at peace in my arms, on the very rocks where we had made him that summer night, I wondered if there were a way to take something of the Crescent back with us to the house, to put by him, to ease him when we could not come here.

  And my gaze fell to the weed that straggled from the fresh-piled tide-wrack. The kelps and dabberlocks lolled like shining tongues on the rock. Perhaps that strappier stuff would do, or the egg-wrack higher up, with its bubbles? Then there was that other kind, harder to see in the stark dim light, like furred string, finer than the others. I laid the bundle of sleep that was my little prince in a hollow in the rock and unravelled some weed-clots and tangles, some long lengths. And I began a loop-and-looping, which, when I turned after a certain length and went back along the loops, pulling more weed through and through them, became one edge of a small blanket.

  Before too long my fingers tired of being the wrong instruments for this task, and I cast up and down and found the perfect bone of some fish or sea-bird, with a broken-off end making it a hook, which I smoothed on the rock so it would not catch in the weed. I collected more makings, and I sat there piled about with them, taking here the fine-furred weed that sparkled wet under the moon, and now and then a strand of bubbles, and back and forth, back and forth, I knitted and knotted my son’s peacefulness up out of the night and the sea-stuff. When I had finished a perfect square of blanket I covered my bab with it, and wrapped him around and gathered him up, and walked wearily home through the beginning dawn.

  The seaweed blanket achieved its end, for a time, but as it dried, it soothed Ean less – though I could revive it, I found, by sprinkling it with fresh seawater or, even better, by soaking it in a bucket of the same.

  But my little one’s distress grew, and though I knitted up another blanket, so that one could soak while the other kept him calm, still he began to be never quite comfortable, never quite comforted. He drank and drank from me, all my milk and more. I was worse than slender now; women stopped me in the street to ask what ailed me, to scold me for not eating. And still the little prince of my life would not grow, but only slept or lay awake listless, making his small speaking-sounds, as if remarking, low and constantly, how this was not his world, however hard he might labour to exist here.

  I could see all too clearly what
I must do. Deep in my deeps I felt the dread of it, the knowledge I fought against with my soaking of blankets, my wringing of breech-cloths, my hours of feeding him. I knew we could not go on this way.

  Finally it came time to do the impossible. Mam had come by that afternoon, throwing about orders for me to begin spring cleaning. The only door she had not flung open was mine; if she had, she would have seen the little prince in a nest of damp weed on my bed, the clean breech-cloths beside him where I’d pitched them, having snatched them from the fireside when I heard Mam greet Pixie Snaylor outside.

  Spring was coming. If I did not act, others would have to know of this bab; Mam would have to know, and my sisters, and the town. Ean had lain unhappy for weeks, his little face creased with pain. His body would not strengthen itself by moving any more, would not lift its own head; he only lay close, his miniature arm around my neck, only lay still, dreaming of better places, his tiny nostrils breathing the sour air off the seaweed around him.

  Night fell and the full moon rose. I unfastened my crossed bands, rolled them up and pocketed them. I picked my boy up, and I wrapped him close, and I took him down through the teeming night to Crescent Corner. Only a few seals greeted me as I came down the cliff path, but more bobbed out in the water, their heads like shawled women’s.

  I knelt with Ean, unwrapped him and kissed him. Fresh weed I took from the lip of the sea, fine as lace. I bound this round him as he gasped, around his tiny goose-fleshing chest that would not breathe enough, that would not broaden and fatten like my niece and nephew’s. Two X-es I made on him, front and back, to make sure he always fled witches and men, to keep him safely in the sea.