But enough time passed for the clouds to lighten in the east, over the top of one cliff, and hope seized me. If it got light soon enough for the ship to see the danger . . .
It did not. Even over the hammering waves I heard the crash as the ship ran into the rocks and splintered. Her lights bobbed wildly. A few moments later they went out.
The men on the beach screamed in joy.
Dawn approached. As the invisible sun rose behind the angry clouds, the entire horrifying scene came into view. The ship lay on her side about a quarter mile out, breaking up as the sea pounded her again and again. Figures struggled in the surf, trying to get ashore. Some disappeared beneath the chaotic water and didn’t reappear. Others reached the beach, dripping and exhausted and bruised, their clothes torn ragged by the rocks. And my uncle’s men rushed to meet them.
I saw the yellow-haired youth grab a sailor by the neck, push him down, and drive a knife square into his back.
It was no contest. For every survivor from the wreck, there was a killer on the beach. Blood streamed along with the rain, turning tide pools red. The men moved in a frenzy, silent now but all the more terrible for that, flashing their knives in and out of living flesh.
After a while, no more figures staggered ashore.
Cargo began to wash up then, great casks and wooden boxes, dashed against the rocks in their passage. The men dropped their weapons—knives and swords and spears would have endangered them in that slippery sea—and waded out to grab the casks before they could split open. Stumbling, cursing, gripping the slippery rocks for balance whenever possible, the wreckers retrieved what they could, half carrying and half floating the cargo ashore. The sun rose higher behind the clouds, and I could see sticky red on the discarded blades.
“You!” Hartah roared at me. “Help! Fetch in cargo!”
A box was abruptly tossed up by the waves, coming down on a rock just yards from the beach. The wood splintered and broke. Cloth spilled from the box, immediately sodden with salt water. Red, gold, blue—the rich silks and velvets and brocades swirled in the water or clung to rocks even as my clothes clung to my body. The dyes began to run, staining the water colors that no sea ever was: red . . . yellow . . . blue . . .
lavender
. . . . I stumbled toward the shore until a hand on my arm stopped me.
“Roger! Go!”
My aunt Jo had materialized on the beach. She must have come down the muddy track, come after everybody else had left the cabin, come to tell me where my mother was. . . . I couldn’t think. My back to the cliff, I stared at her, dumb, amid the wreck and the rain and the cloth dyeing pebbles fantastic colors.
“Go!” She thrust something at me, and without thought, I took it. Hartah’s knife, plucked from the bloody sand. She wanted me to take it, to run away while there was still a chance. A chance to find my mother’s death place, to cross over and see her again—
My feet finally moved.
A huge cry, and Hartah loomed before us. Some of the ruined cloth from the wreck clung to him, dripping blue velvet draped lopsided over his shoulders like a mockery of a cape. In his hands he held a metal-bound wooden box. From somewhere behind me, someone cried, “Soldiers! Run!”
Rage blossomed on Hartah’s face. His head jerked upward, searching the cliff for soldiers. Rain streamed down his red nose, across a bruise on one cheek. Always, rage must go somewhere. He screamed at Aunt Jo, “I told you to stay above!” He raised the wooden box and brought it down hard upon her skull.
Her slight body crumpled onto the rocks.
Without thought, I slid Hartah’s knife between his ribs and twisted it.
His big body went rigid. One arm raised to grab me, and I stepped backward, pulling out the knife. Instantly blood gushed from his side—so much blood! It pooled among the rocks, mingled with the rain, splashed when Hartah fell to his knees and then, after a long terrible moment when time itself seemed to stop, onto his face beside Aunt Jo.
The knife dropped from my slack fingers.
“Soldiers!” someone screamed again, and then they were pouring down the track, slipping in the mud, dozens of them in the rainy dawn. There was no other way off the beach except out to sea, where the ship broke up even more with each crashing surge of the waves. Some of the wreckers fought back, but it was hopeless. Only two of us were taken prisoner, me and the youth with the yellow hair, and there was no way Cat Starling would ever, ever have kissed either one of us.
5
I LAY FACEDOWN
on the ground in the clearing above the beach, bound hands and feet, my mouth shoved against the wet dirt. The yellow-haired wrecker lay beside me, similarly bound. The rain had slowed. Soldiers dressed in rain-sodden blue milled around, and shouts sounded continuously as horses, Hartah’s old nag among them, hauled wagons up from the beach. Every so often a boot kicked me in the leg or the belly, and painfully I brought my bound arms up to shield my head as best I could.
What would these soldiers of the queen do to me?
All my life Hartah had told tales of soldiers torturing prisoners, but even in my fear I knew I would not be tortured here. The soldiers didn’t need to force a confession. They would hang us on the evidence of their eyes.
“A priest!” the yellow-haired man cried. “It is my right to see a priest before I die!”
Two pairs of boots stopped on the muddy ground, inches from my head. “He’s right,” said a voice. “It’s the law.” “And did they have law in their minds when they wrecked
“And did they have law in their minds when they wrecked the
Frances Ormund
? ” demanded another voice, rougher than the first. “Sir.”
The
Frances Ormund
. That must be the name of the ship. Again I saw the bodies on the beach, the tide pools red with blood, Hartah and the others shouting in triumph as they snagged the cargo washing ashore. The killings. And I had killed, too. The knife sliding so easily between Hartah’s ribs, like butter into good cheese . . . And just before, the heavy wooden box, smashing down onto my aunt’s head . . .
My mind shuddered away from both images, and from the knowledge that I was a murderer. And yet I did not regret killing him. The thought astonished me. I, who had shrunk from killing a rat that had crawled into the wagon, a snake in the house, when we had a house. But it was true. I should have killed Hartah long ago. And I should have no fear of death now. After all, I—of all people!—knew that both he and I would continue on across the grave, in the peaceful country of the Dead.
But I did not want to go there. Not like this, not forever. What had Mrs. Humphries said to me?
“It is not your time. Not yet.”
The first soldier said, “Nonetheless, Enfield, I am bound by the law.”
“Sir, these scum don’t deserve the law! Begging your pardon, sir . . . but ten hands dead, with only two survivors! And a woman aboard, the captain’s own wife!”
“I demand a priest!” the yellow-haired youth screamed. A boot kicked him hard in the side. He gasped and writhed on the ground.
“Enfield,” the other voice said, but without warning. All at once I was seized by the arm and hauled to my feet.
“Sir, let him at least see what he’s done before he hangs! Let him face the survivors!”
The officer made no objection. Enfield dragged me to the cabin. As we went, one soldier spat in my face. Over a high limb of a great oak, two more soldiers threw a pair of nooses.
The inside of the cabin was dark, lit only by a single lantern on a small table. Two people sat in wet, bloody clothes. One had a crude bandage wrapped around his temples; he sat with his head in his hands, moaning. The other was a woman.
She was neither young nor old, with gray streaking the salt-crusted hair that dripped onto her torn gown. Her face was swollen, either from her battering in the sea or from tears. Grief dulled her eyes. Enfield thrust me before her on my knees.
“This, Mistress Conyers, is what killed your husband and wrecked the
Frances Ormund
—this!”
She looked at me. I steeled myself for the blow. Instead she said with a kind of hopeless wonder, “But he’s just a boy.”
“Worked with the wreckers, mistress. The foulest vermin there is . . . He’ll hang with the other.”
Her brow furrowed painfully. I could see that she hadn’t taken it in yet: the wreck, her husband’s death, her own freakish survival. She was like those newly arrived in the country of the Dead, bewildered by where she found herself, unable as yet to make sense of this new terrain.
She said, “How old are you, boy?”
All at once I found my voice. I wanted to live. Two nooses swung outside, and I was not yet ready to dwell in that other country. And I looked—so skinny, so underfed—younger than I was, despite my height. I fell to my knees.
“Eleven, mistress. And I did not wreck the ship! My uncle brought me there—he made me come—I didn’t know—I didn’t know!”
Enfield snarled, “A blubbering coward, as well as a wrecker.” He seized me, but I tore myself from his grasp and stayed on my knees.
“Please, mistress, I swear to you—
I did not know!
And my aunt was there, too, my uncle killed her as well—look for the body! It’s skinny and frail. . . . She didn’t enter the sea, she wasn’t killed by anyone coming ashore—she was my mother’s sister! ”
Again Enfield grabbed me, this time much harder. But the dazed, grieving widow raised her hand. “No, wait, please . . . please.”
“Mistress, he’ll say anything to get himself off! He’s lying!”
“Was . . . was . . .” It seemed hard for her to weave her thoughts. “Was there a woman’s body on the beach?”
I thought Enfield would lie, but somewhere amid the vengeance in him also lay truth. As it did in my story, if he but knew it. After a long pause, he said, “There was.”
“Murdered? ”
“Her head was bashed in,” Enfield said reluctantly. “But this bastard might have done it himself!”
“No,” I said. “Aunt Jo was the only one ever kind to me.”
And now, when she was dead, I saw that this, too, was true. My aunt had never protected me from Hartah, no. But she had shared with me what food she had. She had told me to run from this very clearing. She had lost her life coming down to the beach to tell me, yet again, to run.
“Roger! Go! Go now!”
And I had treated her with rage, with contempt, because I was too afraid of Hartah to direct those feelings at him.
Tears pricked my eyes. For Aunt Jo, for my lost mother, for myself. Then shame flooded me—fourteen was too old to cry!
Eleven
would have been too old to cry. All I could do was hang my head, but I knew both Enfield and Mistress Conyers had seen.
She said wearily, “Let him live. He’s just a child.”
“He is not! This is an act and he a coward, a lying—”
“Let him live. It is my right.”
Enfield bellowed, pulled me upright, and dragged me outside. He was not going to listen to her; he was going to hang me. But all he did was hold me fiercely and force me to face the great oak.
One noose dangled, empty, from a high tree. The other lay around the neck of the yellow-haired youth. His whole body trembled and his eyes rolled wildly. He shouted something, but the words made no sense. Three men on the other end of the rope pulled, and the young wrecker was jerked off his feet into the air.
He went on jerking for what seemed forever, kicking desperately. The men knotted the far end of the rope around another trunk. The rope chafed the tree bark as the hanging man struggled for air, his face distorted as he swung, kicking and kicking and kicking. . . .
Eventually the kicking stopped.
Enfield drew his knife and cut my bonds. He shoved me to the ground, where I lay looking up at him.
“Now go,” he said. “Run. It
is
her right.”
But the dead man had had the right to a priest, and they had hung him without any priest. Looking at Enfield’s face, I knew I would not get twenty feet into the woods before he, or one of the others, spitted me on a sword. Or worse. Mistress Conyers would never know.
Her gown, bedraggled and drenched and torn though it was, had been made of richly embroidered velvet.
She had been the wife of a ship’s captain.
Enfield obeyed her, as long as he was in her sight.
I got to my feet. But instead of running into the woods or toward the track from the clearing, I ran back into the cabin and threw myself again at Mistress Conyers’s feet.
“My lady! Please—if I go, the soldiers will kill me! Take me with you!”
Outrage finally brought some color to her face. “How dare you—my husband—”
I said, “I can bring you news of him from the country of the Dead!”
“Guards!
Guards!
”
I did the only thing I could. I threw myself against the corner of the table, hard, aiming so that the corner would hit my forehead. Pain shot through me like fire, great sharp lightning bolts of pain piercing my head, and the room went dark.