The Brides of Rollrock Island (8 page)

Then Ann Jelly was gone from us over the Strait, and Bee and
Grassy and Lorel went worse than ever at each other, without her there to intervene between them.

But Bee was snatched up too, in time, by Thomas Bolt in his brief moment of half-handsomeness and hers of nearly-beauty, and she went up the hill and started turning out babs as fast as a granny turns out thud-cakes. And Grassy went to poor John Tinker and the same, bab after bab, and Lorel to the curate Breachley, who gave her no children, which was no surprise to anyone. And Tatty Anna married Joseph Coil and had one son and then the girl that killed her, so Lorel and Breachley took on those two and had children after all, whom Lorel never treated as anything other than a very great burden on her.

There was no reason to think I would do any better than Tatty or Grassy, and certainly no lawyer-in-the-making would whisk me away to the mainland. One by one all the marriageable boys claimed or were claimed by the girls who flirted or
looked cheerful
, or were only slender and unobjectionable, while I remained like one of the Skittles rocks, a crag in the midst of the moving sea, marking the points on which no sensible man, no man with any prospects, would compromise.

What men were left, my age and older, were either one-legged or mad, or they made the sign against me if I crossed their path, or they did not even see me. I wanted no husband if marriage meant one of these. In the secretest of my moods and the darkest of my nights, I thought of traveling to the mainland, and finding myself a husband there. But if no Rollrock man could look on me without scornful laughter or fear, surely all Cordlin could offer me was a larger pool of such tormentors?

And after Dad fell ill I was well and truly tied to home. It was
more accident than illness; he was man one day and he woke up back to bab the next, and he never found word or step, or grasp, or control of his bodily functions again. Mam’s rages grew closer to the surface; where she had tutted and sighed and banged pots about, now she complained, and loudly—against Dad, against Billy, against her fate to live such a hard, dull life. She would unleash herself on me: “How fat you are getting! You are surely fatter than last summer. Are you eating your father’s food when I don’t look?” She seemed unable to stop sometimes, about my untamable hair, my eyes almost swallowed up by my cheeks, my sour expression. She never remarked upon my harking back to that shameful ancestress, but it hovered there between us; I waited for her to use it to harangue me, but she never quite did. She only lamented at how I was to be a burden on her forever, I was so unmarriageable. Dad was the only bab I should ever care for, she said. Perhaps I was glad of his illness, was I? Perhaps I felt he gave me an excuse for being so useless to anyone else?

“Useless, am I?” I would say, if she pushed this too far. I would put aside Dad’s bowl and whip off my apron and go from the house with a slam. I would take a turn about the town, greeted by some and spat beside or skittered from by others. Or I would climb by field and fence to Whistle Top, and fill my teeth and hair with wind, my eyes with sea around three sides of me, rinsing the house’s cramped darkness and sickroom smells out of my head. I would feel the rage and shame of being a Prout—and of being
this
Prout particularly, the unmarried one, the odd one, the one who
harked back
.

Or I would visit the seals, dangling my legs from the cliff path and soothing myself on the sight of creatures who had no opinion
of me. They soaked up the sun, or they lay in the wind and snow unbothered; they birthed their young in shameless messes and the birds cleaned up after them. The bull, carelessly ugly, fought off his rivals, returning to mate with one of these sacks of well-being, it hardly seemed to matter which.

I would watch them a long time. My irritations would fly off and I would find a patient alertness within me. I was not tempted at all to loosen my crossed bands and disturb them. I had seen deeply into them once; once was enough to know what sparkled inside them, what I might bring out from them when I grew big enough and brave enough. My time would come, I felt sure, and then Mam and the girls would be sorry.

When I returned, Dad would be inexpertly fed, and Mam would be silent but for a clash of pan, a crash of firewood. And I would have some days’ peace before she forgot again how much work I saved her, and recommenced complaining.

I hardly had leisure to think of what I held off from myself with the bands. I was too occupied keeping Mam and Dad’s house, and helping when Grassy or Bee lay in, or were ill, or their children were ill or their men. For a long time I seemed to be everyone’s but my own; I was like a broom or dishrag that anyone might pick up and use, and put aside without a thought when they were done with me.

During this time I saw many girls wed. I stood in the crowd outside the church waiting for bride and groom to emerge victorious, and I followed with everyone else as they proceeded to the feast.
There was no reason why Tricky Makepeace’s wedding should set off my impatience; she was no relation of mine, and no particular enemy or friend. Neither was Jodrell Fence such an enviable catch, or the dress Tricky wore much finer a confection than most.

But that was the night I took flint and steel and went out, tiptoe through the town so as not to wake anyone, then out along the field road. The moon shone brightly—perhaps that had called me out? The air was as still as a held breath.

Down to the Crescent I went, to the seals, who were all the one silver under the moon, except for the bull, the king, who lay among his wives like spilled ink, and the babies, like dark droplets thrown off him throughout the herd.

I gathered driftwood and made a fire, and took off my clothes in the warmth of it, and stripped the crossed bands from myself, and down I went and called the king out from among the mothers.

His waking roar echoed around the Crescent rocks. He rose from the ruck and pitched himself through the bewildered mams toward me, right over some of them. His eyes rolled white in the moon, and his mouth was a paler splash within his dark head.

There with pups moiling and mewing around my ankles, and mams a-fret and a-waggle either side, I set my sights on the man-makings inside him. Like a swarm of bright insects they were, which I must waft and persuade toward his center, even as he lurched and shivered and made his monstrous sound and blasted me with his fish-rot breath. This I did; this I learned to do in the doing of it, searching every corner of him, gathering every seed and spark. The full moon conjured and encouraged the light, and I threw and threw myself as one throws a net, and I drew
each speck toward and into the man-shape at his center. A head-blur parted from the body-blur; some limbs came good, splitting from the main shine. Then suddenly the man’s outline sharpened within the seal. Arms lifted from his sides, reached up, and hands pushed out through the mouth hole and split the seal’s head-end apart.

The coat collapsed to the rock, and the shining man stepped out. The moon lit his lifted face, and I laughed as I fell in love with it, in simple accordance with the terms of the old charm. Then he lowered his gaze to me, and likewise I dazzled him—it was none of my doing, only a matter of proximity and timing and our two natures—and we were locked together.

He glanced about at the sea, at the cliffs, at the fire. “That is your home, up there?” he said.

“That is my fire.” I admired his long lean legs, his man-parts and his narrow hips, the smooth-dented front of him, his broad chest and fine shoulders, and above all his face, so full of strength and loveliness and, most marvelous of all, so fixed on me, with not an ounce of ill will or amusement in his eyes, not the merest smudge of guile in his expression, not a hint of curl in his lip.

Then he bent, and I heard my own little shriek, the most
girlish
sound I had ever made, as he lifted me. He started out among the mothers and pups, commanding them aside in their own tongue. I clung to his smooth neck, breathing in the heady, salty warmth of his skin. A soundless wind poured up through the air around us. It should muffle everything, as crashing surf muffles voices on a beach, as surf fume veils a headland. But instead every wave-plash and seal-snuffle was clearer, every rock
bulked out brighter-edged, and every touch was sharper or more tender than it ought to be.

He lowered me to stand by the fire. He put his arms—long, strong and lean—about me. I stood to my toes and he bent from his heights and we met in the middle very sweetly, I thought, very neatly. And then I thought the kiss had finished, but still he pressed me there, and when my mouth softened wondering at the surprise of that, oh! In he slipped his tongue a little way! I exclaimed against it. I tested and tasted him; I put up my own arms and held him down to me, and up his hot neck and into his slithering hair my fingers found their way, and in among his teeth my own tongue darted, and up and down our bodies we were fast together.

He let me go as gently as he’d taken me up, soft smaller kisses finishing off the larger. He pushed back the curls on my forehead that would never submit to being tied back. I fizzed and rushed with that kiss, quietly thundered to myself. How would I bring myself, at the end, to send all this back to the sea?

But why think of that? I sat to the rock, drawing him down with me. I pushed him back, and lay alongside him, quite unafraid. I roamed over him, exploring the hills and vales of him, the roads and towers, with my small, plump, work-red hands, wondering at all his different degrees of hairiness and smoothness, of warmth and chill, tying and loosing his hair, which was dark as night, slippery as water.

And here was a wonder, that a man so well conformed himself should be so eager to embrace what I had always been told was a poorly made body, laughable, even disgusting. But I delighted
him; he traveled my curves, weighed me in his hands, pressed me and gasped with me as I yielded. Open-faced he looked into me, his eyes empty of the scorn I was used to seeing, in women’s faces as well as men’s. Instead he was only another creature discovering skin, discovering forms of limbs, folds and fancies in the fire- and moonlight, all of them laughable, all gravely serious. He pushed the dampening hair back from my temples, and kissed me again with that wide, that white-teethed, that smiling-serious mouth.

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 afterward; 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, modeled 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 sealness 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.