‘Here,’ Marith said, pulling the horse to a stop. They had not spoken for a long time, riding together without needing to speak, together and alone. He dismounted, helped Thalia down, tethered the horse to a tree. They went on on foot for a little, to the end of the headland where the sea and the sky and the earth met and were all three things together. Grey rocks, rough and leprous with barnacles, slippery and shiny with green-black seaweed, worn and eaten into lacework and worm tracks and smooth flat surfaces like altar stones. The water white with foam, swelling and booming in hollows and caves.
‘Wait here.’ Marith scrambled down onto the rocks, carefully picking his way over the thick clumps of seaweed, between dark rock pools. He reached the very end of the point, where the sea washed over the rock and there was nothing around him but swirling water. He raised his arms, white and black against the grey rock and the grey sea and the grey sky. Shouted in triumph, the shout of a boy: ‘Hah! Hah!’ Stood frozen, breathing in the scent of freshness and wildness, salt and stone and decay, tiny, vast, alive like the water and the rocks and the sky. Then he made his way back up to Thalia, cursing and laughing once when he slipped and soaked one foot in a rock pool, cursing without laughing when he slipped again and struck the heel of his hand on a barnacled rock.
‘I drink too much to be scrambling out over rocks,’ he said ruefully. ‘Once I could climb anything and anywhere.’ He grinned and grinned like a child.
They rode on, and came to a small fishing village huddled beneath the cliffs in the next bay, a bare handful of grey houses clinging to the land behind a shingle beach where the water churned up the pebbles with a sighing whisper, so close to Malth Salene but as far distant from it as the tiny villages of the desert were distant from Sorlost.
So many voices, Thalia thought, listening to the waves breaking. All this silent land is alive with voices.
‘Hungry?’ Marith asked.
Thalia nodded. Marith steered the horse down the track to the edge of the village, dismounted and tapped on the door of the first house. It was low and dark, crouching into the earth, windows looking out bleakly onto the sea. The roof was of reeds, black with pitch. Nets and small domed baskets were piled about. ‘Lobster pots,’ Marith said, seeing Thalia looking curiously. The corpse of a bird, dried and mummified, hung by the neck next to the door, beside a long pole of driftwood, salt-white, so bleached dry it made Thalia’s hands crawl. Rune markings were carved into it, black on white.
‘Protection against death by drowning, death by starvation, death by thirst in the midst of the sea,’ Marith said, seeing her look at it with the knowledge of its power. ‘Cheerful folk, hereabouts. But you’ll see.’
The door opened. A woman gazed at them. Middle-aged, thin and gaunt-faced, but so beautiful she made Thalia draw breath in astonishment. Long hair, still dark and shining, great dark eyes, soft white skin tinged with gold. She blinked at them; when she spoke, her voice was low and guttural and harsh. Pebbles shifting in the waves. Water booming on rocks. So strange, hard for Thalia to understand, the cadences wrong.
‘Yes?’ The woman looked at Marith. ‘I know you. I’ve seen you here before. They said you were dead. Come back, are you?’
Marith merely nodded. He did not seem to expect, or want, her deference. ‘We’d buy bread, if you have some,’ he said simply. ‘Milk, if you have that. Or just water.’
‘Sweet water or salt?’ she said in response, and laughed a harsh laugh. ‘You’re in luck, for I have milk, and bread, and curd cakes hot from the oven. If you’ve money for it.’
Marith handed her a few coins. She weighed them carefully, then ushered them in. The room was larger than Thalia had expected, very low and gloomy but warm, furnished with a heavy table, benches, a great chest with a huge iron lock. More fishing nets hung from one wall, giving the place a strong smell of fish and brine over the peaty smoke from the fire. Marith tethered the horse then stepped in after them. The woman set bread and bowls on the table, disappeared through a doorway. Through the door came the babble of a child’s voice. Thalia looked questioningly at Marith.
‘Not now.’ He smiled at her puzzled expression. ‘Later.’ The woman came back with a jug of milk and a pat of gleaming yellow butter, warm bread, small yellow apples like those they had eaten the previous night, a long side of cured fish, gelatinous and silky as Thalia’s gown. Thalia ate hungrily, enjoying the food far more than the dishes she had been served at Malth Salene. Marith seemed to enjoy it too, ate better, his face filled with a simple pleasure. She remembered him eating the burnt bread and meat he had cooked at dawn in the desert, proud of himself for trying. Perhaps he remembered it too, for he reached out and took her hand.
After they had eaten their fill, Marith walked over to the chest. He bent down and touched the heavy lock, raised his eyes quizzically at the woman. She looked back at him, then shook her head. He breathed out a little ‘hah’ sound between his teeth.
They thanked the woman and left the house. A sense of strange calm descended on Thalia as they crossed the threshold. The bird hung there, twisting in the wind.
‘Come down to the beach,’ Marith said. They walked down and sat on a rock looking at the tide coming in and the boats on the water. The sea shone pale silver in the light, the waves like ripples in a skein of long hair, moving slowly with the heavy liquidness of dreams. A knife blade of sunlight struck the sea far out, brilliant as fires, making the waves sparkle. To shine. To sparkle. To dance like the sunlight on fast-flowing water.
‘What is she?’ Thalia said at last.
‘Not my lover, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ Marith grinned at her. ‘You could tell, then, could you? I wondered if you might. She’s a selkie, beautiful girl. A seal woman. One of the mer folk. A tiny wild sort of a god. Most of the women in this village are such, and in several of the villages round about. The men go out with nets, at night when the moon is full, over to the sands that can only be reached at low tide where the seal maidens shed their skins to dance as human women beautiful as stars. If a man catches one and steals her seal skin, she has no choice but to stay with him. As long as he holds her skin, you see, she can’t go back into the water. So she marries him, and keeps his house for him, and bears his children. And because she is a god of a kind, he has great luck with his fishing. Until she can get back her seal skin, when she will leave him and go back into the sea, and curse his nets so that he will never catch anything but seaweed and sand.’ He thought for a moment. ‘It’s a kind of wager, I suppose. How long he can keep her, how much money he can save, how old his children can grow to be, before she leaves him to starve.’
Thalia was silent for a while, looking out at the sea. ‘That’s cruel,’ she said at last.