By the time it moved, it all seemed to be over.
Chapter Twenty-Three
He was standing on a cliff, with thin, wiry grass under his feet and a brisk, cold wind on his face, staring out at a blue-grey sea the colour of steel in the forge fire, just before it turns red. In the middle of the sea, he could see the white sail of a ship. Fifty yards or so to his left, two crows were pecking at something he couldn't quite see.
When he looked up again, the sail had disappeared; but he was minded to walk down the steep, rather terrifying path that ran diagonally across the cliff face, like the cut of a sword-monk's blade on a man's neck. At the bottom of the path there was a little triangle of shingle, folded in the arms of two spits of rock: a private one-berth harbour set in a fortress wall of gleaming yellow sandstone. You'd never find it if you didn't know exactly where to look.
Either the ship couldn't make it in, or it was in a hurry; instead they'd lowered a little frail boat, leather hides stretched over birch ribs and sewn up in thick, well-greased seams. Two men were rowing, two others sat with their backs to him. The boat was lower in the water than it should have been.
While he waited for the boat to crawl through the lively waves, he took a moment to admire the ship, not that he knew anything much about ships, but it was the aesthetics rather than the technicalities that appealed to him. Long and sweet it appeared to him; the castles at either end melodramatically high, the wide, fat middle absurdly low. It was built to roll with the waves without capsizing, even he could see that; as it bobbed and wallowed in the water, its lines seemed to flow unceasingly, sinuous and meretricious as a dancer.
You'd never get me out in one of those things, he told himself. Not if you paid me.
Then he felt impatient, without yet knowing why, so much so that he splashed several yards into the water, wincing as the cold unpleasantness seeped in round his toes and ankles. The boat was still a long way out when he took a deep breath and shouted, 'Have you got it?'
One of the men with his back to him turned half around; the movement was ill advised and nearly swamped the boat. The oarsmen yelled at him to sit still at the same time as he shouted something inaudible, presumably a reply to the question.
He found this extremely frustrating. 'I said, have you got it?' he yelled, even louder. This time he could just make out the man's reply. 'Yes.'
That was evidently the answer he'd wanted to hear; he could feel joy flooding his heart, as palpably as the sea had flooded his worn-out boots. Of course, he hadn't got a clue what it was.
Perhaps it was because this was a dream, and in a dream things happen at extreme speed, so that you can dream a week in a few minutes of real time, but the minute or so it took for the boat to reach the shore seemed to last an entire lifetime. Just before the brittle prow bit into the shingle, a single crow dropped down on the rock beside him and turned its head away.
'Well?' he shouted.
The man who'd answered his question hopped over the side into the water, then reached back into the boat and picked up a familiar-looking bundle. 'He's asleep,' the man said, 'for a change, the little bastard. You're bloody lucky we didn't pitch him over the side.'
'It's a boy, then.'
The man scowled. 'Well, of course it's a boy. Do you think we'd have bothered otherwise? Here, you take the dirty little snot. If I never see him again, that'll suit me just fine.'
Stepping a yard or so further into the water he took the bundle from the man's outstretched hands and at once felt an all-consuming sense of relief that nearly stopped him from breathing.
'My grandson,' he murmured.
'Yes,' the man from the boat confirmed. 'Almost as big a pain in the bum as his grandpa, if you ask me. Next time you want a kid fetched from a long way over the sea, do it yourself. Now, if you don't mind getting out of the way, we've got valuable cargo to land.'
Some other men had come down the path; they were helping the men from the boat with barrels and jars and boxes. The baby in his arms looked like some exotic wild animal.
'Thank you,' he said, and the man from the boat nodded.
'That's all right,' he replied. 'Tursten was a good lad, I'm sorry.'
He turned away and started on the long, painful climb back to the top. He didn't notice the gradient, or the treacherous footing, or the wind that tried to comb him off the side of the cliff. He was utterly fascinated by the way the strange creature was opening and closing its tiny five-fingered hands, almost but not quite the way a human being would do it. It occurred to him that if some inhuman thing, a monster or a god, were to take a human body to live in for reasons of expedience or policy, probably it would familiarise itself with the way the thing worked by flexing the muscles and testing the nerves and tendons, just as this strange object seemed to be doing. The thought made him stop for a moment and frown. The idea had been that his dead son would somehow have found his way into this small body (because Tursten couldn't really be dead, that would be unthinkable; there had to be a way round it), but now that he was actually holding it, he wasn't sure. Maybe something else was in there, as well as or instead of Tursten.
Well, he thought, it'll be interesting finding out. Even if it is my son, he can't be expected to remember anything of his previous life, it'll be as if Tursten had come home but with all his memories wiped away-in which case, of course, he wouldn't be Tursten at all any more. Take away someone's memories and all you've got left is an empty bottle, a piece of scrap only fit for putting in the fire and bashing into something else.
At the top of the cliff he paused and looked back. There was the sail, more or less exactly where it had been when he first looked down from there (but since then, everything had changed; the old world had come to an end and a new one had slipped in and taken over the physical remains). He noticed something yellow and shiny in the child's left hand, just visible through the gaps between the soft, damp fingers. A gold ring, or something of the sort; he wondered where that had come from, and what it meant.
The child opened its mouth, miming a cry though no sound came out. He cast about in his mind for a nice soothing lullaby, but all he could think of was: Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree, Old crow sitting in a tall thin tree Hardly a wonderfully apt choice; but the kid seemed to like it, so he carried on: Dodger sitting on the red-hot coal, Dodger sitting on the red-hot coal, Dodger sitting on the red-hot coal, Then he jumped in the slacky-tub to save his soul.
The child started to howl, which suggested a certain degree of taste, if nothing else. He laughed, and started to sing 'Sweet Meadowgrass' instead, but found he could only remember the first two lines.
He took his time walking home, as if part of him didn't really want to get there. At the top of Enner's Steep he stopped and leaned against the orchard gate, looking down over the sprawl of thatched and tiled roofs of the farm. For some reason he felt a need to preserve an image of it in his mind, as if something he was just about to do would change it for ever. He made a careful mental note of the position of each building, taking the main house as an obvious datum and locating the barns and outhouses in relation to it, then he looked up at the sun to check the time, though that was hardly necessary. At Enner's, you didn't need the sun to tell you the time, you looked up at the thin, spindly fir trees and then down at the yard. If the crows were roosting, it was early morning, midday or evening. If they were in the yard, mobbing the stalls, it was morning or afternoon feed. If they were pitched out on the grass in the long meadow, it was mid-morning or mid-afternoon; and if they were crowding together on the branches of the apple orchard, it was morning or evening milking and the boys had driven them off the yard as they walked the stock through. As often as not, you could tell the time with your eyes shut just by listening to them. All the years he'd lived here, he'd been aware of them nearly all the time, their single cold mind reaching into his, groping in the dark for his thoughts-where was he going, what was he doing, was it safe to be out or was it time to fall back to safe positions and wait for him to go away? Once a year, ever since he was old enough to toddle and throw a stone, they'd assaulted the castles and cities in the fir copse with every weapon at their disposal, from pebbles and slingshots to blunt arrows and twenty-foot poles, trying to break up the nests while the season's children were too young to fly; every year, no matter how hard they tried to wipe them out, they killed or drove off a third of them, thereby preserving an exact balance with their normal rate of population growth. It was the only time they could even pretend to win a victory against the rookery; the rest of the time, the raiders raided, stole, wrecked and withdrew, undefeated and unassailable.