The Luna of the Tide

The mail boat left me on the quay at dusk with two trunks and a basket of bread that had gone hard somewhere between Saint-Malo and here, and the first thing I noticed was the wind. It came off the water with salt in it and a cold edge that found the gap between my collar and my neck, and it carried a smell I could not place then, something like wet stone and pine resin and animal warmth.

The second thing I noticed was the pack.

They stood along the shore in a ragged line, twenty or thirty of them, and every face was turned toward the bay. Not toward me. Not one of them looked at the boat, or at the trunks, or at the woman in the grey wool travelling dress who had come to mind their dying Alpha. They stared at the water, and the water had something in it.

A coat. Dark blue, heavy wool, the kind a fisherman wears over his shirt in bad weather, spread flat on the surface with its sleeves out. It turned slowly with the current, and I watched it turn and I thought, someone has drowned, and then I thought, no, there is no body, and the wind pushed the coat toward the rocks and a woman in the line broke from the others and waded in to her knees to catch it.

She pulled it out of the water and stood there holding it, and nobody spoke. The surf hissed over the shingle and the gulls complained overhead and the woman held the coat against her chest like a child.

I picked up my trunks. A boy of about fourteen appeared at my elbow, thin as a rope, and took the basket from me without a word and set off up the path. I followed him. That seemed to be the arrangement.

The path climbed between gorse and black rock, and the island opened up as we went, a scatter of low stone cottages with slate roofs and smoke coming from the chimneys, a church with a squat tower, a few fishing boats hauled up on the shingle with their nets drying. The boy walked fast and did not look back, and when I asked him his name he said Luc and nothing else.

At the top of the rise the path turned, and there was the longhouse.

I had been told to expect a house. This was a building the size of a barn, built of the same grey stone as everything else, with a slate roof that sagged in the middle and a heavy oak door with iron bands across it. Two wings ran out from the main hall, and in the courtyard a woman was hanging washing on a line while the wind tried to take it from her. She saw me and dropped the sheet and hurried over.

"You will be Maelle," she said. Her hair was silver, braided tight, and her eyes were the colour of tea with milk in it. "Odile. I keep the laws and the accounts and most of the arguments. Come in before you freeze."

"I saw them on the shore," I said. "There was a coat in the water."

Odile's face did not change. She picked up one end of my trunk and nodded at the boy to take the other. "There is a coat in the water most weeks. Come in."

The main hall of the longhouse was one long room with a fire at each end and a great table down the middle, and the walls were hung with things I had no names for, iron hooks and coils of rope and a harpoon head the length of my arm. Above the far fire, set into the stone, was a curved piece of bone as long as a man is tall, and it was carved all over with marks.

I stopped in front of it. The marks were not decoration. I knew that before I knew anything else about the island.

"What is that?"

"The law," Odile said. "Every Alpha's law since the first one. We keep it where everyone can see it." She set the trunk down by the stairs. "You will have the room at the top of the west stair. It was the last Luna's. She will not mind."

"Was?"

"She died," Odile said, and turned away to the fire.

I should have asked more. Instead I stood in the middle of that hall with the wind rattling the shutters and the smell of peat smoke in my nose and the carved bone above me, and I felt the floorboards move under my feet, faintly, the way a ship's deck moves. It took me a moment to understand that it was not the floor. It was me.

The room at the top of the west stair was small and clean, with a bed, a chair, a washstand with a cracked jug, and a window that looked out over the bay. I put my things away and sat on the bed and watched the light go out of the water, and the coat was gone from the shore and the line of wolves was gone too, though I had not seen them leave.

Then I heard someone on the stairs, and I stood up, and the door opened.

The woman in the doorway had copper hair, thick and pinned up, and the firelight from below made a halo of it. Her eyes were pale green and they went over me once, head to foot, and she smiled.

"Soizic," she said. "The healer. You must be the caretaker."

"Maelle."

"Maelle." She said it slowly, as if she were tasting it. "Odile has put you in the west room. Good. It is close to the Alpha's chamber, and he needs watching at night." She came in without being asked and set a small tray on the washstand, a cup and a covered pot. "Tea. Drink it before you sleep. The crossing leaves a chill in the bones and we have no doctor on this island but me."

"Thank you."

She looked at me a moment longer than was comfortable. "You have your mother's chin," she said.

The room went very quiet. I heard the fire below, and the wind, and my own heart.

"I am sorry?"

"Nothing. A fancy." She smiled again, and it was a good smile, warm and easy, and I did not believe it. "Drink your tea, Maelle. In the morning you will meet the Alpha, and he is not a patient man even now."

She went out. I listened to her steps go down the stair and across the hall, and then I took the cover off the pot and sniffed.

I know what tea smells like. This smelled of tea and something else, a green bitter something underneath, like a plant crushed in a mortar. I poured it into the jug on the washstand and watched the dark liquid run down the crack in the porcelain and drip onto the floorboards, and I told myself I was being a fool, that a healer's tea might smell of anything.

I did not drink it. I have never been able to say why, not then.

I slept badly. The wind came off the bay all night and the shutters knocked, and once I woke sure that someone had said my name, and the room was empty and the candle had burned down to a stub and the sea was loud in the dark. In the morning there was salt on the windowsill, a fine white dusting of it along the wood, and the window was shut and had been shut all night.

I wiped it up with the corner of the sheet and went down to meet the Alpha.

They had put him in the chamber off the hall, the one with the fire that was never let out. Tanguy Kervel had been a big man once; you could see it in the breadth of his shoulders and the size of his hands on the blanket. Now the skin hung loose on his face and his hair was white and thin and his eyes, when they opened, were the faded blue of an old sail.

"Maelle," he said.

I had not told him my name.

"Odile said you would come," he went on, and his voice was a dry rustle. "She said the sea would send someone." He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me with those pale eyes, and then he frowned, and his hand came up off the blanket and shook. "No. No, not you. Not you."

"Alpha, I am only the caretaker."

"You are hers," he said. "You have her face." His breath caught and rattled. "Tell me your mother's name."

The door behind me opened before I could answer, and a man came in, and the whole room changed shape around him. That is the only way I can put it. He was tall, wide in the shoulder, with ash-blond hair that needed cutting and grey-blue eyes that went from the bed to me in one movement and stayed on me. He wore a dark coat and his boots were wet with sea water, and he filled the doorway as if the doorway had been built for him.

"Father," he said. "You should be resting."

"This is the caretaker," Tanguy said. "Maelle. Look at her."

The man looked. I looked back, because I had been looked at by men before and I had learned to do it, and something happened in the space between us that I have never been able to explain to anyone.

His scent reached me first. Sea salt and pine and cold iron, and under all of it something warm that made the back of my throat ache. My heart struck once, hard, like a bell rung close to my ear. I felt it in my teeth and in my fingertips and in a place low in my belly I had no business feeling anything in, and I took a step back and my heel hit the leg of a chair.

His eyes changed. The grey in them went bright, and I saw his hands close at his sides, and I heard him breathe in through his nose, once, deep, the way a man breathes in the air before a storm.

Then he blinked, and it was gone, and his face was as flat and cold as the slate roof.

"Gwenael," he said. "Acting Alpha. Odile will show you your duties." He turned his back on me and went to the bed. "Father, you are frightening the woman. Lie back."

"I am not frightened," I said.

"That is worse," he said, without turning.

I stood there with my heart going like a hare's and my skin still hot where nothing had touched it, and I watched him settle the blanket over his father's chest with hands that were perfectly steady, and I understood two things at once. The first was that he had felt it too. The second was that he would rather have swallowed the sea than admit it.

"I will begin tomorrow," I said. "Tonight I will learn the house."

"Do that," Gwenael said.

I went out into the hall and stood by the great table with my hands flat on the wood, and Odile came in from the courtyard with a basket of turnips and stopped when she saw my face.

"What did he say to you?"

"Nothing." I made myself let go of the table. "The Alpha called me by a name that was not mine. He asked about my mother."

Odile set the basket down very carefully. "And what did you tell him?"

"Nothing. Gwenael came in."

She nodded slowly, and something went out of her shoulders, and she picked the basket up again. "Then nothing was said," she told me, "and we will leave it that way."

The afternoon I spent learning the house. The kitchens, the store rooms, the yard where the water butt stood, the long passage that ran behind the hall and the door at the end of it that was locked. I asked Luc what was behind the door and he said the old rooms, and when I asked what old rooms he shrugged and went back to chopping kindling.

At dusk I took the path down to the shore because I wanted to see the bay properly, and the whole pack was there again.

They stood in the same ragged line, facing the water, and the wind pulled at their coats and their hair, and not one of them turned to look at me. The tide was out and the shingle gleamed wet and grey, and out in the middle of the bay, where the water was still deep, something dark floated.

I thought it was the coat again. I walked down to the waterline to see better, and it was not the coat. It was a boat, a small fishing boat with its gunwale just above the surface, and it had not been there yesterday.

A man near me, grey bearded, noticed me at last and nodded at the water.

"The third one this month," he said. "The sea gives them back when it is done with them."

"Done with them?"

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, "You are the new caretaker," and he turned away, and the whole line of them stood there in the failing light, staring at a boat that had come up out of the bay, and the water lapped at the shingle and the wind came off the sea and I stood among them and felt, for the first time in my life, that I had walked into a house where someone had died and nobody had told me.

Behind me, up on the path, a man's voice said my name.

I turned. Gwenael stood at the top of the slope with the last of the light behind him, and he did not come down.

"Maelle," he said again, and even across that distance I heard the way he said it, careful, as if the word had edges. "Come up from the shore. The tide turns fast here."

"I am coming," I said.

"Now," he said. "Not when you have finished looking."

I climbed the path toward him, and he watched me come, and when I was close enough to see his face I saw that his jaw was set and his hands were in fists at his sides, and he stepped back from me as I passed, one step, as if I carried something catching.

At the top of the path he fell in beside me and we walked up toward the longhouse in the dark, and neither of us said anything for a while.

"You knew my name," I said at last. "In the Alpha's room. Nobody had told you."

"Odile told me."

"Odile was in the courtyard with a basket of turnips."

He was quiet. The wind moved the gorse and somewhere down in the village a dog barked twice and stopped.

"Then I guessed it," he said.

We came into the courtyard and the light from the hall windows fell across the stones, and he stopped at the door with his hand on the iron ring and did not open it.

"There is something I have to say to you," he said, "and I will say it once. Whatever you felt in that room, and whatever you think you smelled, it was nothing. It was the fire and the smoke and a sick old man's fancies. This island has had enough of Lunas and the sea and the things people feel when the moon is wrong. I will not have it again." He looked at me then, and his eyes in the lamplight were the colour of rain on slate. "So we will be civil to each other, you and I, and nothing more, and in three months you will go back to the mainland with your wages and forget this place."

I looked up at him. My heart was beating in my throat, and my skin was hot, and under my ribs something that was not quite me wanted to step closer to him, and I held it still with both hands.

"You do not know what I felt," I said.

"No," he said. "And I do not want to."

He opened the door and went in and left me in the courtyard, and the cold came down off the hill and the sea sounded very loud behind the longhouse, and I stood there a moment with my hand pressed flat against the stone wall until the shaking stopped.

When I went in, Odile was waiting at the foot of the west stair with a candle. She looked at my face and did not ask.

"There is a letter for you," she said. "It came on the boat with you and got mixed in with the stores."

She held it out. The paper was cheap and grey and the wax was broken, and the hand on the front was a hand I knew, a looping, hurried hand that had written my name a hundred times on the labels of jam jars and the backs of recipes and once on a note left on the kitchen table when I was nine years old.

My mother's hand.

My mother has been dead for seven years.

I turned the letter over and there was no date and no postmark and nothing else on it at all, and Odile held the candle steady and watched me, and in the dark outside the window the sea went on moving against the shore, patient as anything.

I slept with the letter under my pillow and woke three times in the night to check that it was still there, and each time the paper was warm from my own body and the ink had not moved. My mother's hand. I knew it the way I knew my own face in a mirror, the way she looped the tail of the M and crossed her t's low and slanted. I did not open it. I lay in the dark with my hand flat over it and listened to the sea and told myself there were a hundred explanations and every one of them was a lie.

In the morning I took it down to the kitchen and held it over the fire and did not burn it. Then I put it in the pocket of my apron and went to see the Alpha.

Soizic was in the chamber before me. She had the shutters open and a bowl of water and a cloth, and she was washing Tanguy's hands where they lay on the blanket, one finger at a time, slow and careful. She looked up when I came in and smiled.

"Good. You can sit with him while I make the morning broth. He likes a voice in