Chapter Eight
The Moon Pool — Tavish
I asked her at breakfast if she wanted to see something, and she was in her boots before I’d finished asking.
The way in is a crack in the cliff, and it fills at every high tide.
You can only walk it at the bottom of the ebb.
Low water was twenty past six that morning, and this week is a spring tide, which means the sea drops farther than usual and comes up farther after.
So we had forty minutes inside before the crack filled again and closed behind us.
I reminded her about the forty minutes twice on the way down. She said fine and kept walking.
The tug of my skin was present before we went under the cliff.
It sat in the drawer at the top of the inn, and I could tell it was there, the way you can tell someone’s in the next room.
Then the rock came between us, and I couldn’t tell anymore.
Nine days, and that was the first hour I couldn’t find it.
It’s possible to stand thirty feet from that crack and not see it. It’s a black line in a black cliff.
I got my boots off at the mouth and carried them, because wet boots on that rock will put you down.
“Left hand on the wall. Don’t put your right hand in the crack—there’s a lip in there that’ll take your fingers off.”
Water to the knee. Colder in than out. She came behind me and never once asked whether it was safe, which I noticed and didn’t understand.
Twenty feet in, the dark went total. She stopped.
“Ten more steps and it opens.”
“You can see in this?”
“No. I can hear it widening.”
That’s true. She took the ten steps.
The water in that chamber makes its own light.
The pool glows. It’s green, and it isn’t bright—about the green you get holding a bottle up to a window. The light comes up off the water and onto the walls, and because the surface moves, the rock above your head moves with it.
Nobody knows why it does that. I don’t either. It has done it since before this village was here.
I’ve been inside four times in my life. Twice as a boy. Not once in the last nineteen years, and nothing was keeping me out. I couldn’t make myself walk in.
Mara came out of the passage behind me and made a sound in her throat.
She had the camera around her neck. She never touched it.
The other thing about this place is quiet. I’ve had wind in my ears for nine days and surf under it for nineteen years. In there it’s water on stone and nothing else.
“It only lights up like this in the spring. When the moon’s fat and the tide runs highest.” I sat down on the wet rock. “Three or four days a month. The rest of the time it’s a hole in a cliff.”
She sat too, a yard off, with her boots in the water.
I put my hand in the pool.
I’ve had my hands in the sea most days of my life, and it has never once done me any good. This was different, and I couldn’t tell why. I left it in there a long while and watched the light run up my wrist, and I didn’t move, and nothing in my chest hurt for as long as I kept it there.
“There’s a shelf up there.” I lifted my chin at the wall behind her. “Dead barnacle, the whole way along. That’s where the water used to come to. It doesn’t reach it now.”
She turned around to see it. The light off the pool was on her face from underneath, which is not how a face is meant to be lit, and it took the tiredness out of her and put softness and vulnerability in.
“How old is that?”
“Older than anything in the village.”
“And nobody comes down here?”
“They come as far as the beach. They don’t come in.” I took my hand out of the water. “There’s iron nailed up over half the doors in that place. They know where they stop.”
“You came in twice as a boy. Who with?”
“My mother, the once. A man called Aonghas the other time, who’s been dead sixty years and would want mentioning.”
She laughed, quiet, and it went around that chamber and came off the walls.
We sat there and said nothing for a long while after. I counted the drips coming off the roof and got to something over three hundred and stopped counting. Just being there with her was the best part of the day.
Then a seal came out on the far ledge.
It hauled up, shook itself, and settled. Another after it. Two together, another, one more, until seven of them lay along that shelf in the green light, and none of them moved.
They weren’t watching her.
Nineteen years I’ve walked this coast and not one seal has come inside a hundred yards of me. They came out of that water one after another and lay on the ledge with their heads up, facing me across forty feet of it.
“Do they always do that?”
“They like the ledge. It’s dry, and the rock holds heat.”
Also true.
She got up on her knees at the edge to see them better and put a hand down on the wet stone. Then she went still.
Two seconds. Three.
She threw herself backward and sat down hard with her palms flat behind her.
“God. Sorry. Vertigo. I looked straight down, and there’s no bottom to it.”
I understood exactly what had happened to her. I let her have vertigo.
“I’m not what you think I am.”
She turned her head.
“I’ll not be good at this. I’ve had nineteen years to work out how to say it, and I’ve spent them walking instead.”
She waited.
“I was born in the water. I had a skin, and I could put it on and go, and nineteen years ago a man took it off me while I slept and shut it in a box. I’ve been on land ever since.”
She didn’t move.
“We don’t last up here without it. It’s not quick. I’ve maybe thirty years left, and I’ll spend the last ten of them unable to stand up. You can see it coming on my face. It goes gray at the mouth first.”
She had her eyes on my face and said nothing at all.
I waited for her to speak, but Mara was looking at me in a way that made it clear she had slipped out of ordinary time.
I surprised myself by saying even more. The story, once begun, came out with a strange, weightless ease, as if it were not being dug up but simply exhaled from somewhere behind my lungs.
“There’s one way it comes to me. It can’t be stolen. Take a skin, and it stays bound to whoever took it, forever, and it’s no use to either of us. It has to be given. By the one holding it. Freely, with nobody twisting an arm.”
I set the whole law down flat between us.
There was a place for the rest of it right there, and I went past it.
I did not tell her I’ve known where it was since the first night.
The water was over the low end of the ledge when we left, and the seals stayed where they were.
She went ahead of me in the passage. Full dark, deeper water, and neither of us able to see the other’s face.
Her voice came off the rock in front.
“I have it. I’ve had it since the night I found you. There was a woman there. She told me not to touch it.” She breathed. “I did anyway.”
Half a second. That’s what I had to work with.
I ran it through. Tell her I knew. Tell her I’ve known since the beach, and that everything since—the walks, the birds, the whisky, the pool—happened with that sitting underneath it.
Then we’d come out into daylight, and she’d be standing in front of a man who explained the rule about giving before she said one word about having it.
My hand went in my pocket and found the stones.
“You have it.”
I put surprise in it. It was good.
It wasn’t good enough. She stopped in the dark with her hand on the wall and turned round, and she couldn’t see me and I couldn’t see her, and she held still one second longer than a person holds still.
Then she went on out.
I stood in the passage and listened to her breathing fade toward the light.
She knew. And she was still walking toward me.
That had to count for something.