Chapter Thirteen
The Lowest Water — Mara
“You’ll have worked out I folded that cloth.” Callum waited expectant, sure of himself.
“Corners in. Top over. Over again.”
“Aye.” He had a coil of line over his arm and a lamp in his other hand, unlit. “I’d hoped you’d not, and you did, and there we are.”
The water past the harbor wall lay flat and dead with the moon sitting on it. The tide was out further than I have seen any tide go. There was black rock showing beyond the moorings that no one alive had walked on, and it stank of ground that spends its life under the sea.
“There’s a passage down the shore that opens twice in a lifetime. It’s open tonight, and it’ll be shut again in about forty minutes when the storm pushes the water in ahead of it.” He started walking. “You can come or not. I’d rather you came.”
I went with him, because he was the only person left who could tell me what I was carrying and why it had cost me everything I had.
He knew that shore the way I know a lens.
Down past the last of the beach, over rock running with water, to a slot in the cliff no higher than my chest. He put the lamp on and went in on his hands and knees. I followed him.
It went down. Twenty feet, forty, the passage widening and dropping, weed hanging off the walls at head height where the water sat when the water was where it should be.
“Thirty-five minutes, near enough. Keep moving. You’ll not need to hurry.”
He talked the whole way, unhurried, never once out of breath.
“I’ve been at this since I was thirty-nine.
I’ve had divers down twice—the first pair took my money and told me there was nothing there, and the second pair got as far as the wall and couldn’t shift it either.
I’ve had a man from Aberdeen with a compressor.
I’ve had charges down there, twice, and all that did was bring the roof down at the second bend and put a year on the work. ”
“And nothing’s ever opened it.”
“Nothing I’ve got. It’s not a door you take off its hinges.
” He put a hand out to a shelf of rock, steadying.
“Nineteen years I’ve kept a thing in a box behind a plank in a boathouse and walked past it twice a week, and I’ve been waiting on two things to arrive at once.
A tide like tonight, and one of them on this shore.
I had the second for four years without knowing it.
He slept under that cross out of the rain, and I’d not the wit to look at him. ”
“You could have asked him.”
“Ask him what? Come down a hole in the dark and open a thing for the man who’s had your hide in a box since 1993?” There was no anger in his voice. He might have been talking about a fence. “You don’t ask. You get yourself into a position where the answer’s already made.”
The passage narrowed, and I heard something overhead, dull and long, going on and stopping and going on again. The storm had got to the top of the cliff.
“Rory was nineteen.” A step down, a hand out to steady himself on the rock. “He’d been down here four times. Fifth time the water came in behind him, and he’d nothing to hold on to. I was up top with the rope. It went slack in my hands.”
He said it and moved straight on to where I should put my feet.
“That’s why I’ll not be told I’m a thief. I bought that skin with what they paid me for him.”
He had something under his arm wrapped in plastic, and he set it down on a dry shelf while he worked the line, and the plastic came open on the corner of a book. Old. Leather gone soft as cloth.
“Are those your tide records?”
“Some of them are.” He got the line coiled. “That one’s not mine.”
I got the flyleaf in the lamplight. A crest stamped into the leather, worn nearly flat—some kind of bird over a bar. And a date. 1791.
“Whose is it?”
“A man who had this errand before me.” He wrapped it up again. “Mind that shelf, it’s greasy.”
His attention shifted. He was already talking about the last twenty feet.
The place we came to was low and wet and ordinary. I had expected something more.
Sand floor, running with water. A wall at the end that was not rock—smooth, dark, and set into the stone the way a door is set into a house, with a lip of it standing proud.
“There it is.” He held the lamp up. “Nineteen years and I’ve never got it open, because it doesn’t open for the likes of me. It needs one of them to walk up and put a hand on it.”
“And he won’t.”
“He’ll not do it for asking. No.” He set the lamp on a rock. “But there’s a thing he wants more than his own skin now, and you’re standing in this cave, and that’s a new position for me.”
Tavish came down that passage more falling than walking.
He was soaked to the neck and one side of his face was bleeding where the rock had cut him. He got to the bottom and had to put a hand on the wall to stay upright. He came here from the inn, on foot, at that speed, in the state he was in.
“Isla told me which way you went.”
He did not turn his head to Callum at all.
“Go up. The water’s coming.”
“Not without you.”
Callum had the iron out of his jacket before Tavish had finished the sentence. Not a weapon. A flat black bar the length of a forearm, and he put it against Tavish’s chest and Tavish went down onto the sand on his knees and stayed there.
He could not get up. He could not get his head up either. He knelt there with his hands open on his thighs and the water coming round his knees, and he could do nothing at all about any of it.
There was no fight in it. That is the part I could not have imagined beforehand. Callum stood over him with the bar held to him. There was no pleasure in his face and no apology in it either.
“Now.” He put his free hand out. “The skin, if you please.”
The water came over the lip at the passage mouth while he was saying it.
Not a wave. It came in flat across the sand, and swished around my boots and then over them, and the sound in that place changed. I knew we had minutes.
And standing there, I understood. All of it, at once, cold and complete.
Callum had held that skin for nineteen years because letting go of it would mean his brother drowned for nothing.
I held it for fifteen days because letting go of it meant losing the only good thing that had happened to me since I was twenty-eight.
He did it for money, and I did it for love, and we did exactly the same thing.
Both misguided.
The sea had no way of telling us apart. Neither did the law they lived under. A thing held was a thing held, and it did not matter one bit what was in your heart while holding it.
Love does not survive being held.
Tavish was down on his knees in six inches of water in front of a man with a bar of iron. He had come here for me. He had lied to me for nine days. Both of those were true at once, and neither of them canceled the other, and I understood him.
I got my hand inside my coat.
The water was rising fast. We had maybe three minutes before the passage flooded.
I had to choose.