Chapter One Kensa #2
Elowen gasped, a small huff into Kensa’s face, only a hair’s breadth away.
The men on the wall quietened, their low murmurs fading as they listened.
Next came a chance, a beat where Kensa could have sunk down, grasped her sister’s arms and apologised.
After all, it was not truly Elowen’s fault, it was a mistake.
Yet she did not, could not admit it. The younger child, eyes spilling over with tears, wrenched herself away and ran.
Her buckled shoes slapped shingle and her fair hair trailed behind her.
She left Kensa standing there, with curdled sea-foam and fish blood stiff and drying on her skirts.
It served her right. Kensa repeated this to herself as she paced. Near by, the drunken men at the harbour were laughing at lewd jokes, though the few words she overheard made little sense to her. Of course, it was always Kensa in the wrong, never her sister.
‘Elowen?’
Where had she gone? Now it was Kensa’s turn to ask, call, wait.
Her voice bounced off cob wall and quarried stone.
There was no answer. She cuffed her nose with her sleeve and walked.
Uphill was home, a small dwelling elbowed into a long terrace which lined the main road through Portscatho.
Elowen had gone the other way, along the path which bordered the coast and dipped precariously close to the sea.
Kensa went after her. As she began to move, her anger was replaced with worry, then guilt.
She called out again and again. No reply.
How far could Elowen’s legs have taken her?
Kensa pushed on, faster, her path a gloom of ferns and tree roots.
She knew the stories, had been raised on them, about the beasts who would snatch a child from its cradle or a maid from her virtue, should the Father of Storms – the Bucka – wish it.
Kensa did not like to think on him too close to the sea, lest her thoughts summon him, impossible though it seemed.
To her left, the ocean sighed and over the waves came a sound.
It was a low, keening cry. A wail like wind across a rum bottle, clear and high and sweet to hear. Loud, terribly loud: inhuman and unanimal. It tightened a knot in Kensa’s chest. Her feet pummelled the earth as she sprinted towards it, that sound, and the creature who made it.
Elowen had got there first.
From a high point on the path, Kensa saw her sister standing on the Towan’s shore, dwarfed beside a ship-sized mass.
She was a thin stripe against a hulking body.
Could it be a whale? It cried again, loud enough to shake the ferns at Kensa’s waist and call her towards it, towards Elowen, towards nothing she had ever seen before.
This was no whale. This was a sea monster.
Towan was a beach whose name meant sand dunes, for that was what the coastal stretch held. Uneven heaps, crowned with grass and pebble rings, ran for half a mile. Kensa barely felt her dash across its ridges, hearing shells crunch and pebbles clack.
No sooner did she reach the sea monster than she heard Elowen speak.
‘Dydh da,’ she said tentatively, in the lost tongue – and one which should have been lost to her.
A chill pulsed from the hulking body, tightening Kensa’s lungs. This was not a night for greetings, it was one for goodbyes. ‘Duw genes,’ she corrected, for the sea monster was dying.
Such beasts as these were rumoured to wash up on the shore in colder seasons, when the bracken had rusted and the departing swifts had sailed an absence into being.
It had been a long time since such an event had happened, a century, at least. The creature had a dulled spine and twin fins nubbled into ridges, along with a funnelled neck as wide as a cartwheel, which curved inwards like a sleeping swan’s.
Across one grey flank was an old scar, long healed.
Its features were odd, almost human; a woman’s face distended across a whale’s snout.
It was so large, Kensa could hear its heartbeat.
A dull boom, boom, boom, which rippled the sand beneath it, beneath her.
Elowen’s face was small and pinched in thought. ‘Eus teylu dhis?’ She repeated in English, ‘Do you have a family?’ Others, perhaps its own kin, who waited in the water.
The question, asked gently, placed an uncomfortable pressure into Kensa’s sternum.
It was not fear. Had she been surrounded by others, she might have been afraid.
Fear is like that, it manifests when there are mouths to feed it.
With only her, Elowen and the sea monster, she carried a strange guilt she could not understand.
As though she must act, though the actions required escaped her.
It seemed prudent to speak in the voice of the Old Ways. Kensa remembered enough from her father and that of the sailors in the village. Odd, to hear Elowen use it, to know how much she’d listened and picked up without seeming to.
‘Who taught you?’
‘I’ve always known it,’ said Elowen.
She got like this, her sister, speaking in a strange way when no one else was around. Kensa was used to it, though tonight was different.
Elowen raised a palm to the monster’s head and rubbed a soothing circle at a slight dip between its eyes.
A shiver rippled the beast’s flesh. Its slim nostrils quivered, then stopped, for ever.
Throughout its last breath, exhaled for a time as long as time, Elowen wavered.
Hand paused, head lolled, knees collapsed.
The younger girl fell sideways, as though her bones had gone limp.
Kensa tried and failed to catch her. On the sand, under the moon, Elowen’s hair lay around her like foam.
She did not respond to her name, to a shake, to a pinch.
‘Elowen.’
Hard steps pressed shingle, had been pressing shingle for some while, but only now could Kensa hear them. A rhythm that was not the waves crashing, her own pulse thudding or the sea monster’s stopped heart.
There, in the shrinking distance, was a cloaked shape.
‘Help,’ cried Kensa, then halted. Bit her tongue. Shrank her neck into her collar.
No one who roamed a beach at night was good company.
She would know. Her father had lured cargo-laden ships to wreck under a sky such as this.
And then there was the sea and its horrors, worse than the one who had washed up this hour.
What to do? Kensa could run back to Portscatho.
Fetch her mother and get aid. That would mean leaving Elowen.
She could not, would not, do that. Kensa rose to her feet and reached for the familiar hagstone in her pocket: the only weapon she had.
A laugh rattled the shells.
‘You will not need that, child,’ said the wise woman, pulling back her hood.