Epilogue
Mist from the hills and mist from the sea blurred the oyster boats which trailed alongside Falmouth Harbour on a cold September morning.
Weighty metal dredging frames were heaved from the boats’ sides and plonked into the water.
At the River Fal’s bed, they pulled along the mud, raising silt that ran away into the ocean.
Upon their recovery, each frame was stacked high with oyster and crab and shell and cultch, the stones and grit which form an oyster’s bed.
That last material was thrown back to sea, to allow further oysters to grow and thrive, ready to be harvested later.
One boat, however, began to struggle.
It was a small vessel with the name Bryluen painted on its side. The dredging frame would not come up, at least, not without a great heaving. Straining, the two occupants – a father and son – began to lift the dredging frame together.
‘It’ll be caught on an anchor,’ said the son to his father.
Instead, it was caught on a man.
His arm was hooked into the dredging frame and, to the son’s surprise, the man was alive.
With one last effort, the oyster catchers pulled him onto the boat, exchanging wary looks between them.
No good came from a haul such as this. At least it did not have a fish tail or a lion’s head, as had been shared in stories at their drinking hole.
The sodden man’s skin was bare and shining wet, one arm marked and bruised from his rise from the seabed.
He seemed shocked by them, the reddened marks, as though he had forgotten what it was to feel them.
When he was finally placed on his back, he vomited water onto the boat’s boards and across the oyster catchers’ boots, clutching the centre thwart for support.
This, too, seemed to surprise him. He moved oddly, startled by each sensation that reached his mottled fingertips.
How long had he been gone? From the weight of the silt in his mouth, he wagered a year.
It had been quiet, peaceful, unending – and terrible for it.
Worse, almost, than being tethered to the sea.
Without its pull on his veins, he was anchorless, as though he could rise above the seafarers who stared at him, not knowing yet to be afraid.
A remembrance of a woman’s voice rang in his mind – Kensa’s – along with the single wish she’d made in his dying breaths, while magic had been loosed from its binding:
I’d wish him back, if only so he could see what he’d done.
And she had. And here he was. Mortal.
‘Tell me your name, sailor?’
Slowly, the man who was once the Bucka lifted his eyes. Ones as blue as the sea, as blue as the sky, as blue as a cormorant’s as he stretches his wings and steels himself for the hunt.