Stormswept

But the boy was still alive. The water seized him, hurled him high into the air, and then plunged him down into its depths. His lungs were bursting but he kicked and fought his way back to the surface. All his experience of growing up by the sea came to his aid as the currents of the storm clawed at him.

“Don’t panic,” Conan told himself. “Don’t fight the current, go with it until you can swim across it.”

Everywhere around him there was blackness. Cloud had come over the moon and Conan couldn’t even see where the great hall had been. He shouted again and again for his father, as he struggled to keep afloat. No one answered. Salt water filled his mouth and he coughed and spat and choked. The sea was too strong. It had got hold of him and it wasn’t going to let him go. Bright speckles danced in the blackness in front of his eyes and he remembered his father’s words,

“You only have to make one mistake, Conan, because the sea never makes any.”

Another wave broke over his head, pushing him down.

At that moment a strong arm came around him. Conan was rising up to the surface again. There was air and he could breathe. Someone was holding him up, holding him so strongly that the sea had no power to pull him away.

They were swimming across the current now, more powerfully than the boy had ever swum in his life. The waves were calming, and the moon had once more pushed the clouds aside. Ahead of him, Conan saw the Mound rising against the sky. At that moment the grip on him loosened. The boy turned and saw a face he didn’t know, with long hair streaming around it like seaweed. It was not his father who had saved him. The man pointed ahead, as if showing Conan the way he must go to safety. Land was very close. The boy trod water, and then his foot brushed against sand. Coughing and choking, the boy dragged himself into the shallows and lay there gasping for breath.

When he looked up, the man who had helped him had disappeared.

Conan never saw his father again. The other survivors became his family. As dawn broke they huddled together on the Mound, with the wide, grey, stormy sea all around them. Castle Mound had become an island. Their city and their homes had vanished beneath the waves. The survivors had no possessions, except for the clothes they were wearing and the blind man’s fiddle. But they had their lives, to start all over again, and they had their memories.

They remembered the music they used to play. As time went on they got other instruments from the mainland: bodhrans, flutes, bagpipes. They played the music of the lost city, even though it made them sad at first. They remembered what their lives had been like, and they built a new community, and a future for themselves and for their children, on the Island. Conan grew up, and became a great fiddle player. People said that he played almost as well as the blind fiddler who drowned in the flood.

Conan never forgot the arm that had reached out from the water and brought him safe to land. No human arm could have had the strength to hold him against that wall of water. No human being could have swum against the current and brought him to the Island.

Years later, when Conan had children and grandchildren of his own, he passed down to them the story of his rescue. He wanted it to be remembered for ever, and it is. I remember it, Jenna and Digory remember it. Our parents told us the story just as their parents told it to them, and back and back for as long as anyone knows. Conan is my ancestor. My great-great-great-great… I don’t know how many greats. He always kept the blind man’s fiddle safe, and we have it safe still. We call it Conan’s fiddle.

When Digory is old enough for a full-sized fiddle, that’s the one he will play. It’s too big for him now. Sometimes he takes it out of its case, just to try it, and to stroke the rich curve of the wood. Maybe some of the blind fiddler’s spirit has stayed in his instrument, because Digory says it is full of music. If anyone can find that music, Digory can. After a while we wrap the fiddle again in its blue velvet cloth, and put it back in the case. Some people say that if the fiddle is ever lost or broken, it will be the end of our island, and we should keep it stored away somewhere safe and never play it. Mum says that is rubbish. Fiddles are for playing, just as life is for living.

There is another legend about our ancestors, but it sounds so weird that not many people even talk about it, let alone believe it. They think it’s just a story that was made up to comfort the survivors, after the flood. But I’m not so sure… Maybe I believe it because Conan is my ancestor, and he was saved by a man with long hair like seaweed and the power to swim where no human being would be able to swim.

This is the legend. They say that when the wall of water swept away all those hundreds of people, not all of them drowned, even though they went down and down into the water, so far that they couldn’t rise again. A few of them – a very few – survived. Their lungs were bursting and burning for air. They couldn’t hold out against the water any longer and there wasn’t a chance of getting back to the surface. They had to breathe in.

They did breathe in. Seawater filled their lungs and salt swept through every vein in their bodies. They should have died but the sea didn’t kill them. They were filled with agony at the first breath of salt water, but then they took a second breath, and a third. Each time, their breathing grew easier. Their bodies took in the sea and became part of the sea, and they didn’t die.

It’s only a legend. Nobody ever saw one of those people who had been changed so that they could live in the sea. They could never come back, because they belonged to the sea now. Their skin changed until it looked like the skin of a seal, not the skin of a human being. They could swim as far and as fast as dolphins. They had their own language, and their own world.

Once Jago Faraday was out in his boat, night-fishing, over the place where the drowned city is said to be. It was a calm night and the sea was flat. There wasn’t a breath of wind. Jago dropped his anchor, and as he did so he looked down into the depths of the water. He saw shadows moving far below the surface.

“Shoal of mackerel, most likely,” said the men in the pub, as he told his story.

“Shoal of mackerel never looked like that,” Jago answered.

“A seal then.”

“Think I don’t know a seal when I see him?”

“Maybe it was that good old Tribute you been drinking, Jago.”

Jago scowled even more.

“I was stone-cold sober as I stand now,” he growled. “I saw shadows and I heard music. Had to turn on the engine so I wouldn’t hear it no more.”

“Don’t you like music then, Jago?” they teased him.

“Music like that, it pulls you after it,” said Jago, and he was dead serious. “You got to stop your ears and make for shore, ’fore you find yourself diving down among the fishes.”

No one believed him about the shadows and the music. But I’m not so sure…

Jago doesn’t care for music. He never listens to Ynys Musyk when we’re playing – he calls it “a load of old caterwauling”, or else he says it all sounds the same to him and he can’t understand why we waste our time playing the same stuff over and over.

“Or ‘rehearsing’, as it’s known,” I whispered to Jenna, the last time he said it.

Jago glared at me. “I heard that, you vixen.”

So why would Jago make up a story about wanting to dive into the sea because he’d heard music?

I love storms, and I hate them. They are in my blood. That’s why I’m already out of the gate with the wind whipping my hair and salt spray all over my face so that I can taste it on my lips. I’ll go down to the shore—

“Morveren! Morveren! Where are you? The meal’s ready! MORVEREN!”

It’s Jenna. The wind is still pushing me, as if it knows exactly where it wants me to go. I want to go with it. I’m curious, excited and a little bit frightened too. The night of the flood is all mixed up in my mind with nearly getting caught on the causeway, as if somehow the two things are connected – and I’ve got to find out why—

But Jenna’s calling again. She’ll be scared if I don’t answer. She’ll think something’s happened to me. I can feel her thoughts as if they were my own.

“All right, Jenna! I’m coming!”

I fight the wind all the way back to our cottage, open the door and go inside.

e’ve all eaten and Mum is saying goodnight to Digory.

“Your dad’s gone for a quick one in the pub with the others,” Mum told us when she got back from rehearsal, and we thought he’d be there for a while, talking and maybe singing. But as Jenna and I are clearing the table, the door flies open and there he is.

“The lifeboat’s gone out from Penmor,” he tells us, not coming in. Rain streams off his waterproofs. Mum hears him and comes downstairs.

“What’s happened?”

“There’s a Polish cargo ship drifting off Carrack Dhu. Lost power to the engines they say.”

“Is the helicopter out from Culdrose?”

“That’s as much as I’ve heard. With the wind as it is, she’s drifting this way, on to the reef. They’ll try to get a tow on her, but—”

We stare at each other.

“We’re going to ready the boat,” says Dad.

There’s no lifeboat station on the Island. Dad means the fishing boat he has a share in, along with Josh Matthews and Will Trebetherick.

“Where’s the sense in that?” cries Mum. “If the Penmor lifeboat’s already gone out?”

“It’ll need more than one lifeboat, if the ship breaks up on the reef. There’ll be men in the water.”

We all know how many ships have broken up on the reef. The sea around the coast here is full of wrecks. Dad knows the sea like the back of his hand. If we lived on the mainland he’d be in the lifeboat for sure.

“I’ll help you, Dad,” I say.

At that moment the gate bangs open. It’s Josh, streaming wet as well and out of breath.

“Been a message to the pub, she’s on the reef with the sea going over her. Crew got off in the lifeboat but two, maybe three, were thrown in the water. Come on.”

“Is the lifeboat still out there?” shouts Mum.

“She’s coming in. Sennen lifeboat’s on its way too. The Sea King’s had to turn back to Culdrose, technical problem.”

Everybody’s heading for the shore. The reef is a mile east of us and we’re the nearest landfall. Even though it’s dark, we can see all too clearly in our minds the way the sea will be boiling around the reef, ready to swallow ships and human lives. The wind is a hard south-westerly, maybe severe storm by now. Dad mustn’t go out in that.

But they are readying the boat.

Suddenly there is a shout. “Lights! Lights!”

It could be the Penmor lifeboat, or maybe the ship itself. The lights are close to where the reef is. Mum’s hand digs into my shoulder. The light disappears behind mountainous waves, then we see it again.

“I’m going to climb up the Mound!” I say. I’ll be able to see more from there.

“No,” says Mum, “You and Jenna come with me. We’ll get the hall ready.”

I know what she means, because it’s happened before. When I was ten, the lifeboat had to bring the rescued crew of a coaster in to the Island because the wind and tide made it too dangerous to cross the channel to the mainland. We laid out airbeds and blankets in the village hall, and gave them food and drink. As soon as the weather eased, a Sea King took a man with a broken leg to hospital. It’s happened other times too, but I was younger then and I don’t remember them.

Mum and Jenna and I get the tea-urn going, turn on the heating and blow up airbeds with pumps. Dr Kemp’s here too, setting up. Other people are in the hall, getting things ready, finding tea and sugar and mugs. Maybe none of this will be needed. I don’t want to be here, I want to be down at the harbour, watching out to sea.

“Dad won’t go out in this, will he?”

“Not unless he judges it’s right. He won’t risk giving the lifeboat any more work, you can be sure of that, Morveren.” Mum speaks calmly, but her face is creased with anxiety. She knows, as I do, that if Dad and Josh think there are men struggling for their lives out in that water, they’ll go to their rescue come what may.

“Jenna, they don’t need us here any more,” I whisper. “Let’s go back down.”

Jenna gives Mum an anxious look, but she comes with me. The wind hits us as soon as we are out of the hall. We run against it, and it holds us up like a wall of air. There’s the harbour, and for a panicky moment I can’t see Dad’s boat.

“Dad’s gone out!”

“No, look, there he is,” pants Jenna, and sure enough, there is Dad among the crowd.

“Are you OK, Dad?”

He shrugs. “Couldn’t get her out. We tried twice, nearly went over as soon as we got beyond the harbour wall.”

“Bad enough job getting her back,” confirms Josh, who is standing beside him. But they look crushed.

“Could’ve done it if we had more horse-power,” says Dad.

Everyone is out, lining the harbour, staring out to sea. Rain drives in our faces but no one seems to notice. There are two tractors with tarpaulin-covered trailers on the wharf, and I wonder why they’re there.

“There’s the light!”

It’s coming closer. A single, powerful beam that shines out and then vanishes as the boat bucks through the waves. Every time it disappears I hold my breath. Every time, it reappears. The seas are mountains that the boat has to climb.

“He’ll be getting his bearings from the harbour lights,” says Dad. “He’ll bring her round and get her in with the wind following.”

I think of the coxswain, who’s got to line up the harbour lights correctly to find the deep-water channel. It’s so easy to get it wrong. I’ve been out night-fishing with Dad and I know what it’s like to watch for those lights while your boat dips on the swell. And that’s on a calm night, nothing like this…

“Wind’s easing off a little now,” says Josh. Easing from severe storm to storm, maybe. Maybe just that little bit will make the difference and help them to bring the lifeboat safely in. Two, maybe three, were thrown in the water. How could anyone survive in a sea like this?

“Here she comes!”

I peer through the dark and wet and the thrashing water at the harbour mouth. Yes, there’s the light! The lifeboat hangs almost vertical, slides down a wave then disappears under the foam. But she’s there. She’s coming in. People are running along the harbour wall to the steps, and suddenly it is over. The lifeboat has made it. She is in the rough, safe waters of the harbour.

There are four crew from the cargo ship, and six from the lifeboat. The Polish crew are wrapped in silver survival blankets, huddled together. Dad goes down the steps behind Dr Kemp but I wait at the top so as not to get in the way. I can hear them shouting above the noise of the storm.

“Two men missing,” shouts one of the men in the lifeboat, “Sennen lifeboat’s there searching. We’re going back out.”

“Any injuries?” asks Dr Kemp.

“One broken arm, this man here. Cuts and bruises, they’re cold but they haven’t been in the water.”

“OK, I’ll see to them and be in touch with Treliske.”

Dad helps one of the Polish men up the steps. The man stumbles, and as soon as they’re up on the level Josh comes round to his other side. They half-carry the survivor over to the tractors. Now I see what they’re for. The tarpaulin is pulled back and the man is lifted very gently – I think he must be the one with the broken arm. They settle him on cushions and wrap him round with more blankets and the tarpaulin again. The tractor sets off immediately for the hall, while the second tractor waits for the other survivors. Already, the lifeboat has turned and is plunging back out to sea.

“That reef’s a desperate place on a night like this,” says a voice behind me. Jago.

“Poorish,” says Will Trebetherick, and it sounds like a rebuke. You don’t use words like “desperate” when a rescue’s going on.

Dad comes back. “We’ll start the shore search at first light,” he says. People gather round to parcel out the Island’s coast and make sure that not a metre of it goes unchecked.

Jenna’s already returned to the hall to find Mum and see if she can help there, and I follow her. Dr Kemp is with the man whose arm is broken. The other survivors stare ahead, as if they don’t yet realise that they are here, on dry land, and not plunging up and down on the sea. They are still wrapped in their silver blankets. Mrs Pascoe, who’s a nurse and works on the mainland, is chatting to them quietly as she takes pulses and blood pressures and checks temperatures. I feel as if we shouldn’t be here any more. They’ve lost so much: their ship, their friends, and very nearly their own lives. They don’t need people looking at them. I slip out of the hall.

Josh is right, the wind is easing off. Too late for the ship and maybe too late for the men who are missing. Could anyone survive out there long enough for the lifeboat to pick them up? I know the lifeboats won’t give up until they are sure there’s no more hope. Maybe the men will be found.

Dad said we would go out and search the shore at first light. I’m going too.

I don’t think I’ve been asleep, but suddenly there is grey light at the window. The shutters are open. Jenna and I didn’t want to close them last night. It seemed wrong, somehow, while the two men might be out there. Jenna’s asleep, flung out across her bed with her hair tangled. She looks pale and tired, and I don’t think I should wake her. I pull on my jeans and a hoodie, and creep downstairs. Dad is at the kitchen table, with his head propped up on his hands, drinking coffee.

“They picked up one of them,” he says without looking up.

“What about the other?”

Dad looks up. “Oh, it’s you, love. I thought it was your mother. No. No sign of him. We’ll search, but…”

I understand what he means. We’ll search the shoreline, metre by metre, but what we’re looking for may not be a living man.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

“If me and Josh could have got the boat out…”

I say nothing. I’m glad they didn’t. It’s a fishing boat, and although it’s strong enough, it’s not made for search and rescue in seas like the ones last night. What if he and Josh had been lost, like that Polish crewman? I don’t even know the crewman’s name. It seems wrong, that someone may have died so close to here last night, and we don’t know his name.

“They don’t speak much English,” Dad says. “It’ll take a while to find out what happened. Right, I’m on my way.”

“I’ll come with you, Dad.”

“I’m not sure you should, my girl.”

“I’ll come with you.”

t’s the full light of day now, early afternoon and the tide is falling. We have searched and searched since dawn, and found nothing. A Sea King from Culdrose has been out searching too. Everybody on the Island has been out, along with coastguard services from the mainland. They came across in their jeeps when it was still dark, at this morning’s low tide. A section of the causeway has been damaged by the storm, they said. It’s still so rough that no boats are running.

I’m cold, tired and aching. I went home with Jenna at midday and we heated up some of last night’s stew, but I couldn’t eat more than a couple of spoonfuls. There was a knot in my stomach that stopped me swallowing.

Jenna stayed at home with Digory, because he was too tired to walk any farther, but I wanted to go back out. I don’t really know why. All the hope of the search has seeped out of me. My hands are sore from scrambling up and down rocks, searching in gullies and overhangs. The wind is still strong, but there are rags of blue sky now, and the barometer’s rising.

The only place we haven’t been able to search yet is the caves below Golant cliffs. They’re accessible for a couple of hours at low tide, if you go round the point. I’m glad that the Pascoe boys have volunteered for that. Those caves always give me a bad feeling. They’re dark and dripping with water, and when we were little we believed that a sea-monster lived in them. I think it was the smell of the place: fish, and something rotting out of sight.

“It’s the monster’s lair,” Jenna would whisper, and we’d scream and run out again. There are tunnels at the back, but they don’t lead anywhere. They are just waiting to wrap themselves around you as the tide rises to fill them to the roof.

I’ll stop soon, and go back home for a while to warm up. No one really believes that we’ll find the missing man alive now. Too many hours have passed. I hope he died quickly. I hope he didn’t struggle too long in the water, hoping for rescue which didn’t come. I hope he wasn’t trapped anywhere. That’s my worst nightmare.

I rub my hands together to warm them. The sun is out now, sparkling on the waves. It looks so beautiful that it’s hard to believe this is the same sea that drove a cargo ship on to the reef last night. The wind is still cold, though. I shield my eyes and stare down the stretch of pale sand, to the rocks that gash into the water. Porth Gwyn. That’s its proper name but we just call it “the beach” because it’s where we always played when we were little. In the summer people come out here to sunbathe. It’s not a great place to swim because of the rips, but there’s a big natural pool hidden among the rocks, right down at the end of the beach. It’s more than two metres deep at one end. Jen and I call it King Ragworm Pool because we found the biggest King Ragworm we’ve ever seen in it, after a storm. It was half a metre long, and hideous. It put us off swimming there for a long time.

The pool fills from a channel, because the tide doesn’t come up far enough. It’s quite strange how it happens: there’s another rock pool higher and closer to the sea, which fills with every tide, and then the water runs to King Ragworm Pool. It looks as if someone engineered a channel long ago.

I search among the rocks, peering down into deep clefts and gullies where the sea thumps in at high tide. While I’m looking, I don’t let myself think about what I’m looking for. I think about Jenna and I searching for lost things that the tide has taken. If you’re patient, and thorough, you often find them. Maybe I should check again along the surf and the shoreline.

At that moment the church bell rings out from the village. Even at this distance I can hear it clearly. Just one bell, tolling out one slow stroke, and then another, as they do for a funeral. It’s a signal. The wind lifts the sound, carries it towards me and then snatches it away. I know exactly what it means. At times like these the church bells have their own language, and everyone understands it. The lost man has been found, but he is dead. If they’d found him alive, all the bells would have pealed out a clangour like wedding bells. This single bell-note is telling us it’s time to give up, and come home.

Such a slow, heavy sound. The sea glitters as the sun comes out more strongly, and a gull dives down, screeching. They used to say gulls were soul-birds, and carried the souls of drowned sailors. No one believes that now, but I wish it were true as I watch the gull ride the waves of the air.