A shadow crossed the ground in front of him, and Tall Andras looked up and waved his arm at the crows that circled the field. His weeding was turning up bugs and worms, morsels that the crows wanted, he knew, and it put his seedlings at risk. He couldn’t afford to lose the crops. Winter was long here, and in the good weather seasons they prepared for it: growing, catching, storing things away. His father was getting old and his mother had been unwell for months, with fever that came and went. Tall Andras was young, just seventeen, but the family depended on him. He would make a bird-scarer, a mommet, he decided. Last summer that had helped. And he had a large gourd in the shed that he could use for a head, with a face carved on it: a fierce face. He twisted his own face, practicing, pushing his lips up against his nose, and then flapped his arms, the way the cloth of his mommet might flap in the wind to frighten away the crows.
Then he stopped, feeling childish and foolish, and glad that the girl had not seen. For her, he wanted to seem a wise and hard-working man, worthy soon of a wife.
Four
They noticed that creatures frightened her. A chipmunk, tamed by the little girls, sat on Eira’s hand nibbling at the seeds they gave to it. But Claire backed away with a startled look.
“You never seen one before, then, Water Claire?” Bethan asked her. “They not be harmful.”
“You can touch him,” Delwyth suggested. “He don’t mind.”
But Claire shook her head no. She was fearful of the smallest of creatures—a mouse, scurrying across the floor of Alys’s hut, almost caused her to faint—and fascinated in a worried sort of way with birds. She found frogs amusing but strange. And she was completely, utterly terrified of cows. Claire held her breath and looked away when she had to pass the place where a scrawny milk cow, its wrinkled mouth moving as it placidly chewed on the rough grass, was fenced beside the cottage where Tall Andras lived with his parents.
“I must try to learn creatures,” she said to Alys apologetically. “It’s not right to be so fearful. Even the smallest of the children feel at home with the creatures.”
“Mayhap you had a run-in with a creature once.” Alys was in the rocker, knitting with gray wool in the dim, flickering light.
Claire sighed. “I don’t know. But it’s not a feeling of a bad memory. It’s as if I have never seen them before.”
“Fish neither?”
“Fish are familiar,” Claire said slowly. “I think I have known of fish somehow. They don’t frighten me. I like how silvery they look.”
“Nary birds?”
Claire shook her head and shuddered. “Their wings seem so unnatural. I can’t get used to them. Even the littlest ones are strange to me.”
Alys thought, and rocked. Her wooden needles clicked in her gnarled hands. Finally she said, “Lame Einar has a way with birds. I’ll have him catch us one, for a pet.”
“Pet?”
“A plaything. A pretty. He’ll make a cage for it, from twigs.”
Claire cringed at the thought, but agreed. It would be a start to the learning.
One afternoon she stood barefoot on the beach, watching the trio of little girls. Using sticks, they had outlined a house and were furnishing it with debris they found in the sand.
“Here’s my bed!” Bethan announced, and patted an armful of seaweed into a shape.
“And cups in the kitchen!” Eira set five scoop-shaped shells in a row. She lifted one daintily and pretended to drink from it.
Delwyth ran to fetch a branch she saw beside some rocks, and dragged it back. Torn from a nearby tree by the constant wind, it was crowned with a thicket of leaves. “Broom! I found us a broom!” the little girl announced happily, and scraped the sand with it. “Wait. It needs fixing.” Carefully she tugged at a thin side branch, broke it loose, and tossed it aside. “There. Now it’s a proper broom.”
Claire, watching, leaned down and picked up the slender branch that Delwyth had discarded. The sand was damp and she saw her own footprints in it. With the tip of the branch, she poked a round hole in each of her own toeprints, then laughed and scribbled the footprints away with the stick. A gentle surge of seawater moved in silently, smoothed the roughened sand, and receded.
She leaned forward and wrote the first letter of her name.
C.
Then L. And A.
But a foamy inrush of seawater erased the letters.
Claire moved back slightly, farther from the sea’s edge, and began again. CLAIRE, she wrote.
“What be that?” A shadow fell across her letters. It was Bethan, looking down.
“My name.”
The little girl stared at it.
“Would you like to do your name beside it?” Claire offered her the stick.
“How?” she asked.
“Just make the letters.”
“What be letters?”
Claire was startled at first. Then she thought: Oh. They haven’t learned yet. She had a sudden image of herself, learning. Of a teacher, explaining the sounds of letters. There was a place she had gone, a place called school. All children did. But she looked around now, at the cliff and hills and huts, at the sea—she could see the boats bobbing in the distance, and the men leaning in with their nets—and she was uncertain.
“Will you go to school soon?” she asked Bethan.
“What be school?”
She didn’t know how to answer the child. And maybe, she realized, it wasn’t important. Six letters; they made a name. What did it matter? She looked again at the word she had written, then erased it with her own toes, stamped the sand firm, and tossed the stick into a pile of glistening kelp nearby.
Alys had sent Old Benedikt to ask the favor of Lame Einar. Not long after, slow on his ruined feet, the young man made his way laboriously down from his hut on the hillside, carrying the twig cage on his back, with the bird inside.
“Here it be,” he told Alys.
Einar was not one for talking. His failures had made him a recluse, but people remembered the vulnerable boy he had once been. Though he had stolen from his father, they forgave him that; his father had been a harsh and unjust man. That he had climbed out, many admired, for the cliff was steep and jagged and the world beyond unknown; few had the courage that Einar had had. They regretted his failure, but they welcomed his damaged return. Einar, though, had never forgiven himself; he lived in self-imposed shame and stayed mostly silent.