Elizabeth snaps at me to wake up and propels me with great confidence through the crowd at the cliff top. Only after several long minutes does she stop to catch her bearings. But I can see now that we’re in the right place. Because I spot a point of stillness in the seething crowd: Sean Kendrick. His clothing is dark, his expression darker, and he looks off into the black night in the direction of the sea. He is unmistakably waiting.
“There,” I say.
“No,” says Elizabeth, following my gaze. “That is not where you’re headed. I think the race is dangerous enough without that, don’t you? This way.”
Sean turns his head just as Elizabeth jerks me in the opposite direction, and our eyes meet. There’s something sharp and unprotected in his expression, and then I have to look down to keep Elizabeth from hauling me off my feet.
Finn scoots up beside me, hands shoved in his pockets against the cold. He casts a doleful look toward Elizabeth.
I turn my head and whisper to him, “You’d think this is the race by the speed she’s going.”
Finn doesn’t smile, but his eyes do. Then Elizabeth comes to a halt. “Here,” she says.
We’ve come around to a third bonfire, and before it is a great, flat rock, splattered and streaked with brown. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing. It’s old, old blood, stained all over the rock. Finn’s face is pinched. There’s a huge crowd of people circling the rock, waiting as Sean was waiting, and already I recognize a few of the riders a short distance away: Dr. Halsal, Tommy Falk, Mutt Malvern. Ian Privett. Some of them are talking and laughing with each other — they’ve done this before, and there’s a sense of familiarity. I feel suddenly ill.
“What’s the blood from?” I whisper to Elizabeth.
“Puppies,” Elizabeth says. She’s caught Ian Privett looking at her and she bares her teeth at him in something that I don’t think is supposed to be a smile. Taking me by both my upper arms, she holds me in front of her like a shield. “It’s the riders’. You’ll go up and put a drop of your blood on there to show you’re riding.”
I stare at the rock. That’s a lot of blood for just a drop from each rider over the years.
Now a man’s climbed onto the rock. I recognize him as Frank Eaton, a farmer my father knew. He’s wearing one of the weird traditional scarf-things that the tourists like to buy — it wraps over his shoulder and pins at his hip and looks utterly ridiculous with his corduroy trousers. I have a very strong association of sweat-smell with the traditional costume and he doesn’t look like he will change that impression. Holding a small bowl in his hands, Eaton shouts to the crowd, which is a little quieter now, “It falls to me to speak for the man who will not ride.”
Eaton tips the bowl and blood splashes down over the rock at his feet. He doesn’t stand back, and so drops of it mist his pants. I don’t think he minds.
“Rider without a name,” he says. “Horse without a name. By his blood.”
“Sheep’s,” Elizabeth says. “Or maybe horse. I don’t remember.”
“That’s barbaric!” I’m aghast. Finn looks like he may throw up.
Elizabeth shrugs just one shoulder. Ian Privett watches her do it. “Fifty years ago, it was a man they killed up there, just like every year before. The man who will not ride.”
“Why?” I demand.
Her voice is bored; there’s a real answer, possibly, but she’s not interested in knowing it. “Because men like to kill things. Good thing they stopped. We’d run out of men.”
“Because,” cuts in a voice that I recognize instantly, “if you feed the island blood before the race, maybe she won’t take as much during it.”
Elizabeth turns to Peg Gratton with a sour look. I blink at Peg — she’s barely recognizable under her elaborate headdress. It looks a little like one of the scary tufted puffins that you can sometimes find on the island: It has a great pointed visor that forms the beak, and ropy yellow tassels that come off over each ear like long horns. I search for signs of Peg’s curly hair, but it’s hidden securely under the fabric lining of the headdress.
“Don’t expect them to be friendly to you, Puck,” Peg Gratton tells me, as if Elizabeth’s not there. “A lot of them consider a girl on the beach bad luck. They won’t be happy to see you.”
I press my lips together. “I don’t need them to be friendly. Just need them to let me go about my business.”
“That would be a kindness,” Peg says. She turns her head, and it’s a strange, jerky motion with the bird head on top of hers. If I wasn’t unsettled by anything that I saw tonight, that motion would’ve done it. She says, “I have to go.”
On the rock, a woman wearing a real horse head stands over the place where the man poured the blood. Her tunic is soaked in blood; her hands run with it. She faces the crowd, but with that massive head, it doesn’t seem like she’s looking at us but at some point in the sky. I feel swimmy and feverish from the heat of the bonfire, from the sight of the blood. I’m dreaming, but I’m not.
There’s murmuring from the people assembled. I can’t pick out individual words, but Elizabeth says, “They’re saying no one got the shell. She didn’t drop a shell this year.”
“The shell?”
“For the wish,” Elizabeth says in her impatient way. “She drops a shell and you get a wish. Probably she dropped it down in Skarmouth and they were too dull to find it.”
“Who is it?” Finn asks Elizabeth, the first thing he’s said in a long while. “In the horse head?”
“The mother of all horses. Epona. Soul of Thisby and those cliffs.”
Finn, patient, clarifies, “I meant, who is the woman?”
“Someone with more up front to look at than you,” Elizabeth replies. Finn’s eyes instantly go to the horse-woman’s br**sts, and Elizabeth laughs, high and wild. I scowl in defense of Finn’s virtue, and she gives me a healthy shove. “They’re calling for the riders.”
They are. The woman with the horse head has gone, though I didn’t see her going, and Peg Gratton has climbed the rock and stands in her place. A dozen or so men are gathered around one end of the rock, waiting to go up, and still more are moving restlessly toward the group. I am a small, motionless animal.
Elizabeth clucks her tongue. “You can wait if you like. They go up one at a time.”
My hands aren’t very steady, so I fist them. I watch closely to see what’s expected of me. The first rider walks up the natural steps at the end of the rock. It’s Ian Privett, who looks older than he is because of his hair, gone gray when he was a boy. He storms across the rock toward Peg Gratton.
“I will ride,” he tells her formally, loud enough for us to hear clearly. Then he thrusts out his hand toward her, and she slices his finger with a tiny blade, the motion too fast for me to see it properly. Privett holds his hand out over the rock and blood must fall, though I’m too far away to see it.
He doesn’t seem to be in pain. He says, “Ian Privett. Penda. By my blood.”
Peg answers in a low voice not hers. “Thank you.”
Then Ian is off the rock and the next rider is mounting the steps. It’s Mutt Malvern, who repeats the process, holding his hand out to let it drip after she’s cut it. When he says, “Matthew Malvern. Skata. By my blood,” he looks out from the rock to find someone in the audience, and his mouth makes a sort of not-smile that I’m glad I’m not the recipient of.
Again and again, riders step up onto the rock, holding out their hands, giving their names and their horse’s names, and again and again, Peg Gratton thanks them before they go. So many of them! There must be forty. I’ve seen the race reports in the paper before, and there’s never been anywhere near forty in the final race. What happens to all of them?
I imagine I can smell the blood on the rock from here.
And still the riders come up to the top of the rock, to have their fingers sliced and to announce their intention to ride.
As it gets closer to when I must go up, I’m shivering and nervous as can be, but I’m also aware that I’m waiting for Sean Kendrick to step onto the rock. I don’t know if it’s because he raced me or because I watched him lose that mare or because he told me to stay off the beach when no one else would speak to me at all, or merely because his red stallion is the most beautiful horse I’ve ever seen, but I’m curious about him in a way that puzzles even me.
Most of the group has come and gone by the time Sean comes up onto the rock. I barely recognize him. He has blood smeared across both of his sharp cheekbones, and the way he looks is at once striking and disturbing, harsh and godless, wary and predatory. Like someone who would climb this rock back when it was a real man whose blood they spilled on it, not just a bowl of sheep’s blood.
I wonder suddenly what Father Mooneyham is doing on this night — if he’s sequestered in St. Columba’s, praying that the members of his congregation keep their wits about them until tomorrow and that they won’t forget themselves to pagan mare goddesses. But I wonder what sort of goddess our island goddess could possibly be, anyway, even if she had existed, that she is satisfied by a bowl of animal blood in place of a man. I’ve seen sheep’s blood and I’ve seen a dead person, and I know the difference.
Sean Kendrick holds out his hand. “I will ride,” he says, and when he says it, I feel heavy, like my feet are being pulled into the rock below me.
Peg Gratton slashes his finger. She really doesn’t look like Peg Gratton at all, not when she’s up there in the light of the bonfire, the shadow of the beak hiding her face.
His voice is barely audible. “Sean Kendrick. Corr. By my blood.”
There’s a great roar from the crowd, including from Elizabeth, who I thought was too dignified for such things, but Sean doesn’t look up or acknowledge their cheers. I think I see his lips move again, but it’s such a slight movement that I’m not sure. Then he’s off the rock.
“This is you,” Elizabeth says. “Up with you. Don’t forget your name.”
As cold as I was a moment before, I’m now blazing hot. I throw my chin up and walk around the rock to where I can step up onto it like the others. It seems wide as the ocean as I walk across it to Peg Gratton. Though the rock must be quite solid, the surface seems to tip and roll as I make my way across it. I can see three different colors of blood under my feet. I keep thinking in my head, I will ride. By my blood. I don’t want to forget them in my nerves.
Now I see Peg Gratton’s eyes, bright and piercing beneath the beaked headdress. She looks fierce and powerful.
I feel the attention of everybody in Skarmouth, everyone on Thisby, and all the tourists that the mainland’s released. I stand as straight as I can. I will be as fierce as Peg Gratton, even if I don’t have her great bird headdress to hide under. I have my name, and that’s always been good enough.
I stretch out my hand. I wonder how much her little knife will hurt. My voice sounds louder than I expected. “I will ride.”
Peg lifts her blade. I brace myself. No one has flinched and I refuse to be the first.
“Wait!” says a voice. Not Peg Gratton’s.
We both turn our heads. There’s Eaton in his sweaty traditional garb, standing at the base of the rock, his head craned back so he can see us. A group of men stands around him, hands in pockets and tucked in vests. Some of them are riders who still hold their hands gingerly so they won’t bleed more. Some of them wear traditional scarves like Eaton does. They’re frowning.
I said it wrong. I came up out of turn. I did something wrong. I can’t think of what it would be, but I feel uncertainty chewing on my guts.
Eaton says, “She can’t ride.”
My heart falls out of me. Dove! It must be Dove. I should’ve gotten the piebald mare when I had the chance.
“No woman’s ridden in the races since they began,” he says. “And this isn’t going to be the year when that changes.”
I stare at Eaton and the men around him. Something about the way they stand together is familiar, comradely. Like a herd of ponies bunched up against the wind. Or sheep, staring warily out at the collie that means to move them. I’m the outsider. The woman.
Of all the things that could stand between me and the races, I can’t believe that this will be it.
My face flushes. I’m aware that hundreds of people are watching me stand on this rock. But I find my voice anyway. “It didn’t say anything about that in the rules. I read them. Every single one.”
Eaton looks to the man next to him, who licks his lips before saying, “There are rules on paper and rules too big for paper.”
It takes me a moment to realize what this means, which is that there really is no rule against it, but they’re not going to let me ride anyway. This is like when Gabe and I would play games when we were younger — as soon as I got close to winning, he would change the rules on me.
And just like back then, the unfairness of it makes my chest burn.
I say, “Then why have rules on paper at all?”
“Some things are too obvious to have to write down,” says the man next to Eaton, who is wearing a very tidy three-piece suit with a scarf in place of the jacket. I can see the neat triangle of the vest, dark gray against white, more clearly than his face.
“Come down now,” Eaton says.
There is a third man at the base of the rock where I just climbed up, and he holds his hand up in my direction, as if I am going to just take it and go back down.