A Stranger Came Ashore (10 page)

A blind man would have been better off than Robbie at that moment, for a blind man could at least have used his other senses to aid him. Robbie was so panic-stricken, however, that he could not even judge the direction of the voices echoing faintly back to him; and by the time the green glow rolled over the sky again, the figures he had been following were too far off for him to say exactly which house they were making for, or which one of them was Elspeth.

He would just have to make for the nearest house, he decided then, for that would be the likeliest place to find her; and off he went, running as hard as he could towards a gleam of yellow lamplight beckoning from across the hill. But no, he was told when he reached this house, Elspeth was not there.

“Try Laurie Tulloch’s house,” someone advised him; and so off he went again, only to find that this had also been a wild goose chase.

“Try Bruce Hunter’s house,” he was told, when he started asking then if anyone knew where Elspeth had last been headed, and wearily Robbie turned in that direction. But now it was no longer a case of running fast, for he was nearly dropping with exhaustion by this time.

He ran a few steps, he walked a few steps, then ran again. And now also, he realised, he was by no means alone on the hill, for wherever he turned his eyes he seemed to catch glimpses of figures outlined darkly against the green sky – weird figures that ran or danced or gestured strangely – and the fear of trows grew so
strong on him that he did not dare to wave or call or do anything which would draw their attention to himself.

His right arm seemed to be powerless, too, for – try as he would – he could not lift it to bless himself. Moreover, the words that trows hate to hear seemed to have vanished from his mind. In panic at this, he tried to run faster, but like someone in a waking nightmare, he found that his feet had become ton weights and that he could no longer trust his own senses.

He heard laughter crackling faintly on the still, night air. He saw the strange figures draw nearer, then vanish suddenly, and re-appear in different places. They loomed large against the night-sky. They grew small again, small as trows! Robbie ran on – slowly, slowly, his breath sobbing in ever-growing terror, yet still not knowing whether all this was really happening, or whether it was only the strange green sky and the hill’s uneven outline that were playing tricks on his sight.

One thing he did know, however, and with the utmost despair he admitted this to himself. He had now completely lost track of Elspeth; and so now the only purpose in his running was to escape all those weird figures that threatened him, and then somehow to find the Skuddler.

Another sound broke on his hearing, a sound much louder than the occasional crackle of laughter. It came from the seashore – from the beach down at the voe, and instantly he knew what it was, for once before he had heard that same sound. It was Tam howling, he realised. Somewhere down at the voe Tam was howling the same long-drawn out cry of mourning he had raised at the moment of Old Da’s death.

For all his terror then, Robbie stopped dead in his tracks. There could be only one reason for that cry, he told himself. Finn Learson and Elspeth must be down at the voe at that very moment; and Tam was there too – howling for Elspeth’s last moments on earth!

The thought of this hit Robbie with a shock that was like cold
water dashed on his face. He gasped, feeling his brain clearing on the instant and the power coming back into his right arm. Quickly he blessed himself and called aloud the words that trows hate to hear; and like black shadows snuffed out by the sun, the leaping figures on the hillside disappeared.

Or so it seemed for the moment, anyway, but a second look showed Robbie that some of the figures were still running along the skyline of a ridge above the point where he stood. They were peculiarly-shaped figures, too, but now that he had his courage back he could tell who they were.

For a moment, Robbie turned from them to look down towards the voe. A boat rocked there at the water’s edge. Two forms stood on the beach above the boat. Some distance from the forms, a dog crouched, mournfully howling. Robbie took a deep breath, then he faced about towards the line of running figures, and yelled, “
Skuddler! Sku-u-u-dd-ler
!”

The figures stumbled to a halt. They turned to the sound of his voice, and stood poised on the ridge. Now they looked like a row of haystacks planted there, their long petticoats billowing round them, their tall hats poking the sky. Robbie drew in another lungful of breath, and yelled again, “
Sku-u-u-dd-ler
!”

One figure broke from the line and came plunging towards him. Robbie turned and ran ahead of it, shouting back over his shoulder as he ran, “Finn Learson, Skuddler, Finn Learson! Down there – look! He’s going off with Elspeth!”

The tall form of the Skuddler overtook Robbie, and thundered ahead of him towards the beach; but Robbie was not far behind, and the closer he drew to the beach, the more clearly he could see what was happening there. Finn Learson had Elspeth by the hand. His arm was outstretched, as if he were trying to pull or coax her nearer the boat at the water’s edge. But Tam was still at his mournful howling, and Elspeth was hanging back like someone frightened to take another step.

“Let her go!” the Skuddler roared, and Elspeth began struggling to snatch her hand from Finn Learson’s grip.

The Skuddler roared again, and with a flying leap that took him on to the shingle of the beach, he seized her other hand. Elspeth screamed, a loud scream of fear and pain – and small wonder, either, for now she was stretched out between him and Finn Learson, with each of them determined to pull her from the other.

“You’ll kill her!” yelled Robbie, for no one knew better than himself, then, that the magic behind the guising had turned the Skuddler into the earth-god he was supposed to be. And how could anyone live, pulled like that between all the forces of
earth-magic
and sea-magic?

“I’ll kill him first!” the Skuddler roared, and made a sudden lunge that let him circle Elspeth’s waist with one arm. The movement took Finn Learson by surprise. He stumbled, and in the flash of time it took for this his grip slackened enough to let Elspeth snatch her hand free.

One swinging movement of the Skuddler’s arm took her out of Finn Learson’s reach. With Elspeth behind him then, the Skuddler backed away up the shingle, but Finn Learson shouted with rage, and leapt forward to close with him. Tam dashed for cover. Elspeth sank, weeping, to her knees, and Robbie edged as close as he could to the two forms swaying back and forth across the shingle.

Both men were panting now, their bodies locked in a hating embrace as each tried for a hold that would bring the other down; but Finn Learson’s rush at the Skuddler had carried the fight above high-water mark, and with feelings of dreadful joy, Robbie saw the result this was having.

The Skuddler was big enough already, for he was a tall man and his high, pointed hat made him even taller. But now, to Robbie’s eyes, he seemed to grow bigger and more powerful with every moment that passed. And Finn Learson was also changing!

Finn Learson was ageing, it seemed to Robbie. The skin of his
face was withering, falling away into wrinkles. His hands were becoming an old man’s hands – stringy, with muscles bunched like badly-tied knots. The youthful lines of his body were sagging into something twisted, and evil, and very, very old.

The movement of the Skuddler’s long legs set his straw petticoats flailing like a harvest field struck by storm. His wide shoulders seemed to grow even wider in a heave of terrible effort to break the grip of the stringy old hands. The tall cone of his hat towered ever higher against the green-lit sky. The white mask beneath the hat loomed ever more threatening and mysterious over Finn Learson’s ageing face; and with a final tremendous heave, the Skuddler brought him to the ground.

“Watch out!” shouted Robbie then, for the two of them had fallen right across the high-water mark. The shout brought Elspeth to his side, crying out in fear and trying to hold him back as he made to dash towards the two struggling figures.

But Robbie was too desperate to be held at that moment.

“The high-water mark!” he yelled, wrenching himself free of Elspeth’s hands. “Get him back over the high-water mark, Skuddler!”

The Skuddler knelt astride Finn Learson and gave a heave that was meant to lift him clear over the dry seaweed marking the highest point of the tide; but this movement freed one of Finn Learson’s arms, and he was still half in his own territory – which meant he was not yet conquered.

The free hand came quickly up in a thrust that sent both himself and the Skuddler rolling over and over, and a horrified Robbie saw them coming to rest well below the high-water mark. Shouting, he ran after them, knowing that any moment now the time might come for
him
to act; for now they were in Finn Learson’s territory where his sea-magic was bound to defeat the Skuddler’s power.

“Robbie!” Elspeth screamed after him, “
Robbie
!” but he ran on, paying not the slightest heed to this.

It was Finn Learson who was on top in the struggle now – Finn Learson with all his youth and strength restored, Finn Learson kneeling over a Skuddler suddenly stripped of all the earth-god’s power. One hand held the Skuddler down. The other hand was stretched out towards the white mask. A single jerk whipped the mask free, and a face stared up from the shingle – the flushed and angry face of Nicol Anderson.

Finn Learson breathed a long sigh of understanding. A grin of triumph spread over his face, and quick as a flash, he shot out both hands to Nicol’s throat. Nicol gasped at their grip, and Robbie also gasped, for the deadly purpose of it was clear; and this was something he had not bargained for when he persuaded Nicol to fix it so that
he
played the part of the Skuddler.

Finn Learson squeezed still harder, and Robbie threw himself forward, clutching and tearing at the death-grip on Nicol’s throat.

“Leave him!” he yelled. “Let him live – or you’ll never see the Great Selkie’s skin again!”

Finn Learson’s head jerked up in astonishment, but his fingers were still gripping tight enough to choke Nicol, and Robbie hurried on, “I’ve got your skin, Finn Learson. I stole it from the cave, and if you kill Nicol, I’ll never tell where it is now!”

Slowly Finn Learson’s hands loosened their grip. Slowly he rose, and standing astride of Nicol, he glared down at Robbie.

“What skin?” he challenged. “What fancy are you spinning now, Robbie Henderson?”

“This is no fancy,” Robbie told him defiantly. “And it is no use pretending with me, for I
know
who you are and why you came ashore. That’s why I stole your skin – and that’s why you’ll never get it back without me.”

Finn Learson stepped clear of Nicol’s body. “So you think you have the advantage of me now, do you?” he asked harshly. “Well, take me to this skin, boy, and then we shall see who really has the advantage!”

One powerful hand clamped down on Robbie’s shoulder, keeping tight hold of him as he started forward in obedience to its urging. At the top of the beach, however, he managed to steal a backward glance that showed Elspeth running to help Nicol to his feet, and Tam frisking beside her as she ran.

A first, small thrill of triumph shot through Robbie then, and feeling braver than he had imagined he would at that moment, he led on to the place where Yarl Corbie had hidden the Great Selkie’s skin.

Nowhere at sea … That was what Yarl Corbie had said, and that was why Robbie turned his back on the voe when he walked away with Finn Learson’s hand on his shoulder.
Nowhere on land
… Yarl Corbie had said, and so Robbie did not continue walking inland. Instead, he took Finn Learson to the top of the cliffs running west of the voe, seeing his way by the light of the Merry Dancers, still flaring green overhead.

For half a mile then, he led the way over the close, thick turf clothing the rock of the clifftops, and this brought them to a point where a great hole opened suddenly in the turf covered rock. The hole was deep – deeper than any eye could guess or tell. Its walls were sheer rock, and from somewhere at the foot of those steep, rocky walls, came the sound of water swishing and swirling about.

Robbie halted at the lip of the hole, and there he glanced around, fully expecting to see Yarl Corbie coming towards him. To his utmost dismay, however, there was no Yarl Corbie in sight and not even the slightest hint of his presence.

“We’ll have to wait,” he said desperately over his shoulder to Finn Learson. “I can’t tell you yet where the skin is.”

Finn Learson gave not a word in answer to this. He simply turned Robbie towards himself and that was answer enough; for it was then, Robbie realised, that he was seeing at last the true face of Finn the Magician.

In mortal terror at the sight, he shrank as far back as he could. The face hovered over him, and it was not old, or young, nor yet anything in between, but simply a shifting blur of features that
changed with every nightmare moment of his stare at it. It was no face at all, in fact, and yet somehow it was still every face that had ever haunted his deepest fears and his darkest dreams.

The eyes of the faceless face bored into his own, for they were the one thing about the nightmare that did not change. They were still the great dark eyes which had tried to trap him earlier that night, and he could feel them probing his mind again, forcing him somehow to give away his knowledge of the hiding place Yarl Corbie had found for the Great Selkie’s skin.

In a shaking voice, Robbie began to speak of the place that was open to every eye, and yet secret from all.

“This great hole beside us,” said he, “is more than a hole, for it was made by the action of the sea boring a tunnel deep underground through a crack in the rock of the cliffs. And your skin is in the tunnel that leads from the hole.”

Triumph flashed from the dark gaze holding him in its spell. The figure towering over him swung round towards the hole. It teetered at the edge, ready to plunge into the sea-water that sucked and swirled far below; and as it swayed there, a black shape rose swiftly up from the concealing darkness of a ledge a few feet down the rocky wall of the hole.

The shape became the form of a bird that called out with the croaking voice of a raven. A noise of great, dark wings flapping, mingled with its cry. The wings beat furiously around the head of the figure swaying on the edge of the hole. The figure cried out – a terrible cry of pain that was neither animal nor human. Then, with hands clapped to its eyes, it hurtled helplessly into the depths below.

The raven wheeled to flap in a circle around the place where Robbie stood, shaken out of his wits by this turn of events, and hurriedly he threw himself flat on the ground. Trembling, he lay there hugging his head with his arms and not knowing what to expect next. But nothing happened – nothing at all, and at last he
ventured to raise his head again.

At first, he thought he was alone. The next instant he realised there was someone standing over him. He rolled away from the someone, ready to jump up and run for dear life, but he was hardly on his feet before he realised it was Yarl Corbie standing there.

Anger seized him then, and recklessly he shouted, “Where were
you
a minute ago? You promised to be here in time!”

“Where was I?” Yarl Corbie echoed. “Where do you think I was, boy? You came asking for magic to help you, and it is not for nothing I am nicknamed Yarl Corbie!”

Robbie backed a step, his mind spinning with thoughts of the mirror-writing in Yarl Corbie’s ancient book of spells and the raven that had flapped around the head of the falling figure.

“You …?” he whispered. “You were that –
You
were the raven?”

“Why not?” Yarl Corbie asked coolly. “There was no better way to take him by surprise; and no better way, either, to have my revenge on him.”

Robbie stared, still trying to take in the thought of Yarl Corbie transformed to the shape of a raven. The cry, the terrible cry of pain rang in his mind again. His gaze shifted to the black mouth of the hole, and Yarl Corbie chuckled, a dry and whispery sound that was more like a cough than a chuckle.

“You’ll not see him come back out of there,” he remarked, “– but you
will
be able to see him come out of the cave at the seaward end of the tunnel!”

Turning on his heel with this, he strode briskly away from the hole. Robbie hesitated to follow, but curiosity drove him on; and at the very edge of the cliffs, Yarl Corbie halted to wait for him.

“Watch there,” said he, pointing downwards as Robbie drew level. “And wait for the next flash of the Merry Dancers.”

Robbie stared down to the white foam and steely shimmer of the water at the cliff-foot. The Merry Dancers were still flickering over the sky but their light was too faint to show him anything
more than this, and impatiently he looked up to wait for their next flash.

“Keep your eyes down,” Yarl Corbie warned.

There were a few moments of silence after that; and then suddenly, the flash came. It was a brilliant one, too, lighting up sea and sky like a great green searchlight; and right in the searchlight’s path across the water, they saw what they had been waiting for – the head of a great bull seal forging rapidly seawards.

“There he goes!” Robbie shouted.

“Aye, there he goes,” Yarl Corbie echoed. “But he’ll go back to his own country a different creature from the one that came out of it!”

Robbie glanced up in wonder at the tall figure beside him.

“Why did he cry out like that?” he asked. “What did you
do
to him?”

Yarl Corbie gave another of his dry, whispery chuckles. “A raven’s beak is a powerful weapon,” he said softly, “– powerful enough to blind a man. And that was the revenge I chose to have!”

Robbie felt a shiver of horror running over him. “But a selkie hunts with its eyes,” he exclaimed. “And so you might as well say you’ve doomed him to starve to death!”

“Would that be so bad?” Yarl Corbie asked.

“I don’t know,” Robbie admitted. “But it’s cruel, all the same.”

Yarl Corbie shrugged. “The thought does you credit, I suppose,” he said drily. “But my revenge was neater than that – much neater! I blinded him of only
one
eye – which means he will still be able to hunt the seas the way a Selkie does, but never again will he be able to come ashore in the shape of a handsome young man. And so never again will he have the chance to hunt human quarry!”

Robbie’s gaze went back to the great dark head travelling
seawards. It was a neat revenge, he admitted to himself – cruel, but neat; for certainly the Great Selkie would no longer be able to charm golden-haired girls like Elspeth when he could no longer be handsome in human form!

The light on the water went out as Robbie stared. Yarl Corbie turned him homewards, and that was the very last sight he had of the Great Selkie. Or so it seemed at that time, at least, for he had no cause then to think otherwise.

“And it is the very last you are to speak of him, too, remember,” Yarl Corbie reminded him as they walked back along the cliffs. “For if one word of my part in this gets out in Black Ness, Robbie Henderson, I’ll know where it came from. And you’ve just seen how I take revenge on those who harm me!”

“I know,” said Robbie, shivering with remembered horror. “You don’t ever have to fear that
I’ll
run foul of you!”

The way things turned out after that, however, there was never any danger of Robbie mentioning either his own or Yarl Corbie’s part in the whole business, for there was still nobody else who found anything mysterious about it. Indeed, so far as everyone else was concerned, the story was still a perfectly simple one – the sort of thing that could have happened anywhere, in fact.

A stranger had come ashore to Black Ness, and there he had fallen in love with Elspeth Henderson. Then there had been a fight between him and Elspeth’s young man, and the stranger had taken off in a huff. That was how everyone saw things when Finn Learson did not appear the next morning, and for many years afterwards, that was what everyone continued to believe.

Peter and Janet Henderson never did learn the truth, in fact, since Yarl Corbie outlived them both, and Robbie dared not speak out so long as
he
was alive. So the years went past, with Elspeth and Nicol getting married and happily rearing a big family of children, while Robbie went off to the whaling and finally got command of his own ship at last.

In between voyages, however, he always came back to the island, and there he got himself quite a name for the stories he told of his adventures at sea. Not everyone believed these stories, of course, for Robbie’s imagination had not grown less with the years. And so when the death of Yarl Corbie finally set him free at last to tell the story of Finn Learson, he was quite bothered to find that not everyone believed this either.

“A thing like that,” said some, “is just too strange to believe. And anyway, nobody can ever tell how much of Robbie Henderson’s stories are true, and how much of them are made up.’

“Aye, he’s just like his Old Da in that,” said other people; but Elspeth spoke up then, and told them, “Robbie didn’t make up the bit about Finn Learson’s look. I remember what it was like. And I remember the way I felt it drawing me to the shore of the voe on that Up Helly Aa.”

“I don’t think he made up the bit about the Skuddler, either,” Nicol remarked. “I remember how I fought Finn Learson that night, and how I seemed to have a power beyond my own strength. I remember, too, how that power seemed to go from me, as soon as I was below high-water mark.”

“And Yarl Corbie
was
a wizard,” Robbie reminded everyone; which made them all pause to think again, since no one had any doubts at all on that score.

There was one further thing which struck the people of Black Ness then. All of them had noticed a bull seal which haunted the voe from time to time – a huge, old fellow which had only one eye, and which had certainly never been known to come into the voe before the night of Finn Learson’s disappearance from the island.

To some of them, at least, this seemed to prove
something
– indeed, there were those who went as far as saying that this creature could be the Great Selkie haunting the scene of the terrible revenge Yarl Corbie had taken on him. And as for Robbie himself, of course, he was quite convinced that this was the case.

In spite of all this, however, there were still people who believed that Finn Learson had been no more than the young man he had seemed to be. And so the argument went on, with these same people always claiming that Robbie was just telling the kind of story his Old Da used to tell, and that it would be foolish to think otherwise.

So a great many more years went by, until Robbie himself was an Old Da, with grandchildren who had never heard of the Selkie Folk until he spoke of them. Yet still, even after the passage of all those years, the one-eyed selkie continued to appear in the voe; and every now and then there would be some youngster who came asking Robbie questions about it.

To each and every one of these young folk, then, he told of the stranger who came ashore, exactly as that story has been given here; and it no longer bothered him if any of them said, “I don’t believe that!”

Robbie could remember himself saying the very same thing the first time he had been told about the Great Selkie. Also, he was more than old by that time. He was wise – very wise; and so he never tried to convince anyone against that person’s will. Instead, he did exactly what his Old Da would have done. He just laughed, and went on with another story.