A Stranger Came Ashore (5 page)

A moment of deathly silence followed Robbie's warning, then Peter headed a mad rush for the window.

“It
is
the Press Gang,” said he, staring in dismay at the boat in the voe. “And we're trapped here, because their boat is between us and the open sea. We can't escape to the hills, either, because they'd sight us the instant we're out the door – and already they have the house within range of their pistols!”

“Then we'll just have to risk being shot,” Nicol declared. “Better to make a run for the hills, Peter, than stay lamely here to be taken.”

“No!” Finn Learson spoke suddenly, surprising them all with the first word he had uttered since the funeral. Every face turned towards him, and calmly he went on,

“There's no need to take such a risk, Nicol. Stay here, and –”

“But we're trapped if we stay here,” Nicol interrupted angrily. “You heard Peter say that!”

“I did,” agreed Finn Learson, calm as ever. “But Peter was wrong, for you can still escape
if you stay here long enough to let me draw them away from the beach.
Make a dash for the sixareen then; head out to sea, and that will be you well clear of danger!”

“But they're certain to capture you, if you do that,” Nicol protested. “And that means you'll be the sacrifice for all of us.”

Finn Learson moved to the door, smiling his strange and secret little smile as he went. “It doesn't mean anything of the kind,” he answered. “Not with the game
I
will play! And don't wait for me once you have the chance to escape, for I'll easily find my own way back to the fishing station. And that's where I'll meet you all
again.”

He had the door open with this, and was gone before anyone could say another word. Nicol stared after him, frowning, and then said flatly,

“He's a fool. He'll be one against twenty out there!”

This started another rush for the window, but Peter soon put a stop to that.

“Get back from there!” he shouted. “Can you not see he wants them to think he is the only man in the house, and that it will spoil his plans if they notice
your
faces at the window?”

The crew of the sixareen fell back from the window, casting sheepish looks at one another; and Peter told them,

“That's better. But we still need a look-out to tell us what's happening – and so, on
you
go, Robbie. They'll not think anything of a boy watching them!”

Robbie darted to the window, and saw the Press Gang's boat only a few yards from the shore.

“The boat's coming in fast,” he reported. “It's nearly there!”

“And Finn Learson?” Peter demanded. “What's he doing?”

“Nothing yet,” Robbie answered. “He's just sauntering down to the beach as if he hadn't a thought in his head except to pass the time of day with the Press Gang!”

“Then they'll have him for sure,” Peter exclaimed. “There's not a chance he'll escape now.”

“That's the way it looks,” Robbie agreed. “Their boat's almost touching … It's in! It's grounded on the shingle!”

The men in the boat began leaping ashore, waving and calling to the tall figure sauntering to meet them. Finn Learson called cheerfully in reply; and with broad grins at the thought of someone too stupid or too ignorant to run from them, the men of the Press Gang scrambled forward over the shingle.

Still Finn Learson did not run. The distance between him and the Press Gang narrowed to a few feet, and the officer who led the
chase stretched out a hand to seize him.

“They're grabbing him!” Robbie shouted. But even as the words left his lips, Finn Learson leaped back out of the officer's reach. “But they've missed!” Robbie added triumphantly. “And he's running now – running just ahead of them along the beach.”

“Get ready to move,” Peter warned the rest of the crew, and they all gathered around him at the door of the but end.

Down on the beach the Press Gang continued to chase after Finn Learson, laughing like men playing a game as they ran clumsily over the shingle. And it
was
only like some horrible game to them, Robbie realised, for it still looked as if they would have no trouble in capturing him.

He was keeping ahead of them, but only just ahead; and with every step of the chase it looked as if they
must
seize hold of him. Yet still, every time a hand was about to close on him, he seemed to melt out of its grasp as if he were no more solid than smoke. Then once again, he was magically that little bit ahead; and as Robbie stared in fascination at this, Peter urged, “Come on, boy. Tell us what's happening now.”

“Finn Learson's playing the wounded bird,” Robbie answered them, for that was exactly what Finn Learson was like – a bird trailing along with a pretence of a broken wing that would make it an easy capture, and all the time leading its pursuers further and further away from its nest. “But it's the way he's doing it, Da! It's like magic the way he's just not there when they grab at him!”

“Leave imagination out of this, and stick to facts,” Peter said grimly. “Are they far enough away from the sixareen yet?”

“No, but they soon will be,” Robbie told him, for now Finn Learson had reached the grassy slope that led from the beach to the cliffs rising on one side of the voe, and the pace of the hunt was quickening. The officer in charge of the Press Gang was losing patience with it too, and suddenly it was no longer a game as he spread out his men and began to close them like a net around Finn
Learson.

But even this did not succeed, for suddenly also, Finn Learson was escaping from the net with an ease that seemed more than ever magical; for now he was moving so fast that his feet seemed to skim the ground with no effort at all, and he was no longer like a man running. He seemed to be flying, instead; and far from closing in on him, the men of the Press Gang were being left well behind.

The officer in charge of them drew his pistol and pointed it at the flying figure.

“They're shooting at him!” Robbie cried, and instantly Peter ordered the others, “Run for the boat! And shout as you run, to draw their attention off him!”

The shot from the officer's pistol sounded at that moment, and flinging open the door of the but end, Peter rushed outside. The others piled after him, yelling at the tops of their voices and running as hard as they could for the beach. The men of the Press Gang turned towards the sound of the yells; and crowding to the door to watch from there, Robbie and Janet and Elspeth saw them shaking their fists at the way they had been tricked.

Robbie took his last look at Finn Learson disappearing far into the distance, and then turned his attention to the voe. Half of the sixareen's crew had already got their boat pushed out and were holding it steady. The others were busy setting the Press Gang's boat adrift. The Press Gang, meanwhile, were running back to the beach, firing their pistols as they ran. But Finn Learson had taken them a good bit out of range, and well before they were within real firing distance, the sixareen was pulling strongly out into the voe.

“They'll be well out to sea before the Press Gang can get
their
boat back,” Janet decided then. “They're safe now!” And smiling with relief at this, she went back into the house to wash the teacups.

Elspeth stayed to watch the Press Gang's rage at finding their boat afloat in the voe. “That Finn Learson,” she remarked; “it was some trick he played them!” Then, a little scornfully, she added, “It's a pity
Nicol couldn't have been so clever.”

“That's not fair,” said Robbie, flying immediately to Nicol's defence. “Nicol was brave enough to want to make a break for the hills. And anyway, he couldn't have played the wounded bird – not the way Finn Learson did, for it was like magic the way he kept slipping through their hands. And it was like magic, too, the turn of speed he put on at the end of the chase.”

“You'll be in trouble if Mam hears you talking nonsense like that,” Elspeth told him sharply. “You know she's forever complaining about the way you let your imagination run away with you.”

“And you'll be in trouble too, if you let Nicol hear you say such things about him,” Robbie retorted. “He might even think twice about marrying you then!”

“And who said I wanted to marry Nicol?” Elspeth demanded.

Robbie stared at her. “But I thought –” he began, and Elspeth interrupted, “Oh, yes. Everybody thinks I want to marry Nicol because he wants to marry me. Well, maybe I did at one time. But maybe now I'll marry somebody quite different. Somebody …”

“Well?” demanded Robbie, as Elspeth's voice tailed off. “Who's this somebody?”

Elspeth smiled to herself. “Somebody rich,” she said teasingly. “What do you think of that, Robbie?”

“I think you're daft,” Robbie told her. But lying in his box-bed that night when all the excitement was over, he remembered that it was Finn Learson who had put this idea into her head in the first place.
You will live to wed the man of your choice, and you will be rich when you wed.
That was what he had said to her at Old Da's funeral. And now, thought Robbie, it sounded very much as if be had been encouraging her in this same idea of a rich marriage!

For a while longer he lay thinking about this, and wondering how far Elspeth might have believed anything Finn Learson had told her since the funeral. The uncanny way Finn Learson had avoided the Press Gang came back to his mind. Old Da's warning,
Don't trust him,
rang in his head, and sleep began to seem very far away.

But maybe Elspeth was wakeful too, he thought; and if she was, he would have a word with her about it. Then he would know for sure if
she
had trusted Finn Learson! Cautiously, quietly, Robbie slid open the door panel of his bed, and looked across the ben room.

The door panel of Elspeth's bed was open. She was sleeping, lying very still with her hands on the cover and her long hair spread out like a fan on the pillow behind her. The white night of summer had crept into the ben room to lie pale across her, making her face ghostly, turning the gold of her hair to silver; and seeing her like this, a strange idea seized hold of Robbie.

The
lik
straw and the raven, he thought, had foretold death for Elspeth; but Finn Learson had said she would live to wed the man of her choice. And now, lying there all white and silver in the white night, she was indeed like a girl dressed for her bridal. But she still did not look like Elspeth asleep. She looked like the ghost of Elspeth –
like Elspeth already dead
!

Shivering, Robbie closed the door panel of his own bed, and was immediately enclosed again in safe, warm dark. Yet still this did not shut out the vision of Elspeth dressed for some deathly bridal. Still it did not banish the uneasy feeling that the vision was linked in some way to his own sense of something uncanny about Finn Learson.

Tossing about and about as he tried once more to sleep, Robbie thought miserably that Old Da would have understood this uneasiness. But Old Da was dead. And so now there was no one who would understand, no one at all he could turn to; for now there was no one except himself who even suspected there was anything uncanny about Finn Learson.

It was at harvest time each year that the
haaf
season ended and all the men came home to Black Ness. Finn Learson got a hero’s welcome then, of course, and he rose even higher in Peter and Janet’s favour when he offered to stay on to help with the harvest on
their
croft. Even when this work was over, however, he still lingered, and the reason for this was soon plain. It was Elspeth who had been the attraction for him all along, it seemed, for now he was beginning to court her with all the charm at his command.

There were various opinions about this situation, of course. Nicol was furious about it, but Elspeth was delighted to have no less than two handsome young men courting her. The rest of the folk in Black Ness saw no harm in it at all – how could they, indeed, when they were all still of the opinion that any strangeness about Finn Learson was due to his being a foreigner?

Only Robbie thought differently, and he was utterly dismayed by the idea that Elspeth might even consider marrying Finn Learson. But supposing she did, he argued to himself, that would make nonsense of the words,
You will be rich when you wed
; for how could Elspeth be rich if she married Finn Learson, any more than she would be if she married Nicol?

The weeks after harvest time slid by with Robbie still uneasily pondering this; and meanwhile, Peter and Janet agreed that they were still glad to see Finn Learson staying on with them. He was a great help on the croft, after all, and he was company for Peter now that Old Da was dead and Nicol had turned so awkward over this courtship business. Moreover – as they were both fond of saying –
the favours were far from being all on their side, considering what they owed him over the matter of the Press Gang.

Indeed, it seemed to Robbie, things had now got to the stage where Finn Learson could do no wrong in his parents’ eyes; and since the same Robbie had a great respect for his parents, he began at last to wonder if his own thoughts about Finn Learson might perhaps be a bit on the foolish side.

After all, as he had to admit to himself, he had no really good grounds for these thoughts – just his own imagination, in fact, and the last rambling words of a sick old man. Besides which, he was finding Finn Learson a much more talkative man now that Old Da was dead, and quite willing to speak in a friendly way of the roving life he had led.

“Once, on the shores of Greenland,” he told Robbie, “a man came at me with a knife to kill me – see, I bear the mark of his knife to this very day, in this long white scar of the healed wound in my shoulder …”

Then on he went, spinning many another tale of strange adventures in far countries. And never once did Robbie dream that all this friendliness might be just a device for drawing him into the same snare of charm that had already begun to hold Elspeth!

There was something else, too, which lulled Robbie’s fears at that time and drove other forms of imagining from his mind, for it was in the slack season after harvest each year that he went to school. And that particular year, he had begun to study navigation.

Now this was a subject which could take a Shetland boy far – perhaps even as far as commanding his own whaling ship – and Robbie thought it would be a grand thing to sail north, and ever northwards, in pursuit of the great whale. So it happened that he began to think ever less about Finn Learson; and it was with grand dreams of whaling ships in his head that he set off each day for the schoolhouse on the far side of the hill to study with the rest of the boys in Black Ness.

This left him with only weekends for the other great interest which always occupied him at that time of the year, and which was therefore another thing that took his mind off Finn Learson; for it was then – from about the middle of September to the end of October – that all the selkie pups were born.

Robbie knew every place where these were to be found, of course, from all the previous years he had gone with Old Da to visit them. And so, every Saturday he could persuade his father to let him have the boat, he was away by himself to the cliffs rising steeply from the west side of the voe.

This was where the sea had made deep cuts in the rock face – the kind of cut with a name that is sounded “yoe,” although it is spelt “geo.” This was where the great, dark-grey bull seals came ashore to fight for mastery of the shingle beach at the inner end of each geo. This was where the sleek and shining cow seals came ashore also, to have their pups. And this was where Robbie hoped one day to realise his great longing to pick up one of these pups so that he could learn what a seal felt like.

Not that he would take any risks in that, he assured himself when he remembered Old Da’s warnings and felt his conscience pricking him. To begin with, he would choose a small geo where there was only likely to be a small nursery of pups with a few cow seals and probably only one bull seal. Also, he would not go ashore at all if the bull was there to guard the beach, and he would take care to hold the pup so that it could not possibly bite him.

With all this in mind then, Robbie fixed that year on a geo that exactly suited his purpose; and patiently every Saturday he visited it, until at last there came the moment he had planned. Eight white seal pups lay on the tiny beach at the inner end of the geo. There was no sign of the bull seal which usually lay roaring there – no sign even of a single cow seal flopping about on the beach, or sliding gracefully through the water.

With his heart hammering out a great drumbeat on his ribs,
Robbie let the boat ground gently on the shingle. Stepping
knee-deep
into the water, he edged the prow on to the stones. Then, moving as silently and cautiously as possible, he approached the nearest of the pups and knelt beside it.

The pup’s fur was thick and wet; but the wetness did not seem to bother it, for it was sound asleep, lying on its back with its flippers in the air. Robbie stared at the sleeping pup. It was the first time he had seen one at such close quarters, and he could feel the desire to touch it becoming quite overpowering. Gently he reached out a hand, and laid it on the thick, white fur.

The pup’s great, round eyelids snapped open. Its mouth opened also, showing two rows of very white, very sharp teeth. Rolling quickly over on to its belly, it made an angry, hissing noise at Robbie. Then, with strong, rapid movements of its flippers, it began pulling itself away from him. Robbie stared after it, swallowing his disappointment as best he could before he turned to the next pup.

This one was also lying on its back, and it seemed even more sound asleep than the first pup had been, for it hardly stirred at all when Robbie ventured a gentle hand on its fur. Cautiously he knelt beside it. With his right hand supporting himself on the shingle, he let his left hand travel slowly, very slowly, across the pup’s soft, wet fur. And slowly, slowly, as Robbie’s fingers caressed it, the pup awakened.

It stretched, tail and flippers quivering. It made little, contented mewing noises, and its head rolled round to rest against Robbie’s right forearm. Its eyes opened; great, dark-brown, shining eyes as round as buttons, that stared soulfully up at him.

Robbie began to tremble with the effort not to laugh at this look. The pup was still leaning its head against his right arm, and when he thought he had control of himself, he slipped his left arm around the other side of its body. Carefully then, he gathered the pup clear of the shingle; and rose, holding it cradled in his arms.

It was astonishingly heavy, he found, for such a young creature.
And even more astonishing was the heat that came from its damp little body. Holding it, thought Robbie, was like holding a little furnace against his chest.

The black nails on the underside of the pup’s flippers caught his attention, and he put one finger against them to see what it would do. Immediately it bent its flipper so that it could grip the finger with these nails, and there was such strength in the grip that Robbie realised there was no way of breaking it except by laying the pup down. Unwillingly, he did so, and then saw the reason for the power of the pup’s grip as it bent its flippers again and used the nails to pull itself rapidly away over the shingle.

The other pups on the beach were all awake, their heads turning towards him, their bright, brown-button eyes staring. Robbie approached them one by one, stopping gently, going down on one knee beside them; but the pups would have none of him. They hissed, showing rows of sharp white teeth as the first pup had done. Even the pup he had lifted was unfriendly, now that it was wide awake and could sense the alarm of the others; and resigning himself to this at last, Robbie walked back to the boat.

But still, he told himself, he had done what be had set out to do. He had discovered at last what a selkie
felt
like, and so he had learned something that even Old Da had never been able to teach him – quite apart from which, it had been fun to hold the pup!

Feeling greatly pleased with himself as he came to this conclusion, Robbie considered what he could do next, and wondered if he should head for one of the big geos where he knew there was a nursery of over fifty pups. He could take the boat into the geo, he thought, and from a safe distance there he could watch the three bull selkies that roared challenges to one another as they guarded the beach. And he could count the pups, to see if any more had been born since his last visit!

This last thought decided him on what he wanted to do, and bending strongly to the oars, he headed for the big geo.

It was not far away. Twenty minutes of rowing like this brought him to the entrance channel, and with careful strokes, he backed the boat through this narrow passage. In the wider water beyond, he turned the boat; then, gently feathering as Old Da had taught him, he sat staring at every detail in the scene around him.

The water lapping the boat was deep and green, the colour of melted emeralds. The high cliff walls of the geo were wet black, streaked with dull green veins of serpentine. The upward slope of the shingle beach at the geo’s inner end was backed by a great jumble of larger stones; and above this jumble, the empty mouth of a cave yawned, huge and black.

On the beach itself, three bull seals reared up, bellowing at one another. And everywhere around the great, greyish-black forms of the bulls, right from the mouth of the cave down to the edge of the emerald water, was a mass of cow seals and their pups.

The sight of the boat had already sent these cow seals heading for the water; and soon, as Robbie rowed closer inshore, they were gliding all around him. He had other things on his mind at that moment, however, and paying no attention to the graceful forms of the cow seals, he prepared for his count of the pups.

He would have to stand up in the boat to make this count, he decided; otherwise, he would not get a clear view of the pups that lay among the big boulders at the back of the beach. But standing up in the boat need not unbalance it, of course – not if he used the trick he had learned along with all the other boys of Black Ness playing around with boats in the shallows of the voe.

Carefully slipping one of his oars on this decision, Robbie slid the other one over the stern of the boat. Then, rising to his feet and holding this second oar almost upright against the stern, he made quick, gentle little movements that sent the boat sculling steadily along the line of the shore.

The three bull seals roared again, as if in astonishment at this sight. The pups kept up a shrill mewing for their vanished mothers;
and, rearing chest-high out of the water, the cow seals themselves began to make the sort of noise that cow seals do make at this particular time of the year.

Robbie quite forgot to count then, for this noise from the cow seals was a high, sweet one that sounded like human voices sliding up a scale and echoing eerily between the steep walls of the geo. Also, it was something he had never heard before, in spite of all the times he had watched seals, and he was quite entranced by it. Maybe, he thought, it was this that Old Da had been thinking about when he told that long-ago story about selkie singing …

Then suddenly at the back of his mind, he found a different sort of memory stirring. He
had
heard this noise before, he realised. It was the singing sound he had heard from his father’s fiddle on Finn Learson’s first night on the island!

The boat began to rock under him as his mind wandered further down this track, and he sculled fast to try to bring it back to an even keel. It swung in a half-circle, bringing him round to face the cliff at the inner end of the geo; but where the line of the clifftop had been bare a moment before, there was now a man standing. With a jerk of surprise, Robbie recognised the man as Finn Learson, and it was this startled movement that finally cost him his balance.

The boat rocked wildly, snatching the oar from his grasp, and he pitched overboard. The emerald water closed over him. The boat was spun away by the force of his splashing plunge, and he surfaced with his mouth open on a yell, for the water was very deep and he could not swim so much as a single stroke.

A shout from the clifftop answered his yell, but Robbie was struggling too madly to hear this. Water sang in his ear. Water blurred his vision, so that black cliff and grey sky and emerald water became nothing but colours jumbling in a confused mass around him. Yet still he managed to gulp enough air to keep from choking; for the fact of the matter is that even a person in Robbie’s position can stay afloat like this for a good minute before he goes
right under.

No one had ever told
him
this, however, and so the terror of drowning was like a frenzy on him. Moreover, he was too blinded by water to see Finn Learson starting down towards him, and leaping swift as a cat from ledge to ledge on the cliff face.

Half-way down the cliff Finn Learson paused, balanced for a blink of an eye on his perch, then dived; and Robbie’s first hint of rescue was the splash and surging backwash of this dive. A second later he felt a hand catch hold of his hair. An arm closed round him, pinning his threshing hands to his sides. A voice breathed in his ear.