Then she saw him running along the quay with his two companions, carrying a sack, pursued by palace guards, and he was a hand reaching down to pull her from the hole into which she had fallen and if only he made it to the boat in time she would be safe and happy. They pushed off and the men jumped the widening gap between the hull and the harbour wall. A guard leapt behind them and was struck in the face with a sword and dropped into the water, his blood spraying the man who killed him. A second leapt and clung briefly to the rail of the boat before his fingers were broken under heels and he fell onto his companion. Then they were too far away for anything but angry yells which were soon drowned in the roar of the fires.
He turned to her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pulled her close and she could no longer hear or see the flames, she could only feel the warmth of his body and smell the sour tang of his sweat. Then she looked down at the deck and saw the mouth of the sack fall open to reveal her brother’s head.
She is woken by the biting cold and the sound of two hundred thousand birds taking flight. Waking to anything solid is a relief after the murky, cycling panic of her dreams. She walks to the door and sees the creatures that petrified her the night before emerging from their burrows and climbing into the air like ashes above a fire, black backs turning into white bellies, the whole flock becoming a cloud of grey flakes drifting out over the ocean.
When they have gone the air is washed and white and she is able to hold the events of the previous day at a distance for a few minutes, as if they happened to someone else, or happened to herself many years ago. Then it all comes back, raw and real, and there is a spasm in her guts. She crouches behind a rock and relieves herself, and the sight of her own excrement sickens her, doubly so when she finds that the earth is too thin to bury it and the handfuls of grass she rips free just blow away in the wind and she is forced to use a stick to push it under the lip of the rock where she will not see it.
She drinks from a muddy pool of rainwater, retches and makes herself drink again. She wraps herself in the rug from the tent floor and walks round the perimeter of the island, a figure of eight with two stony beaches on either side of its narrow waist. It takes her two hours. There are no trees, only clumps of low thorn bushes bent flat by the wind, green cushions of mossy thrift, bracken and sea campions, razorbills and butterflies. The greater part of the coast is sheer cliff, though in places the grass falls away to great slabs of cracked and toppled stone, stained with an orange crust above the waterline and shaggy with weed beneath it. She catches a movement in the corner of her eye and thinks, for a moment, that she is not alone, but it is a group of seals lying beached on a thin promontory, half-fish, half-dog, their wet skins like mottled gemstones. The only signs of human presence are the remains of an ancient stone circle about which there hangs an atmosphere that scares her.
She returns to the tent pitched in the low saddle between the two halves of the island and sheltered from the worst of the wind. She is hungry but has no idea what she can eat. She wonders how long it takes to starve. She knows nothing about such things.
He held her till her sobs began to die down then wiped her cheek and looked into her eyes. “I have to command these people. They need to look at me and see someone who has powers they do not possess. They need to know that I can kill monsters.” He was not angry. He did not need to be angry. “Your father killed twelve of us every year for ten years. Those people had sisters, they had mothers. Your father was planning to bury us in a ditch. I killed your brother. I could have done a great deal more.”
She had no choice. She had to embrace this man and put her brother out of her mind. She had to throw away her old life and become a new person. She wondered if this was what it meant to love someone completely.
The second morning, hunger wakes her before dawn. It is like a broken bone. Her body is not going to let her starve.
A cold drizzle is falling. She wants to stay in the tent but the pain in her stomach is worse than the prospect of getting wet, so she makes her way down the scree again to the little beach. She stands at the top of the shingle slope and looks around. She does not know if there is anything edible here. Her food has always been cooked and prepared. She has little idea of what this involves. She is accustomed to eating grapes and pears and quinces but she has seen no fruit on the island. To her left is the seal pup’s head but that would need cooking and she has no fire and she cannot look at the object without thinking of her brother.
She tries to chew some seaweed but it is leathery and gritty and covered in a layer of slime. She finds some shells stuck to the sides of a rock pool but they prove impossible to remove. She wades into the shallows. The water is like shackles of ice around her ankles. She bends down, turns the pebbles over and pushes aside the fronds of shaggy weed, nervous of what she might find beneath. She wades a little deeper. Already her sense of danger is being overridden by an animal need which obscures all other thoughts.
She is up to her thighs in the freezing waves now, the stones under her feet are harder to see and searching among them requires her to put her face into the water. Her fingers find a cluster of something sharper and more geometric than the surrounding rocks. She pulls and breaks it free and retrieves a cluster of shells, speckled with stony mortar. She walks out of the water and discovers that the temperature of the ocean makes the air seem warm. She tries to prise open the shells but splits a nail, so she goes up the beach to a flat shelf. She puts the shells down, takes up a large pebble and cracks the shells open. There is a kind of meat inside. She picks away the shards of broken shell and scoops some out. She puts the contents in her mouth. It is like salty phlegm. She waits and swallows. At least she does not need to chew. She eats a second. Then a third.
The air is no longer warm and she is beginning to shiver uncontrollably. She has five more shells. She carries them back up the scree towards the grassy saddle. She goes inside the tent, thinking that she must get warm and dry, but there is water dripping through the roof onto the bed and she has very little energy. She removes her clothing and wraps the deerskin blanket round her and lies down in the dry half of the tent.
She cries and rocks back and forth and manages to descend into a half-sleep that calms her a little. Then the stomach cramps begin. With no warning, she is sick onto the ground in front of her. She rolls over so that she does not have to look at it. The cramps ease a little.
He ordered one of the women to bring a cloak from below decks and sat her on a bench to one side of the boat then returned to the other men, commanding them to trim sails and watch for rocks and stow the ropes, sending them to the rowing benches when these tasks were done, to maintain as high a speed as possible. When they were out of sight of land he altered course to throw off any following ships.
She had never been on a boat before. The cleanness and the coldness of the air and the spray coming over the prow took her by surprise. The way the deck yawed and pitched terrified her at first, though everyone else on board seemed oblivious. She tried to pretend it was a child’s game, like swinging on a rope, or being thrown into the air and caught by her father.
It was the sheer size of the ocean which unsettled her most. She wondered how deep the water was beneath the hull and felt a nauseous tingle in the back of her legs as if she were standing on a high tower and looking over the edge. She thought of how they were supported by a wooden platform no bigger than a courtyard floating across this sky of water, how none of them could swim and how they were all less than ten steps away from death, and she began to understand how brave sailors were, or how stupid.