The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

One minute they had been there, her brother Diarma and his dear Befind, happily trying out Artin’s new masterpiece, the next minute there was nothing but the lonely speck of their apple basket still swirling in a grey sea circle where the boat had been sucked down. No mast, no sail, no Diarma, no Befind, no Artin — all three of them gone, in an instant!

The fool, the fool. What had he done? She had hoped that it had simply been more clowning around. There had clearly been much mirth earlier, with Artin demonstrating how to work a sail, but the frantic scramble amidships that she had just witnessed could only have been a real fight. Poor Diarma must have guessed and lost his temper — their family failing — and now they had capsized. He had killed them all. Poor Artin would never find his young wife and little Niav had lost her parents.

Grizzel teetered as near the edge of the cliff as she dared, gingerly following the tidal surge inwards round the curve of the cliff, all the time holding tight on to the baby as much for reassurance as for safety. She felt the soft breathing against her neck. Surely, surely, there must be something?

It took slow steps to negotiate the hummocked grass of the steeply sloping clifftop. One missed footing and they could both be hurled into the sea, so far below them — but she tried to watch the swirling grey waters for even the tiniest scrap of hope.

Once she was safely on the bouncing turf of the path that led down to the river’s edge, she started to run. The smudge of a dark head could be seen, bobbing through the current’s swirl, in along the river — could they still be breathing? Would they whirl in on the tide or would the river catch hold and swirl them out to sea again? Grizzel knew the way the river could run.

Faster and faster over the grassy hillside, hoping against hope that she wouldn’t trip and let fly the baby too, her whole family gone in one fell swoop. She could see a body — whichever one it was — still being tossed along the western side, trapped by the current. A sudden glimpse of yellow and she knew it was Befind — might she wash in where other people sometimes had — and yet survive?

Now Grizzel was speeding over the well-trodden route along the river bank. She almost slipped on a patch of slime, and baby Niav let out a yowl of protest which turned into a full-blown spate of yelling. Grizzel’s breath was agony and there was a taste like dried blood in her mouth. “Please be alive, Befind, please be alive!” Surely someone from the village would still be around? There had been so many people there to see them off.

And Befind did wash in where the others had. Among the dark green reeds, Grizzel saw the crumpled shape, still recognizably Befind by the tatters of her yellow tunic. She was slumped half-in, half- out of the great, grey bowl of the headless snake-stone.

Leaving the yelling Niav firmly wrapped in her shawl between two rocks and well above the waterline, Grizzel waded over to the huge stone bowl. Befind’s beautiful face was almost under the blood-stained water — her long auburn hair floating in tendrils around her. What irony to drown in her own blood, if somehow she had managed to survive the onslaught of the waves.

Standing with feet wide apart to get some purchase among the squelching mud and the reed stalks, Grizzel yanked Befind out of the hollowed stone in a promising trail of bubbles and dragged her up the bank. To the background clamour of the baby’s yelling, Grizzel worked hard to force some life back into its mother. “Can’t you hear her? You can’t leave her, Befind, what would she do!”

A great blood-soaked cough — and Befind’s eyes flickered open, only to close again. Grizzel wouldn’t let her go. “What were they doing? Had Diarma seen?” She sat Befind roughly against a flat-faced rock and placed baby Niav firmly at her mother’s breast. The yelling ceased.

Befind’s eyes flickered again. “This is where Seyth …” she murmured, letting the baby nuzzle.

“Yes, yes — we are where we found Seyth washed in,” Grizzel almost screamed in exhaustion and grief — she could see that she was losing her.

Befind was stroking the baby’s tiny hand. She raised her head and looked across the river as though trying to focus for one last time on the image of the eastern headland and the mound of the Sacred Howe that she had betrayed for love. “I told them the bung …” she whispered through the blood, and with a final racking sigh, her head dropped forward on her breast.

Beating back the tears, Grizzel bent over them, knowing she would discover the worst, that Befind was dead. She found that baby Niav had her hand curled firmly round the shaft of her mother’s sacred barra which, miraculously, was still held secure by its snakeskin strapping to the blood-soaked belt at Befind’s waist.

“So much for its sacred power!” thought Grizzel contemptuously. “What good has it done Befind to make it worth her spiriting it away? What good would it do this poor infant either!”

And then the villagers arrived.

* * *

Niav picked her way to the top of the cliff-path, wiping away angry tears. A single pure white gull swooped and soared against the leaden clouds as she surveyed the familiar skyline from where the dark beast-like headland jutted out over the northern sea on her left, across the deep grey expanse of swollen river-mouth down below her, and on to the stately beauty of the sacred headland far to her right, with the wedge-shaped Sacred Howe in silhouette.

Maybe it should have been her sacred howe by now; who was she to say? Lower down the ridge, the ancient house that had been home to her mother and grandmother — and the countless grandmothers before that — stood out among the patch of smaller huts that clustered around it like so many limpets. Niav felt cheated, her Aunty Grizzel had lied to her — suddenly this was an unlovely world. The soaring gull did not impress her. She stood hunched and shivering in her shawl at the clifftop, gazing sourly up at it.

The replying scut of bird lime, which just missed, was somehow not a coincidence.

“I am not going to blame her for not telling me,” she told herself as she glowered out over the grey sea, trying to fight her anger. “It must be terrible to have your brother scraped off a rock and then brought home by his greatest enemy, particularly if he could then look smug about it.”

Was she fooling herself? Hadn’t she a right to have been told a long time ago? She wasn’t a baby, and, if there was some mystery about it all, it was a mystery that belonged to her. She was just so used to Aunty Grizzel’s moods — but maybe there should be limits. She couldn’t just throw those eggs away. It would be wicked to let them go to waste on a whim. And it was just a whim. Gloom, doom. People listened to Aunt Grizzel quite enough as it was. Being expected to act as fledgling to the local wise-woman really could be depressing if they treated you like a baby the next minute.

It had been a beautiful, sun-kissed morning and the rain, so far, was holding off. Niav had come down to her special spot by the river in search of bull-rush roots. Aunty Grizzel seemed in real need of sweetening up, and the roots, after a short spell shoved among the hot ashes, were the sweetest thing she knew.

They had told her it was meant to be a bad place, an unlucky place where unfortunate things were washed in, but there, amid the gentle rustle of the reeds, at the very centre of the great, headless snake-stone bowl, Niav had discovered an impeccable nest, exactly placed, holding six perfect eggs, and not a guarding parent in sight — almost a miracle.

But then cousin Kyle, that vermin, had ruined everything. He hadn’t just burst through the rushes and spoiled the perfect moment, he had told her something utterly unforgivable — that this, her favourite place of all places, was where the body of her mother, Befind, had been found washed in “all bloated like so much bladderwrack!” And she had never, never known. No one had even so much as hinted.

Of course she threw an egg at him — and it did not miss.

She had held herself firm, while he crashed his way back through the rushes trying to wipe the egg yolk from his eyes. She didn’t cry. Not only had she collected up the remaining eggs and packed them neatly in the basket, all carefully bounced out with moss as she had been taught, she had even gone grubbing for a respectable bundle of roots as well.

Unsurprisingly, the last thing Niav got when she reached home laden with her unexpected goodies was gratitude or congratulations.

“They will be bound to have gone rotten. Why else would they be left for you to find so easy?” Aunt Grizzel said sourly, after one glance at Niav’s basket.

She had tossed her long wavy hair from around her shoulders and swept back towards the weaving-hut. The beads of her many-rowed jet necklace all flashed in a shaft of sunlight — she was a good-looking woman and everyone acknowledged it.

“Perhaps something got the parents — a fox or something. I don’t know!” said Niav, trailing behind her in