The Silver Dark Sea
A profound tale of love, loss and the lore of the sea.The islanders of Parla are still mourning the loss of one of their own. Four years since that loss, and a man – un-named, unclothed – is washed onto their shores. Some say he is a mythical man from the sea – potent, kind and beautiful; others suspect him. For the bereft Maggie, this stranger brings love back to the isle. But as the days pass he changes every one of them – and the time comes for his story to be told…Tender, lyrical and redemptive, The Silver Dark Sea is the dazzling new novel from the author of Eve Green (winner of Whitbred First Novel award) and Witch Light. It is a story about what life can give and take from us, when we least expect it – and how love, in all its forms, is the greatest gift of all.
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SUSAN FLETCHER
The Silver Dark Sea
Table of Contents
The Giants and what became of them
The Wild Sheep and the Stormy Night
The Imps at the Farm called Wind Rising
The Sly Tide, or the Perigean Spring Tide, or the Highest Tide of all
The Nurse and the Wasted Heart
The Twins, the Fishman, and the Lighthouse-Keeper’s Son
The Widow and the Man from Sye
The Stranger, Celia and the Night-Time Sea
The Woman with the Inland Life
The Fishman of Sye
Once, there was a man. He was bearded and kind. He lived on an island in a stone-walled house with a tap that dripped, and a small peat fire. He had no friends to speak of. All his family were gone.
In his youth, he had been strong. He’d carried hay bales in one hand and lifted bags of grain up into the highest rafters. His farm had been neat and his pigs were fat; his shoulders browned in good weather. A handsome man, also. He loved a girl with sun-coloured hair and sometimes she’d smile as she passed him, so that his heart fluttered and his mouth ached. But above all else, he was shy. He’d blush when he heard her name; he’d stumble and not speak for days. She is too pretty, he thought to himself. And in time the sun-haired girl went away. She married another and the seasons blew on. Time passed. His beard greyed.
In the evenings he’d think of her. He’d sit by the fire and say I am old, now. How did it happen? The years had gone too quickly. His life had flown by, leaf-dry.
No children, no wife.
What a small life …
One night he was so sad he could not sleep. The loss kept him wide-eyed. He lay on his back, stared at the ceiling; the sea unfolded in the dark. And the day that followed, he left his home. He walked to the north of the island where the grass was wind-bent, where the skies were fast and the sea thundered. Why was he here? He didn’t know. But the wind tugged at his coat and foam skittered across the cold sand and the gulls above him called out no! No! He found himself on a stony shore.
I am so tired, he thought. I am so tired of being me. I am tired of being alone.
He thought of all the wasted years. Why had he never spoken of love? Why didn’t I tell her? Or see the wide world? He hadn’t stepped off the island, not once. It all seemed too late, now – too late.
He cried. He wept like a child.
But then he opened his eyes.
He opened them and saw a curious thing.
There was a man in the water. Not driftwood? Or weed? No – it was certainly a man. He bobbed, on the waves. He had black hair – wet, bluish-black – and a beard, and very pale skin. His eyes were round like a seal’s were. He did not blink or turn away.
Who is …?
Who might swim, in such waters? With these waves that were crashing like glass? And with a north wind blowing as strongly as this? Yet this sleek-haired man did not struggle. He was not drowning or asking for help. He simply floated. He seemed to smile, as he floated there. And then he raised his arms – he raised them above him, pressed his palms together as if he was in prayer – and he threw those arms forwards so that his fingertips broke the water and his head and body followed in an arc. He dived into the sea, and was gone.
Briefly, there was nothing.
Then, in his wake, there was a tail – a huge, silver-flashing tail. It raised itself up, like a mirror. And it sank down where the black-haired man had been.
The pig farmer stood very still.
He blinked, shook his head. A fish? Or a man? Neither? Or both? And at that moment, at that precise moment, as the sea rushed onto the stones at Sye and as a lone gull settled on the rocks nearby, he heard a voice very clearly. It was not a human’s voice. It did not feel as if someone was standing next to him; it was a deep, soft voice that seemed to be all around him so that the farmer turned, and kept turning.
It said this: there is hope.
The voice came off the cliffs. It rose up from the stones. He looked, but there was only the foam, fizzing, and the white lace of broken water where the tail had been.
That night, the farmer sat by his peat fire with a rug wrapped around him. He knew what he had seen. He’d seen a kind, human face and then a fish’s tail. He also knew what he had heard.
In the days that followed, he spoke of it. Do you know what I saw? At the cove called Sye? Some laughed at him, of course. But others listened with shining eyes for their own hearts were tired, or partly so, and they longed for this to be true. Hadn’t there been a legend, once? In a leather-bound book? They thought so. There had been a story just like the pig farmer’s story – of kind eyes and a raised silvery tail.
