The Pier Falls: And Other Stories Read online

  His face materialised behind the bars of the little window. “You came.”

  She had spent her whole life waiting for this moment and never realised it. She thought stories only happened to men. Now her own was beginning.

  “My father is the king,” he said. “In time I will become king. If you save us I will make you my queen.”

  She gave him her ring and he told her what to do. She slid her hands between the bars, let him grip her wrists and cried out for help. When the guard came running and reached through to free her the prince grabbed him. He wrapped one hand around the man’s mouth and the other around his neck. He put a foot on the bars and heaved as if he were pulling a rope. The man kicked and thrashed for a long time before he sagged and slid to the floor. She took the keys from his belt and unlocked the door. She had never seen a man being killed. It looked no different from the games her cousins played when they were young.

  He took the man’s sword and met the second guard running in. He swung it into his belly and lifted him on the point to force it deeper, then let him drop. He put his boot on the man’s chest and pulled the blade out with a sucking gurgle. By this time his friends were pouring out of the stables, the men arming themselves with makeshift weapons from the walls—staves, pitchforks, iron bars.

  He told them to take her to the harbour and treat her well. For a moment she thought he was going to murder her parents. He laid a hand on her cheek and told her that they would be safe.

  He chose two men to accompany him and they ran towards the palace.

  They said her mother had been raped by a bull and had given birth to a monster who lay chained and snarling in a nest of straw and dung at the centre of a maze beneath the palace, waiting for the young men and women from Athens to be offered to him as fresh meat. Let the peasants keep their stories, her father said. They had precious little else. And it was safer to be feared than to be pitied.

  There was some truth in the story for her brother sometimes seemed like a monster, his bloated head, his rages, the way he lashed out at the men who went into the cellar to sluice him with buckets of water every week, to carry off the foul straw and fill his trough with the same food they gave to the pigs—kitchen scraps, greasy bones, wine gone sour.

  They thought he could not speak. They never asked him a question so he never gave them a reply. But she knew. She went down to the cellar most days and sat with him in the light of that single, guttering torch and held his hand. He would lay his head on her lap and tell her about the things the men did to him for their amusement. She gave him fruit and bread which she had hidden under her skirt and while he ate she told him about the world outside, about the ocean that was like the water in the bucket but deeper and broader than he could possibly imagine, about boats that were like floating houses, about music that was sound shaped to make you happy, about the pines outside her window and the woodcutters in the summer.

  He wept sometimes but he never asked for help. When he was younger and she was more naïve she suggested that he try to escape, but he did not understand what she was saying for he had never seen anything beyond these damp walls, and thought her stories of oceans and boats and music were simply games to make the darkness bearable. He was right, of course. He could not live outside. The sun would blind him. He would be mocked and taunted and stoned.

  Her mother, her father, her cousins, they put him out of their minds, but she could not. She felt his presence constantly, like the distant rumble of thunder, and when she felt the weight of his deformed head in her lap and ran her hand through his patchy hair, the kindness flowed both ways, for he was easing her discomfort as much as she was easing his.

  They reached the harbour to find that the Athenians had already hoisted six small barrels of pitch out of the hold, set them on fire with flints and torn cloth and slung them onto the decks of the other ships so that the sailors on watch were too preoccupied with trying to extinguish the flames to concern themselves with anything but saving their own vessels.

  She was petrified. She could see what it meant to be in the middle of a story, and why the men protected them from this. It was a mistake. She understood that now. A moment’s weakness had caused this horror, the way a single spark from those struck flints bloomed into the fires that surrounded her. Metal struck metal, planks split, the air was so full of smoke she was finding it hard to breathe.

  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.

  The thought of her brother was like a pounding headache. She moved as little as possible and watched and listened hard to what was going on around her and tried to distract herself from the pain.

  Finally the rowers broke off and a basket of provisions was brought up from below, olives, salted fish, fresh water and dry biscuits of a kind she had never seen before. He sat beside her but addressed her directly only twice. She liked the way in which she had so rapidly been accepted into the magic circle from which the others were excluded. He had to maintain a public face, she understood that. She was flattered that the private man belonged to her alone.

  They anchored in the bay of the island shortly before nightfall. A small boat was lowered on ropes and three men rowed ashore to reconnoitre. They returned with the news that the island was uninhabited and began ferrying boxes and packets and bundles to the beach, taking passengers only when several tents had already been erected on the grassy ridge.

  Nightfall frightened her. The firelight at home had always illuminated a stone wall, painted plaster, a woven hanging. She had never seen darkness eat up the world like this. She was losing her bearings a little, and times and places began to overlap. She remembered the stories she had heard as a child, how Chaos gave birth to love and hell, how Kronos castrated his father with a sickle, and these things now seemed no more or less real than her cousin Glaucus nearly drowning in a barrel of honey, or her cousin Catreus trying to ride a goat and breaking his arm.

  They ate more of the salted fish and the dried figs which had been compacted into discs like little millwheels. Some of the men found a young seal on the beach and chased its mother away so that they could kill it. They roasted chunks of the flesh over the fire but several of the women found it inedible so she declined, deciding that she could easily wait another two days for proper meat. The sweet wine, in any case, had taken the edges off her hunger.

  So novel and so consuming were all these events that she forgot entirely about the one waiting at the evening’s end until he drained his final glass and took her hand and led her towards his tent. She knew almost nothing about what he would do to her. She had been told little by her mother and less by her cousins. She had gained more information by overhearing the maids’ gossip, and they seemed to find it comical, though the things they described were both repellent and unnerving. She consoled herself that they were talking about men of a kind very different from the one she was marrying.

  He closed the door flap and kissed her, for longer this time. She wondered if he would hurt her but he simply slid a hand inside her dress and held one of her breasts. It felt odd and clumsy and wrong. She did not know what she was meant to do in return, if anything. Earlier in the day she trusted him to protect her. The stakes seemed higher now, the rules less certain. Her life depended on remaining inside the magic circle, and to remain inside the magic circle she had to please him. She had already become a different person this morning. She would have to do it again. She pulled her mouth away from his and said, “What would you like me to do?”

  He laughed and lifted her dress and turned her round and bent her over the bed. The maids were right. What he did to her was indeed repellent and unnerving, but oddly comical too. She should have felt adult and sophisticated but it reminded her mostly of being a child again, wrestling, doing handstands, turning cartwheels in the dust. It was demeaning at first, and dirty, then it was good to be a child, to have no responsibilities, to forget everything that had happened today and concentrate only on the present moment.

  When he was finished he rolled onto the bed and pulled the deerskin blanket over them. Within minutes he was asleep. She was unable to move without detaching herself from his embrace and she did not want to wake him so she lay listening to the voices outside getting fewer and fainter as everyone made their way to bed and the fidgety orange light of the fire faded. Every so often the wind flicked back a tongue of canvas at the top of the door and she could see a tiny triangle of sky that contained three stars hanging in a darkness tha
t went on forever.

  Sometime after midday the rain stops, the pain in her stomach disappears and her mind is returned to her. She hangs her sodden clothes on the guy ropes outside the tent so that they will dry in the sun. She does the same thing with the bedclothes and ties back the door of the tent in the hope that the breeze might evaporate some of the water from its muddy floor. She is naked. She cleans up the vomit, scooping it into her hands and carrying it outside, then wiping her fingers clean on the grass. She does this without thinking and, in the middle of doing it, she sees herself from the outside and realises how far she has travelled in such a short time.

  She finds a shallow pool of brackish water gathered on the concave top of a mossy rock and drinks, and the coldness of the water makes up for the earthy, vegetable taste.

  She begins to think, for the first time, that surviving here might be possible, but that to do so she must become like a fox, hunting constantly and never thinking about tomorrow.

  Wrapped only in her blanket and wearing her sandals, she makes her way back to the area of the island where the thorn bushes were thickest and finds that her memory is correct and some of the plants are indeed covered in small red berries. She does not want to repeat the mistake of this morning, so she picks just one and puts it into her mouth. But when she crushes it between her teeth the taste is shockingly sour and she has to spit it out.

  She makes her way down the scree to the beach, determined to master her feelings about the seal pup’s head. But it has begun to rot and the smell is overpowering, and when she gets close she can see something moving inside.