Chapter 6: What the Tide Brought In

The dead man's name was Peter, and I had known him for a liar and a drunk since I was a boy.

He had come to the village the spring my mother died, a lean man with a grey beard and a way of standing too close when he talked, and he had carried things for Marcus's father in a boat with no name painted on it. Then he had gone, the way men like that go, and nobody had spoken of him in years. Now he was lying on the shingle with his chest carved open and his lips pulled back from his teeth and the tide coming in to take him.

"We cannot leave him here," I said.

Marcus did not answer. He was still looking at the word. His copper red hair had come loose from its tie and the wind was pushing it across his forehead, and the beauty mark near his lip was dark against the pale of his face.

"Marcus."

"I heard you." He crouched again and put his hand on the dead man's shoulder, and he did it gently, the way you would touch a sleeping child. "Peter. You stupid, thieving, drowning fool." He straightened up. "Get Bram and two of the Gamma's men. Bring a hurdle from the byre. We carry him up to the chapel and Father Callum says the words over him and we bury him in the yard before the Council man gets here."

"And we tell the pack what?"

"That a wolf from the south drowned. Nothing more." He looked at me. "You will say nothing about the cup. You will say nothing about his chest. If the pack asks, he came ashore in a storm and the rocks did the rest."

"There is no storm, Marcus."

"There will be by morning. Thomas says there is weather coming down the coast." He turned away and started up the shingle. "Go and get the hurdle."

I got the hurdle. Bram came with me and asked no questions on the way down, which was unlike him, and when we got to the boat he saw the body and went white around the mouth and had to sit on the stones. The two men from the Gamma's lot lifted Peter onto the hurdle and covered him with a tarpaulin, and we carried him up through the village in the last of the light and the people came to their doors to watch. Old Agnes stood at the pack house gate with her hands folded and her white braid over her shoulder, and when the hurdle passed her she closed her eyes and moved her lips, and then she looked at me and her look said what it always said. Watch your Alpha.

Father Callum met us at the chapel door with a lantern. He is a small man with thinning sandy hair and kind green eyes and a way of holding himself as if he expected to be blamed for something, and when we set the hurdle down in the chapel porch he looked at the tarpaulin and said, "Who is it?"

"Peter," Marcus said.

The priest's face did nothing for a moment. Then he said, "I will need to see him."

"Not tonight."

"I will need to see him, Marcus." The priest said it quietly and he did not move out of the doorway. "I am the one who will stand over him and say the words. I will know what I am saying them over."

Marcus stood in the porch with the wind coming through and the lantern light on his face, and I watched him decide. Then he pulled back the tarpaulin himself and Father Callum looked down at the dead man and the word carved in his chest, and the priest's hand went to the little wooden cross at his collar and held it.

"Who did this?" he said.

"That is what I mean to find out." Marcus put the tarpaulin back. "He goes in the ground tonight. In the dark. No one sees the chest. You say the words and I will have the men fill the grave before the sun is up."

"Marcus," Father Callum said. "If I bury this man in the dark with a lie in my mouth, I will be doing the thing I have spent forty years in this village trying not to do."

"Then do it as a kindness to a dead man and a living pack." Marcus took the priest's arm and led him aside, and they spoke low for a while, and I stood by the hurdle with my bad arm aching and watched the two of them and did not hear a word.

They buried Peter in the dark. I stood at the wall of the churchyard and held a lantern and watched the two men from the Gamma's lot work the spades, and Bram said a prayer that he got half wrong, and Father Callum said the words and his voice was steady and his face was wet. When it was done Marcus walked down the hill with me and he did not say anything until we came to the turning where the road forks to the pack house and the school.

"Thomas will have heard by morning," he said. "He hears everything in this village. If he asks you, Peter was a man from the south and the sea took him. That is all."

"You told me once that a lie told to protect the pack is a debt the pack pays back in time."

"I remember."

"Then who is paying this one?"

He stopped in the road. The lantern light was on his face and he looked tired and old and there was a small drop of rain on his cheek. "I do not know yet," he said. "Go home, Elias. Get some sleep. Tomorrow you take the boat out and you look at the south beds and you find out where that man came ashore, and you come and tell me before you tell anyone else. That is an order."

I went home. I did not sleep.

Some time after midnight I got up off my bed and put my coat on and went out to the shore again, because I could not stop thinking about the kelp. Peter had come in on the kelp, or with it, and the south beds are a mile out past the point where the water is deep and cold and the weed grows thick on the rock. If a man had been in the water a few days he would have drifted with the current, and the current in these parts runs north and then west and then in toward the point. So he had gone into the water somewhere north of us and drifted south and come ashore at our door like a letter.

The moon was behind cloud and the shore was grey and the water was grey and the wind had picked up the way Thomas said it would. I walked out along the point with a lantern in one hand and my collar up, and the wind took the lantern and made it swing, and I was halfway along the point when I saw the light.

It was down on the shingle below the point, a small steady glow that was not a lantern, because a lantern in this wind would have guttered. I put my own lantern behind a rock and went on quiet. The shingle is loud under boots and I went along the top of the point on the grass, where it is soft, and I came to the edge and looked down.

There were two of them on the shore. One was a big man with a shaved head and a coat that had been good once, and he was kneeling by the water with a rope in his hands. The other was standing over him with a covered lamp held low, and he was thin and quick looking and he had the hood of his coat up against the wind. Between them, half in the water and half out, was a bundle of something dark that was not a bundle.

"The tide's turned," the thin one said. "We have to go now or we lose the boat."

"He's not here." The big one pulled the rope in and there was nothing on the end of it. "The current's carried him."

"Then he's carried. We leave him and we go back and we tell him the message went into the water with Peter and there's nothing more we can do."

"He'll have our skins for it."

"He'll have our skins anyway." The thin one turned his lamp and the light swept along the shingle and stopped on the rock where I had left my lantern. He went still.

I was up and moving before he said a word. I went down the grass bank on my heels with my bad arm swinging and my heart going like a hammer, and the big man dropped the rope and came up off his knees with something in his hand that caught the lamplight, and the thin one ran. He ran along the shingle toward the boat that was pulled up in the little cove beyond the point, and I let him go and went for the big one, because the big one had a blade and a blade in the dark is a thing you deal with first.

He swung at me and I got inside it and took his wrist and turned it. The blade went into the shingle. I put my knee into his thigh and he went down on one knee and I had his arm up behind his back before he could get his breath.

"Who sent you?" I said.

He did not answer. He was strong and he was trying to get his feet under him and I put my weight on his shoulder and he stopped.

"Who sent you," I said again, "and what was the message?"

"It went in the water with Peter." His voice was thick and he had a south country way of talking, all flattened vowels. "You're the Beta. You're the one he talked about."

"Who talked about me?"

He laughed. It was a bad laugh, short and wet. "You don't know. You don't even know." He twisted his head round to look up at me and his face was a broad flat face with a broken nose and pale eyes, and he said, "He said the Beta would be the last to know. He said it would be the funniest part."

I felt the silver in my arm go hot. It went up from the cut to the shoulder and down into my chest and it was like a hand closing round my heart, and I let go of the man's arm and put my own hand against the rock and the world went white at the edges and then dark.

When I could see again the big man was gone. There was a scrape of boots on the shingle and the sound of a boat being pushed out, and I got myself up on the rock and looked out and there was a dark shape moving away from the point with two men in it, and the thin one had the oars and he was pulling hard.

I stood on the shore with my arm burning and the wind coming off the sea and watched them go. They were heading south, along the coast, and there was a light far out that was not a star, a small steady light on a ship that was lying off the point with its lanterns dark.

I went back to the pack house and I did not go to Marcus.

That was the first thing I did that I could not take back. I stood in the yard with the wind pulling at the gate and I looked up at the window of the study, and there was no light in it, and I thought about Peter and the cup and the word carved in a dead man's chest and Marcus saying, I want to know myself, and I turned round and went across the yard to the store under the eaves where I keep my own things, and I took out the paper and the pencil I keep for writing the accounts and I wrote down everything I had seen that night. The two men, the boat, the light on the ship, the words the big man had said. I put the paper in the lining of my coat and I went to bed.

In the morning the weather came down the coast the way Thomas had said. The rain hit the windows and the wind went round the chimneys and there was no question of taking a boat out. I went down to the harbour instead and found Thomas under the eaves of the custom house with his coat collar up and his silver hair wet.

"Peter's dead," I said.

"I heard. He came ashore at the point and the rocks did for him."

"That is the story."

"It is a poor story." Thomas looked at me and his sharp blue eyes did not blink. "I have known you since you were a boy in bare feet, Elias, and you have never once been able to lie to me. What really happened?"

"Last night two men were on the shore below the point. They were looking for something in the water. They had a covered lamp and a boat and they went south when they saw me. There is a ship lying off the point with no lights."

Thomas was quiet. The rain ran off the eave and made a line in the mud between us. Then he said, "A ship with no lights, and men on the shore in the dark, and a dead man with a message on him. I have seen this before, Elias. Twenty years ago, in the year the old Alpha died, there was a ship off the point and men on the shore and a great deal of trouble, and when it was over there was a new Alpha in the pack house and nobody in the village asked how he came by it." He pulled his collar up. "If you want my advice, and you did not ask for it, you will find out who is on that ship before your Alpha does."

I did not answer him. I stood under the eave and watched the rain come down on the harbour and thought about the big man on the shingle saying, he said the Beta would be the last to know.

The second thing I did that I could not take back was to go up to the schoolhouse.

It was the middle of the afternoon and the children had gone and there was smoke coming from the stove chimney and a light in the window, and I knocked on the door and Clara opened it with a piece of chalk in her hand and her sleeves rolled up and a smudge of ink on her jaw. She looked at me and then past me at the rain and then at me again.

"You are supposed to be in bed," she said. "You look like a man who has not slept."

"I need to ask you something."

She stepped back and let me in. The schoolroom was warm and smelled of chalk and wet wool and something cooking on the stove, and there was a map of the world on the wall with the edges curling and a slate on her desk with a sum half worked out. She stood by the desk and folded her arms and waited.

"Your father's silver cup," I said. "You said he came home with it and put it on a shelf and told you never to touch it. Did he ever say where he got it?"

She was quiet a moment. Then she said, "He said he got it from a man in a boat, and that the man in the boat was a fool to give it away, and then he drank and did not say anything else for three days." She looked at the stove. "I remember it on the shelf. I remember the shape of it. I was not allowed to touch it and I used to look at it and think it was the prettiest thing in the house." She looked back at me. "Why are you asking me this now?"

"Because a man washed up on the shore with a word carved in his chest and my Alpha says he was the man who carried that cup for his father."

Clara's face did not change. She looked at me for a long time and the chalk moved in her fingers, and then she said, "Explain it to me again. Slowly. From the beginning, and this time do not leave anything out."

So I told her. I told her all of it, the body and the burial and the two men on the shore and the ship with no lights, and while I talked she listened the way she listened to a child reciting a lesson, and when I was done she said, "The man with the shaved head knew about you. He knew you were the Beta and he knew you would not know something. That means he was told about you by someone who knows this pack well enough to know its business."

"Yes."

"And you have not told Marcus about the ship."

"No."

"Why not?"

I looked at her. The rope between us was pulled tight and my arm was aching under the sleeve and the rain was coming down on the roof, and I said the thing I had not said to anyone, not to Nina, not to Agnes, not to the dead man on the shingle.

"Because Marcus told me the dead man carried the cup for his father," I said, "and the dead man washed up with my pack's name carved in him by someone who did it slowly and wanted it read. And I have been Marcus's Beta for eleven years and I have never once asked him a question he did not want to answer." I put my hand on the back of a child's chair. "The last time I saw Peter, years ago, I was a boy and he was coming out of the pack house at night with a silver cup in his hands and Marcus was standing behind him in the door. I did not remember it until last night."

Clara's fingers stopped moving on the chalk.

The schoolroom was very quiet. Somewhere out in the rain a gull was crying over the green, and the stove ticked as it cooled, and Clara said, in a low voice, "He was not carrying it for his father, Elias. Your Alpha was watching him carry it away."

I did not answer. I had no answer. I stood in the warm schoolroom with the rain on the roof and the truth sitting between us as plain as the slate on her desk, and it was Clara who moved first. She came round the desk and put her hand flat against my chest, over the place where the rope was tied, and her palm was warm through the cloth and her eyes were close to mine.

"Whatever Marcus is," she said, "you will not find it out by standing in the rain on the shore on your own. If there are men on that ship who know the cup, then the cup is the thing to look for, and the cup is not on the ship, because the cup went with my father and my father is not dead." Her hand stayed where it was. "I told you I came back for answers. I did not tell you the whole of it, and I am going to tell you now. My father is alive. He wrote to me in the spring. He told me to come back to this village and find the man who gave him the cup, and he told me that the man had lost something and was looking for it, and that he would pay any price to get it back. He told me the man's name."

She looked at me and her eyes were steady and I could feel her heart going through her hand on my chest.

"Tell me," I said.

"Marcus," Clara said.