The Windward Path

A tale of Saltgate and of Cragholm, the Hard Isle: being a boatload of fen reed, a smuggler who was never once in a hurry, and the one green thing on a rock.

Loomis Skerry keeps the Kittiwake, the boat that is officially empty, and it is officially empty a great deal of the year, both ways, between Saltgate and the two Isles. That spring it was officially empty of reed.

A whole boatload of it: good Muckle reed, roof-grade, come down the fen in bundles and stacked on the Saltgate quay in the rain, with a certificate from the grader swearing to its quality, which nobody believed, because the grader was also the cutter. The harbour stood round it and wondered. Nobody on the Cold Coast had ever heard of anybody taking reed to Cragholm. Cragholm is rock. Cragholm buys nothing that grows, because nothing it buys will grow there; it takes Vinholm's wine and Saltgate's cured fish and the fen's timber for its boats, and it sends back salt and lime and stone, and it has no use for reed at all.

"Who wants reed," said Marget Reek, "on a rock?"

"A widow," said Loomis Skerry, and would not say more.

Nate Sackett helped him load it. Nate fishes the near water and has never once in his life cleared the harbour mouth, and everybody in Saltgate knows it, and nobody says it; and he carried reed down the quay all morning, bundle after bundle, into a boat that was going where he never would, and did not complain once, and Loomis watched him do it.

When the Kittiwake was low in the water and the tide was on the turn, Nate stood on the quay steps with his cut hands in his pockets and looked past Loomis, past the boat, out through the gap in the harbour wall at the grey water beyond — the way he always looks.

"What's it like?" he said. "Out there."

"Wet," said Loomis. "Then dry. Then wet again coming home." And cast off, unhurried as a calm tide, and did not look back; but he had seen Nate's face, and it went with him out of the harbour mouth, the way a stone goes with you in a pocket.

The Hard Isle came up out of the sea at noon: a long grey back of rock, no green on it anywhere, stone jetties on the windward side and a town of drystone houses huddled low in the lee of the crag. And the wind came across the jetty as he tied up and did not let go of him for three days. The wind on Cragholm never stops. Loomis has been going there all his working life and has never once got used to it; it was in his ears and his sleeves and his bread; it leaned on him at the corners of streets; it sang in the drystone walls, which are built with gaps on purpose so they will not blow down.

The widow's house was up the hill, at the top of the town, where the last houses give out and there is only stone and sky. On the harbour-master's chart the way up was the leeward road: a proper, marked, sheltered road that went the long way round the back of the crag, out of the wind. So Loomis loaded the reed onto a hand-cart and went that way, because he is never in a hurry, and the road went round, and round, and gave out at a quarry face with a sign on it that said, in the careful letters of the Salt-Reckoning, CLOSED FOR WEIGHING.

He went back down. A quarryman at the bottom watched him come with no expression at all, and when Loomis asked the way to the widow's, he pointed straight up the steep face of the hill, into the full teeth of the wind, at a path of worn steps nobody had put on any chart.

"Windward path," the quarryman said. "Everybody goes windward. The chart's for visitors."

"Why's the chart wrong?"

"It isn't wrong," said the quarryman. "It's sheltered. Nobody's ever wanted to go that way. It was drawn by a man who didn't like wind." And he went back to his stone, and did not offer to help, and then — when the cart stuck on the third step with Loomis's whole weight behind it — came up without a word and put his shoulder to the other side, and pushed it to the top, and went back down, and did not look round once to be thanked.

The widow was very old and very straight. Her husband had been a quarry-master and had died in the winter, and she lived now with her granddaughter, a small fierce girl of seven or so who looked at Loomis's wet coat as if it were both disgusting and the most interesting thing she had ever seen.

Behind the house, on the windward side, there was a scrap of ground walled round with drystone — and in it, in a trench, in soil that must have been carried up the windward path a basket at a time, there were six little sticks.

"Hawthorn," the widow said. "From the fen. My husband had them off you, last year. He wanted the child to have a hedge. Something green that isn't a Vinholm grape." She looked at the sticks. "They'll not live, of course. The wind takes them."

It did. The six sticks were bent flat to the ground, three of them already dead, the soil round them scoured to the stones.

"You don't grow a hedge on a rock," said Loomis, as if it were obvious. "You grow a hedge behind a reed fence, and you keep the wind off it for three years till it's tall enough to keep the wind off itself. Every child in the Bogmoor knows that. Nobody on Cragholm does, because nobody on Cragholm has ever had reed to try it with."

So he built it. It took two days, and the whole of the good Muckle reed: a thick woven fence of fen reed, bound in bundles, staked deep into the drystone on the windward side of the little trench, curved round the hawthorns like a cupped hand. The granddaughter carried stakes and gave orders. Neighbours came to the wall to watch and said nothing, and then, one by one, as Cragholmers do, climbed over it without a word and helped, and went home again without a word, and were not thanked, because you do not.

On the last evening the wind came round the crag as it always does, and hit the reed fence, and the reed fence sang — a soft, dry, rushing sound, a sound from somewhere else — and behind it, in the still air, for the first time since they were planted, the three living hawthorn sticks stood upright.

The granddaughter sat down in the lee of the fence among them, where there was no wind at all, and put her hand flat on the soil, and looked up at Loomis with her face gone entirely astonished.

"It's quiet," she said. "In here it's quiet."

"That's what it sounds like in a fen," said Loomis. "All the time."

She thought about that. "I'd not like it," she decided. "Not all the time." And then, after a while, lower: "Just here."

He sailed the next morning. The widow came down the windward path to the jetty, which she did not have to do, and stood on the stones as the Kittiwake pulled away, and did not wave, because on the Hard Isle you do not. But she had put a sack in the bottom of the boat while he was busy, and when Loomis opened it halfway home it was salt — Cragholm's best table salt, which they do not sell — and a small stone, flat and grey, with a single word scratched into it in the careful letters of the island.

He knew who that ought to go to. He had known since the quay.

The Kittiwake came home into Saltgate on the evening tide, past the harbour wall, into the grey water, where the fleet sat ready and unsailed along the quay exactly as it had when he left. Nate Sackett was on the quay steps. Nate is often on the quay steps at that tide.

Loomis tied off, and climbed up, unhurried, and put the flat grey stone into Nate's cut hand without a word, and went off to the Arms.

Nate turned it to the last of the light. "Windward," he read. "What's that mean?"

"It's the way up," said Loomis, over his shoulder. "On Cragholm. The one that's not on the chart. They go the hard way, into the wind, because it's the way that gets there." He paused at the door of the Arms. "Your reed's keeping a little girl's hedge alive on the top of a rock, Nate. It sings when the wind hits it. Thought you ought to know you'd been."

And he went in.

Nate Sackett sat on the quay steps until it was dark, turning the stone over in his hands. He did not look out through the harbour mouth quite as long as usual that night. Some of him had been past it now — only as far as the near water, only as far as a fence round six sticks for a child he would never see — and he found, holding the grey stone, that it had been enough to know the wall was not the end of the world. And that when Cassie Pell sat down beside him on the step, quick, where the families couldn't see, and asked what he'd got there, he had, for the first time in his life, a far-water story of his own to tell her.