Migrations(81)

“We’re alone out here,” I murmur. “Aren’t we?”

He nods.

“They’re all gone.” I put the empty tin back in my pack, along with our two forks. But I can’t yet rise. I don’t have the strength. “I was almost there with him,” I say. “I was so close by. But I wasn’t there, in the end.”

“You were there.”

“No. I left him and left him. That’s what his spirit will take with it.”

“Bullshit.”

“I should have been with him.”

“You were. And he still went alone. We all do. Always.”

“It’s too far for him to go alone.” I press my eyes with trembling fingers. “I can’t feel him.”

“You can. Why else would you still be walking?”

With that he stands up, and I stand up, and we keep walking.



* * *



It only takes another couple of hours. I am trudging up a particularly grueling slope, worrying about Ennis, who has fallen a long way behind, turning back to make sure he’s still moving, and then I glance ahead.

And stop.

Because something just flew across the sky.

I break into a run.

More of them appear, swooping and diving and then I am cresting the slope and—

Oh.

Hundreds of Arctic terns cover the ice before me. Squealing and creaking their cries, dancing upon the air with their mates, caterwauling joyously. Sea swallows, they are called, for the grace of their dips through the water, and I see it now as they dive hungrily for fish, in a sea thriving with what must be millions of scales.

I sink awkwardly to the ground and weep.

For the journey they have made. For the loveliness left behind. For you, and for promises, and for a life that was given to fate but could not comprehend your death’s inclusion in that.

Ennis reaches me and gives a low rumble of laughter. It’s in this moment that a huge whale fin crowns the surface and waves to us from the distance, and we both gasp half out of our bodies and then we are cheering and jumping and it’s so beautiful, so desperately profound that I can hardly stand it. What else is hiding in these clean, untouched waters, in this sanctuary?

“I’m sorry the Saghani isn’t here,” I say, wiping my streaming nose. “All those fish and no way to catch them.”

He looks at me funny. “I stopped wanting to catch them a long time ago. I’ve just needed to know they’re still out here somewhere, that the ocean is still alive.”

I hug him, and we hold each other for a long time, and the sound of the birds echoes all around.



* * *



“I wish Niall could have seen this,” I say later. God, I wish it so much.

He breathes out deeply. “How long would you like to stay?”

“For always?” I suggest, offering a smile. “We can go. But I have something I need to do first. He wanted his ashes scattered with them.”

Ennis squeezes my hand. “I’ll go ahead, then, shall I? Leave you to be alone with him.”

I nod, but don’t let go. “Thank you, Captain. You’re a good man and it’s a good life you’ve led after all.”

He grins. “It’s not over yet, Mrs. Lynch.”

“No, it certainly isn’t.”

I watch him walk down the slope, back the way we came. Then I turn in the other direction, heading for the water’s edge. From my pack I draw Niall’s letters, and the small wooden box protecting his ashes. I had meant to let the letters fly free but I find that I can’t, Niall would hate the thought of his words littering this untouched environment. So I put them back in my pack, running my fingers only once over his handwriting.

Gently I bring the box to my lips so I can kiss him goodbye as I never did when he was alive.

The wind isn’t as fierce as it has been, but it’s enough to lift the ashes and carry them through the fluttering white feathers until I can’t tell where they end and the birds begin.

I strip off my clothes and wade into the ocean.





29





IRELAND TEN YEARS AGO


“What have you found?”

“It’s an egg.”

He moves to my side and we stare down at the little thing nestled in the grass. The most extraordinary shade of electric speckled blue.

“Is it real?” I breathe.

Niall nods. “It’s a crow’s egg.”

I bend to pick it up, but—

“Don’t touch it,” Niall warns.

“We have to take it back to its nest.”

“If you touch it, the mother bird will smell you on it, and reject it.”

“So we just … leave it there? Won’t it die?”

He nods. “Still. The less we touch, the better. All our touching does is destroy.”

I take his hand gently. “We could look after it. Hatch it ourselves and set it free.”

“It would learn our faces.”

I smile. “How lovely.”

He looks at me. At first there is a shadow of pity. Of understanding the way of things better than I do. Of his pessimism. But I return the look, and let him see my own certainty, let him see perhaps a hint of how we don’t always have to be poison, a plague on the world, of how we can nurture it, too, and slowly something shifts in his eyes.