Edvane Stories

My father told me this tale when I was old enough to go with him beyond the shelter of the bay. His father had told it to him, and before that it had passed through other mouths, back to the daughters of Talorc, who lived when the stones were first cut.

The words have changed. They must have. A tale carried through winters, births and burials cannot keep every word it began with. But the bones do not change, and it is the bones I was charged to remember.

Dunnicar still stands where it stood then, above the hard coast where the sea works day and night against the rocks. Our boats still go out beneath the shadow of the stack. We still watch the weather gather beyond it, and hear the water strike the stone when the wind comes from the east.

There are those who say the carvings were made only to honour a chief and mark some creature seen in the deep. They do not know what was paid for this shore. I know because I come from one of the three sisters who survived that night.

So listen closely. I will tell it as it was told to me, and you will carry it when my voice is gone.

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Talorc was chief at Dunnicar in the years when boats still carried more news than people, and a man might know what had happened along the coast by the cargo unloaded on the shore. He was no great taker of land, nor did he measure his strength by the number of men who had fallen before him. His work was in the harbour, among the fishers, traders and boatmen whose labour kept the settlement alive. He knew which families had grain enough for winter, which hulls needed repair before the next hard weather, and which strangers could be trusted when they came north with iron, amber or salt.

The axe he carried was broad-headed and plain, though few ever saw him raise it. It marked him as chief, but his authority came from steadier things. His judgement in quarrels, the fairness of his bargains and his willingness to stand on the shore in bad weather until the last boat had returned. The sea had shaped him as surely as it shaped the rocks, leaving him patient where patience served and immovable where it did not.

His daughters were often near him. Derile, the eldest, had already begun to take on the quiet burdens of the household, while Drusticc and Nectu still ran between the boats and storehouses, known and indulged by everyone who worked there. They belonged to the life Talorc had kept whole, and he believed, as men do in peaceful seasons, that careful hands might preserve such things indefinitely.

Yet every chief of Dunnicar inherited another duty, one spoken of seldom and never lightly. Beyond the harbour, beneath the water around the sea stack, lived the Og Mori. Every chief was taught that it could be called, and each was told the price. Talorc carried that knowledge for years, hoping it would remain what it had always been. A warning never used.

The Anglians came before the first autumn storms, in three ships that crossed the bay under dark sails and grounded where the beach ran shallow beneath the settlement. They were men sent by Ida, who was making himself king in Bernicia, and some among them had stood on that shore before with furs and iron laid out for exchange. Talorc recognised two of their faces and went down expecting hard bargaining, for men who travelled armed rarely came in a generous temper, but he did not yet believe they had come as enemies.

There were more of them than before, and they carried themselves differently. Their spears remained in their hands while the goods were unloaded, and the man who spoke for them named a price so low that Talorc first took it for an insult meant to open the bargaining. When Talorc refused, the man laughed and told his companions to take what they had come for.

They moved through the stores, choosing hides, grain and worked metal while Talorc’s people stood back beneath the points of their spears. A young boatman who tried to stop them was struck to the ground, and when two others stepped forward, Talorc ordered them away. He knew there were too many of them, that their shields were close-fitted, and their weapons had been made for killing men rather than defending nets and cattle.

Talorc spoke to them until there was nothing left that speech could mend. He reminded them of earlier bargains and of the welcome they had been given on that shore. Their leader answered that the coast belonged to whoever was strong enough to take from it.

What they did afterwards was worse than theft. They took Derile, Drusticc and Nectu, and violated them. There are deeds that grow no clearer through description. It is enough to say that the sisters survived, and that nothing in Dunnicar remained as it had been before.

Talorc’s warriors gathered with axes, spears and fishing knives, demanding that he lead them down to the beach before the raiders could withdraw. He stood among them with his own axe in his hand and would not give the order. Rage had made them forget how few they were. Talorc had not forgotten.

The Anglians returned to their ships before nightfall, carrying what they had stolen and laughing across the water. They posted men to watch the paths from the hills, certain that any attack would come from the land. Fires burned on their decks, and the sound of drinking carried over the bay. They meant to come ashore again at first light and empty whatever stores remained.

All that night, their watchers faced Dunnicar, yet none of them looked down.

Derile found her father after the fires had burned low, standing outside the house with his axe in his hand. She had been washed and wrapped in wool by her mother’s sisters, but there was bruising at her throat and one side of her face had begun to swell. Even so, it was not herself she spoke of. Drusticc had finally slept, she told him, and Nectu had stopped trembling whenever a man crossed the doorway. By morning, perhaps, they might eat.

Talorc listened as he looked across the bay, where the Anglians’ fires flickered across the dark water. Derile saw the direction of his thoughts and came closer, taking hold of his arm as she had done when she was a child, fearing he would leave with the boats.

“Do nothing foolish,” she said. “We have lost enough.”

He placed his hand over hers and held it there for a moment, though he gave her neither promise nor farewell. Then he sent her back to her sisters. No one saw him leave Dunnicar. By the time the moon rose clear of the clouds, he was already walking north along the shore, towards the stack and the deep water beyond it.

No one had followed Talorc to the rocks, and no living person saw what passed between him and the sea. What I tell now is what was told to my father, and to his father before him, drawn from the axe found there and from words older than any hand that later carved the stones. The words may have altered, but the bones remain.

Talorc reached the stack when the tide was rising. Beneath the cliff, the water washed across the lower stones of the path in long black folds. He climbed until he stood above the reach of the waves, where the oldest marks had been cut into the rock by people whose names were gone even then.

Every chief of Dunnicar had been brought to that place and taught what lived beyond it. They were told never to call unless the settlement faced a ruin that no spear, bargain or sacrifice could prevent. They were told that the Og Mori would not serve a man and could not be commanded. It would answer only if the caller gave himself entirely, with no hope of returning to the shore.

Talorc had carried that knowledge all his life. Now he stood alone and spoke the name into the dark.

For a time, nothing answered. The sea moved as it always moved, striking stone and drawing back through weed and shingle. Then the water beyond the stack grew still. The tide continued to rise along the shore, but in that one place the surface flattened until it held the moon without breaking it.

Something rose beneath the reflection.

Those who first told the tale could not agree upon what they had imagined from the wreckage and the marks left in the bay. Some said the Og Mori bore a neck like a horse, though no horse had ever bent in that way. Some gave it the length of a serpent and the back of a great fish, but these were only the nearest things their tongues could find. It belonged to the deep water before men had names for what lived there, and no telling has ever made it smaller or more familiar.

Talorc did not flee. He knew what had answered him and why.

The Og Mori came close enough that the water lifted around the rock. Talorc set his axe down upon the stone. He placed it carefully, with the blade turned towards the land, and removed his cloak. Then he stepped from the rock into the sea.

The cold reached his knees, his waist and his chest. He kept walking until the water closed over his shoulders and only his head remained above it. Whatever words were spoken then have not survived. Perhaps none were needed. The price had been known before either of them came to that place.

Talorc took one final breath of the air above Dunnicar.

The Og Mori moved beneath him. The water rose around him, and something pressed against his legs. Then his feet left the rocks and he did not sink.

The cold reached past skin and muscle, and Talorc felt his hands open, though he had not willed them to. He felt his chest expand beyond the breath he had taken, as though something larger were breathing through him. Along his arms and across his back, the flesh drew close against the bone and then closer still, until he could no longer tell where his body ended and the water began. There was a sound like stone splitting very slowly beneath the earth. It was the sound of one thing becoming two, or two things becoming one.

The last thing that remained of Talorc as his people had known him was his face, held above the surface for a moment longer than the rest. His eyes were open. Whether they still saw Dunnicar, or the stars, or something that no human eye was made to recognise, the tellers have never agreed.

Then the sea closed over him, and the Og Mori turned towards the bay.

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The first ship broke before any man aboard it understood that there was danger beneath him. Those keeping watch had their faces turned towards Dunnicar, where the settlement fires could be seen in the dark, and they saw no movement on the paths from the hills. Behind them, the men who had spent the evening drinking lay on the decks, with their weapons close.

The water beneath the stern lifted without a wave. The ship rose with it, slowly enough that one of the watchers turned, puzzled by the change beneath his feet. Then something struck the hull from below.

The sound carried across the bay. Those who heard it afterwards said it was like a tree splitting in winter, though louder and deeper, with the whole sea seeming to shriek in reply. The stern sprang apart. Men woke beneath a rush of black water, clawing at planks and one another while the ship settled beneath them.

The other crews called out, but the darkness gave them nothing. They saw broken timber and men struggling among it. They heard one scream cut short when something passed beneath the surface, drawing the swimmer down so quickly that his hands vanished before the others could reach him.

Torches were raised. Their light trembled across the water and showed a long disturbance moving between the ships.

Some said later that they saw a broad back break the surface, slick and dark, with ridges that caught the firelight before sinking again. Others swore there was a head above the water, narrow as a serpent’s and large enough to look over the side of a ship. No two accounts agreed, because frightened men carry away whatever their fear permits them to see. They agreed only that it was vast, and that it moved towards them with purpose.

The second ship tried to turn for open water. Men threw themselves upon the oars, striking one another in their haste, while their leader shouted for the sail to be raised. They had spent the night watching the land because they believed vengeance must come with feet, shields and shouting. Now the thing beneath them moved without challenge or warning, and nothing they had brought from Bernicia could reach it.

An oar jerked from a rower’s hands. Another snapped against the hull. Then the Og Mori rose alongside them.

Whether Talorc still knew his own name, no teller can say. Enough remained for him to know those ships and the men upon them. Enough remained to remember Derile’s bruised face, Drusticc lying sleepless beneath her aunts’ blankets, and Nectu trembling at every footfall. What remained was not thought as men understand it. It was recognition stripped of patience, judgement and restraint.

The Og Mori struck the ship broadside. The hull rolled so violently that men fell across the benches and over the rail. It struck again, and the planks opened. Water poured through the breach faster than hands could close it. Some leapt into the bay rather than wait to be taken down with the ship, but the sea offered no escape. The darkness moved beneath them, turning sharply from one struggling body to the next. Men were lifted and gone. The water closed over each of them with scarcely a mark left behind.

Those aboard the third ship cut their rope and pushed away from the others. They raised the sail badly, with half the crew pulling and the rest looking back at the wreckage. Their leader stood at the stern with his sword drawn, shouting threats towards a creature he could not see. When the water behind them flattened, his voice failed.

The Og Mori followed.

It came beneath the ship with such force that the mast bent and the sail collapsed across the deck. Men hacked at the cloth, trapped beneath it while the hull lurched forward. Something seized the steering oar and dragged it from its fittings. The ship turned helplessly towards the rocks.

Then the creature rose among them.

The oldest tellers did not attempt to give it a single form. They spoke of a neck that curved above the deck, of limbs moving where no limbs should have been, of a mouth pale within and wide enough to take a man without closing. They spoke of water running from its body in sheets, and of eyes in which nothing human could be found. Yet they also said it did not wander among the ships or strike blindly. It knew its work.

The mast broke. The deck split beneath the weight of what had climbed upon it, and the Anglians who had survived the first assault threw themselves into the remaining boat or clung to fragments of the hull. A few reached the open sea in a damaged vessel that had remained farther from shore. They did not turn back for the drowning, nor for the men calling their names. They pulled south until their hands bled and the cries behind them were lost beneath the sound of timber breaking.

When the Og Mori was finished, no whole ship remained in the bay. Wreckage drifted towards Dunnicar, carrying shields, barrels, broken oars and the dead. The sea continued to churn long after the last living raider had fled. Then, the sea became still.

◆ ◆ ◆

The next morning the people of Dunnicar met the tide. No wind moved across the bay, and the water carried the wreckage in slowly, laying broken planks, shields and bodies along the shore as though it were returning borrowed objects.

The men went down first, armed though there was no enemy left to face. They found three ships broken beyond repair and another gone south beneath a torn sail, if the watchers on the headland had seen rightly. Of the Anglians who had remained in the bay, none lived. Their weapons lay among the weed, useless now, and the goods they had taken from Dunnicar washed back in sodden bundles or sank where the water had scattered them.

Talorc was nowhere among the dead.

Derile came to the shore with Drusticc and Nectu beside her, though their aunts tried to keep them back. She asked where her father was, and no one answered, because by then the first men had already begun searching the paths beneath the cliffs. They climbed the stack, searched every hollow in the rock and sent boats along the coast, calling his name into caves and narrow inlets where the tide might have carried him.

They found no body, no cloak and no mark of a struggle. On the high rock above the water they found only his axe, laid with the blade turned towards the land.

Derile knew then that his silence had been a farewell. She did not weep before the others, for Drusticc and Nectu were watching her, and there was still grain to recover, damage to mend and a settlement looking to the daughters of its chief for some sign that life would continue. In time, all three women married and raised children within sight of that same bay. They were not left untouched by what had been done to them, but neither were they ended by it, and much of Dunnicar in the years that followed came through their blood.

Ida’s men never returned to that shore. Traders came again, cautiously at first, but no armed ship from Bernicia entered the bay.

The settlement prospered, though Talorc did not return to rule it. His people had been saved, his daughters avenged, and the coast made safe, yet every gain carried the space where he should have stood. For many years, when a boat came home at dusk, there were still those who looked beyond it towards the stack, hoping to see a man walking out of the sea.

In the years that followed, the people of Dunnicar raised two stones above the bay, where every boat returning from the north could see them. On the first they carved Talorc as he had been, standing upright with the axe in his hand, for that was how they wished to remember their chief. A man of the shore, watchful, steady, and answerable to his people. The axe itself had been found upon the rock where he left it, and though no hand could restore what had gone into the sea, this mighty symbol of Talorc’s strength could be returned to his kin.

Upon the second they carved the Og Mori. No one claimed to know its true form, and those who had seen the battle from the land had seen only darkness moving through darker water, the rise of a back, the turn of something vast beneath the ships. So the carvers worked from terror, wonder and the oldest descriptions, making a creature that belonged to no known kind. It was not Talorc, and yet they understood that some part of him remained within it.

I tell this because we learned it from the daughters who stood upon that shore. Whether my blood comes through Derile, Drusticc or Nectu, I cannot say, for names are sometimes lost where truth survives. One of them carried this tale forward, and through her it came to me.

Talorc has forgotten much beneath the water. Perhaps he has forgotten his own face and the voices of those he loved, but he has not forgotten Dunnicar. When the sea beyond the stack grows still before a storm, we do not bar our doors or call the children inside.

We look towards the water and remember that something is still keeping watch.

The Og Mori is there, and it remembers.

I welcome polite comments. If you enjoyed this tale, then you may also enjoy The Vanishing of Spearhafoc