Free The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan Page B

with its bubbles? Then there was that other kind, harder to see in the stark dim light, like furred string, finer than the others. I laid the bundle of sleep that was my little prince in a hollow in the rock and unraveled some weed clots and tangles, some long lengths. And I began a loop-and-looping, which, when I turned after a certain length and went back along the loops, pulling more weed through and through them, became one edge of a small blanket.
    Before too long my fingers tired of being the wrong instruments for this task, and I cast up and down and found the perfect bone of some fish or seabird, with a broken-off end making it a hook, which I smoothed on the rock so it would not catch in the weed. I collected more makings, and I sat there piled about with them, taking here the fine-furred weed that sparkled wet under the moon, and now and then a strand of bubbles, and back and forth, back and forth, I knitted and knotted my son’s peacefulness up out of the night and the sea-stuff. When I had finished a perfectsquare of blanket I covered my bab with it, and wrapped him around and gathered him up, and walked wearily home through the beginning dawn.
    The seaweed blanket achieved its end, for a time, but as it dried, it soothed Ean less—though I could revive it, I found, by sprinkling it with fresh seawater or, even better, by soaking it in a bucket of the same.
    But my little one’s distress grew, and though I knitted up another blanket, so that one could soak while the other kept him calm, still he began to be never quite comfortable, never quite comforted. He drank and drank from me, all my milk and more. I was worse than slender now; women stopped me in the street to ask what ailed me, to scold me for not eating. And still the little prince of my life would not grow, but only slept or lay awake listless, making his small speaking-sounds, as if remarking, low and constantly, how this was not his world, however hard he might labor to exist here.
    I could see all too clearly what I must do. Deep in my deeps I felt the dread of it, the knowledge I fought against with my soaking of blankets, my wringing of breech-cloths, my hours of feeding him. I knew we could not go on this way.
    Finally it came time to do the impossible. Mam had come by that afternoon, throwing about orders for me to begin spring cleaning. The only door she had not flung open was mine; if she had, she would have seen the little prince in a nest of damp weed on my bed, the clean breech-cloths beside him where I’d pitched them, having snatched them from the fireside when I heard Mam greet Pixie Snaylor outside.
    Spring was coming. If I did not act, others would have toknow of this bab; Mam would have to know, and my sisters, and the town. Ean had lain unhappy for weeks, his little face creased with pain. His body would not strengthen itself by moving anymore, would not lift its own head; he only lay close, his miniature arm around my neck, only lay still, dreaming of better places, his tiny nostrils breathing the sour air off the seaweed around him.
    Night fell and the full moon rose. I unfastened my crossed bands, rolled them up and pocketed them. I picked my boy up, and I wrapped him close, and I took him down through the teeming night to Crescent Corner. Only a few seals greeted me as I came down the cliff path, but more bobbed out in the water, their heads like shawled women’s.
    I knelt with Ean, unwrapped him and kissed him. Fresh weed I took from the lip of the sea, fine as lace. I bound this round him as he gasped, around his tiny goosefleshing chest that would not breathe enough, that would not broaden and fatten like my niece’s and nephew’s. Two
X’
s I made on him, front and back, to make sure he always fled witches and men, to keep him safely in the sea.
    I kissed him again, and then I wrapped him head to toe in clean breech-cloths like a shroud; he moved inside them, inside his sleep. Around the cloths I wrapped a weed-blanket,