Her round brown face would crinkle with a smile as she went on, pretending I hadn’t spoken. “A poor fisherman’s wife. She was unhappy because her baby had died, and she had waited so long, and then to lay the poor little stranger in the ground . . . well, it was hard. The milk stung in her breasts and the tears stung in her eyes and she could not think of food or eating; she sat by the cold hearth and cried. But then—what do you think happened?”

“The fisherman found me!” I shouted.

“Shhhh. Softly, little one. Yes, it was—it was uncanny.” Her smile turned rapt, and in back of her words I grew aware of the vast sea sighing and stirring and muttering like a sleeper outside our window. “Like a miracle. The good fisherman walked down to see to his nets, and there, beached almost at his door, what should he see but a fine coracle. And in the coracle what should he find but a wee naked baby boy, cold and hungry but still alive.”

“That was me!”

“Yes, dear one, that was you.” Now there was a bright glimmer in her smiling eyes. “The good fisherman picked you up and carried you against his chest, under his tunic to warm you, and he hurried to me—”

From his place by the fire my fisherfather grumbled, “I should have seen to the coracle first.”

“Hush, you.” Fishermother spoke gently because she knew he was teasing. He was a dank, silent man, as crusty as the salt on his nets, but she had an understanding with him. She went on with the story. “He hurried to me where I sat weeping and he gave you into my arms, poor wee babe, so weak and starved that you could barely cry, yet when I offered you the breast you suckled strongly. Like a miracle. And when he turned again to the sea the coracle was gone.”

“As if it had never been.”

“As if it had never been, yes. Uncanny.”

My fisherfather growled, “The sea took it back, that’s all.”

“But the sea was calm. And never a splinter of that coracle did we see again.” My fishermother spoke almost in a whisper. “Old Lyr had heard me crying, I think.” Lyr was the god of the sea, who allowed Fisherfather’s boat on his wide slumbering chest in the summer but shook the hut with purple storms in the cold of the year; I knew the power of Lyr. “Old Lyr had grown weary of hearing my crying and sent you to dry my tears, little one.”

I lay quieted by the wonder of the story.