‘Now?’ She lowered the sweater she was mending to her lap.

‘Aye.’

‘There’s no fish to be caught by the light of this moon.’

‘True enough – it draws other things.’

‘You’ve never had to go out any of the other times.’

‘No.’ He came to her, gently drew the sweater from her hands. ‘Things aren’t as they were before. They’re all out of balance.’

She raised a hand; he took it and she grasped tightly. ‘Don’t go out,’ she whispered, fierce. ‘Please don’t. I dread it.’

He bowed to kiss her eyes, each sightless, each staring. ‘Sorry, my chick. I must.’

’Then you know you go with my love.’

‘Yes, dear one.’

The fisherman drew on the sweater. He shovelled embers from the hearth into a brazier, then filled a short clay pipe and lit it with an ember from the fire.

‘Good-night, love.’ He smiled. ‘Sing for me, won’t you?’

She raised a hand. ‘You know I do. Come back quickly.’

‘I will. Soon as I can.’

She turned her head to listen to the door, heard the wind moaning through the rocks, the ocean heaving itself against the shore with slow, insistent pressure. The door latched shut. She lowered her head and folded her hands in her lap.

The wind blew steady and chill. Clouds raced overhead – the leading banners of a solid front filling the entire south horizon. Beneath the silver eye of the newly risen moon nothing moved among the shacks perched on the barren southern shore of Malaz Isle except the fisherman picking his way down to the wave-pounded shingle. In the lashing wind his brazier flamed like a beacon. For a moment he stopped to listen; he thought he heard the hint of a hound’s bay caught on the wind. Squinting towards the south he grimaced: along the dark horizon of cloud and sea blue-green lights flashed like mast-fire. Lights that sailors claimed lured men to their doom.

He found the surf had risen almost within reach of his beached skiff. He set the brazier into an iron stand at the middle thwart, put his shoulder to the bow, then jerked away as if stung: scaled ice covered the wood like a second skin. He mouthed a curse and laid a hand against the wood. The ice melted, beading to condensation over the age-polished wood and steaming into vapour the wind snatched away. Singing low under his breath, the fisherman shoved against the prow. The skiff skimmed over the stones and he pushed on, wading into the surf up to his thighs, then clambered in.

While he pulled on the thick wood oars, he chanted a song that was old when men and women first set foot upon the island. The humped, time-worn bedrock hills shrank into the distance as if the raging wind itself had swept the island away.

With one oar he turned the skiff amid the waves, then turned around to face the stern, bow to the south. Between the skiff and Malaz, now a dark distant line at the north horizon, the sea rose in slow heavy swells as smooth as the island’s ancient hills. Hail lashed white-capped waves all around, yet none touched the fisherman’s grey hair as it tossed in the wind. Deep ocean surge, tall as any vessel, bore down on him, ice-webbed, frost and spume-topped. But they rolled under his bow as gently as a meadow slope while he crooned to the wind.