The Nuckelavee's Winter Tide

• Chapter 1 The Frost That Would Not Lift
• Chapter 2 Black Kelp and Frozen Soil
• Chapter 3 The Hearth Fire Dies
• Chapter 4 Whispers from the Deep Firth
• Chapter 5 Salt in the Well
• Chapter 6 The Sickle of the Moon
• Chapter 7 Red Foam upon the Shingle
• Chapter 8 Tracks of a Cloven Strider
• Chapter 9 The Scent of Rotten Seaweed
• Chapter 10 A Shadow on the Skerry
• Chapter 11 The Call Across the Swell
• Chapter 12 Skinless and Crowned
• Chapter 13 The Stench of the Pestilence
• Chapter 14 The Pact on the Black Sand
• Chapter 15 A Token of Marrow and Sea-Glass
• Chapter 16 The Longest Night Falls
• Chapter 17 Blood Upon the Snow
• Chapter 18 Voices in the Chimney
• Chapter 19 The Village Holds Its Breath
• Chapter 20 Treachery at the Roost
• Chapter 21 The Rising of the Grey Wave
• Chapter 22 Fresh Water and Burning Torches
• Chapter 23 The Wrath of the Sea-Beast
• Chapter 24 The Price of the Harvest
• Chapter 25 Dragged into the Froth
• Chapter 26 The First Thaw

The salt on the windowpane had frozen into thick, milky ferns that blotted out the grey light of the Pentland Firth. Mairi Cleid stood at the hearth, poking at a turf fire that refused to throw off any real warmth. The peat was damp, harvested late from the moss behind the village, but it was not just the quality of the fuel that made the peat-smoke settle low and sour in the room. The cold outside was different from any cold Mairi had known in her nineteen winters on the island of Hoy. It was a dense, heavy stillness that seemed to cling to the stone walls of the croft like a wet burial shroud, thick with the sharp, bitter stench of old brine.

Her father sat in the low-backed wooden chair near the chimney breast, his woollen stockings pulled high over his knees, his knuckles swollen red and raw. He was rubbing his shins with a greasy tallow rag, his joints clicking like dry twigs whenever he shifted his weight. Outside, the wind ought to have been howling through the high gap of the Ward Hill, bringing the spray off the Atlantic to scour the roof timbers. Instead, there was only the dead, heavy hush. The sea was

The iron spade struck the runrig with a sound like an axe cleaving dry whinstone. A dull jar ran up through the ash-wood handle, setting the bones of Mairi’s wrists aching clear into her elbows. She leaned her full weight against the shoulder of the blade, boots sliding in the grey rime that coated the withered grass, but the turf would yield nothing more than a shallow scar. Beneath the top layer of frost, the dirt was not merely cold; it had set into solid rock, as if the salt marshes had turned to slate overnight.

Across the ditch, Tammas work-oxen stood with their heads hung down to their knees, their shaggy brown flanks heaving in slow, shuddering breaths. The older beast had white crusts of frozen snot ringing its nostrils, and its tongue protruded, purple and thick, between its yellowed teeth. Tammas himself leaned against the timber shaft of his wooden plough, his hands stuffed into his sleeves to keep his fingers from stiffening around the reins. He spat into the frozen trench, the gob turning to slush before it hit the dirt.

"No use, lass," the old crofter shouted across the wall, his voice rattling like dry peas in an iron bladder. "The earth has gone stone-blind. You could drive an iron wedge into the rig with a sledge and get naught back but sparks to blind you. Even the tatie-pits have locked their jaws. If we cannot dig the neeps before the dark falls, we’ll be boiling leather belts by Hogmanay."

Mairi wiped her forehead with the coarse wool of her mitten, leaving a smear of damp peat-dust on her brow. She looked south, toward the low spine of the hills that ran down toward the geo. The sky was the colour of an old lead kettle, curdled with belly-grey clouds that seemed too sluggish to drift, yet neither snow nor rain fell from them. The sea had not retreated in a normal tide; it lingered out past the skerries, muttering to itself in a sluggish, churning roll that looked more like boiling pitch than clear Northern water.

"We have to get the bottom four rows lifted, Tammas," she said, her voice steady despite the shivering ache in her knees. "If the frost sets any deeper, the frost-rot will blacken the roots before we can scrape them out. My father cannot chew dry bear-meal without broth, and the meal-chest in our lean-to is three-quarters empty already."

Tammas gave a bitter grunt and pulled his ox around by its hemp halter. The beast moved grudgingly, its hooves clattering over the furrowed ground with the hollow clink of horse-shoes on cobbles. "Aye, well, your father should have laid up more barley when the sun was still yellow, instead of trusting the winter would come in kind. The Sea Mither has turned her back on Hoy, Mairi. Anyone with two eyes in their skull can see that. When the kelp rots black on the ebb and does not wash away with the flood, the water has gone sour."

He dragged his ox toward the low stone byre, the wooden runners of his sledge groaning over the frozen tussocks. Mairi did not answer him. Arguing with Tammas was like trying to turn the wind with an open barn-door; he had lived seventy winters on the shore of the sound, and every year he grew more certain that God had built the Orkneys purely to torment the people who lived upon them.

She turned her back to the wind and set the tip of the spade against the earth again, using the heel of her leather boot to drive it down. The metal bounced off the earth with a ring that set her ears humming. Beneath the surface, three inches down, lay the crop her father had put into the ground when the autumn rains were still soft: half an acre of small, bitter neeps and yellow potatoes that were meant to see them through the long, sunless stretch until the spring boats arrived from Stromness. If they stayed in the ground, the deep black frost would turn their flesh to water, and by the turn of the year they would be nothing but sacks of sour grey pulp beneath the crust.

She dropped to her knees, not caring that the freezing turf bit through the patched cloth of her petticoats, and began to claw at the edges of the trench with a short-handled grubber. The iron tines scraped and screeched against the shale, tearing out dry moss and clods of dirt that crumbled into dusty grey powder. The smell rising from the broken earth was entirely wrong. Good Orkney soil, even when the winter gales brought the salt-spray up to the very chimneys of the clachan, smelled of sweet rotting bracken, sheep-dung, and clean wet slate. This earth smelled of stagnant rock-pools, of things drowned and left to stew under summer heat until the marrow went slick and oily.

After an hour of back-breaking labour, she had loosened only four small turnips, none of them larger than a sheep’s kidney. Their skins were not the bright, purple-tinged yellow of healthy roots, but a dull, bruised slate-grey. When she thumbed the skin of the largest, it split without snapping, oozing a drop of dark, bitter-smelling sap that stung the cracked skin around her fingernails.

A sudden flutter of feathers made her look up. A black-backed gull had dropped from the grey sky, landing with an awkward, stiff-legged flop on the low drystone dyke twenty paces away. The bird did not scream or bob its head as gulls usually did when offal was about. It sat hunched, its feathers rumpled and unkempt, its yellow eye fixed upon Mairi with a flat, mindless stare. Clutched in its heavy beak was a strip of sea-tangle—not the broad, amber-brown kelp that the crofters gathered for manure, but a thick, rubbery strand of black wrack that trailed down the stones like a length of greasy gut.

Mairi threw a clod of frozen soil at the wall. The clod shattered with a sharp snap against the stones, but the gull merely blinked, shifting its webbed feet an inch to the side without dropping its prize. It seemed as heavy and lifeless as the stones it perched upon, dulled by the bitter quiet that lay over the parish.

Leaving the spade driven into the turf where it might mark her progress, she bundled the four miserable turnips into the coarse linen of her apron and stood up. Her legs were stiff from crouching, the blood crawling through her calves like melted grease. Down the slope of the hill, the small huddle of stone houses that made up the crofting township seemed shrunk in upon themselves. The roofs of heather-thatch and grey flags were weighed down with drifts of frozen rime that looked more like salt than snow. From only three of the nine chimneys did any smoke rise, and that smoke was pale, thin, and hurried, as if the air outside were too heavy to let it climb toward the clouds.

She made her way down the path toward the shore, intending to wash the bitter dirt from the roots in the burn that ran past the mill-race before she carried them back to the hearth. But as she rounded the shoulder of the sheep-fold, she saw that the burn had ceased its running.

The little stream, which came down from the peat-hags of the Cuilags and usually ran sweet, amber-coloured, and fast even in the hard frosts of January, had choked upon its own foam. Near the stone footbridge, the water had frozen into thick, tiered steps of yellow-grey ice. Beneath the upper skin of frost, the current was sluggish and dark, thick with ropes of black scum that had backed up from the mouth of the voe.

At the edge of the shingle, near where the burn emptied into the salt water, two men were standing over a wicker basket. One was Peter Mainland, the smith, his leather apron stiff with grease and his bare arms mottled blue with the cold; the other was his brother, young Jock, who carried a hazel pole tipped with a three-pronged iron fork for gaffing flatfish in the shallows.

"There is no fish in the eddy, Peter," the younger man was saying as Mairi approached over the frosted bladderwrack. "Not a flounder, not a podley, not even a sea-scorpion. I waded out to the bladder-beds at slack water, and the weed is all lying flat on the stones like greasy wool. It smells like a dog’s mouth."

Peter Mainland did not look up from the basket. He was using a broken barrel-hoop to scrape at the tangle inside. "The weed-beds have taken the rot," he said, his voice flat and level, the voice of a man who worked iron and expected little from the world beyond heat and hard blows. "Look here, Mairi."

She stopped beside the basket, the turnips heavy against her ribs. Inside the wicker frame lay a heap of tangle gathered from the tide-mark. Usually, the great kelp harvested after a winter blow was slick, elastic, and rubbery, smelling clean of the open Atlantic and rich with the salt-salts that made the barley grow tall in the summer rigs. This kelp was dead. It had turned the colour of tar, its broad fronds soft and greasy, melting into a black, jelly-like smear wherever Peter’s iron hoop pressed against it.

"It will not burn for kelp-ash," Peter said, lifting a strand that broke under its own weight and dripped a sluggish, foul-smelling liquid back into the basket. "It will not rot down for the land. If you put this upon the rigs, you would poison the seed in the furrow. It smells of the furnace."

"It smells of the deep shelves," Jock muttered, leaning on his fork and staring out toward the mouth of the sound where the grey swells broke upon the Black Skerry with a muffled, hollow thump. "My grandfather used to say that when the great winter comes—the winter that has no sun behind it—the weed dies from the roots up because the things that dwell beneath the bottom have begun to stir. He said the sea has its own rot, same as the sheep have the scab."

"Your grandfather was an old blether," Peter said, though he dropped the barrel-hoop into the basket with an uneasy clatter. "He spent forty years drinking gin out of Dutch wrecks until his brain was as soft as that blubber-wrack."

"He knew what came out of the water when the frost set in the deeps," the boy insisted. "He told me that when the sea