Forever Shores Read online

  ‘Princess, I, William, am sent by the Gods to serve and guard you in this strange shadowland, until we are shown the way home by such signs and portents as I am trained to recognise. I pledge my life to you.’

  Twelve years old, with one slightly turned eye, a broken front tooth, ripped shorts and a too large cast-off T-shirt advising the world to ‘Be happy’, and here he was pledging his life to her.

  He had a collection of T-shirts abandoned by the drug addicts and drunks who came to stay at Goodhaven to dry out. The weird thing was that those T-shirts always seemed to have something pertinent to say about what was happening when he wore them, and in the end, she came to see them as signs, just as William saw as signs a certain bird flying overhead, or a particular rock resting against another.

  Hearing his absurd pledge, she had experienced a fleeting instinct to laugh out of nervousness or incredulity. That would have changed everything. Life could be like that sometimes—hinging on one tiny little thing or other. But she hadn’t laughed because underneath the urchin dirt and crazy talk, she had seen a reflection of her own aching loneliness.

  ‘Are you sure you have the right person?’ she had said, instead of, ‘Are you crazy?’ But it was close. They even started with the same words.

  ‘You are Princess Ragnar,’ he had said.

  Those words sent a shiver up her spine, even after so much time. Because she had never seen him before. Then there was how he said her name—as if he was handling something infinitely precious. No one had said it like that before in her whole life except maybe her mother, though perhaps that was just a memory born of wishful thinking.

  ‘How do you know my name?’ she had demanded.

  He had grinned, flashing the chipped tooth that she later learned had been broken when he’d happened on a drying-out drunk who had managed to drink a whole cupboard-full of cough medicine. The Goodhaven people stocked up on everything because they thought the world was going to end any day now and they wanted to be prepared. Though how a hundred tins of baked beans and a cupboard-full of cough medicine was supposed to help you survive the end of the world was beyond Ragnar. The drunk’s back-handed slap had left William with the chip in his tooth that his aunt called God’s will. In fact, that was what William had told her when she’d asked what had happened to his front tooth.

  ‘It was God’s will.’ As if God had slapped him one.

  The chip was wide enough to make him talk with a lisp, but since he could still use his teeth, fixing it would have been cosmetic and his aunt and uncle eschewed worldly vanity, believing it to be one of the things that brought most of the human debris they called Poor Lost Souls to Goodhaven in the first place.

  Besides that, William was simple and it would hardly matter to the poor addled child that he had a chipped tooth when his brain was all but cracked clear through.

  Those words came to her in William’s mimicked version of his aunt’s high-pitched folksy voice. That was how she explained him away to occasional government visitors and fund-raising groups concerned about a child being exposed to the sort of people who came to Goodhaven.

  ‘Oh, he has seen much worse than anything he could ever see here,’ William had mimicked his aunt. ‘Why, his brain cracked under the pressure of seeing his mother and father murdered before his very eyes. He was there all alone a good two years before someone found him wandering around mad as a hatter.’

  William had been looked after by the same people who had murdered his parents, though no one could figure out why they would bother. Maybe it was because he was so young. He was four when his relatives had agreed to take him on.

  He was no simpleton. Ragnar had seen that right off, but he was sure as heck one strange piece of toast, and no wonder. Seeing your parents murdered would be enough to make anyone a little crazy.

  Of course, she had known nothing at all about that the first time they’d met.

  She had been swimming and had come out of the water wearing nothing but her long red hair. There was never anyone around during the week and she had been pretending to be the mermaid; trying to make up her mind whether the love of a prince would be worth the loss of her voice and the feeling that she was standing on knives every time she took a step. Especially when her father said love did not last, or else why had her mother run off and left them?

  She was trying to figure out where she had left her clothes when William walked out carrying them. He had his eyes on her face and he did not once let them drop. He just held out her clothes and she snatched them up and pulled on jeans and a sloppy paint-stained windcheater, her face flaming.

  Then he had suddenly fallen to his knees.

  Her embarrassment evaporated since she was clothed now and anyway the boy clearly had no prurient interest in her nakedness.

  She put her hands on her hips. ‘Who the heck are you?’

  ‘The gods have seen that you are lonely, Ragnar, and so I was sent to be your companion.’

  Anything she would have said was obliterated by astonishment. For she was lonely beyond imagining. Her father had forbidden her to let anyone at her school know they were living illegally in the boathouse, which made it easier to have no friends than to make up believable lies. They had been squatting since the owner had moved to America, having told her father he could use the boathouse for his dinghy if he kept an eye on it. Her father took the dinghy out maybe three times a year and she was always convinced he would drown because he never took any of the things you were supposed to take like flares or lifejackets. He didn’t have to fish since his Sickness Benefit paid for food and cask wine. He worried her sick when he went out, and she could never understand why he did it. It wasn’t even as if he ever caught anything big enough to be legal or good eating.

  Once, while they were keeping vigil for his return, William told Ragnar matter-of-factly that her father fished because he remembered when he had been a real fisherman.

  ‘He was never a real fisherman,’ Ragnar snorted. ‘He was some sort of mechanic.’

  ‘In his past life he was a fisherman and he slept with one of the goddesses. She took you away with her, but because you were part human, the gods made her send you here. As a punishment to her because she broke the rules.’

  ‘Seems to me the gods and goddesses do nothing but break rules. Look at Prometheus and Pandora.’

  ‘They are lesser gods,’ William had said with a lofty kind of pride. ‘My princess comes from an older and greater race of gods. And if he was not a fisherman once, then why does your father fish?’

  As usual his habit of suddenly circling and darting back on an argument left her gasping like a fish out of water. The thing was she did not know why her father had brought them here to this spit of flat sand between an industrial wasteland and a whole lot of salt pans and wetlands. Nor why he fished.

  Ragnar had known no other life. Not really. She sometimes remembered a mother who did not seem to have much to do with the mother her father muttered and cursed about. William had an answer for that as well. He thought that she was remembering not her mother in this life, but the goddess mother of her other life.

  ‘Then how come my father remembers me being born?’

  ‘The gods can make anyone remember or forget. They made your father remember his wife having a child—and maybe she did have a baby.’ His eyes flashed as he warmed to this theme. ‘Maybe she took their real child with her and the gods just stepped in and put you here, so he would think she left his baby. So he would take care of you and keep you out of the eye of the world.’

  William was as worried about the eye of the world as her father. William, because of his uncle and aunt’s fear of negative publicity that might affect Goodhaven’s funding sources, and her father because he did not want to be thrown out of the boathouse, or have Social Security people poking around. Sending her to school worried him because if he didn’t They would be after him—They being the Government—but if he did, people would find out where they were living. He had solv
ed the problem by sending her to school, but telling her that if anyone figured out where she lived, she would be taken away to an orphanage and locked up. That had frightened her so much she said so little at school that people thought there was something wrong with her. Fortunately integration policies, and her own consistently normal marks, kept them from trying to send Ragnar to a special school of the sort William told such horror stories about. His relatives had tried a whole lot of schools before he had managed to convince them he was too far gone for school.

  ‘I like people thinking I’m crazy. It’s easier and I know what I am inside so what they think doesn’t matter.’

  Of course as she grew older, Ragnar’s fear of the authorities was diluted to wary caution, but her father sealed her silence. He said they would never allow her to take Greedy away with them.

  Greedy was a crippled seagull William had rescued and given to her as a gift, saying that in the realm of the gods, the seagull was her personal hawk. It was so devoted, William told her solemnly, that it had followed her to this world, but in order to come to her the gods offered the proud hawk only the form of a lowly scavenger. He told her the hawk’s real name was Thorn, but secretly she nicknamed it Greedy, because it was.

  ‘Thorn is hungry because in his previous life he was starved by the gods to try to make him forswear his allegiance to you,’ William had told her reproachfully the one time he heard her calling the bird Greedy.

  William had an answer for everything. Truth was, he was a lot smarter than most of the kids and the teachers at school, at least in ways that mattered. He did not read, but he could tell stories better than any book, and he had built around the two of them a fantasy that was far more wonderful than life could ever offer. In the years since they had first met, he had been her companion and everything else she had wanted—slave, brother, confidant, friend. He had shed blood to seal his pledge though she had not wanted or asked for it, and he had promised to serve and obey, honour and protect her—with his own life if necessary.

  He had watched her for a long time to make sure she was truly the one, he told her earnestly one time as they were baking mussels in a battered tin pot of salty water on a small fire. The water had to be salty or the crustaceans tasted vile.

  ‘But how did you know in the end?’

  He shrugged. ‘I found a sign and I knew—a ring of dead jellyfish on the beach in the shape of a crown.’

  It was easier to obey William’s odd instructions than to try to understand why he thought a toilet brush in seaweed was a warning that you were being discussed, or how walking a certain way round an overturned shell could avert an accident. It was very rare that he wanted her to do anything troublesome, though once when he said they must walk along the railway lines for so many paces, she worried a lot because, if they were caught, they would end up in the children’s court. But they had done it and William claimed that was what had stopped a council van coming down to Cheetham Point to check out rumours of people living there.

  Did he manipulate events as he claimed? Mostly, Ragnar figured not, but it never hurt to take out insurance. Because there were many times when William knew things he could not know. Sometimes she would be going to catch the train and he would tell her that she would miss it, so he would wait for her in their secret place. And the train mysteriously would not come. Other times he would tell her it was going to rain when she was dressed lightly and, sure enough, by the end of the day, it would be pelting down.

  Coincidence? Maybe. Ragnar did not believe she was a princess in exile. Not really. Though she did feel as if she had been born for more than this bit of barren land. One part of her looked at her father when he was drunk with his mouth open, a thin ribbon of drool falling from his lips, and knew she had been born of nobler blood. Sometimes when she was sitting in class, knowing the answers, but never speaking out because being too smart could bring you into the Public Eye even more than being too dumb, a little voice would whisper to her that she was special and destined for greatness, just as William said.

  Sometimes when she and William sat at the very end of the land watching the sun fall in a haze of gold into the ocean, he would ask her if she felt the magic, and she would nod, lifting her chin and holding back her shoulders as regally as a princess, proud even in exile. Greedy would shiver on her lap, as if for a moment remembering his life as a mighty hawk hunter, bane of mice and small birds and even of cats.

  It had been through such a sunset of molten gold that Torvald came to them. The day was uncommonly still and a sea-mist was shot with bloody gold and red lights as the sun fell. Ragnar saw something shimmer and all at once could see a young man with golden hair flying in the wind, and a proud handsome face, coming on his boat out of the mist, and her lips had parted in breathless wonder. Then she heard the whining stutter of the speedboat engine and realised he was coming across the water to Cheetham Point from the Ridhurst Grammar School jetty.

  She felt foolish the way she always did when she entered a little too deeply into William’s world of myth and magic. Just the same, sitting in the back of the boat with one hand lightly on the tiller, long pale hair about his face, there was no denying he looked marvellous. She wished she could see what colour his eyes were, for her daydreams, but of course he would turn back before he reached the Point because of the shallows.

  Only he did not turn. For a moment she thought he had miraculously managed to sail over the sandbar even with the tide out, but then he had come suddenly to a grinding halt, beached until the tide rose again. After making some useless attempts to get the boat off the sandbar, he looked back, obviously concluding it was too far to swim. Then he turned to face the Point.

  I will always see him that way, Ragnar thought. Him turning that first time to face them, so tall and handsome, the sky all gold and glorious behind him.

  ‘We must help him, Princess,’ William had announced.

  Ragnar had been shocked, because one of the rules was that they should never seek out the Public Eye or any other eye. During the holidays when boat people came, they stayed away from the Point during the day, mostly within Goodhaven grounds. And they always stayed away from the rich spoiled Ridhurst students who would do anything for a dare, including tormenting a small boy.

  ‘He’s from Ridhurst,’ Ragnar hissed, remembering how William had shivered when he told her how a group of students had ridden around and around him in ever smaller circles on their roaring motorbikes.

  ‘He is one of us,’ William had announced, though he looked paler than usual.

  Ragnar stared at him incredulously. ‘One of us?’

  ‘Aye, Princess. He is the golden-haired voyager from over the sea whom you are destined to wed. His coming is a sign that the way will open soon for us to return. We must save him because there will only be one chance for all of us to cross.’

  ‘William, he is not from over the sea. He came from Ridhurst …’

  But he was running across the sand and shouting to the young man to wait and that they would help him. The handsome stranger waved back, and sat on the edge of the boat.

  ‘We’ll get the Longboat,’ William cried out over his shoulder.

  The Longboat was a slim wooden boat to which its owner hitched his larger boat when he came to the Point each Christmas. It was bolted to a post outside the shed that housed his bigger boat, but William discovered that with a bit of wriggling you could get the chain off in spite of the lock. They often used the Longboat to fish or to go for short jaunts, but never in broad daylight.

  ‘William, stop, I … order you to stop!’ She only used her Royal prerogative to stop William from his most dangerous schemes, because it did not seem fair to take advantage of his illusions that way. But on this occasion he seemed not to hear her. He was wriggling the chain out from its bolt and dragging it towards the water, straining his skinny arms.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ Ragnar muttered, then bent and helped him. The sooner they got this over with the better. They r
owed out to the sandbar and up close Torvald was as handsome as he had been from the distance. His teeth were perfectly straight and white and his eyes as blue as the sweetest summer sky. He was a picture-book prince, which may have explained what happened next.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, smiling right into her eyes. ‘Thanks for the rescue. No one warned me about the sandbar.’

  Ragnar had melted at the sound of his voice, deep and soft, with just a touch of an accent. But she managed to say, ‘It wasn’t me … I mean, William got the boat.’

  ‘I meant thanks to you both. William, is it?’ He held his hand out but William bowed.

  ‘I am William and I am the pledged protector of Princess Ragnar in her exile.’

  Ragnar could have died. Her face felt as if it had third-degree burns.

  ‘Really? Well, I am Torvald the Curious from over the seas,’ the stranger answered and bowed low to William and then to Ragnar. ‘I am pleased to make the acquaintance of the beauteous Princess Ragnar.’

  William gave Ragnar an ‘I told you so’ look as Torvald the Curious stood up and smiled at them both.

  ‘Come aboard our humble craft, my Lord Torvald, and we will bear you to shore and give you what humble sustenance we can offer in this place of exile until the waters allow you to depart,’ William said.

  Torvald’s smile deepened and without further ado, he gave their boat a push to free it from the sandbar, and climbed in. William rowed them back and Ragnar looked steadfastly towards the shore, refusing to look at Torvald whom she could see staring at her out of the corner of her eye.

  The humble sustenance turned out to be her leftover school lunch and a rather shrivelled looking trio of apples that was William’s offering. Torvald lowered himself to sit in the sand, stretching his long legs out in front of him, and when William solemnly offered him their picnic, he smiled a little and chose one of the apples.

  ‘It looks as if you were expecting me. And this …’ He held up the apple. ‘This seems appropriate, somehow.’

  ‘Truly,’ William agreed. ‘Eve offered the apple of knowledge to Adam, and Aphrodite offered an apple to Paris.’