PodCastle

* Author : Frances Rowat
* Narrator : Kaitlyn Zivanovich
* Host : Summer Fletcher
* Audio Producer : Peter Adrian Behravesh
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Previously published by On Spec magazine.


Rated PG
The Gannet Girl
by Frances Rowat
They said Castermay’s mother had held sea-glass in her mouth when she’d lain with the girl’s father, and that was why Castermay was standoffish and still, tongue weighted by salt and sand, and eyes the colour of the leeside lichen found on the chalk rocks in the saw-bladed grass. Castermay was not warmly welcome in the village longhouse where she lived with the other children who had no brothers or sisters, but her mother’s work was too valuable for her to be turned away.
Her mother lived down on the beach in a small hard house built on a flat rock between high tide and low, the roof of which was a favored perch for gannets. Four times a year, clear sky or storm, she walked into the waves and cut herself to bleed for the sea with a heavy bone knife, and so the sea within a day’s sailing was thick with life. The village sustained itself, and had more to cure with smoke or salt and trade uproad and inland, and losses to the sea were lighter than they might otherwise have been.
Castermay worked like any other child of an age to do so; she pulled in her own weight and more on the days she worked the nets, and her fingers were sure and her knots were firm, if ungainly. When she did not work, she walked the strip of rough beach between high tide and low with her mother, or spoke with the gannets that rested on the roof.
As she grew older, she came to spend more time in the village; she was quiet but not cruel, and two or three of the other children who lived in the longhouse with her came to like her well enough.
Still, most of the village wished her gone down to live between high tide and low with her mother, and grumbled more and louder as it seemed she would not choose to do so and might settle on land.
In the spring after Castermay’s fifteenth winter, her mother went out to the sea and never returned, and Castermay was turned out of the longhouse and sent to tend her mother’s empty house. If she cried, she did it in private; and if her eyes were raw and red against their odd grey-green color, it was nothing she could not have blamed on a hard day’s work, for she refused to stop working the nets. She had loved her mother, but she had not loved the loneliness of the beach, with only the gannets for company, and she did not wish to call her mother’s house her home.
Then the sea began to dry up.
It was still as wet and vast as ever, and it hushed and roared steady through the nights and long days of summer bright and storm. But the nets brought in fewer and fewer fish, and the tidepools went from scuttling to twitching and then to stillness, and the seaweed that draped and combed along the sand in the pulse of the water grew sparser.
The village traded more meanly with the ships that came close ashore, and dipped into its own stores of smoked and salted flesh.
“The sea has never been so barren,” said Castermay’s gannet, floating comfortably near her as she gathered up her net preparatory to dragging it slowly back. He was a young gannet; plucks and smears of mottled brown kept a foothold among his white feathers and circled his neck to fall upon his breast.