The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fic - By Mike Ashley Page 0,70

really still a mystery, even to the people from the river mouth, though of course they would be the last people to admit it.

Jet could be quite dangerous as well. Though you could collect jet along the sea and river shores, the best jet was mined – often dangling, from an exposed cliff face. This had to be done with caution; if you were not careful, you might awake the hidden spirits that lurked in the rock faces. If they were treated wrong they would get angry and the ground around the mines might burst into fire – to show the spirits’ power and spite – and be of no use to anyone, unless, of course, you were trying to dispose of an unwanted serpent.

People like Uncle Lurgan (and her long chain of grannies stretching back into the past) on the eastern bank inherited the job of taking care of the right ceremonies for this sort of thing. It was time someone explained to Niav how and why she had lost this right when she ended up on the west side of the river.

No, Niav appreciated that her people were very special, and had been chosen by the gods because of their artistic talents and shrewd business sense, and not only for their wisdom and piety – so why this strange divide?

Aunty Grizzel summed the dilemma up. Of all the people who lived on the west bank, she was the most talented, on top of which she could look really beautiful. She might be shockingly failing in piety but she was also amazingly and universally accepted to be wise. For her, not liking strangers just for the sake of it would be particularly unlikely.

But it wasn’t all strangers, she had eventually realized; it was the group of strangers led by Artin.

Looking down at the small, blunt-prowed boat, with its steering oarsman making purposefully towards the eastern shore, Niav remembered another thing said about jet: it could keep away dogs. Aunt Grizzel disliked dogs almost as much as she seemed to dislike Artin – and there was another bit of nonsense.

Kyle had a big half-sister called Estra (she was Uncle Lurgan’s daughter but not with Kyle’s mother, Aunty Helygen. Estra’s mother had died when she was a baby). Estra could tell the most gripping stories – particularly ghost stories. There was one peculiar tale about the very first time that the people of the river-mouth had been visited by Artin. Niav didn’t know how long ago this was supposed to have been. On the few times Niav had seen Artin, he always seemed to her to be quite young.

“It was a really wild evening,” Estra said. “All the boys were up on the west cliff watching the sunset and then the sky opened and the rain came lashing down. Everyone started dashing down the pathway to get home but suddenly they saw this slip of a boat leaping from wave to wave, driven in by the storm. But it never made the harbour and crashed in under the east cliff – as boats do – and it was sucked clean under, all in a second.” Then Estra put on her creepy story voice. “Everyone was stunned. There in front of them, something horrible and dark was fighting its way in through the surge and it leapt ashore – a great black dog – and they all watched it limp out of the water and clamber, really slow, up the path by the east cliff. It seemed to have injured its back left leg.

“But the next day, they found Artin (just a boy) lying out on the hillside with a horribly mangled left knee. The bodies of the other strangers floated in all white and bloated after that.”

Niav was so taken with the story that she had told Aunty Grizzel.

“Now that must be a very old version of Artin’s first arrival – I wonder where Estra got that from?” she laughed.

“But it’s so weird – almost as though Artin’s something evil. Estra’s an idiot – she talks rubbish.”

“You’re happy enough to listen to her. She’s just got a vivid imagination. Poor child, with her mother being drowned like that – you of all people should be a bit more understanding.”

“But I’m not creepy and try to stand too close to people, or say I have got magical powers because my mother was some wise-woman!”

“Well, you could if you wanted; besides, Estra’s poor mother, Seyth, was a wise-woman – where she came from.”

“But