The Wreckers by Iain Lawrence Page A

always been Eli. Plain old Eli. And all this land is half his.”
    We passed through the hedgerows and started up the slope of the valley. We were heading north, away from the sea. “Then why,” I asked, “does he live in that little cottage?”
    “Years ago, they both did. Oh, once the Mawgans had a lovely place, but they lost that in a fire. When the wrecking started, Uncle Simon built the new house on the ruins of the old one. Eli is the only man I know who never touched a thing from the wrecks. He worked in the ground, in the mines, for his shilling a day. He called it honest work; you can see what it did to him.”
    I said, “He didn’t lose his tongue in the mines.”
    “No. Eli despised the wrecking so much that one night he rode to Polruan in a storm. The wreckers had a shipembayed; they didn’t see him go. Like the wind he went, and he came back at dawn with the revenue men. They were an hour too late. The wreck was stripped, but in the moor they found a fresh grave. There was one man hanged for that—Caleb’s brother.”
    Near the top of the slope, the ground steepened. Mary panted as she climbed—it didn’t occur to me that she might be crying. And at the top we felt the wind again. It rushed at us over the moor, it came with a dry moan through the grass. And I heard a thrumming, a faint beat, that was surf on the cliffs.
    Mary stepped along the ridge, and the wind took her hair and her clothes and stretched them like streamers. “The wreckers held a court; they do everything proper. If Eli hadn’t been a Mawgan, if he hadn’t shared right of wreck, they would have killed him on the spot.”
    “So they cut out his tongue?” I said.
    She turned round, and we stood for a moment with the wind at our sides. “That’s why I have to stop this,” she said. “However I can.”
    She looked at me as though waiting, wanting me to promise to help. And when I didn’t—I couldn’t do that—she pulled away. “Come on. We’re almost there.”
    We ran east for a way, then back down the slope, to a jumble of enormous stones arranged on the moor. Four stood upright, like the walls of a shack, and the roof was an enormous slab lying at a tilt across them. In the eerie light of cloud-shadowed stars, it looked ancient and foreboding.
    “It’s a cromlech,” said Mary. “It’s the tomb.”
    “Whose?” I said.
    “Nobody knows.”
    The stones didn’t join. There were rocks heaped at the corners, but wind moaned through the gaps. We walked toward it, then in a circle round it. In a corner was an opening, a dark, gaping hole where the stacked rocks had tumbled away.
    “What’s in there?” I asked.
    “Nothing. Only dirt.”
    “I want to see.” But when I stepped up on the rocks, Mary pulled me down.
    “Don’t!” she said. “Uncle Simon says there’s a terrible curse. He says anyone who even looks in there will die within the day.”
    I laughed. “You believe that?”
    “Yes. Yes, I do,” said Mary. “But see, John? There’s carvings on the stone. Here’s your running man.”
    Even in the darkness I could see it easily. The lines were deeply carved, and I traced them with my fingers, up the legs and the body, round the head. I felt foolish. Eli hadn’t told me to run for it; he’d said, “Running man.”
    “But why?” I asked Mary. “Why did he show me this?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “You can’t always tell with Eli.”
    The stone was cool and gritty. I kept following the lines of the drawing, hoping to feel in them the secret that Eli was trying to pass on. A gust of wind whistled in the stone, like voices inside. Mary shivered.
    And a sound came to us, a hollow pop, then another.
    “Gunshots,” I said.
    “Wait,” said Mary. She clutched my arm and listened. I could see every muscle in her neck, and her eyes were staring. “Only two,” she breathed. “Thank God, only two.”
    “What does it mean?” I asked.
    Her skirts billowed like sails as the wind gusted