The Dead Men Stood Together Read Online Free

mother. ‘I’ve never wanted more.’
    My uncle smiled.
    ‘I know you haven’t,’ he said and he winked at me. My mother saw it and scowled.
    My uncle leaned over and gave her a kiss.
    ‘Peace,’ he said again. ‘I’m teasing you. Some are made to wander and some not. There’s no right or wrong. We’re all made different.’
    My mother smiled, but I knew that smile – it was a keeping-the-peace smile. It said, ‘I have more to say, but I’m choosing not to.’ I knew it well and I had the impression that my uncle had seen it a few times himself.
    He proved himself to be a man who is happy with the sound of his own voice, and we were happy listeners, as he told of his adventures in exotic places we had scarcely heard of.
    We’d not quite heard the story of each scar he chose to show us, when my mother said that she must away to bed and that I must do the same, for we had a buyer coming by close after dawn to collect some crabbing pots.
    My uncle declared he was tired too, but refused my offer to give him my bed, saying that he wasn’t sure he could sleep in a bed after years of sleeping on rocks and in ditches and the holds of rat-infested ships. He swore that our barn would be luxury in comparison. And with more embraces and a noisy yawn, he said his goodnights and retreated to the barn.
    I went to my room and looked out of my window, out past the roof of the barn in which my uncle made his rest and towards the woods and the hermit. All the warm glow that had built up in our kitchen seemed to drift out through that round window and be replaced by a sudden chill.
    The words of the pilot’s boy came back to me and, though I should not have let his foolish talk upset me, it did. I spent a restless night, my dreams troubled by those pictures scrawled into my uncle’s skin and by the thought of the air alive with demons.

IV
    I woke very early, before anyone else stirred, and lay in my bed in a waking dream and ahead of me, in my dreaming, was the open ocean. I had always felt in my heart that this was where my future lay. The menfolk of our family had all been mariners for as long as anyone could recall.
    And I don’t mean fisherfolk. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve nothing against fishermen. They are brave enough and do a job that’s needed. But I’m talking about true mariners here.
    My family had sailed the seven seas. They’d served in the navy and fought for their country. They’d crewed merchant ships trading with distant empires. They’d seen things most men only dream of – and more than a few things that most men would be glad to dismiss as a nightmare and nothing more.
    My own father was a mariner and, like so many of that kind before him, had lost his life to the sea, swallowed up by it in a storm that likewise took the lives of most of his crew. I knew many of them and had known them since I was a little boy and my mother had taken me down to the harbour. I would be there to see my father sail out and cheer him as he came home.
    I couldn’t wait to get a chance to climb aboard my father’s ship and would have sailed away with him when I was five, had he or my mother let me. I sailed with him often on shorter voyages and learned many of the skills and crafts of sailing men. I should have sailed with him on his last and fatal voyage, but I was ill and could not go.
    Another ship saw my father’s go under and, though they tried to come to their aid, the seas were too high and they managed to pick up only a handful of men, and my father was not among them. I was twelve years old when we heard of his death.
    The news hit my mother like a bolt of lightning. She cried and cried until I feared she would never stop, and in looking after her and looking after the business when she was too beaten down to work, I could hide the fact that I did not feel the same pain.
    I did feel pain, but it was a bitter pain – it was the pain of feeling I had never really known my father and that now I never could.