Devil's Rock - Chris Speyer [3]
‘Lunch?’
‘’Bout time. I’m starving!’ said Michael.
Father and starving brother disappeared into the cabin, leaving Zaki alone with the bay.
Had anything changed? Were there signs that others had been here? Trespassers?
Zaki scanned the shoreline. There were no footprints on the beach. There was some litter at the high-tide line – the usual plastic bottles and broken pieces of polystyrene that no beach, however remote, escapes. No, there was no evidence that their world had been invaded.
Ahead, the inlet narrowed to become a twisting creek – their Amazon, where pygmies with poison darts lurked behind the oak trees. To his left the ebbing tide was just revealing the low, rocky ledge with its tide-pools, those miniature underwater worlds from which twitching, transparent shrimps could be scooped in nets, and crabs tempted from their hiding places by the soft flesh of limpets tied to thin strings. To his right, on the beach, lay the giant trunk of the fallen tree that had given the inlet its family name – Dragon Pool. The remains of the tree’s roots made a snaking tail. A knotted branch arched up to form a fierce head supported on a long neck. Two more branches provided the forelegs. They had ridden that dragon, Zaki and Michael – clung to its back while its great, beating wings carried them high over snow-capped mountains. Swooped from the skies, their war cries echoing around the bay, as the dragon’s fiery breath incinerated the castles of evil wizards. At the highest tides, when only the dragon’s head and tail protruded above the water, they would climb its neck and leap from its head screaming ‘Ahhhhhh!’ – every nerve in their bodies anticipating the shock of the icy water.
‘You coming down, or do you want your sandwich out there?’
‘Should we rig the legs yet?’ Zaki asked.
Zaki’s father climbed a little higher out of the hatchway.
‘Plenty of water still and we’re in the deepest bit. We’ll do it after lunch.’
At low tide, Dragon Pool would empty to become a wide expanse of hillocked sand, pockmarked with the little blowholes and curling casts of lugworms that had burrowed to safety. At the lowest tides, only sun-warmed pools trapped between humps of sand and the narrow channel created by the flow of the Orme remained.
Any boat wishing to stay at low tide needed to be able to stand upright on the sand. Morveren, with her deep keel, would lie on her side if she weren’t held up by her ‘legs’. Grandad had taken this into account when he built her. Two lengths of timber with iron feet lived in a cradle on the cabin-top. When needed, they were bolted to the sides of the boat, the bottoms pivoting down to rest on the sand. Each leg was held rigid by ropes that ran from the feet up to the bow and stern of the boat. When the water drained away, Morveren would stand on her keel and legs looking like a small-scale Noah’s Ark waiting for the animals to troop two by two across the beach.
It was Grandad who learnt the trick of entering the Orme when, as a boy, he worked on the local fishing boats that occasionally used the estuary for over-night shelter. He taught Zaki’s father, who, in turn, was passing the knowledge on to Zaki and Michael. These days the fishing had moved further offshore and the boats were bigger. Fishermen no longer bothered with the little Orme.
There were stories, Grandad said, that in the old days wreckers used the Orme, luring ships on to Devil’s Rock to plunder their cargoes. The river got a bad reputation. Even in his youth all honest people avoided it – all apart from that woman who lived alone in the old cottage. And Zaki remembered his grandad adding, ‘Who could say if she were honest? Never spoke to nobody.’
Like a relative who had fallen from favour and was shunned by the family, the little Orme became ostracised, the world had turned its back and crept away. No road came within miles