Shush, shush, don’t worry, don’t fuss now. I’m here, momma’s here, you can stop worrying and crying.
Yes, yes, you’re all alone now, you’re too old for your crib. You sleep in the high bedroom like a child should now, like a big grownup child. And that’s scary. I understand that it’s scary. To be so high above the house, to be nearer to the gulls than to your parents. To be alone.
Yes, yes, it’s not fair. It’s not fair that your hammock is your home, and it rocks in the night wind that blows through the holes where there should be wholes, the ragged gaps where windowframes were.
But listen.
Listen close now, listen clear, and I will tell you why it is this way. Why it matters.
A long time ago, right here…
There was a great storm blowing out from the brightreefs. Scary, yes? But not so dangerous. Your great-great-grandma was clever, and so were all her friends – the men had warned them of the signs coming down from the birds and the clouds and they’d all tucked their boats deep inside the cliffs, stopped up the knotholes with great big stones. Then they slammed their shutters and furled their windmills and called down the children and they spent their nights in the hearth-room praying over the little oil lamps. They were smart, and they stayed safe. Only a very few boats belonging to careless and lazy people were broken, and nobody drowned or was blown down below to the waves. It was very safe.
Then everyone came out in the morning, found the sun floating all soft in the sky high above the old steeple, and we saw there had been a very strange thing. Do you know what your great-great-grandma saw, dearest?
Yes, that’s right – a ship! A big ship, a strange ship. It was nearly bigger than the village, its cabin was broader than two houses put together, its mast was a stump but it was still bigger than anything they’d ever put on a boat. It was a strange ship. And on its deck, sitting half-bent with her left knee bandaged, was a strange person. She was more than thrice as tall as your great-great-grandma – who was a very tall woman, as you know – and she was much too blue, not nearly as green as a sailor should be.
So your great-great-grandma and everyone went down to meet her, all at once, and everyone all stood still and stared.
“Hello, small, strange people,” said the strange person. And we all said hello back, and asked her who she was, and if she’d come far, and if she was in trouble.
“I am a voyager, an explorer, a navigator, and a sailor,” she said. “I am my own admiral. And yes, and yes. My mast is destroyed and my knee is crookt, my lenses are shattered and my larder is bare. I will be stuck here ‘till winter storms drive down and dash my ship to splinters. I ask for help to set me on my way.”
And this made everyone very nervous, smallness, because they’d never tried to fix anything so big before, and so fast, and for such a person. They were not bad people, your great-great-grandma and the others, not really that bad at all. They helped their friends, and they would help their neighbours for favours, but they’d never met anyone so strange – and moreover they were much unsure of how they would be able to fix such a large ship.
“Do not fear,” said the strange person. “I will show you how to make repairs. My devices are complex but their mending is not. My needs are as any other, my food is as any other.”
They were still slow to help then, smallness. They weren’t quick to believe this strange person, and she saw that. So she spoke a little more.
“I promise you, your aid will not go unpaid. Restore my boat to me, small, strange people, and I promise that I will give you a great gift in return.”
Now, some of them were a little hesitant still, but many of them – and your great-great-grandma was one – were very interested in this gift, and they argued and argued until everyone agreed to help, although the ship was so very very big that they were nervous. You know how that feels, don’t you? You do.
So they made it smaller by turning it into a list. A list of things to do and fix and patch.
First on the list was the strange person’s belly. Her food was all spoilt or overboard three days now, and she was starving. And what’s more, when they offered her their catches from the dimreefs, she refused them.
“These are too heavy,” she told them. “They click too strongly. I would be bleeding in a week and dying in a month. Is there no other food here? Food from farther inland, away from the reefs?”
No-one was sure. Inland was where the men spent their time, and they were always too busy weaving and timbering to look for food. That wasn’t their job.
…At least, that’s what your great-great-grandma and the other women told the strange person. Then they went home and called a meeting underneath the old steeple with their men because they saw they all looked very uncomfortable, and by wheedle and needle they got it out of them that there were special roots, very small little round ones with green leafy stems, and the men liked to eat them when they were out at work and tired. Oh, those clever, selfish little men – don’t grow up to be that way, will you? Will you? Oooh, you won’t, will you? Good child!
So that afternoon a bunch of the laziest men were sent out with blistered ears and they came back with great baskets of this root, which they baked wrapped in clay and leaves in fires, and the strange person ate them all.
“These do not click,” she said. “They are good.” And the women heard that and gave the men a few more words. You can learn them when you’re bigger, smallness. They’re not good ones. The men were passing sore about that, and they mumbled that they ought to get an extra share of the gift when it came, to pay back for losing their secret snack.
Second on the list were the lenses. They were big and brilliant and there were dozens, all held in a row by a big brass frame that spun them around and around each other and turned the globe they hovered about a thousand shiny colours.
At least, that’s what she said they did. They were all broken, each and every one, and the brass frame was nothing more than a big pile of hinges.
“For finding hot spots that click fast and loud,” she said, and she showed them the slivers of green, red, blue, and more. “They broke on your brightreefs when the storm carried me over. Without them I will have more disasters. What if I were to sail over a far-away place like your brightreefs but bigger, small, strange people?” Brrr, you’re right they all shivered at that. Brrrr. Don’t go imagining places like that, will you? Don’t worry. If there are any, they’re far away and can’t hurt anyone. Brr.
We searched long and hard up and down the town, but we found nothing. Glass is hard to make, smallness. Then a particularly lazy man who’d had a particularly long earful (he was your great-great-grandpa, yes he was) pointed up, up, up at the high rooms of the houses and asked about the windows.
“Yes,” said the strange person. “They should do nicely.”
Well there was a big row and a big huff – no windows for their children made the women awful mad, I can say that much. But they were perfect, just perfect – their shuttering would make the lenses work even better, said the strange person. So in the end the windows came off the high rooms of almost every house in town, and they went into boats, which went to the ship, where their frames were hammered into proper shape by the strange person until they fit the globe as well and as fine as could be. And the men were a bit happier, if the women were a little grumpier.
“This gift had better go a bit more our way than yours now,” they said. “You can find more tubers like that, but where’s our windows? We deserve better things now.”
Third on the list was the strange person’s leg. It hadn’t been there before, but it had been almost a week and her knee still would not bend.
“I cannot sail with one leg crookt, small, strange people,” she said. That’s true, isn’t it? Nobody can, it’ll have you overboard when you hit a bump as quick as blink. Like that – see? “It needs splinting.”
That now – that was right easy, smallness. They took a hammer in the hands of the strongest lumberjack man and they took the strange person’s leg in the arms of the two strongest hauler women and they put them together – BANG until that bad mend snapped. Then the two women splinted the leg with the straightest beam they had – the mast of the tallest boat in the village. They snapped it in two and it was just barely long enough to cradle the strange person’s leg kindly. Oh, your great-great-grandma gritted her teeth long and hard over that! Oh she did! But she took saw to timber herself and cursed great-great-grandpa when he offered to help – did it all in one go. She said the gift held her aim straight. The gift in her head.
Fourth was the bodywork. Oh, that strange person’s ship soaked timber, smallness. They had to haul it off the stones it had settled on with long, long poles – she helped too, one-legged though she was – then they had haul it onto the shore until it was seaworthy, then they had to add more rocks to the dock so it’d be deep enough to hold it. Oh that ship ate days and turned the nights short, like winter and summer come at once! She helped with hammers and with words and as her leg came back under her she spent more and more of it moving, always moving, walking up and down the town and into the hills where women weren’t supposed to be, looking for a new mast for the ship, looking for something that stood tall.
That was the fifth thing, and it was almost winter, child of mine. They had to finish soon, and there were no trees big enough. The strange person was stumped, and everyone was in a fit – all that work for nothing if they couldn’t get the mast ready for her! So they got together under the old steeple and they all agreed to look. All the men went out into the hills and forests and the women put to water and went down the coasts and they hunted all day for two days, and when they came back at night – empty-handed, empty-storied, every one! – they staggered home to meet again, under the old steeple.
And then your great-great-grandma looked up and said this, I remember she said exactly this because she told this story to my grandma a hundred thousand times, she said this: “Hey! We found it!”
So they took down the old steeple, because otherwise they would have helped the strange person for nothing at all, and they shaved off its old decorations and trimmed out its elder carvings and rubbed off the little marks the birds had left on it. And it was a little bit short and a little bit wide, but the strange person said that was good. “It will be sturdier than my last mast,” she said, “and this one has been proven in many gales, even in the same that wrecked me.” And she was right.
Not more than a week from that, all was done. The ship didn’t gleam, smallness, but it still shone there in the early morning. It shone especial bright in the eyes of everyone, because most of them had been up all night waiting in excitement, like you did on your birthday last night. When you became a child, wasn’t that nice? It was like that for all of them. So they were twitching and hopping and wincing in the cool dawn when the strange person walked down from the heights one last time, loading the last basket of the little tubers the men had shown to her. She walked down the steps six at a time, leg straight, and parted the crowd like this – woosh! – like a big fish through little minnows. She walked up the gangplank – boom boom boom – and stood there, her right foot on the boat, her left foot still waiting. And she turned to us.
“Thank you,” she said.
We waited there, all huddled up, and people made that mumbly sound they do in big parties. You know, like mmuururmrmrurmrurm. Murururmrm – yes, like that. And then up stepped your great-great-grandma, and she said what they were all saying a lot clearer, and she said this.
“What about it?”
The strange person tilted her head a little at her. “About what?”
“What about the gift?” asked your great-great-grandpa.
“Yes, the gift!” said your great-great-great-grandpa, who was old and cranky. “What is it? Where is it? Is it in the boat? I know we looked in the boat.”
“It is not in this ship,” said the strange person, “and I do not cheat. Do you wish it now, then?”
“Yes!” said everyone all at once and all past each other, some of them pushing to see properly. “Give it to us! We earned it!”
“Then do not worry, small, strange, kind people, for I have already given it to you, though it took much effort to install – and you yourselves have already repaid it.”
“What is it?” we asked – from the dock, from the windows, from the cliffs. “What is it?”
“Generosity,” she said.
And she kicked the plank loose from the dock with her foot and drifted away, already moving to hoist the sails into the fresh sunlight.
And that’s why your bedroom has no window, smallness, and neither did mine, nor your grandma’s.
So you’ll know how to behave properly when the next stranger comes.