Wulf by Hamish Clayton

Author:Hamish Clayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742287720
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2010-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

‘These weren’t here last night,’ Kirkpatrick said again. He told me that he’d walked up and down the beach before the sun had set the night before. He said he would’ve remembered seeing such a strange and deliberate pattern. He stood there shaking his head while I said nothing. He asked me who could have put it there but still I said nothing.

We returned to where we’d made our camp and Kirkpatrick reported the curious sign we’d found further down the beach. Only a few men were there, the others having mostly returned to the ship or else, like Kirkpatrick and me, taken to exploring the beach. We led them back to the pattern, half a dozen curious men, Cowell among them. I stood near and eyed him carefully as he came upon those shells written in the sand like a letter from an unknown alphabet. I watched him for any glimmer of knowing, for the thought had occurred to me that Cowell himself had laid them there in the middle of the night. So for the second time in only a few days I found myself watching him closely, trying to detect the traces of any secret knowledge carried hidden inside him, a sign of his dark purpose. A few days before, when I’d strained to measure the sudden swerve in his way of being among us, when I thought he’d sworn a private oath against the ship and its captain, I had found no change in him. He’d stayed a ship’s man. That morning as we looked upon that pattern, white and alien on the sand, I was relieved to see that his face was as blank and confused as any of ours. I was sure he knew nothing of those shells’ mysterious authorship. He had no answer or explanation. He was still with us, it seemed. Whoever had made that artistry of shells upon the beach, it had not been Cowell. But we listened to him describe what we saw in the sand about us.

He told us that the spiral was the form of choice among the native artisans. He told us that all knowledge could be contained within and carried by a spiral. He didn’t tell us what that meant.

So it stayed on the beach as a signal we knew nothing about, a sign of arcane knowledge. We did not know who it was from or who it was for. We did not know if it was a welcome or a warning. We understood nothing of it, and yet we could not resist the temptation that it meant something. And if it meant something then we wanted to be able to read it, to translate it from its own dark time, from whichever dark mind had made it, and deliver it whole into a world of light. Above all we hated leaving the things we found unknowable. But we could not understand it and so eventually we found ourselves taking away its shells as mementoes. We drilled holes in them and wore them around our necks.

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