A ship of the dead, it coasted in on the northwest breeze, topsails still set but the yards braced for a long-lost wind on the open ocean. The yawlsmen sighted it first, on the eve of St. Beynac’s Day. It was heeling heavily, even on the slight swell, and what was left of its canvas shuddered and flapped when the breeze fell.
It was a day of perfect blueness—sea and sky vast, even reflections of one another. A few gulls flapped expectantly round the silver-filled nets the yawl crews were hauling in hand over fist, and a school of gleaming oyvips were sporting off to port: an unlucky omen. Within each, it was said, howled the soul of a drowned man. But the wind was kind, and the shoal was large—it could be seen as a broad shadow under the hull, twinkling now and then with the bright flank of a twisting fish—and the fishermen had been here since the forenoon watch, filling their nets with the sea’s uncertain bounty, the dark line of the Hebrionese coast a mere guess off behind their right shoulders.
The skipper of one yawl shaded his eyes, paused and peered out to sea, blue stone glinting out from rippled leather, his chin bristling with hairs as pale as those on the stem of a nettle. Water shadow writhed luminously in the hollows of his eyesockets.
