Water by Peter Dickinson, Robin McKinley Read Free Book Online

would
    have come sooner or later. But when trouble came, it was grievous.
    Three generations of land-people ago, a greedy merchant had cheated the sea-people who had
    rescued him from drowning, and they had been angry. But when they asked the town councillors
    to right this wrong, the town councillors had said that as the merchant was of the land, like
    themselves, they would not decide against him.
    The sea-people are no more cruel than those on land. But they had lost several of their own in the
    storm that had foundered the false merchant’s ship, and they guessed—correctly—that the landmerchant’s faithlessness was for no better cause than a desire to recoup financially. So then the
    king and queen of the sea-people had let their wrath run free, for they had asked for redress to be
    offered honestly and had been denied.
    The water had risen in the harbour and beaten against its walls till all the ship docks were washed
    away. And the sea-people said: This is what you have earned, for your greed and your treachery,
    that this kind harbour shall never be kind to you again, and the merchant trade of which you have
    been so proud is denied you for as long as the sea-people shall remember you and your decision,
    and the sea-people’s memory is long. If any shall set a boat in this harbour, it shall be
    overturned; and if any shall set foot on the bridge at the head of the harbour, then shall a wave
    rise up and sweep them off and into the sea where they shall drown, as your merchant might
    have done.
    And so it was. At first the towns, who had been rich and fat for a long time, could not believe it;
    and they set to work rebuilding the docks, and repairing their ships, and repaving the bridge at
    the head of the harbour, and they grumbled as they did it, and particularly they grumbled at the
    greedy merchant who had brought them to this pass. But in a year’s time they had all but
    bankrupted themselves, all the merchants of both towns, and the banks that had loaned them
    money, and the outfitters that had provided the goods; and there were no longer any workers who
    would take jobs on docks or ships either, because there had been too many freak waves, too
    many sudden storms, too many drownings.
    Over the three generations since then, the towns had shrunk back from the harbour, and looked
    inland for their commerce, and the farmers, who had once been considered very much inferior to
    the merchants of the sailing trade, were now the most important citizens. The merchants and
    bankers and outfitters either died of broken hearts or moved away; and the hired workers learned
    to cut a straight furrow instead of a straight mast, and the sailors mostly went north or south,
    although a goodly number of them, too, went inland, and became coopers and cordwainers. It
    was said that the original merchant who had caused the trouble changed his name, and took his
    family to the other side of the world, but that bad luck had pursued him even there, and he had
    died in poverty.
    Jenny’s family had been farmers on their farm for many generations, and were little touched by
    the change in their status. They were farmers who cared about farming, and what the people
    around them thought of farming seemed to them only amusing, because everyone must eat, and
    that is what farming is for. Perhaps they had a few more cousins on the town council in the three
    generations since the collapse of the sailing trade than they had previously, but this did not
    greatly change their outlook either, so long as the towns continued to provide markets and fairs,
    and enough hungry and prosperous folk to buy farm produce. There had never been any sailors
    or fisherfolk in their family, and they believed in their blood and bone that the sea was an
    unchancy thing at best, and better left alone. Even the tale of the sea-people’s curse could not stir
    them much; it was too much what they would expect of sea-people, had they ever thought about
    it.
    A