The Shadowy Horses

"What happened?"

"Well, it's a point of honor, like, that if the one boat goes out all the rest go, too. So at eight in the morning they sailed from the harbor and made their way out to the fishing grounds. Four hours they fished, then at midday the sea changed. It was the stillness that warned them ... a horrible stillness ... but afore they could move the whole sky turned to black and the wind rose up screaming and wild."

She pointed to the first panel of the tapestry. Against the vivid blue background of the sea, two terror-stricken fishermen clung desperately to the lines of their sinking vessel, struggling to guide it into shore. "Whole boats were tossed up from the water, their masts torn away, and their sails ripped to shreds, and the sea took the ones who were heading for harbor and dashed them apart on the rocks. Those on the shore tried everything—tossed out lines and made human chains, reaching out hands for the struggling men, but the waves took them anyway."

I stared, transfixed, at the tapestry's second panel, a more symbolic rendering of the tragedy, with seven childlike figures scattered around the outline of a boat, watched by a wailing line of human-faced cliffs. "How terrible."

"Aye. One hundred and eighty-nine men were taken in the Disaster, from all four local harbors—Burnmouth, Cove, St. Abbs and Eyemouth. That's what the four maps show, in this third section. And the sea wall, just here, has one stone for each Eyemouth man lost. One hundred and twenty-nine stones," she gave me the tragic count. "Half the men of the town gone, and all in one day. That was the toll of the Eyemouth Disaster ... October the fourteenth, eighteen-hundred-and-eighty-one.''

Embroidered with painstaking care on the tapestry were the names of all the fishermen who died in the Disaster, along with the names of their boats. It made a chilling record.

I stood a moment, deeply moved, reflecting on the ironies of history. Nearly two thousand years ago, if Quinnell's theories were right, another group of men had faced their own Disaster day in this same place—men who spoke a different language, served a different god, but who had dreams and wives and mothers, like the fishermen of Eyemouth.

And the shadowy horses had come for them, too, to carry them off to the land of the dead. I had a sudden and disturbing sense of something evil, undefined ... some dark and vengeful entity that lay in wait to ambush all who passed this way, whether they travelled by land or by sea, chasing men down through the centuries.

The silence clutched at me and held a moment, and then Jeannie nudged me forward to the light, and shaking off the foolish vision I turned my back to the Eyemouth Tapestry and the terrified stares of its drowning men.

The weather had cleared a little by the time Jeannie and I finally left the museum. In the car park, we found Wally Tyler waiting for us.

He pitched his cigarette away when he saw us coming, and Kip, at his heels, jumped up joyfully. Behind them, through the thinning mist, I saw the long dark promontory where the Fort had stood, jutting out into the waves, and below that the waves themselves, white-capped and swirled by salt-sprayed wind that carried still the bone-chilling dampness of rain.

"Heyah," Jeannie greeted her father. "Where's Robbie?"

"Asleep in the car."

"Wore him out, did you? Where did you go?"

"Round aboot. Had a few pints, like, wi' Deid-Banes."

"Oh, aye? Well, we'd best get the two of you home, then."

The collie, soaking wet, brought an indefinable odor into the car, and Jeannie wrinkled her nose. "Och, Kip, you're mingin."

I sniffed myself, and decided that "mingin" was one word I needn't look up in my dictionary. "Deid-Banes," though, was something different. I flipped the pages casually, eventually translating the term into the equally unhelpful English "Dead-bones."

Jeannie, glancing in the rearview mirror, fixed her father with a stern accusing eye. "Granny Nan smoked a cigarette this morn."

"Oh, aye?"

"You gave it to her, didn't you?"

The old man shrugged, all innocence. "I might have left yin lying aboot, where she could find it."

"But Dad, the doctor said—"

"I mind whit the doctor said," he cut her off, his gray eyes unimpressed. "But Nancy Fortune's always done as Nancy Fortune pleases, and she wasna in the grave last time I looked."

Two hours later, sipping tea with Peter in the cozy red-walled sitting room, I learned that his opinion took a slightly different twist.

"A difficult woman," he mused, with a shake of his head. "Most difficult. She simply will not listen to advice, you know. She never has. Her doctor says she must slow down, but Nancy . .. Nancy never listens."

He'd been drinking, from the looks of it. The glass beside his teacup held a half-inch of clear liquid that I guessed would not be water. But his sigh implied his own health habits were above reproach, a pure example to be followed, if only David's mother would be reasonable ...

"Well, she looked perfectly healthy to me," I said. “I quite liked her. And I liked the museum, it's very well organized."

“You saw the tapestry, of course? The Disaster tapestry?''

"Yes."

"They do remember their Disaster, here in Eyemouth." Scooping Murphy from the arm of the leather chair, he re-positioned the creature so it draped across his knees. "Not that I've a problem with people living in the past," he went on, stroking the black cat absently. "I'm all for it, actually. · My Irish blood, perhaps." He smiled. "I've always liked what that one writer said—that chap who wrote Trinity—"