There was a boy who was born by a river where ships came in from every place in the world. When he grew older he went down after school to the quays where the sailors gathered and threw dice and waited for the tide to turn. He ran errands for them and brought them the news of the town, and one day a brown winking man with eyes as pale as a sea bird’s whispered the words that he longed above all things to hear.

He went back to his house, and pulled out his father’s old sea chest from under the stair, and dried his mother’s tears.

That night he stood on a ship’s deck and watched as the lights of the town disappeared and the river gave way to the sea; and he breathed that salt air for the next forty years, growing to manhood and becoming in turn a boatswain, a mate, and at last the master of his own tall ship, sailing the Seven Seas.

The sea of gold and silver, where the sirens conjured the winds.

The sea of furs and amber, where the great whale fishes blew.

The sea of nutmegs and parrots and cloves.

The sea of rubies and peacocks and tea.

The sea of apes and ivory, where the slaves cried out in the hold.

The sea of silk and china and pearls, where the pirates haunted the bays.

And the ancient sea at the heart of them all, where the trade routes began

and ended.

He came back each year to the river where he began, and each year he passed a green headland with a lighthouse beacon, and a long spit of sand that sheltered the harbour below. Gulls hung on the wind above the white church on the hillside, and sheep dotted the bracken slopes behind the houses. He told himself he would make his home there someday, when he was done with the sea.

In the year that his mother died, he sailed far to the south and west, through a chain of islands where palm trees leaned over the strands, and there one night, lying at anchor on a dark lagoon, he watched men carrying torches out over the water while women sang and danced on the reef, calling the bonito fish in to the nets. And a girl rose laughing beside his ship, waist-deep in the foam, her teeth gleaming in the torchlight.

He came back that way, on his voyage home, and searched through the islands until he found her. He brought her away with him, back to the river of his birth, and sold his ship and bought a house in the town on the green headland, and became the harbour master there. And there their son was born.

The boy grew up in a silent house. His father seemed a different person at home from the man who took him sometimes to the excise house down at the harbour, or to the tavern beside it. There, among sailors and fishermen, with his traveller’s tales and shanty songs, he was full of quick jests and laughter, but as they walked back through the town his steps grew heavier and gloom settled over his face. They ate their meals in silence, and the boy’s mother never sat with them.

She moved like a shadow through the house, with timid eyes and downturned mouth, but her touch was the softest thi 9781927068021 13