She looked up at Ianto in horror. She hoped he didn’t expect her to actually set foot on the ruined platform.
As if able to read her thoughts, he thrust out his arm to hold her back. It was a large arm, black-haired, the skin under it as pale as the ancient stone.
“Don’t go any further,” Ianto said. “And ignore yet another testament to my father’s negligence. I want you to look at the view.”
Feeling safer behind Ianto’s arm, Effy peered forward. Over the rotted wood was the cliff face, green and white and gray, dotted with eyries and smaller gull nests, feathers catching in the wind. Below it, the sea looked sleek and deadly, waves gnashing their teeth against the rock.
Effy felt the height in the soles of her feet and her palms turned slick. Before, when the cliff had broken apart beneath her, it had been so unexpected, she hadn’t even had the chance to be afraid. Now she understood the danger of the rocks, the ocean’s foaming wrath.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Ianto said. Even in the wind, his hair still lay mostly flat.
“It’s terrifying,” Effy confessed.
“Most beautiful things are,” Ianto said. “Do you know why it’s called the Bay of Nine Bells?”
Effy shook her head.
“Before the Drowning, the land stretched out further into the sea. There were dozens of small towns there on the old land—fishing villages, mostly. What have you been taught about what happened to them?”
“Well, there was a storm,” Effy started, but she could tell it was one of those false questions that was like a hole in the floor. If you took the bait, you would fall right into it.
Ianto smiled at her thinly. “That’s one of the misconceptions many Northerners have about the Drowning. That it was one enormous storm, a single night of terror and then its aftermath. But it can take a person up to ten minutes to drown. Ten minutes doesn’t seem like a very long time, but when you can’t breathe and your lungs are aching, it seems very long indeed. You can even die after you’ve been pulled from the drink, dry on land, water having rotted your lungs beyond repair. The Drowning of the Bottom Hundred took years, my dear. It started with the wet season lasting longer than it should and the dry season being less dry than it ought. A few cliffs crumbling, a marsh or two swelling past its margins—at first it was scarcely remarked upon, and certainly not taken as a warning.
“Have you heard the expression about the frog in hot water? If you raise the temperature slowly, he won’t notice a thing until he’s boiled alive. A soft-bellied Northerner might have seen the danger coming, but the Southerners practically had scales and fins themselves. The sea took and took and took, thousands of little deaths, and they endured it all because they knew nothing else. They didn’t think to fear the Drowning until the water was lapping at their door.
“The lucky ones, the wealthier ones, with their homes set back further from the shore, managed to flee. But the waves rose up and swallowed everything, houses and shops and women and children, the old and the young. The sea has no mercy. In this bay there were nine churches, and they were all swallowed up, too, no matter how hard their supplicants pleaded with Saint Marinell. They say that on certain days you can still hear the bells of those churches, ringing underwater.”
Effy turned toward the water and listened, but she didn’t hear any ringing.
“The Drowning was two hundred years ago,” she said. “Long before your father was born.” She hoped it didn’t sound disparaging.
“Of course,” Ianto said. “But the story of the Drowning lives in the minds of every child who is born in the Bottom Hundred. Our mothers whisper it to us in our cradles. Our fathers teach us to swim before we can walk. The first game we play with our friends is to see how long we can hold our breath underwater. It’s the fear we have to learn. The fear keeps the sea from taking us.”
Effy remembered what Rhia had told her about the Southerners and their superstitions. About how they feared a second Drowning and thought the magic of the Sleepers would stop it. Watching the ocean barrage the cliffs, and hearing Ianto speak, Effy could understand why they thought such a thing. Fear could make a believer of anybody.
Strangely, she found herself thinking of Master Corbenic. When he had first placed his hand over her knee, she had thought he was being warm, fatherly. She hadn’t known to be afraid. Even now, she didn’t know if she was allowed to be.
“That’s why my father built this house here,” Ianto went on. “He wanted my mother and me to learn how to fear the sea.”