Climb with the Bellwethers

by McCaffreyan Science Fantasy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The ram was to be killed on Fourthday, and Sorcha Breen had three days to change Fergal Maguire's mind, which was roughly two days and twenty-three hours longer than anyone had ever managed.

She knew it from his hands. Sorcha had been deaf since the spotted fever of her sixth winter, and nine years of watching had taught her that people said more with their hands than with their mouths, and said it more honestly. Fergal's hands, when he spoke of the grey yearling, chopped. Down, and down again, the flat of the palm on the rail of the fold.

"—no use to man or ewe," she read off his lips, the rest lost in his beard. "Stands at the wall all day like a gatepost. Won't follow, won't lead, won't be led. Butted Dinny Rourke into the dip trough. Fourthday."

Her mother, beside her at the carding bench under the lean-to, did not argue with him. Úna Breen never argued with the herd-master. She only looked at Sorcha, the small sideways look that meant don't, and went back to drawing the wool between her cards, grey fleece into grey rolags, the steel teeth whispering a sound Sorcha could not hear but remembered.

Sorcha put down her own cards and went to look at the ram.

---

Skellig Landing sat where the founders had set it, two hundred and some years ago, on the only good harbour of the Cathair coast: a crescent of black shingle, a stone quay, the boat slips and drying-sheds strung along the shore, and above them the town climbing the hill in terraces, turf roof over turf roof, to the high fold at the top where the bellwethers were wintered.

They were not sheep. Everyone said sheep and ewe and ram because the founders had said it, but the beasts stood as tall at the shoulder as a pony, had six legs, the front pair short and clever, for digging and holding, and wore a fleece so dense and oily that the rain on Cathair, which was considerable, rolled off them in beads. The founders had made them. That much was in the Charter Book in the reeve's house, on the pages nobody could read any more because the ink had been made on a world nobody could reach any more and had faded to the colour of weak tea. Made them for wool, and for milk, and for one other purpose that the Charter Book named and nobody now remembered.

Old Tess Farrelly remembered a rhyme, but Old Tess Farrelly remembered a great many things, most of them about other people's grandparents.

The grey yearling was in the end pen, alone, because the others would not abide him. He stood exactly as Fergal had said, at the seaward wall, his long head over the top course of stones and his ears, which were broad and folded like a bat's and lined with pale skin, spread wide and quivering. He was facing south, out over the roofs and the harbour and the long grey sweep of the Cathair Sea.

He did not turn when Sorcha came in. She had expected him to. Animals always turned for her; it was one of the few things that did not go wrong in her days. She walked the length of the pen with her hands open and low, the way her father had taught her before the Fainne went down with him and four others in the year of the fever, and she stopped an arm's length from the ram's flank.

His fleece was the blue-grey of slate after rain. Under it, she could see the long muscles of his back trembling.

"What is it?" she said aloud. She could not hear herself, and she knew her voice came out flat and odd, which was why she used it as little as she could. "What do you see out there?"

The ram's near ear swivelled back toward her for a moment, then forward again to the sea.

Sorcha put her palm on his side.

---

It was not a sound. She had no sounds any more, and she had been told often enough what she was missing, by people who meant well and people who did not. It was not a sound, but it came in through her palm and up her arm and settled in the cage of her ribs, a slow vast pulse like the sea breathing in its sleep, rising and falling, rising and falling, each breath long enough to count to five in. And under it, quicker, tighter, the ram's own response: a hum of his own that she felt in her breastbone, low and urgent, the hum a ewe makes over a lamb that has strayed too near the cliff.

Danger, the hum said, and it said it not in words but in the clench of her own stomach, the prickle at the back of her neck, the overwhelming and quite unreasonable desire to go up. Danger coming. Far yet. Coming. Up. Up.

Sorcha snatched her hand back as if the fleece had burned her.

The ram turned his head. For the first time he looked at her, really looked, with eyes the colour of peat water, the oblong pupils widening. Then he swung his whole long body round in the pen, deliberately, and leaned the weight of it against her, so that she staggered and caught herself with both hands buried in the fleece.

The pulse came back, and the hum with it, and something else, warm and enormous and astonished, that flooded through her so completely that her eyes stung.

You hear, came the feeling. You. You hear it. The others are full of noise and cannot hear it. You hear.

"I'm deaf," Sorcha said into his fleece, stupidly, and began to laugh, and found she was crying as well.

Not to this.

He had a name. She did not know how she knew it, any more than she knew how she knew which way was down, but it was there between them as plain as the stones of the wall: a shape of a sound, deep and round, that her mind turned into a word she could say. Gorm. The old word for blue, for the colour of the sea a long way out.

"Gorm," she said, and the ram pressed harder against her, and the hum in her chest changed, the way a held note changes when a second voice finds the harmony.

---

She tried Fergal first, because the ram was Fergal's.

It went as she had known it would go. She could not say it well. The words came out of her too loud and in the wrong order, and Fergal's face did the thing that hearing faces did when she spoke for long: a patience settling over it like a cloth over a cage. He let her finish. Then he said something to Dinny Rourke, who was mending the hurdles, and Dinny laughed, and Sorcha did not need to read his lips.

She tried her mother, who listened properly, as she always did, with her hands still in her lap, and then took Sorcha's face between her palms and said slowly, so Sorcha could read every word: "Love. The tide tables are in the reeve's house. The big perigee is next month, not this. Colm Daly has the boats hauled for it already. There is nothing coming."

"It's not the tide," Sorcha said. "It's far away. It's coming."

"What is?"

She did not know. That was the trouble. She knew it the way Gorm knew it, as a weight in the air and a pull toward the hill, and she had no word for it at all.

So she went to the one person on Skellig Landing who collected words nobody else wanted.

---

Old Tess Farrelly lived in the last house on the second terrace, with four cats and a loom and a peat fire that never went out. She was nearly ninety, and she had been a schoolmistress, and she had taught Sorcha her letters after the fever, when the other children went on with their singing and their sums and Sorcha sat at the back in the silence and learned to read faces instead.

Tess heard her out. Then she took a slate down from the shelf, because Sorcha's speech tired her old ears, and wrote on it in her careful copperplate:

Which way was he facing?

"South," Sorcha said. "Out to sea. All day. Fergal says for a week."

Tess looked at her for a long moment. Then she wrote, more slowly:

When the bellwethers climb, climb with them, When the bellwethers cry, mind the sky, And the one that stands at the wall and will not eat, Find him the keeper whose ears are deaf to the street.

Sorcha read it twice. Her heart had begun to thud in her throat.

"I never heard that last part," she said.

Nobody has, for sixty years. My grandmother sang it. The schoolboard took it out of the book because it did not scan and nobody knew what it meant. Tess rubbed the slate clean with her sleeve and wrote again. The founders bred the beasts to hear the far storms. The Charter Book says so, on the pages nobody can read. I could read them, when I was young and the ink was darker. Keepers, it said. The beasts chose their keepers. And the keepers were nearly always the ones who could not hear.

"Why?"

Tess shrugged, a wonderful, expressive, Cathair shrug that took in the whole sky. Perhaps because the rest of us are too busy listening to ourselves.

---

That night the pulse woke her.

She had gone to bed in the loft over the carding room and lain awake, and slept, and woken with her heart going hard and the bedframe under her shivering faintly, steadily, the way it shivered when the wind came down off the hill. But there was no wind. The window was black and still.

Up on the hill, in the end pen, Gorm was humming, and she could feel him from here, through two hundred yards of turf and stone and sleeping town. The vast slow breathing of the sea had changed. It had grown a second rhythm on top of the first, and the second was quicker, and nearer.

Close now, said Gorm, and the fear in it went through her like cold water. Tomorrow. When the light goes. Up. All of them, up.

She dressed in the dark, and went to Tess, and Tess, who had not been asleep either, sat in her chair by the peat fire with her cats around her and drew for Sorcha on the slate what the founders had known and the town had forgotten.

A storm. Not here; far south, in the empty quarter of the Cathair Sea where no boat had sailed in living memory, a storm the size of a continent, spinning. Its winds would never reach the Landing. But it raised a swell, long low hills of water travelling north, too long and low to see from the quay, and a swell like that carried a great deal of sea inside it. When it met the shelving shore at the harbour mouth it would stand up. And if it came on a spring tide, as the Hag, the great moon, would be giving them tomorrow, the water would come over the quay and up the shingle and through the drying-sheds and the boat slips and the whole of the bottom terrace.

The storm cries before the water comes, Tess wrote. It cries too low for any ear. The cry travels fast, through the air. The water travels slow. The beasts hear the cry a day or two ahead. Your ram has been listening to it come nearer for a week.

"The boats," Sorcha said. "Colm hauled them up the slips. For the perigee. Not high enough."

No.

"The Rourkes live on the bottom terrace. And the Dalys. And the Kinsellas, and the netmakers, and—" She stopped. "They won't believe me."

Tess put down the chalk. She reached out and took Sorcha's hand, and turned it over, and tapped the palm twice with one swollen finger, which was an old sign between them from the schoolroom. Pay attention. Then she wrote:

They will not believe you. But they will believe the herd. Every child on this coast knows the first line, even if they think it is a skipping rhyme. Go and make the bellwethers climb.

---

The high fold was locked at night, and Fergal kept the key on his belt, and Sorcha had never in her life broken a rule that mattered.

She climbed the wall.

Gorm met her at the gate of his pen as if he had been waiting there all night, which, she supposed, he had. The other bellwethers were restless in their long pens, a hundred and forty of them, ewes and wethers and the season's lambs, shifting, pressing toward the uphill wall. They had begun to feel what Gorm felt. But they were penned, and they had no leader; the old lead ewe had died in the spring, and Fergal had never found another that would take the bell.

Sorcha unlatched Gorm's pen. Then she took the brass bell off its hook on the gatepost, the heavy bell with the founders' mark on it that no beast had worn since the spring, and she buckled it round Gorm's neck. He stood very still while she did it. When she stepped back he shook himself once, all along his length, fleece and ears and bell, and she felt the bell's note through the soles of her feet on the frozen ground.

"Can you bring them?" she said.

The feeling that came back to her was not quite a word. It was nearer a laugh.

She opened the long pens one by one, and Gorm went down among the herd like a stone dropped into still water. She could not hear what he said to them. She felt it, though, the hum in her chest deepening and widening, and she saw the old ewes lift their heads, and turn, and the yearlings bunch, and the lambs press in close to their mothers' flanks. Then the whole herd, a hundred and forty grey backs in the half-light, flowed out of the high fold not up, as she had expected, but down: down the track between the terraces, into the town, Gorm at their head with the bell swinging, and Sorcha running beside him with her hand wound in his fleece.

Up is for later, came the feeling, very patient. First they must see us climb.

---

He took them to the very bottom. Through the lanes of the lowest terrace, along the shingle in front of the drying-sheds, past the boat slips where the long fishing boats lay on their cradles, right along the front of the stone quay, the bell ringing at every step. Doors opened. Sorcha saw faces in them, white with sleep and then sharp with surprise: Dinny Rourke in his nightshirt, Mairéad Kinsella with the baby on her hip, the netmaker's twins hanging out of an upstairs window. She saw mouths shaping the herd and what in the name of and who let them out.

Then Gorm turned at the end of the quay, and threw up his head, and cried.

She felt it in her teeth, in the long bones of her legs. She saw it in the faces, too: hands flying to ears, children clutching at their parents. A hundred and forty bellwethers took up the cry after him, and then, as one beast, they turned their backs on the sea and began to climb the hill.

And down every lane of the bottom terrace, Sorcha watched the old rhyme go through the town like wind through barley. When the bellwethers climb. An old man stood in his doorway saying it, his lips plain in the lamplight. A girl of eight said it to her brother. Mairéad Kinsella said it, and looked at the sea, and then, without another word, went back inside and came out with a blanket and a second child and began to walk uphill behind the herd.

Not all of them followed. Not at first.

Fergal Maguire came down the hill against the herd with his lantern in one hand and his crook in the other and his face the colour of a winter dawn, and Colm Daly the harbour-reeve came out of the reeve's house, and the two of them caught Sorcha by the end of the quay and both talked at her at once, so fast and so angry that she could read neither. She stood and let them. Her hand was still in Gorm's fleece, and the pulse through it was so strong now that she could barely stand straight.

When they had run out of breath she said, as clearly as she could make the words: "Tonight. When the light goes. A swell from the south, on the spring tide. Ask Tess Farrelly. Ask your own Charter Book." And then, because she was fifteen and very frightened and had climbed a wall she had no business climbing: "Kill him on Fourthday, if you like. But get the boats up the hill first."

Colm Daly looked at her for a long time. Then he looked at the ram, who was standing very square on the quay with his ears spread wide and his long face turned to the south. Then, slowly, Colm looked south himself.

The sea was flat and grey to the horizon, flat as a slate. The only strange thing about it was a very faint, very long rise and fall along the foot of the quay wall, like the breathing of something asleep.

---

They got the boats up. Not all of them, and not as far as they ought to have gone, because men argued and the cradles stuck, and by the middle of the afternoon half the town had decided Sorcha Breen was mad and the other half had decided it did not care to find out. But by the time the light went, the families of the bottom terrace were sitting in the high fold among the bellwethers, wrapped in blankets and fleeces, with their kettles on fires of peat and their children asleep in the warm straw.

Sorcha sat at the seaward wall with Gorm. He had not eaten all day. Neither had she.

The first sign was not a wave. It was the harbour filling.

She saw it in the last of the light: the spring tide already high against the quay, and then higher, the water climbing the quay steps one by one as if someone were counting them, over the mooring rings, over the old tide-mark that the founders had cut in the stone. Somebody behind her stood up. Somebody else began to pray.

Then the swell came in on top of it.

It did not break. It did not look like anything much: a long, smooth, grey shoulder of water, sliding in through the harbour mouth without hurry, without foam. It came over the quay as if the quay were not there. It came up the shingle and into the drying-sheds, and the drying-sheds lifted off their footings and went sideways, quite slowly, and folded up. It came up the slips, and two of the fishing boats that had been hauled only halfway rose off their cradles and floated, turning, and grounded again in somebody's kitchen garden on the bottom terrace. It came into the lanes. It came to the doorsteps of the houses where Dinny Rourke and Mairéad Kinsella and the netmaker's twins had been asleep at this hour every night of their lives, and stood at the windowsills, and stayed there.

And then, with great dignity, it went away again; and came back, a little less; and went away.

Nobody in the high fold said anything for a very long time. Sorcha did not need to hear them to know it.

---

Fergal Maguire found her at first light, still at the wall, asleep on her feet with her face in Gorm's fleece. He woke her by touching her shoulder, very gently, the way you would wake someone who was ill.

His face was grey with no sleep. He looked at her, and then at the ram, and then down the hill at what was left of the bottom terrace, the black weed hanging in the lanes, the drying-sheds in a heap of sticks against the quay wall, the two boats in the cabbage beds. He opened his mouth and closed it again.

Then he unhooked something from his belt, and held it out to her: the key of the high fold.

"Keeper," he said. She saw the word shaped carefully on his lips, slow, so that she would not mistake it. It was not a word anyone had used on the Cathair coast for sixty years. "You'll need this. He'll need a proper pen. And you'll need to teach me what to look for." His hands, she noticed, were not chopping at all. They were held a little open, uncertain, as a man holds them when he is not sure he has the right to ask. "Will you?"

Sorcha took the key.

Behind her, Gorm swung his great head round and laid his chin on her shoulder, the bell at his throat shifting with a note she felt along her collarbone. The pulse of the far sea was still there under everything, slower now, fading, the cry of a storm going away into the empty south. Gorm was already listening past it, to the next one, and the next, all the long seasons of storms that the founders had known would come and the town had forgotten.

Mine, came the feeling, warm and certain as a hand in hers. And I am yours. And we will hear them all.

Sorcha Breen, who had been deaf for nine years, put her arm around the ram's neck and listened.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (19 October 2026), ā Simulācrō McCaffreyānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

McCaffreyan Science Fantasy Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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