The Lullaby of Drowned Sailors

Dr. Halla Brandt had come to the village of Nethergarth to record a lullaby, and she had stayed to decode a murder.

She was a folklorist of the rarest and least fashionable kind, a person who believed that the old songs were not quaint survivals but documents, that a melody passed down for four hundred years through the mouths of people who could not read had carried, in its very stubbornness, in the way it had refused to change while everything around it changed, some freight it had been built to preserve — and she had come north, to the last village on the last road on the wind-scoured edge of a country that the maps had nearly forgotten, because of a single line in a single nineteenth-century antiquarian's notebook, a marginal note that the fishing village of Nethergarth sang its children to sleep with a song that no one in the village could explain and that no folklorist had ever properly transcribed. She had expected a charming morning's work. She had found a song that took her two years to understand and that she now wished, on the worst nights, she had never heard at all.

The lullaby was called, by the villagers who sang it without knowing what it meant, "The Cradle on the Grey Water," and it was sung to every child in Nethergarth from the first night of its life, a slow circling melody in a mode that had died out everywhere else four centuries ago, with words in a dialect so old and so corrupted that the villagers reproduced them phonetically, as nonsense, as the meaningless beloved syllables that lullabies become, the way a child sings a song whose words it does not parse because the comfort is in the sound and not the sense. The mothers of Nethergarth had sung "The Cradle on the Grey Water" to their children for as long as anyone could remember, and their mothers before them, in an unbroken chain of women rocking children to sleep with a song none of them understood, and it had worked, had soothed and settled and sung to sleep four hundred years of Nethergarth's children, and not one of those children had ever known that the soft circling syllables their mothers breathed over them were a confession.