The Ferryman of the Misty Strait

For forty years Bevan had rowed the misty strait, and in all that time he had never once crossed it without meeting his dead.

The strait was a mile of grey water between two shores, and a fog lived on it that no wind ever fully cleared, and the boatmen of both coasts knew what the local people only half believed: that the fog of the strait was not ordinary fog. It surfaced things. A man who rowed out into that wet grey blindness would find, somewhere in the middle where neither shore could be seen, that the mist began to give back to him the things he carried — not as ghosts, exactly, nothing so simple as a haunting, but as memory made briefly visible, a face in the vapour, a voice under the slap of the water, the dead and the lost and the bitterly regretted rising up out of the white to keep a man company across the deepest part of the channel and then thinning away again as the far bank came in sight. Passengers wept in Bevan's boat and did not always know why. Bevan did not weep. He had crossed too many times for that. But he met his dead every trip, in the white heart of the water, and he had long ago stopped pretending he did not.

The one he met was his daughter. Eira. Nineteen years old forever, because nineteen was the age at which she had needed to cross the strait in a hurry, in the bad years, when the men from the capital were taking the children of anyone who had spoken against them, and Bevan — careful Bevan, law-abiding Bevan, a ferryman who had spent his life keeping his head down and his licence clean — had told her to wait. One more night, he had said. Let me arrange it properly. Let me not row my own daughter across in the dark like a smuggler and lose my boat and my living. Wait. And she had waited, because she trusted him, and in the night they had come for her, and that was the last of Eira, and the fog had been giving her back to him in the middle of the strait every single crossing for the twenty-two years since. He had learned her face better in death than he had troubled to learn it in life. That was the particular cruelty of the strait, and the particular justice of it. It made you keep what you had failed to keep.