The Girl With The Roman Coin E-Book

alastair macleod

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

"The seal was close now, swimming parallel to the shore. “Enter,” it said, “Enter”. She watched in amazement as, starting at her toes her feet, then legs, began to turn silver. She could feel under her clothes the rest of her body changing too. She pulled off her trousers and pants, then her top. Her whole body was silver now right up to her necklace. Beautiful iridescent silver scales. She looked down. She could not move her legs apart, her feet were becoming fused together into into ..a tail. She felt an urge, a terrible urge to slip into the sea. She turned and without fear slid into the water. It was not cold to the touch but warm. She began to swim out to the seal. As she neared, it spoke. “On the land you are a Finn girl, here in the sea you are a mermaid, you can swim wherever you wish but beware of the currents. I will teach you."

Leseprobe

Alastair Macleod

The Girl With The Roman Coin

for Macsen, an island girlBookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

The Girl with the Roman Coin

      The sea was a glacial green, the atmosphere above it smoking with mist that merged upwards into grey low clouds. The wind, a chill and snappy south easterly, gripped and buffeted all. Not a raging force 8 or 9 nor a howler wind, storm force 10 or 11, which lifted the hen houses and sheets of corrugated iron, tossing them hither and thither. No, that wind had been last week. Today’s wind was not heroic and violent; it seemed mean and spiteful, relentless. A wind that might have blown off a glacier in the days of the ice age.

      The burn ran swiftly, rippling to the sea, braiding out over the sand. In the channels of peaty water, lay limpet and razor shells, empty and broken by gulls, oyster catchers and the waves.

      By now the sea had retreated far out in the arc of the bay, exposing little clumps of sea weed on the hard rippled sand. In the distance, at the water’s edge, a small gathering of ringed plovers made tiny steps.

      The find at first seemed a common place thing , a disc of metal about the size of a coin, its surface pitted, the edges worn with here and there a golden hue showing through the brown and turquoise patina. She slipped it into the deep pocket of her outdoor jacket beside the shells, bits of sand, worn glass and the pebbles. She continued onwards along the strand line.

      Here, she knew, was where the sea left what it no longer needed. The sand here was desert soft, dried out now the tide long gone. Her feet first sank then struggled on the yielding surface as she walked forwards, eyes glued to the thin strip of seaweed and bits of broken shell. Today there was nothing large, and no plastic.

      There had been a community beach clean and zealous persons had taken all the modern debris away in plastic sacks. But there was always something. That’s what interested her in the first place when she was younger and came with dad.

   Now she was fourteen she still came but was allowed to come on her own. After all, the beach could be seen from the cottage. The big binoculars by the sink would let mum check where she was, except when she passed behind the big dune; there no one could see her from the window, binoculars or no.

      Sometimes she fantasised about what she might find; a whale? Slowly dying. She would help it to swim off. Perhaps a body? A poor dead fisherman. She would be shocked and scared. Perhaps a strange deck cargo washed off in a storm. Dad always had tales of such things. When she was wee, a bale of cannabis had washed ashore. Drug smugglers. What did they look like?