He wakes to sing to the dead. A prayer thrown in the air to be caught by the sea. Eyes down, lips drawn tight, heels on the lane before the sky admits light. Oars ride his shoulder, salt on their throats, lines in the wood lain smooth with use.

The village stirs.

Handheld lanterns lilt as they guide the way. Women with woven baskets pass alongside, heads bowed, their skirts whisper over the cold, damp ground. A black-haired boy, blue-eyed like a jackdaw, watches from a step, almost waves.

The fisherman offers no words. A nod, perhaps. For some.

The shore slopes in shingle, small shells that bite underfoot. His boat, small and dark, waits keel-up, a glint of tar on her seams catching the first light. He sets down the oars, puts his shoulder to the hull, turns her away with the slow sway of a man who knows the weight by heart. The sea meets the bow with a small slap, like a hand finding a wrist.

Rope coiled. Thwarts checked. Plug in. Without looking back, he shoves off from the shore at the draw of the wave, swings both legs in as she’s caught in the narrow space between retreat and return. Moves with the rhythm of the sea. The oars dip and rise, dip and rise – an old ceremony.

Past the weed-slick rocks, the village blurs to grey, soot, slate – the church tower lifts its finger to sketch a blessing that never quite lands. The headland hunches to his left, beyond it the channel lies in plates of pewter. He breathes with the stroke – out on the pull, in on the feather. The boat answers with a low wooden hum with each strum of the oars, a voice tuned to his ribs.

His throat thrums. Low, long whispers to the wind, quiet as a line of smoke.

When the cliff no longer throws his echoes back, he lets the oars rest. The boat turns gently to the push of the tide. Water beads on the blades, runs off in threads. Gulls cry, a guttural squall, white-winged arrows across the pale blue sky. Far off, a buoy bell chimes once, falls silent.

High tide, shy tide, carry me steady;

One oar for me, one oar for the ready.

The air hears it first. The sound skates across the surface, makes tiny ripples in the skin of the sea. Then the timber hears. The frame of the boat takes the note and holds it.

The fisherman listens, waits. But no answer comes, so he lengthens the melody – a gentle tone, nothing to spook the shy.

Hiraeth in the cordage, salt in the bread;

Sing soft, sing true, for the ones with no bed.

A habit, grown like a barnacle on a hull – slow, unnoticed – until he realised what the songs bring. They’re not a spell, not a bargain. More a door left ajar. If they wish, they will come. If not, the deep will keep its own counsel.

He pulls a few more strokes – odd numbers feel truer at sea, they never divide clean. The headland thins, the horizon flattens. The sky shifts from iron to milk. Wind lifts the scent of kelp and salt.

Black rock, grey wave, names in the foam;

If you hear me, kin, I’ve kept you a home.

His hands know the halyard’s knots without looking. The sail is small, patched twice with cloth a shade too light. He thinks of her hands, how they caught each stitch, so they held tight. He hoists just enough to feel the pull, then lets it ease. The boat leans into the breeze, a shoulder against the wind.

A porpoise, a harbour leaper, rolls in the wake, once, at the edge of sight. The sea accepts the note of his song and lays itself a little smoother. Llamhidydd harbwr. The Welsh words roll off his tongue.

In the village, the lanes are a market of noise – feet on slate, barrels rolling, voices cracking from door to door. Each one clamours to be sorted and weighed. Here, sound comes in long, effortless verses – the slap at the stem, the whistle through the sail’s leech, the boom of a wave in the headland cave. Each could be taken in both hands and set where it belongs.

A gull drops a shell near the stern, it splits with a pale, open mouth. The fisherman flicks the shards away with the side of his boot.

His gaze stays on the horizon, where the seam between sea and sky is tight enough to thread with a needle.

The water smooths out in a circle from the bow, as though someone has laid a calming palm.

The gulls go quiet. The breeze holds its breath.

‘Dadi,’ says a boy.

In the shadow of his own, he sees him – a wool cap she had mended twice, a scar he had kissed three times, a grin they had told not to grow up so fast.

‘Sing the one Mami likes.’

The fisherman draws in a breath that tastes of seaweed, iron, salt. The melody feels like the grip of a small hand. He gives the first line, soft as cloth.

High sun, low wind, bring her a feather;

Tie it to her shawl so she’ll always know this weather.

His boy’s gold hair blows, his mouth shapes a laugh that makes no sound. He steps into the boat as if there were a plank between water and wood. Where his foot should have weighed, there is only a coolness curling around the fisherman’s ankles.

Behind his boy, the sea folds itself into the shape of another. The fisherman holds the last note in his mouth like a dram he can’t swallow. He thinks he sees a hint of copper. Hair in long curls, eyes deep enough to jump into. The song pauses. The fisherman catches his breath. But it’s not her. Instead, a man with red hair and a broken oar splinters the air, shifts the light. The shape disappears.

The boat rocks with the tide’s long breath, the sail barely holds its curve. His boy sits at the thwart across from him, leans forward, elbows on knees, watching his father’s fingers fuss with a rope.

‘You still sing to them too?’ his boy asks, tilting his chin towards the horizon.

The fisherman has no answer. The wind answers for him, pressing a fold into the sail, and the boat shifts a little nearer the scum lines.

The water carves a shape – not a wave, not a swell. The fisherman watches, his fingers stop fussing. A long smear of darkness rises and resolves into the outline of a man standing knee-deep in the channel. Salt streaks his red beard, the stump of the split oar wedged under one arm. The fisherman’s gaze meets the other man’s for the space of two heartbeats, then slips away to the horizon again. Keeping watch.

The red-haired man now steps in without a splash. The boat never takes his weight, but she leans, as though making space. The man takes a seat on the stern bench, his palms spread flat on either side. He begins to hum under his breath.

The fisherman’s gaze returns – it’s a tune he knows, a working song from the cod runs. It’s the kind with a chorus that seeps into your bones, settles, and stays there.

As the two men sing together, two women appear at the stern, their skirts swaying in time with the boat’s movement. One wears a shawl that clings to her shoulders, the other’s hair is a drift of deep green weed, each strand catching the light like a line thrown out for fish. They murmur to each other, the syllables round and old.

The fisherman sets down the oars, lifts his cap, looks around. His boat now holds nine souls. Another woman, much younger, sits with her child no higher than the gunwale at his feet, tracing the pattern of the wood grain with one finger. A boy with blue eyes and black hair leans against the mast, eyes half shut as though only resting. His thoughts drifting, perhaps to his younger brother – the jackdaw boy – who never left his side, who clung to him like a shadow. And in the bow, her face turned to the wind, sits a woman with the high cheekbones of the next valley over, her dress torn as if the sea had tried to keep it.

With his eyes on the horizon, the fisherman sings again.

South wind, slow wind, carry me through;

One hand for the anchor, one hand for you.

The man with the broken oar takes the harmony, low and sure, his voice like rope dragged over wood. The blue-eyed boy grins and slaps his knee in time. The young girl cradles her child, rocks in time with the tune. The older women sway with their skirts and the roll of the sea. His boy watches and smiles.

When the verse ends the fisherman looks out, the sea the same shade as the sky.

She does not come.

The first to break the silence is the shawled woman. She leans close, the damp of her shawl prickling the skin of his arm.

‘Tell my sister to leave the candle,’ she says. ‘It’s no good burning on a fine day. Tell her to keep it for fog.’

The fisherman nods once.

The blue-eyed boy with black hair speaks next, his voice thin but unbroken.

‘I saved some coins I earned, they’re in a barrel, wrapped in a cloth,’ he says. ‘I buried it under the rocks, by the slipway. Give them to my mother and brother.’

Another nod.

The man with red hair leans forward on the splintered oar stump.

‘Warn them about the reef,’ he says. ‘The one by the outer buoy. It’s shifted. Won’t matter in calm, but in a blow—’ He lets the rest hang there.

The fisherman nods a third time, as though marking a tally.

The others listen more than they speak. He tells them the news of the village – the price of mackerel at market, the state of the chapel roof, who has married since last winter. He gives them what he can. What he does not say, they seem to know anyway.

Now and then, one drifts to the gunwale, leans out, peers into the water as if watching for something to pass far below. His boy reaches over, lets his fingers trail over the water, but there are no ripples in the surface.

The fisherman sings once more, not to call them, but to keep them. A verse of a ballad from the north coast – a song of a sailor who dreams his own death but wakes to find the tide has carried him home. The souls take it up until the sound fills the small boat and the sea beyond it – a quiet choir with no breath between lines.

When the sun lifts high enough to silver the edges of the swell, the fisherman lets the sail luff. The dead know. One by one, they stand, step back into the sea or simply loosen into the air until they are no more than a colour that doesn’t seem to belong to the morning. His boy is last.

‘You’ll sing tomorrow, Dadi?’

The fisherman’s nod would never be enough.

He watches his boy sink. Again.

For a moment he thinks he can see her. Like a net let loose for the catch, gold and copper strands sink and circle, drop, then stretch into the deep blue. Sink and circle. Eyes wide and grey, unblinking. They breathe again with the water. Circle and sink. Arms move like they’re waving. He hopes the sea will eventually bring back everything it took. That she may come back to him too.

He turns the bow towards the headland. The wind shifts. It carries the faint smell of tar from the harbour and the sharper scent of gull droppings on the rocks. The village will be waking properly now – smoke heavier, voices raised to call across lanes, barrels thumping onto the quayside.

By the time he beaches the boat, the tide has dropped enough to leave a crescent of wet sand. He ships the oars, steps into the shallows, hauls her up until she rests on the shingle. No one comes to help. They have learned to not.

As he shoulders the oars and makes his way up the beach, a woman passes with a basket of cockles. She glances at him, looks away, mutters something to the man beside her. The man snorts. Both turn their heads towards the tide.

They do not see the messages tucked in his mind, ready to be placed where they belong. They do not hear the last verse still humming in his chest.

The village always feels smaller when he comes back, as if the lanes have tightened while he was gone. The light here is different too – it comes off walls, not water. It sticks to the skin instead of moving through it.

The fisherman makes his way to the slipway. Picks up a shovel as he passes a group of cockle women, talking by their sacks. He walks to the spot, knows where to look. He kneels by the rocks, lets his hand move over the base of them, where the cold, grey stone meets the sand. Finds the barrel, takes out the coins wrapped in cloth, tied with a length of frayed, tarred rope.

He walks the harbour path with the oars balanced on his shoulder, each step measured to keep them from knocking against the stacked stone wall. Gulls wheel low over the quay, their cries sharper here, pitched to cut through the clatter of work – rope thudding onto cobbles, barrels rolling from cart to hold, voices thrown like ropes across the gaps between boats.

Near the chandlery, the harbourmaster stands with two others, chart in hand, his thumb tracing the outline of the bay. The fisherman pauses at the edge of their circle, waits until the harbourmaster glances his way, and makes a small motion with his fingers no one else can see – a shift in the air, like moving a marker stone. The harbourmaster’s gaze sharpens, looks out at the horizon, towards the reef. He takes a breath then turns back to the chart.

At the market, the fisherman lingers alongside the fish stalls. A widow from the far end of the quay bargains over a pair of hake. Beside her, the jackdaw boy clings to her shawl of faded green – the same green she wore the winter the boat did not come home. When the sea kept her husband and eldest son. As she turns her shoulder away, the fisherman steps closer, sets the small parcel inside her basket, unseen. When she turns back the fisherman has gone. She frowns when she sees the tarred rope, runs her thumb over the twist. He does not wait to see her face change when she recognises the splice.

Farther up the lane, two girls are plaiting each other’s hair on a doorstep, their feet bare against the chill. One of them hums under her breath – a fragment of a tune the fisherman knows too well. It had been on the lips of a young man in his boat just three days ago, who’d asked for it to be carried home. The girl didn’t seem to know where the melody had come from, but she hums it again, and the other girl picks it up without asking. The song moves between them like something alive. He passes on without breaking its line.

At the edge of the village, he takes the narrow path that leads past the old chapel, down towards his own small cottage. Here, the air thins, the noise drops, and the smell of salt returns. He stops by the low wall of his neighbour’s garden. The woman there is bent over, tying up bean stems.

‘Fog tomorrow,’ he says.

She straightens, brushes earth from her hands, gives him a brief smile. ‘You’ve always a way of knowing.’

By morning, her candle will already be at the window.

*

On the sea the next day, the air changes before the sky does.

A taste in it, metallic, the way blood tastes when you bite the inside of your cheek. Or bitten lips. The breeze no longer slides past but presses, testing the seams of the boat.

He rows farther out than usual – the line where the tide meets itself lies well behind him now – but the morning feels open, the water loose-hipped under the keel. He sings, low and even, the kind of tune that fills the boat without drawing too much notice.

Then the wind swings. Quick, like someone turning their head to catch him in a lie. The sail snaps, shudders.

The fisherman hurries it down, quick hands on the halyard, the patched cloth slaps his shoulder. The boat staggers sideways. The oars clatter in their locks.

The sky is no longer pewter but slate The edges of the clouds gurn into shapes. The wind starts to claw across the surface of the sea, gathers itself into the signs of a gale. Sound begins to layer – whistles through the rigging, a low hum along the gunwale, a thin, high note that comes and goes like a knife’s edge catching the light.

He sets the oars and begins to pull. The first strokes bite clean. The next meet resistance – not the smooth weight of tide, but a grip, a hand closing on the hull.

White water lifts at the bow and slaps down in his face. Salt burns his eyes. He blinks, tastes it in the dark back of his throat. Pulls again.

The headland is no nearer. The sky lowers another hand’s breadth. Rain begins in sudden hard drops, like falling stones. Loud on the boards, on his back, in his ears.

He begins to sing. Not for the dead, not for the sea – for himself. The rhythm of each verse keeps his strokes steady.

Pull, boys, pull, keep her head to the swell –

One for the living, one for the knell.

The wind takes the second line and tears it. The next verse comes ragged.

A wave hits broadside. The boat rolls, the gunwale dips close enough to gulp a mouthful. He shifts his weight. Braces. Pulls hard to bring her straight again.

Another wave rises – he sees it lift, sees the darker underside of it – and then it is over him. Cold clamps around his chest. His breath locks.

He drags in air that feels too thin. Too sharp. He shakes. Tries to sing. But there’s only a gravel sound, where air meets water that’s found its way into his lungs.

They come all at once. They crowd the water around him. Faces he knows, faces he doesn’t, all turned towards him. Their voices join his, not in harmony but in something rougher, older – a sound like the sea on a reef in midwinter, tearing the air.

Rain blurs the world to greys. The horizon vanishes. Sky and sea become one. Heaving. His hands slip on the oar handles. Blisters from years of work burn as if they have just been made.

The wind screams now. Or maybe it’s her. Shapeless sound. Just a pressure in his ears. Each wave strikes without rhythm. Each takes something with it – a coil of rope, a tin cup, the space between heartbeats. Reaching for him.

Another wave, larger, rises ahead. The bow lifts, lifts higher, keeps lifting. The stern slides down into a trough so deep it feels as though the sea is tipping him into itself. For a long, slow moment, the boat hangs on the crest. Then, fast, it tips forward, slides, the bow buries itself in the next wall of water.

The cold this time is everywhere at once. No difference between air and wave. Salt fills his mouth, his nose. The oars float free, knock against his hands. Then they are gone.

He sinks without falling – one moment in the world above, the next in the muffled dark green, dark grey below. No breath. No song.

Shapes move in the darkness. Hands, faces, the drift of skirts, the flicker of a boy’s wool cap. They surround him. Not pushing. Not pulling. But holding. The pressure on his chest eases just enough for a thin gasp. Then another.

Their voices are no longer above the water or below it. They are in him, a chord stretched through every bone, humming with the steady certainty of tide.

Then the sea lets him go. For now.

He sees her copper hair. She is here. Reaching. She wants him to stay.

Sink or sing. His choice to make.