Captain Richard's Arc

Chapter 13 of 13

Morning came soft on the hidden beach. Richard knelt at the tree line with a flat stone, scraping a square of sand clear for the first shelter. Kovu watched from the cave mouth. Alexis carried driftwood in both arms. The kelpie rested in the freshwater pool behind them, blue flank rising and falling. Richard pushed the stone deeper. It struck something hard that was not rock. He dug with his hands. Sand fell away from a smooth curve. He lifted out a pale stone shaped like an egg, veined with cracks that held a soft light. A moonstone. Small enough for one palm. He brushed it clean and felt the weight settle wrong in his chest. Someone had buried this. Someone had marked this beach. He stood and walked the shore with the stone in his hand. At the far end, where the trees thinned, he found what he had missed at dusk. A leaning post of weathered wood. Beyond it, half swallowed by sand and vine, the broken planks of an old dock ran out toward the water. A collapsed tower lay on its side at the dock's end, white paint flaked away, a red band still showing near the base. A lighthouse, once. A surveyor's base, long abandoned. And driven into the sand at the dock's foot, a great moonstone the size of a barrel, cracked and glowing faint in the morning shade. Alexis came up behind him. She did not speak. He held out the small moonstone in his palm. She looked at the broken lighthouse, then at the marker stone, then at him. "Someone was here first," she said. Richard nodded. "Long before my mentor ever drew a map." The wind moved in the trees. Kovu padded up and pressed against Richard's leg. Richard stood very still and let the thought finish. Whoever charted this beach was gone. The dock had rotted. The tower had fallen. The marker had been swallowed by sand until his stone struck it. No boats came. No watchers came. The man who hunted them did not know this name because there was no name left to know. The surveyor's claim had died with the surveyor. What remained was only a beach, and four living things on it. He walked to the great moonstone and set his hand flat on its cracked side. Cold. Quiet. He pushed. It did not move. Good. Let it stay. Let it be their marker now. He turned back toward the driftwood log where Alexis waited and felt the long weight he had carried for twenty years lift and settle into something he could put down. That night they slept inside the half-built shelter with the wolf at the door and the kelpie in the pool and the small moonstone on a flat rock between them. Richard set his hand on the wood. Alexis set hers beside it. Their fingers touched. He had kept the promise. He was home.