Nory Ryan's Song by Patricia Reilly Giff Page B

went through my shawl. We stood up and danced away from each other, pulling on the rope at our waists, to be sure it was tight. I pointed. “I’ll go down that way.”
    “A brave child like my son,” Anna had said.
    Please let me be brave .
    “Don’t face the sea, face the rocks,” Sean said. “Don’t look down.”
    I watched him wedge himself in, his feet up, his hands wrapped in a cloth holding the rope. “I’ll hold my own weight,” I said, “you know that.” I didn’t say what we were both thinking. If I lost my footing and fell, he’d have to depend on the strength of his body and the rocks to keep me from going into the sea. He’d never be able to use his hands.
    “If you’re in trouble,” he said, “the rope will tighten against me. Otherwise it will be slow and steady, and you will give a tug on it once in a while so I know you are still …”
    “Alive.” I tried to grin at him. “Bringing you an egg for your breakfast.”
    “Two eggs.” He tried to smile. “There is a hole in my stomach where there should be food.”
    I touched his hand, made the sign of the cross over myself …
    And took a step.
    And another.
    And turned my back away from the sea.
    And lowered myself down, one rock at a time, feeling with my toes, testing each rock as Sean had said, to make sure it would hold me.
    And rested, catching my breath, leaning my head against a slab of a rock, my feet on a wide flag.
    And listened with my eyes closed to the sound of the wind and the surf and the spray crashing against the cliff below. Don’t look at the sea , but I had to look over my shoulder, a quick look, the quickest look.
    The clouds drifted across the sea and away again, making patterns of light on the water in the distance, and suddenly the sound of what I was hearing, the whistle of the wind across the cliffs, the booming of the surf, was music. And at that moment I felt like Queen Maeve.
    I felt Sean tugging at the rope. He must have wondered why I had stopped. I tugged back with my free hand to let him know I was all right.
    From there it was not as hard. I made music in my own mind to go with the music of the cliffs. And my hands held each rock above and my feet found the right places one after another …
    Until I reached down and there was no rock under me. I circled the air with my leg, toes pointed, searching for something, a rock, a ledge. Suddenly there was a screaming in my ears and a great flapping of wings against my head and in my hair. Claws raked my forehead, opening a cut. Blood ran over my eye and down my cheek, and I screamed with the same sound as the bird.
    Without thinking, I let go of the rock to beat it away. I dropped, one hand still holding the bird’s legs, feeling the dizziness as the sea below tilted and moved up toward me. With a sickening crunch I landed on the ledge.
    The screeching of the bird stopped and I saw that it was dead under me. I moved as far away from it as I could on the edge, so far that my back was up against the wall of rock. I could feel Sean pulling on the rope. I tugged again and lay there, thinking I’d never get up, never get away from the bird.
    I saw the nests above me, within my reach, and got up on my knees, shouting, waving my arms, to be sure there wasn’t a bird on a nest that would startle me into falling again.
    The birds wheeled above me, screeching, their powerful wings flapping. I took the eggs quickly, searching out the largest ones, putting them carefully in Sean’s cap, nesting them in bits of grass to be sure they wouldn’t break. I left an egg in each nest.
    And then I was finished. There was more to eat in that cap than we’d had in days. I pictured the eggs bubbling gently in the boiling water, tried to think how long they’d last, because I’d have to do this again, and again, until Da came back, or Celia and Granda.
    I crawled back along the ledge, trying not to look at the poor dead bird, its feathers blowing in the wind.
    The bird.