Slowly my breath eases.

After ten minutes I am strong enough to get to my feet. I walk to the edge of the grass and look down at the water. It surges below my feet, close enough to spatter me with the occasional gout of spray. It is not more than eight feet down to the strip of grey sand strewn with shells and pebbles that is rhythmically covered and uncovered by the falling tide.

The water must be only a few inches deep.

I look more closely. The sea has been working here. Over the centuries, the pounding waves have scoured the cliff into a deep curving wall. It is smooth, without cracks or crevices of any kind. There are no bushes, no vegetation. From the sand it will present a curving overhang, eight feet in height. As long as the tide is out anyone on that patch of beach will be safe. Once it turns, the only ways of escape will be up the cliff or out through the narrow entrance into the waters of the gulf. I watch the waves breaking heavily in the entrance. No-one could live in them, and the smooth rock overhang, eight feet above the sand, would be out of the reach of a fourteen-year-old boy.

I never warned him. I had been here before yet I never thought to say anything to him.

We fjord children were brought up by the water. It held few terrors for us but we learned early to treat it with the respect the sea demands. I must have been more or less the same age as Edward. With my father so often away, I grew up with greater freedom than most. I used to explore by myself. There was a cliff, dark, high and frowning, at its base the same curving inlet, the same circular overhang rubbed smooth by the sea. I had jumped down to the wet sand before I realised there was no way back. I would have drowned in the frigid water had a fishing boat not found me.

I have been here before.

I look at the surf thundering in the entrance, behind my back I feel the cliff looming high overhead, the sun-bright water is blurred by my tears.

I kneel, eyes screwed tight, clasped hands raised to the breaking waves. I hear their voice beyond the darkness of my closed eyelids, taste the mist of spray on my lips, feel the rock tremble beneath my knees at the relentless hammer-blows of the sea.

The sea has taken him, the child I loved. I am of the sea. I look to it for recompense.

BOOK ONE

PETREL

Petrels form an extensive family of seabirds common to the Southern Ocean. Individual birds are occasionally beached after storms along the South Australian coast.

ONE

Left hand clasping a tin pannikin brimming with hot rum, Jason Hallam came out from the shelter of the deck house and hurried aft, staggering and lurching against the wild movement of the hull. The gale sank its claws in him. Far above his head the three mast tops swung violently against the black clouds that drove in endlessly from the west. The few scraps of sail that remained unfurled strained full-bellied in the wind. Even from the deck Jason could hear the triumphant yell of the storm in the spider’s web of rigging. The wind blew the tops off the waves and flung them over the rail in solid sheets of water, cold, salt and dangerous.