Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~

Somehow, Sonali found a gap in the heather off of one of the narrow trails out through it, and was able to kick enough of the brambles far enough out of the way to stow her bike in underneath without popping the tires or tearing her clothes to shreds. Nothing to lock it to, and no way she would even if there was; a bike standing up locked to something was a notice to whoever might come around that there was someone else here. With a few pictures in her phone to help her find her way back to it, Sonali turned around, face into the wind, and started looking for something that looked like a way down the cliff.

Closer to the edge, the heather couldn't hang on in the wind and the steep, dry, slope, and Sonali found herself shimmying backwards down the cliffside, not really following a trail so much as looking out for a way that didn't end suddenly on a ledge thirty feet above a roaring sea, hands full of the coarse grass that was barely holding the soil on. Nothing looked like a cave here, but from this far down the slope, it looked like the tide was out – so any entrance at the water line might be exposed, and it wasn't like Sonali could really climb back up this way, not like this. As long as there was a shoreline, and not just the waves smashing against the rock, she might as well keep on going down. The drop, when it came, was short enough, short enough for her to inch her way out, looking closely at the rocks below, timing it so she plopped down the last meter or so between waves and then ducked back against the cliff, barely spattered by the spray. Well. That was that, down to the water. Now to look and see if there was a cave anywhere around here – and hope there was a better way up near it than the one she'd come down.

Going through the heather, catching thorns through her clothes at every turn, had been a pain in every possible sense for Sonali, but down here, bouldering over the wet rocks as the ocean roared in her ears, she wished hard that she could be back up on top of the cliffs instead of at the bottom. She was barely crawling, her few handholds mostly full of barnacles cutting at her fingers, everything slick with salt water and seaweed slime, and she was getting the definite idea that the waves seemed to be coming up higher at each crash – the tide was coming in, and she would be crushed against the cliff, battered to pieces, swept out to sea. There was no sign of a cave – no sign of any other way up or down – no sign she had done anything but just walk off over a cliff edge following the dumbest of possible ideas. She was going to die down here, and it would be her on the flyer, her bike discovered rusted out come the winter when the heather died back, her disappeared without a trace, without a warning, puzzling people who didn't have the sense to not stick their noses in where they didn't belong.

There was a gap between this rock and the next one, wide and flat and full of tide pools dimpled in the top, and Sonali jumped across, skidding to a stop, arms out, before she pitched onto her face, and as she collected herself, she noticed that the sea wasn't so violent here. She looked around, further out into the water, and saw the knob island between her and the tide, the waves breaking around and onto it in geysers of spray. She looked back at the land; sheer walls, almost, right behind her. So there wasn't a way up, but at least she wasn't going to get washed out by the tide from here. Sonali took a deep breath, forcing her nerves down, and looked on ahead. There were more islands seaward of the cliffs to the south, a natural breakwater, and some sort of tidal lagoon set in under the rock; in that fallback behind it, there might be a cave, and at the very least, she wasn't going to get killed by the ocean going down to check it. Shaking the water out of her trainers and making sure she didn't slip on the slick stones, Sonali started off down along the cliff, still with a hand on the rock to steady herself.

The cliff inland of the sea loch was just a cliff, no openings down at the waterline, but the cliffs past the loch, out around one of the breakwater ridges into the ocean, were a lot less sheer, a lot less directly sinking under the tide, than the ones Sonali had negotiated to get down this far. This was almost easy, staying inland of the spray, looking up at the high-water-mark stained into the granite and thinking about how you'd get get up over that if you had to, head up always to make sure a rogue wave didn't get you. It would still have been easier to go down this far by bike and not have to climb up and over and around and down on these rocks, but if Sonali was going to be down on the shoreline, it was a lot better to be here, and not with her face smashed into a cliff clinging on for dear life. There was only a little bit of that – crossed hanging on to grass tufts that groaned in her hands like she was going to rip the roots out of the cliff – getting across maybe twenty feet of ledge, and then Sonali dropped into a sand wash, the outspill of some burn running under the cliffs. A burn running under the cliffs – the ocean was coming in, splashing around her ankles as she staggered across the sand, up the thin rivulet of fresh water running out – out from a dark hole, barely high enough for her to crouch through, into the cliff and wholly below the high-water mark.