Lion portrait with scrollwork on a shoulder

It was a plain beast when the harbour was built, the mason said, until Orrin Teague the smith cut its mane into scrolls of iron and fern, curling outward like spray that never fell. He drowned the spring after, going out for mackerel in a borrowed boat. Nobody else would touch the lion, so it kept its place by the slipway, its face turned inland by day and west by night, toward the reef where the Marigold had gone under with eleven men aboard.

On the night of the thick fog, Mara climbed the cliff with the last can and found the lamp guttering. Somewhere below, a bell was ringing out of time. She went down the harbour steps in the dark, feeling along the wall with her palm until her fingers met the cold curls of the mane. The lion's head had swung right, toward the channel, the way a figurehead points a ship. She stood at its shoulder and followed the line of its gaze through the murk, and when the fog thinned she saw the white break of water over the rocks and the dark gap between them. Mara walked the boats home along that line, one at a time, and the bell stopped.

In the morning the keeper found the lamp full and a bright crust of salt on the lion's open jaw, as though something had been speaking to it all night.