Sword, triangle and ivy on a shoulder blade

The sword was standing in the shingle when the tide went out that spring, point up, the way a man leaves a spade he means to come back for. Nobody on Carrick Bay would touch it. Old Ysolde said the blade was the colour of wet slate and warm as a loaf to the hand, and that the three stones behind it had been set in a triangle by people dead a thousand years who still knew how to count. Ivy had crept over the cracks. Ivy grows where it likes, and nobody argues with ivy.

Then the gold thing came. You'll have seen them, a ball no bigger than a plum with wings going like a moth's, shaking dust off itself as it flew. It hovered over the sword and would not be caught. Ysolde's boy Pell spent a whole summer chasing it along the cliff paths with a fishing net, and every evening it dropped its sparkle on the blade and flew off, as if a thing that small could laugh.

On the last night of the herring run Pell stopped running. He put his bare hand on the hilt, and the ivy rustled though there was no wind. The gold thing came down very close and settled on his knuckle like a bee on a foxglove. Pell pulled. The sword came out of the stone as easy as a cork, the triangle cracked clean across, and the ivy went quiet.

So the sea has him now, or the sea has the blade, or both, and I don't pretend to know which. Pass me that cup. The light's showing.