The Knight and the Deer

The wind woke first on the fourth day. Up in Sítio, the village on the clifftop, it swept across the wide stone square and pushed the gulls sideways as they landed. Polly hopped across the square with her feathers pressed flat. That morning she moved like a tiny grey sail leaning into the gusts.

At the edge of the cliff she found a chapel so small that a dozen visitors would fill it. Inside, every wall was lined with painted tiles, blue pictures on white, rising from the floor to the curved ceiling. The air was cool and completely still. Polly walked slowly across the smooth tiled floor and felt the wind vanish behind her.

The tiles told a story more than eight hundred years old. On a foggy morning, a rider was hunting a deer along this very clifftop. The deer leapt out into the white mist, and the ground simply ended. At the last possible moment the rider's horse stopped, hooves at the very edge of the rock, and the rider was saved. The little chapel was built to remember that morning, on the exact spot where the ground runs out.

Outside again, near the lighthouse, Polly perched on a tall stone statue. It had the head of a deer and held a surfboard under one arm, the old legend and the new courage carrying the same board. Below the statue, the swell had grown again, and the booms now arrived in slow, steady sets.