Storm Singing and other Tangled Tasks (15 page)

Next morning, it was impossible for Helen to speak to Rona at the wide beach by Skerness Point. The new Sea Herald was surrounded by well-wishers, with speeches, songs, and help fitting the bottle into the chain round her neck.

As Tangaroa and Serena were taking their responsibilities seriously and staying close to Rona, Helen couldn’t speak to them either.

So she settled on a rock with her fiddle, and played along with the celebratory music.

When the sun rose, Rona’s four land-bound friends watched her dive into the water, then a cheering group of selkies, mermaids and blue men followed her out of the bay.

Helen packed her violin away, and looked round. Past Yann’s broad back, the beach was empty.

Except for one sad shape, hunched on the sand to their right.

She recognised the pattern of blotches on the seal’s back. “Is that Roxburgh? Why hasn’t he gone with everyone else?”

“Probably sulking,” said Yann. “Just leave him alone.”

“Let’s try to cheer him up. It’s not his fault he’s a good
singer or his dad’s a traitor. He didn’t ask to be the
sea-through
’s puppet.”

She walked across the sand to the depressed-looking seal, who took one look at her with his huge sad eyes, and slid into the water.

Catesby laughed, and Yann said, “Well done, Helen. That really cheered him up.”

Helen watched as Roxburgh surfaced out at sea, his dark head bobbing up and down, staring at them. She shouted, “Rona will be fine, the other Sea Herald contestants will look after her.”

“Shh!” said Yann. “Don’t tell the whole ocean our cunning plan!”

“He looks worried, I’m just trying to …”

The seal’s head vanished.

“Great,” said Yann. “If he’s off to tell the bloom she’s got a guard, it might send more than its usual single
sea-through
!”

Then Roxburgh’s human form stepped onto the beach, and walked towards them.

“It’s all over,” he said in his most tragic, sobbing, musical voice. “The coast will be destroyed, the sea will own everything and my father will be king of a wet wasteland. I hadn’t realised! I don’t want to be prince of death and destruction.”

“It’s fine,” said Helen. “The other tribes are protecting her, the message will get though.”

“The message will get through!” Roxburgh laughed. “So it will. But that will make things worse!” He walked off, hunched and miserable, as the friends shrugged at each other.

Then Helen saw his shoulders straighten. He turned
and ran back to them. “You can sort it out! You have land magic and power, and the sea-through has never quite beaten you. I can’t do anything, but you can sort it out.”

“Sort what out?” asked Lavender.

“The message. My father switched the message. He reminded Strathy last night of the tradition that a firsttime Sea Herald is given a night off, that an elder fetches the message from the challenging power. And Strathy let my
father
get it from Thalas. So father made a new deal with the sea-through. The sea-through wrote a different message, put it in one of the losers’ holders, and gave it to my father. That’s the message efficient little Rona and her friends are delivering. Not a ritual challenge. An insult.

“It goes something like this:

“
To Merras the withered. I am tired of pretending to fight on equal terms with you, when I see your muscles grow weak, your fish grow grey, your currents sink low and your power ebb away. It is my duty to use my superior strength to crush your pathetic body under my sandy feet, to rule the waters all year round, and to seize back what belongs to the sea. Prepare for defeat. From Thalas the conqueror
.”

“That will definitely provoke war!” gasped Yann.

“Can you stop it?” Roxburgh looked at them hopefully.

Helen said, “What exactly do you think we can
do
, Roxburgh? We can’t swim after Rona. We can’t go to the powers and explain. We’re land people.”

“Where is the original message?” asked Lavender. “Could we still get it to Merras? Your dad must have collected it from Thalas, or Thalas would be suspicious. Is it with your family’s possessions on the island?”

“No,” moaned Roxburgh. “He swapped bottles with the sea-through. The true message is in the middle of the bloom.”

“Could we write our own message?” suggested Yann. “Write a politer message from Thalas to Merras, or even an explanation?”

“That wouldn’t work. It has to be in a proper herald’s holder.” Roxburgh shook his head. “No, not even you can help. It’s impossible!”

“Don’t give up yet,” said Helen. “Let’s climb the headland, and see if the bloom is still where Lavender and Catesby saw it.”

Yann led the way off the beach and up the slope to the headland, where Helen stood on the very edge of the cliff and looked out to sea. When she wrinkled her eyes, there was a faint pink sheen on the surface of the sea. “Is that it?”

Lavender nodded. “Yes, that’s close to where we heard it chant.”

“I could row out there,” said Helen doubtfully, “but I don’t know what I’d do when I got there.”

They heard a massive roar. They saw a ripple start on the horizon. A high wave rushed towards the shore, crashing into the feet of the two stacks at the point of the headland.

Then there was silence.

“Merras has read the insult,” wailed Roxburgh. “It’s too late … she’s going to attack Thalas.”

“It’s never too late,” said Yann firmly. “If we deliver the true message to her in the herald’s holder, she might stop.”

“But the message and holder are out at sea,” Helen
pointed out. “And the sea is about to turn into a battleground! We can’t go and get the message.”

Another roar rolled from the sea, like wet echoing thunder, and Helen almost turned and ran towards Ben Loyal and its reassuring height, or the moors far inland …

But then she looked at the bloom again, rocking gently on the water after the first waves of anger had passed.

“We can’t go to the bloom,” she said suddenly, “but it can come to us.”

“Don’t be daft,” said Yann. “Why would it come inshore? It can ride out the battle storm in the deep water, but it would be smashed to pieces on the shore.”

Helen grinned. “In the olden days, wreckers attracted ships onto the rocky parts of this coast with lights, watched as they broke on the rocks, then collected all the valuable cargo. We could smash the bloom on the rocks at the base of the cliff, then clamber down and find the message.”

“How will we get it to come shorewards? Wave a lantern?”

Helen gestured to the rising mountains of water already building up over the battling sea powers. “We’ll sing up a storm and pull the bloom inland.”

“But we don’t have a Storm Singer!”

“Yes, we do. Roxburgh is almost as good a singer as Rona. He could have won all on his own, if she hadn’t had the technique I suggested. Roxburgh can sing up a storm.”

“No, I can’t!” Roxburgh backed away. “I can’t even make up my own songs without father coaching me.”

“I’m sure you can. Anyway, you don’t have to sing a storm up from scratch. There’s enough moving water
out there for any number of storms. All you have to do is direct it, use it as a weapon to drag the bloom between the stacks and onto the rocks.”

“I can’t!”

“Yes, you can,” said Yann, standing tall behind him. “Unless you want to be prince of nothing but a watery graveyard.”

Roxburgh looked up at the frowning centaur above him, then out at the turmoil on the horizon. “What do I have to do?”

“Sing the song you and Rona sang at the competition,” explained Helen, “but don’t stick to the simple rhythm you learnt as a pup. Listen to the water. Hear the pauses, the moments when the water is hanging and waiting, and sing into those, persuade the water to join you. Speed up with the water as it rushes to shore, and breathe the wind movements as you breathe in and out. Listen to it, use it as backing, then draw it into your song.”

“Is that what Rona did?”

“Sort of, though she had to pull a storm from calm weather. You already have a storm. You can do it.”

So Roxburgh started to sing.

At his first attempt, his voice cracked. He had to sing the first line three times before he made it to the second line. Helen nodded encouragingly.

But once he got going, he sang the song exactly like he’d sung it at the competition.

Helen grunted in frustration. “No! Listen to the wind and waves. Hear them and sing into them.”

He started again. This time he kept stopping to listen, then losing the thread of the melody.

Helen shook her head, and swung her fiddle off her back. “Like this.” She played the melody, like she had on the beach rehearsing with Rona just three days ago.

As she played she joined the beat of the storm, and tapped her feet and chanted the words, to emphasize and encourage the crashing waves and howling wind, so the storm sounded closer and the music sounded like part of the storm.

She stopped. Roxburgh was staring at her. “You’re doing it, human girl! You just keep doing it.”

“No, I’m not a selkie, I don’t have magic. I can’t call the storm. But I can keep the music going, if you sing.”

Helen started to play again, and Roxburgh, more confident now he had someone to follow, added his powerful voice to Helen’s rhythm.

Helen felt the storm move closer. Her hair whipped about, her eyes stung with spray, and she barely noticed when Lavender hid in her fleece, while Yann held Catesby to his chest. The centaur stood to the seaward side of the fiddler and singer, to shield them from the rising weather.

The storm moved closer. The waves moved closer.

“Maybe it’s not us,” gasped Helen, “maybe they’re just starting to fight closer.”

“No,” yelled Yann. “It
is
you, you’re pulling it right towards us.”

Helen peered over his back and saw the bloom writhing in the water, a pink mass struggling to get free of the white waves throwing it towards the coast. She could see the vast baggy stomach and the wriggling edge of thousands of tangled tentacles, caught in the surge of water towards the shore.

Helen called to Roxburgh, “Change song! We need something louder, harsher, to get it on the rocks, not the beach.” Roxburgh nodded and started to sing about a storm bubbling up from the sea.

Helen needed a moment to get the notes right, so he stopped singing, unsure what to do without her accompaniment.

“Keep going!” yelled Yann. “The bloom is sliding out of the storm’s fingers!”

Helen and Roxburgh started up again, louder, faster, more confident, though they were being lashed by wind and spray.

Now he’d grasped the idea, Roxburgh was giving it everything: huge volume, huge emotion, and singing like the world was listening poised to applaud. Finally, he had the confidence to add his own notes to the tune, and that was when the storm really started to batter the coast.

“It’s too near,” warned Yann. “We have to move back.”

“No,” shouted Helen, “we have to stay here, we have to hear the sea, or we can’t sing the storm. You can move back through.”

But Yann dug his hooves into the turf and shielded them, as the storm, the waves and the bloom got closer.

Helen watched the bloom being thrown towards them, looking like a heap of soggy old pink party balloons trailing poisonous ribbons.

The waves rose higher, so it wasn’t just spray and wind hitting them now. Solid sheets of water were falling on their heads. Helen hunched over, trying to protect her violin.

Below them, the two stacks, the Old Man and Old Woman of Skerness, were channelling the waters, breaking the waves into a chaos of white and grey, then pink and purple. Sea-throughs were being ripped off the tattered edges of the bloom.

The bloom was being lifted so far up by the waves that at the highest point, when Roxburgh reached the highest notes, the bloom was opposite them, hundreds of sea-through eyes staring at them in shock and hatred. Then the wave crashed down again and the bloom was dragged away.

Helen had an idea, and started to play high and low notes in a relentless rhythm. Roxburgh copied her and between them they raised the incoming waves even higher and the crashing falls even lower.

Helen yelled, “Stop, on four!”

As they played the next high notes, the bloom was lifted so far into the air that they could see underneath it to all its dangling tentacles.

Then Helen and Roxburgh stopped, suddenly, on the same beat.

The wave fell.

And the bloom fell.

Right onto the stacks. Right onto the Old Man and Old Woman of Skerness.

The stacks stabbed through the centre of the bloom like two spears, and the bloom disintegrated.

All the sea-throughs let go, and slid down the stacks, or landed in jellied heaps on the headland, or crashed down onto the rocks, or clutched the cliff edge and pulled themselves up, struggling to change into their landforms as they slithered around.

The western stack, the Old Man, split in two, and crumbled into the sea.

Catesby squawked, pulled himself free from Yann’s protective arms, and flew straight into the wind.

The phoenix soared over the stacks, dodging falling jellyfish, and seized the green bottle, which had been thrown up and out of the ripped bloom.

But as the phoenix struggled to stay airborne with the weight of the bottle in his claws, a transparent hand snatched him out of the air.

The tall sea-through stood near the edge of the cliff, surrounded by creeping and scuttling sea-throughs. Helen saw it was twice the size of the others from the bloom, which were sliding off the cliff, escaping into the water below.

Catesby held the bottle, and the sea-through held Catesby.

“The message is written in squid ink on fishskin,” hissed the sea-through. “And the bottle came from a wreck. The sea wants them back. They will come with me, back to the sea. And the bird in my hand comes too.”

Catesby pecked and struggled, but couldn’t get free of the long stretchy fingers.