The Seventh Tide

Joan Lennon lives in the Kingdom of Fife in Scotland, on the River Tay. She has a husband, four tall sons, two short cats, and a miscellaneously sized group of piano pupils. Joan was born in Canada.

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Books by Joan Lennon

QUESTORS
THE SEVENTH TIDE

There are places they call ‘liminal’ – where the divisions between present, past and future are thinner than normal. Even the walls between universes aren’t always up to scratch. Things blur and leak into each other in places like that. Connections are made between peoples and times that are against all the rules. Things… break through, good things sometimes, but not always. Sometimes the things that break through are evil, and relentless, and driven by terrible hungers.

The Western Isles of Scotland is a place like that.

Dark worlds, bright worlds, worlds (like our own human one) that are peculiar combinations of both – so many realities include this stretch of islands and seas and sky, heart-breakingly beautiful at one moment and deadly the next, full of softness and hardship and terror, and a hundred shades of purple and green, blue and grey.

In the sixth century, on the island of Iona, there was a boy called Adom. In the twenty-fourth century, in a suburb of Greater Glasgow, there will be a girl called Jay. And in the universe of the G there is Eo, a young shape-shifter-in-training. You’d think there couldn’t be three more different specimens of life in existence, and yet they do have two things in common.

One – they all live in the same place, in this landscape of chance and change, where the tides are powerful and strange, and the walls of a thousand worlds are thin.

And two – they don’t always pay attention.

1
Eo

A basically human shape is the default appearance of the G. In fact, before they reach fully trained adulthood, human is all a G
can
do. So it wasn’t surprising that Eo should look like a boy, since his training still had a long way to go. (His full name was Eo Gofer-Baroque, but that is another story.) According to his current teacher, Professor Pinkerton Hurple, the point at which Eo’s training would finish was actually
receding
rather than getting closer.

‘It’s hard to believe that anyone
could
know less at the end of a lesson than they did at the beginning – but
you
manage it. If it weren’t so AGGRAVATING, it would be an interesting phenomenon.’

At fifteen, Eo gave the impression of being a master of self-confidence and complete bone-idleness – at one and the same time. Having said that, he often did
plan
to be attentive, but then he forgot partway through. The things going on inside his head were so much more interesting.

Any self-doubts he had, he kept well buried. If the work threatened to become difficult, he didn’t wait around to find out. He slid out from under such things as neatly as possible, with charm and his own personal brand of deviousness.

Some of the time, Eo pretended to be more stupid than he really was, just for the fun of it – particularly during lessons with Professor Hurple. He enjoyed watching the Professor’s fur get all bunchy with irritation. The Professor was a ferret and his emotions clearly showed in the state of his coat. A more dapper beast at the beginning of a lesson would be hard to imagine; by the end, he was dishevelled and unkempt and fit to be tied – and Eo would have had an enjoyable afternoon, learning not a lot.

Confusingly, Professor Hurple was not a G. He couldn’t shape-shift. He actually
was a ferret
(though an exceptionally intelligent one, as he was quick to point out), coming originally from the early twenty-first-century Scotland of the humans. How he came to be in the G universe at all is a story in itself, but not one that Eo had yet managed to wheedle out of him. (Of course,
all
ferrets are astonishingly good at squeezing through the tiniest cracks or down the most unobvious holes, and all ferrets are enormously curious, so finding a way from one universe to another is not the challenge to them that it would be to most life forms.) And although Professor Hurple had never
been
human, he had, as it happened, spent more time in their company than any of the G themselves.

He had also read a great deal, which helps.

Why would the G need to be educated at all, you may ask, since surely all they have to do is shape-shift
into
something else to know everything about it, from the inside out, as it were. In fact, the truth is exactly the reverse.
Before
a G can shift, they have to know as much as possible about the life form they are changing into.

For example, a G can’t become a clam (at least not for long) without knowing about clam predators, or what to do when the tide goes out, or even (if so inclined) how to tell girl clams from boy clams. But, not surprisingly, individual G then find themselves more comfortable in some shapes than in others. And the more time they spend in that form, the more they learn and the deeper their understanding becomes. Then, as specialists, they pass on their knowledge to trainees. For example, Eo was taught about pack dynamics, how to organize herbivores and the joys of digging by Hibernation Gladrag, currently Head of the G and, most of the time, an extremely handsome Border collie bitch. (Eo paid
close
attention to these lessons because he quite fancied shifting into some kind of canine, and also because every time his teacher smiled he remembered she was capable of ripping his throat out.)

Very few of the adult G chose to spend time as human, however. This could be because they got enough of it as children, when human was all they
could
do. Or it could be because, as a species, they rated fun as the highest goal and being human was often just not fun enough. So the G tended to use the shape only for formal occasions or boring ceremonies or rare moments of unpleasantness with other universes. Which explains why, when a Professor of Human Studies was needed to teach a young G, they were grateful to be able to turn to Pinkerton Hurple.