The Seventh Tide (21 page)

Jay shifted uncomfortably. ‘I won’t be staying that long,’ she said.

Cait smiled gently. ‘Lots of us say that. It’s hard to
get used to at first. But you will, don’t worry. And once you accept that there’s nowhere else to go – that you can never go back – well, it all gets easier then.’

She looked out over the strait.

‘It’s hardest for the local girls,’ she said. ‘The ones that can even
see
home, or their father’s fishing boats hugging the other side of the strait, or the smoke rising from fires they used to stoke themselves – those are the ones who sometimes don’t settle. The ones who wear themselves out with longing by day. The ones who walk off the cliff in their sleep at night.’

Are you a local girl?’ asked Jay softly.

Cait didn’t answer and Jay didn’t ask again.

As they stumbled along the shore path, Adom whispered to the others, ‘Should we try to escape?’

One of the girls overheard.

‘Try it!’ she grunted. ‘We’re on an
island
in case you’d forgotten. Everyone knows the currents are so strong round here they even make the fish think twice! And I don’t plan to tell where we keep the boat. But now you mention it, we haven’t had a Hunt of the Maenads for some time. That’s one of the Lady’s ideas – a treat for the whole island! So if you lads fancied a chance to stretch your legs and give us a run for our money, we’d all be happy to take part!’

They walked a bit further in silence. Then, ‘What’s a Maenad?’ whispered Eo.

‘Don’t ask,’ muttered Hurple.

The girl grinned unpleasantly. ‘Listen to your weasel, boy’ she sneered.

‘Why are humans apparently unable to distinguish
between
Mustela nivalis
and
Mustela putorius furo
?’ asked Hurple wistfully.

Adom sounded the Latin words out carefully then checked with his wrist computer.

‘Mustela nivalis
is the Latin for weasel and means “least mouse-killer”. But it says the Latin name for ferret is “
smelly thieving
mouse-killer”!’ he whispered to Eo incredulously. ‘Is that right?!’

Eo winked at him, and Hurple pretended not to hear.

‘Get
on!
growled the grandmother, and poked at them with a stick.

It was possible to hear the sheep a good while before they could see them. The cave in which they were penned opened at an angle to the strait, with a stream running past it on its way to the sea. Someone had built a temporary dam, so that the water was quite deep behind it. A cauldron of strange-smelling stuff bubbled on a fire nearby.

‘What’s in there?’ asked Eo. ‘Is it lunch?’

‘Not unless you eat sheep dip,’ said Janet, and the others laughed. ‘The Lady provides the herbs, we add them to the water and shove in the sheep. Whatever’s in there, it’s poison to parasites. So maybe we
sfauld
give you some, eh?’

‘We’ve no time for all this talking,’ scolded the grandmother. ‘It’s past noon already and not a beast dealt with.’

And whose fault is that?!’ snapped Janet. ‘It wasn’t my idea to bring them!’

‘Get in!’ ordered Una, giving the two boys a shove that almost knocked them off their feet. Reluctantly, they
climbed over the barricade into a small sea of surging wool. The sheep – who, like sheep everywhere, were always up for a bit of recreational panic – milled and leapt and baaed loudly.

The boys found their way to the comparative safety of the back wall.

‘Do you know anything about sheep?’ Eo asked Adom after a moment.

‘Not really’ he said. ‘My family didn’t keep any. Why?’

‘One of them just peed on my foot.’

‘I think that could be considered a compliment,’ said Hurple cheerfully. ‘It may even be a declaration of some sort of undying affection.’

‘How flat do you think a group of sheep like this could trample something as small as, say, a ferret?’ Eo said, looking at Adom.

‘Now that I don’t know either,’ he said. ‘Shall we try and find out?’

‘It would be quite interesting to know…’

There was a baa-filled pause. Then Eo stirred restlessly.

‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ he said in a low voice. ‘How are we going to be given anything useful if we spend the entire Tide stuck in a cave with a bunch of stinky sheep? And what about Jay? How do we know she’s all right? She looked a mess –
I
know, head wounds bleed a lot. But this Lady she’s going to… do we trust her? What do we know about her anyway?’

‘Well,’ said Hurple a bit prissily ‘what
you
know about her will depend on how much you were paying attention when I taught you Greek mythology last year.’

Eo groaned. ‘How was I supposed to know it would
ever
possibly
come in handy?’ he muttered, not quite quietly enough.

‘What do you mean, mythology?’ asked Adom, distracting the ferret from his obvious intention of telling Eo off till round about sundown. ‘Who is she, this Lady?
What
is she?’

‘Circe.’ Hurple sounded definite. ‘It’s the only possible identification. Daughter of the immortal sun god and an extremely long-lived nymph of the sea, she is, of course, beautiful and also, of course, virtually immortal herself. But more importantly, she is fiercely intelligent and a gifted sorceress, with a vast knowledge of the uses of herbs to kill and to heal – probably acquired on the off chance that it might
possibly come in handy.
’

Eo made a face.

‘I think you might both benefit from a summary of
The Odyssey
right about now,’ said the Professor. There and then, he launched into the story of the Greek hero Odysseus. How, after the Trojan War ended, he and his men set sail for home, a journey that should have taken a few months but instead lasted for
tenyears.
How interfering gods, terrifying monsters, a descent into the Underworld, encounters with mythological beings of horror and wonder, all conspired to keep them from finding the way back. And especially, he told them about the time Odysseus landed on the island of the sorceress Circe, who turned his men into pigs but fell in love with him…

From time to time, one or other of the girls would stop work for a while and listen in, but Hurple didn’t manage to hold their attention for long.

‘We’ve heard it all before,’ they said. ‘From the dog.’

∗

After a while, Cait and Jay came to a fold in the hillside where the path split. A noisy stream raced past, then dropped off the edge and plunged down to the sea. One part of the path crossed a rough bridge and carried on along the cliff-top, skirting round the central mountain that formed the Island of Women. The other turned inland. It was little more than a track, and quickly disappeared round a curve and out of sight.

Cait seemed uncomfortable. She set Jay down and rubbed her hands together, and then mumbled something Jay couldn’t hear over the plashing of the water.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Jay. ‘Why are we stopping?’

Cait glanced sideways at the track leading inland, and then away again. ‘That leads to the sacred garden,’ she said, only slightly louder than before. ‘Moira told me to take you there, but I’m… afraid.’

Jay waited to see if there was anything more coming, but that was it.

‘It’s not far, is it?’ she asked.

Cait shook her head.

And is there any chance of getting lost on the way?’

She shook her head again. It seemed to make her uneasy even to talk about the place.

‘You know,’ said Jay, ‘I’m feeling a lot better already. There’s no reason I can’t just go the rest of the way by myself.

Cait looked at her with an expression made up partly of guilty embarrassment and partly of relief. Jay knew so well what that felt like.

‘Then that’s what we’ll do,’ she said firmly. ‘You’ve already been really kind to me, Cait, and I
know
you have more to do than carry me about! I’ll take it from here.’

She set off cheerfully, before the woman could feel obliged to argue them both out of it, calling back, ‘Thank you!’ as she went.

The noise of the water drowned out Cait’s reply. ‘But, Jay – you do know, don’t you? You mustn’t go
in
the garden…’

The little valley the stream had formed was narrow and felt shut in. A breeze blew down through the bracken, heading for the sea. It was curiously scented, and warmer than you’d expect. Though the path was perfectly gentle to walk along, Jay found her feet were slowing down of their own accord.

She passed a copse of small trees, their roots in the dampness round the stream bed. She passed between two cairns. She passed a strange pattern carved on a rock, and what must have been the skull of a sheep.

‘I wish Cait were still here,’ she muttered to herself, as the world blurred a little again. ‘I better not pass out –’ but then she realized she’d arrived. The hills fell back to reveal a rounded open space and nestled in it, in the full warmth of the sun, was a garden, surrounded by low stone walls, with benches and pergola, terraced and full to bursting with plants and trees and shrubs. The stream welled up in the midst of it all, then ran down under the wall on its way to the sea. The track led up to a stone archway. Normally, Jay would have been interested in the carvings round the lintel and supports, but she was feeling worse by the minute now and just wanted to get in and drink from the spring and sit down.

She didn’t pay attention to the odd resistance of the
air as she passed under the archway, putting it down to the bump on the head. But then, once she was inside the walls, the feelings of discomfort faded and the warm scents made her feel calm for the first time this Tide.

She went to the spring, drank deeply and washed the blood off her face and out of her hair. The icy water stung her cuts and scrapes at first and then made her feel numb and clean. Still dripping, she had a wander about the garden.

She pulled an oddly fuzzy leaf off a shrub at random and sniffed it. The effect was as quick as a patch – the pounding in her head eased at once and a feeling of well-being flooded her mind.

‘Whoa!’ she muttered, and let the leaf drop.

Out of the blue, the dog trotted past, his plumy tail waving. He didn’t seem to notice her, which wasn’t surprising perhaps. With so many scents overloading his nose, he was unlikely to pick up hers. At the far end of the garden there was a small hut with a sunny patch of grass in front. The dog headed straight over to it, turned round a few times and then curled contently in the warm sun.

The sight of him made Jay smile.

There were herbs and flowers and shrubs of many sorts clustered together in groups that would have made sense to a gardener, but which seemed completely random to an underwater city dweller. Jay strolled on, touching and sniffing and enjoying.

One bush, however, was by itself. She went over and looked at it for a moment, wondering idly why that should be. She picked a leaf and sniffed it.

It was a strange, compelling scent. She closed her eyes
and breathed in again, deeply, filling her lungs. Her hand dropped to her side…

When she opened her eyes again the garden was the same, but everything else had changed. The sky was brassy and, in the heat, crickets and cicadas yelled incessantly. A woman and a little girl of no more than five or six were sitting on a bench in the shade.

And this?’

The little girl wore a short linen tunic and had black hair that tumbled over her shoulders. The young woman sitting beside her was dressed in a full-length robe of white and had the same luxurious raven-coloured hair. A single glance showed that the two were close relatives, and the child was in the middle of some sort of test. The young woman kept producing leaves and flowers and herbs from a basket for her to identify.

The basket was almost empty.

And this, Circe? It’s the last…’

The child thought for a moment, fingering the leaf she’d been given. Then she answered, a note of triumph in her voice.

‘Love’s Truth!’ she said. ‘Hallucinatory when inhaled; poisonous when ingested. Fast-working. Untraceable. I’m right – aren’t I!’

The woman didn’t speak at once. She sat there, looking solemn, until the child bubbled over.

‘I
know
I’m right! Medea – don’t tease me!’

The young woman’s face was just blossoming into a smile when the scene changed again…

It was the cool of dawn, before the day’s fierce heat returned, but much more than a day had passed. The
girl was a woman now, wearing a married woman’s robes. Her face was ashen in the dim half-light, as she reached out to the shrub, Love’s Truth, and gathered its leaves…

It was dawn still, but a different dawn, in a different, colder climate. The garden was a blackened wreck, fire-ravaged and apparently deserted. Then something moved in the shadow of a ruined wall. It was the same woman grown old, still straight but only by strength of will. The hands that reached out to the only shrub remaining were clawed, but did not shake…

Jay came back to herself with a shudder. The wind from the sea was salty and clean-smelling, and the sun gave off a familiar, northern warmth. Like a dream, what she had seen began fading from her memory almost at once. And like a dream, it left something else behind, a feeling of great swathes of time and tension and passion pent…