The Seventh Tide (5 page)

She glared at the crowd but found no clues there. Nothing but sea of blank G expressions faced her –some deliberate, some the result of not having a clue and some stemming from being in a state of near-catatonic shock. The Queen’s eyes narrowed to slits, but she still couldn’t see through to whatever their deception was.

Finally she gave up.

‘I am tired of your squirming,’ she said in a voice thick with menace. ‘Let the Challenge begin.’

‘No,’ said Hibernation Gladrag. ‘Not
quite
yet.’ The Head of the G turned her back on the Kelpie. She walked calmly to the nearest cluster of her people and spoke to them quietly – so quietly no one else could hear. From there, the word went out through the crowd, a wave of whispers, until everyone knew what they had to do. Throughout the crowd, hair of every colour and texture coiled itself serviceably out of the way and, grim-faced, the G began to leave.

The danger was old and unremitting. The souls of the G were so full of life that demons of every variety never gave up hope of breaking through to such a luscious world. So the G were prepared. If the first line of defence was breached, there was a second plan, a contingency plan – a worst-case plan.

Change! Scatter! Hide
!

Spreading out across the isles, the G would find forms
that were camouflaged, changing into the unnoticeable shapes of life that are easy to miss. One more sprat in a shoal, or limpet on a rock. A midge among millions, or a mouse snug among the heather roots. But what about the children of the G, who hadn’t yet grown into their shape-shifting abilities? On the backs of dolphins and whales, they would be taken and laid away in secret caves, in a self-induced cold sleep. They would lower their heart rates and slow their breathing until they were as near to rock as a living thing can become. In this state they would wait, and hope for a miracle.

The G practised these plans regularly and with some care, to be ready for the worst-case scenario no one ever believed they would see. With a word, Gladrag had set the plan in motion. This is not a drill. This is not a drill.

In a shorter time than seemed possible, the crowd of G had gone. The beach and the cropped grass of the dunes were empty. Only when Eo and the three were the last remaining, did Gladrag turn her attention back to the Queen of the Kelpies.

‘Let the Challenge begin
now
,’ she said sweetly.

The Queen looked as if she were about to explode but there was nothing she could do. There was nothing laid down in the ancient Rules to control the movement of bystanders. Her own people were contained, but the slippery G… The Head’s expression was bland and blank. For a long moment they stared at each other, but it was the Kelpie who broke the contact first.

With a snort, the Queen turned on her heel and stalked back across the sand. When she was right underneath the looming slanted side of the vortex she paused and
then, without warning, thrust her hand into the maelstrom. It must have been the G’s imagination that made them think the gigantic phenomenon flinched away from her touch. And the scream they heard could perhaps be explained by some law of physics that governs the interruption of water moving at impossible speed and under unbearable pressure. But it seemed much more as if the vortex screamed like a creature whose flesh had been torn. The figures within shrieked violently as well.

The sounds made the Queen smile.

With a casual twist of her hand, the stuff she was holding began to spin and form itself into a funnel which she balanced on her palm – a perfect tiny copy had been spawned, identical to the huge vortex whirling above it. For a moment the Queen played about with it, leaning it this way and that and watching it right itself like a gyroscope, admiring her new toy.

‘We call it a Traveller,’ she said, still dallying with it.

Then, as if by accident, she let it fall.

As soon as it hit the ground the Traveller began to grow, until it was as tall as the Queen herself. She nodded, satisfied, and flicked her fingers at it. As the Traveller started to move, the three adult G found themselves frozen to the spot, unable to escape in any way. But the thing wasn’t interested in them. It was Eo it wanted. Closer it came, and closer, until the very edge of the Traveller touched him. Eo screamed in terror and the onlookers groaned, but even then it didn’t take him all at once. Instead he began to be drawn out, thinner and longer, as if he were paint dissolving in water that caught and swirled and dragged him in, dragged him round.
Even his cries for help became thinner, like a distant wailing, and then he was gone.

In the silence that followed they could hear the Queen chuckling to herself. She snapped her fingers and the Traveller returned to her, shrinking as it came, until it was as small as when she first formed it. She scooped it up from the sand and showed it to the remaining G. They clustered around, needing to look but sick at the thought of what they might see…

A tiny Eo was trapped inside, whirled round and round, his face distorted with fear, his hands clawing at the invisible barrier, his body stretched impossibly backwards around the contour of the minute maelstrom. With a sudden jerk, the Kelpie Queen tipped the Traveller into Gladrag’s hands.

‘Your throw,’ she said.

Gladrag yelped and almost dropped it.

‘Careful!’ warned Market Jones.

Hibernation nodded, holding the thing gingerly now in her two hands, as if it might break. She couldn’t stop staring at it and the tiny terrified face that kept swirling past.

Your throw
!’ The Queen’s voice grated.
‘It’s TIME
!’

Market Jones leaned close to the Head of the G and whispered to her from behind his hand. Gladrag closed her eyes for a moment and then nodded. Interrupted Cadence was practically jigging up and down on the spot with anxiety.

‘I don’t understand,’ he half-whispered, half-wailed. ‘How can we know when –
where
to throw it?!’

‘NOW
!’ shrieked the Queen. ‘
The Tide is turning – can’t you tell?! NOW
!’

‘Best guess,’ Gladrag muttered – and threw.

The tiny vortex glinted in the morning sun as it arced from her hand and then fell towards the sand…

… and disappeared.

For a moment no one moved. Then the distant, indifferent cry of a gull broke the silence. The G stirred and looked at one another.

‘Is that it?’ croaked Interrupted. ‘Is there nothing more we can do? Do we just
wait
?’

Gladrag had already started to nod when the Kelpie Queen laughed scornfully. ‘Why wait when watching’s half the fun?’ she shrilled. She reached into the main vortex, making it scream again as she dragged away a part. She smashed the piece flat between her long hands, then spun it out like pizza dough till it was about the size of an Extra Large.

‘A window on the worlds,’ she purred unpleasantly, and flipped the disc on to the beach, where it lay, shiny and vibrating slightly.

The G looked from the Queen to the disc and back again.

‘Er,’ said Hibernation. ‘You’re staying? I mean, aren’t you going back in, er, there?’ She nodded at the Kelpie vortex.

‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’ the Queen sneered. ‘You’d like me to just leave you on your own, hatching up some cheat. Well, I don’t choose to do so. I think I’d rather just stay. Settle in a little, don’t you think – since it all, in a very few tides, will be mine…’

She turned her back on them and studied the thing on the sand intently. The G took a step closer, trying to see over her shoulder, but she turned on them like
an animal guarding a kill. ‘Mine!’ she snarled. ‘Mine!’

They reared back, shocked by the look on her face.

Then Market Jones reached for the encyclopedia. ‘What was it I read?’ he murmured, as if to himself. ‘It was under Unfair Advantage… Rules of Forfeit…’

The Queen frowned, unable to remember any such section, but unwilling to call his bluff. For a long moment she hesitated, then, with a poor grace and no apparent care, she reached one more time into the body of the maelstrom and repeated the process. She flung the new disc up the beach, well away from hers, and turned her back on them again.

The G rushed over, peered into the disc, and gasped.

Inside the Traveller…

It was temfying – a whirling boneless blackness. Eo couldn’t feel Hurpk round his neck. He couldn’t breathe. He should be drowning in the freezing dark but eternity passed and he was still alive, still aware…

It was only when the Traveller finally spat him. out that unconsciousness, kindly, came.

4
The First Tide

‘God forgive you – do you never pay attention?! A
beast
could write better than that
!’

‘
Gently, Brother. Maybe God meant him to be thick of head as well as thick of arm. He can row my boat for me even if he can’t get his wits round Holy Writ!
’

Adom felt his face flare red all over again.

I’ll be hearing those words on my deathbed
, he thought to himself.
I’ll be old and grey and every morning I’ll wake up to the Holy Father jeering at me in my head.

He didn’t notice the way anger was making him pull too hard, skewing the curragh off course.

‘ADOM!’

‘Pay attention, boy! Follow the boat in front, can’t you?’

‘He practically had us on the rocks there –’

The brothers were all of a twitter, but the Holy Father hadn’t even looked up. If he were any other old man, Adom would have sworn he’d nodded off in
the warm sun, but Columba was not like any other old man. He was
Columba –
the Holy Father, the stuff that saints are made of. Why should he care about Adom?

And yet he’d brought Adom back from the edge of death, all those years ago. How could that not
mean
something?

Adom was the youngest of a large family, a bit of a late surprise to his parents, but there had always been comings and goings between the farms of his older brothers and sisters, so he was never lonely. It was a life he knew well. He could so easily have just stayed a part of it all – if it hadn’t been for Columba.

He’d heard the story a hundred times, of how ill he’d been, and how his family had given up hope.

‘Then we heard a holy man was come to the village to preach and heal, and we carried you there, as one last chance.

‘We laid you down on the ground, and the good man kneeled down beside you and prayed silently for a while. Then he made the sign of the cross on your forehead and was about to rise and move on – when you grabbed him! You grabbed hold of his hand with your two little ones and you held on to him like a dog with one bone. You didn’t
say
anything. You just held tight and
stared.

‘We didn’t know what to do – we couldn’t loosen that grip for fear of hurting you! But the Holy Father only smiled, and said, “Let go of me now, little man. If it’s God’s will for you, when you are well once more and grown, I will take your hand again. Eh? How would that be? Sleep now, my son.”

‘You let go of him then, peaceful as could be. And
when he marked your forehead with the sign of the cross a second time, you were already asleep.’

‘And I got better?’ Adom would prompt.

‘You did! Before the week was out, the fever had left you, and it wasn’t long after that you were up and about as if you’d never been so ill at all. Of course, the Holy Father left long before then, and with the world so big we may not ever have the blessing of his presence here again. But yours is a different story. He set you apart, that day.’

It was a good story.

But when, at age fifteen, he left behind everything he’d ever known and journeyed to the great man’s monastery on lona, it was as if the story had never happened. There was no special welcome, not even any kind of
acknowledgement.
The Columba who had saved him –
he
might have remembered Adom. But not this gaunt, silent old man.

He barely saw the Holy Father that first summer, so caught up was Columba in his vigils and fasting and wrestling matches of prayer with God. Adom
did
see a lot of Brother Drostlin, though, the monk in charge of the boys and novices. And Adom was even
less
special to him.

‘Lazy. And stupid.’ That was his verdict on the new recruit. And the reason was simple: weedy youngsters half Adom’s age were learning in days and weeks what months of Brother Drostlin’s beatings failed to teach
him.

It had never occurred to Adom what the hardest part of his new life was going to be, because he had never had to deal with the written word before. You didn’t need to read to plough your scrap of land. You didn’t need to know how to write to catch enough fish to feed your family. Books and book learning were the province
of the Church, part of its magic. But for Adom, it was a magic for which, it seemed, he had no aptitude. He could not make the letters speak to him. His hand was perfectly capable of everything else he’d ever put it to – but it
could not
control a quill.

But I’m not lazy
! Adom yelled inside his head.
I’m not stupid! Why can’t I do this? I don’t understand
!