Dolphin Song

by Lauren St. John

  Martine screamed.

  Ben burst from the water beside her, frightening her almost as much as the explosion had. “Martine! Martine, speak to me. Are you okay? Where are you hurt? Here, hold on to me.”

  Martine was in shock. She couldn’t believe that a living creature had been blown apart right before her eyes. She couldn’t stop shaking. Her ribs, where the manta ray had barreled into them, felt as if they’d been through a crusher. “B-Ben,” she finally got out, “w-what are you doing here?”

  “I saw you swimming out to the wreck and I followed because I was worried about you. But never mind about that now. Did you see what caused the explosion? Was the wreck booby-trapped? Did you touch something?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know. I found these cables on the sea floor and I was on my way to take a closer look at them when this manta ray knocked me sideways. It sort of came after me. Then there was just a bang and a blur of red and white. Oh, Ben, the poor ray. What happened? Was it a bomb?”

  “It sounded like an undersea mine of some kind.”

  Ben was treading water, taking as much of Martine’s weight as he could. Blood trickled from a gash on her upper arm, mushrooming into the water and then dissolving into nothing. Above the horizon, a washed-out sunset indicated that they had perhaps half an hour before the African night descended. “We need to get you back to the beach fast,” he said to Martine. “Do you think you can swim?”

  A sudden, unnatural wave rippled across the surface of the sea inside the reef, which had become glassy again as if the blast had never happened.

  “What was that?” panicked Martine, clutching at Ben’s arm, and then they heard it, the snap of sails and the slap of a boat hull against water. A dhow appeared from around the other side of the island, bounding over the rolling waves.

  “A rescue boat,” cried Martine. She raised an arm painfully and opened her mouth to shout.

  “No!” Ben warned. “Those might be the men who laid the mine. Dive deep now!”

  The wind was strong and the dhow was approaching the mouth of the reef at speed. Martine had time for only one gulp of air before Ben pulled her beneath the surface. Seconds later, the sea boiled white and the dhow’s rudder flashed over their heads. Had they moved any slower, it would have smashed into them.

  Ben swam strongly for the wreck, Martine behind him. The fading of the sun meant that the hulk of the galleon was barely visible underwater. It seemed a long way in the greeny dark. Martine had lost her reed in the blast and her lungs were on fire by the time she felt the ship’s grainy side beneath her fingers. She and Ben surfaced cautiously and gasped for breath as quietly as they could.

  The dhow had anchored and its sails were down. There were four Africans on board. Two were clad in shirts and trousers; the others were in wet suits.

  By now, a gloomy twilight shrouded the bay, and one of the divers produced a spotlight. He held it up with his right hand and pointed at the sea—which was gory with the remains of the ray—with his left. He said something in a dialect Martine didn’t understand.

  Ben strained his ears. “He’s saying that something big has died,” he translated. “Probably a shark or a ray, but not a human being.”

  The taller of the two men in shirt and trousers barked aggressively at the diver. He seemed to be questioning this verdict. The diver handed him the spotlight and picked up a speargun, and then he and the second diver flipped backward off the boat. They entered the water with barely a splash. Ben and Martine looked at each other in trepidation. If the divers checked the wreck, they’d be discovered.

  “Quick,” whispered Ben, “up here.”

  He clambered onto a ledge about as big as a shoe box and pulled Martine up beside him. They clung to each other for balance. Blood seeped from the graze on Martine’s arm, trickling down her bicep. Salt had penetrated the wound and she winced at the sting of it.

  The divers appeared in the water below them, the lights on their helmets illuminating the nooks and crannies of the galleon. A tickle came into Martine’s throat. Her face turned red and her eyes began to water. Ben noticed and gripped her hand tightly, as if willpower alone would prevent the inevitable. The divers separated. One swam out through a hole in the ship’s side to check the reef; the other swam directly beneath them. The tickle in Martine’s throat was excruciating. Her whole face contorted with the unbearable itch of it. Finally it erupted in a combination cough-sneeze. The sound ricocheted around the wreck.

  The diver’s head popped out of the water. He had a speargun in his hands, cocked and ready to fire. He shouted through the echoing hull to the men on the dhow, apparently asking if they had heard anything.

  Their reply was accompanied by laughter. From the sounds of things, they were making jibes about him hearing the voices of long-dead sailors.

  The diver scowled. He was so close they could have bent down and touched him, but he was preoccupied with examining the underbelly of the wreck, and it never occurred to him to look up. Satisfied that there was nothing more hostile there than a shoal of striped fish and a single bemused turtle, he tucked the speargun in his belt and sank beneath the water. There was a snap of cloth as the dhow’s sails billowed. A minute later, Martine and Ben were alone with the wind and sea.

  They swam back to the shore in darkness. All the way there, Martine kept thinking about what might have happened if Ben hadn’t shown up. She could have panicked after the explosion and tried to get back to the beach before she was ready, got a cramp and sunk to the bottom of the sea. She could have been kidnapped, or even shot with a speargun. She tried to thank Ben and to apologize for hurting him, but he hushed her, telling her to save her energy for the swim. Halfway across the bay, the dolphins came fussing around. Martine hung gratefully on to Sun Dancer’s dorsal fin and was given a ride in.

  As she clambered tiredly up the cliff, it occurred to her that she need never be afraid of deep water again, because what, in the ordinary course of events, could possibly be worse than falling into a stormy sea from a great height, half drowning in tsunami-sized waves, being circled by sharks, battered by a manta ray, and almost being blown to bits by an undersea mine. After this, the swimming pool at Caracal would feel as safe as a bathtub.

  Half an hour later, they were sitting by a fire on Ben’s rock ledge, drying a slimy, unappetizing heap of seaweed for dinner. It hissed and spat while Ben cleaned the graze on Martine’s arm with freshwater he’d fetched earlier that day from the lake, binding it loosely with his red bandanna. They were both deep in thought. The same thing was going through both their minds: What should we tell the others?

  Should we tell the others?

  Martine broke the silence. “The ray saved my life,” she said suddenly. “Somehow he knew what was going to happen. So did the dolphins. They tried to stop me.”

  “What kind of people would plant an undersea mine in an area with so much marine life?” Ben said with uncharacteristic anger. “The ray must have swum into some sort of trip wire and detonated it. Somebody or some organization has gone to a lot of trouble to make sure that something underwater stays untouched or undiscovered. The dhow was on the scene within minutes of the explosion. That means it was probably anchored, or sailing nearby. But what was the mine protecting? The cables or the wreck? Maybe there is buried treasure after all.”

  They were eating shriveled kelp and pulling faces at the foul saltiness of it when a figure appeared at the far end of the beach. It was moving swiftly through the darkness, as if the person was running at tremendous speed.

  Ben sighed. “What now?”

  Martine rolled her eyes. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. As the figure neared the foot of the cliff, they saw it was Lucy. Her hair was flying in the sea wind. She paused and looked up in the direction of their fire. “Ben! Martine!” she called. When they didn’t immediately answer, she scaled the slippery rocks and pulled herself weakly up onto the ledge. When she stepped into the firelight, Martine saw that she was a wreck.
She bore no resemblance to the well-groomed tennis club girl she’d been on the ship. Her hair hung in rats’ tails, her white tracksuit was filthy, and her eyes were spidery squiggles of red.

  “It’s Claudius,” Lucy said in a small voice. “There’s been an accident. We need your help.”

  18

  Claudius lay unconscious on the sand, so colorless and lifeless in the glow of the flashlight that if it weren’t for the red welts on his belly he would have blended into it. His face, lips, and neck were swollen. His breathing was shallow and labored. A short distance away from him was the Portuguese man-o’-war responsible for his condition, its top a clear, gas-filled bubble, its tentacles trailing like purple-blue spaghetti almost the width of the beach. It looked too pretty to be dangerous.

  Jake was pacing up and down, periodically squatting beside his comatose friend, saying, “Claudius, mate, you stay with us, you hear?”

  Sherilyn was even more of a mess than Lucy. She was sitting on the sand in her crumpled pink pajamas, wringing her hands. “We’re going to die here,” she said tearfully. “I’ll never see my mum and dad again. This island is going to kill us and all they’ll find is our bones.”

  The only person doing anything constructive was Nathan, who was going back and forth to the ocean’s edge like an automaton, filling a gourd with seawater and trickling it over the welts on Claudius’s stomach in an attempt to soothe the inflammation. Martine remembered her dad telling her that vinegar or urine were the best treatments for jellyfish stings, but the man-o’-war was a different species and had a reputation as one of the most venomous creatures in the sea.

  “We thought because your dad was a doctor, you might know some first aid or something,” Lucy said in the same small voice to Martine. “We’ve tried everything.” Shamefaced, she handed over the survival kit. “We even tried pouring some of the stuff you had in bottles over the red patches, but nothing worked.”

  Martine could have wept. Grace’s lovingly made potions had been wasted in the sand. The fishing hook and line was missing. Other items were covered in grit. She zipped it up so she didn’t have to look at it, and knelt beside Claudius. As they’d run over, she’d felt many conflicting emotions about her tormentor, few of them good. She’d been quite sure that he was being a hypochondriac; that they’d get all the way across the island to find him faking some medical drama just so he could be the center of attention. But those feelings and doubts left her as soon as she saw him. It was obvious he was critically ill. He was straining so hard to breathe that the veins were practically popping from his neck, and his pulse was so weak that Martine had difficulty finding it.

  She tilted his head back to ensure his airways were clear, and stood up. “There’s nothing I can do,” she said. “There’s nothing any of us can do. He’s had a severe allergic reaction to the sting. I think he’s gone into shock. Unless he gets to a hospital fast, he’ll probably die.”

  Lucy went almost as pale as Claudius, Nathan threw his gourd into the sea, and Jake swore softly. Sherilyn burst into tears again.

  Ben said, “You can help him.”

  Five mouths dropped open—Martine’s, because she was so stunned to hear Ben break his silence in front of their classmates, and the others, because in the entire three and a half years they’d known him, he’d never uttered a syllable.

  “What did you say?” Lucy said incredulously.

  “I knew it!” Jake cried. “I knew you could talk. I knew it was an act.”

  “Shut up, Jake,” snapped Lucy. “Claudius is about to die and all you can think about is yourself. Ben, what do you mean about Martine helping him? Martine, if you know a way to save him, do it. I know he’s given you a lot of grief. We all have. I’m sorry about the lighthouse and I feel really bad about your survival kit. But can’t you forget about that for now? If you help Claudius we’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

  “It’s not that,” Martine told her. “None of that matters now. Claudius needs treatment only a hospital can give him. He needs allergy medication or some antidote to the man-o’-war venom, and if his heart stops he’s going to need CPR to get it going again.”

  “What about that black magic thing you do?” Jake demanded. “What about that thing you did with the goose at the botanical gardens in Kirstenbosch?”

  Martine looked at him. She’d once healed an Egyptian goose with a broken wing during a school visit to the botanical gardens in Cape Town, but it was not a happy memory. The part with the goose was, but afterward the group of kids who’d witnessed the healing—of whom Jake was one—had chased her with sticks, chanting, “Witch! Witch! Witch!”

  She snapped back to the present. “I don’t do black magic,” she told Jake. “It’s the opposite of black magic. Sometimes I help animals a little, that’s all. I can’t help people.”

  “Yes, you can,” Ben repeated. “You can help him.” There was such conviction in the way he said it that Martine, conscious of what Ben had done for her that afternoon, knelt down beside Claudius without another word and laid her hands on him. Almost immediately her palms began to heat up, just as they had done with the goose and the dolphin, and she could feel a powerful energy flowing through her. But there was a problem. The energy went as far as Claudius’s skin and then stopped as if blocked by an impenetrable barrier. Martine concentrated harder, but there was no improvement in Claudius’s condition. If anything, he grew even paler and his breathing became more ragged. That’s when she knew for certain that her healing gift was for animals and not for people.

  So she thought about Grace instead and the wisdom of the grandmothers through the ages, trying to fathom what they would do if they were her. She remembered the night that Grace had come to her in the Memory Room in the caves at Sawubona and had given her a crash course in traditional medicine. Was there anything she had learned then that would help? Grace had spoken a lot about toxins and venoms, but there seemed to be hundreds of variations—poisons that attacked nerves or cells, or clotted blood, or shut down the immune system. It took years of sangoma study to get to grips with the antidotes. Martine had a couple of hours at most to find one for Claudius. Meanwhile, his hands, feet, and face were swelling to elephantine proportions.

  Grace had told her on the day she stopped the bus that when the time came she would know what to do, but Martine didn’t. She didn’t have the faintest idea.

  She concentrated harder. Soon she began to feel light-headed and peculiar. The scene at the beach swam away and she saw smoke and Africans in animal masks and then, out of nowhere, a mental picture of Grace’s plant sitting in the blue water bottle in her cabin on Sea Kestrel came into her head.

  The beach scene, with its deathly-still patient and circle of frightened faces, came rushing back to Martine. “Is there another name for a man-o’-war?” she asked.

  They stared at her blankly.

  “Oh, please think. Does it have another name? Do they call it anything else?”

  “Umm, uh, a bluebottle,” Jake answered. “Some people call it a bluebottle.”

  “The leaves,” she said to Ben. “We need Grace’s leaves.”

  He was gone before she had finished the sentence.

  19

  Martine sat with her knees scrunched up, watching Claudius’s chest rise and fall. For months, she’d thought him one of the most arrogant, unpleasant boys she ever had the misfortune of meeting. Now, as day broke muted and gray across a motionless sea, all she could think was how good it would make her feel if he woke up.

  Little by little, Martine realized, the island was changing them. The evening before, Lucy, who’d never previously exhibited the slightest interest in anything other than fashion accessories, music, and herself, had worked as hard as the boys to construct a shelter to protect Claudius from the elements, and then she had insisted on taking the first shift to watch over him, sitting up all night long before waking Martine shortly before dawn. Now she was asleep, spread-eagle on the sand, snoring faintly.


  Even Sherilyn had pulled herself together enough to help gather firewood in the creepy-crawly-haunted darkness. But the biggest change was in Nathan, who was a city boy through and through and had always gone out of his way to avoid contact with wild beasts and the outdoors.And yet he had volunteered to rise when it was still dark and go with Ben to try to catch fish without a hook or line. An embarrassed Jake had confessed to losing Martine’s fishing equipment the first time he used it. He and his friends had eaten nothing but coconut for days. So Ben and Nathan were going to try an old islander’s trick to get some.

  One of the Mozambican sailors on the ship had told Ben that, in the absence of line, island fishermen would sometimes crush the leaves of the lulla palm, spoon the juicy mixture into a rock pool, and wait for the fish to become intoxicated. Meanwhile, they would block the fishes’ exit to deeper water. When the fish were rolling drunk, the men would simply scoop them into a net, using sand to protect their hands from the spiky gills.

  Since they weren’t sure which, if any, of the species of palms that grew in groves on the island were lulla palms, the boys were going to take sample fronds from each and hope that the lulla was among them.

  “We don’t have a net,” Ben said, with a sly sideways glance at his assistant, “but Nathan has already offered to give up his shirt!”

  Nathan’s squawks of protest could be heard halfway down the beach. Martine waved them off and returned to her unconscious patient. It had been a traumatic night. Ben had taken over an hour to find Grace’s plant, because he’d been up at the lighthouse when she’d planted it at the lake, and he’d had great difficulty locating it by flashlight. By the time he reappeared with the leaves, Martine had gotten cold feet about squeezing their milky sap directly onto the welts on Claudius’s stomach and legs. Then again, doing nothing could be disastrous. It was Nathan who eventually convinced her to take a chance on the leaves by suggesting the group make a pact. They would each put a hand on Martine while she was administering the sap so they all shared responsibility for the outcome. So that’s what they did.