by Lari Don
“But we did hear a lot about their plans.” Helen began to limp back towards the campsite.
Lavender snorted. “I’m not sure I know much more than I did. Whatever they were planning today failed, and whatever the sea-through is planning next the selkie can’t help with. What else do we know?”
“We know that whatever it’s doing, it hasn’t given up.”
“And we know it doesn’t like you, Helen, and it still wants your coral necklace.”
“It’s not a necklace any more.”
“The sea-through doesn’t know that. You’re still in danger, so I think we should sleep in the boys’ tent tonight. Anyway, we need to tell them what we’ve heard.”
Helen muttered, “If we can wake them up.”
Lavender laughed. “If prodding them doesn’t work, you could fall off something. That makes enough noise.”
Helen rubbed her bruised knee. “Or you could tickle them!”
The boys had been too sleepy to understand much the night before apart from the need to stop the sea-through attacking Helen. So in the morning, with cold rain outside the tent and a hot breakfast from Sheila’s kitchen inside them, Helen and Lavender showed them the broken necklace and the goo in the clasp, and repeated everything they’d heard.
Even wide awake, no one could make any sense of it.
“What I can’t work out,” said Lavender in frustration, “is whether the sea-through’s other plan is to do with today’s race. If the failed plan was the foiled attack on Roxburgh, is the new plan to attack the Sea Herald contest?”
Helen shrugged. “It didn’t talk about the race or the contest. Just about getting stuff back for the sea. But the selkie mentioned a crown. Is there a crown in the Sea Herald contest?”
Yann and Catesby shrugged too.
“The race starts in less than an hour,” said Helen. “We have to decide if we’re telling Rona what we heard before the race or after.”
Yann sighed. “I don’t think we should tell her yet. She’s nervous enough already. A conversation about sea-through attacks and selkie traitors would not be the best pre-race preparation. She might refuse to compete at all. We should let her race, then talk to her afterwards.”
“Shouldn’t we warn her that the sea-through might be out there?” Helen objected.
“But we have no evidence that it is,” Lavender pointed out. “It didn’t mention the Sea Herald contest or the race at all.”
“She won’t be in any danger,” said Yann. “There are judges all over the course. They can’t help her with the obstacles, but they’d intervene if she was attacked by a huge jellyfish.”
Helen shook her head. “I think she has a right to know.”
But the others all agreed with Yann, so Helen put the broken necklace in her pocket, and jogged through the drizzle to Sheila’s house with their breakfast dishes. The campsite was already empty: the tents and bikes were still there, but the minibuses had gone.
As she stacked the plates in the dishwasher, she asked Sheila, who was making their packed lunches, “Where did the Scouts go so early?”
Sheila didn’t turn round, just kept putting sandwiches in bags. “They’re climbing Ben Loyal most of the day, taking their canoes out for a quick test run in the afternoon, then having a barbecue tea on the Scout leaders’ favourite beach. They won’t be anywhere near the race. Rona will be quite safe.”
“Thanks, Sheila. And thanks for breakfast.” Helen grabbed the packed lunches, and ran out to join her friends.
It was nearly eight o’clock when Helen beached the boat on the gentle eastern end of the island. Yann cantered up the hillside, Catesby flapping by his shoulder. Helen snatched Lavender out of the rainy air and sat the fairy on her shoulder. “Shelter in my hair if you feel the slightest breeze,” she ordered as she followed the others.
When she reached the ridge, where the grassy island fell sharply away into cliffs and rocky shore, Yann was already sheltering behind a roofless stone house, so he couldn’t be seen from the mainland.
Helen joined him, and stared at the never-ending, ever-moving landscape of the Atlantic stretching to the north. Then she looked at the rocks below, where a crowd of selkies, blue loons and mermaids surrounded the three contestants.
Tangaroa was limbering up on the huge starting rock with extravagant stretches, and whenever he took a break, two of his friends were covering him in protective oil, which Helen hoped wasn’t made of seal fat. Serena was perched on the edge of the rock, her tail draped elegantly into the small waves below, while two of her friends were winding her hair round her head. Rona was standing on her own, doing breathing exercises which Helen had taught her.
Yann called down, “Good morning, Storm Singer! Are you singing this rain down on us?”
Rona waved. “No, this is just Scotland in September! The rain makes no difference to us, we’ll be underwater most of the race anyway.”
Yann turned to his friends. “On three. One, two, three …” The friends yelled, chirped and squawked, “Good luck, Rona!”
Rona waved again, then flapped out her sealskin and became a seal.
“What did she mean, she’ll be underwater most of the race?” Helen asked. “Won’t she be underwater the whole time?”
Lavender perched on her hand and gave her a puzzled look. “She has to come up and breathe. So does Tangaroa.”
Helen stood in sudden embarrassed silence, then gabbled, “Of course she does. She’s a mammal, isn’t she? She’s a mammal just like us – not you, Catesby, obviously – but the rest of us. Of course she has lungs, and has to fill them.”
Helen shook her head. She was shocked at herself. She’d assumed selkies could breathe underwater. Why didn’t she know more about her best friend’s seal life? Why hadn’t she asked?
“So,” asked Helen slowly, “how often will she need to come up?”
“It depends how deep she dives,” replied Lavender, “and how long she can spend on the surface recovering, but probably about once every twenty minutes or half an hour.”
“What about Tangaroa?”
This time Yann answered. “He’ll need to come up for air more often, every ten or fifteen minutes.”
“He’s human! How can he stay underwater for fifteen minutes?”
“Human free divers can stay under that long without air,” said Yann in his lecturer voice.
“How do you know all this?”
Yann grinned and lifted a hoof. “One step ahead of you, as always, human girl.”
She punched his shoulder.
“All right! I didn’t know until yesterday. I asked the blue loons at my end of the table while you were admiring Tangaroa’s tattoos.”
“So, Mr Underwater Expert, how often do mermaids come up for air?”
“Never.”
“Never? But they definitely breathe in air, or how else do they breathe out to SPEAK like THIS all the TIME …”
“They have lungs in their chests,” said Yann, “but gills in their necks.”
“That’s why they wear their hair long, even the boys,” added Lavender, “because the gills spoil the smooth line of their necks.”
Helen felt totally out of her depth. “I thought it was a mermaid’s bottom half that was fish, not the top half.”
“They’re far more than half fish,” said Yann. “They’re cold-blooded as well.”
Helen laughed. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
As the sun finally broke through the clouds, and the drizzle stopped, Helen looked at Yann, at the huge bulk of his chestnut horse’s body and the slim boy’s body on top. She wondered if he thought of himself as more than half horse and less than half human.
Catesby squawked, and Lavender said, “They’re about to start.”
Helen, Yann, Lavender and Catesby watched as a tall mermaid lifted a curved shell and blew a booming note.
Tangaroa dived, Rona and Serena slid, all in one moment, into the cold grey water.
Helen saw three lo
ng shapes under the surface speed off to the open sea. Soon they were out of sight, swimming too deep for the friends on the cliff to see them.
“We can’t do anything for her now except wait,” said Yann.
“And hope,” added Lavender. “Wait and hope she comes back safe.”
Chapter 15
She watched silver bubbles of air flick off her whiskers as she accelerated through the water. It was always a joy to be back in the sea.
Rona looked to her left, and saw Tangaroa’s dark shape, with knives flashing bright at his ankles and a grin flashing white in his face. He speeded up, so she flicked her back fins and propelled her smooth body well ahead of him.
Serena was swimming deeper, and a few strokes behind. The mermaid was harder to see, because she was further from the sunlit surface waters, and also because it was impossible to see long distances underwater. No matter how bright the sun or clean the water, so many tiny plants and animals lived in Scottish seawater that it was never as clear as air. But visibility this morning was as good as Rona had ever seen it, so she’d certainly notice if either of her rivals tried to get ahead.
She settled into a slight lead over the other two, wondering if they could keep this sprint up for as long as she could. Her whole body was ideally evolved to swim underwater. Serena was half perfect and half awkward in the sea. The mermaid had a stronger tail than Rona, but her heavy human head and poky elbows weren’t streamlined. Tangaroa’s long limbs were better adapted for running or climbing trees than swimming, but he had strong arms and wide shoulders, and he’d been training for this for years.
Anyway, for Rona, the real challenge wasn’t beating the mermaid and the blue loon, it was beating her fear of the hazards.
The first obstacle was a wreck, which all selkie pups were warned to stay away from. The rock run and tidal race were dangerous too, but at least they were natural.
She was most afraid of the fishing boat. She couldn’t believe her family were encouraging her to get so close to men with nets, knives and possibly guns. Selkies didn’t pay much attention to human politics, but they did know that the people most likely to be given licences to shoot seals were fish farmers and fishermen.
Rona felt her pace slow as soon as she thought about the boat. She forced her fins back to a sprint, and stayed comfortably in the lead.
She remembered Yann advising her to start at the front and stay there, or else stay at the back and make her move at the end. Not let anyone overtake her or she’d feel like a loser. So she’d either made her first winning move, or her first major mistake. She was in the lead. Now, by Yann’s rules, she had to stay in the lead. She had to face the hazards first.
She felt water shift behind her, and glanced back. Tangaroa was surfacing quickly to refill his lungs. She grinned. She’d be able to stay under for much longer without breathing. Tangaroa kept swimming as he leapt up into the air, breaking the sea’s surface like a dolphin, and gasping a chestful of air. He kept his forward motion going beautifully as he surfaced three or four times. By the time he dived under again, he’d lost only a few body lengths to Serena.
The dive to the wreck was only a few minutes away, so Rona knew she should breathe again now, even though she didn’t feel the burning need for air.
She’d been impressed by Tangaroa’s leaping breath on the move. Seals couldn’t just gulp a chestful of air. They needed to breathe long enough to oxygenate their blood then empty their lungs again, so they weren’t buoyant.
If only she’d taken this race seriously, she could have practised breathing at a sprint like the blue loon.
She angled upwards. Her snout and whiskers broke the bright surface, her nostrils sprang open and she breathed deeply. She kept swimming along the surface, and after three deep breaths, she forced the final outbreath from her lungs, snapped her nostrils shut, changed the angle of her fins and swam back down. Towards the wreck.
She wasn’t in the lead any more. Now she was shoulder to shoulder with Tangaroa.
Where was the mermaid? Still behind, but lower down, so she wasn’t much further from the wreck.
Rona looked at the dark water beneath her, water where almost no sunlight reached.
Then she saw a shadow flick past her, upwards.
She flinched. Shark? Whale? No. It was the blue loon. Having looked at the depth they had to dive, he was going to breathe again.
Rona hesitated. She didn’t want to lose the lead, but she didn’t want to dive to the wreck first either.
Serena didn’t overtake when Rona slowed. Perhaps she was going for the second, sneaky one of Yann’s strategies. Stay back, let others set the pace, then sprint at the end.
Rona wished Yann was here. Or Helen. Or Lavender. She wanted to do this in a team. But this wasn’t an adventure with friends; this was a race against rivals.
So Rona dived.
Her eyes adjusted to the dimmer water. She could see much better in underwater dark with her seal eyes than in overwater dark with her human eyes.
She saw the long fish-like shape of the wreck, the broken propeller lying like a sharp flower on the seabed, the lazy waving of the green and yellow flag which the mermaid judge was shoving in the silt to mark the way into the ship.
Floating above the wreck were two more judges: a selkie she didn’t know and a blue man. All three judges were watching to make sure the contestants swam inside the wreck from stern to bow, rather than using the rusty holes in the deck to escape early; and waiting to rescue the contestants if they got into trouble, then disqualify them immediately.
Rona had never been inside this wreck. Teenage selkies sometimes sneaked in for a dare, and returned with creepy stories of sailors’ bodies floating in the water, white hands reaching out to grab seal fins.
In the bright cave, Rona laughed at these stories. But even if she didn’t believe the descriptions of bony hands and empty eye sockets, she knew that real live predators liked the small spaces of human wrecks. A shark or a killer whale wouldn’t fit in the wreck she was swimming towards, but an octopus or an eel would be very comfy inside.
It was a big wreck. A long swim with no air. They had to enter by the hole for the propeller shaft at the back of the boat, then find their way through the wreck to emerge at the jagged hole bashed in the front.
She was almost at the flag marking the entrance. Tangaroa and Serena were still behind her.
If she went in first, she’d have to use her eyes, her ears, her whiskers, her sense of direction to find her way through. She’d have to be the trail blazer.
She realised she wanted someone else to go first. She didn’t care if they gained a tactical advantage by overtaking her. Rona suddenly slowed. Serena and Tangaroa both slowed too, staying behind her, perhaps wondering if she’d seen something inside the wreck.
Rona knew if she stopped dead to force someone else to go first, she would look and feel like a coward. So Rona twisted in the water, used all four fins for a burst of acceleration and forced herself through the small round hole into the wreck.
It was suddenly darker, and the water felt wrong: oilier, less alive, as if it didn’t move about as much.
Rona was squashed by the feeling she sometimes got sleeping on Helen’s bottom bunk: stuck in a small unfamiliar space, with corners to bang your head on if you moved too fast, and the suspicion there were monsters under the bed ...
She had to keep going. She pushed through the narrow entrance and found herself in a larger space, where the water tasted even nastier on her lips. A little light was leaking in where the ceiling had collapsed, so she could see enough anemone-covered machinery to know this was the engine room.
Rona pushed herself forward carefully. She saw a couple of staircases nearby. But she needed to get to the other end of the ship, so she sprinted towards the far end of the room, even though she could barely see it. As she got closer, she could make out the steps of another staircase ahead.
When she glanced back, she could no longer see where
she’d come in, because her flicking fins had disturbed rustflakes and silt off the floor. She couldn’t see Serena or Tangaroa either. Was she in here alone?
She peered through the gloom. She caught a glimpse of the mermaid’s red hair, and a little further back, a blue blur. They were all inside the wreck.
Rona sprinted for the wide staircase. She’d never swum up stairs before, but this was easy. Just a push off the bottom step and she glided up a claw’s width above the metal treads.
At the top, she found her way out of the huge engine room, into corridors and smaller rooms.
Rona started to hum inside her head, keeping the beat with her fins as she swam down the middle of a barnacle-encrusted tunnel. The door at the bow end was warped and rusty. She turned round and saw Serena dart in at the stern end of the corridor.
Rona battered her hard swimmer’s body against the closed door. It didn’t budge. She glanced back again. Serena was floating, serenely, at the other end, waiting for Rona to open the door for her. Rona growled, and looked around. There was a half-open hatch above her head. She checked on Serena. The mermaid was too far away to see the hatch. Rona bit down on a grin, mimed an exaggerated shrug of disappointment, then swam back towards the mermaid. Serena smiled, and turned to go out, to be the first to find another way. As soon as she was out of sight, Rona made a lightning quick turn in the water, and shot up and through the hatch.
Now she was in a long room with a pile of white bones in the corner. The sailors! And their fingers! The pile of bones was at the bow end of the room, so she had to swim towards it. Rona shuddered, her fur twitching all along her spine, and swam very slowly towards the pokey heap.
Was it really a pile of skeletons?
She wanted to close her eyes as she glided over. But she couldn’t help looking down.
It was a pile of chairs. A pile of broken legs, arms and backs. Bent metal tubes covered in white plastic, which nothing alive wanted to stick to. She gulped an airless laugh. All those teenage selkies, scared of some furniture!
