“I’m not scared!” he yelled. But he wasn’t stupid enough to do what she said. It had to be a trick.
Poking around in the wreckage, he found a scrap of goatskin that would do to make a slingshot, and a scabbard of woven leather, only slightly rotted, and a perfect fit for his knife; then a small hide pouch tied at the neck with complicated knots like a nest of vipers. It felt empty, but when he described it to the girl, she said—with that irritating assurance—that it was a wind pouch: Sailors bought them from seers and untied the different knots depending on what kind of wind they needed; hadn’t he heard of them?
Setting his teeth, he went on exploring. He found a small earthenware jar that had survived intact, right down to its wax seal. “Here!” he shouted at the girl. “Catch!”
She missed. The pot shattered on the rocks, and olives bounced into the Sea. “Can’t you do anything?” he cried.
“You didn’t give me any warning!”
“Oh, shut up and go and fetch some water! I suppose you can find my waterhole? It’s near the cliffs, behind my camp. Wait—you’ll need something to carry it in, won’t you? Take the biggest bit of that pot you just broke. And be quick, I’m burning up!”
She stalked off with her shoulders around her ears. When she came back, he was astonished to see her fling down a full waterskin. “There!” she snarled.
“Where’d you get that?”
“I’m not telling.”
“Why didn’t you say you had water? I’m thirsty!”
“Oh, what a shame.”
In stony silence, Hylas crawled over the plank and drank his fill, then crawled back again. After that, they didn’t speak.
Salvaging was hard work. He was still tired from his ordeal at Sea, and his muscles screamed for rest. He had a long, sweaty struggle just to untangle one oar.
Spirit came and swam up and down, trying to attract attention. Hylas splashed him for a bit, which he knew the dolphin liked, then went back to work. That seemed to annoy Spirit, who kept nodding and clacking his jaws. It was as if he wanted something. Hylas didn’t know how to explain that he was busy, and eventually Spirit gave up and swam away.
At last the oar was freed, and Hylas hauled it higher up the wreck, out of reach of the waves.
It occurred to him that if Telamon had been with him, this would’ve been fun. Telamon would have been good at planning how to salvage the wreck, and they could have broken off to wrestle and splash each other. And Issi would have loved the Sea, and all the new creatures. And Scram would have padded up and down, swinging his tail and chasing seagulls…
“Why’d you stop?” called the girl.
“Why don’t you go and find us some food?” he shouted. “There’s plenty of grass to make a fish trap, and you could set a couple of snares.”
She looked blank. “What’s a snare?”
He threw up his hands. She was unbelievable. It was amazing she’d survived this long.
He had a lengthy struggle to free another oar, and when he next raised his head, the Sun was getting low and the girl was gone. So was the plank.
In disbelief, he spotted it drifting out to Sea. She must have flung it away on purpose.
He was wondering how he was going to reach land when he saw her coming over the point with the waterskin, which she’d refilled.
She saw the plank and her jaw dropped. “I didn’t mean that to happen,” she said. “I just pulled it in and left it on the rocks. I thought it’d stay there while I was gone.”
“Why did you do it at all?” roared Hylas.
“How are you going to get back?”
Ignoring her, he lashed the oars together, manhandled them to the edge of the wreck, and pushed them toward her. “Grab hold,” he shouted. “And don’t miss!”
By the time he’d got ashore he wanted to strangle her. “You really are mad, aren’t you? Don’t you realize that if I’d been washed off and drowned, you’d have starved?”
“And if you’d followed me and seen where I found the water,” she shot back, “you wouldn’t need me anymore—and then you’d leave me to starve!”
He was tempted to retort that he could find out where she got water any time he liked, by tracking her; but he didn’t want to put her on her guard. “If you try another trick like that,” he said, “my dolphin will eat you.”
“Dolphins don’t eat people.”
“How d’you know mine doesn’t?”
That shut her up.
In the end, the only things they salvaged that day were the rope, the wind pouch, and a bundle of sailcloth, which they spread on the pebbles to dry.
Back at camp, Hylas made a slingshot and downed a seabird with a lucky shot. He baked it in the embers and ate the lot.
The girl was outraged. “That’s not fair!”
“Yes it is. First rule of survival: Only help those who help you. And you didn’t help.”
“What d’you mean? I found the wreck and the water!”
He shrugged. “I’d have found them anyway.”
Fuming, she stalked off. Some time later she returned, with three of those sea-hedgehogs in her skirt. She ate them raw, scooping out the gooey insides with a stick.
This made Hylas suspicious. “How come you don’t know what a snare is, yet you know about sea-hedgehogs?”
“I’ve seen slaves preparing them in the cookhouse,” she said. “And they’re called sea urchins.”
“What’s a cookhouse?”
She stared at him.
A bit later she said, “What’s a hedgehog?”
“They’re the size of a boar,” lied Hylas. “They’ve got huge fangs and they lurk behind bushes and leap out at night.”
In alarm she glanced behind her. Serve her right for losing the plank.
He wouldn’t let her share his shelter, so she had to build her own. It was hopeless, and as she hadn’t thought to fetch any dry seaweed to sleep on, she had to lie on the stones. He almost felt sorry for her. Then he reminded himself that her people were in league with the Crows.
Over his shoulder, he saw her huddled under her miserable pile of sticks on the other side of the fire. She was awake. Probably on the alert for hedgehogs.
Night deepened, and he lay listening to the foam hissing over the pebbles. He missed Issi. He missed her chatter and her never-ending questions. “The thing about Issi,” Telamon had once said, “is that she always has to be making some kind of noise. Either she’s talking, or singing, or humming, or just chucking stones. I think it’d actually hurt her to keep quiet.”
Hylas shifted uncomfortably on his bed of seaweed. He missed them both. It felt like months since he’d last seen them. It was frightening to think that it was only a few days.
As he drifted off to sleep, he heard Spirit softly blowing in the shallows. Earlier, the dolphin had been trying to tell him something. Had he come back to try again? Hylas was too exhausted to find out.
Tomorrow, he told himself. He’ll be there tomorrow.
The dolphin was getting really anxious. His pod had vanished. This had never happened before.
At first, while he’d been helping the boy, everything had been fine. He’d heard them calling each other’s name-whistles as they hunted a shoal of mullet; then they’d gone off to take a belly scrub in one of the island’s sandy inlets. After that he’d been too far away to hear, but he wasn’t worried. He knew he could find them whenever he liked.
But not this time.
As soon as he’d gotten back, he’d searched the Blue Deep, but found nothing except a few scraps of mullet. He’d circled the island. He’d searched the Black Beneath, clicking anxiously as he tried to pick up their familiar, well-loved shapes.
Nothing. They’d disappeared in the flick of a flipper, leaving him alone.
Poking his snout through the Edge, he’d whistled their names at the Above. This time, he’d caught a faint reply. They sounded oddly muffled—as if their voices were coming through land. How could that be? He could hear
that they weren’t far away, but he couldn’t find them. What did this mean?
The boy could help. He was clever for a human, much cleverer than the dolphin had first thought. He could swim a little and even hold his breath for a few clicks, and although he couldn’t make himself understood in the swift-flowing dolphin way, his speech had a rough warmth in it and much feeling, so the dolphin could usually grasp what he meant. If the boy knew that the pod was lost, the dolphin was certain he would help find them.
The trouble was, he wouldn’t listen. Ever since that girl had come, he’d been too busy fighting.
The dolphin wasn’t sure about the girl. Once, when she was by herself in the little inlet, she’d waded into the water on her spindly crab legs, as if she wanted to make friends. The dolphin had swum closer and given her a gentle nudge, but she’d fallen over and splashed about, gulping, so he’d gone off in disgust. Another one who couldn’t swim.
On the land, all was dark and quiet. Both humans lay in that deathlike, unmoving sleep that the dolphin found so disturbing. He hated it when the boy stopped moving. The dolphin never stopped moving. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like. It was frightening even to think about.
Impatiently, he swam up and down. The humans wouldn’t wake until it was light. Meanwhile, what to do? He was too anxious to hunt. Besides, he had to stay at the Edge, where he’d last heard the pod.
Being lonely hurt. He missed the soft sigh of his mother’s blowhole, and the sound of her beautiful sleek shape as she sped through the Blue Deep. He even missed his little sister, and her ridiculous attempts at hunt-the-seaweed.
It was still dark in the Above when the dolphin decided. He had to find his pod, and he couldn’t do it alone. He was fed up with being ignored. He had to make the boy listen.
And to do that, he had to go where no dolphin had ever been before.
Hylas woke with a start from an irritating dream in which the mad Keftian girl had stolen his knife.
The Sun wasn’t yet up and the sky was just turning gray. The knife was still at his side, but the waterskin was gone. The girl wasn’t in her shelter, and he couldn’t see her on the shore. She’d probably sneaked off to refill it while he slept. Or else she’d fallen into the Sea and drowned, which would be annoying, because he needed her to help build the raft.
Thinking of this, he saw her emerge from the thornscrub at the foot of the headland.
“Glad that’s cleared up,” he said drily. “Now I know where you get your water. What is it, a spring?”
She didn’t seem to hear him. She was breathless and pale, and the burn on her cheek was a livid red sickle.
“I found your dolphin,” she panted. “It’s bad.”
19
The dolphin had only wanted to make them listen. He’d thought that if he could get onto land, they’d have to take notice, and then they would help him find his pod. But the Sea had been angry with him for trying to leave. She’d pushed him farther and farther up the inlet, and now he was stuck.
For a while the surf had kept his tail cool, but then it had ebbed away, leaving him stranded. He’d wriggled and thrashed, but he couldn’t get back. He was frightened. He could hear the surf, but he couldn’t reach it.
He’d only ever been in the Above for a few clicks during a leap, and he’d always splashed down again into the cool blue waves. But now. He was trapped in this terrible place, where everything was scratchy and brown and dry and hot.
The dolphin had never been hot in his life. His skin felt tight and his flippers hurt. Sand kept drifting into his blowhole, and he felt so dreadfully heavy that he hardly had the strength to cough it out. Worse even than that, his beautiful green Sun, who lights the Sea to help dolphins hunt fish—this same Sun was now an angry white glare.
It was so angry that he couldn’t open his eyes, so instead he tried clicking, to listen to the shapes around him. Nothing came back. It seemed that in the Above, clicking didn’t work.
Even ordinary sounds were blunted, and yet painfully loud. Instead of the Sea’s soothing murmur, the surf was a crashing jangle, and the squawks of the gulls made his teeth ache.
But the heaviness was worst. In the Sea he was light and swift as a dolphin should be, but here it was as if some dreadful weight were squashing him to the sand. It was a huge effort just to breathe, let alone move, and when a gull perched on his head and pecked his snout, it was all he could do to twitch it off.
A distant rumble of voices. The dolphin felt a flicker of hope. Had the humans come at last? He tried to squeak for help, but he was too weak. Every breath was becoming a struggle.
He couldn’t see them because his eyes had dried shut, but he heard the clunk of pebbles as they raced toward him. He sensed the girl’s anxiety, and the boy’s terror that they’d come too late.
A sudden blissful shock of cold water splashing over his back, soothing his hot, sore fin. Dimly, he heard them running into the surf. Now more water was washing over him, and small gentle flippers were patting his flanks, and carefully keeping the water out of his blowhole. The dolphin tried to tell them how glad he was that they’d come, but he hadn’t the strength to stir a fluke.
For a while, the water made him feel a bit better; but he was still hot, and the Above was still crushing him to the sand.
All at once, it came to him that the water they were pouring over him wasn’t enough. It wasn’t the Sea—and without the Sea, he would die. The noises of the humans began to blur. The dolphin sensed that they were still with him, but their voices seemed to be drifting farther and farther away.
Hope fled. He was going to die out here in this terrible, burning sand.
He would never see his pod again.
20
The dolphin had seemed to revive a little when Pirra emptied the waterskin over him, but now he’d stopped moving. His eyes were closed and his hide had gone from bright silver to lifeless gray.
“Is he dead?” she whispered.
The boy turned on her. “Shut up!” But she saw the terror in his eyes, and she knew that he thought it too.
Falling to his knees, he put his ear to the dolphin’s blowhole.
“Anything?” she breathed.
He motioned her to silence.
She raced to the shallows to refill the waterskin. When she returned, he was still listening. He met her eyes without seeing. Then his face worked. “He’s alive. But only just.”
Shakily, Pirra sloshed seawater over the dolphin’s back. Some trickled near his blowhole and she shielded it with her palm—but warily, for she was touching a creature of the Goddess. She noted with awe that when its blowhole was open it was the shape of the full Moon, and when shut, a perfect crescent; and beneath her hand the flesh wasn’t soft, as a person’s is soft, but smooth and hard, like polished marble.
“Careful,” warned the boy. “Don’t let any in his blowhole or he’ll choke.”
“I know, I’m not.”
“I’ll do it.” He elbowed her away. “You fetch more water.”
“I was going to,” she muttered.
He wasn’t listening. He was stroking the dolphin’s flank and murmuring, “You can’t give up, I won’t let you. We’ll get you back to the Sea. Just don’t give up!”
It was hard going, stumbling back and forth to the Sea. The dolphin was stranded only a couple of paces from the surf, but the sand was hot, and Pirra floundered ankle-deep. When she started to tire, the boy snatched the waterskin and took his turn, while urging the dolphin constantly to hold on.
The Sun rose higher. Pirra felt it beating down on her head, and imagined how much worse it must be for the dolphin. She looked at his constant smile and thought in horror, He’s not smiling. He’s dying.
“The Sun’s getting stronger,” she said.
The boy glared at her. “So?”
“I mean, we’ve got to keep it off him, or he’ll die.”
He made to retort—then shut his mouth with a snap. “You’re right. How?”
<
br /> Silence while they thought about that.
“The sail,” they said together.
“I’ll fetch it,” he said. “You stay and keep him wet.”
He was back astonishingly quickly, scrambling over the headland with the rope coiled over one shoulder, the sailcloth in his arms, and a pile of driftwood from his shelter on top. He threw the lot down the slope, and Pirra scrambled to collect it. While he worked at building the shelter, she went back to keeping the dolphin wet.
She asked if the dolphin had a name, and the boy said he called him Spirit; he shot her a glance as if he expected a sneer, and she said it was a good name for a dolphin.
In no time he’d planted the driftwood crosswise in the sand on either side of Spirit, and lashed it together to make a support. Pirra helped spread the sailcloth over the top—and they had a rickety tent. It wasn’t big enough to cover Spirit completely—about a cubit of his tail stuck out—but the close-woven wool kept the Sun off his head and most of his body, and he rewarded them with a feeble twitch of his flukes.
Now they had to haul him back to the Sea.
Without a word they took up position on either side, grabbed a flipper each, and pulled. It was like pulling a mountain. Spirit didn’t budge.
The boy seized what was left of the rope and tied it around the dolphin’s tail. “One, two, three—pull!”
No effect.
“We’re hurting him,” panted Pirra. She pointed to where the rope was chafing the thin skin raw. “It’s not going to work.”
The boy didn’t answer. He’d untied the rope from Spirit’s tail, and now he was scowling down at his footprints in the sand. Those nearest Spirit were dry hollows, but the ones closer to the surf were full of seawater…
In a flash, Pirra grasped what he was thinking. “We dig under him,” she said, “and—”
“And the Sea comes in and floats him free.”
Grabbing sticks, they started scooping the sand from beneath Spirit’s tail, taking turns to race down and fill the waterskin to keep him wet, then hurrying back to continue the trench to the Sea. At last they broke through, and water rushed foaming and splashing under the dolphin’s flukes. Pirra saw a shudder run through him. She thought how good it must feel for even part of him to be cool.
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